To Whom, About Whom Do We Sing?

We have a new song leader at church. He just sings choruses, which is something I've come to expect now in meeting for worship. The songs we sang today, however, really got to me.

They were all filled with sky god imagery, the paternalistic god out there, looking down on us poor human beings, while we call out to be taken care of. We need to be taken care of because we are totally incapable of taking care of ourselves. So the all-father in the sky brings us his light and delivers us. And Jesus is come as savior of the world.

So there are several parts of this that annoy me. First is the statement that God is "out there" somewhere, rather inside of us. The assumption that God is someone we have to call on in order to get his/her attention. Quakers say that we seek to speak to that of God in everyone, but these songs seemed to forget that the divine is part of our very being.

Second is that the songs so exclusively see God as male. At the last election, Sojourners had a bumper sticker that said God is not a Republican, nor a Democrat. Well, let me rephrase that: God/Goddess is not a male, nor a female. Or perhaps God/Goddess is both male and female. I get so very tired of the paternalistic speech I hear all the time in church, and not only in the songs.

Three is the exclusionary tone of the songs. Yes, as Christ Followers, we find great meaning in Jesus, in his life and death. But you can't listen long to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and others telling how meaningful their traditions are to them before you realize there are many ways to God. I get tired of Christians assuming we have the only truth or a universal truth.

Fourth is the emphasis on light. Yes, light is important, and this time of year has traditionally (for thousands of years) been the time when people would gather to encourage the light to return, for the longer days that herald spring to come again. But we seem to forget that God is also the God of darkness. All life begins in the dark, whether that is a child in the womb, or a seed in the ground or a caterpillar in a cocoon. We need both light and dark to survive. If you stop to think about it, having no darkness ever would be terrible.

And fifth and last is one of the real bees in my bonnet, seeing ourselves as helpless people who need to be taken care of. I'll likely write about this again and again, so let me just say here that God can't be pleased with us wanting to stay dependent. I call it the infantilization of Christianity.

I expect better of Quakers.