Now, though the hour is night and many are deep in the sleeps of denial and cynicism, of fear and self-betrayal, know this: Beneath the last garment that covers our life with kindness and community; at the base of bereavement; in the basement beneath the broken beams of all a person built or dreamed, there yet a mystery awaits: Your being, your eye, You absolute: irreducible, precious without price: being.
But we are going there, to a place so far from the mere troubles of institution and organization which have vexed us. Hungering after our own experience of God, we will make the last appeal on behalf of the littlest and lost, the deceived and the dead, and thus we shall meet God anew on holy ground in the faith of the future.
If we would be strong in faith and mature in seeing; if we will not pretend that God is safely in control of all our evil; if we will affirm that neither is any good man at the top of power able to solve our nation’s sorrows, though a greedy man can make them sorer; then we may begin to feel after God truly, who is moving deeper down and deeper in than we ever thought
Throughout my ministry, I have worked to help people dismantle weak and unstable terms for faith. Faith need not mean believing that God breaks the laws of nature to rescue the beloved. That branch can break; let it break. Faith need not mean believing that Bible stories record what a video camera might have seen. That branch can break; let it break. . . Faith is not a magic shield. That word will break. Let it break.
Don’t you sometimes feel that religion, the way we do it, is no match for the way the world does wrong? Every day in this city, police stop and frisk–violate–two thousand mostly black and brown men doing nothing wrong–and what has church to say to that sorrow? A few weeks ago, an eighteen year old Bronx boy was shot and killed by a policeman in the bathroom of his own home. He was unarmed, scared, dumping something in the toilet bowl. What is old time religion for that boy, that family, for any citizen whose heart cries out at the dawning of another day of evil?
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