Tag Archives: Christianity

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Why God is the Opposite of Boobs

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I got your interest with that title, didn’t I? It’s true though. And it’s not because I’m trying to gender God or something. Maybe God is a woman and then She would be opposite of Her boobs. That’s all I’m saying.

When we are little (like before-we-can-move-by-ourselves little), we have very little concept of the world. And it is theorized that new-borns believe that the entire world is their mothers’ breasts. That’s all there is to life. Nothing else matters or is important. They, supposedly, are consumed by their little newborn perception of that breast. And that’s all that is going on.

Well, then fast-forward a decade or two, and life seems really really complicated. We deal with careers, school, mortgages, children, spouses, significant others, aging families, funerals, marriages, births, birthdays, war, taxes, depressions, disease, and all the other stuff we think is important. And we think we have grown vastly superior to the baby who cannot comprehend anything other than her mother’s breast.

But the truth is that we still haven’t reached a sophisticated truth. Sure, life isn’t all about boobs. It’s good we learned that. (Maybe some people are still trying to get over that part.) But it’s silly that we think that life is all about all of the various things we surround ourselves with now. Why should ten, twenty, thirty years make all that much different.

It’s funny because we often include God in this list of stuff that life is about. But we would be much closer to understanding what God’s power was if we said something like God is life. We used to believe that boobs were life. That was wrong. God is life probably isn’t all that wrong. God’s kinda the opposite of boobs.

There’s a scene in the movie V for Vendetta when one of the characters is reading a letter from one of the other characters, and the letter-writer says that her grandmother used to tell her that “God was in the rain.” I try to remind myself of that every time I find myself uptown without an umbrella.

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Dancing a Sacred Song

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I like to look around in places where we aren’t supposed to notice other people. One of my favorite places to look around is church. People do surprising things at churches. The only churches I’ve ever gone to regularly are contemporary, postmodern types where it’s not really clear what denomination anyone is. I can’t really see myself being happy anywhere else. I am too much of a pluralist to find denominational churches appealing. And one of the pluses of non-denominational churches is that they typically have really good contemporary music. I’m not much of a singer so I really like worship bands that are loud. That way the loudness can kind of drown out all of my self-conscious thoughts about being a bad singer. Plus, I just like hearing music that sounds like music I might hear on the radio. It makes it feel like I might be worshiping all the time, not just on Sundays when the worship team is leading the congregation in Psalms.

Anyway, the best time to look around at church is while everyone is singing. Everyone’s kind of into their own thing. I imagine if you were some sort of psychologist and knew what all the signals meant, you could really tell a lot about people based on what they do while they are supposed to be singing at church. Some people are spending time with God. Others are doing what they think makes them look like they are spending time with God. There are a couple of people who are more concerned with what their neighbor is doing. Some dudes are standing with their arms crossed. They can’t even soften up at church. Parents are busy trying to keep their kids from going somewhere they shouldn’t, which always kind of strikes me as silly because one of the best things about worshiping at church is when one of the small kids breaks away from her parents.

Corinna Phillips and Kim Lyons by Barbara Jewell © Barbara Jewell/Lois Greenfield Photography Workshop!

She never really goes anywhere. She just stays there right in front of her parents and starts to dance. And it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful because of the simplicity of the thing. She doesn’t comprehend all of the metaphysical things we are taught to think about when we are worshiping – raise your heart to God, let the words be a prayer to God, praising God as a community is important, and all that sort of thing. Instead, she hears music, and she dances. She probably knows that she is in God’s house and that God loves her very much. And so for her, it’s kind of like dancing in front of her grandparents. And it kind of makes me think that we spend all of this time stressing out about God’s will, and we really shouldn’t. All of that stressing out could be avoided if we just started dancing. We won’t always get it right. But that’s okay because God has our back. Sometimes the little girl tries to climb up on the pastor’s chair on the stage, and at that point, her parents have to lovingly tell her to come back.