The Need for God

"Now - here is my secret:
I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt that I shall every achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God - that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond able to love."
-From Douglas Coupland's, Life after God

"Christianity is a crutch." That's what I used to say to other students in high school. I had a theological chip on my shoulder, and I wanted the world to know it. However, looking back, I see that to level such a claim is both entirely true, and completely fallacious. It just depends on where one is standing. Douglas Coupland's little paragraph gets at the ambiguity, and actually illumines quite well why there is a two fold need for God (and why its not a crutch, in one sense).


Robert Penn Warren wrote in All the King's Men, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something!" And indeed, there is always dirt to be found under the fingers. There is always something. After every absolution there is a new indulgence. To recognize sin must come after first recognizing God. Its a theological driven vision of the world. The path to a pre-existing morality that circumscribes theological particularity is a road toward Kantian ethics. Such a deontic ethic not snuffed out from the beginning, builds into its own self-validating perspective. Sin doesn't prove God. Sin is known only as Sin because of Scripture. In God's goodness He gave grace. To call grace a 'crutch' seems almost vulgar, but visually intuitive. Here, grace is not some helpful third-leg, but a life-source. Grace doesn't help, it saves.

The other reason people need God is because they don't have God. This was what Douglas Coupland meant when he wrote, "I need God." The book was entitled, "Life after God." But there is no such thing. There is no Life after God.

Bertrand Russel wrote a book entitled, "Why I'm Not a Christian." It's not a very good book. Its a collection of essays, and he basically levels one criticism on Christianity: not the divinity of Christ, not the cannibalistic notion of Eucharist, nor the misanthropic stance of being martyred for a cause. No, he thought that basically, Christianity was a philosophical crutch. Russel thought that God resembled a benevolent father-figure far too much for there to be any good to come of it. What he should have said was that he had read Feuerbach, and had agreed with him.

It reminds me of T.S. Eliot who, from his poem The Waste Land, wrote, "The world ends like this, not with a bang, but with a whimper." The man who was an ardent atheist most of his life found God in the end. He probably needed God, because he knew there was no life after God.

So Christianity is a crutch. Either because someone knows God, and knows sin is real, and needs grace from God. Or because someone does not know God - and knows there is no life after God - and for that reason needs God.

There is a popular little poem that has been going around in the past few years, it troubles me a bit.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

In college, back in my youthful naivete that I someday, somewhere misplaced I did feel that way: My deepest doubt was that I was powerful beyond measure. Not anymore.

So, acknowledging sin and doubt is not a goal, but it can be a felix culpa. At times our legs will ache, we will groan from pain. We will want a crutch, and God will be there.