A TWISTY THOUGHT SEQUENCE? MAYBE

‘O…o, po’ little Jesus, dis worl’ gonna break yo’ heart…..’
So starts a spiritual. This particular train of thought begins with my thinking of how my late first wife’s heart, had she been alive to see the Penn State scandal of 2010, would have been broken (she loved Penn State, of which she was an alumna). From there, I mull over how, sooner or later, this world breaks the hearts of close to all us bipeds.
Then I ask myself, and maybe ask God, What do we expect? We all need to grow up and know our parents, our countries, our ‘tribes’, including our faith communities, are human beings or human communities, with all their failings as well as their points of light. Why, then, do such shocks hurt as they do?
One reason is, how bad most humans (we Americans are, unfortunately, by no means unique in putting together theologies in almost every way but the God-centered way; anyone remember about Islamism and/or Hindutva, to name but two other bad examples?) are at understanding, and acting like, God.
One thing that I see as indispensable here is drawing a clear, sharp line between acting in the same way God looks to be and ‘playing God’, which is what humans do when they imagine God in all-too-human ways.
For us in what used to be called Christendom, Jesus is the primary exhibition of what God is really like, shorn of all (or most?) of the human projections we all put on God. Maybe Krishna is like that in Hinduism. Anyone who can enlighten me and my readers on this, please feel free. Jews and Muslims have their own, sometimes wonderfully idiosyncratic, ‘takes’ on these matters.
I’ve…