UNITED STATES
Waiting for Godot to Leave
Kevin O’Brien
The biggest temptation of self-styled “religious” people is pride.
That is to say we think that, since we’re religious, we’re better than others. This is especially tempting to think if we’ve paid some sort of price for our faith – if we’ve lost friends or given up what could have been great sex outside of marriage or told the truth and suffered the consequences when a little white lie would have made everything so easy. So jealousy plays a part too. “If I’m not having the kind of fun my wild friend Bill is having – who, even though he calls himself a Christian, drinks and sleeps around and makes a lot of money in some very dishonest ways – if I’m not gettin’ what he’s gettin’, I must be holier than thou … or at least holier than Bill.”
But we forget – especially if no one reminds us – that the point of our faith is not self-satisfaction, not jealousy, not pride, not a sense of moral superiority. The point of our faith is love.
And we forget – even though we are sustained by love – what love is capable of, and what a God who is love really is and really does.
As I wrote to a friend the other day …
The Incarnation shows us that there is nothing that God is squeamish about. You and I are squeamish and we draw back from the down and dirty part of reality. But Jesus Christ does not. He is right there with every victim, every addict, every murderer and cheat, every moral monster and sexual pervert. There is nothing so bad that Love cannot redeem it. Mother Teresa could pick the worms out of the skin of a dying homeless man. God died even for Hitler.
One of the things you and I have in common is a lively imagination and an over-sensitivity that old Jack Lewis also shared. It makes it easy for us to imagine in a very real way a God who is much different than what He really is. When our bubbles start to burst and we find situations that are less than pretty, it’s hard to picture the pristine God of our dreams getting involved in something so sordid or jarring or messy. The God of our imaginations (our fuzzy-perfect-God) is not the God who roots through the garbage to save a soul – that’s not what we picture him to be.
But it’s our image of God that’s off, not God Himself. Whatever shame or sin is at the heart of any problem, He’s going right at it.
With that in mind, consider Woody Allen.
Let me say, to begin with, that we know he’s a child molester. No normal man marries his teen-aged step daughter. A man who would do that would do what Dylan Farrow has accused him of, especially when the accusation rings as true as it does. (Also, incidentally, the entire argument of his movie Manhattan is that romance trumps all convention, especially when a grown man loves a teen-aged girl, as a middle-aged Woody does in that movie – if memory serves me).
20 years ago some people got a kick out of pretending that we didn’t know if OJ killed two people, or if Clinton was with that intern. “How dare we judge!” some people would say, and some people would get a false sense of moral superiority from saying that.
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