First Sunday of Advent: In what Story will we Stand? (reprise)

Sometimes I will post pieces I have written in the past because they are appropriate for the season or the feast. Today I am reprising this piece for the additional reason that it marks a theme I have recently returned to in my own life, namely, the way genuine conversion transforms the story in which we participate. The question of in what (or who's) story will we stand really represents the question of who we will be as persons: Advent especially poses this question powerfully and freshly.

A Poignant Conversation

Last week I spoke to a friend I haven't seen in a number of years. She has Alzheimer's and now lives in a different state. We have known each other since the early 80's  when we were both working with the same spiritual director and sometimes stayed at the Center for dinner or made retreat together. Today Denise remembers that time clearly as a watershed period of her life and it is a complete joy for her to talk about it. Doing so is part of what allows her to remain a hopeful and faithful person. It is a major part of her ability to remain herself. But her capacity for story has been crippled and to some extent reduced by her illness.

We are Made for Story

For me this conversation helped underscore a deep truth of our existence. Human beings are made for story. Story is an inescapable part of being truly human and we are diminished without it. It is not only a profound need within us but a drive which affects everything we are and do. Nothing happens without story. Nothing significant that happens in our life is unmediated by story.  When scientists reflect on and research this truth, they conclude we are hardwired for story. Neuroscientists have even located a portion of the brain which is dedicated to spinning stories. This portion of our brain sometimes functions to "console" and compensate one for the loss of story in brain disorders (amnesia, for instance) and I sometimes hear it at work in my friend Denise as she fills in the holes in her own memory for herself; but it is implicated in our quest for connection, context, and meaning in all its forms.

Thus scientists explain that story is actually the way we think, the way we relate to and process reality, the way we make sense of things and get our own hearts and minds around them. Whenever we run into something we don't understand or cannot control --- something we need to hold together in a meaningful way we invariably weave a story around it. Children do it with their dolls and crayons; Abused children do it and often have to be helped in later life to let go of these so they may embrace their place in a better, truer story. Physicians do it when they determine diagnoses and prognoses. Historians do it in explaining the significance of events. Scientists spin stories to explain the nature of reality. The complex stories they author are called theories. Like the myths of religious traditions, these narratives often possess a profound explanatory power and truth. They work to allow the development of technology, medicine, and the whole of the sciences, but they are stories nonetheless. And of course, gossips, know-it-alls and scam artists of all sorts routinely spin stories to draw us in and exploit our capacity and hunger for story.

We all know that stories are essential to our humanity.  At their best they help create a context, a sacred space and healing dynamic where we can be ourselves and stand authentically with others: Thus, when someone we love dies it is natural (human!) and even essential that we gather together to tell stories which help reknit the broken threads of our story into something new and hopeful, something which carries us into a future with promise. In a way which is similarly healing and lifegiving we offer strangers places in our own stories and make neighbors of them. We do the same with friends. Ideally, there is no greater gift we can give another than a place in our own stories, no greater compassion than our empathy for and appreciation of another's entire story. For good and ill our humanity is integrally linked to the fact that we are made for story. We reside and find rest within stories; they connect us to others. They are vehicles of transcendence which make sense of the past and draw us into the future. They link us to our culture, our families, our communities, our faith, and our church; without them we are left bereft of identity or place and our lives are empty and meaningless. 

We have only to look at the place story holds in our life in the Church to appreciate this. The creed we profess is not a series of disparate beliefs or dogmas but a coherent story we embrace more fully every time we repeat it and affirm "I believe" this. Our liturgy of the Word is centered on stories of all sorts --- challenging, inspiring, consoling us as only stories can do. Even the act of consecration is accomplished by telling a story we recount and embrace in our "Amen" of faith: "On the night he was betrayed, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it saying. . . then he took the cup, blessed it saying. . .]] Stories like these, we know, provide the context and overarching narrative in which all things ultimately hold together and are meaningful.They make whole and holy. For this reason we yearn for them and honor them as sacred.

Our Capacity for Story is Both Blessing and Curse 

Augustine summarized all of this when he said, "O God, we are made for thee, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee." He might well have said."O God your story is our own and our hearts are restless until they finally reside securely in that story". Just like physicists who are searching for that one theory of everything, we are each made for and in search of the story which makes complete and ultimate sense of our lives, the story which allows us to develop our own personal stories fully, the narrative framework which lets us be completely and exhaustively human. Christians recognize this blessed story as the Kingdom of God, God's own story.The challenge for each of us, I think, is to make this story our own. The problem? We already reside rather securely in other stories, other controlling narratives and myths. Because of our capacity and even our hunger for story our lives are full of scripts and tapes which conflict with the story we are offered in Christ. Some seem lifegiving but many do not serve us very well at all.

 For instance, when young persons opt to join a gang, they are choosing a particular story of status, community, belonging, power as opposed to powerlessness, and a place in a world which seems larger and more adult than the one they occupy already. Unless these things are distorted into badges of courage and achievement the narrative omits prison, death, the sundering of family relationships, loss of education, future, and so forth. Another example: when adults choose to have affairs they are buying into a story they tell themselves (and our culture colludes with this at every point) about freedom and love, youth, immediate gratification, sexuality and attractiveness. The part of the narrative they leave out or downplay is the part of the story we are each called to tell with our lives about personal integrity, commitment,  faithfulness, patience, and all the other things that constitute real love and humanity. 

What we are seeing here is the very essence of sin. It is no coincidence that the Genesis account of humanity's fall from "grace" (which is really a place in God's own life or "story") centers around the fact that at evil's urging Adam and Eve swap the story God tells them about themselves, their world, and their place in it for another one they prefer to believe. In THIS story eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil will not bring death; in THIS story God is a liar; in this story humanity grasps at godhead and lives forever anyway. So many of the scripts and tapes we have adopted are as distorted and destructive and they touch every part of our lives. Two of the most recent I heard are, "The poor are takers" and "Selfishness is a moral imperative and the key to the common good." But there are many others! Scripts about what real men and women do or don't do --- both in society and in our church --- about what freedom is, divine justice, what is required to gain God's love (despite the fact God gives it freely to anyone who will simply accept it), etc. As sinful human beings we are an ambiguous mixture of stories which make us true and those which stunt or distort us. Our capacity (and, even more, our need!) for story is both blessing and curse.

Story is also the way Home

If our capacity for story is both blessing and curse then it is also the way home. In particular the stories Jesus tells us are a primary way home. Jesus' parables are, in fact, one of the ways he works miracles. (If anyone --- even Webster's Dictionary --- ever tells you these parables are "simple religious stories with a moral" don't believe them! They are far more dynamic and dangerous than that!) Like every story, Jesus' parables draw us in completely, allow us to suspend disbelief, check our overly critical voices at the door, and listen with our hearts as well as our intellects. They create a sacred space in which we are alone with God and can meet ourselves and God face to face. No one can enter this space with us even if there are hundreds standing shoulder to shoulder listening to the same story. But Jesus' stories do more. As I have written here before: [[ When Jesus told parables, for instance, he did so for two related reasons: first, to identify and subvert some of the less than authentic controlling myths people had adopted as their own, and second to offer the opportunity to make a choice for an alternative story by which one could live an authentically human and holy life.

Parables, Jesus' parables that is, typically throw down two sets of values; two perspectives [or stories] are cast down beside one another (para = alongside, and balein = to throw down). One set represents the Kingdom of God; one the kingdom where God is not sovereign --- the realm the Church has sometimes called "the world". Because our feet are firmly planted in the first set of values, [the first set of stories or scripts], the resulting clash disorients us and throws us off balance; it is unexpected and while first freeing us to some extent from our embeddedness (or enmeshment) in other narratives, it creates a moment of "KRISIS" or decision and summons us to choose where we will finally put our feet down again, which reality we will stand firmly in and inhabit, which story will define us, which sovereign will author and rule us. ]] 

Will we affirm the status quo, the normal cultural, societal, personal, or even some of the inadequate religious narratives we cling to, or will we instead allow our minds and hearts to be remade and adopt God's own story as our own? Who will author us? Will it be the dominant culture, or the God who relativizes and redeems it? Where indeed will we put our feet down? In which story will we choose to walk and with whom? These are clearly the questions that face us during this season of Advent as we prepare our hearts for Christmas and a God who tells us his story in a most unexpected way.The fresh cycle of readings are an invitation to approach God's story with fresh ears and a willingness to have our lives reshaped accordingly. It is the story we are made and hunger for, the story in which we are made true and whole, the story in which nothing authentic of our lives is ever lost or forgotten. What greater gift can we imagine or be given?

Idolatry is Both Unavoidable and Must be Avoided!

[[Hi Sister Laurel! You wrote that "idolatry is a temptation and reality none of us [can avoid]. It strikes all of us." I don't think I have ever committed idolatry so could you say more about this? Oh, I wanted to say I am sorry about your computer. I hope you are getting it fixed! Thank you!]]

Important questions and objections! I am glad you asked. You may remember that I once gave an Advent homily: In What Story Will we Stand?. It referred to the capacity for story which is part and parcel of being human. More specifically it spoke of a place in our brains which is responsible for spinning stories. We are in search of meaning and are terrified by absurdity and chaos; a central piece of having a meaningful life or appreciating the meaningfulness of reality involves context. Most of the time the contexts we supply to events are forms of narrative or story. Stories are the way we supply the context which combats absurdity and chaos. They are the way we give ourselves a place to stand in a universe which might otherwise be frustrating, terrifying, and even a source of desolation or despair for us.

Human Beings as Storymaking and Storytelling Animals:

When a doctor makes a diagnosis, for instance, she will tell (or rehearse!) a story which wraps the symptoms up or makes sense of them in a neat and coherent way; it will be a story of anatomy and physiology, how x is working with y, how z has ceased to respond to w, how t has gone off on his own and is creating chaos, or v is entrapped by the inflammation of q, etc. But it will also have personal dimensions: "When patient x experienced y, the reason was z and she responded by doing a, b, and c --- only to find these were not helpful. Together we have to find a better approach to y." When a cosmologist or astrophysicist discovers a new particle or something like dark matter, they will invariably begin to work out a narrative or story of how this fits in the universe's own story. Theories are, in fact, good stories which fit the facts as we know them; they are most effective when they have room for the developments called for by new discoveries. No matter who we are or what field is involved we try without ceasing to make sense of things. In part this "making sense of things" is an act of discovery but in part it will also involve us in the creative act of story-telling as a part of this discovery process. Often it is in the process of working out the story that the discoveries are really made.

Theology is no different here. Moreover our religious quest for an ultimate meaning, our quest for a God who will make sense of everything and in whom everything will cohere (hold together) is simply a deeper form of the process described above for the physician or the cosmologist. (Insofar as cosmologists are in search of a grand unifying theory they echo the work of theologians who believe God is the ultimate reality which cosmologists pursue.) In any case, we are constantly taking the bits of revelation we have and spinning stories about God which, we sincerely hope, provide a theological context for what has been revealed. Similarly, we spin stories about ourselves, our universe, the nature of hope, justice, and any number of other things which lead to a more or less consistent worldview glimpsed through the lens of this revelation. Systematic theologians do this in a formal, educated, and conscious way by relating the pieces of revelation (and thus, of the faith) to one another as they search for and formulate a consistent framework in which all of the partial and disparate pieces of theological knowledge can mutually illuminate and make sense of one another. Moreover, we do this with our eyes on the Christ Event where we believe the fullest revelation of both divinity and humanity was made real among us. This event/person is the norm which challenges, contests, or confirms every piece of the theological narrative we create.

But, whether we have studied systematics or not we all do theology! We can't help it!! We do it every day whenever we draw conclusions about God or explain why something in our lives ultimately does or does not make sense. Agnostics do it when they question the consistency of religious beliefs or try to measure these against "objective reality". Atheists do it when they deny the existence of God! (That God does not exist is a theological assertion and atheism is a religious position.) There is no such thing as a naked, uncontextualized, uninterpreted, or completely anomalous  experience in our lives. We simply cannot leave things that way. It is too uncomfortable and anxiety provoking. We NEED to understand and that means we need interpretive contexts which make sense of things, first smaller or more immediate ones, and gradually more and more ultimate ones. If I am in pain, for instance, I immediately explain it (" Ah, must be tension; it's a passing thing. No problem!) and determine how to stop it; less immediately, especially if the pain returns or is not eased, I try to find answers and solutions from professionals. Especially my concern here is what I can do to avoid or minimize the pain in the future, what can I do to function normally and live fully? Eventually with ongoing or chronic pain my questions become more ultimate ones: I wonder what it says about me, how it will affect my life; I want to know why this has happened to me, what has God to do with it, is it the way things are meant to be and if not why are they this way, etc etc. Bit by bit, in my ongoing grappling with this problem or experience, I build a personal theology of suffering, a theodicy if you will.

Similarly, if something good happens to us we spin a narrative explaining that. Our "story" will reflect on the universe, on our worthiness or unworthiness for this good thing, on the place of God in this good thing, etc, etc. Wherever there are gaps in our understanding, wherever we are restless and feel incomplete, we will search for answers AND we will spin stories (e.g., theories, hypotheses, theologies, philosophies) to provide meaning, understanding, and intellectual and emotional rest. This does not mean there are no answers and we have to make them up; it does not mean that these explanations or narratives are necessarily fictions (much less complete ones!) or some sort of "opiate" for the merely insecure. It means rather that we open ourselves to the One who is the ultimate answer via these stories. We hold these stories lightly allowing God to change and expand them as they need to be changed and expanded. They are vehicles through which we pose the question of our existence and attend to the answer to that question. When these explanations harden into certainties which cannot be changed by new more ultimate revelations of Godself, certainties we grasp at in spite of these revelations, then we are in trouble. It is here that idolatry becomes particularly problematical.

The Place of Idolatry in all of this:

Our own incompleteness, our yearning for an ultimate story in which we can rest, an ultimate narrative in which everything in our lives is rendered meaningful and coherent coupled with our innate tendency to spin stories which give us temporary rest even as we search for something more final is the source of both our openness to God's own revelation of Godself, and our daily acts of idolatry. There is the additional fact that everything we say and think about God is entirely inadequate, always partial, and often downright wrong. Theologians know they are on the verge of committing heresy and betraying the very God they so love and serve with every word they write, every theological conclusion they come to, and so forth.

When I was first studying theology as an undergraduate I had a professor who allowed us to take a theological position and explore it by arguing for it as fully and convincingly as we could. He did this again and again through the years I studied with him (I also did most of my MA work under him). We held a position until we clearly saw its defects (usually because of the counter position someone else assumed) and then we took up another one --- often one which exaggerated its move away from the distortion or defects in the earlier one just like all heresies tend to do --- and the same process occurred. What my teacher was doing was a kind of recapitulation of the history of heresy and of theological and doctrinal development. We would fall into an heretical position until we understood it from the inside out and then, in correcting the heresy, innocently fall into another one and so forth. Over time we adopted more and less sound theological positions which made pastoral sense but were measured against the norms (and especially the norma normans non normata) of theology as well. We came to understand the history of theological thought, the development of doctrine and dogma, and the nature of heresy as well as specific heresies per se pretty well in all of this.

But we also came to understand very clearly that every position a theologian adopts and argues is inadequate to a transcendent and ineffable God. That simply cannot be avoided. Our language is inadequate, our categories of thought and our understanding is inadequate, even our sense of the questions which human beings pose (and are), the questions which give rise to theology and the articulation of the ultimate answer which is God are partial and more or less inadequate. The images of God we draw or conceive are, to one degree or another, idols. This is always and everywhere true. They must always be submitted to the norm which is the Christ Event for correction, and they must be held lightly in a way which is open to clarification or restatement, correction, challenge, and purification. God is always greater than anything we can conceive. The prayer of the theologian is always, "God forgive us our theology, perhaps our theology most of all!"

What is true of trained theologians is even truer of the rest of us who naturally and often unthinkingly carve out theologies every day of our lives. Is someone we know suffering? We spin a story, a theology in fact (the technical word for this kind of theology is theodicy), which explains and makes sense of it. Is our world chaotic? We spin a theological answer to explain it. Does something happen which seems unfair? Again, the reason we tell ourselves to explain the presence of injustice is a theological narrative, whether that is explicit or merely implicit. Are we aware of good things happening to us each day which are entirely undeserved? Once again the explanation we conceive is a theology (or at least a theological one). We may borrow bits of theology from those who lived before us, we may make these theologies up out of whole cloth (mistakenly thinking we have come up with something new!), but how ever we do it, we are idol-making factories because we are in search of and made for meaning. We are meant to be completed by and rest in the Ground of Being and Meaning we call God and until we do, we naturally work to make it true. This is the source of sin and to the extent it causes us to theologize endlessly about a God we can never truly comprehend, it is also the source of idolatry.

The Forms Idolatry Can Take:

Thus, I am not necessarily speaking of idolatry as adopting or making golden calves we can worship. Usually idolatry is much more subtle (and so, more dangerous) than that! Anything in our lives which pretends to offer us a sense of rest and completion apart from God, any image of God which falls short of the whole truth but which we embrace with an ultimate concern, anything at all which takes the place of the real God in our lives is, at least potentially, an idol.

In the post I put up about a week ago I was thinking about a situation in which some truths about God had been distorted by human ideas of justice and perhaps more so by a tremendous need for meaning and yearning for a life of true significance. Our God is a God of justice; in loving us and our world he recreates these in his image, he perfects them, completes them, and raises them to new and abundant life, significant life. He loves them into wholeness and makes them to be all they are meant to be. This is the very nature of Divine justice. To substitute distributive or retributive justice for the love that does justice by freely and mercifully recreating things is a serious theological error which substitutes an idol for the real God. Similarly, to take a theology of divine sovereignty and conclude that God wills us to be miserable or live less than fully human lives, to suggest or affirm that God authors or is the architect of the misfortune and tragedy in our lives. is to believe in an idol. Moreover, to adopt a piety which calls sadism love and cruelty justice may make one unable to hear the Gospel message of gratuitous love. When this occurs the enmeshment involved may rise to the level of unforgiveable sin, again, not because God will not forgive this, but because he has been shut out and made incapable of effectively forgiving (healing) it.


While idolatry is unavoidable it must be avoided (or, better said, perhaps, since we can't avoid it we must be rescued from it). That only occurs when we allow God to be God within our lives, when we let the God of life and love reveal Godself on his own terms and to do so again and again every single day! Our faith involves knowing but even more it involves being known. The cure for idolatry is a faith which is really an openness to being grasped and shaken by the eternal and always new and surprising God. This will involve us in attending to the spirits at work in our own lives. Do they make us deeply and truly happy, whole, and alive? Then they are good spirits even if they cause a bit of discomfort in the process. Do they make us miserable, less open to love, more concerned about the preciousness and meaningfulness of our own lives? Do they lead us to partial images of God which speak of his justice as retributive or distributive for instance? Then they are "bad spirits".

The dynamic of theology is one of searching and openness --- we are open to having our theologies informed and changed by the real God, our certainties made uncertain and questionable by God's own truth. We keep our eyes on the cross of Christ because it is there that the deepest truth of ourselves, our capacity for idolatry and the cruelty, intolerance, homicide and Deicide associated with our incompleteness and terrible insecurity (as well as our idolatry!) are revealed. Similarly it is here that our capacity for sacrificial love and real obedience to God are most clearly revealed. Of course, it is also the events of the Cross which reveal the humbling depth of God's unconditional, gratuitous Love, and so, the very nature of God as Love-in-Act. God's own Self and presence is the only sure solution to idolatry. God must be allowed to bring us to rest in Godself. When that occurs our searching is really at an end, and so too is any grasping at false (or partial) gods, any profound unhappiness, any incapacity to love others, any fear that our lives are wasted or senseless, etc. These are also part of what we call the fullness of redemption.

God as Master Storyteller: Picking up the Narrative Threads of an Unfinished and Broken World. . .

Reading through the book of 1 Samuel has left me feeling a bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. I mean, really! There are stories of lies and deception, murderous intent, jealousy, ambiguous motives, secret anointings, etc., and so long as these help David achieve Kingship they are identified as the will of God! David, as much as we might like to idealize him as a beautiful young shepherd, gifted musician, healer, and noble King, and as often as the Scriptures tell us he has a "good heart," also has some pretty dark aspects to him and sometimes I find him profoundly unlikeable! But somehow all of this, including the machinations, deceptions, lying, etc, "is the will of God." How can this be??? Do the ends justify the means? Do we simply accuse Israel of a primitive and simplistic faith? Do we want to be accused of being naive and credulous ourselves?

Add to all this the really marvelous homily my pastor gave on Sunday in which the affirmation, "Everything happens for a reason" was a central point and refrain and you have something of a snapshot of what I have been meditating on and grappling with this last week.

I believe two things profoundly: 1) not everything that happens is the will of God, and 2) everything happens for a reason. These statements seem contradictory but they are actually coherent. How can that be? They come together in a third statement --- the statement Dietrich Bonhoeffer made to complete the first affirmation, namely, "but inevitably, nothing that does happen happens outside the will of God." It is this truth, that nothing happens outside the will of God, that allows me to understand and accept the second affirmation, "Everything happens for a reason". However, for me, this is not an affirmation that rules out senselessness, absurdity, evil, and the powers of sin and death that are NOT of God. Instead, it is a statement of faith in God's ultimate capacity as creator and redeemer. It is an affirmation of my belief in God's identity as Master storyteller and that the unfinished cosmos (including every detail of our own relatively little but infinitely precious lives) are part of his story and are encompassed by his providence.

I have long believed in the wisdom of Bonhoeffer's position but it was difficult to make clear everything it actually meant; certainly, it was not identical to the affirmation "everything happens for a reason" --- until last week.

Theologians speak of God telling the story of creation where his "telling" is a creative act, of course. Usually, we think of God standing "behind the story" and it spreading out before him, but because we are dealing with an evolutionary and "unfinished universe" tending toward the day when God will be all in all, some theologians today speak instead of God standing "in front of the story" drawing the story towards its future and completion in him. In other words, God creates first of all by summoning something out of nothing and then he summons reality to greater and greater levels of complexity and relatedness in himself. In this perspective, God is identified as absolute futurity. Even with this perspective, it was very difficult for me to agree with the refrain of my pastor's homily, "Everything happens for a reason!" Again --- until last week.

Staff Lunch and a Halloween Game:

What happened was that as I was meditating on some of this I remembered a game the parish staff had played at the end of a lunch last Halloween at my pastor's place; because of this image, and along with the theology I had been reading regarding evolution and the unfinished universe, everything fell into place for me. Even more, it added exciting dimensions to my image of God as Creator, as Master Storyteller, and as a Lover who protects our freedom even as he works to do justice in mercy. The game went like this: every place setting had a slip of paper with a number on one side and a Halloween-related item on the other. The person who was #1 had to begin a narrative and weave their item into it at which point a bell was rung and the person who was #2 had to pick up the threads of the narrative and weave their own item into all of that --- and so on through all 9 or 10 of us.

Now some of the staff were diligent and creative and did as required. They listened, respected the story told by those who had gone before, and tried hard to build on it in a unified and unifying way --- even when their own loosely planned narrative was now made impossible and had to be sacrificed because of what had come before. Others essentially said to heck with the larger story and used the clue in whatever way they could think of. Some resisted playing altogether. In all cases (except that of the first person's narrative!) threads were dropped and the narrative was fractured into uncounted pieces while each person, limited as we were, muddled through --- managing to link only a few things as we wove our clues into a more or less (usually less!) coherent narrative. To call this challenging, especially after someone had gone their own way in an unrelated story is an understatement. (I was #9 in the queue and my own attempt was a complete and utter failure! However, it etched the game in my mind and is now a failure for which I will always be grateful.)  On the whole, our game was more like herding cats than weaving a tapestry or telling a unified story. But it was also reminiscent of a microcosm of sinful, finite humanity trying to "tell" our own stories both with and in spite of the overarching story God is trying to weave together with and through us.

As I thought about the ways we each struggled in this game what I also finally saw clearly was God standing in front of the story working to weave all the threads of all of our lives, and indeed of the entire cosmos together into a coherent whole bringing it forward into the future of his life and love. The weaving God does is immeasurably more complex and incomprehensible than the little game we played but he is intelligent, creative, and above all, loving enough not to allow anything to get lost or to remain absurd, senseless, ultimately destructive, or unredeemed.

And here is the essence of faith. We trust that God is truly the Master Storyteller who will drop no threads, leave nothing disconnected or senseless, treat nothing as insignificant or forgettable, and will redeem even the darkest threads by providing a final context and future for them and all they touch. We trust that eventually all of these will glorify (reveal) God in the overarching story of creation's fulfillment which we call the Kingdom. It is in this way --- and I believe, only in this way --- that we can confidently and critically say everything happens for a reason. Something may be truly senseless or downright evil when it first occurs --- we do not naively deny this nor do we say it was God's will, but, for Christians, there is an implicit promise in even these events that God will supply a "reason" for their having happened; God will make them meaningful and bring life out of them. Even the very worst and most godless reality that befalls us participates in this promise.

I think this is an illustration of what Bonhoeffer was saying, of course --- inevitably, nothing that happens happens outside the will of God. It's also exactly what happens with Jesus' passion and resurrection when God brings life out of death, meaning out of the senseless, and good out of evil, but it was the first time I could see it as the same affirmation I have rejected so often: everything happens for a reason. To be honest, I don't know if this is the way Israel saw creation or the history of its People and the story of David, but I do know that ours is the creator/redeemer God who stands "in front" of the story of our unfinished lives and our unfinished universe constantly summoning things into being even as he also weaves together disparate and broken threads with a love great enough to encompass every darkness and failure along with every bit of light. And we are covenant partners in this affirmation of promise and all-encompassing providence; at every moment we are called to trust in and cooperate with God's unceasing weaving, with, that is, his determined and loving bringing of the story of creation not only into existence but to completion and fullness in Himself.

cf also, John Haught and a Metaphysics of Future and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Bearing our Crosses

Postscript, 2/1/14. Tonight as I reflected more on this I was reminded of an old and wonderful folksong by Peter, Paul, and Mary: Weave Me the Sunshine. Though not the source of my theology it is an apt bit of punctuation: