H,
The rule over idolatry has always fascinated me. There seems or seemed such
a desperate plea in: “Love no other God but me.” In the old senseless way, we
were told to love God with our soul but not our spirit or our mind. We were
told to obey and not understand, to not want to but to choose to and to not engage
our whole personality in worship, but to obey like drones. This misguided view
of things left us prisoners to the things we were supposed to avoid. As Paul said,
“I did not know sin and did not sin until the law told me, this is sin.” I paraphrase
but you get my meaning.
So, we are caught in this terrible paradox: told to be without heart or
mind in worship but then told that our will, our soul, must avoid everything
with heart and mind in it. We cannot be whole, and we cannot ask why we are not
whole. We cannot feel things deeply except the scriptures spell it out and we
cannot ask why we cannot feel things outside the ambit of those old words that are
not yet life because we have no heart in them in the first place. We are
trapped by the “depth” of small men behind big pulpits and eternal ideas they
cannot yet grasp.
These tin gods are not God, thank God. They sometimes mean well but are
desperately wrong. They sometimes mean ill but are helplessly trapped themselves
in the games they perpetuate.
We are meant to come to God with soul, with all our heart and with our
mind. We are meant to question, like the Psalmist, or feel overwhelmed, like
the Christ. It is expected we will fall flat on our faces, forget to worship,
leave the narrow path or find it after hitting our heads against walls we
created ourselves.
Never let anyone tell you that they know, exclusively, the way to God. They
are just pilgrims. We are all pilgrims.  At
best, we share experiences with open hearts and open hands. These men and women
are just human. They are not God.