On a date with God (again)

Posted on by Rita Sommers-Flanagan

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God asked me out on a date, and I threw caution to the wind and accepted. Dating God has distinct disadvantages. First, we go nowhere. We sit in second-hand chairs, drinking stale beer, listening to tunes people posted on Facebook, and we cry. We cry for the homeless, the cold, the hungry, the uninsured, the unwelcome. We cry for those grieving, those healing, and those who will not heal. We cry as the embers stop glowing and the room grows cold. The saints and prophets, the angels and devils, the Buddhas and philosophers crowd together for warmth, and the sky stays bleakly gray. We cry.

“God,” I say, trying to stifle the sobs. “This…this…this isn’t helping.” But one look at God and I collapse back into the mire of all that is wrong, all that hurts, all that enrages. God is midnight blue, absorbing the light and the agony, mixing it up. God is alive with sorrow, awash in the dreadful choices humans keep making. We are destroying the earth. We torture, maim, consume, lie, steal, and kill, denying culpability past the point of absurdity. God gulps it down, takes the hits, stays the course.

Finally, God drains the last of yesterday’s special Yuletide brew and pulls himself together. He’s not a sloppy drunk, and I’m not a cheap date. We hold hands as the crashing waves of all that is true slowly calm into a serene sea of snow. It’s brutally cold. The shy sun pushes through cracks in the blanketed horizon, insisting we remember how beautiful–how devastatingly beautiful–the frozen earth can be when hit by light.

“May I have this dance?” God asks. I agree. This may not be the tune I was hoping for, but there’s no way to know when the band will stop playing. It seems wiser to make the best of it now, rather than wait for the perfect beat.

8 thoughts on “On a date with God (again)”

  4. I really liked this image; for we are all “on a date with god” in some sense with the hope of “consummating the relationship” some day. (Please be patient as I think I crossed a line recently on sexuality.) But by merely “being on a date” with god/God we flirt, tease, and cajole without “going all the way.” It is a pleasant and very “erotic” event as in it “gets the juices flowing.” But, being confined to this cursed time/space continuum, if we ever “consummate” the relationship…in our ego-driven estimation…we have (in the words of Auden, “Sprung the gates of hell..” For in our earthly sojourn, as if there was any other, we think that we have “arrived”, as in “consummated the relationship,” we are in a delusional state. Please forgive me if I offended you and this is a very intrusive notion. My heart sinks as I realize just how “rude” it could easily be.

    By the way, I have lived most of my 66 years in one of these “delusional states” and am not out of it yet….and realize I never will be; for, we at best, “see through a glass darkly.”

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  5. Hey Lew, the Catholics are way ahead of you in their sometimes-awkward dating God and consummating the relationship symbolism. I don’t think you are rude at all. God, of course, isn’t gendered, or limited to a body, or caught in the space/time continuum she invented…and I hope she’s subject to extreme orgasmic ecstasy sometimes–with all the misery her creation must cause, she well deserves it.

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