Sermons and Opinions

A Bug on its Back

This is my favorite line in the Old Testament:

And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

How human. How very, very human.

Human? But this is God. Or is it?

Despite the assertion in Genesis that "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them," it is just as likely that man created God in his own image.

Like the gods on Olympus, the God of the Old Testament is a very flawed, very human being, just like us but writ large.

Consider this:

You walk into your kitchen and find a bug on its back, frantically waving its legs in the air.

Supposing the bug is sentient, he may be praying to the bug god to flip him over.

You flip him over.

From his point of view, it is a prayer answered, a miracle. From yours, it is almost meaningless. And yet your random act of kindness has made you a god.

The bug cannot see you as you are (any more than a cell in your body can), so he sees you as an all-powerful bug.

Likewise, you can't visualize God as he/she/it really is, so you visualize an all-powerful human.

Does that mean that God doesn't exist?

The short answer is yes and no.

The long answer comes from Voltaire: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

How Art Makes Us More Human

In the 1988 movie The Accused, Jodie Foster plays a scantily dressed young woman who saunters into the backroom of a bar and is serially raped on a pool table. (This, incidentally, is the original meaning of the term "gang bang.") While each man rapes her, the others cheer him on.

I have never raped anyone. I will never rape anyone. Yet in the anonymous safety of a darkened movie theater, I found myself silently cheering on the rapists on.

The movie revealed to me something about myself that I was totally unaware of till that moment.

How did this revelation make me more human?

We are all flawed human beings. We cannot be ourselves unless we know ourselves-the shameful as well as the praiseworthy-and accept ourselves. Otherwise, we are just playing parts; we are personas, instead of being people.

Only when we acknowledge our darker impulses can we direct that energy into more productive channels, instead of mindlessly acting them out.

Art also makes us more human by letting us live someone else's life vicariously.

In the 1995 movie Devil in a Blue Dress, Denzel Washington plays an African American private detective who is totally at home in the black neighborhood in L.A. where he lives. But when he ventures out into the white upper-class world, he is the potential victim of bigoted white cops. My stomach twisted with anxiety whenever he left the safety of his ghetto.

Being human means being able to empathize with another human being, no matter how different from you he or she is.

Seven Years in Tibet (1997) tells the true story of Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian mountain climber who became friends with the very young Dalai Lama at the time of China's takeover of Tibet. There is a scene in which the distraught little boy is slumped on the edge of his bed with his back to Harrer (played by Brad Pitt), who is standing at the opposite end of the room. I kept silently urging Harrer to go over to the boy and hug him, which he finally did. I have never known a Tibetan, let alone a Dalai Lama, but because we are both human, I knew what he must be feeling and how to console him.

Being an artist also helps us get in touch with our inner humanity-and that, of course, makes us more human. I have written and had published 22 short stories. In each one of them, I am all the characters-the good, the bad and the ugly-because they are all projections of my own personality. The protagonist of my story "Small Wonder" is considered by every woman who has ever read it to be a male chauvinist pig. He is. But because I see him from the inside-and because he is also me-I cannot judge him. I can only understand and sympathize with him.

It is always more comfortable for us to think of people as though they were statues. Mother Teresa is a saint; Adolf Hitler is a monster. But both are imperfect human beings just like you and me.

I don't condone anything that Hitler did, but when I read about his childhood in Alice Miller's For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, I began to understand why.

Miller has written elsewhere:

Like every other child, Hitler was born innocent, only to be raised, as were many children at the time, in a destructive fashion by his parents and later to make himself into a monster. He was the survivor of a machinery of annihilation that in turn-of-the-century Germany was called "child-rearing" and that I call "the concealed concentration camp of childhood," which is never allowed to be recognized for what it is.

In order not to die, all mistreated children must totally repress the mistreatment, deprivation, and bewilderment they have undergone because otherwise the child's organism wouldn't be able to cope with the magnitude of the pain suffered. Only as adults do they have other possibilities for dealing with their feelings. If they don't make use of these possibilities, then what was once the life-saving function of repression can be transformed into a dangerous destructive, and self-destructive force. In the careers of despots such as Hitler and Stalin, their suppressed fantasies of revenge can lead to indescribable atrocities.

The Führer once told his secretary that during one of the regular beatings given him by his father he was able to stop crying, to feel nothing, and even to count the thirty-two blows he received.

In this way, by totally denying his pain, his feelings of powerlessness, and his despair-in other words, by denying the truth-Hitler made himself into a master of violence and of contempt for human beings. The result was a very primitive person, incapable of any empathy for other people. He was mercilessly and constantly driven to new destructive acts by his latent feelings of hatred and revenge. After millions had been forced to die for this reason, those feelings still haunted him in his sleep. Hermann Rauschning reports nocturnal paroxysms of screaming on the Führer's part, along with "inexplicable counting", which I trace back to the counting he did during the beatings of his childhood.

By letting us walk in another's shoes, art lets us get in touch with our own humanity by letting us get in touch with someone else's. And instills in us a sense of humility. We are not better-or worse-than anyone else; we are all equal.

There but for the grace of God-or whatever-go each and every one of us.