Dear Professor Rivera:
I've been haunted by my words in class yesterday: "I wish president bush thought g*d was omnipotent."
The truth is: I think president bush probably plays lots of lip-service to g*d's omnipotence: G*d...the ultimate supreme container for all power on earth and in heaven. And it is the rhetorical nature of this lip-service that I wonder about.
It seems to me that g*d's omnipotence is (usually) used for two reasons: 1) to deny creaturely agency and thereby duck responsibility for creaturely decision-making & the consequences thereof 2) to deny creaturely agency and thereby encourage creatures to remain complacent (and thereby complicit) with life/structures as they are. In my working context, I often hear the latter. Lots of women have been told to hold on, to wait for the glory of god to reveal itself to them, when they could be going to therapy, entering into healing circles and healing wounds. In the political context I hear the former. G*d intended Sept 11; therefore the US is/was intended to occupy/enslave the nations assummed to have perpetrated the 'terrorist acts.' No colonial agenda; just divine justice.
What would it mean for pres bush to believe, I mean really believe, that g*d had ALL power and agency? Would he continue to extract, demand and pollute and conceive of it as divine mission? Or would he put down his agenda of mass destruction and wait for the lord to reveal himself? Either way, a sense of participation (either by receiving revelation, or embodying the missio dei) is implicit. Hasn't omnipotence run its course? if by omnipotence we mean power and by power we mean the full capacity to make things happen???
I was pissed off in class yesterday and I'm afraid, because of the anger I feel/hear/experience in my body, that I disrupted and postured in unhealthy ways. I am sorry for that. No one was even arguing FOR omnipotent theology! The voices that have trumpeted omnipotence theology in my/the past were rapists, consumers of the most cruel content, genuinely abusive/selfish human beings (though of course that's not all they were/are). It's hard to separate the "concept" from the living damage caused in and through the concept. And yet, I am highly aware that reliance upon God's power has pulled more than one body/community through trials and tribulations. Sometimes I think my frustration is just the fear of loss that I know comes when G*d-talk/G*d-thought comes out of the closet in complex clothing: never pure, never clean, just dressed up in all kinds of costumes for different celebrations/pilgrimages/funerals. Sometimes I want G*d to come out looking just like me, but then I remember, I need grace in here that I cannot get without the "there" there.
Thank you for your class. I am stretching and growing because of it/us/you.
Love,
Emily Joye
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