I’ve been reading the novelist Colum McCann recently. Impressed by TransatlanticI moved backwards to Let the Great World Spin and found this passage:
What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth–the filth, the war, the poverty–was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn’t interested in a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence.
“‘Someday the meek might actually want it,” he said.
What do you think of Corrigan’s God? To what extent is this God present in the Episcopal Church? When you hunger for an encounter with Corrigan’s God, it isn’t just that much of the ever so safe expressions of Christianity that thrive in our church and in our country leave you unmoved, they make you uneasy, or alienate you, or turn your stomach. And, then, like Corrigan, you find yourself struggling desperately to find some way to remain in the institution you thought would save you. Or so I have observed.