The following was written in a review by Mary Pols of the book Devotion by Dani Shapiro:
“Devotion does not provide a template for finding your personal Jesus (or whoever). It’s a history of Shapiro’s quest to explore her own faithlessness. She grew up in an Orthodox household but cast aside her Hebrew religious study as a teenager. As an adult, her sense of God was that if he existed, he was not a micromanager. (“As far as I knew, he had never gotten me a parking space.”) She wants to believe in something but doesn’t know what.”
For me “God as micromanager” has always been a problem. It is common in Mormon culture to recite inspirational stories of how God has personally intervened in lives. Here are three stories that I remember. Years ago, my home teacher related a tale of an overflowing bath tub. Without any communication, the neighbor ran over with a shop vac and helped clean up the flooding. My home teacher was convinced the neighbor had been alerted by God.
At a fast-and-testimony meeting (FTM) meeting, one of our neighbors related an experience of trying to repair a bike. She was stumped and frustrated, and couldn’t get the job done. So she retired for a moment of personal prayer. She then returned to the bike repair job and was able to complete it successfully. She attributed her success to God’s inspiration.
At another FTM, our Bishop told of an experience where the family car broke down in a very dangerous stretch of canyon highway. After a family prayer, a good semaritan stopped, and took our Bishop’s family to his home in a nearby city. While the car was being repaired, the Bishop’s new-found friend let his family stay at his house. The Bishop, with tears in his eyes, attributed the successful resolution of the problem to God intervention.
While I’m sure that each of the inspirational storytelIers was a sincere believer, I find their three tales difficult on several different levels (eg. Bad things can and do happen to people who pray for relief? And then what? Do you lose faith or rationize God’s response.). But most of all, the God I believe in is not a micromanager. I don’t believe that he Is up in heaven stirring the pot on micro-issues.
Prayer does provide an important step in the two examples above. In the first, it provided a brief respite from the problem. A timeout is frequently all that is needed in problem solving. It works for me on crossword puzzles. On the second, a family prayer was very important in helping to settle the everyone down.
Good post, Roger. Your last paragraph seems like you share it as though it were an afterthought, when in fact it may be the key to your whole post. While I still haven’t given up my faith that prayers are really answered, these behaviors are undoubtedly beneficial and provide their practitioners with useful coping and problem-solving mechanisms. Furthermore, if we think of ourselves as extensions of the divine community, all of which could be called “God,” then prayer is just as much a tapping into our own true potential as it is calling on a higher external power. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Hi Carl, it sounds like some of your thoughts about God might parallel those of “Process Theology.” Dan Wotherspoon, past editor of Sunstone Magazine is currently working on a book about Mormonism and Process Theology. I look forward to Dan’s upcoming oeuvre. Thanks for your comment.
Not long ago, I suffered through a lesson in relief society in which everyone was trying to top each other on their “answers to prayers”. Two struck me as a bit preposterous. One, a woman who knelt in prayer as a family on their front lawn, because her young son was overcome with pain because he had lost a hot wheels car, apparently worth lots of money because it was a rare model. The family prayer worked. They prayed and were able to find the car on the lawn. The other involved a woman who was having a hard time potty training her daughter and the miracle of prayer made everything right.
I have got to come to grips with prayer. I have not prayed since my Mother’s death. Not at all. I feel like I am not worthy of prayer, not worthy of an answer. Besides that, as you mention in your article, what about when you pray fervently (like I did when Mom was terminal), and your prayers are not answered? Sorry, I digress. I did enjoy the article and the response from a colleague of yours. And you are right. Maybe sometimes prayer is as simple as making someone take a different thought approach, which helps them to solve their own problems.
The March 2010 ‘Ensign’ magazine seems fixated on a micromanaging God. That obstacles can be overcome through obedience and God’s intervention. Lin Si-Chia lost her favorite Book of Mormon and then her job. She was counselled to stay true. Of course, she learned from her tribulations (p. 22): “As it turned out, I found another job–one that was even better than my previous one. Better yet, I found my copy of the Book of Mormon.” The rewards of obedience are always highlighted in the ‘Ensign”. But what about extremely bad things happening to “good” people, members who obey all the rules? I think the explanations are much clearer if God isn’t stirring every little pot. But it does place responsibillity on the individual.
According to Wesley J. Wildman in Dialogue (Spring 2010, p. 214):
“Unsurprisingly, to Darwin, God gradually came to seem less personal, benevolent, attentive, and active. Surely, such a loving, personal Deity would have created in another way (other than evolution), a way that involved less trial and error, fewer false starts, fewer mindless species extinction, fewer pointless cruelties, and less reliance on predation to sort out the fit from the unfit. Darwin arguably never lost his faith in God. Rather, he believed that God created through the evolutionary process, but his growing knowledge of that process dramatically transformed his view of God, which left him ill at ease with the anthropomorphic personal theism of his day and at odds with friends and colleagues who believed in a personal, benevolent, attentive, and active divine being.
Christians and othe theists who casually assert that God creates through evolution–as if there is no theological problem with this assertion–should pause and consider Darwin’s faith journey. Darwin was theologically more perceptive than many of his liberal endorsers. He knew that evolution puts enormous stress on the idea of God. . . .”