Looking for Mr. Big

Looking For Mr. Big
by Bernadette Voorhees

Have you ever had a time in your life when something you needed turned up missing? Something you counted on?
I’m not talking about little things like socks or keys or phone numbers written on scrap paper, things that routinely fall between the cushions on the sofa & get sucked into the netherworld between galaxies or those things you chalk up to something the dog chewed up & carried away. Those things you can forget & attach a little sticky note to the refrigerator asking other people in the family if they’ve seen it. I’m talking about bigger things, things we can spend months or even years looking for like our sanity or our identity or our purpose in life, the kind of things that don’t fit on sticky notes or refrigerators.

In Woody Allen’s short play, “Mr. Big,” a detective named Kaiser Lupowitz is hired by a Vassar philosophy major to find something that turned up missing, a missing person to be exact. Kaiser questions her & discovers, early on, that the person she wants to find is God. When Kaiser asks her what God looks like, she admits she has never seen him. “Oh great!” he responds. “Then you don’t know what he looks like? Or where to begin looking?” “No. Not really,” she replies. “Although I suspect he’s everywhere. In the air, in every flower, in you & I & in this leather sectional sofa.”
“Uh-huh,” Kaiser thinks. “So, she’s a pantheist.” Following
the twists & turns of the parody investigation, Kaiser later talks to the police. He is asked if he’s still looking for God, the ‘Great Oneness, the connection between all things, Creator of the Universe, Mr. Big?”
When the detective nods the police tell him that somebody answering to that description has just showed up at the morgue. After reviewing the facts, Kaiser & the policeman conclude that the divine murder wasn’t a professional job.
‘Couldn’t have been,’ they say. ‘Probably done by an existentialist,’ they surmise. When Kaiser asks how they could know, the sergeant answers, “Haphazard way it was done. Doesn’t seem to be any system followed.”

I know of families where, if God turned up missing, it wouldn’t be much of a problem. Families where it would be a problem if someone left a sticky note on the refrigerator asking if they’d seen God, or if they wouldn’t mind helping to look for God. Families where it would be a problem if their teenage son came home from school & said that he’d FOUND God. In many households, seeing God’s picture on a milk carton wouldn’t raise many eyebrows.

For some, God just turned up missing one day & they never bothered to file a report & some people were so turned off by a long history of personal experiences with hell & brimstone pastors preaching sin & shame & misguided people in their lives who told them so many times that ‘God was going to punish them for this or that;’ that they finally summoned the courage & good common sense to get rid of such a hurtful & destructive God themselves. Many people in Unity share a history like that & say that even thought they finally understood that the role of God was never meant to be a harmful or negative thing in our lives that their family or friends still believe otherwise & while they held on to God, their family & friends went missing.

Woody Allen wasn’t the first to write about the killing of God. Many people before & since have reflected on the idea of ‘theocide’ if not carried it out themselves. The point I’m making here is that since the purpose of worshipping God is to inspire you to become more God-like, when you realize that the God you’ve been taught to believe in is a vengeful, condemning & punishing God, isn’t it better to kill off such a God than to become more like Him.

But then what do you do when all that’s left is the chalk outline of where God used to be in your life. ‘What do you do to fill that place?’ What do you turn to? What do you believe in? What do you worship if all you are left with is a God-sized hole? Nothing? Anything? Does this matter?

Carl Jung, one of the father’s of modern psychology, wrote a book called “Modern Man in Search of a Soul.” In it he said, “About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically define-able neurosis; but [instead] from the senselessness & emptiness of their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time.”

The general neurosis of our times is meaninglessness, emptiness, the feeling that something is missing. And the questions that cry to us out of our emptiness are simple: ‘What should I be doing with my life?’ What can I do so that I can someday look back & feel like my life was significant? When I die will my own disappearance leave the world richer, poorer, sadder, or just less crowded? Unlike some other religions, the question we in Unity wrestle with isn’t whether there is ‘life after death,’ but whether there ‘life after birth & life before death.’ These are questions that we usually turn to God with for help. But when we’re worshipping a God that demands blind allegiance, or for whom we can find no allegiance, we must contend with the emptiness on our own & make no
bones about it, rather than living with emptiness, we will learn to fill it by turning to something or someone.

In his essay on the Oversoul, Ralph Waldo Emerson talked about this saying: “A person will worship something – have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret, in the dark recesses of our hearts – but it will get out. That which dominates our imaginations & our thoughts will determine our lives & character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.”

“What we are worshipping, we are becoming.” This is so true. Yet how many of us are always aware of exactly what we are worshipping? How many of us will honestly admit to what habitually dominates our imaginations? If you asksomeone what’s more important: having the latest computer, boat, car or thing off Madison avenue or devotion to family, their answer will likely be family. But if you watch how they live their lives & what they spend their time, energy & money on you are likely to see otherwise.

Emerson is referring to the idolatry we commit when we confuse or simply replace the worship of something meaningful with something that’s merely alluring. The voices that call us to keep up with the Jones’ or look as good as the people around us are just a few of the voices that often live in the available emptiness of our soul. They can, as Emerson notes, ‘dominate our imaginations & determine our character.’ But possessions, success & vanity are only a few of the tempting false gods that will try to roost in an empty nest.

The world is not unfamiliar with the gods of power, fame & influence. Jesus & other Master’s all warned against their seduction saying such things don’t bring peace. The drive for power & fame, like wealth, leads people to see their lives in terms of competition & attempts at domination rather than cooperation & relationship with the highest & the best for all concerned as the end result. The exercise of power can make human relationships very difficult not to mention unbalanced.

Rabbi Harold Kushner said “There is a tricky link between the quest for love & the quest for power. If you love someone because they always try to please you, because they always do what you want them to, that isn’t love, that is just a round about way of loving yourself. Power, like water, flows downhill from someone in a higher position to someone lower down. Love can be generated only between people who see themselves as equals, between people who can be mutually fulfilling to each other. Where one commands & one obeys, there can be loyalty & gratitude, but not love.”

If we need an example of those who would try to convince us that love will come through approval, obedience & submission, we only need look at how a cultured, educated people like the Germans could have let a man like Hitler come to power to know this is true. Likewise, words of such gods of approval are also found in the journal of a medieval Spanish monk when he wrote, “I am confident that, after my death, I will go to heaven because I have never made a decision on my own. I have always followed the orders of superiors & if I ever erred, the sin is theirs, not mine.” Such a heaven could only be filled with souls who spent their lives as sycophants & know only conformity and obedience. For myself, I couldn’t imagine a greater hell.

The Roman poet Ovid told a story of 2 characters who were dominated by false gods & the fate they encountered. It is about a young pair named Echo & Narcissus.

“Echo” was a maiden so named by the God Juno whom she served as a handmaiden. Juno wouldn’t stand for brazenness & when she heard Echo’s tongue speak for itself, she cast spell over the maiden that reduced her ability for speech to the shallow mimicry of other people’s words. No independent, original thought of her own could escape her lips. This would become a tragedy for Echo, later on when she met a young boy named Narcissus. Narcissus was endowed with beauty so great no one could resist him. It was prophesied at his birth that he would live to an old age, unless he somehow caught sight of himself. Echo, seeing his beauty, tried to draw Narcissus to her, but she had no words of her own to attract him. When he rejected her, she hid behind some trees where she pined & pined until her body wasted away leaving only her voice to echo others around her. Narcissus escaped Echo by running to a still & clear stream, where he bent down to get a drink. As he did, he saw his reflection on the surface of the water. Thinking it was the most beautiful person he’d ever seen looking up at him, he bent down to kiss the surface. This he did over & over, never able to coax the reflection out of the water & thus pining away there for his inability to take his eyes off himself. In his last few breaths he lamented his unrequited love, saying ‘Alas,’ & from the trees nearby came Echo’s haunting voice, ‘alas, alas, alas,’

The ‘kingdom of God’ is found by people learning how to come together with all of their beauty & brazen independence, a kingdom built on recognition of mutual strengths. Echo & Narcissus were not able to achieve this kind of relationship& for good reason, they had chosen to follow, or were directed by what Ovid calls ‘smaller Gods.’

Any God worth following wouldn’t prompt or expect us to become blindly obedient, only able to echo other people’s words or ways. Parroting scripture is a way to be religious, but without some authentic insight & voice of our own, there is nothing significant within us that will allow more than the most shallow connection with others, this is what Jesus called ‘second hand light’ & blind repetition that results in the sins of the Father being visited on the son.

When we seek to fill that God-sized hole with gods of Power, wealth, fame or vanity we become narcissistic; Trying to captivate or control others & draw them & bind them to us never allows us to see beyond our own image which we have to do in order to truly appreciate who they really are, what they really think & what they have to offer & what they actually do as individualized expressions of God.
Now more than ever, it feels gods that demand obedience or who rule through the power of shame are turning up more & more as missing or in the morgue. & ‘We the people’ seem to be taking on more and more responsibility to fill the emptiness – in our own souls and in our own country & in the world – with something godly of our own. A new vision for transparency & accountability that seems to elude the olds Gods of power.

& If you wonder what guided & inspired me this morning with such a hopeful vision where the powers tells us that things are still bleak, I ask you to reflect on the principles Robert Steyn followed in his efforts to rid South Africa of Apartheid.

1st “First, finding compassion for those other than myself’

2nd practicing non-judgmentalism & acceptance of all people, including their ability to learn & do!

3rd & third, “When living amidst a society with a sick & twisted ideology it is imperative to hold up a vision of that which is good and decent and kind in our humanity.”

These 3 ideas are as holy as any I’ve read in the Bible or heard anywhere else. & in the end it doesn’t matter whether the acts of our conscience come from God’s word, the words of those acting in godly ways or Jiminy Cricket. It’s only important that we begin to ask ourselves some hard questions & begin to consider what we worship & what we are becoming individually & as a family & as a church & as a country and that we begin to take ourselves seriously. If we don’t know one else will.

I’d like to close with these thoughts from Buddha.

The thought manifests as the word.
The word manifests as the deed.
The deed develops into a habit,
And habit hardens into character.
So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let it spring from love,
Out of respect for all beings.