February 29, 2020 - Diana Butler Bass Presentation - Grounded and the "Elevator God"

I drove three hours to Bend this last Saturday to see noted author and church historian Diana Butler Bass' presentation at Trinity Episcopal. Eight years ago her book Christianity After Religion impressed me. I read her past work and her next two books Grounded and Grateful. She read stories from her new manuscript tentatively titled either Keeping Jesus or Freeing Jesus and she put that manuscript in the context of the last two books,

She started her presentation of Grounded with a projection of a painting:

 

Everyone recognized this as a portrayal of God  and, judging by the knowing laughter, no one in the room admits to believing in. This half-hidden, haloed, old Caucasian man high in the sky looming at the top of a geometric triangle the figure itself forms is insidious however, in being an image we mentally fall back on. When we learn about the atom we are shown diagrams that we eventually understand are not correct but we have no good diagram that pictures our current understanding.

Tackling one aspect, this painting assumes a tiered view of creation. God is in heaven above us and hell exists below our feet. Bass spoke about her struggle to deconstruct this vertical view that God is always “up there” and we are always “down here”.

In the tiered view the church acts like an elevator (or a dumbwaiter) where ”Believers“ send up prayers, petitions, supplications” then wait to see if God  what God will send down. Religious figures help us understand what has been sent down or why nothing was sent,

Bass did not believe in this God intellectually but the "elevator God" is everywhere in the liturgy, the hymns and the images created in worship. She vowed not to sing or say anything that contributed to this image at church and her husband said :"Congratulations. With that you have just become a Quaker."

Grounded was her book exploring alternatives to this tiered view of creation. The story of her daughter asking where God resides that I wrote about in the last post was part of her meditation on this together with the theologies of immanence and transcendence.

When I began attending church again many of my close friends assumed I was now bought into this vision because the transcendent nature of God is so emphasized at church. There are, of course, other reasons. What image can instantly be universally recognized as representing God's  imminence in our lives?

The language of imminence even evokes but does not truly describe. We know what someone means when they say "Jesus lives in my heart" but we, and even the speaker is not claiming that organ is more special to our spiritual lives than other organs.

This is a third of the presentation but I will stop here for brevity's sake and incorporate other parts of the presentation into my upcoming blog posts.