Jimmy Carter was born today in 1924

                                  Psalm 102:18 

Let 

this be written for a future genera-tion, so that a people yet unborn may praise the Lord. 

                Saints and Seasons 

There is a saying that God does not have grandchildren. God has only children, each of whom must have their own encounter or there is no relationship.  You can't be given it, you can't be born into it. You do not  automatically have a relationship with God if your mother or your father is a Christian, or, for that matter, a Muslim, or a Jew, or devout Hindu or Buddhist, 

or anything else. Even being a cradle Episcopalian does not automatically count, as blasphemous as that sounds to my own ears!

The "faith of our fathers" is a wonderful thing, but unless it is our faith, unless we see with our own eyes, and hear with our own ears, and touch with our own hands, it remains just a thing, something outside ourselves -someone else’s, but not ours.  Knowledge of God is not enough, because faith does not reside in our head alone; we cannot simply give it intellectual assent and have it mean anything in the way we live our lives, raise our kids, face our problems, meet our death and the death of those we love. What we need is "a God we can do business with,” as it says in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. 

I find that those who reject God,  most often reject a caricature of God, or a Sunday School faith which was tailored not for adults, but for children, children whose logical minds and imaginations are not fully formed, a faith I too would reject. Luckily, having “a God of my understanding” does not mean reinventing Him, but it does mean that I need to get to know Him. The Gospel must be interpreted anew to each generation. We are blessed if our family, parents, or grandparents, or a beloved aunt, knows God, and can introduce us. But even that is not a slam dunk. But even without it, there are many and varied ways to God - through nature and pain, through addiction, thorough love and loss and longing, through the sacraments and prayer and holy friendship, through beauty, through music and art, even through logic, mathematics and the sciences. God has a way into every life and every heart and every mind.  And it is up to us the nourish it, because that relationship is like any other; either it grows or it diminishes as we make our way through the complexities and losses of life.

As children of God of whatever age, we are “in everlasting life” here and  now, in this wonky, already-and-not-yet place that is the present. We are never finished, we are never done. Our relationship grows as we do - though childhood, into our teenage years, in our mature working years, into old age, until at last, we face into eternity and The One who is waiting, and we recognize Him “as my friend, and not a stranger.” 

Written by Louise Buck October 2015

for The Gospel At St  David’s 

An Episcopal Church in San Diego