Hallelujah Anyway: The Abiding Spiritual Stupidity of the “Smart Monkey”

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding. — Job 38

So elsewhere I’ve been drawn into, for the X times infinityest time, yet another discussion about God. You know, the ones that go…

Is He this? Is She that?
Is God’s “morality” thin or fat?
Does He wear a halo or a hat?
Does He care if you crush a gnat?
Can you see Him?
Could you be Him?
If He tells you to kill your kid
Would you do what Abraham did?

All the usual suspects show up
With all their suspect notions.
Some come to sell you a Bible.
Some come to sell you a potion.
Some come to sell you a bottle
Of the very best Atheist lotion.

In short, when it comes to God — as we learn in the Holy Book of Dylan — “Everybody wants to get you down in the hole that they’re in.”

Me? I’m a believer because… well because I’ve really got Nothing. Better. To. Do. That’s because measuring myself against even the smallest, most finite, and bounded idea of God I can conceive I’m about gnat size in relation to that Everest. I wish others saw it that way, but among the smart monkeys most of us think of ourselves as some sort of gigantic intellect — at least in comparison to, say, a clam. Interesting that the “intelligent” who are long on stupidity are always short on humility.

The point is that smart monkeys (aka Human Beings) are, deep down, stupid and shallow in anything that even starts to compare us to the Creator. At best we’ve been granted a small, dim sense of the smudge left by the passing shadow of the afterimage of Creation and are forever limited to that. We cannot go beyond it. For us there is no outside looking in. We simply don’t have the wetware.

For many smart monkeys this vague, haunting sense is such an insult to their small monkey mind’s ego that they cannot endure the humiliation. And so they deny what little light they have and turn, turn away. It’s futile of course but so many now are so afflicted that they find, with each other, small and cold comfort in numbers.

It’s a shame that in this brief Grace-granted glimpse of the Immense Light between a sleep and a sleep that so many shut their eyes to the unfolding Miracle of each Moment, and think, poor little monkeys, that since none of it is about them none of it needs to be seen as it is — glorious, compassionate, incomprehensible, and indifferent. They actually think … no they actually “believe”... that the Creator should not be beyond their good and evil; that the moral life of Creation should reflect our dim and limited mind.

Given the Gift of Life they use it to curse the Giver.

Poor fools. Poor prideful fools. Poor little limited semi-smart monkeys. Pick a fight with God? All their puny arms together are still too short to box with God.