The Monster God: Coming to Terms with the Dark Side of Divinity

THE MONSTER

GOD

Coming to Terms with the Dark Side of Divinity

John R. Mabry

All Biblical notations take from the New American Standard Bible unless otherwise noted.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Hunted by the Hound of Heaven

Chapter One: The Ire of the Gods

Chapter Two: The Gods of Wrath

Chapter Three: The Gods of Betrayal

Chapter Four: The Gods of Rape

Chapter Five: The Gods of Genocide

Chapter Six: The Gods of Judgment

Chapter Seven: The Shadow of God

Chapter Eight: Talking Back to God

Chapter Nine: The Search for Another God

Notes

OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN R. MABRY

Spiritual Guidance Across Religions:

Providing Spiritual Counsel to People of Differing Faith Traditions

A Christian Walks in the Footsteps of the Buddha

What Child is This?

A Christmas at Bremmer’s Novel

Faithful Generations:

Effective Ministry Across Generational Lines

Growing Into God:

A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Mysticism

The Kingdom: A Berkeley Blackfriars Novel

The Power: A Berkeley Blackfriars Novel

Salvation of the True Rock

People of Faith:

An Interfaith Companion to the Revised Common Lectionary

The Way of Thomas:

Insights for Spiritual Living from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas

Noticing the Divine:

An Introduction to Interfaith Spiritual Guidance

Faith Styles: Ways People Believe

God Has One Eye:

The Mystics of the World’s Religions

God is a Great Underground River

I Believe in a God Who is Growing

Crisis and Communion

Heretics, Mystics & Misfits: A Sermon Cycle

God As Nature Sees God:

A Christian Reading of the Tao Te Ching

Jesus Stories

The Apocryphile Press

1700 Shattuck Ave #81

Berkeley, CA 94709

www.apocryphile.org

© Copyright 2008 by John R. Mabry. Originally published in 2008 by O Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, Ltd.

Apocryphile edition, 2015.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without written permission of the author and publisher, except for brief quotations in printed reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 9781940671840

eISBN 9781940671871 (Kindle)

eISBN 9781940671888 (ePub)

Ebook version 2

This book is dedicated to

BROTHERS FRANK SR. & FRANK JR.

High priests of the Monster God

and

DR. MARGARET DANA

who encouraged me to exorcize the Monster God.

At the height of the heavens,

the angels, whose voice I hear, glorify me.

I am beneath the sun, a wandering ant,

small and black, a rolling stone

reaches me,

crushes me,

dead,

in the sky

the sun blazes furiously,

it blinds,

I cry out:

it will not dare

it dares.

--George Battille

Inner Experience

Introduction:

Hunted by the Hound of Heaven

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days’

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Up vistaed hopes I sped;

And shot, precipitated,

Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after

But with unhurrying chase,

And unperturbéd pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

They beat—and a Voice beat

More instant than the Feet—

All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.

—Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven

Ihave always had the feeling that I was fundamentally irredeemable. I remember vividly as a child of six or seven being ushered into the Pastor’s office by my mother. I was sure that I was going to hell. I didn’t know how I knew it, but I was terrified—and quite certain—of it. The pastor of our mid-sized Southern Baptist Church led me through some scripture verses, assuring me that God would not let me slip through his fingers no matter what happened. I appreciated Pastor Jones’ patient and concerned explanations. But even as I was walking back out to where my mother was waiting I knew he was wrong. God was out to get me. I knew it.

Nevertheless, I did everything I was supposed to do to win God’s favor. The stories of God’s wrath poured out upon the heathen nations in the Old Testament were there for my sole benefit, a foreshadowing of what was in store for me. The many sermons I endured vividly depicting the horrors of hell made me faint with panic at what would most assuredly be my final resting place. As a child I remember crying myself to sleep, wondering if my mother would endure hell on my behalf. I knew the answer to that, and the terror of my utter aloneness and certain damnation wracked my little life.

Later, when I was licensed to preach (at the wise old age of sixteen), I began to give back what I was given: I used to walk up to people in shopping malls and inform them that they would spend an eternity in unquenchable fire unless they embraced my peculiar religious formula. I cringe today at the thought of it, but the truth was I was driven to do this, too, out of fear. Quoting Ezekiel 33:8 (If I say to the wicked, ‘O wicked ones, you shall surely die,’ and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand.) our leaders told us that God would hold us accountable at judgment for every person we came in contact with that we did not proselytize. So, out of fear, I inflicted fear on others, perpetuating a sincere but insidious spiral.

Near the end of my high-school years (when I was called Rev and carried a huge red Bible wherever I went) my family and I were disfellowshiped from our church for a variety of petty reasons. I was bitter and very, very hurt. I played the church game a while longer, but I finally renounced the God of my parents and my childhood. Keeping him happy was an impossible and thankless task, and, as a young adult, I was discovering that all of those people whom I had long considered evil and corrupt—namely anyone who wasn’t a Baptist—were fine and sensitive people with beliefs and wounds of their own. This was quite a revelation, and I began to avidly explore the faith traditions of others, searching for the right one.

Disconcertingly, I discovered that these other traditions also had strict proscriptions of just how one should believe and act, with terrifying descriptions of the eternal consequences of ignoring them that rivaled the vividness of my tradition of origin. Finally, blind drunk at four in the morning in the parking lot of my girlfriend’s apartment building, I sank to my knees and screamed up at the heavens, I don’t know who you are—and I cannot accept the God of my parents—but if something is up there, I have to know. Please!

Within twenty-four hours, I was on a road-trip with my girlfriend and my best friend BJ and his wife. I asked BJ to describe God. BJ began to describe a magnificent cosmic dance, with all the planets, suns, galaxies, angels, and demons spinning around in a seemingly chaotic but endlessly ornate choreography. Only humankind had forgotten how to dance, and our various faith traditions are our attempts to learn the steps again and rejoin the cosmic shindig. It was the most marvelous and intuitive explanation I had ever heard. Everything in me cried Aha! and I wept for two days. I realized that Christianity was my tradition—my place in the Dance—and that I must learn to dance again.

But this time, I would be real. I got my ear pierced as a covenant with God never to fall back into fundamentalist conformity. I would be the first to admit to being a hypocrite, and would do everything in my power to be a person of faith, intellect, and integrity.

Not long after, I went away to California Baptist College, where I had to confront the demons of my childhood faith face to face on a daily basis. I was looked down upon as a sort of bohemian misfit, but in the Humanities Department I found many like-souled friends and compatriots. All seemed to be going well until the nightmares began. I dreamed of hellfire night after night, and would wake up screaming and thrashing (which upset my wife to no end, as one might imagine). I was reaching another point of crisis in my life, when I came upon the Robert Browning poem, Caliban Upon Setabos.

Caliban, you might recall, is the monster in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Setebos is Caliban’s name for his god. In the poem, the monster is soliloquizing about how he loves to make other things suffer, and surely Setebos must be the same, reveling in the groveling of the weak before his might, playing with them, squashing them at whim. Caliban fears that he may be ground underfoot as he has done to so many creatures smaller than he. So he grovels, begs the Monster God Setebos for more mercy than he himself has ever shown, and envies the might that could very well extinguish him:

This Caliban strives hard and ails no less,

And always, above all else, envies Him;

Wherefore he mainly dances on dark nights,

Moans in the sun, gets under hoes to laugh,

And never speaks his mind save housed as now:

Outside, ‘groans, curses. If He caught me here,

O’erheard this speech, and asked, What chucklest at?

‘Would, to apease Him, cut a finger off,

Or of my three kid yearlings burn the best,

Or let the toothsome aples rot on tree,

Or push my taem beast for the orc to taste:

While myself lit a fire, and made a song

And sunt it, "What I hate, be consecrate

To celebrate Thee and Thy state, no mate

For Thee; what see for envy in poor me?"

The poem shook me deeply—for the first time someone had dared to speak the awful truth: God was a monster, driven by lusts beyond his control, hell-bent on our misery and destruction.

This had a twofold effect upon me. I realized in a moment of satori that repentance born of fear is invalid, and that only love is an acceptable religious motivation. But how can one love a monster? I had no answer to that question at the time. The other effect was that I began to write poetry of my own in which the figure of the Monster God became more and more prominent and well-defined. I was terrified at first of what was pouring out from my pen. The poems came fast, a torrent of rage and violence. The Monster God developed as a fierce but buffoonish caricature wantonly leveling buildings and masticating innocents. At first I had to rename God Zeus and Jesus Apollo in order to deal with the fear that accompanied these creations.

The final chapter of the Monster God cycle from my novel-in-odd-verse The Frog Mentality, takes the Monster God caricature to the outermost limit:

It was God’s Birthday and so we took him to Denny’s for dinner. God didn’t wait his turn when the time came to order, but thundered out Thick slabs of meat! so loud that the waitress picked blood from her ear.

     I’m First! God slathered at Dad.

     Uh, of course, Dad said nervously, inching closer to Mom and sweating at the neck.

     When their meals came God grabbed whatever he wanted from their plates, and not only that, he chewed with his mouth open, making loud smack, smack noises.

     Hey! objected Timmy, but God crushed his head in.

     When God got up to go to the bathroom, Sis leaned over and whispered, What a pig!

     Well, Mom, flustered, mounted to God’s defense. I’ll bet that where God comes from, grabbing, smacking, and murdering the young are the very peak of social etiquette.

     You mean in heaven they chew with their mouths open? Sis asked.

     When dessert was over, God was licking his lips and staring at the food at the next table. Dad turned over the check.

     I’ll get that! God shouted.

     No, it’s your birthday….

     You think I can’t pay for this, don’t you? God sneered.

     No, not at all, it’s just that….

     Well, I’ll teach you a thing or two! God reared and splattered Dad’s head across the paned glass.

     Oh, how beastly! Sis piped indignantly.

     Beastly? What? Fuck off! God said and stuck his thumb through her head.

     I’m a nice guy, he breathed to the horrified clientele, and don’t forget it. And don’t forget to tell your kids. ‘Cause if you do…. and he rambled off a deluxe assortment of threats.

     Can’t take him anywhere…. Mom sobbed.

     I heard that! God sneered.

Eventually I began to make an internal distinction between the God of my true and heartfelt devotion and the Monster God of my childhood. The true Mother of the Universe was not the Tasmanian Devil of my nightmares, but the full internalization of this distinction was still a long time in coming.

After many years of study, and the completion of my doctoral work in philosophy and religion, I have again turned to the subject that has stalked me all of my life. In researching the history of the Monster God, I found the evolution of an idea, not the biography of a person. In this book I stare the Monster God in the face, and explore the many facets of his personality, displaying him naked in all of his glory and his shame.

With this book I have turned a significant corner in my journey. I have also found that this journey is not mine alone. I was not the only child to cower before the specter of a malignant deity. The image of the Monster God has been haunting us for as long as we have cringed at the crack of thunder. The idea that the being that controls all things might not only contain the capacity for evil, but might in fact be evil creates a cognitive dissonance that is difficult for us to resolve, and has kept the human imagination busy creating a variety of fabulous theologies and theories to account for this awful contradiction. Not only does it shake us intellectually, but psychologically it undermines our hope and moves us to apathy and despair.

Of course, I am no stranger to these feelings. I know them intimately, and this book is the result of such dangerous and tender knowledge. This is a small book, and I am not attempting an exhaustive treatise on the subject. It is my goal only to explore ideas about the Monster God in a few choice traditions. But it will be clear, when we are finished, that this deity is part and parcel of the human experience, from the very earliest glimmerings of spiritual intuition.

I will explore this darker aspect of the divine in many of the world’s Native traditions, as well as in each of the three dominant religions in the West: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, with a brief foray into