Homily at Church of the Morningstar on 3/18/2023

So as part of my theology I firmly believe that every human being is possessed of an inner god.  This god is utterly benevolent towards the person it is a part of.  They love us, as we ought to love ourselves.  They are the part of us that knows how to keep moving, to keep loving through the hardest shit in the world.  They can banish any frightening spiritual force.  They give us our capacity for compassion, and moral reasoning.

It’s weird, but I think most of us have experienced something like our inner god at some point.  That voice within us that is kind, and that holds us together in the face of hardship.  It is the voice that gets you through.  And it can be drowned out by so many things in life, fear and other people’s unkindness, our own pain, innumerable things.  I don’t believe the world is naturally a just place.  I don’t think the ledger is balanced by some divine hand in the end.  Justice is up to us.  So I don’t think that our inner gods can always yell over the din, we have to find a way to listen.  They are a resource we can turn to if we know how.  

The inner god is a concept about which I still have a lot of theological questions.  Are inner gods one per person?  Given the same information, will all inner gods reach the same moral conclusion?  If morality is too complex to be axiomatic (as in reduced to a series of axioms) but they would come to the same conclusion, would that be to suggest there is some absolute morality?  Objectively true in itself?  But of course, I think there is usually more than one “right” answer to most things, and of course there are a lot of times where there’s not really a good answer, just a lot of least bad answers and unavoidable collateral damage.

But I mean I suppose, despite their lack of omnipotence, inner gods are the closest thing to the vast and ineffable “big god” style gods to me.  Every human being contains that sacredness, and of course, the sacred is also the potentially dangerous, isn’t it?  We all know about wrathful gods.  I think a mistreated god is likely to become a wrathful god.  As well, I don’t know whether if everyone truly listened to their inner god if there would be no conflict?  I’m not sure it would.  I do not think we live in a clockwork universe where when everything is “working properly” we function as a well oiled machine, each piece fitting perfectly into place, never bashing into one another.  We’re not a puzzle with loops and blanks perfectly aligned, destined to make a perfect whole if we all just find our right place, I think.  But if that’s true… what is this?  What is it for?  Why do we have it?  How do we do it?

This is a hard sermon to write, because for me the inner god is so deeply a felt experience, that trying to describe it, to explain a rational theology of the inner god, to explain what conclusions I draw from this felt experience, and I think it’s a good exercise, a useful thing to actually think about.  I think it must be for something in a way, but of course like any idea of human life having a purpose, anything articulable is unsatisfactory.  If we were to know that the purpose of human life is to provide the… specific atmospheric conditions necessary for the universe to function optimally as a doorstop for the cosmic crystalline unicorn that exists outside of time, that would still be unsatisfactory because then we’d wonder what the unicorn was for.  

But of course “forness” is like… a concept that exists within human life.  Purpose is something that exists on too small and specific a scale to cover a whole life I think.  It’s like asking “what color is a human life?” there’s too much color in a human life to answer the question, there are too many human lives to answer the question.  I don’t know.

Now, of course, believing every human being is divine and being as you all know, not someone who preaches pacifism or tolerance for injustice, is a complex thing.  What does it mean to believe in the divinity of humanity and to acknowledge that as long as there is oppression, there may be the necessity of things like wars?

Well, I mean to me it means acknowledging the full weight of that.  The full weight of both the need to combat all oppression and the true potential cost of combating it.  It requires a serious commitment to thinking about the strategies you employ and choices you make.

I do think that there is something to be said for trying to listen for the inner god.  I think we’re happier and generally kinder to one another when we do, but how and why that works?  That’s a mystery of my faith, the way the nature of the trinity might be to a Christian.

I don’t know, it’s the thing that keeps you moving when it’s freezing and you’ll die if you don’t keep walking.  It’s the thing you hold onto.  That’s what I’ve got.  That’s all I’m sure of.