Getting God Wrong

At the church that I used to attend, an elderly lady would on occasion interrupt the service, demanding to read poetry that--so she insisted--had been granted her by God.




If she was correct, gentle readers, then Hail Satan.

By the same token, another lady in the same church made similar claims--with similar veracity--about the songs that she sang while she watched over her cows; a music professor from my college days told of a student who had refused to revise his (badly executed) counterpoint assignment for fear of blaspheming the Holy Ghost; and an endless stream of three-chord schlock has poured forth from the guitars of the earnest-yet-untalented 'spiritual' under the guise of inspiration since time immemorial.

CS Lewis once said that a man who claimed to be God, but wasn't, is either a fraud or a madman.  But those who claim to speak for God are mostly worship leaders: the type who would condemn my arrogance for claiming to have written myself what I had in fact written while ascribing the excreted flotsam of their stream-of-consciousness to the transcendent creator of the universe.  We have another option: those who claim some touch of revelation might be neither frauds, nor mad, nor right, just ... wrong.