“NEVER PLACE A PERIOD where God has placed a comma,” said the comedian Gracie Allen.
The comma, taken as a symbol by the United Church of Christ (UCC), suggests open-endedness, possibility, change, and growth. It sorts with ideas of process rather than completion, the “grand perhaps” of curiosity, and an undefensive position in a world of mutability.
It is an unusual theology, for many traditions seek the opposite, using myths of origin that describe a world created in welcomed immutability. Often, origin myths tell of a series of alterations to the world during its creation, a series of commas in the great paragraphs of life; once formed, however, the world was considered to be, well, “just so,” as Kipling’s stories suggest. The created world was finished and complete. Period. Both…