Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The Thirtieth Day of Lent

It seems to me that our lack of purposeful awareness with regard to who and whose we are is costing us a great price. There is an uncannily strong parallel between the legalsim of Jesus’ time and ours. In first-century Judea, obedience was to the law of God as interpreted by Man. In the present, however, our supposed obedience is to the law of Man which has essentially preempted God’s existence. For the former worldview, breaking the law was a transgression against God. In today’s society, breaking the law is a transgression against Man; unethical, perhaps, but certainly not immoral. We hear a lot of talk about having lost our moral compass, but what did we expect when we neatly killed off God to human experience? The God of religion is just that, isolated now to institutions such as the Church which are literally segregated from the rest of society. As long as God is confined to the Bible and houses of worship, Wall Street and the like can carry on with immoral impunity because they see themselves as outside or beyond God’s sphere of influence. Who’s to blame for this current ideology is hard to say, and probably not worth the effort of trying to determine. What may be more important is to individually, mustard seed by mustard seed, work diligently to restore first the awareness and then the connection. I invite my readers to give it a try as the journey to Easter grows shorter each day. Instead of storing God in a box somewhere, strive to recognize the God within and see what kind of difference it makes.

Monday, March 30, 2009

The Twenty-ninth Day of Lent

I actually feel like I’m making a little headway on my Lenten journey. By focusing on what distracts me from being in fuller communion with God by concentrating on the 24/7 nature of something that is everything I actually end up with brief moments of lucidity with regard to what and who I am. On a relative scale, however, I am still woefully preoccupied by those things that confuse and distort that relationship when they don’t actually deny it altogether. Being culturally immersed in a religion which limits God only to “goodness”—while attributing “evil” to a power other than God—makes it difficult to comprehend a monotheism which must by definition be inclusive of everything. The human process of evaluating, assessing, and most fundamentally judging is thrown askew when anything is included in the something that is everything. Think of the current “popular sin” of homosexuality, for instance, and what happens when the life force within the “sinner” is recognized to be the same as that in the “righteous”. First, the so-called righteous are immediately relieved of any obligation to make a judgment on anyone else because it is placed squarely back on themselves. I am finding that this principle generally applies to all forms of human judgment. While it is true that we are called to do whatever is necessary to improve our own relationship with God, it pretty well nixes taking the speck out of other eyes until we successfully remove the log from our own (don’t you just love how I work Jesus’ parables into these things?).

Friday, March 27, 2009

The Twenty-seventh Day of Lent

Power on

All systems go

Where now, my Lord?

When?

Now

Transformation

Paradigm shift

Engage

My God!

Follow the light

Lost in darkness

Today you will join me in paradise

I cry


Wednesday, March 25, 2009

My Very Own Omnibus

Omnipresence: check. Omnipotence: check. Omniscience: next up. When we regard any of these characteristics from the anthropomorphic perspective we inevitably end up with Superman, able to leap tall buildings, faster than a speeding bullet, and so on. It is understandable that we construct an image of the unimaginable in our own image because that is what we have to work with. To say that God “knows everything” in the sense that we know things is very misleading. Of course God is omniscient in that knowledge is part of the whole, but to attach human elements of cognition, perception, etc, utterly limits the something that is everything, including thought and knowledge. These are our terms used to explain as best we can what we are and what we do, but they are wholly inappropriate when projected onto God. We’re back to the early Hebrew understanding that little more can be said of God than “I Am”.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

The Twenty-fourth Day of Lent

As a physicist, Albert Einstein devoted his life to discovering a single unifying principle that would account for and explain everything in the Universe. Ironically, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth-century passed on feeling that he had failed. Currently, string theorists are discovering that Einstein was on the right path and came much closer to discovering “reality” than he realized.

In metaphysics, the singular unifying principle is identified with a variety of labels, perhaps the most common to Western civilization being “God”. As Dad often comments, Einstein felt that the most counterproductive notion posited by theology and religion was that of an anthropomorphistic deity; i.e. the old man sitting on his throne in heaven. The natural sciences, such as physics, don’t place a value judgment on positive, negative or neutral charges. All are required. Here, a metaphysical application to understanding God would do well by recognizing that ours is not the task of judging, but of recognizing the value of each to the whole.

The most extreme example I can think of to illustrate what I’m trying to say is Adolph Hitler. To be sure, Hitler was evil incarnate, but was just as surely a child of God as you or I. Science has brought us to the brink of stem cells, cloning, etc, but even as life is formed in the petri dish there is still no accounting for or explaining the life force that results. I like to think that we are on the threshhold of a new understanding of ourselves and the world around us when we are finally able to comprehend and accept that there is nothing that is not God, that there is no life force that has spontaneously generated itself. Each and every one of us is God manifest on Earth, making our contribution to the collective experience. When the first atomic explosion occurred, another physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer was reminded of a line from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. At that moment humankind was launched into a new dimension where a holistic understanding of God can no longer be that of the good guy in a white hat.

Monday, March 23, 2009

The Twenty-third Day of Lent

God is great, God is greedy,
That’s not good news for the needy.

My already left-leaning hermeneutic has pretty well moved all the way to sympathetic interpretation since leaving the church, and that combined with an already “liberal” theology has afforded me the opportunity to perhaps remove some of the mystery from the enigmatic forty-fifth verse of the fifth chapter of the Gospel According to Matthew: because he makes his sun rise on both evil and good people, and he lets rain fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. (ISV)

It seems to me that the most difficult element of radical monotheism to comprehend is that, while God is good, God is also evil. If God experiences in and through creation as I have proposed, then it is not really God’s “business” to place limitations or restrictions on that process. Sacred scripture of nearly all faiths implies one way or the other that the one true God is omnipotent, capable of anything. We sin, we miss the mark, and we separate ourselves from the love of God when we fail to understand that the something which is everything is not only that which we desire it to be.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

The Twentieth Day of Lent

He's got the whole world in His hands,
He's got the whole world in His hands,
He's got the whole world in His hands,
He's got the whole world in His hands.

He's got my brothers and my sisters in His hands,
He's got my brothers and my sisters in His hands,
He's got my brothers and my sisters in His hands,
He's got the whole world in His hands.

He's got the sun and the rain in His hands,
He's got the moon and the stars in His hands,
He's got the wind and the clouds in His hands,
He's got the whole world in His hands.

He's got the rivers and the mountains in His hands,
He's got the oceans and the seas in His hands,
He's got you and he's got me in His hands,
He's got the whole world in His hands.

He's got everybody here in His hands,
He's got everybody there in His hands,
He's got everybody everywhere in His hands,
He's got the whole world in His hands.

As I stepped into the elevator with a coworker preparing to go on my morning walk, she asked, “How are you this morning, Pastor?” She wasn’t even being sarcastic. She’s among the select few who know of my colorful past, and I once tried to answer her question about which translation of the Bible would be most appealing to her teenage son (I told her that I hoped the Serendipity Study Bible was still in print). It has been reaffirming to discover that some people are able to see me as a man of God without all the religious trappings. Indeed, it is somehow more genuine outside the context of organized religion. It is also encouraging to validate the notion that we really can see and treat others as expressions of God. There’s an obvious downside to this worldview, but I’m going to deal with that next week so that today I can just enjoy God in our midst.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

The Nineteenth Day of Lent

The New Calvinism by David Van Biema

I found this article in the current issue of TIME very interesting. So, then, should you. I understand that the questions I ask are rhetorical in the context of my silent audience, but what do you think? Has God planned out every minute detail for the Cosmos? Are you already “saved” or not? What does God “think” about Calvinism?

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

The Eighteenth Day of Lent

A Catholic Archbishop has sparked a bitter debate by excommunicating the mother and doctors of a 9-year-old girl who received an abortion. Brazilians, including President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, assailed the church for hewing to doctrine despite extreme mitigating circumstances—the child, who was carrying twins, had allegedly been raped by her stepfather. While generally illegal in heavily Catholic Brazil, abortion is permitted in rape cases. Critics said the church—whose actions were backed by the Vatican—risked alienating congregants.
--TIME, March 23, 2009

It’s a quantum leap between wanting to know the mind of God and claiming to know the mind of God. There could not be a better example than this news story to illustrate that theology and religion are not the same thing. I think one of the things I need to give up for Lent because it interferes with my relationship with God is authoritarian religious ideologues.

Monday, March 16, 2009

The Seventeenth Day of Lent

I’ve just returned from a delightful lunch at Potato Valley with Rebecca and Kevin. God is good. Amen.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Thursday, March 12, 2009

O! You better watch out!

My understanding of the Christian Easter proclamation is that the connection with God is always available, that even death cannot break it. That’s comforting to a point until you read the fine print of the convenant: although the connection is always available, it is optional, subject to human volition to choose awareness or not. When God becomes dead to human experience, it is not God that has died; it is the awareful, intentional connection that has terminated. Granted, it may be difficult to determine the termination of something that never started, but it remains a problem of connectivity rather than an absence of the something that is everything. I’m guessing that J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie weren’t intending to be theological when they wrote, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”, but the words convey in their own way the intimate nature of our relationship with God. “He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!” This analogy falls apart, of course, because it identifies a person occupying time and space, albeit with supernatural powers, and I hope that I’ve already developed a sound argument for why that image of God is so severely limited as to be obsolete. It does give pause to wonder, however, how important it may be to our inevitable destiny to work on making the connection as strong as it can possibly be in this experience we call life. What we learn to experience now may serve to keep the connection alive in the future.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

The Line Is Busy

Theologian Paul Johannes Tillich died the same year that theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer stirred the waters with his “death of God” postulation. I am unaware of any collaboration between the two, but there is a strong similarity between how the two regarded the “God connection”. Tillich defined sin as anything that separates us from the love of God. Altizer made the cover of the Easter 1966 TIME magazine bearing his question, “Is God Dead?” What you had to go ahead and read to find out was Altizer’s qualification: to human experience. Each man was saying in his own unique way that our relationship to God is critical to life’s meaning, and each of them was simply expounding on that same revelation of the Christ. God is always present and available. Humans have the choice to be aware of the availability of that presence, or not. As I have pursued my Lenten quest to give up all the things that keep me from being aware that God is in me and I am in God, I am quite literally dumbfounded by how ubiquitous they are. Now, I’m not recommending some sort of monastic isolation as the route to a good connection with my Creator because that isolates and limits the omnipresence of God. The something that is everything is present in the television, the morning commute, the water cooler exchange, etc. What is either present or not, then, is my awareness, my comprehension. When I am not aware, God is dead to my experience. When I am not aware, then I am separated from the “love” of God (this term is going to require some further examination) and, according to Tillich, in a state of sin. Jesus himself riled the religious establishment by declaring that piety and righteousness in and of themselves are not the means by which to enter the reign of God. Indeed, he exposed them as empty acts without redemption when they interrupt and distort the ultimate connection.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

On the Twelfth Day of Lent

It is disconcerting to realize that I have nothing new to say, which leaves me only to try to find different ways of saying the same old thing. For instance, the great theologians (to the best of my knowledge) have never resorted to saying that God would not shoot first. I mean, really! how absurdly idiotic to even say such a thing. And yet it is the meager best I can do to try to come up with some sort of concrete example of what I am talking about. To generalize it somewhat, I am of the opinion that a human being in full relationship with its Creator will never intentionally do harm. I guess because I was a cop once, I place this doctrine of nonmalifecence in the context of intent because I’m not sure that unintentional harm is as immoral as intentional harm. Everything attests to the creative nature of something and refutes nothingness in the process. This is, however, different than saying that destruction is not part of the creative process. Everything seems destined to ultimately yield to something new that will take its place. In the natural world there are destructive forces, but they lack intent and therefore remain consistent with the ultimate creative power that affirms itself. Humans exist for one reason only, the life force that is within them, and it is counter to a harmonious relationship with that force to intentionally destroy it. We would do well to give a great deal of thought to the proposition before we would ever intentionally do harm, because in the end it is ourselves that we are destroying.

Monday, March 09, 2009

The Shot Not Heard Around the World

I failed to post on the ninth and tenth days of Lent because, quite frankly, I was immersed in the mundane. Fortunately, Sunday afforded the opportunity to have a heart-to-heart with my soulmate, an exchange of ideas and opinion with Mary that I cherish because such conversations with her always help me to crystallize some of the things I have been trying to say but have not found the words. “What will be different when everyone accepts a personal relationship with God?” I do not pretend to even know how to tell whether someone’s relationship to/with their Creator is authentic, but in mulling over the question I have come up with one tiny example that would signify to me a genuine relationship. A human being in harmony with its Creator will never shoot first. My confidence in this statement is one-hundred percent. Whether or not a human being in communion with God will ever shoot in self-defense, I do not know. But based on everything I have learned from Scripture, Tradition, Experience and Reason compels me to declare unequivocally that anyone truly in alignment with the Divine will never be the aggressor, the shooter, the killer.

Thursday, March 05, 2009

The Eighth Day of Lent

"The devil is in the details." We’re hearing this phrase quite a lot these days, and I hope that you find its origins to be as interesting as I do. That it is a variation of “God is in the details” is precisely where I wanted to go with this. So far, I’ve supposed that God is the something that is everything and is therefore who and what I am. Such simplicity really isn’t very satisfying to inquiring minds, the very sort that developed the scientific method which is now being used to probe deeper and deeper into the details of the human mind. The current literature is rife with reports of the results of MRIs and CATscans of the brain and how it functions, but I am going to be so bold as to predict that even when they get to the final synaptic neurons, researchers will be no closer to understanding what a ‘thought’ is than they were before. The metaphysical truth of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts will prevail. No less than Albert Einstein said, "I am not interested in this phenomenon or that phenomenon. I want to know God's thoughts – the rest are mere details."

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

The Seventh Day of Lent

It won’t surprise me to learn that some of you have reached this point ahead of me. I’ve commited to a Lenten discipline of giving up those things that interfere with my relationship to God, and now I’m discovering that God may very well be present all the time everywhere. If this is true, it creates a very dire scenario of what is interfering and how to give it up: life itself is the culprit. When I set out to achieve a stronger connection with my Creator, I cannot rule out that through my experience the Creator is setting out on the same journey. Talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees! The harder I look for God, the further I am removed from the realization that God is literally right under my nose—more accurately: is my nose. In the most theological of the four canonical gospels, that according to John, Jesus makes an incredibly bold claim: The Father and I are one. The Father is in me and I am in the Father. The history of Christianity supports my contention that the Church uses this claim to support the divinity of Jesus the Christ; to demonstrate, if you will, how Jesus is superhumanly one third of the Trinity. Taken in an existential context, however, the statement applies not only to Jesus but to those to whom he is speaking. It does not make sense to me that Jesus’ calling was to distinguish himself from the rest of humankind as God on Earth. As Albert Schweitzer contends, this is a claim made for Jesus by others. According to the Gospel of Mark—generally agreed to be the earliest of the canonical gospels—the very first words out of Jesus’ mouth proclaim that the reign of God is at hand. Taken in a static context, that statement would raise the expectation for the apocalyptic end of time, but understood as a dynamic process it confirms the imminency of God in both time and space. In other words, don’t go looking for God somewhere else. As I have said before, without God I am nothing. What I need to learn to give up is anything that detracts from the continuous perception that I am in God and God is in me.

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

This Is What I Think

It is quite clear to me that what we believe, what we hold to be true, affects our every waking moment. If I believe that I am superior, then those things which are not me must be inferior. The converse is also true; if I believe that I am inferior, then most everything else is superior to me. If I believe there is a God, then I will act accordingly. If I do not believe there is a God, then I will again act accordingly. And if I do believe that there is a God, then the way that I behave will be further influenced by what I believe to be true about God. If I believe that the Jesus of the Church was/is God on Earth, and if I believe that the scriptural portrayal of him is inerrant and infallible, then I am going to end up with a very specific “picture” of God and how God functions. If I choose to believe what others tell me is true about God that is going to be quite different than if I base my belief on personal experience. It is the difference between the abstract and the concrete, both of which are included in the human persona. Where science is seemingly at odds with religion is the issue of empiricism, that firsthand experience that can then be independently tested for the same results. For far too long, religion has emphasized the secondhand experience of others that, rather than being tested, is accepted on “faith”. Because it says in the Bible that Moses found God in a burning bush, much of organized religion will say that this is to be accepted as unquestionably true. Such “faith” unfortunately rules out a further questioning of just what such a report may be really trying to say. Theology, as opposed to religion, is highly instrospective precisely because it ultimately requires firsthand experience.

Monday, March 02, 2009

If Not Where, Then When?

We humans perceive our existence on a time-space continuum. I can plug my current location into Google Earth and see the precise space that I am presently occupying, and I can look at my wristwatch that is tuned to the atomic clock at the Bureau of Standards to know within a fraction of a second when I am occupying that space. Our human frame of reference is based upon when we are where. This cannot help but significantly affect our theology because it is only natural to try to locate God in those same terms of time and space. To this point I have argued that omnipresence makes moot the question where is God by more appropriately asking where is God not? By that same principle, then, the question of when God is present is reasonably transitioned to when is God not present? I can understand that this line of reasoning can seem pretty silly, that is until we more closely examine human behavior. I think it’s fair to say that most people locate God in time and space, and as a result reach the logical conclusion that there are some times when God is not present—or at least as present as at other times. My experience informs me that many people actually think of God as having an on/off switch that controls whether or not God is “aware” of what’s going on. For true atheists this is not the case because there is nothing to turn on or off, but I will reiterate here that the fact of something negates the theory of nothing. So, as I continue on my Lenten quest of giving up those things that stand in the way of my communion with God I am confronted with the virtually impossible challenge of finding a frame of reference other than time and space.