Sunday, May 28, 2017

A Consciousness Change

“The Age of Nations is past,
The task before us now, if we would not perish,
Is to build the earth.”
                                                                                                            Teilhard de Chardin


I believe there is a God and that there is meaning and purpose to our existence: humanity is to evolve and learn to live as God has directed—then we will join God in eternity.  I believe that Father God, who created life and the world, first guided infant humanity.  I believe he gave directions to Abraham to form the Jewish nation in a time when ‘Might Means Right’ was the only guiding principle.  For the nascent nation God chose Moses to lead their development with laws and rules.  This changed humanity’s consciousness.  It evolved from tribalism and led to the first Axial period wherein, throughout the globe, isolated clusters of humanity, led by great Prophets, laid the foundations of civilization between 800 and 200 B.C.

When God determined the time was ripe, God the Father ceased direct guidance, giving humanity full power of free will.  God entered time as the man Jesus, demonstrating how we are to live.  Like rebellious adolescents, mankind did not adopt ‘The Way’ given us by Jesus.  Some saw the wisdom and Christianity took hold, keeping Jesus’ words alive.  For centuries the world progressed physically in adolescent-like rebellion, playing dangerous war games, claiming for profit earth’s natural resources and rebelling against moral order.

We now stand on the brink of self-destruction!  We're children no longer, needing to be guided and led; we can see what the rebellion has achieved.  It is time to accept our adulthood—another consciousness change is needed—to recognize our world is one interacting/interdependent unit that will succeed or perish as a whole.

* * *

                                          THE CHILD IS FATHER OF THE MAN


From parent comes child
Who is destined himself to become parent.
From God comes man
Himself to become as God—
One to other
United in understanding
Through shared creation.
Each still is
But they share a being
Impossible without the evolutionary development.

But that is the completion—
The becoming is painful.

To grow under protective care:
                  To have one to give answers,
                  To have one to run to for comfort,
                  To have one to define limits’
                  To have one to forgive mistakes,
                  To have one to answer needs
                  To have one to see in us value . . . . . .
                                                      Childhood and Innocence.

Then to be alone:
                  To search out answers,
                  To endure without comfort,
                  To draw our own limits,
                  To be responsible for mistakes,
                  To find the means to answer needs,
                  To create our own value by our actions . . . .
                                                      Maturity and Responsibility.

The aloneness feels like abandonment;
But necessary for becoming.

It is weakness, cowardice, and death
To run back to the protectiveness outgrown.
It is strength, courage and life
To face the challenge alone.
The challenges to be met?
One cannot foretell.
For some they are few;
For others, many.
But the greater the challenges met and overcome,
The greater the one overcoming.

Refuse the challenge
               Deny the worth of the struggle.
                                 Give no example to those who follow,
                                                   Destruction . . . . . . .
                                                                     And worse yet,
                                                                                       Responsibility for that destruction!

Refusal, denial, and the killing of hope
Will not eliminate the responsibility inherent in maturation.
There is no choice but to go forward and build,
To find within the self
The ability to become as the One who gave being.

God is not dead
His infinite wisdom sees the necessity
Of Man’s accepting the responsibility
Of his own destiny.

The pain?
                  The suffering?
                                    The aloneness?
                                                      To be endured!

Instead of receiving,
It is now ours to give
The child must now become the father.






Wednesday, May 10, 2017

As God Loves

       Easter season continues until Pentecost, so I look again at the Easter message—Jesus died for our sins.  It has always troubled me when preachers say Jesus died for MY sins—indicating a personal thing.  Beyond personal sin, there is societal sin—a far greater offense!  Our world is a singular unit in the vast Universe.  We are one interdependent/interacting world.  We’ve not acknowledged that, we’ve not learned to love as God loves, we’ve held self-interest above universal concerns so our world is in crisis: Climate Change breeds weather disasters, our institutions are failing and in disarray, angry rebellion and wars are widespread, refugees flood neighboring nation’s exhausting their ability to give aid . . . because we haven’t learned to love.
       With his Passion, Jesus lived evil’s consequences.  Jesus did more than just free us from our personal sins—God could have done that with a wave of his hand—but not without canceling free will.  That freedom has given us the right to shape our world by our collective choices.  In Deuteronomy God’s edict to mankind is:  “I lay before you life and death, choose life.”  That points to freedom that carries the burden of responsibility. When we maim and steal, maliciously exploit, abuse our neighbor and ignore their needs we are choosing to sin.  Individually it is personal sin, but when adopted by a culture it is destructive to Humanity.  God, in the human form of Jesus elected to live out sin’s long-range effects . . . he endured the harshest, cruelest, most malhuman acts of which man is capable—unfettered venomous hatred and complete utter destruction—that is sin’s consequences.
       Jesus lived it out for our understanding.  He endured it and his body was destroyed, but his spirit rose.  Only love is strong enough to conquer evil—hatred and wars are its fuel.  The Passion addressed our human need to see proof of the effect of not learning to love.  God loves us that much; to become the material evidence of sin’s overwhelming destructive power.
       In this 21st Century humanity cannot continue to be a world of ‘us’ and ‘them’.  Thousands of years have been spent exploring, discovering, developing and connecting the ‘parts’ of this one world, and, if we but look, we can’t help but see we are One interacting, interconnected single unit in a vast Universe—we survive or perish together.  Jesus’ entire earthly message was ‘love one another as I have loved you’.
       The Passion was God’s pure love showing us the outcome of the path we are walking—until we learn to love.  He died willingly to bring the message:  God loves us this much!  Because Jesus rose from death, we esteem him, praise and honor him—for our theology tells us that doing so is a guarantee of our personal salvation . . . but do we understand the message?  It’s more than Jesus saves each of us; the call is salvation for all of us.  God awaits humanity together, to choose for life.  We are called to return God’s love by learning how to love as God loves.