Of Creator God

I share my journal entry of June 13, 2016:

Hawaii—so incredibly beautiful!

It is 3 AM, I sit on the balcony of the 9^th floor of my hotel in Honolulu, allowing my thoughts to go where they will:

God of the Universe,

You are one God of three manifestations

--as Creator, you give us life and our world;

--as Savior, you clothed yourself in human flesh and entered time as Jesus to show us how we are to live;

--as Sanctifier, ever-present Holy Sprit, the Divine Milieu enveloping us in your love and giving guidance to those who seek your council. *

(And I thought more deeply about each stanza.)

You are the God of the Universe . . . I can’t grasp that; I can only be awed by it.  The Universe, your grand Creation!  It is there because you are ‘Creator God’ and within that universe you molded our world to support teeming life, which would evolve to one day share in your creative power.  You chose to share creativity with the highest form of life via the wonder of consciousness.  It was to come into being slowly over eons of time, each new life form reaching greater complexity.  As the life forms complexified they eventually gave rise to beings with reflective awareness – consciousness.  The human creature, with unlimited capacity to continually emerge to ever-higher levels of freedom and complex thought, had the ability to understand and evaluate and make choices.  With this ability they became creative in the environment they inhabited.

Human beings; we create our world.  As we continue to advance, with increasing awareness, we come to see more deeply into ‘the good’—love, justice, truth, beauty . . .—and awaken to wonder and marvel at our human potential.

You, God, ever draw human consciousness to yourself; You, the totality of all goodness.

Only through this slowly evolving process could created creatures become co-creators to join with the God of Creation.

Thank you, Creator God

* This prayer first appeared in my blog entry of 4/4/16 Trinity Thoughts

Part of a Greater Whole

I want to expand on a comment made to the 7^th of my Teilhard series (10-1-15).  It reads:  “Yes, we are co-creators with God.  Not many people grasp that.  We create our own reality, which gives us the opportunity to create something different if we don’t like what we did the first time.”

As stated, that seems to be addressing our individuality, but beyond that Teilhard is asking us to realize we are also creating as part of a greater whole.  Our world is one interdependent, interacting system which functions for better or worse by the choices we collectively make.  Here too we can choose something different if we don’t like what we are faced with.  Human choices determine the direction of the world’s progress.  Our exploration in space has shown us what is hard to grasp from our individual perspectives—we are one whole interacting system and when one part is injured or harmed the whole suffers from the damage.  Until we realize that, we close our eyes to the damage that occurs beyond the circle of our own interests.

During the early part of WWII, history tells us that initially, as Hitler invaded one European country after another, we in America adopted a policy of non-involvement . . . until Pearl Harbor was bombed, then the entire nation rallied to a total involvement as never seen before.  Men women and children were committed to fighting the ‘scourge’ of Nazism—men joined the services, women went to work in defense plants and school children sold defense stamps and war bonds while pulling wagons from house to house to collect useful things for the war effort.  When America united with allied forces that common cause led to victory—the scourge was defeated and annihilated.  That historical event demonstrates what is possible from united effort.

There is another scourge now threatening the very core of civilized society!  The jihad movement has thrown the Middle East into turmoil; millions of people are fleeing the destruction, many drowning at sea trying to escape in unsafe boats after paying their life-savings to human traffickers.  The hordes of refugees that make it to safety are met with anger and resistance because their huge numbers strain the resources of the countries to which they flee.

This is not a local problem, not a nation’s problem, not a regional problem, this is a global problem and the world must address it as such!

Our world is faced with a multi-headed monster . . . a rogue culture that has as its goal, the annihilation of civilization; a culture which delights in sheer destruction and seeks to eliminate freely chosen self-government so as to install its form of enslavement.  The many-headed monster shows itself under different names but its body is jihad—reveling in terrorism and malhuman acts.  TV has shown us their treatment of dissenters: from flying passenger planes into the twin towers, to deaths by stoning, beheading and mass executions.  Girls are forbidden education and hundreds have been abducted and sold as ‘wives’ into sexual slavery.  Boys are narrowly educated by rote memorization of religious treatises.  Jihadists carry out killing of whole villages of noncombatants.  The looting of artistic treasures helps support their activities and they gleefully destroy irreplaceable ancient cultural

artifacts simply to show distain for other cultures and values.  All their actions defy humanitarian values.  Jihad is a cancer on this planet; the civilized world must unite against all forms of its expression.  In this scourge, pure evil is once again threatening civilization.  It is critical that we see our planet as one whole interacting system and give support to the beleaguered parts of this greater whole that is our home.  The sum or our choices will determine the shape of our future.