In the Dark of the Night

9/11/16 – the 15^th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the United States by al-Qaeda, Osama ben Laden’s Islamic extremist group which hijacked four U.S. commercial passenger planes and flew two into the World Trade Twin Towers in New York City.  The 3^rd and 4^th planes were destined for Washington DC; one, as planned, was crashed into the Pentagon while the last was diverted and crashed into a field in Pennsylvania when passengers charged and fought the hijackers preventing the completion of their mission.  This orchestrated event caused the death of three thousand innocent people and injured six thousand others.  Among those killed were 78 police officers and 200 firefighters during rescue efforts.  TV cameras were at hand; live broadcasting of the events covered the world.

Following is my journal entry on the 1^st anniversary of that event.

       9/11/2002 – it was a year ago today when the unthinkable happened—unthinkable that America could be the victim of such a profoundly horrendous surprise attack; unthinkable that human beings could be so callous as to perpetuate such a heinous act; unthinkable to consider the horror that the people in the planes and buildings must have experienced; unthinkable to realize that people round the entire planet could turn on a TV and watch the towers crumble to the ground in real time; unthinkable to calculate the degree of hatred that motivated such a morally depraved plan; unthinkable to learn that the hijackers considered it an act of worship to their god.  

       The Bible tells us that God created man in His image . . . a being with intelligence and reflective awareness capable of knowing right from wrong.  To this being God gave free will—the power to choose any path in life.

How can we reconcile this in our minds?

--a segment of a religion has so perverted the image of god so as to perceive him in terms of pure evil!

--that is contrary to the Muslim religion which, like Christianity and Judaism perceives God as the creator of order and source of all that is good.

--could awareness of the unthinkable horror of which humans are capable spur us to work together to make conscious choices for the greater good?

Animals are programmed by instinct; free will is unique to humans.  It is with that freedom we create our personal world, but beyond that, our actions affect a wider world.  We live in a closed system within a vast universe, all activity in a closed system effects everything within that system.  Whether God-given or the result of random chance, we hold creative/destructive power and our actions shape the world we occupy.

Events of the 20^th and 21^st Centuries have made us aware of mankind’s destructive powers:  WWI, WWII, holocausts and genocides, atomic and hydrogen bombs, world-wide terrorism—the unthinkable has happened—that makes it imperative that we recognize we all share a common humanity, thus a common destiny; planet earth is one closed interacting system.  The ‘unthinkable’ calls us to use our freedom and creative powers to actively identify and embrace values that can underpin a sustainable world.

The dream of a better world may seem impossible but consider how far humanity has come in creating a better world thus far:

--from the beginning of time most people were uneducated—after the invention of the printing press people gradually came to recognize the importance of education and now, all parents seek it for their children.

--it took until just 150 years ago for civilized society to acknowledge the absolute need to abolish slavery—and it came to be.

--the technological advances in the 20^th Century connected all parts of the world by transportation and communications leading to the recognition of our home planet as one global world.

--following the ‘Great War’ leaders awoke to the need for nations to work together for their common good.  After two decades of struggle, in 1942 ‘The United Nations Declaration’ established the UN.  It’s importance and value has not yet been fully recognized because humanity’s advances are measured in centuries, not years—long term perspective is needed.

--in 1948 the UN adopted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.*  It has been translated into hundreds of languages—the most translated document in the world.  It is a beginning.  It identifies the values needed for a sustainable world, fundamental values, which can be embraced by all peoples, as they are not connected to specific religions, yet can be found among all the world religions.   It is the blue print for that ‘better world’—which can become a reality when adopted into the curriculum of all schools.

                                                                                                                                             (* Google it)

                  line from a song:  “Let there be hope in the dark of the night”

God of the Universe

God of the Universe . . . ?!!    Who can grasp that?

      God, You are the generating spark of the Big Bang

                        From which all that IS arose . . .

            Your being surrounds and engulfs all of Creation

                        Containing All within yourself . . .

      The life-process unfolded over eons of time:

-from ‘the without’, generating myriads of forms and shapes

continually complexifying toward ‘something more’;

                        -from ‘the within’, a rudimentary light of consciousness

                               was growing ever brighter, expanding toward knowing,

                        -till finally there emerged the reflective creature

                               able to realize the wonder of which it was a part.

      God, You brought forth life through evolution,

                                    everything is interconnected;

                        a process continually advancing forward to greater being.

                                    You are Greater Being,

                                    And you offer that to humanity.

      You have gifted us with consciousness

            to become cells of Your Being

                        You are All

            yet you fit yourself into the depths of our nothingness.

God of the Universe . . . I am awed!

            Although I try, I can’t grasp the full measure of that.

            

Third Stanza Reflection

This is my final reflection from the Trinity Prayer (see two prior entries)

            --as Sanctifier, ever-present Holy Spirit, The Divine Milieu enveloping

            us in your love and giving guidance to those who seek your council.

We live in the Divine Milieu—within God who surrounds and permeates all that is.  The dictionary definition of Spirit is:  ‘the vital principle or animating force within living beings’.  To sanctify ‘is to recognize as holy’.  God, the third way you manifest yourself to us is as Holy Spirit.  It is you, God, who calls us to realize the sacred wonder of life and our world.  You made humankind to evolve in consciousness, gradually awakening to what and who we are—you offer guidance, never imposing it—that is the basis of our free will.

We struggle to give expression to the intangible . . . elusive, yet more real than all we can touch, weigh and measure.  Spirit has neither shape nor form; without parameters, it simply IS—like light and breath; a non-material dimension that can’t be captured and contained; the ‘within’ (Teilhard’s word) that permeates our material being and animates it.  Is that not life itself which we cannot fully comprehend?  We experience it, know it’s reality by living it, recognize its presence or absence, can enumerate its requirements, chart its functions and its effects, but cannot explain the why of it by the science we have developed.  If we can’t even understand life although we live it, why does it surprise us when we can’t understand God? 

God, you are mystery beyond our capacity to fathom but what we do know is that we exist and live on a planet that we didn’t create yet continue to shape by our collective action, located within a galaxy dwarfed by an unimaginable expanding universe . . . and that awareness draws me to awe and thanksgiving for the wonder of it.  Thank you, source of all being.

Over the centuries of our development men have tried to ‘capture’ god with images, explanations and rules of exclusivity. As our knowledge increased (mainly by science that weighs and measures everything), the explanations of gods seemed no longer believable for they divided people and sought to impose shape and form upon spirit.  Many people began to conclude: “since there are so many conflicting views and we can’t prove god’s existence, god must be an illusion.”

The ‘within’ in the human is consciousness, said to be the ‘spark of God’ that produces thought.  Thought reaches for understanding—(to know all: all of life and time and being) and to love—(seek goodness for self, others and all).  With our consciousness and free will, humanity does and will continue to create the world we occupy.  We reflect God’s love by using our freedom to choose only ‘the good’ and create a world in harmony.  (A work-in-progress)

A new understanding of God is needed in the 21^st Century.

What are we to salvage from the many ways of explaining God?

            God is Spirit and Spirit is Being itself.

            --Life—we have it (till we don’t??—no certainty of ‘after’)

            --Light—is everywhere all at once

            --Breath—we explain about oxygen and circulation

                        . . . but why and how does fragile breath sustain life?

            --Consciousness/Thought—expands exponentially

                        . . . and calories and chemicals can’t justify it.

            --Love—the desire for goodness for another

It is said: God is Love; God is Life; God is Truth; God is Being

The Bible quotes God’s self-identification as:  I AM that I AM

  

Middle Stanza Thoughts

This is a continuation of my former July 17 entry wherein, while in Hawaii, I explored the deeper thoughts stirred by the Trinity prayer, I continue with the prayer’s middle stanza:

            --as Savior, you clothed yourself in human flesh and entered

            time as Jesus to show us how we are to live.

God, you created matter—the solid stuff of being that has weight and dimension.  Teilhard has told us: in Being there is a 'within' and a 'without'.  The within—the Word and Spirit—preceded materiality.  At the appointed time your creativity brought forth mass and form—the without—and life, in an evolutionary process that revealed endless possibilities—reaching for the form most appropriate for containing the seed of spirit.  The mechanism of the process was that of complexity-consciousness:  a progression from simple to complex (the without) and ever deepening consciousness (the within).  Through eons of time, slowly evolving to eventually produce the human form that came to know itself and emerge from a primitive state to become a communicative, creative being—developing language and utilizing tools to shape their environment.  Slowly the light of awareness increased—knowing without knowing they knew—they were to gather together to organize and build while paying tribute to the unknown beyond their comprehension.  Mankind emerged as an altogether new species.  Beginning with limited awareness, the ‘without’ received more attention than the within—managing food and shelter, refining communications, gathering together to establish roles and rules and rituals, growing in awareness that there was something greater than what they could see and feel and touch. Looking backward from the present to some four thousand years ago we see a people gathering their tribes into a nation with a central focus binding them together; their belief in One God, creator of all that is.

When outer and inner development was sufficiently established to sustain fuller consciousness of meaning and direction, You, God, entered time as Jesus, accepting both the process and the limits of being human to demonstrate the full measure of human potential—the power and goal of our freedom: to create a world of peace and love by acknowledging our interdependence and together willing that our world be so.

Jesus came into the world in a male body full of strength, courage and intelligence, with a feminine soul living the truth of love, compassion and self-sacrifice.  The ‘without’ of Jesus was here but briefly, while the ‘within’ remains in Spirit.  God, you aren’t ‘out there’ or ‘up there’ beyond our reckoning but right here in our midst, waiting for us to discover you, not in the many conflicting ways men have designed you, but as you truly are.  

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

Global Challenges

This past week has been a week of devastation for our nation with wildfires raging in the West accompanied by temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  Over 200 homes were incinerated in California.  Today is Sunday and the fires still burn.  In the South and Central parts of the country powerful storms with hail and tornadoes flattened whole towns leaving a death toll of at least 35.  West Virginia was swept with historic floods that destroyed more than 100 homes causing over 20 deaths.  This scale of catastrophes is not normal!   In this we get a preview of what is in store from the effects of Climate Change.  Although scientists now agree that humans are in a large part responsible, there are still people stubbornly denying that human activity is the cause in order to continue to avoid facing the need to change our patterns of living.

As a culture we seem to have lost our taste for long-term thinking.  Since we became the ‘NOW generation’ in the 60’s and 70’s more and more we seem to have replaced deep thought with an obsessive drive for quick fixes, instant answers (instant gratification?); but more than ever the world needs careful analysis and solutions that point to a sustainable future.  Our world is in crisis.  Throughout the globe humanity seems to be moving relentlessly toward self-destruction, either slowly by environmental degradation or quickly by wars that promise to unleash the weapons of mass destruction that we have amassed and which continue to be produced.

I believe the tensions of that unspoken fear is given a voice in the increasing violence that is bubbling below the surface and erupting suddenly and relentlessly in terrorist attacks, mass shooting of innocent strangers, violence flaring at sporting events, and in public gatherings that degenerate into riots . . . I see it also in the expressed dissatisfaction with the institutions that are needed to keep order in society.

Not for a moment do I suggest our institutions aren’t flawed and in need of repair—be it the economic systems, health care services, religious institution, educational systems and yes, governments . . . but total rebellion against the established institutions will not bring a ‘quick fix’; rather chaos with new and different problems.

The week of environmental disasters was topped off by the shocking vote by Great Britain to exit the European Union.  The EU was established after WWII to bring greater unity and harmony between those close nation neighbors and lower the dangers of Nationalism, exclusive self-interest and xenophobia.

The great visionary Teilhard de Chardin (1881 -1955), foresaw the inevitable movement of civilization toward globalization and he was acutely aware of both the promise of and the dangers that movement held.  In his book, Building The Earth he states: “The Age of Nations is past.  The task before us now, if we would not parish, is to build the earth.”

The world has not yet embraced the fact that we are an interdependent global world and we must build the earth together, transitioning from exclusive self-interest to consideration for the greater whole.  This is a difficult but necessary change to make.  The reality is that the world we now occupy IS a global one.  Communications, transportation and trade have made it that. 

A global world must prioritize differently and use different decision-making methods—from demands and threats to cooperation and negotiations.  For many, rather than giving serious consideration to how to accomplish the integration, there is a pulling back, a retreat to the former ways.  Tensions arise, polarization occurs and issues become only black and white, “my side is right, his is wrong”.  This polarization has swept Great Britain into opting out of the European Union.  That choice has worldwide ramifications. 

It has often been said that progress happens by two steps forward and one step back.  Unfortunately Great Britain has taken the step backwards, lured by Boris Johnson’s rhetoric that fanned the Nationalism of ‘taking our country back’, his firm stand on anti-immigration and the promise of more money for health care by not paying into the EU. 

We in America face a similar polarization.  Soon we face a national election.  I can only hope and pray that we don’t also confront the global challenge with a backward step to fanning nationalism, choosing exclusive self-interest and embracing xenophobia; thus re-defining progress as ‘one step forward and two steps back.’