'Something'

[The author of the Christmas poem in my last blog is Ian Oliver and the poem is in the book, We Ask Your Blessings: 100 Prayers edited by Donald Shockley.  I did not find a way to contact Ian Oliver.]

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Today I grab a page from my journal of a few days ago:

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There is ‘something’ that gave rise to the Universe and Life.  We had come to call it God.  There were many ways to say God’s name, but whatever name was used, people were identifying the Creator of Life and the Universe.

Creator of the Universe?? . . . that is beyond our ability to grasp! . . . so we constructed images and/or ideas of what we thought God might be in order to try to give us understanding—but all our ideas led to false images because God IS beyond our understanding.  For thousands of years we have struggled with the concept of God, nailing him down tighter and tighter while arguing with, or denying, or warring with those whose images and ideas were different from our own.  Since the beginning of conscious thought we humans kept seeking the source of our being—until the modern era when we made such giant strides in Science and leaps in technology that we developed the arrogance to believe Our Intelligence is supreme—so there is no need for a god.  Little by little we eliminated the search for who or what God is and now believe we can do without ‘a god’ (God).  But without a Center to operate from we are gradually destroying the structures we built to guide us to sustainability in a chaotic fragmented understanding (or lack there of) of who and what we are.  We enthroned our selfhood, liberated our inhibitions, took restraint off our aggressions and so are destroying the civilization that was thousands of years in the making . . . instead of working to correct the flaws in our institutions the attitude is to rebel against them with protests loud and long to get what ‘we’ (our little group) wants because we’ve come to feel entitled to have our every need met with no consideration to ‘the All’ (the Greater Good) and the future.

Whoever/whatever ‘a god’ is, we need the values God represents to point the way to how we can live together on this tiny planet in this vast universe.