A Work in Progress

For a while I’ve been having a problem with writer’s block, yet I wanted to write here this month. Searching my journals for inspiration I found this from 1986:

What I know to be absolutely true:                                                     

            One cannot know who or what God is.

            But that which is known as ‘God’s Kingdom” is the ONLY thing that is worth living/dying for.

            The soulless institutions we build destroy meaning, and life without meaning cannot be endured by creatures whose central quality is reflective awareness.

            We must live out our existence with ‘human nature’, which is attracted to evil as well as good.  We aren’t going to be transformed into another kind of being.

            We can train ourselves to develop and utilize the capacity for reflective awareness, which has sat mostly idle within the species (actualized in only a few).

            And thus as mankind becomes a choice-making creature guided by the wisdom in our sacred scriptures . . . that is none other than a blueprint of how humankind can co-exist in life’s diversity and find joy.

            There are only two options left: either we finally build the Kingdom of God, or we destroy ourselves and this planet—there is no other option available.                     

                                                               _ _ _

I remembered that after having read Teilhard’s book ‘How I Believe’, it haunted me for some time. I liked that he had distilled the genius of his mind to make a simple statement of belief.

I believe the universe is an evolution.

I believe that evolution proceeds toward spirit.

I believe that in man, spirit is fully realized in person.

I believe that the supremely personal is the Universal Christ.

                                                                                Teilhard de Chardin

                                         _ _ _

I wanted to do something similar and write a brief statement of belief.  It wasn’t brief and resulted in the above ‘What I Know’.   It took a surprising amount of time but I finally wrote what, after some 20 years, still reads as true.  I read and reread it and made a few changes.  It now reads:

            One cannot know who or what God is.

            But that which is known as ‘God’s kingdom’ is the only thing that is worth living and dying for.

            We must live out our existence with human nature that is attracted to evil as well as good; but with consciousness, we can learn to choose the good.

            We pray, “Thy kingdom come”.  What does that mean?  It will be our One peaceful global world with people choosing compassion, forgiveness and love.

            We, mankind, must evolve to become choice-making creatures with long-term vision guided by the Wisdom from all of our sacred scriptures.

            There are only two options: either we finally build the kingdom of God, or we destroy this planet and ourselves.

                                                               _ _ _

It is not yet concise enough; I will continue to search my soul and return to it another time.

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

  

Trinity Thoughts

Throughout this Easter season I have thought much about the Trinity.  I find it does not present to me the great incomprehensible mystery theologians speak of – Why?

This is how my mind addresses it.

I am Barbara, one singular limited human being.  During my lifetime others have known me as different persons.  I can and have manifested myself in these ways:  I am parent—“Mom”; teacher—“Ms. S-C”; and writer—“B. Sabonis-Chafee”.  Because I am limited by my material reality and exist in time and space, those manifestations happen sequentially.  Although most people can and do experience me mainly as one or the other (and can even be unaware that I’m manifested differently to others at other times) I am always the same Barbara.

For God, there is not a limit.  The Eternal God exists beyond the limits of time and space.  God’s Being has been manifested to humanity in three ways: as Creator, Savior, and Spirit.  Christianity has chosen to identify those manifestations as: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Theologians have also chosen to label God’s different ways-of-being as ‘3 Persons’. The choice of terminology has effected our perception of and our ultimate understanding of God.

Consider the word ‘person’.   Unconsciously we bring our common understanding to it, which refers to a separate individual or ‘unit’ of being.   We know of a person as one who comes into life by way of two individuals joining in sexual union to produce a baby—or new unit of being—which is first dependent upon parents but develops (over time) into the new singular unit, independent of the source of their existence.

The vastness of God is beyond our ability to comprehend but we use what we do know to try to reach a degree of understanding.  During the two thousand years of development, the Jewish people became monotheists—believers in One God—and awaiting a Messiah.  The life and message of Jesus brought people to the belief that he was the promised Messiah, the Christ.  He preached love and peace, was crucified, died and arose—conquering death.  The Messiah, thus God’s presence had been manifested to the world.  Some of the Jews, then non-Jews became Christians, believers with the conviction that Jesus=God.  Then, experiencing another manifestation of God’s presence with Pentecost, accepted that Holy Spirit =God.  It took centuries to establish the tenets of Christianity.  One great problem (still considered the greatest Mystery) was how to reconcile monotheism with a Triune God of three different persons.  The world’s experience of God had been in three different ways as: creator, savior and spirit; these encounters were different experiences so, in thought, they were separated and given the labels of ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Holy Spirit’, calling them different ‘persons’ of God, creating the confusion of One God, but three ‘persons’.

God is beyond our knowing and those awarenesses that do come to our understanding are clouded by explanations we have invented.  When reason advances our understanding (consciousness?) it requires that we change our perceptions and relinquish the long-favored errors present in the explanation.  Faced with a change in perception it is imperative not to deny the essential experience or main point but realize the error was in the way it was explained. 

Regarding the Trinity, I suggest relinquishing the use of ‘persons’ to describe the differing manifestations—the ‘Person’ of God is God (I Am) One God.  God was manifested in an earthly sojourn as the human person, Jesus.  The Christian belief is that God did enter human form for a specific duration to share the experience of being human and demonstrate how we as humans can share in ‘godness’.  We can’t fully understand it, but history and scripture affirm that it happened.  God did not ‘leave’ eternity to become Jesus (making eternity absent of God).  Eternity holds all expressions of reality within itself, so God continues eternally while entering time’s temporality. 

How many ways can God manifest the God-self?  We can’t know that, so lets confine the issue to the ways in which humanity has recognized them.  God’s Being is manifested to our human world: 1) as Creator (we see and experience life and the world in which we exist); 2) as the Savior in the person Jesus, also identified as The Christ (saving us from limited being); and 3) as the Holy Spirit, (The Divine Milieu) present throughout all of creation, guiding our evolution.

My prayer:    God of the Universe, you are one God in three manifestations;

                          --as Creator you give us life and the world;

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

--as Holy Spirit you are everpresent, enveloping us in your love and giving guidance to those who seek your council.

            Thank you—for all that is

            Amen—Thy will, not mine be done
            Trust—I believe, Lord, help my unbelief