THE POINT ABOUT US

WHAT IS THE POINT ABOUT US?

Perhaps the most perplexing questions we are faced with concerns who we are and discerning the purpose of our lives on this speck of dust floating through the vastness of the universe.  

 What about us?  Why are we here at all?  What's the point of our being?

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We cannot give a definitive answer as to why we exist any easier than we can answer questions regarding the existence of God.  In the  unanswerability of such questions, however, is the connection between God and us.  As such, the history of our being is the history of God's being.  

That may sound as if we humans invented God, but that would be missing the point entirely because there is a point at which our ontological questions have no point, where the question as to our existence simple becomes  the question of "What is the point of us?

This interconnectivity between the existence of God and we humans is referenced in the Psalms, "For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks?"  (Psalm 6:5) and "Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave?or thy faithfulness in destruction?" (Psalm 88:11).   The point of these questions is to posit the question, "If we don't exist, does it matter if God exists?"  

I am sure this is an uncomfortable question to many religious people because the answer is clearly "No."   It doesn't matter.   If we don't exist, then God or a creative force by some other name does not matter as the Psalmists clearly points out.  So the point of our existence is, in part, to proclaim the existence of God and places some importance on our being.  Our being is the proof of a creative force unimaginably bigger than the sum of us or the sum of an ever expanding creation

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The only way religion has been able to express this truth is through its mythic imagination telling our story with God from an imaginative outside perspective. This imaginative perspective is not make-believe, but rather a perspective garnered from our collective life experiences within the world of our making which extend back to our prehistory that prompted our ancestors to find meaning and purpose in them in order to orient ourselves to world in which we live.  Without these stories we have difficulty understanding who we are and why we do the things we do.  They help explain our experiences to this day. 

Cast in theism these mythic stories tells us that the life we experience is the life that proceeds from God's kenotic creativity; of God expending self to expand SELF.  While God is unlike us, we are connected to God by and through God's kenotic creativity; God's desire to be and, in particular,  God's desire to be known.  In most religions this desire to be known is associated with the human emotion of  love.  

For example, "God is love," is Christianity 's  fundamental creed.  To feel unloved, is to feel a profound absence, a hole in one's being that will seek something to fill its void.  The absence of love in one's life is the loss of connection with God who nevertheless continues to love the one feeling unloved because we are of God and God is love.

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The truth is we matter to God, regardless of who one is, what one does, or what one fails to do.   This  truth is something that transcends our sense of justice within the world of our making.  There are times that I feel we, as a whole, are striving to value every human being's worth as something we humans can accomplish on our own.   Seeking to value every human being and every form of life we encounter  is not a "Christian" endeavor but rather a human endeavor that is present in almost every religious and non-religious ideology.  It hearkens back to what I have written earlier blogs on the primary impulse of religion (of bringing us together in shared beliefs) is the fundamental realization that we need each other.  

In the world of our making, however, the ability to differentiate has caused us to see the most subtle nuances in an other as a barrier to this value of every living thing.  This is particularly challenging in the differences we see in our fellow human beings.  In Abrahamic monotheism,  this nuance is captured in the mythic story of Adam and Eve, our first parents who differentiate themselves based on sexual appearances.  

In my reading of this story, I do not find a "fall" from God's grace but rather a fuller engagement with it.  Gifted with the ability to choose, we opted to know good and evil like God,  Since we cannot know as God knows, we were summarily tasked in our dualistic understanding of good and evil to  make a world of our own amidst the diverse world of God's creating.  Our story from that moment onward is a story of dealing with the paradox of God's being and God's creation.  

Where we see dark and light, good and evil, God only sees light and the goodness of the creation God loves.  Where we see difference, God sees none.   Difference makes no difference in the light and love of God.  What we perceive as paradox in the world of our making is the sign of God's presence in it; that Oneness and Singularity from which all things proceed and dwell in.  

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Ours is a struggle with the temporality of our existence and the limitations which hinder our ability to experience the ultimate fulfillment of what we seek in our creative endeavors.  Nothing symbolizes this than the monumental structures we leave behind us to serve as a reminder to those who follow us that we made a difference in the world of our making and that they stand upon our shoulders and, at the very least, owe us recognition.  We are haunted by our perceptions; that whatever knowledge we possess will never be enough; that our ending will be much as our beginning, an emergence into the nothingness from which we were born.  

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The point of our being is to be alive; to give, in the short span of our existence, acknowledgment of the God we seek to know in full.   God's delight in us is never-ending even though we cannot comprehend it or understand the paradoxical love of God.  The point of our existence is to engage the love that brought us into being; to be that love in the world of our making; to love ourselves, to love our neighbors as ourselves, and, paradoxically, love that which we find unlovable, our enemies. 

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The point about us is that we matter to God, otherwise we would not be here.  God needs us to need God; to give recognition to the giver of life whose desire to be is expressed in our being.  Understanding our being is central to understanding God's being.  

We are not God, yet God shines through us.  God is evident in us as we are contained in and sustained through the being of God.  We proceeded from God's kenotic desire to be; to expend self to expand SELF.  We are, in part, that SELF of God expressed in and throughout the entirety of God's creation.  

In the shortness of our life-span, we give evidence of the plentitude of God's creating grace.  At the end of this transitory life, one can only hope that the life force of one's life, the totality of one's soulfulness returns the one who made us living souls.  We were made of love, made to love, and it is hoped that this love will return to LOVE, to God.

Until next time, stay faithful.

Norm

ONE PLANET, TWO WORLDS

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.  And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.   Genesis 1: 1-5

GOD

As I have mentioned in other posts, God is a kenotic action; God (BEING-NESS) expending self in order to expand self.  Theologically speaking, God is the Singularity (God is One) from whom or from which all creation came into being.  To put it into the language of Act 17: 28, God is that being in which we live and move and have our being.  

Given that expansive understanding of "God," we human "earthlings" have difficulty understanding our  place in its immensity.  While it is no longer difficult for most to accept that the Earth is not the center of the universe,  it remains difficult to avoid thinking of ourselves as the crowning achievement of God's creation.  

IN THE BEGINNING

If one is talking about the need of Christianity to have a Copernican type of revolution, a revolution that orientates us to a right perspective of our relationship to God and our place in the Universe, one must start at the beginning. The five verses quoted above from Genesis 1 is the starting point we are given in the Holy Bible.   It is important that one does not gloss over them but pays particular attention to them.   To begin with one must understand that the canvas of scriptures paints a picture of us in relation to our Creator via the intimate brush strokes of individual stories within the framework of a particular story of an interrelated people referred as the Chosen People by which to depict our true nature as being embodied in that Being through which and in which we exist.   

Remarkably, the creation story in Genesis intuitively depicts an evolutionary process.  It confirms that there is a process to creation which, in Genesis story,  began with the conception  (the idea) of heaven and earth.   The term "In the beginning" (an a priori a sense of time)  the proto-earth or the idea of earth is conceived as a formless and void of any particular meaning.  According to Genesis, measurable time doesn't occur before light is separated from darkness by which to measure earth-time in terms of its having days and nights.  Broadly speaking it also hints at the temporal nature of our known universe.  

A point before time begs the question of whether such a point is eternal.  What does "in the beginning" tell us about God?  Did God exist before the beginning or does "In the beginning" denote an ever-present nowness of God's potential (or creative force) in which there is no sense of linear time, no measurable dimension of being?  

In Genesis, time has a starting point and therefore our scriptures talk about its ending point.  From its starting point to its ending point time is conceived as a linear measurement of both past and future. One could say that time measures anticipatory decay; as in, the past giving way to a future whose presence  quickly becomes the past, as each present moment instantaneously dissolves into a past that no longer exists as it gives way to the future in a nanosecond.  

One may ask why this is important.  Its importance is that  the world in which we currently live, what I refer to as the world of our making, is undergirded by an incomprehensible cosmic now, a constant that has no past or future but is briefly recognizable in the brevity of a present moment.   It is against that incomprehensible constant backdrop that the world of God's creation proceeds including the world of our making which resides on this specific speck of dust called Earth. 

OUR PLANET HOME

Earth is called "Earth" because that is what we call the skin of our planet home in any number of languages. We know today that life on earth has existed for a long time.  Relatively speaking, human life, is the new kid on the block.  We literally stand on the remains of distant,  one-time living worlds that are part of God's ongoing creation that goes as far back as when the first single cells plants and animals emerged from the chemical soup that this planet produced and housed. 

It is from that primal soup that we humans eventually evolved or as Genesis describes as being made in the image of God.  In essence we are cognitively aware that we embody the both the physical and animating force of God's creation.  For most of human history the Earth was understood to stand at the center of God's creation and humankind was understood to be the pinnacle of the animated life on it. The Sun, Moon, and Star all revolved around us.   

This notion of centrality, both of place and being, remain intact in the human psyche.  Even though science has long ago proven that our planet is not the center of our solar system and much less the center of the universe, we humans largely continue to consider ourselves as the pinnacle of God's creation and Earth its brightest gem.   This will remain true until such time there is proof of intelligent life beyond the Earth and even if that were the case such intelligent life will have to demonstrate to a more advanced intellect than we humans before we will lose the idea of our centrality.

For the present, we are the only known planet on which intelligent life exists, which brings us to the concept of a world.  The word "World" has many meanings.   Generally, it refers to various domains of human interest; such as, the world of animals, the world of plants, the world of sports, the world of business, and so on.  For the purpose of this post, as noted throughout this blog, the term world is used to describe two perspectives of life on this planet; the world as God's creation and the world  of our making.  

THE WORLD OF GOD'S CREATING

"... in the place where the beginning is, there the end will be."  -The Gospel of Thomas*

 

In the Gospel of Thomas the above teaching of Jesus is in response to his disciples asking what will happen to them at their ending.  Thomas does not give the reader any sense of the context in which their enquiry is made.  We do not know if it is reference to the Last Judgment, which seems implied, or whether it is about the end of life.  

Unlike the canonical Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas directs them to go back to the beginning, to Genesis to find what they are looking for.  In other word, to know one's ending, one must know one's beginning.  The open ended aspect of this teaching of Jesus is what makes the Gospel of Thomas so intriguing.

The world of God's creating is the structural foundation upon which the world of our making rests.  The world of making is like the earthy skin of our planet.  It is a surface covering of something more substantial and foundational.

If we consider the two creation myths of Genesis; the creation of the Cosmos, the Earth, and all the living creatures on the Earth found in Genesis 1 and the formation of humankind in Genesis 2 in the Garden of Eden, we should come away with the understanding that Eden is more than a geographical place, it is a metaphor for the world of God's creating, a world that exists along side of and beyond the world our mythical first parents were tasked with creating as they were cast from this garden state.   

It is the world of God's creating that God judged as being very good.   As the Gospel of Thomas points out if you want to know our ending, go back the beginning because that primal judgment of God's creation is God's final judgment of it.  Eden is the term I use as a synonym or metaphor for world of God's creating, what Jesus referred to as the Kingdom of God. 

All of us have our roots in Eden.  It is motherland of our being.   It is the metaphorical home we long for, the Kingdom of God that Jesus said is at hand.  

* "A New New Testament: A Bible for the Twenty-First Century" (Copyright 2013, Hal Taussig. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, New York, New York.).   

THE WORLD OF OUR MAKING

"Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my Words shall not pass away" - The Synoptic Gospels

The world of our making is (for the lack of a better word) a byproduct of the world of God's creating.  The world of God's creating is foundational to the world of our making.  The world of our making could not possibly exist without it.  

That being said, there is, in a manner of speaking, a world of difference between these worlds; in that, we differentiate in the world of our making.  We are obsessed with differences.  Please understand that by differentiation, I am not being critical of seeing differences but  acknowledging them as a fact of life in the world of our making.  Our ability to differentiate, like most everything else we do in our world has both good and bad aspects; hence, the mythic story of Adam and Eve being dispelled from Eden.  Knowing difference helps us to be imaginative, how things compliment and contrast each other.  According to Abrahamic religions it is an aspect of being made in the image of God.  We could not be artists of every kind, builders, inventors, idealists, etc, without the ability to differentiate.  

This ability to differentiate, of course, has an evil side.  It seems for every good thing we humans do, there is an evil aspect that can be derived from it.  In the realm of God, differentiation does not exist.  Light and dark are both alike to God, our Scriptures says Psalm 139:12.   In Matthew 5:45, Jesus points out that rain falls on both the righteous and the unrighteous.  In the world of God's creating good and evil, righteousness and unrighteousness are non-issues.   Difference makes no difference to God.   Difference is clearly a human issue.  We cannot escape difference in the world of our making.  It proceeds from our ability to make choices.  In order to chose, one must have the ability to differentiate.

In the world of our making, this non-difference between that which appears and feels different is understood as paradox; when two contradictory things or points of view come into play simultaneously.   Paradox is considered a sign of God's presence, the sign of Christ which will be discussed in later posts.  In contemplative circles, paradox is embraced as non-dualism; that is, achieving or striving for a sense of equanimity about all things and seeing the interconnection between all things created and the Creator.  

In the world of our making, however, paradox is perplexing.   That opposing elements or entities can be at play at the same time disrupts our sense of certainty; in particular,  the certainty that there are absolute truths that are unchangeable within the world of our making.   Most of us fail to understand or refuse to understand that our sense of difference is a product of our making; a product of the choices we have made since the beginning of our history. 

Jesus proclaimed that the Kingdom of God is at hand, which is to say that the world of God's creating is present within the world of our making.  As Paul reminds us, however,  we see it as if looking through a dark lens.  What, for the time being, preoccupies us is the illusionary surface world we have made that occludes the immensity of God's kenotic Being.

The world of God's creating is the "cosmic now" of God, the cosmic center of all that is.  A center that knows no boundary or as the hymns, John Mason wrote of God in the 17th century, "Thou art a sea without a shore, a sun without a sphere, Thy time is now and evermore, Thy place is everywhere." That is the world of God's creating the kenotic world of God expending self in order to expand self, the unbounded center of all things.

The earth and the world of our making are only a minuscule part of the world of God's creating; a part that is a temporary manifestation of God's creative expansiveness.  The heaven and earth we know is merely an experience with impermanence.  Death is a necessary facet of life within time.  

Mass and energy may always exist in the Cosmic Now of God, but how it is manifested; how God is expressed or manifested through it is subject to what God told Moses, "I am that I am;"in other words, "I will be what I will be." God is undefinable as a being as God is BEING.  Christians take note:  God cannot be differentiated or given a specific image that we shape either through the imagery of matter or the limitation of  our language.  We can only express our imaginative depictions and thoughts of God, but such imaginative depictions and thoughts are simply that and nothing more. We cannot not comprehend the fullness of God in or through the world of our making.

In the world of our making we have power, but our power is limited by the ability to differentiate.  As such we only have the power to make and the power to destroy.  This dichotomous, either/or ability, is manifest in our many achievements and in our many wars.  As great and tremendous such power is in the world of our making, it does not compare to paradoxical power of God.  We do not have nor can we ever possess the creative power of God that both expends and expands simultaneously.  

Until next time, stay faithful.

Norm