Why we matter?

Ahhh, what children we all are. We have our needs and we burst upon this world for instants in eternity bright coloured and filled with excitement. And then where do we go? I believe we live for ever. I wish to believe that we live for ever. And what's more it seems reasonable. Creation is not wasteful. The creator is not wasteful more to the point and I am fully aware of the creator, the great unknown, and the intense degree of her / his involvement in our small but so dramatic lives. We are each one of us like mini soap operas but each with the potential of an epic. That's how we should live our lives of course, each of us, on an epic scale, in the knowledge that our lives matter exquisitely to our fellow man / woman if not to God and all the host of heaven who watch on from the wings. Which is why we should be selfless. Also why we should be loyal.

So Who Is God?

God expects us to depend on Him when crisis strikes, to ask Him to help. Yet what agonies of prayer must have gone up from good people in the days of the Concentration Camps. God permitted that martyrdom.

I wonder if God is a woman. Perhaps I'll try again, praying to Her rather than to HIM. I tried that before and found it difficult but interesting. Our view of God is too father-centric And by allowing the pendulum to swing you eventually find centre. The reality is, of course, that though built in our image (as we are in "His"), He is neither male nor female. Many do pray to God as a woman however; they just call her the Blessed Virgin Mary.

But what do we want? What have we ever wanted from God? What does the Saviour save us from? What would we have Him save us from? From death? Maybe from sin? No. What we want to be saved from is our troubles. I have plenty of those. Oceans of them. Just like you.

Church of the East

The Church of the East is the oldest of the Middle Eastern Churches. They are Nestorian. They are kept out of the Middle East Council of Churches by the Copts who veto their inclusion every time it comes up. They believe in and emphasise the dual nature of Christ - human and divine - but in essence their heresy is that they do not believe Mary to be the "Mother of God". Their creed is in Aramaic, just as they wrote it down more than a thousand years ago. Bihop Mar Ishack gave me this translation into English - it is similar to the Western creed . . . but different . . . and poignantly beautiful in its differences. It goes:

We believe in one God, the Father almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible

and in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Only-begotten, the first-born of all creatures, who was begotten of his Father before all worlds and not made, true God of true God, consubstantial with his Father, by whom the worlds were fashioned and everything was made, who for us men and for our salvation descended from heaven and became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and was made man; and he was conceived and born of the Virgin Mary, and suffered and was crucified in the days of Pontius Pilate, and was buried and rose on the third day, as it is written, and ascended to heaven and sat down at the right hand of his Father; and he is prepared to come in order to judge the dead and the living

and in one Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, the life-giving Spirit;

and in one holy, apostolic, and catholic church; and we confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of our bodies, and life forever and ever. Amen

Listening to the Triune God

Triune views of God have been around a long time. The Hindus consider most, if not all, of the innumerable members of their pantheon, as being manifestations or avatars of their trinity which comprises Brahma, the creator; Vishnu, the preserver; and Shiva, the destroyer. The Ancient Egyptians had a Trinity of Osiris, the father; Isis, the mother; and Horus, the son. Modern Christians have God the father, the creator; Christ the son, the redeemer; and the Spirit, the preserver. In the Western Church these three tend to be placed in an inverted triangle, with the Spirit proceeding from the father and son. In the Eastern church, the triangle is upright, with the Spirit proceeding from the father. And then you have the reformed Anglo-Catholics with their cult of the Virgin Mary, whom they inadvertently deify as a mother Goddess, the Queen of Heaven. Then there are the reformed Protestants, who are inadvertently making the Spirit a force or emanation of God, like the Hindu "Shakra" in place of the Pneumos Hagios or Holy Ghost, an actual persona.
And does doctrine matter? No. At best it is a useful tool for contemplation. At worst it is a stumbling block, anathema to all with any soul left, the last refuge of scoundrels, bigots and well meaning bishops.
So then, "Where is God?"
God is there, always. The original sin is to limit GOD. So said the man who wrote Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, and he had a point.
God is paradox, neither father nor mother and both father and mother. God is. She does not begin. He does not end. She is. As is creation in its many manifestations, which is also eternal, shaped again and again out of the very stuff of the creator, within whom (and on this at least St Paul was right) we live and move and have our being.
God both transcends creation, and walks within creation, and indeed is creation. God is great. And will be greater still, always growing. A marriage between creator and created is part of the very essence of the purpose of life. As a product of which there are always new heavens and again and again there will yet be a new earth.
The most terrible aspect of all of this is that nothing ends. You can't kill the Spirit. God exists. And in this world of tsunamis and oppressive wars in which God insists on continuing with his non-interventionist policy just because His experiment demands free-will for all creation . . . God has much to answer for.

Who is God? That is not the question. Can you find God? That is the question. We should all listen for - and listen to - God.

All of us

The universe is alive, the sum of its parts. It is born. It lives. It will die. And at the moment it is very, very, very young.

Think of creation as all that is that is not the Great Unknown. Creation is not unique in so much as this is not the one and only universe. Others exist. Those others in the cosmos that is itself a bubble bath of universes are each unique in so much as they are each different from the other, just as one person differs from the next.

None the less, this universe is constructed along basic lines, a framework that is mirrored in all creation. That part of the material universe that we - for want of a better word - call inanimate, is the body. The animate (both sentient and non-sentient) is the spirit, or life force. Whereas that which is sentient is, or has the potential to be, the mind.

Our own world is young, and humanity far, far younger. The human race becomes more interdependent, as we develop a cyborg character, linked by a web of intimate communication at both the macro and the micro level that draws us ever closer one to the other. If this is a hive-like existence, ours is a hive without a queen. Ours will become a collective consciousness. The whole will progress (or regress as happens at time of war) as it grows, whilst individuals, like cogs in a machine, wear out over time and are replaced.

That everything dies is a given, whether it be a universe, a galaxy, a solar system, or an individual. One road to immortality is therefore the development of a collective consciousness whereby we meld one with the other to such a degree that individual identity becomes less critical. The ultimate purpose of this Gaea-like, quasi-Avatar existence is to transcend that which is material in order to manifest a spiritual reality that can never die.

Intervention

Process theologians reckon that we are, in a sense, the body of God.

Well, He should take better care of his health then.

I believe in a living, breathing universe that is composed of the very stuff God's made of - but that stands apart from God. A broken universe that, in the microcosm that is this world, protests at our gross neglect of creation - hence, for instance, the earthquake in the Indian Ocean and consequent Tsunami, the floods in America, and all such incidents, were a warning - a response to our bad stewardship of the natural world . . . Perhaps.

Or perhaps God simply doesn't recognise the great crises, such as death, indeed most particularly death, as we do. Thus God is God of the minutiae - interfering to direct the small things as each day passes - indeed even intervening in major ways should it not impact the free will of another - and should We ask for His intervention. But not on the macro scale in this broken world. Not normally. Scarce ever.

And if we set ourselves up to judge the actions of God, we should perhaps also judge ourselves. Whether we intervene or not is a judgement we make just as God makes His. The key, though, is that we should act in a spirit of selflessness. Which of course means we think nothing of our own death, of our own needs. Our total focus is on the other.

Nothing comes from Nothing

"Nothing comes from Nothing" - Shakespear's Lear
"Nothing ever Could" - Maria in the Sound of Music

Which is the basic conundrum. The universe - everything - right down to you and me. Everything is indestructible. Everything has a source. The ancient Egyptians had an "I think therefore I am" approach to religion that is echoed in the Gospel of John's "In the beginning was the word" concept. But you are still left with the "What was before the beginning?" question.

The answer of course is there is no beginning. If you have no ending you have no beginning. God is eternal - the all in all.