Tag: God

YOUR TRUE CALLING

Rosemary Radford Ruether, the great feminist theologian

was one of the first to see patriarchal/dualistic thinking –

that things are divided not one –

causes not only sexism but also racism and environmental destruction

 

theology itself can be patriarchal/dualistic

if it does not paradoxically give up

what it has always asked other disciplines to give up: supremacy –

like all sciences it must submit to the greater wisdom

of evolutionary cosmology – the blueprint of the universe –

the unrelenting progress from atoms to humans to divinized humans –

astronomy blesses us with a scientific revelation of God’s Plan

 

whereas classical thermodynamics said closed systems dissipate energy

and thus the whole cosmos is winding down –

which breeds nihilism – we are ultimately doomed so why care about anything?

but biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, inventor of General Systems Theory

revealed that open systems do not run down

because they get new energy from their environment

 

but systems are not The System that wants to fool us and rule us –

the culture we live in is deceptive and hegemonic –

“We need Christ and the poet/artist/mystic to give us liberated vision –

new ways to see” – Canadian folk legend Bruce Cockburn

 

the journey to find new ways to see

the departure of the hero on the Hero’s Journey – has sub-stages:

The Call

The Refusal of the Call (and the folly/futility of resistance)

Supernatural Aid

Descent into the Night:

God calls Moses to free the Israelites from slavery in Egypt

Moses says “No way, I cannot go, who am I to challenge Pharaoh?”

God says “I will be with you”

Moses leaves for Egypt and the rest is history

 

“The True Calling for all of us is the Present Moment –

that’s why they call it the “Present” – the “Gift from God” –

the bigger miracle is not for one person to walk on water

but for all of us to walk on our blue/green planet

in the Eternal Now”

– Thich Nhat Hanh

 

if you live in the One and the Now

dualistic thinking has no power over your True Calling.

THE FREEDOM OF RELIGION

God can only be in all things if we allow God to be with us

in mercy as well as power

in littleness as well as greatness

in emptiness as well as fullness –

when we are full of ego God empties us

and when we are empty God fills us with Spirit

 

our love of God depends on the emptiness/trials/tribulations

of the world because we cannot get to pure love

until we experience emptiness/setbacks/limitations to our ego

 

if you go into the world with the conscious intention

to not shut anything or anyone out of your heart

you will be constantly challenged by learning

ugly things about yourself that you always repressed –

prejudices that want to keep your heart shut down

 

according to psychologists there are ten lines

of internal development that can go thru stages of growth:

moral/spiritual/psychological/esthetic/physical lines

cognitive/financial/social/sexual/emotional lines

 

and of course psychologists overlook religious lines –

since religion is always ironically a blind spot for psychologists

even though religion pervades every culture throughout history

and religiosity is an inescapable part of our human constitution

and rights of religious freedom are founded on the dignity

of being human which can be established

thru reason and the Word of God/the Bible

 

freedom of religion and freedom of religious development

should therefore be written into every nation’s constitution

as a civil right of all citizens so that no one is forced

to be an atheist as in Marxism/communism

and no one is forced to be religious

as in ancient times when Christianity became

the state religion of the Holy Roman Empire

 

even if Christianity, unlike other “myths” –

“lies that turn out to be the Truth” – even if you don’t like it

that Christianity proposes something greater than immortality –

eternal life with God – since immortality without God and a living body

with senses – and therefore without a life – would be eternal boredom

still, despite what you like/dislike, the freedom of religion must be respected.

 

THE POWER OF PENANCE

The major challenge to Immanuel Kant’s view of religion

as morality came from Friedrich Schleiermacher

the greatest theologian of the 19th century

who conceived of religion not as morality or belief

but as an immediate awareness of our absolute dependence

on God – religion is thus pre-moral and even pre-cognitive

and expressed everywhere in different ways

 

we are absolutely dependent on God

but in human relationships co-dependency is a betrayal

of wholeness because co-dependent people

have no personal center

 

whereas the enlightenment we seek already dwells within us as our center

like a mustard seed/treasure buried in a field/pearl of great price

 

when Jesus said “if you call another ‘fool’ you are in danger

of hellfire,” he did not mean “if you get angry, God will condemn you

to hell,” he meant that “unjustified and indulged anger

is hell” – you put yourself in hell and hell in your self

 

to break through into nondual consciousness

we need to overcome the domination of ego and reason

and forgive ourselves and reality

for being exactly what they are: a mixed bag

of goodness and darkness –

we are all simultaneously sinners and saints

 

even proto-saints like Thomas Merton

who never wanted to be a plastic saint

on the dashboard of someone’s car

finally realized after nine long years as a monk

that penance is pleasing to God

and “enables God to take undisturbed possession

of the soul” because in penance

your ego is reduced to nothing

 

unlike the Pharisee who thanked God “I am not

a sinner like that tax-collector” who at the back of the synagogue

beat his chest and cried out “Lord have mercy on me

a sinner” – Jesus said it was the latter not the former

who went home justified in God’s eyes – for penance tells you

“the old sinful self is not dead”

but absolution tells you

“God’s love is greater than the old self.”

DRAWING ALL THINGS TOGETHER

 

Ken Wilber’s Integral Philosophy includes everything:

“I” equals self and consciousness

“It” equals body and organism

“We” equals culture and worldview

“Its” equals social systems and environment

 

Jesus also included everything:

he saw humans as creatures alongside other creatures

flowers/sparrows/foxes – Jesus saw humans as a very important

part of nature but not above or separate from it:

“All things bright and beautiful

all creatures great and small

all things wise and wonderful

the Lord God made them all”

– United Church of Canada children’s hymn

 

John Macquarrie, the great Anglican theologian, used objective natural law

to challenge the relativism/subjectivism of existentialists –

there needs to be a dialectical tension between subjective authenticity

which Buddhism/Confucianism/and particularly Jesus advanced

and objective/public/universal values derived from nature and its laws –

we need to include both subjectivism and objectivism

 

the Church and its sacraments were meant to be divine invitations

to meaningfully explore how everything is interconnected/related

but sometimes it devolves into just an institution

with rituals that command legal observance

and the objective dominates the subjective

 

it was Ambrose’s ability to subjectively/symbolically

interpret Old Testament passages about violence

Augustine had taken objectively/literally

that began to create cracks in Augustine’s Manichean/

anti-Catholic stance until he was converted to the Church

 

the objective physical sciences may see the movement of evolution

towards greater complexity and consciousness

as biogenesis or cosmogenesis

but in subjective Christian terms it is Christogenesis

the coming to be and unfolding of the Cosmic Christ

 

the Church as the Universal Beloved Community was meant to be

the instrument of, and integral to, Christogenesis

the drawing together of all creatures and all things–

the I/It/We/Its.

WAKING UP TO UNITY

David Bohm, the great physicist, proposed an “Implicate Order”

the undivided oneness/wholeness of all things:

“All things are internally related, which fits well with

quantum entanglement/non-locality/ spooky action at a distance”

 

A basic principle of quantum theology: God/the Divine

is creative energy, which includes and transcends

all traditional theology/everything previously said about God

 

Buddhists get their creative energy/peace/wisdom/joy/bliss

from practicing mindfulness and their joy has the power

to transform others

 

We are not transformed by sitting in a pew for an hour

once a week and listening to a sermon –

people learn any faith by hands-on training

as a novice/apprentice/journeyman/master

 

And Jesus, of course, was a master –

“Jesus inherited his father’s carpentry business

he was a master of the spirituality of business

and therefore was of the middle class, not poor –

out of compassion he became an outcast by choice”

– Albert Nolan

 

We normally begin the journey towards wholeness

by becoming baptized as an infant – by becoming an outcast

of godless society but part of the Beloved Community, the Church

“God can divinize us through baptism” – Gregory of Nazianzus

 

We can become part of the Implicate Order

the Universal Beloved Community

by experiencing God’s grace through all the “sacraments”

through all the “visible signs of God’s invisible love and grace”

which are constantly all around us

and through realizing our oneness with

God/others/nature

 

All we have to do is

wake up from our godless society’s

godless slumber.

 

THE HARDNESS AND EASINESS OF DISCIPLESHIP

Raimundo Panikkar sees the world as in a crisis

of biblical proportions ecologically and humanly –

therefore the Church’s main focus should be on this

not its own inner disputes: sexual morality/ordination of women

these are important but first world problems while 75% of humanity

lives in subhuman conditions of poverty/war/destruction

of the earth and the very air they breathe – smoked out by wildfires/

washed out by floods/starved out by droughts –

the “First World” will only help the “Third World”

if we learn asceticism – giving up endless consumption and greed

 

The Imitation of Christ, a tenth century manuscript

by Thomas a Kempis is asceticism to the max –

an antidote to our contemporary culture’s fixation on

egoism/materialism/hedonism to the max

 

On the other hand, the ego is necessary and not evil in itself

it is our functional self – we need it to survive

the problem is our culture tells us

our ego is the only reality and should control everything

for its own pleasure and enjoyment

without counting the cost to others

On the other hand again, there is plenty in the gospels

to encourage asceticism: pray always/sell all you have/

deny yourself/pick up your cross/die to your ego/

die with Christ/the person who finds their life loses it/

the person who gives up their life for Christ’s sake finds it/

the “world” and the “flesh” as seen by Paul and John were demonic

and Jesus wrestled with his own inner demons in the wilderness

 

After God created humans in a state of holiness/oneness with God

from the start we abused our freedom as sons and daughters of God

set ourselves up against God

tried to find our fulfillment apart from God

 

Yet the first promise of Jesus in Matthew 11:28-30

despite all the necessary asceticism was

“Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden

and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you

and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart

and you shall find rest for your soul

for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

 

PEACE THRU INTEGRATION

Science is going thru a major paradigm shift

from seeing nature as mechanical and inanimate/dead

to seeing it as organic and alive

 

The physical sciences noted

the dissolution of energy in entropy

but ignored increasing complexity/consciousness

which is building energy up and up – it is this increase

that gives the whole cosmos its purpose and direction

 

Believers claim the resurrection of Christ integrates

the whole cosmos and all people into God

which is God’s purpose/direction/flow for everything:

union and transformation in God

 

It is good to include all religions and thus integrate everything

in a new way not the old way –

Buddhism can be part of cosmic integration

since it will not block the flow of God’s plan –

doing no harm to ourselves or others

is basic Buddhist teaching on nonaggression

which includes not killing/stealing/lying and the Christian commandments

of not doing harm in our heart/thoughts/speech/actions

 

However, Rosemary Radford Ruether, a great feminist theologian

pointed out that in traditional Judeo-Christianity there exists

a sacralised assumption of a divinely ordered patriarchy/hierarchy

from God to angels to men to women to animals –

this Great Chain of Being invented by men –

was the primary metaphysics for all cultures East and West

before science – and it placed women somewhere

between men and animals

 

No matter how we integrate everything – whether thru science

or religion or science and religion working together –

what people want most of all is to live in peace

 

Peace is all around us – in the world/nature/ourselves

when we live in the present moment – when mindfulness

whether Buddhist or Christian – is in us

the Holy Spirit and peace are in us –

this is not a matter of faith but of practice

and others will sense it and be transformed –

world peace begins in everyone’s heart.

SUCCESS AND THE TRUE SELF

The highest norm of human life is the divine law –

objective/universal/eternal – by which God

governs the whole universe and the human community

with a plan conceived in wisdom and love.

 

But Bernard Lonergan’s greatest criticism  

of the old/dogmatic theology

was its exaggerated notion of the objectivity of truth

and its corresponding neglect of the subject, the self

particularly since in the recent history of thought

Hegel/Kierkegaard/Nietzsche/Heidegger/Buber

emphasized the importance of subjective truth.

 

According to Carl Jung, “individuation” is the process

of continually finding parts of our subjective self that were lost –

this refinding of the whole self/True Self

is what the parables of the lost coin/lost sheep/

lost prodigal son were really about –

Jesus was way ahead of modern psychology.

 

The “prosperity gospel” sees success as the sign

of God’s blessing, but success is never what your True Self

is really about/never the real goal of the journey of life –

success only feels good/right temporarily

and then it is gone – all things must pass – except God.

 

After the Second World War everyone wanted to blot out

of their consciousness that disaster which pointed out the lie

of the liberal ideology of eternal progress

by highlighting our capacity for total depravity –

so everyone got into success and upward mobility

and to accommodate this we developed a culture

of choice not obligation – there were no longer any

religious or social obligations – there was no longer any pressure

from others to be religious – it became a choice not an obligation –

and many chose to be spiritual but not religious.

 

Once we were old enough to make conscious acts of love

our life became a never-ending series of choices

between our false self with its selfish ambitions for success

and our True Self with its loving consent to

God’s Mercy

despite our lostness and total depravity

which the True Self includes and transcends.

INTEGRATING POLAR OPPOSITES

In some mythology and theology

all contradictions/opposites/polarities

emanate from Providence: good and evil/life and death/

pleasure and pain/prosperity and destitution –

God is everywhere and in everything –

God is with us/for us in all things – even dark things.

 

“Meister Eckhart, more than any other thinker

knew how to integrate opposites:

biblical theology and spirituality

prophecy and mysticism

faith and reason

art and life” – Matthew Fox

 

Asking questions in search of integration

can help us with polarities –

asking questions was the basic method of Thomas Aquinas

in his monumental Summa Theologica

in which he integrated all medieval theology –

in his search for Truth/God, he kept asking questions

and turning over in prayer the profound mysteries of

philosophy/scripture/church teaching/the universe.

 

Thomas Merton also used questions to find Truth/God –

he questioned how can we integrate polarities like

Church as Beloved Community versus

Church as Institution of Individuals under Church Law?

 

If you use questions and search hard enough you will find

your True Self/your ground floor spirituality/an absolute

reference point that is at one and the same time

utterly within you

and utterly beyond you.

 

If you are aware of your True Self’s original blessing

you can handle your original sin/

if you are aware of your True Self’s ultimate security in God

you can handle earthly insecurities/

if you are aware of your True Self’s original dignity

you can handle insults easily/

if you are aware of God as your heavenly Father/Mother

your earthly father/mother

cannot hurt you too much.

 

A NEW AGE OF LOVE/JUSTICE/HEALING

“The fear worldview and the love worldview

do not know each other” – Marianne Williamson

 

Early in the 20th century a new Age of Love began

in the consciousness of Pentecostals/liberal Protestants/

progressive Catholics as they grew in awareness

that the Holy Spirit is the Motivator of Justice.

 

Justice is based on God seeing and loving God’s Self

in all things, and it is this seeing and loving by God

that gives all things their innate value and goodness.

 

The basic divine energy is to be

in relation to others – “I am because you are” –

and “I am because Creation is” – these ancient African

and Indigenous sayings show the lie of western philosophy

based on Descartes famous dictum “I think therefore I am.”

No, no – “You think because the Creation and others are.”

 

Because God’s energy is to be in relation to others

there is a deep need for authentic ecclesial/sacramental

experiences that model for us how to be in relation to others.

 

And being one with other humans would be incomplete

without being one with the universe – humans are

an integral part of the greater community

of all living beings – the true Beloved Community.

 

Jesus came to show us the Eros of God –

the desire of God for total intimacy – total love-making with Creation –

Jesus never counselled the use of force or fear

just love of life and all its creatures

particularly the most vulnerable: children/the sick/disabled –

Christ came so all creatures might live this life

to the full – not just the afterlife.

 

Thus, bringing our most vulnerable/wounded parts

to God in prayer is essential to getting them healed –

suppressing our wounds out of shame

or lack of trust in God

keeps them out of our prayer life

and out of God’s healing.