Wisdom's Cry

We have been talking a lot about the nature of God and the most fundamental beliefs of the the faith of the prophets and mystics. Of the hundreds if not thousands of ways we could take the discussion of the nature of the Deity, I have decided to continue my posts inspired by Brian McLaren’s a Generous Orthodoxy.

In the book, McLaren describes the God he sees in creation in a simple yet profound way.

God is a:

a unified, eternal, mysterious, relational community/family/society/entity of saving Love (a Generous Orthodoxy, 85).

This is a phrase for meditation and quiet contemplation in the night. We have already talked about Rabbi David A Cooper’s image of God as a Verb (see this post). This notion of God is very close to the glimpses of Providence we get in our everyday life, but McLaren has found a way to describe our encounter with the Divine.

Unified

The testimony of the Prophets reveals to us a God that is One. On the night before he was crucified, our Lord prayed:

That they all may be one; as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that you have sent me (John 17:21).

It is our mission to reconcile all to God and to spread the word that we are one in Christ, and one in God. We are one human family, in fact, we are one terrestrial family. This is where our impulse for peacemaking and conservation arise.

Many people confuse the unity of God is one of the most misunderstood ideas in the history in monotheism. There is but one God, called by many names. There are no other Gods. Once we realize this, our tribalism melts away and we realize the commonality of all faiths.

Eternal

As Joseph Campbell said:

Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. There’s a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva, the one whose being (sattva) is illumination (bodhi), who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it. ‘All life is sorrowful’ is the first Buddhist saying, and it is. It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved which is sorrow. Loss, loss, loss.

Moyers: That’s a pessimistic note.

Campbell: Well, you have to say yes to it, you have to say it’s great this way. It’s the way God intended it (Power of Myth).

Eternity is a present reality that we tend to ignore. Through prayer and meditation we learn to reside in this eternal now, and through mindfulness we learn to live with in it. In so doing, we are learning to practice the presence of God.

Relational Community/Family/Society/Entity

God is most clearly seen in the relations of things to one another. We see God in the heart of all living. We find God as Father/Protector, Mother/Nurturer, Sibling/Believer, and Child/Actions.

The God we see through providence is the Unknowable Father, the one whose name has never been soiled by human language.

In nature and times of trouble, we rest in the nurturing Spirit as our Divine Mother.

In every believer, we see Christ in them as our Brother and Sister in the Lord.

Through our actions and the actions of the faithful, we see God as Child, the one who is conceived in us upon conversion, and who through our lives we bring into the world.

Corporately, we as the church are the body of Christ. We see God in the hearts of all people.

This is the Living God who is with his people and frees them from fear and torment through his marvelous grace.

Saving Love

The power of God is intimate love and peace we find as we rest in the arms of the Godhead in liturgy and meditation. This Saving Love is the power of Christ to deliver us from Satan’s power.

In all things, we worship the Living God.

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain`also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.

Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device.

And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commands all men every where to repent:

Because he has appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he has ordained; whereof he has given assurance unto all men, in that he has raised him from the dead (Acts 17:28-31)

In Christ Jesus, the world met someone who radically challenged their views of God. The God of Jesus is something the world had never seen before.

He is our Daddy, or Abba as Jesus called him. This God is so close and dear to us that we can call him Daddy. This is very different from the aloof, distant gods the were discussed previously.

This God cares about how we treat one another, and not in a legalistic or moralistic way that previous visions of God had described. The God of Jesus judges us by how we treat the unfortunate, the sick, the hungry, the imprisoned, and the homeless.

In Jesus himself, this caring God is met in a very real and powerful way.

Domine Iesu Christe, Filii Dei, miserere mei, peccatoris.

Lately, I have noticed that the Jesus Prayer has been spontaneously popping out of my mouth. I don’t even notice that it is happening until it is happening.

It has become so common to refer to Jesus as the Son of God that I think most of us have never stopped to consider what it means.

McLaren suggests that the phrase “Son of God” is the same as saying “Embodying God (80),” or “Embodying the Essence of God (80).” But it is almost as important to ask what the word God means before we can discover the meaning of “Son of God.”

Rabbi David A. Cooper found the most brilliant way I have ever seen to discuss God:

“The closest we can come to thinking about God is as a process rather than a being. We can think of it as ‘be-ing,’ as verb rather than noun. Perhaps we would understand this concept better if we renamed God. We might call It God-ing… [Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi] suggests that God-ing is a mutually interactive verb, one which entails an interdependency between two subjects, each the object of the other (God is a Verb, 69).

When we begin to think about God in this way, then what does that mean about Jesus as Son of God. If “Son of God” means “Embodying God,” then Jesus is the embodiment of this mutually interactive being. or as McLaren puts it:

God is “a unified, eternal, mysterious, relational community/family/society/entity of saving Love (85).”

If we look at Jesus, his life and his teachings, it is plain and easy to see that he is the embodiment of this God. Nothing can ever be more clear.

You may want to skip ahead and then come back to this paragraph. I don’t want you to think I am saying something that I am not: I think heaven and hell do not play a large enough issue for the followers of Jesus.

I know what you are thinking. There he goes, I knew this was coming, Fire and brimstone, but it is not what you think. I am not talking about a hell in the hereafter to which few will fall, I am talking about the hell that we ignore everyday.

Heaven and Hell, like the Kingdom of God itself is with us even now. Look at the turmoil in the world, the wars, the famines, and plagues. As Joseph Campbell said, “Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us (Power of Myth, 39).” It is all here set before our eyes. When we looks into the war ravaged regions on the world, we are looking into hell. But even in these places, it is possible to find sights of heaven.

We forget the Good News that Christ came to tell us:

And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said,

The kingdom of God comes not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:20-21).

The Kingdom is here. This is the Gospel according to Christ (Matt 4:23; Mark 1:14), the Kingdom is nigh at hand.

This is the work of the faithful, to live in the Kingdom and reconcile the world. This is why Jesus’ teachings are about helping others. “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world (James 1:27).” Truly, we are to save others from this present hell:

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and you gave me meat: I was thirsty, and you gave me drink: I was a stranger, and you took me in: Naked, and you clothed me: I was sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came unto me.

Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when did we see you an hungry, and fed you? or thirsty, and gave you drink? When did we see you as a stranger, and took you in? or naked, and clothed you? Or when did we see you sick, or in prison, and came unto you?

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was an hungred, and you gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and you took me not in: naked, and you clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and you visited me not.

Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick,or in prison, and did not minister unto you?

Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.

And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal (Matt 25:31-46).

These are the standards of Christ our Lord. Too few Christians these days. The modern church has become obsessed with the private lives of people and forgotten about standards of Jesus.

So I do believe that we should talk more about Heaven and Hell, in the same way our Lord did.

I have been reading Brian D. McLaren’s, a Generous Orthodoxy, and it has really been making me think a lot about my faith. At the end of each chapter, he asks numerous questions, and I have been learning a lot about the faith I actually believe.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be sharing with you my answers to his questions. I invite and encourage you to read the book and share your answers too. We discern the voice of the Spirit in the witness of the faithful.

McLaren begins by talking about the Many Jesuses he has known in his life. I thought I should use his labels (and one of mine) and share my own story.

The Conservative Protestant Jesus

I grew up in a Baptist home. My grandfather and great grandfather were both Baptist ministers. I used to go up to talk about the Bible with my great grandmother all the time. I would read the story and we would talk about the text. In many ways, some of my happiest and most disturbing memories of religion come from this period of my life.

The happy memories are all with my family and Brother John. The disturbing ones are memories I don’t like to dwell on for very long. I attended a Baptist school… the teachers prided themselves on scaring the children. They constantly threatened us with corporal punishment, and gruesome stories about the tortures of hell that awaited us if we did not behave exactly as we were told… The other more despicable things they did, I will not go into.

The Pentecostal/Charismatic Jesus

The next phase of my life started after we moved to Maryland and I saw Pat Robertson on the TV for the first time. I was young, and the God he talked about was God of Magic and Might. It was easy to how this cosmic Super Savior would appeal to a young kid. This Jesus is not only superheroic, but he will include you in his circle of super friends. It was like magic, and I wanted that magic so bad. There was only one problem: I am gay.

I have known this since I was about 7 or 8, but I never new what the word for it was until Pat Robertson defined the word and said that all people like that were going to hell… Imagine my horror. The Baptist school I used to go to had burned images of hell into my mind.

This initiated what was for me the worst period of self-loathing, an act I was assured made me pious. I often thought about killing myself. If God hated people like me, maybe God would reward me if I took myself out. It all seemed so natural.

One night, I decided to do it. I went into the kitchen to get a knife to do the deed, but luckily I met:

The Roman Catholic Jesus

Over the silverware drawer, I found a copy of a book my cousin gave me, The Secret of the Rosary, by St Louis de Montfort. The preface of the Black Rose promised that even the darkest sorcerer with one foot in hell could be saved if they said the Rosary faithfully. So instead of killing myself, I prayed the Rosary for the first time in my life.

It was amazing. I began to pray it everyday and read the other works by St Louis de Montfort. Soon I was asked to leave the small nondenominational church that I attended for wearing a crucifix. I started taking classes and walking to church every Sunday for Mass and Eucharistic Adoration.

I would often go up to the Shrine of St Elizabeth Anne Seton to pray.

The Charismatic Catholic Jesus

One summer, I went to live with my sister in Pennsylvania to watch my niece. While I was there I encountered the Charismatic Catholic movement. It was amazing. I will never forget the profound experiences I had that summer.

Imagine the ritualism of Catholicism and the exuberance of Pentecostalism mixed together into a single thing. This summer changed my life.

The Eastern Orthodox Jesus

By the end of the Summer I found the Philokalia and the Way of the Pilgrim. I began saying the Jesus Prayer in addition to the Rosary, and hunting down more books on the Eastern Orthodox faith.

What impressed me the most was with the way one book answered the question: if Adam and Eve had never tasted the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, would Jesus have still been crucified?

The answer was amazing to me. Yes, it is in the crucifixion that Christ was hung on the border of faith and doubt, hope and fear, life and death- at the very transit of every pair of opposites and points the way to God through it all. Wow! The Crucifixion as a love letter to humankind. How refreshing.

The Liberal Protestant Jesus

As was almost inevitable I began my own quest for the historical Jesus. I read everything I could get my hands on. The numerous gospels and works of the early church. I began studying the various expressions of the early church as it struggled to express their encounter with the Risen Christ.

I was amazed that doctrine was regional. Creeds varied so much from place to place as did the books that were considered Scripture. I began to see these expressions as a mosaic. The more disillusioned I became with the church, the more attracted I was to the God of Paul Tillich, Bishop Spong, and Marcus Borg.

The Jesus of the Oppressed

Then I discovered Matthew Fox. His writings about the Cosmic Christ and Creation Spiritually completely transformed me and my faith. In his call for a new reformation, I found my spiritual home. This Jesus speaks with the same voice as the one I meet in the gospels, and helps me to Live God into the world every day.

These are the Seven Jesuses I have known in my life. They are different from the ones McLaren met in his life, but the lessons that I took away are very similar. It left me looking for a relational Divinity who is truly present with me in my life.