I close my eyes and open myself, my inner self, so that all is in tune with the universe, the music of the spheres as they rotate through the heavens, the vast expanse of being, the electrodes swirling around the atoms, millions upon millions to make up space smaller than vision. The feeling of falling strikes, as flights of fancy reel the mind. Is God here? Can the Power and the Glory be seen within the infinite space that is the human conscience?
Through memory and time our great church father, Augustine of Hippo, sought God. Is revelation of God possible? Karl Barth taught that only through Jesus Christ is revelation of God made known, and now, because of that knowledge, one can see the revelation of God in the world. The fingerprints of God are in all of creation. Can one see these without knowing the revelation of God contained wholly present in the man Jesus Christ?
Annie Dillard said that each day is a god. I say every breath, inhaled and exhaled, is a god for it contains the mystery of the divine. God is within and without, God is here and not. God created all in God's own very image, so that all one needs to experience the presence of God is to experience the presence in communal relationship, to see and feel God is to see the face of one another, to feel the interrelational emotions between oneself and all of creation. But God is so much more! These are but the shadows of God cast into our vision. To see the true God, to reach beyond the world and to touch upon the veil, to look beyond, is impossible. To look beyond that glass through which we can only see dimly dark shadows of the truth--it is unthinkable, unknowable, and certainly intangible.
But what Paul, along with Luther, taught us is that God was made fully present through Christ, fully known through the suffering of a man who died upon a cross two thousand years ago. And by that death on the cross, Jesus promised to be known through our own suffering. In the tears and pain and heartbrake that clutters all of our lives, we know that Christ is truly present. The Gospel of Thomas states thate if we were to just look under a rock, to split a branch in two, Christ--God--would be there. Because of the revelation of God in Christ Jesus we have no farther to look then in the eyes and hopes and dreams, the flights of fancy that accent our lives, to see the revelation of the Power and the Glory. Alleluiah!
Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto,
Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.
Pax et bonum,
JKW +
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
On God as an Orange Ball
I have been asked, and asked myself, a few times "What (or who) is God?" The most interesting answer came from my undergrad professor, Dr. Thompson: "God is not an Orange Ball." He was describing the relationship of God and the world, discussing the difference between pantheism and panentheism. Thompson used an image, like the one I crafted up below, to show the difference between the two.
In the image, you can see three different approaches to understanding the universe in relation to God (I use the term "world" to represent creation, the universe). The orange ball represents God--"God is not an Orange Ball"--and the blue ball represents the world. In the first, God created the world, and may have power over the world, but the world is not God. In fact, God is wholly other then the world. The second, pantheism, shows God and the world as being one. Think of Star Wars, the force. God is everything and everyone, a collective "force" that is a part of everything. Now panentheism posits that all of creation is part of God, but God is much greater than that. Christians have generally thought of God as either the "seperate" model, or, more recently, the "panentheist" model.
Now, why do I say all this? Because the quest to seek out God, to use our senses and minds and spiritual nature to try to understand this orange ball has been the quest of religion since it first began. John Caputo wrote of God as the ocean and religion as a raft sailing above it. The raft is always in danger of capsizing under the vast and dangerous sea. Or maybe God is the white whale, and religion is Captain Ahab, hoping against hope to pin it (God) down, but knowing full well that at any time, at any moment, the whale could catch us off guard and we'd be destroyed.
God revealed the Name to us, God revealed this full presence as a battered man on a cross and in a mysterious celebration, an amnesis of sorts but so much more, in elements of wine, bread, and water. Yet, even still, God is not an orange ball--God is not something (or someone) that can be examined and felt and harpooned, a trophy of life-long sails. But, with every fiber of our beings we feel the questing and questioning nature of the unknown begging an answer, and so we try. Let us begin this journey of discovery, of self, of one another, and of the Other-yet-same, hand-in-hand we tread, together.
Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto,
Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.
Pax et bonum,
JKW +
In the image, you can see three different approaches to understanding the universe in relation to God (I use the term "world" to represent creation, the universe). The orange ball represents God--"God is not an Orange Ball"--and the blue ball represents the world. In the first, God created the world, and may have power over the world, but the world is not God. In fact, God is wholly other then the world. The second, pantheism, shows God and the world as being one. Think of Star Wars, the force. God is everything and everyone, a collective "force" that is a part of everything. Now panentheism posits that all of creation is part of God, but God is much greater than that. Christians have generally thought of God as either the "seperate" model, or, more recently, the "panentheist" model.Now, why do I say all this? Because the quest to seek out God, to use our senses and minds and spiritual nature to try to understand this orange ball has been the quest of religion since it first began. John Caputo wrote of God as the ocean and religion as a raft sailing above it. The raft is always in danger of capsizing under the vast and dangerous sea. Or maybe God is the white whale, and religion is Captain Ahab, hoping against hope to pin it (God) down, but knowing full well that at any time, at any moment, the whale could catch us off guard and we'd be destroyed.
God revealed the Name to us, God revealed this full presence as a battered man on a cross and in a mysterious celebration, an amnesis of sorts but so much more, in elements of wine, bread, and water. Yet, even still, God is not an orange ball--God is not something (or someone) that can be examined and felt and harpooned, a trophy of life-long sails. But, with every fiber of our beings we feel the questing and questioning nature of the unknown begging an answer, and so we try. Let us begin this journey of discovery, of self, of one another, and of the Other-yet-same, hand-in-hand we tread, together.
Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto,
Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.
Pax et bonum,
JKW +
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