How I'm Feeling Just Now

My heart feels as though it were a Leyden jar.
Not the cardiac muscle with its autonomic contractions -
I mean mi corazón, that center of psyche-spirit where bonds
of affection are meant to be formed with other persons;
where all those affect receptors ought to be aquiver,
awaiting a new acquaintance’s touch,
waiting to try for a fit, as a key fits its keyhole.

But no one has been able to reach inside the glass jar
since you sent me away into exile
to search in the taiga for my destiny.
And the battery wire is disconnected.
And the foil sheets lining the jar
make it impossible for anyone to peer inside
for a glimpse of what’s there.

I go about the tundra, and up and down in it like a ghost,
whose availability no one notices, even when I smile.
I imagine my smile is like the Cheshire cat’s grin
– a disembodied thing.

A Fable, After Aesop

Once upon a time a terrible forest fire drove all the animals in the woods down to the inside of a bend in the river. The birds took to the air and flew to the opposite bank. Some of the legged ones dove in and swam across to safety, but the others who crept or crawled, or slithered couldn’t swim or paddle. These gathered together, in great fear, with no means of escape.

One little snake, of a venomous kind, begged a large frog to carry him across the river on his back. “Please, please, kind Ranadaean Sir, Best of Batrachians, won’t you save my life, since you swim so well and easily?” wheedled the juvenile adder.

“But I fear you will bite me if I come close; you’ll kill me with your poison. No, no, I’m afraid to help you,” replied the old frog.

The snakelet answered, “Heaven forfend, dear Anuran Lord; I swear by all that’s holy, I won’t harm a wart of your handsome head. I’ll name my first hatched offspring after you. I promise the tale of your goodness and trust will be told for generations in Viperdom. There’s no time to lose; hurry! Come here and let me coil upon your back.”

Well, that big old frog repented of his mistrust; he beheld before him the spectacle of masses of creepers and crawlers beginning to charbroil, he felt a tide of mercy lift his warming heart, and he consented to remove the garrulous serpent from harm’s way, saying urgently, “Hold on as best you can; I’ll try to keep you above water.” And off they went, the frog stroking strongly, his bow wave streaming back from his nose as he surged ahead, the puff adder pup balancing on the frog’s broad green back.

When the odd couple of refugees, reptile and amphibian, arrived on the other shore, in the snake’s promised land of salvation, as it were, the good frog exclaimed enthusiastically, “Hallelujah, Brother Serpent, we made it!” And the snake struck, sinking his deadly fangs into the frog’s cervical spine just below his skull, where the back of his neck would have been, if frogs had necks.

The frog cried, “You bit me! You’re killing me! Why did you bite me, when I had just saved you from certain death? You made a holy oath! Why did you betray your word?” And the rescued puff adder, slithering away, replied simply, “Hey, I’m a snake. I bite. That’s what I do!”

The moral of the story is: Never turn your back on a snake. Not even a well-spoken one.

Bad Obama, Bad!

The Pentagon Plutocrats have no idea how to bring their Godforsaken debacle in Afghanistan to an end, no more than for their continual splattering of young people's blood and bone all over the map of Iraq - whilst a widening pall of depleted uranium dust and futility settles over all.

Into the City of War strides the new President Barack Obama, proclaiming a compromise deployment - or sacrifice - of seventeen thousand more troops into the quagmire of Afghanistan, who are now supposed to "stabilize" the situation.

I'm having deja vu, big time, Barack. Maybe you're too young to remember, but we've been here before, not so very long ago. Stabilize, you say? Are you playing Big Brother, Barack, or what? Let's lose the Newspeak, shall we? Tell us now, just what is the big idea, Mr. Commander in Chief?

Campaigning for election last fall, you blustered about, threatening to send - yes - no fewer than thirty thousand more hapless hod carriers for the Kabul regime construction project. What's up with your new number? Are you opting for the Golden Mean? Are you striking a virtuous pose, replete with classical virtues of temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice?

If so, I beg to differ.

This is not prudent, not just. True temperance, and due fortitude would rule out warfare in the first place, deploying diplomats, not destroyers to engage the world in peaceful solutions to whatever real threats might subsist. And I challenge the idea that any regional political movements, from the Mideast through Central Asia, are our enemies. We, not the alienated victims of our world-girdling military empire, are our own worst enemies.

It's not just the economy, stupid.

Start the task of reconstructing the political economy by decimating the American military-industrial complex. Slash away the brass hats at the Pentagon; burn out the institutional thickets of waste and larceny thriving there behind corridors of closed doors. Put the multitudes of undereducated American youths who have been, and otherwise will be suckered into Devil's work in the military class, into re-education and vocational rehabilitation programs oriented toward waging peace, not war.

Let's just stop manufacturing mountains of weapons to arm the whole world. A single executive initiative on the part of our new President could put an historic end to that evil enterprise. Instead, let's make enough silicon photovoltaic solar cells to roof the planet, to power pumps to raise deep groundwater to subsistence farm families all over the Two-Thirds World, to do every piece of life-sustaining work electricity without emissions could to to bring about the transformation of our whole world into a new world of peace and justice!

Make love, not war!

I, for one, am not too young to remember the powerful impact those words had on the imaginations of a generation too much reviled now, but still capable - if we all have the will - of saving the world. I still believe, and I'm not the only one. I hope one day you'll join us, Barack; let the Devils of War and Mammon take the hindmost!

 

Let's hear the truth, for a change, Mr. Obama

In his inaugural address, President Obama declared, “Our nation is at war, with a far-reaching network of hatred and violence . . .” Probably, his speechwriter did not include the significant comma I do in that declarative sentence. But, with that critical punctuation, the statement is definitively true. Without the comma, it is merely a turn of deceitful polemic.

The truth the entire world knows is that our nation is indeed at war, with its far-reaching network of hatred and violence, that is, with the demonic power of its world-girdling military complex, headquartered in the Pentagon, and standing ever ready to dispatch cruel death, destruction, and despoliation, anywhere resistance to American hegemony arises.

I have yet to see a clear sign that this status quo will be altered, now that Barack Obama sits in the Oval Office.

How now, Mr. President?

Indulge me, my friends, will you please, on this Inauguration Day 2009, so full of bombast, hoopla, and dewy eyes, in an uncommon exercise of common sense.

We hold, I trust you’ll agree, these truths to be self-evident: That common men and women, of every land, in every age, are mostly people of good will; that is, they demonstrate in their lives and works, most of the time, the virtues of faith, and hope, and charity. And this, as well: That the predominant forces in all societies’ institutions, that rule the lives of the common people, are those of bad faith, mistrust, diffidence, and ill will.

You know there’s something going on here that is not good, but you don’t know what it is, do you?

Even the former President of the United States, George W. Bush, in his farewell address to the nation, reminded us that, “I've often spoken to you about good and evil, and this has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise.”

Right. So you may say.

I ask then, why is the common good so patently compromised by evil?
Something wicked this way comes, eh? That phrase is to be found in Shakespeare's play “Macbeth.” The speaker is the second witch, who prophesies, "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes." The wicked thing is Macbeth himself, by this point in the play a traitor and murderer.

What do I make of this? Well, first of all, the common people are not in charge of society. And those who are in charge obviously do not have the common good in mind. Why? Well, ipso facto, they are not common people.

Those who are in charge are rich and powerful people, a perennial ruling class, and they are enemies of the common good. Thus, Mr. Bush, a scion of ruling class patriarchs, were he at all a reflective man, would do well to consider the tragedy of Macbeth. Even more so, I think, should President Obama, a man surely better equipped for self-reflection, as he assumes authority himself, going henceforth ever amidst a congeries of ruling class plenipotentiaries.

We will all do well to keep in mind that what is going on, in the final analysis, is not a struggle between good and evil; it is everywhere and always an economic class struggle, and we must choose which side we are on. Let us remember the still-relevant words of Frederick Douglass, penned in 1857:

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

You are now between a rock and a hard place, Mr. Obama, God help you. I wish I knew which side you are on.

Now, Mr. Obama, change U.S.-Israel policy

When you step into the Oval Office, Mr. Obama, will you be leaving a trail of bloody footprints? Are you already so obliged to the Israel Lobby that you’re constrained to say nothing, and do nothing, about the ongoing massacre of Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli war machine, its veritable Wehrmacht, its “mighty defense,” wielding horrible weapons supplied by the U.S.A.?

The Godforsaken rogue terrorist state of Israel is, and has been since its strategic, founding war of conquest in 1948, a lawless, merciless criminal aggressor in the region of Syria-Palestine – the enablement of the U.N. under the control of the U.S. and the U.K. notwithstanding.

Israel’s so-called “Defense Forces” have unceasingly engaged in cruel, unjust, unmerciful acts of forced relocation, and confiscation of Palestinian lands and buildings, mass displacement and imprisonment, “ethnic cleansing,” and virtual genocide against the indigenous Palestinian people. They are the native Muslim and Christian farmers and villagers whom the Zionist Movement, and its synthetic Zionist State, have resolutely sought to decimate and destroy, as individuals, families, communities, and even as a would-be Palestinian nation.

The criminal Zionist Israeli military regime has made for itself a history of decades of evil-doing, having waged war endlessly against its Syro-Palestinian and farther away neighbor states, and having become loathed and reviled uniformly throughout the world – except for the political and military-industrial elites who control the policies of the United States government – the corporate godfather and super warlord that supplies its Eastern Mediterranean vassal Israel with all the weapons and finances, and military support it ever needs, to continue and enhance its ongoing criminal aggression and war crimes.

The Palestinians of Gaza are trapped within armed perimeters, like fenced-in cattle, awaiting slaughter. They are living and dying – by thirst and starvation, untreated disease, and Israeli military murders – in a scenario reminiscent of nothing so much as the Warsaw Ghetto, where German Nazis imprisoned and massacred European Jews seventy years ago.

This cruel irony of history seems peculiarly unnoticed by the bloodthirsty leaders of the three Israeli war parties competing for election to its Prime Ministry. Zionist Israel has become the Doppelgänger of the Nazi's Third Reich. Its pursuit of military solutions to the problem of Palestinian resistance is like the Nazis’ pursuit of successive solutions to the “Jewish Problem.” Will Israel’s “Final Solution” be anything like Die Endlösung der Judenfrage?

The United States of America has played the single most dynamic role in the international pro-Zionist cartel to establish, arm, and enrich Israel through a process of violent dispossession, impoverishment, and dislocation of the native Palestinian people, since Israel’s inception in 1948. At present, the government of the U.S.A. virtually controls the military, economic, and political prerogatives of the state of Israel.

To be sure, the persistence of Palestinian liberation fighters in resisting Israeli oppression by firing homemade rockets toward the towns of the Israeli Negev is misguided and counterproductive, and deserves to be reproved. Nevertheless, this is no justification for Israel’s abominable airborne terrorism and ground assault on the helpless captive people of Gaza.

I say, Mr. Obama, I beseech you, to end U.S. government complicity in the war crimes of Israel, to withdraw immediately all U.S. military aid to and financial support of the state of Israel, to demand the removal of Israeli blockades on the borders of Gaza, to further demand Israel’s withdrawal from the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies, and to insist on the abandonment of all Israeli-occupied settlements in the Palestinian territories. The United States has also provided small arms and military support to the Palestine Liberation Organization for use against Hamas, and those policies must be ended as well.

Our near-term goal should be a cessation of hostilities, followed by substantial disarmament and demilitarization of all warring factions in the Syria-Palestine region, including Israel, Hamas, and Hizbollah. No renegade state intransigence should be tolerated – such as Israel has demonstrated in the past, with the collusion of the United States.

This process should be enforced with all the diplomatic and economic powers at the disposal of the United States, the United Nations, and the European Union. Every attempt should be made to engage Russia, Iran, and China in the peace process as well. May it be so.

No, Mr. Obama, there is no "right war."

Mr. Obama, I supported you and voted for you – being for me, as Ralph Nader said, “the best of the worse” – but this time, my friend, you are wrong, dead wrong.

The United States military misdeeds in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, are not “the right war.” There is no “right war.” As a self-identified Christian, you should know that, better than most folks do. And you know as well as I do, although perhaps you would not admit it publicly, that the so-called “just war” rationales of modern and pre-modern Christian ethics are obsolete and impossible to justify in our post-modern world.

A genuine follower of the way of Jesus Christ would prefer (as Platonic ethics required too) to suffer injustice than to do unjustly unto others, would try to never do violence to anyone for any reason, and would rather choose the way of peace, as with St. Paul and St. Peter, “not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing: but contrariwise blessing; knowing that ye are thereunto called, that ye should inherit a blessing.”


Furthermore, and again you know as well as I do, although perhaps you would not admit it publicly, that the supposed threat to U.S. national security posed by “Islamic terrorists” – whether located in Afghanistan or Pakistan, or Iraq or Iran, or Palestine or Somalia, or anywhere else in the world – is a convenient political fiction, a nightmare, a bete noir, a bugbear, used on behalf of this country’s plutocratic elites to falsely justify their imperialist crimes of transnational conquest.

I do not fear harm by “Islamo-fascist extremists,” but I do fear for the future if we do not begin to dismantle the military-industrial shadow government that rules the United States.

I believe I stand with a broad and diverse majority of the people of this country in an unequivocal demand to you as President-elect to withdraw U.S. military forces immediately, not only from Iraq, but from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and everywhere else in the world where they don’t belong, and aren’t required to protect our lives and properties – and I’m speaking for we, the people, not the military industrialists and plutocratic elites who have usurped our government!

We elected you to begin to undo the manifest evil visited on this country and the world by previous administrations, not to advance it and expand it.

To the barricades! Let the Revolution begin!

As our old tophatted comrade Pogo declared decades ago, "We have met the enemy, and it is us!" Let those with ears to hear listen!

The United States government and the elite ruling class minority it represents have, together, become a formidable enemy of the People. Our national government and its allied military-industrial complex have, together, become the greatest threat to peace and security the world has ever known. Today, under the mendacious, maleficent usurpation of Richard B. Cheney and George W. Bush, we have finally realized a dire state that the founders of our nation, in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, foresaw with stern resolve.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that [all persons] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . . That to secure these rights . . . Governments are instituted . . . deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government . . . Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes . . . But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

The time has come for the Cheney/Bush regime to be decisively, forcibly, forever removed from power. The United States Congress has the Constitutional authority, and now the political wherewithal, to impeach the pretenders to the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency, for the commission of many high crimes and misdemeanors against the people of our country.

Furthermore, these outlaw executives have engaged our armed forces, and clandestine operatives, and armies of sociopath mercenaries in continual criminal wars of international aggression, in defiance of all applicable norms of international relations. Many more than one million human beings have been murdered, maimed, and tortured, in direct consequence of the Cheney/Bush junta’s policies and directives, for no other purpose than the corporate greed and sheer power lust of ruling class elites.

Though more than two thirds of our citizens, and majorities in Congress oppose them, the bloodthirsty White House dictators now demand the lives of tens of thousands more of our sons and daughters, to follow the hundreds of thousands who have gone before them, to be sacrificed for the idols of Mammon, on the bloody altars of this regime’s unholy wars.

The plurality of the governed no longer consents to the powers so unjustly wielded by the representatives of the miscreant junta who have seized control of our nation’s executive offices and the Pentagon. It is high time to alter the present state of executive power, to abolish the rule of the Cheney/Bush regime, to dispatch all their co-conspirators and accomplices, to rid the precincts of our Capitol of their evil and corruption.

It is our right; it is our duty, to overthrow that unjust and illegitimate government that now defies even the will of the United States Congress, in its hell-bent determination to escalate its wars in the Middle East.

The New American Revolution has begun; it is even now under way. The first sign of the confrontation between the People and the Presidency was the 2006 midterm election, in which Republican Party representatives were turned out of office in droves, and new majorities of opposition Democrats were elected, in both houses of Congress. The People’s Mandate was and is unmistakable: No more war! The People demand a complete, permanent withdrawal of U.S. forces, and their bases, from Iraq – and by logical extension, from the entire Middle East, East Africa, and Central and South Asia.

Yet Cheney and Bush scorn and despise the expressed will of the People. “I fully understand they could try to stop me,” Bush said of the new Democrat-run Congress. “But I've made my decision. And we're going forward.”

Now, Congress must make its decision, to go forward with equal resolve, to impeach Cheney and Bush, to deny the Pentagon any further funding to escalate, or even to continue to wage this war, and to expeditiously reverse the criminal regime’s military deployments, returning what remains of our occupation forces to the places they belong – at home with their families and loved ones.

The warlords of the Cheney/Bush regime have made the United States of America public enemy number one throughout the world. The time has come for the American people to declare them public enemies at home, and to decisively drive them out of the seats of executive power.

Love Is The Way

A homily preached on Sunday May 28, 2006 at New Spirit Community Church, in Berkeley, California.

Good morning! My name is Jim Weller. I’m your student intern pastor, and this is the last day of my official internship. I’ll bet you thought you were going to get away without having to hear me preach to you!

Perhaps I should explain the schema for our chapel arrangements this morning. White and red are the prescribed liturgical colors for the six Sundays after Easter, of which today is the last. I thought we would hang our United Church of Christ “God Is Still Speaking” identity banner, since we are now a full-fledged UCC church, and it matches the color scheme. And I just got back last Sunday from the UCC Northern California Nevada Conference Annual Meeting weekend at Asilomar, full of denominational identity!

I am, after all, a theological student, as I will continue to be until I become august and venerable, so I thought it good today to give you a brief survey of the key meanings of Christian theology, as I understand them. The core message is that love is what redeems us, but a few other theology words will make appearances, too. Don’t let them distract you!

Anyhow, I have my white and red on; my head is polished, so let’s go!

Let those with ears to hear listen:

“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?” asked Anna, the firstborn and the more pensive of my two preschool-aged daughters, one afternoon while they sat together, talking with me on the front porch.

“God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” I answered her, quite as thoughtfully. “God is . . . a feeling inside you. God is how you feel when you know you are alive. God is what you feel when you love someone. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you feel God in you.”

Anna sat quietly for half a minute, enjoying her ice cream cone. “I love you, Daddy”, she said.

“I know, sweetie. I love you, too. Listen. Do you remember the day we were at the beach, when you were kneeling in the wet sand, with your back to the waves, and you’d laugh as each wave surprised you, splashing over your shoulders? Maggie was playing by herself, near us on the big rocks, and you and I were there in the surf, and I’d laugh when you laughed, and you looked up at me then and yelled, ‘I’m happy!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”

Now, friends, I can speak to you in more sophisticated terms than one can with a child. To you I can affirm that yes, God is not only not a person and not a thing, God is utterly other – absolutely unlike any object of understanding. Nothing that can be said of anything in being can be said of God, as Godself.

And yet, God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is not one and the same as everything in being, but God is real and present in every time and place, with every thing and every person, for God is being itself, ground of being, first and final cause of being. Creator and creation completely interpenetrated.

Our lives are God’s gifts of being, in relatedness with all other beings and being itself. We are given the gift of awareness of our relationship with God in each other, and our accepting response is love. There is no way by works of penitence to attain to the love of God. Love is the way.

Let me tell another story here. A Unitarian Universalist minister I know was preaching the good news of God’s love one day, and afterward an older man approached her with a question. Now this man, Bill, like most Unitarians, had an advanced education, and he was a perfectly rational thinker. He really was a rocket scientist. He and his colleagues knew how to put a man on the moon, and bring him back to tell about it – and they actually had.

So Bill asked, “Pastor, I know you believe in your experience of God’s presence, but how do you know that’s what you’re experiencing? How do you know it’s not just your imagination? Rachel could have launched into an intricate philosophical proof of the existence of God, and Bill could have followed it.

But instead, she asked him another question. “Bill,” she asked, “Have you ever been in love? I mean, really in love, so that everything was brighter, and more beautiful than before?” Bill smiled, remembering. “Oh yes,” he replied. “Well, how do you know?” she rejoined. “How do you know you didn’t just imagine it?

There you go.

Though any meaning we may attribute to God is but a metaphor, a symbol, or a sign pointing to the incomprehensible reality of God, one glorious affirmation is indubitably ours to make – God is! Ancient Hebrew Scripture tells us that that is how God, in the burning bush, told Moses God’s name – “I am!”

Centuries later, because he knew he was of God too, that is the way Jesus answered his accusers – “Before Abraham was, I am!”

“The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” wrote an early Christian, Irenaeus.

As it is said, we are children of God, beings made in God’s image. And by God’s holy grace, the same affirmation is ours to make in every season of our lives, in sorrow and in gladness, with our first breaths and our last, “Yes God – I am! I am of you and I am yours, God. Your will be done, not mine!”

Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echod! "Hear, O Israel, Adonai your God is One!"

"You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your strength, as you are beloved of God. You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself."

We are here to love one another, for that is the way to love God as we are beloved. These are the greatest commandments.

The relationship between God and human persons really is one of unending, unconditional love and acceptance. You are a beloved child of God in whom God delights. You are accepted in the kingdom of God, now and forever. God’s acceptance does not end.

That is the good news of God. Your part of the relationship is very simple: Accept your acceptance!

The way Jesus put the saving message was this: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the good news."

What this meant was that God's time is always fulfilled. The love and acceptance of God are immediately available for you, right here, right now.

To re-pent is to turn the soul round right. It means, "Think again!" It is to respond rightly to the good news of God. We take our turned-inward spirits and turn them inside out, turning the light of love toward God and other people.

Jesus taught us to believe that in this way only, we will be redeemed from sin.

Sin is not a popular topic in churches like ours, where the gospel of love is emphasized. We all know that mistaken ideas about sin have been used, or misused, in church as weapons to shame us in our expressions of love and the joy of living, and to separate us from the love of God.

No one is untouched by sin. William Sloane Coffin said that sin is the abuse of our God-given free will. I say that it almost always involves pridefulness and abuses of power. In any case, it erects barricades that keep love out.

Sin forms in the shadow of the isolated self that stands between the human soul and the light of God’s love.

To sin is to do the opposite of the Great Commandment to love God, and love others as oneself. It is to be alienated by self will from God's will to love unconditionally. It is to will harm, and to act harmfully, instead of for good. It is to abide in diffidence, ignoring and disguising the harm others and we do in our alienation. And, it builds up permanency in our social structures and inherited cultural traditions.

Sin and salvation could be explored at length in many other sermons. Understanding them is at the core of understanding the meaning of the gospel. But today’s topic is simply about love and acceptance.

The glad tiding of God is the good news that you are accepted! Sinners and saints alike. You have been beloved of God and accepted into God’s realm since the day you were born, and before then, and nothing you can do or believe, or not do or not believe, will cause God’s love and acceptance of you to be withdrawn.

All that is required of you for salvation is to accept your acceptance. Repentance of sin demands no more of you than this: "Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly in the presence of God."

Remission of sin is a process engaged in on the part of the human person who has accepted God’s unconditional acceptance – one who has been redeemed by simple surrender to divine love. It is a movement of the human spirit in love toward God, the divinity of being itself that is reflected in the human spirit.

One morning last weekend during the UCC Conference Annual Meeting, I took a walk by myself among the flowering dunes, back of Pebble Beach on Monterey Bay. The sky was full of sailing clouds and sunlight, and the wind tore wildly at my shirt. It would have whipped the hat off my head if it hadn’t been tied on. For weeks, I had been full of self-doubt, and despaired of the authenticity of my vocation, feeling alone and ill equipped to accept God’s calling – if it even was that, and not just my wishful imagination.

Then I rounded a bend in the path, coming into the lee of a sand dune under a sheltering growth of cypresses. And the wind ceased its howling. The hollow where I stood was bright and quiet. I reflected that this walk was a metaphor for these days of my arrival in the company of saints, so to speak. For I was a part of a gathering of members of the body of Christ, young and old, clergy and laity, ordinary human persons who were accepting their acceptance – and I was accepted among them, imperfect as I am.

[solo singing accompanied by choir, humming the melody] “Sometimes I feel discouraged, and think my work’s in vain, but then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again. There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole; there is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.”

Salvation is never done once and for all. We need periodic renewal treatments, makeovers, or tune-ups. We salve each other. That’s why we pray and worship together. Salvation is the balm of God’s grace given freely and received by faith, and it is the way of life for God’s people. All people are chosen to be redeemed by God’s grace, if only we will accept God’s choice.

The Deuteronomist of ancient Israel discerned God’s message of salvation this way: “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life – so that you and your children may live" – by loving your God, heeding God’s commands, and holding fast to God.

Love made us, and it is what we are here for. Love is the way.

Let us choose accordingly, and love one another as God loves us.

May it be so. Amen.

Anselm said it way back

More than a thousand years ago, way back in the early eleventh century, the Christian philosopher and logician Anselm of Canterbury used words to the following effect to express the meaning of the word, God:

“God is that reality than which nothing greater can be imagined.” This has stood as the generally accepted meaning of God among people of discernment and wisdom ever since. Than which nothing greater can be imagined.

Apparently alone among earthly beings, we humans are creatures of awesome imaginative powers. We are, beyond doubt, perfectly real ourselves, and we can imagine, as though real, things and configurations far beyond our personal realities, some of them so fantastic they could never be made real – but some can be, and sometimes actually are.

You are real. Your personal reality is indubitable. It is deeply rooted in the ground of being itself. But you are a finite reality. Your physical being is contained within the boundaries of a relatively small envelope of space and time. You were born a few years ago, and before then, you were not. You will die some time hence, and again you will be not.

While you live, you have mental capacities that enable you to perceive, in limited ways, areas of reality beyond your personal envelope. And you have high-order mental capacities by virtue of which you may imagine incomprehensibly vast, but still finite, extensions of space-time. Of the unknowably great, but not infinite, number of intelligible realities that can, in principle, be imagined, you can even imagine the totality of reality – sort of.

But there, you reach your personal limit. You cannot imagine that ultimate reality than which nothing greater can be imagined. That would be God. In contemporary theology, God is ultimate reality, being itself, the ground of being. Or, in ancient Greek thought, the unmoved mover, first cause and final cause, the uncreated creator.

Any word-concepts that may be attributed to God as God are ones that may not be said of anything in being, or even all of everything ever in being. God is infinite. God is eternal. God is absolute, unchanging, indivisible, and ever present. To some minds, God is omniscient, omnipotent, and all good.

None of these terms can be truthfully said of a person, any person. Therefore, obviously, God as God is not a person. God as God is not even a being, the popular term Supreme Being notwithstanding. Because God as a Supreme Being, exalted above and all-powerful over all other beings, can be imagined, just barely.

That cannot be a description of God. God is that than which nothing greater can be imagined. The only reality, the only being greater than which nothing can be imagined is ultimate reality, reality itself, being itself.

And, since you are a temporal, finite but fully real being, embedded, as it were, in the infinite eternal reality of being itself, and since you are (by now) conscious of your curious position (this should blow your mind), you are a personal being in conscious relationship with being itself, that ultimate reality in which you exist, out of which you came, and into which you will return. You are in direct and intimate relationship with God. You are of God. Your very being is a manifestation of God. God is closer to you than you are to yourself.

And since you are a being who, finite and temporal creature though you are, is capable of reflecting consciously on all the multifarious aspects of reality of which you are a part, and even on reality itself, it can be well said that you are the consciousness of being itself.

Now if you speak of God using the language proper to persons, which God is not, but most people routinely do anyway, you could say that yours are the eyes through which God looks upon God’s Creation. Yours is the mind by which God perceives, and feels, and knows, and apprehends those proximate aspects of reality that are accessible to you, including the reality and presence of Godself.

This amazing way of understanding the basics of theology is not new, as I have mentioned. I believe it was the core insight of ancient Israelite monotheism, and hence, of all religious traditions which followed after it. Only the most elite priests, monks, and scholars understood it, of course. Listen to what Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth century Spanish saint, said about all this:

“Christ has no body on earth but ours, no hands but ours, no feet but ours. Ours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ looks out upon the world, ours are the feet with which he goes about doing good, ours are the hands with which he blesses his people.”

Now, by the time Teresa wrote that, the Christian church had developed an elaborate Christology, a subdivision of theology, in which Jesus Christ was understood to have been fully human – meaning finite, temporal, and historically contingent, in his lifetime, and that he was nonetheless fully God, and merged with God, especially after his crucifixion and resurrection, being or becoming one of three divine persons, or substances, which together comprise God. Christ was the aspect of God with whom human persons could most easily and directly relate.

Because of the way most people think – other than erudite theologians and philosophers –people’s ways of relating to God, and having discourse about God, are personalized. This is to be expected, since we are persons, and those other beings with whom we are most significantly related are persons. (In my person-ology, higher vertebrates are kinds of persons, too, since human persons have psychologically significant affective and cognitive relationships with them, and we have the same lower brain architecture.)

Each one of us, whether we recognize it or not, is in profound relationship with God, a relationship more ultimate, and ultimately more meaningful, than any other human relationship can be. God is not a person, but, given the ultimate concern (to use Paul Tillich’s term) of human persons in their relationship with God, and their need to express themselves about that relation to others, God is necessarily spoken of, depicted, and thought of as a personified being.

Thus, God is given names, and prayers are directed to God as though God were a person capable of receiving them and answering. All of this kind of God-talk is metaphoric, because it has to be. Nothing pertinent to persons, or beings of any sort whatsoever can be said of, or thought of, or attributed to God as God.

However, I am a man of charity and mercy, and I understand that, even though metaphoric, we tend to relate to God by names and social identities which are proper to the most significant other persons with whom we are related. Thus we have LORD God the Father, God the Son, Lord Jesus Christ, Mary Virgin Mother of God, and so forth.

If this is the way that most folks put their spirituality into words, who am I to disabuse them? It takes little or no effort for me to convert such metaphoric terms to simple signs pointing, for me, to the reality they signify, as I understand it. Anyway, I sort of enjoy the sweet quaintness of these artifacts of folk religion.

When I am in the company of cognoscenti who insist on political correctness achieved through use of inclusive language for talking about God, I usually go along with their shortcomings of tolerance, and avoid pronouncing any God names or pronouns smacking of patriarchy, racism, or androcentrism. Even though the Bible is, in fact, shot through with all of those unwelcome characters, there are always ways the text can be revised to clean it up.

The most important thing to remember about God and your relationship with God is that God is love; you are a beloved child of God, created by God in God’s own image. Metaphorically speaking, of course. God’s love – a metaphoric construction signifying an ineffable reality – is not the same as human persons’ love, though it is fair to say that our love for each other and God is inspired by and responds to God’s love for us.

The nature and meaning of the relationship between God and human persons really is unending, unconditional love and acceptance. Though it is a metaphor, it is an accessible one. You are a beloved child of God in whom God delights. You are accepted in the kingdom of God. No matter who you are, what you have done, or intended, or said, or thought, or believed.

That is the good news of God. Your part of the relationship is very simple: Accept your acceptance. The way Jesus put it was this:

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the good news.”

What this meant was that God’s time is always fulfilled; the power, love, and acceptance of God is always immediately available – here and now, for you; take your gnarly turned-inward spirit-mind and turn it inside out, toward God and other people; and believe that in this way, you will be redeemed from sin.

When you have made that spiritual conversion, that repentance, that metanoia, you will be able to live in the way recommended by Jesus and stated in the Torah centuries earlier:

“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and all your mind, and all your spirit; and you shall love your neighbors as you love yourself.”

And the prophet Micah, also long before Jesus’ time, summed up the Torah this way:

“What does the LORD your God require of you, but to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?”

So there you have it. It’s not rocket science, is it? All you have to do to get right with God is to love with all your heart, all your soul, and your entire mind. Love God, as you are beloved of God. Love your neighbors as yourself. Love your enemies. (That pretty much covers everyone.)

Do justly. (That means avoid doing harm, and do good whenever possible.) Love mercy. (That implies loving kindness, care for the sick and suffering, nonviolence in action and intention.) Walk humbly with God. (God is always with you; stay in right relationship with God.)

Of course, there is no guarantee you won’t get into trouble in the world, especially if you go around doing evil – but then you might get away with it after all, particularly if you’re very powerful. In the end, of course, you will die and be not, just as all creatures do.

Remember that you are just one finite, temporal human soul in exquisitely interconnected interdependence with all other people, and all life on Earth. Take from the abundance of the world only what you need to live simply, that others may simply live. (If you wind up with a little more than you need, don’t worry – you can give some away!)

Holy Trinity?

God Almighty, Christ, and Holy Spirit – these are different aspects of the One God. Though understood metaphorically as distinctive divine persons, the differences among these aspects are occasioned only by human sensibility. God is triune only in traditional Christian understanding, not in essential reality. While it may be useful to conceptually differentiate the aspects of God’s ultimate unity, and it certainly is traditional in Christian orthodoxy, it is not religiously necessary.

Early Christian theological doctrine distinguished between the three divine “persons” who are, ineluctably, one “substance” - but not the same - by extrapolating from clues found in their study of the Greek wording of the sacred Biblical texts available to them. The venerable Jewish tradition, from which the Christian church fathers diverged, of course, affirmed simply, “Adonai, your God, is One.” The more ancient religion was, of course, the religious tradition of Jesus of Nazareth, who was not a Christian, but an observant Jew.

In individual religious worship, what I call the “God relation,” there is only one person involved, that is, the human person. God in Godself is not a person. God-consciousness is a uniquely human personal capacity. In my terminology, it is the conscious relation of personal being with being itself.

“Being itself,” drawn from the theological lexicon of Paul Tillich, is for me an equivalent of the Hebrew vocalization, Adonai, a name signifying the ineffable reality of God. “God” is a word; like all words, it is a sign, standing for and pointing toward the reality it signifies.

Every human being, that is, every person, is an instance of what I call “personal being.” Every human person is an “image” of God, Imago Dei. For me, to aver that we are “created in the image of God” is to see that we are personal manifestations of being itself, that is, of God.

As I’ve said before, if there were no minds to know God, there would be no God to be known. We, creatures of God, are given minds in order for God to know Godself. So, in a sense, we are the minds of God. We are the creaturely lenses through which God regards Godself. Without minds, God would be as God in Godself is – unknown and unknowing oneness of being itself. What I describe in these terms is, of course, the same core meaning described metaphorically in the Biblical words of Genesis.

God, Adonai, is One, but we creatures, or manifestations of God, are many. A more philosophical way of saying this is that we, finite, temporal, relative, and conditional instances of the infinite, absolute, eternal, unconditional, ultimate reality, necessarily regard ourselves, and everything in being (most often including God), as multiple separate realities. That’s just the way our minds are made.

This is because every aspect of being upon which we focus our attention appears to us, necessarily, as a discrete object at the moment we are attending. This is the nature of conscious attention. (I am not sure there is such a thing as unconscious attention – if there were I imagine it would not discern multiplicity in the oneness of being.)

Thus, it is the nature of our consciousness to experience ourselves as unitary subjects in relation with a multiplicity of objects of our attention. This ordinary mode of awareness is what I call personal self-consciousness, or “personal being.” (The altered mode of awareness, in which the person in being realizes the oneness of being, I call “transpersonal consciousness.” This is the center of God-consciousness. It happens in centering prayer and meditation.)

To return to the subject of the Trinitarian Doctrine, then, I see that the church fathers, in their sincere human penchant for diffraction of the one light of God’s truth, gave names or identities (picked and later translated from their Greek Septuagint texts) to the diverse ways in which the reality of God was apprehended.

The ontologically prismatic element here was the Pauline divinization of the Jewish Meshiach (Messiah) - the Christos, or Christ. This vision of Jesus as the Christ, uniquely God incarnate, was developed by the authors of the several gospels, culminating in the extremely exalted “high” Christology of the Gospel According to John. These first-century and early second-century scriptures contained the sources of the singular “Father-Son” conceptualization of God in Christ. (The term “Son of God” existed much earlier in Jewish religious lore, referring to any particularly holy person, not to be confused with God as Godself.)

The figurative Holy Spirit was an ancient Hebrew concept signifying what I understand as the acute awareness of God-consciousness, the transformative “power” of God that “touches” the human spirit and brings about a profound sense of holiness and “repentance” (a “turning” or re-orientation of the mind toward God.) The figure of the Holy Spirit was evoked in the Christian narratives deriving from the Jewish tradition, and, no doubt, from the oral testimonies of the Jewish followers of Jesus, who understood their experiences in those terms.

Thus, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity consisted in a theological synthesis of certain elements of the Greek interpretation of the ancient Hebrew Scriptures, with the newer Greek texts of the early Christian scriptures.

For me then, the concept, “Christ” (signifying both the human person of Jesus Christ and the “Godness” of Christ) is a symbol of the reality of God-consciousness, a mode of awareness and of personal being available to all people, at all times. This state of being is a saving grace in that it “saves” us or “delivers” us from sin, which is a state of alienation from God – the opposite or converse of God-relation. I believe this is what Jesus was calling for when he proclaimed, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” (Of course, the trick of salvation is only temporary, because we are only temporal entities, and thus it needs to be rehearsed frequently, which is what we do in prayer and worship.)

In this understanding, Christ is an eternal dispensation, a gift or grace of God present and available to humanity from time immemorial, consistent with the Christology expressed in the Johannine gospel.

I identify myself religiously as a Unitarian Universalist Christian (or, meaning the same, as Christian, Unitarian Universalist.) I affirm that God is One in All, in Christ.

Unlike me theologically, most members of contemporary Unitarian Universalist congregations are not particularly interested in Christology, and have little use for Christian tradition, or any Biblical tradition for that matter, although most would agree with the humanistic ethics attributed to Jesus. Thus, I am something of a throwback to an earlier form of Unitarianism-Universalism, and accordingly, I believe I belong in today’s United Church of Christ more properly than I do in the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

Word of God?

Yes, my friends, the Bible has great social, cultural, and religious importance. It is an incomparable, paradigmatic artifact of the human spirit. It is best understood religiously as a metaphoric record of the deeds of God and the piety of the people of God. But it is not literally the Word of God. It is a collection of the words of many ancient authors about God, among other things.

The Bible should not always be interpreted literally. In fact, it is most often not to be. It consists of the religious expressions of ancient people who spoke languages now long forgotten, and who were not of our world time, our culture, or our society. It is foolish to believe that their holy scriptures must apply directly to us in our contemporary context.

God gave us minds, and hearts, and consciences in order for us to work things out ethically and theologically for ourselves, not for us to rely, near-sighted, wearing shades and blinders, on literal readings in translation of archaic and unchangeable textual artifacts.

For liturgical purposes, sincere believers may name The Bible, metaphorically, as the Word of God. But God does not actually speak in words. God does not speak at all, actually. God needs people for that, and people have done their job to the best of their abilities. God needs people, reading the signs of their times, to create new symbols, metaphors, parables, psalms, and sermons, informed by the Biblical tradition, but reinterpreted and recontextualized, so as to bring the kerygma of the early Christian Jesus movement, and the good news of God home to our diverse, sectarian, secularized twenty-first century people.

If the Bible, then, is a merely human testament to an ancient era of religious experience, why do I continue to read, study, interpret, quote, and preach it? A one word answer is sufficient – Tradition! Tradition is the way that human societies accumulate, appreciate, and assimilate the wisdom and experience of their forebears. I place high value in the venerable religious traditions, and persistent philosophies of humankind.

Like all persons who have lived before us, we do not apply our human faculties to contemporary realities in isolation from our cultural precursors. We are swimmers in a great and ever-flowing stream of tradition that has largely formed us, to which we belong, and which belongs to us. The Bible’s recollections are the primary sources of our religious traditions.

Along with more than one-third of the world’s people, I stand in the vast and interflowing delta of the broad river of Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Truly indeed we are, historically and culturally, people of the Book. But that is not all we are. We are children of the living God, and, as my confreres in the United Church of Christ love to say, in rich metaphor, God is still speaking.

My Calling

My calling, to use Judaic terms beyond a Judaic context, is toward a prophetic and rabbinic ministry. I am called to pedagogy, to teaching the meanings, interpretations, implications, and applications of religious wisdom and truth, in the manner of a rabbi. I am called to proclaim the glad tidings of God, as Jesus did, and to a saving or healing ministry, as Jesus’ own ministry was, salving the wounds of sin and pointing the way to salvation in the embrace of eternal life.

My vocation is to reinterpret the Hebrew and Christian scriptures for the hermeneutical edification of my Christian and non-Christian contemporaries. I feel I am in an apt position to do this, as a member of a post-Christian religious movement, descended from Jewish and Christian traditions. If we have largely outlived the usefulness of the old modes of meaning making, we have not transcended them. We still live in the world our forebears have made. In our own lives, following in the living tradition we have received, we are making a world of meaning our progeny will inherit.

My vocation is to serve the people of God, that is, all people, and to serve God’s purpose, which is the well-being of all people, because we are all children of God made in God’s image, and God’s will is for justice and mercy.

The glad tidings of God are that you are accepted! You have been beloved of God and accepted into God’s realm since the day you were born, and before then, and nothing you can do or believe, or not do or not believe, will cause God’s love and acceptance of you to be withdrawn.

All that is required of you for salvation is to accept your acceptance. Repentance of sin demands no more of you than this: Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in the presence of God. This is easier said than done, though, because sin abounds. It is as perennial as grass. Sin, as well as hope, springs eternal. Where there is life, there is sin –and hope.

Remission of sin is a process engaged in on the part of the human person who has accepted God’s unconditional acceptance – one who has been redeemed by simple surrender to divine love. This is the ultimate meaning of forgiveness. It is a movement of the human spirit in love toward God, the divinity of being itself that is reflected in the human spirit.

“There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole,
there is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.” (Trad.)

Salvation is never done once and for all. It is the balm of God’s grace given freely and received by faith, and it is the way of life for God’s chosen people, that is, ones who live in faith. All are chosen to be redeemed by God’s grace, but not all will ultimately accept God’s choice.

“I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life – if you and your offspring would live – by loving your God, heeding God’s commands, and holding fast to God.” (Dt 30:19-20)

How shall we learn what God requires of us? By the insights of Holy Scripture and through prayer.

Homily on the Theology of Love

Let those with ears to hear listen:

“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?” asked Anna, firstborn and the more pensive of two sisters, one afternoon while they sat together, talking with their father on the front porch railing, after their preschool day.

“God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” he answered her, quite as thoughtfully. “God is . . . a feeling inside you. God is how you feel when you know you are alive. God is what you feel when you love someone. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you feel God in you.”

Anna sat quietly for half a minute, enjoying her ice cream cone. “I love you, Daddy”, she said.

“I know, sweetie. I love you, too. Listen. Do you remember the day we were at the beach, when you were kneeling in the wet sand, with your back to the waves, and you’d laugh as each wave surprised you, splashing over your shoulders? Maggie was playing by herself, near us on the big rocks, and you and I were there in the surf, and I’d laugh when you laughed, and you looked up at me then and yelled, ‘I’m happy!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”

Now, friends, I can speak to you in more sophisticated terms than one can with a child. To you I can affirm that yes, God is not only not a person and not a thing, God is utterly other – absolutely unlike any object of understanding. Nothing that can be said of anything in being can be said of God, as Godself.

Truths of God, that God is eternal, absolute, infinite, unconditional, are true of no person or thing in being. God is ultimately beyond reason, unreachable to finite human understanding.

And yet, God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is not one and the same as everything in being, but God is real and present in every time and place, with every thing and every person, for God is being itself, ground of being, ultimate reality, first and final cause of being.

Hear, O Israel, Adonai your God is One! You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength, as you are beloved of God. You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. These are the greatest commandments. Love your enemies, and bless those who revile you. This is the Way of Christ.

We hear and we believe we are beloved of God, and God is love.

Though any meaning we may attribute to God is but a metaphor, a symbol, or a sign pointing to the incomprehensible awesome reality of God, one glorious affirmation is indubitably ours to make – God is! Ancient Hebrew Scripture tells that that is how God answered Moses, asking God’s name – “I am!”

Because he knew he was of God, that is the way Jesus answered his accusers – “Before Abraham was, I am!”

As it is said, we are children of God, beings made in God’s image. And by God’s holy grace, the same affirmation is ours to make in every season of our lives, in sorrow and in gladness, with our first breaths and our last, “Yes God – I am! I am of you and I am yours, God. Your will be done, not mine!”

Response to "Nearer, My God, to the G.O.P."

Now, Joe, I’m all for free speech, and I practice the Christian charity I preach, but I do think it would be more seemly of you, as a public intellectual, to know your story before you publish your opinion. (“Nearer, My God, to the G.O.P.” by Joseph Loconte. The New York Times Op-Ed, January 2, 2006.)

You decry “attempts to draw a direct line from the Bible to a political agenda” by House Democrats and progressive religious leaders like Jim Wallis. Perhaps you ought to read The Book first. The Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Jewish Prophet of the New Covenant, Jesus himself, did little else but point toward a political agenda. That’s why they were assassinated by the ruling powers. The Roman prefects in Judea didn’t bother to crucify just anybody. Nailing prophets to the cross was a dramatic kind of political execution reserved for those who seriously threatened the imperial status quo.

Jesus, Jeremiah, Isaiah, et al were no friends of the imperial governments that usurped the just prerogatives of their nation, and oppressed the people of Israel. No more are today’s rising voices of the religious left willing to countenance moral outrages perpetrated by the right-wing cabal in our White House and Congress, and their collaborators, the false prophets of the religious right.

“Linking faith with public policy” is the soul of political discourse in a democratic society. Faith without works is dead. Contrary to your disingenuous statement, this is exactly what American politics does need. The political “misdeeds” of so-called Christian conservatives are not being “replicated” by spiritual progressives – indeed, they are being repudiated. You claim there is no difference between anti-homosexual bigots quoting Leviticus, and Jim Wallis proclaiming the prophetic witness of Jesus on behalf of the poor. Excuse me, but I beg to differ.

You say the ethics of Jesus and the Prophets are “no substitute for a coherent political philosophy.” I think most Americans would differ with you on this. In my opinion, Judeo-Christian ethics are the sine qua non of political justice in Western society. I suppose you’d prefer the moral relativism of Hume, or Machiavelli – or Kissinger or Wolfowitz.

In defense of what you call the “war against Islamic terrorism,” you ridicule the supposed “chorus of left-wing clerics and religious scholars who compare the United States to Imperial Rome and Nazi Germany.” Methinks you protest too much. I cannot help but note that it is you who frame the discourse in those terms – and there would be none of it, after all, if there were not meaningful comparisons to be made.

You mention with disdain an “event for liberal politicians and advocates at the University of California at Berkeley in July,” as though it were somehow linked with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the Democratic Party leadership. I was there, and it was not. It was a convocation of some 1300 religious leaders of many faiths, and some “not religious, but spiritual” community leaders, most of whom are no more sympathetic with the Democratic party than with the G.O.P. – which is to say, not at all.

I was a participant in the Spiritual Activism Conference, organized mostly by energetic members of Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun Community, not by Rev. Jim Wallis, although we welcomed him, among many others, as a featured speaker. Our common concerns are grounded in spirituality and religion, and they are very much political, but certainly not partisan. As Rev. Wallis says, our religion is deeply personal, but it is not private. We must be very public about it. We deplore the hypocrisy and depravity with which the G.O.P. has co-opted Biblical religion in America, and the moral diffidence with which the Democratic Party has, until recently, abandoned it.

Jesus Who?

I tend to go along with Christian tradition in supposing that Jesus of Nazareth was a singular historical person. However, an intellectually honest critical analysis of the pertinent ancient texts calls for admission that there is virtually no direct evidence to support that view. It is entirely possible that the ultimate source of the Jesus traditions was not one singular person, but several, whose teachings and life circumstances may have been concatenated or conflated by re-tellers and later literary compositors, i.e. the Evangelists, the authors of the gospels.

My view, which serves as a framework for understanding and representing the religious-ethical teachings attributed to Jesus, is that the surviving scriptures are ultimately based on oral accounts of the sayings of a remarkable, prophetic Judaic teacher who engaged in a brief but very influential ministry, which was profoundly transformative for most of the people who received his teachings. I do not doubt that Jesus, like multitudes of prophets and religious teachers before and since his time, was divinely inspired, i.e. he was consciously and whole-mindedly in communion with God. His purpose was well described as proclaiming the gospel, or the good tidings, of God.

I have no reason to doubt that Jesus, or an historical personage very like him, was crucified in Jerusalem by Roman occupation authorities in about 30 C.E. It is also plausible that a few of his devotees promulgated a tale that Jesus had gone missing from his crypt on the third day following his death. What actually happened is unknown, but this story, and the fictive denouement of Jesus' bodily resurrection that was added to the first gospel narrative, have had incalculable consequences, affecting the history of religion more than any other dogma has ever done.

Whoever the original instigator of the first-century Jesus movement might have been (if but one), I believe he was no more God incarnate than any human being potentially is. Moreover, he was not Christian. He was, apparently, a Judaic Messianist. For all we know, 'he' may well have actually been 'they' - several 'Jesuses' as it were.

Early Christianity as we know it seems to have been invented almost single-handedly by the apostate, repentant Pharisaic letter-writer Saul of Tarsus, who was called Paul in Greek. The emergent Christian religious tradition was elaborated, following Paul, by a number of evangelistic authors working with textual sources based on oral transmission - and a few scraps of written "sayings" of Jesus. Nothing resembling an established, organized church developed in these traditions until some time in the second century, in circumstances far removed from the original Jerusalem assembly of “The Way,” observant Jews who heralded the coming of the Lord, that is, the advent of the Jewish Messiah, the Son of Man who they believed would inaugurate the reign of God in Israel.

The Greek translation of the Aramaic term, “Meshiach” - Messiah - was "Christos," i.e., Christ. The theological meaning I make of the term, “Christ” is that it signifies that condition of the soul in which the human person is in conscious communion with God. Another way I have put this is “the consciousness of personal being in relationship with being itself.” To be “in Christ” is to be awakened to the reality of one’s sacred identity with God, as Jesus is said to have been. Thus, as I would interpret the evangelistic narrative, upon baptism by John, Jesus became consciously Jesus Christ, Son of God, standing for the potential of sanctification inherent in every person.

I understand the term, “grace” as signifying that spiritually transforming self-realization in which one recognizes the identity of one’s personal being with the ultimate reality of being itself. Grace is the gift of God-consciousness, and it brings about the state of being in Christ. The gift of grace is received through faith, which is precisely that orientation of the whole person prescribed in the Biblical commandment to “love God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind.”

The Parable of True Wealth

A certain wealthy young man owned a mill, which was the most important source of income for the people of his village. This he had inherited from his father, who had taken over the business from his own father, and so on, for several generations. The wealthy man inhabited his estate for all the years of his life, and throughout the years, as he walked proudly through his village, which eventually became a town, and then a small city, he often passed by a man in ragged clothes, the same man year in and year out, who meekly begged for alms each time they met.

The wealthy man was disdainful of the poor, thinking them lazy and idle. He was chiefly concerned with increasing his profit and his property. Yet he was a church-going Christian, and he was not mean or cruel. He remembered the parson quoting Deuteronomy, saying, “There will always be poor people in the land. Give freely to those who are poor and needy in your land. Open your hands to them.” So whenever he could not pass by unnoticed, he would give the poor man a few coins from his purse. Thus it went for many years.

The wealthy man strove industriously all his life, and multiplied his inheritance. Many sought to gain at his expense. People flattered, and wheedled, and cheated, and sued for his advantages. But the beggar just humbly thanked him for his little gifts and blessed him contentedly. The wealthy man and the beggar both grew old, keeping their different ways and means. The wealthy man at last became ill and weary, and was sorely burdened with his worldly concerns. One evening when again they encountered each other in the street, while handing him a coin, he asked the beggar in exasperation, “How can you have endured so long in your wretched alley, yet you seem so thankful and at peace?” The beggar bowed gratefully, and replied, “My friend, true wealth is knowing what is enough.” And so it was.

The Parable of the Seekers

Once upon a time, in a strange and faraway place, there lived a species of people who were small, but their numbers were very great, and they populated a land that, to them at least, was vast. Their species was ancient, having occupied the land for uncounted generations. The clans, and communities, and countries of them were numerous, and there were many different languages and traditions among them. They had no writing though, because their fingers were short, and so were their legs, so they rarely ventured very far from their birthplaces.

The landscape where these people lived was ridged and wrinkled, full of hills and dales, and rills and rivulets, and in the middle of it was an enormous rise of peaks, that they called the Mountain of God. Most of the people never knew what lay beyond their own particular crease in the earth, for their lives were as short as their limbs, and they had to work hard every day for a living. They all could see the towering tops of the Mountain of God though, from the higher vantage places, on certain days and moonlit nights, when fog and clouds didn’t hide them.

These people had just one food, which they prepared in many different ways, for variety. This was a sweet, aromatic, seed-like, whitish substance that appeared overnight as if materializing out of thin air, like hoarfrost. It was called “manna.” Some said it resembled a gummy resin exuded by certain trees, and some said it was like a grainy residue left on leaves by aphid-like insects. Legend had it that once, in a wilderness encampment, a great flock of quails had arrived, and then the people had feasted on roast squab, but as long as anyone living remembered, their food was just manna, manna, and manna, nothing but manna.

The people gathered their manna every morning and ate it up that day, because it would not keep overnight. It would spoil and be found crawling with maggots by next morning - except, oddly, on the sixth night. Every seventh day, no manna would be found, but the leftovers from the day before would still, inexplicably, be edible. So on that day, which was called “Shabbat,” no one had to labor gathering food. Everyone said the manna was a gift from God for God’s beloved people.

Another strange fact about this land was that the force of gravity was not the same everywhere. Everything weighed less at higher elevations, and weighed more at lower elevations. For this reason, though it was difficult for people to climb very far uphill on their short little legs and tiny feet, their work was easier, and they felt lighter and more restful, when they had made the effort to reach higher ground. Naturally, hilltop real estate was the most valuable. The big problem, though, for most people, was that the food always collected in the low hollows, and thus only the very rich could afford to pay servants to carry it up the hillsides to them. Consequently, no one lived permanently on the highest ridges, though people sometimes came there on day-trips, and felt their yokes most joyously lightened.

Now, most of these people didn’t think about God very much. They all believed that God could, in principle, be found way up on the tops of the Mountain of God, but almost no one claimed to have ever seen God. They would get together in small or large groups, on Shabbat, to praise and thank God for not having to work that day, and they cherished and enjoyed that tradition, but few were really very concerned about God, as Godself.

There were always a few, though, who were ultimately concerned with God. They loved God with all their hearts, and all their souls, and all their minds, and all their might. They were called “Seekers.” They sought to approach nearer to God by journeying arduously, step by tiny step, over the land, up hill and down, toward the Mountain of God. As they reached the ridge tops, they felt weightless and light-hearted, and they knew in which direction to travel because they could see the peaks of the Mountain of God gleaming beautifully in the light of the sun and the moon, when the air was clear. They were often hungry on their pilgrimages, since their manna did not last overnight during their crossings of the high country, where they could find none. On Shabbat days, the Seekers rested and worshipped God with the people gathered in little brown churches in the dells, who shared their manna with them.

For as long as anyone knew, Seekers had told the gathered people about their visions of the Mountain of God, about their hopeful journeys, their enlightenment in the high places, how they expected one day to see God, and to be in God’s presence. From time immemorial, multitudes of Seekers had come from every direction in the land, and many had reached the Mountain of God. Not only had they done that, but also many had returned to tell of it. They told of many paths worn and cleared by halting, little steps up the mountain, and of age-old signs and monuments left by those who had gone before, showing Seekers the way up, higher and higher.

Some paths ended in sheer stone outcrops, or had been blocked by rockslides. Those ways were hidden with overgrowth, or covered with rubble. But other paths, though steep and impossible to discern from below, had been kept open and free from stumbling blocks. Seekers knew, they said, that some pathways could still be ascended all the way up. Of these, there were known to be quite a few, approaching the peaks of the Mountain of God from every side.

To reach the summits took Seekers many years, even lifetimes. It required of them prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. The climbing was easy, even though their short-limbed locomotion was very slow, because they were light as lizards at that high altitude. But how did the Seekers survive on the rocky mountaintops without fresh manna? God provided them with freeze-dried, extended-release, high-protein, carbohydrate-balanced manna substitute with organic preservatives, because God wanted to see the amazement on their sun-burnt faces when they finally arrived. God had a liberating truth to reveal to them, which came in a blinding flash of the obvious - this, of course, you already know.

The Seekers who had made their way to the top, and returned with the good news of God, advised others to do this: Find a well-worn path with well-kept signs; study the signs and understand them, set out on the path you’ve chosen, paying close attention to the ground ahead, and stay on that path. That will be your Way. Do not turn aside from it, looking for a better route. There are many ways to reach the heights, they said, but scrambling across the mountainside, scrabbling and sliding on this path, then that, from one blind curve to another, without learning the meanings of the signs, is definitely not the way.

But did the neophyte Seekers heed the advice their venerable mentors so generously gave them? Actually, most of them did, because they had never seen pulp fiction or television shows, and their undergraduate professors were Dominicans and Jesuits. And what of the unfortunate, sophomoric, heedless ones in a hurry, who couldn’t tell a blunderbuss from a bowling pin? Some of them eventually wandered back down into the valleys, all knot-headed, shin-scraped, and bruised, saying that, as far as they were concerned, there was no God up there after all.

So, ages came and ages passed, and most of the people never did see God’s face. God never spoke, and they couldn’t have read God’s handwriting anyway, but they mostly believed in God nonetheless, and they kept getting their daily manna. Wise and weary Seekers kept coming back from the Mountain of God, radiating God’s glory, and people fed them and listened to their stories, but most people really were content just to scrape up breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and admire the daffodils blooming in the meadows.

God, being just and merciful, and having other worlds to create, continued to love them as long as their short little lives lasted, because they were God’s people, with all their short little fingers and short little legs, and God had promised to deliver them from evil into the land. And so it was, because even though God is invisible and speechless, and no one can decipher God’s handwiting, God is nothing if not one who keeps promises.

Where is God?

God is not located somewhere up there, or out there; not beyond us, nor beside us. We may say that God is omnipresent, everywhere; and God is transcendent, entirely other; and God is immanent, acting in Creation. Or, maybe not.

The most salient truth is that God is to be found within us, at our hearts’ level. If we feel God’s presence, we feel it within. We may imagine God as a being present with us, but the divine presence is truly to be found within, where felt reality resides. If we feel God with us in corporate worship or prayer, it is truly God’s presence in other persons who are here beside us.

This is what early Christians meant when they referred to the church as the body of Christ. When the ancient people of the Jerusalem temple gathered around the Holy of Holies to be in God’s presence, it was God’s presence within them, and within each other, that they really felt. The ark was actually empty, just as the communion cup is really empty until we fill it with meaning, and the host is only a morsel of complex carbohydrates until we take it into our being where God truly is.

I think the prophets and priests of ancient Judah and Israel understood this, as they elaborated the uses of religious symbols and signs to represent the ineffable reality of God’s presence in the very being of the human person. Jesus certainly knew it, as his words pointed toward God within, although his disciples and some of their followers may have missed the point.

I believe the early proto-orthodox theologians of the Christian church understood that their Trinitarian formulations were symbolic representations of the inward reality of God. Thus, the prismatic diffraction of God into distinctive “persons” (which were originally conceived of as “substances”) were not to be taken by cognoscenti as objective descriptions of reality. They were systematic analogs of subjective religious experience, based in the received mythology of the resurrected Christ. I think the construction of the Christian mythology was conscious and intentional on the part of the apostles, the epistolary authors, and the evangelists of the synoptic gospels.

Each of us is a particular concrete manifestation of ultimate reality, and by the mysterious providence of God, we have been given the miraculous gift of apprehension of the divine presence of which we are images; and more than images, we are avatars. We are the creaturely lenses through which God recognizes Godself in Creation, and the mirrors in which God’s image is reflected.

God Is What Love Is

“God” is a word; it is a name for something - not the thing itself. As such, it is a sign, a signifier, and “an outward indication of the existence or presence of something not immediately evident.” Ordinarily, words refer to phenomena, that is, immediately perceived realities, as distinguished from noumena, or realities which are perceived by mediation but cannot be directly known or apprehended. “God,” “Allah,” “Yahweh,” “Jehovah,” and all holy names like these, are signs that point toward, or refer to, the limitless noumenon that underlies all phenomena, that is, “being itself.”

Love is the orientation of the soul that arises in the conscious relation of personal being with being itself. This (“the conscious relation of personal being with being itself”) is also how I have described “the presence of God.” Ergo, God is love, as the Johannine scriptures tell us. Now I affirm this as true myself, not because John said so, but because I have discovered it to be true according to my own experience and reflection. This sheds light as well on Paul’s scripture saying, “Faith, hope, love; these three abide.” In other words, faith and hope, too, are orientations of the soul inherent in this conscious relation. But, as the Apostle avers, “love is the greatest of these.” Without love, hope is faint and futile; without love, faith is brittle and desiccated.

It is notable that in these terms, “God” is a relation, not a thing. I used to speak of God as “being itself,” that is, the ultimate reality “behind” or “beneath” all things, until I realized that I have also come to understand that the human personal consciousness of God is necessary for the “presence” of God. As I once wrote, “If there were no minds to know God, there would be no God to be known.” Just as the human being - or “personal being” - is an aspect of the ultimate reality I describe as “being itself,” personal God-consciousness can be regarded as the “consciousness of being itself,” something I’ve also said repeatedly. Here, then, is the truth of the religious affirmation that humanity is created by the love of God, and in “God’s image.”

I refer here, as I have again and again through the years, to my first articulation of this, which I wrote twelve or thirteen years ago, when my daughters Anna and Maggie were very young:

“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?”, asked Anna, my firstborn and the more pensive of my two little girls, one afternoon while we sat together on the front porch railing after their preschool day.

“God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” I answered her, quite as thoughtfully. “God is . . . a feeling inside you. God is how you feel when you know you are alive. God is what you feel when you love someone. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you feel God in you.”

Anna sat quietly for half a minute, enjoying her ice cream cone. “I love you, Daddy”, she said.

“I know, sweetie. I love you, too. Listen. Do you remember the day we were at the beach, when you were kneeling in the wet sand, with your back to the waves, and you’d laugh as each wave surprised you, splashing over your shoulders? Maggie was playing by herself, near us on the big rocks, and you and I were there in the surf, and I’d laugh when you laughed, and you looked up at me then and yelled, ‘I’m haaaap-py!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”

Being itself recognizes itself in the aspect of personal being. As this relationship becomes conscious, love arises, the subjectivity of which is called “divine love.” It is all together the love of God for the world and humanity, the human person’s responsive love of God, and love of neighbor. Thus we recognize the “subjective self” in each other, each and every one a being created in the image of God. And thus, God is love, and is located in the conscious relation of God with God’s human image.

And for animal lovers, to the extent that other sentient beings are in conscious relationship with God, love is there too. What about atheists? Well, in my view, they’re no exception. They just don’t like to use the term, “God.”

And what about agnostics? Their difficulty is in the mistake of worrying about the existence of God. God does not exist – God is existence itself, the ground of being, or being itself. To use some fancy verbal footwork, theirs is the perplexity of existents questioning the reality of existence itself, in which they consist.

This is, pretty much, the setup for St. Anselm’s “ontological argument” for the existence of God. The agnostic knows explicitly that he or she exists, and implicitly that all things in existence also exist, but doesn’t know that God is not to be understood to exist in the same way, as an existent, but rather as existence itself in relation with its human aspects which consist in it, and by grace and providence become conscious of their relation with it. As soon as a relational description of God is accepted by them, all their worries will fall away, like scales from their eyes.

What is God? God is not a what. God is not an existing being. God is not an object; God is the ultimate subject. God is being itself. God is. Who is God? God only knows. If God is anyone, God is I and Thou; God is the ultimate subject in the subject-subject relation.

To impute attributes of beings to God, as God, is to speak of God as if God were in being, among other beings. You and I and the lamp post are beings. Attributes, or Names of God, are metaphoric when speaking of God as God: God is good; God is just; God is merciful. Or else they are hyperbolic: God is great; God is all-knowing; God is all-powerful. Any words that can be said of God as God can be said of no thing in being: God is infinite; God is eternal; God is unconditional; God is absolute.

God the Creator and God’s Creation are completely interpenetrated. All Creation is in being; God is being itself. Wherever you are, there you jolly well are, aren’t you? And there God is, too; God always was, is now, and ever shall be, forever and ever, Amen. God’s presence is in us and among us here and now; ours is the consciousness of being itself. In our awareness of being, being itself experiences being itself. With each new generation, God’s faith in humanity is renewed; in each regeneration, humanity’s response of faith is renewed.

Through our consciousness, God apprehends Creation, and we, the fully self-conscious parts of Creation, apprehend God the Creator. This state of God-consciousness is what is called “sanctification” or “redemption.” It is a state of reconciliation with God; it is what is meant by being “in Christ.” When we then act out our lives in congruence with the ethics of Christ, we are “saved.” Salvation means we are saved from the effects of our potentialities for doing evil.

What is Satan? Satan is said to be the anti-Christ; as such, it is the antithesis of the human potentiality for redemption. If the Christ is the human capacity for reconciliation with God, the Satan is its converse. Neither the Christ nor the Satan is a supernatural person, or divine being, or real entities of any sort. Their names are symbols of the universal human potentials for salvation and damnation, ultimate good and ultimate evil. In Hebrew, the words ha Satan ("the Satan") appear in the Book of Job. These are usually translated as “the Adversary,” understood allegorically to signify the “shadow” side of the human personality.

Between the Adversary and the moral righteousness of the "blameless and upright" human being, a constant dialectic was thought to be acted out in people’s daily lives. The effect of the embodied and unconstrained Satan is to tempt or traduce the human soul to sin, which denies the Christ potential and alienates the person from God’s grace. Deeply infected with sin, people do evil, causing various kinds of harm and damage to others, usually intentionally.

Remember well that the Christ and the Satan are symbols standing for human mental, ideational, and intentional configurations, or “states of mind,” that can become more or less permanently internalized, and consequently affect a person’s conscience, character formation, moral and ethical faculties, and the entire array of human personality factors, for good or ill.

To be “in Christ” is the converse of being “in sin.” In Christ (remember, this is a sanctified state of the psyche, a holy condition of the soul, not a mystical divine being), the “saved” or “redeemed” person is incapable of sin, that is, of doing willful harm to self or others, or to God’s Creation. The sanctified one is relieved of sinfulness by virtue of a capacity for self “disciple-ing” in which one walks in the way of the internalized Christ. The sanctified one “fears God,” that is, conscientiously avoids doing harm to God’s Creation.

To be in sin, in thrall to the Satan, means that the potential of being reconciled with God, of being “in Christ,” is denied or preempted. The human will to do evil, to not refrain from doing harm, is unleashed. In this state, the human person is free to act out diffidence or malice, and to carry out damage, destruction, aggression, and oppression by whatever means will suit his sinful ends or sinful attributes – Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, and Lust, among them.

Who is Jesus? “Is” is the wrong tense. Jesus was an itinerant, indigent Jewish teacher and religious reformer, a Rabbi and a rabble-rouser, a prophet of profound religious and social transformation. He was brutally murdered by crucifixion at the orders of the Roman Provincial Authority, as an enemy of the state. He was not, by any means, the only person to have suffered this fate, for the same reasons.

Jesus was not a Christian. He was, however, “in Christ,” awakened, enlightened, exalted, and sanctified. He was truly a saint. He was also not, by any means, the only saint to have been sanctified “in Christ.” There have been multitudes, before and since Jesus, even now there are. Some of them are Christians; many are not. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, for instance, was “in Christ.” Maybe Augustine of Hippo was, maybe Muhammad of Medina, John Wesley, George Fox, Mahatma Gandhi, and John Freeman, to name but a few.

How does Jesus redeem us from our sins? He doesn’t. He died two thousand years ago. “In Christ,” one day at a time, we are redeemed and sanctified by reconciliation with God through our own human conscientious faculties. We are to promote salvation, by proclaiming this gospel and acting out in beneficence toward others, “in Christ,” until we die and are eventually taken up, body, mind, and soul, into the earthly biosphere from whence we came.

Except in Biblical mythology, no one has ever seen or heard God, and no one ever will. This is because the "Supreme Being" is not a being, as human beings are, as every object of human intentionality or relationality is. We are persons; God is not a person. Yet God the Creator and God’s Creation are completely interpenetrated. All Creation is in being; God is being itself. God cannot be known objectively, because God is not an object. The human person can only know God subjectively, as we know our own experience and ourselves.

All I can say about God, qua God, is that God is. God’s essence is to be; in God alone, essence and existence are one. Of this, I can have the same perfect certainty as that I am. Objectively considered, my personal being is contingent, finite, temporal. I was once not in being, and the time will come when I am no longer, subjectively incomprehensible though that is. God’s being is absolute, infinite, eternal, and necessary to my being. That I am is indubitable, if not necessary.

The miracle that I am a conditional being, who can apprehend the ultimate, unconditional reality of being itself, is the gift and grace of God. In this transcendent apprehension, it may be said truly that I manifest the consciousness of being itself. What people call the presence of God is the self-conscious relation of personal being with being itself; and vice-versa, if you prefer - the relation of being itself with conscious, personal being. One key to this understanding is relatedness, but not just in the usual interpersonal sense. God is self-relatedness; God is relatedness itself. In God-consciousness, the dichotomy of subject and object is both necessary and it is self-transcendent.

The American Buddhist teacher Adyashanti says, “Because of an innocent misunderstanding, you think that you are a human being in the relative world seeking the experience of Oneness, but actually you are the One expressing itself as the experience of being a human being.”

As Alan Watts put it, “Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” (I have put it this way: “We are being itself experiencing itself being experienced.” Experienced by whom? By itself, of course.) Watts explained further, “God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that’s the whole fun of it – just what he wanted to do.”

In the ancient Hebrew myth, God’s presence is revealed to Moses, appearing symbolically, in a burning bush that is nevertheless not consumed. It is significant that this realization is made by a human being. It could not be otherwise. It is said we are made in God’s image, because it is in human reflection that God the Creator recognizes himself, or herself, and remembers that the Creation was no accident, after all.

Sometimes this realization occurs to us when we recognize ourselves in other beings, other people. It is in shared awe and in praise of this incomprehensible reality that we worship together. If you would see the face of God, look in the faces of women, men, and children. If you would see the hands with which God works in the world, the feet with which God walks in the world, look at your own hands and feet. If you would hear the voice of God, listen to your own silent voice in prayerful reflection.

As Jesus taught, all the Torah and the Prophets are summed up in this single greatest commandment, “you shall love the LORD your God with all your soul, and all your heart, and all your mind,” because God is ever present within us and among us. Jesus taught another commandment like it, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” because every person – the inner conscience in every person – reflects the image of God, whether we recognize it or not.

This is the good news. The presence of God is reflected, brightly or dimly, in six billion human souls’ mirrors, everywhere in the world. These are God’s images. These are our neighbors. Jesus’ ministry called us to love them, and ourselves, for our brightness and our dimness as well.