Being about our Creator's business 


Did Paul get it right, or can we stand on his shoulders and see farther?  

Last night Stephen and I stayed in a Holiday Inn in Richmond, Indiana on our way to Marietta, Ohio to visit my 92-year-old mom. Both of us had strange dreams, but mine led to a spiritual insight of sorts.

As background, I have been reading Paul’s Letter to the Romans as an assignment for the Educational for Ministry class that I am taking. I have always been skeptical of Paul, because of the use of some of the passages in his writings by conservative Christians to condemn homosexuality. Now that I have been studying Paul more carefully and have begun to understand the context in which he was writing, I can see more clearly the important mission that Paul had. Paul wanted the world to understand that the faithfulness of God was not only given to the Jews but likewise to the Gentiles. In one of the epistles he tells us that he took it as his mission to spread the word to the Gentiles while talking Peter and others into evangelizing to the Jews.

Paul was a Jewish Pharisee, persecuting Christians in the Roman Empire. Paul, as Saul, on the road to Damascus, was struck by a vision of Christ asking him, “Why are you persecuting me?” This led to a complete conversion of Paul to Christianity; in fact, he claimed that his apostleship was bestowed upon him directly by Christ. In Romans 5, Paul explains that Adam sinned and because of this all men became sinners, but Jesus Christ, who did God’s will even unto death, redeemed humanity. Although he doesn’t quite say it this way, the idea is that in His perfect conformity of His will to God’s will, Jesus Christ became the Way for us to escape the imperfections of our own nature.
Paul ministered to many early Christian communities, and he expected the members of these communities to stand with him in the faith that Jesus Christ would return soon and bring with Him the physical resurrection of the dead as well as a New Creation.

Now what I have taken from this new and deeper understanding of Paul is not belief in the literal return of Christ and the literal resurrection of the dead. Rather, I now stand in solidarity with Paul’s unifying message, but I want to go beyond it. Paul wanted it known that Yahweh’s message of salvation was for all, Gentile and Jew alike. I want it known that the sincere spiritual striving of all human beings is to be honored and respected by each human being, even as it creates a Temple to God.

I propose that most human beings are God-seeking in the following sense. Human beings at some point recognize that they were created and that they alone didn’t create themselves. They wonder about this Creator, and they seek to experience their Creator more intimately. They do this because they seek to live indefinitely long, and they think that by understanding their Creator better, they will be able to assure their continued existence. In short, all human beings are theologians at some level of that term. There are, of course, ways that people get off this path or get side-tracked, and there are exceptions, but this is a basic human tendency.

Paul has the Damascus conversion story to tell us. And, once Paul made this personal connection with God, he began to assume the truth of the Jewish-Christian stories about the miraculous death of Jesus Christ. I myself, as my mother before me, have a conversion story to tell. It may be that many persons of faith, and I include all believers, not just Christians and Jews, will have their conversion stories, or their stories of faith to tell. It is this that I honor and respect about human beings. God speaks to us through the stories of faith of all people. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the more stories of faith we can listen to with respect, the closer we may get to God.

I firmly believe that we are all connected. I cannot prove this, but I can tell stories that may make it plausible to some of you. I accept the theory that human consciousness is a certain type of holographic phenomenon in which billions of particles in the brain synchronize to some degree. The quantum connectedness of the subatomic world is thus carried into experience by the concepts we bring to the world. It is through our human consciousness that we are all connected. And hence, I believe, we are connected (at least potentially) to God-consciousness.

I grant you that this brief sketch is in no way proof, and that perhaps there is no scientific proof possible for these beliefs. However, I am satisfied that this is an evolution one step beyond Pauline Christianity. In Pauline Christianity, one still has to confess Jesus Christ as the Divine Redeemer to enter into eternal life. Just as Paul did not want to exclude the Gentiles from the promise of God, so do I not want to exclude amateur and professional but non-Christian theologians from the promise that their unique consciousness of their relationship to their Creation has made to them. I want to be completely inclusive. I even want to include the sincere atheist and agnostic and stay in dialog with them.

And, in doing this, I give up any certain claim to resurrection in Jesus Christ. It wasn’t unreasonable for Paul, given his mystical experiences, to believe and teach this. And it isn’t unreasonable for me, given my mystical experiences, to construct a different pathway to God. I “saw” the hand of God come through the roof of a church and hold me, bringing me weeks of complete peace. I was clear that it was God, but after years of reflection, I was not so clear that it was or was not Jesus Christ. I never figured it out, and figured that if God wanted me to know for sure, I would get further information. Perhaps my attraction to and current membership in the Episcopal Church is a step towards an answer for me, perhaps not.

Paul’s view may be restricted in a similar way to the one he was trying to reeducate after all. He is at pains to explain that if the Jews are following the Torah just because it is the Torah, then that is the wrong reason. What the Jews need to be doing, Paul thinks, is following the Torah because they love God for being faithful to their disloyal selves. Christ certainly thought that certain Jews needed to be reminded that love of God and neighbor were higher criteria than to live blindly by the scripted law. But my point is that Paul still wants everyone to honor only one approach, namely the one he figured out. And since Paul was human, it is impossible that he can have figured it out exactly right. Somewhere and some time, someone will get closer to God. But Paul will have excluded that person.

Now, I do not give up my hope of eternal life. I simply do not know if or how that will happen. Perhaps, after all, some or even most Christians have over-literalized the events that took place so many millennia ago. I do not deny that these early Christians and even earlier Jews were experiencing Divinity and Holy Creativity. I merely mean to say that their minds and their communities were using the best stories that they knew at the time how to tell to give shape to their sense of the infinite and its relationship to them.

I think today what we need to do is once again to be about our Creator’s business. We need to be Creating Heaven here on Earth, but the streets needn’t be flowing with milk and honey. Heaven on Earth will never happen as long as we are excluding others who have valid points of view. Anytime humans literalize or reify the prevailing theological concepts of an age, this exclusion is going to happen. Instead, we need to be rejoicing in the fact that we do indeed have the potential to become loving and spiritual beings.

I am certain that there are many out there who will tell me that I have no claim to be a Christian. But what if I have been a Christian Chrysalis? What if that is what all organized religions do: give form for the spirit to break its bounds? What if Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism are equally valid outward forms for forming the spiritually realized soul? What if acknowledging this unity in diversity were the final step that was necessary to bring the full glory of God’s love into the world?

Although I have not studied all of them carefully, I do know that there are contemporary religious traditions who honor all sincere paths, such as the Bahai faith, and other traditions that attempt to integrate different approaches to God, such as the Self-Realization Fellowship, that brings together the teachings of both Krishna and Christ. The Sahaja Yogas, headed by Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi have analyzed the major religious traditions and now teach that realization does not require striving so much as recognition. Also, the spirit of ecumenism has long been working in the Christian tradition.  

Posted: Tue - November 1, 2005 at 11:26 AM          

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