Today’s Post

Last week we moved from a working secular definition of God to seeing how this God is manifest in the roots of our personal development, and how these roots are extensions of the upwelling of complexity that underpin cosmic evolution.  This week we will move on to explore how the concept of a ‘personal relationship with God’ emerges naturally from these insights.

Looking For God

Thus far, we have come to a ‘secular’ concept of God without recourse to scripture, dogma or miracles.  While this may well be consistent with Professor Dawkins’ recognition that such a non-supernatural force is indeed at work in the ”raising of the world as we know it into its present complex existence”, it does not address having a personal relationship with such a force.

We can start with Teilhard’s assertion that

  “It is through that which is most incommunicably personal in us that we make contact with the universal.“

If Teilhard’s assertion is true, it seems clear that the very act of being a person is the starting point for experiencing such a God.  If the God that we have defined is the essential center of our existence, and this essential center lies along the axis of the unfolding of the universe, it would seem that finding such a transcendent source of ourselves would be very straightforward.  The myriad and oft confusing and contradictory methods offered by the many world religions are evidence that this isn’t necessarily the case.

A case in point can be seen in the many aspects of ‘dualism’ which can be found in our own Western expressions of Christianity.  This was addressed in the post of Nov 26, The Evolution of Religion, Part 7: The Rise of Christianity: The Issue of Concepts:

“Much more so than Judaism, Jonathan Sacks asserts, Christianity divides: body/soul, physical/spiritual, heaven/earth, this life/next life, evil/good, with the emphasis on the second of each.  He sees the entire set of contrasts as massively Greek, with much debt to Plato.  He sees these either/or dichotomies as a departure from the typically Jewish perspective of either/and.”

As Sacks points out, this duality tends to move God from the intimacy found in Judaism (and in the teachings of Jesus) to a distance that can only be overcome through the bewildering matrix of rituals of atonement, forgiveness and salvation which have characterized expressions of Christianity.  This point of view, captured in Blondel’s fear that we should regard our relationship with God as ‘we are here and God is there’, sabotages our search for God at the very outset.

Not that Christianity only expresses such distance.  If one takes John at his word, “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”, Blondel’s statement that “It is impossible to say, “I am here and God is there”” makes much more sense.  It acknowledges that the act of God’s creative energy in me is necessary for me to make such a statement.

Blondel, Teilhard, Sacks and the contemporary theologian Richard Rohr all decry how this message of John, a logical conclusion from the teachings of Jesus, is frequently lost in the subsequent evolution of the Greek-influenced Church.  Thomas Jefferson, an early practitioner of Dawkins’ goal of “stripping the baggage” from traditional Christianity, sought to extract the essential morality of Jesus from the webs of duality which grew as Christianity was increasingly influenced by Greek philosophy.

This duality undermines the search for God within.  If we start with the assumption that “We are here and God is there”, the search is hobbled at the start.

All such searches begin with the facades and scaffolding that we inherit from our beginnings, which become frameworks which make it safe for us to act in a world so full of unknown and potentially dangerous consequences of those actions.  They keep us safe in a dangerous world, but like all walls, keep us enclosed at the same time.   To discover our inner reality requires negotiation and selective discarding of these artifacts.

This requires an open mind, and as is universally acknowledged, a mind is a difficult thing to open.

This is not a new problem.  The subject of searching for our inner core has been the subject of religious thought for many centuries.  While the approaches developed by the many religious expressions might be bewildering and often contradictory, there are nonetheless many common aspects.

The Next Post

This week we began to address the search for God as an active agent of our personal life with which we could have a personal relationship.  Next week we will continue this exploration by addressing the universal belief, expressed in nearly all religions, that there is within each of us this extension of the force by which the universe comes to be.