Got a Fix on God? Fuhgeddaboudit
Someone once asked me, “Do you have a guru?” I answered by referring to the book title, “If You See the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him?”
So, no, I don’t have a master to whom I give my unwavering devotion because,
In This Life, We Swim in a Thimble
Recently, I had a heated discussion with a friend who had spent years at the feet of a spiritual master in India. She proclaimed that he was the only one who taught us how to tame the ego and find the way to enlightenment.
That rattled my cage.
I overreacted and told her, “You are no better than a fundamentalist who thinks you have a corner on the market of spirituality.”
Please wait until we hit the pearly gates, where we will more fully grasp the ultimate things. After all, did not St. Paul say
Now, we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything perfectly.
Dirty windows block the view.
Someone once said that politics is like window cleaning; the dirt is always on the other side.
When we attempt to define God with our minds, instead of leading to greater clarity, we end up with cognitive rigidity or textbook belief that often results in an immature and hateful religion.
When I expressed my reservations about figuring out God with our minds, one evangelical theologian lost his gourd. He wanted me to
Intellectually affirm the historic doctrines of Christian orthodoxy while embracing the guidelines of the historic Christian creeds.
But take a moment at the genesis of church statements like the Nicene Creed: “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible, etc..”
These so-called statements of faith were riddled with political agendas.
After the Roman Emperor Constantine had his supposed “come to Jesus moment”, in 325AD he called together the male bishops aligned with his political agenda to formulate a unifying statement of faith.
His goal was not just to give a head-oriented clarity to the fathers’ faith (what about the mothers?)
Instead, it was to solidify his political power base.
Does that not sound familiar to the Christian Nationalism in our country today? Appeal to a pro-life belief, patriarchal view of marriage, and binary views of who’s saved and who is not,
And bingo
An election is in the bag.
Constantine also excluded a vocal minority voice in the church that begged to differ from the beliefs of the Orthodox bishops.
The next step was an authoritarian police state when the Roman army became Christian and started killing the pagans in the name of Christ.
However, I have a bigger beef with a literal intellectual attempt to grasp the nature of the Eternal One.
Your God is Too Small
When will we have the humility to realize that there are more questions about Divinity than answers?
That was my point to my guru-infatuated friend, who had all the answers about Divinity and our place in the world.
Does she not realize that most direct experience with the divine cannot be put into words?
Yes, Moses met God at the paradoxical bush that “burns without being consumed.” When he asked the apparition for its name, he only got a vague “I am who I am” that indicated that he had met the ground of all being or the stream of eternal consciousness.
So the message I take home is “better zip your lips than shrink God to a person or entity.”
Better still, enjoy the show and allow yourself some awe or wonder.
Going Batshit speaks Volumes about us.
We have a problem when we try to make our fix on God the norm for everyone else.
And our perception grows to monstrous proportions when we react in anger with those who don’t agree with our ego-generated ‘wisdom’.
Or we shrivel up inside and become like,
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same
We declare how afraid we are of differences.
My sense is that the drive for conformity comes from a fear of the other, the illusion that we can control everything from our offspring to one another’s beliefs, and our grievances from the past where we may have been excluded from the mainstream of society.
Going Batshit about differences is the projection suggested by Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
It may be time to see that we have more in common with others than we can even begin to fathom.
An Accidental Teacher at a Saharan Oasis
Years ago, my wife and I traveled to an oasis on the edge of the Sahara desert in Morocco. At afternoon tea, we noticed a young Muslim man sitting alone in the corner.
We caught his eye and invited him over to join us. It was our luck that he spoke fluent English.
When we asked him about his life and culture, we soon became aware that, like us, spiritually, he was a seeker.
We shared so much common ground.
Amidst our swirl of dogma, our knives of doubt started to cut, one strand at a time, through a thick rope of tribal intellectual certitude.
He, too, longed for direct experience with the Divine that he did not find only in his Holy Book, the Koran.
He also experienced awe and wonder amidst the beauty in nature.
This and other experiences with pilgrims along the way instructed us that at the end of the day.
We need to
