Friday, August 30, 2013

Over and Under and Through


Preface:  It’s time to build a bridge

Can the worldviews of the religious and the secular be reconciled in Western thought?  Can we loosen the knots of our language and ideologies enough to share greater collective meaning, but not so much that we lose the meanings we already have?  Indeed, in our global world today can we really afford NOT to?  Can we underestimate the need for the world of science to understand faith?  At the same time can we dismiss the need for theology to fully reckon with the fabric and patterns of the natural world?

Is such a unity even possible?  I, for one, believe this is a bridge we can build in our time.  Indeed I believe the foundations are already here for the mantle of philosophy to again take its place between the knowledge and mysteries of the world and the mysteries and knowings of our hearts.

And I believe Christianity is a prime candidate to place a bid for this bridge-building project.  Of all the major world religions, Christianity was the first to let go of its tribal God and embrace a God of all.  And in spite of Papal stumblings in the centuries that followed, Christian culture became a nursery for all of modern enlightenment and science that we value today.

So, is there a secular way to adequately describe God?  Is there a religious way to accurately appreciate the facts of science?  Is there a unified structure for us to hang the data and experiences of both our outer and inner worlds?  I think there is, and I’d like to share my own view of it in short.

Granted it requires a loosening of supernatural claims on the side of religion, just as much as it demands a letting go of material reductionism (reducing the world to just bits of matter) on the part of science.  Crudely put, both sides have their own portions of denial that must be overcome.  Religion in general is in denial of certain realities and rules about the natural world.  And at the same time most of the physical sciences are in denial about certain distinct qualities and vitalities of inner conscious experience.

But I believe that with contemporary courage and skill a bridge can be built, one that will open up a whole new territory for humans to finally share our deepest and greatest meanings of life and faith.

I invite you to consider the following sample summary.  And then consider for yourself if it helps or hinders the core assumptions of both science and religion.  Can you see space for the physical and human sciences?  Can you find room for the spiritual and symbolic aspects of religion.  To this end, I try to use plain Christian language to encompass some of the most plainly accepted things about reality: like existence, consciousness, and human values.

You be the judge whether such material might have the right properties and proportions to build a bridge that can span the distance that divides our world today.


Over and Under and Through

by:  D. Bradlee Grim

We experience God around us.  God as Father is the expression of the sacred outside of us.  We experience this ultimately as the universal embrace of existence.  But we also experience the Father in the blessings and beatitudes of life in our world.  The Father is the external embrace of all existence.

(Note:  This does not necessarily require an exclusive belief in the Hebrew tribal god Yahweh.)

We experience God within us.  God as Holy Spirit is the expression of the sacred inside us.  We experience this as the in-most spark of consciousness of our minds.  And we also experience Holy Spirit in the positive qualities of things like love, joy, peace, and kindness.  Holy Spirit is the inner embrace of every heart.

(Note:  This does not necessarily require a belief in ethereal spirits or ghosts.)

We experience God between us.  God as Son, as Living Word, is the expression of the sacred within our human form.  We experience the incarnation of the Son in the example and teachings of Jesus.  We also experience Jesus as Christ in the subsequent living body of his Kingdom of love.  Christ the Son is the harmonic embrace of our humanity; a reconciliation of the sacred between our inner and outer lives.

(Note:  This does not necessarily require believing in miracles, biological resurrections, or an afterlife.)

This is a universal, non-exclusive, non-literal view of the sacred that does not require any supernatural beliefs or spectacular claims contrary to nature.  It rests only on the faith to experience and share the sacred in existence, in our hearts, and through our humanity.

It is said that in Jesus was summed the Hebrew Law and Prophets.  Likewise in Jesus’ Kingdom today is summed the Christian Gospels and Epistles.  In this way Jesus’ Kingdom can be shared globally and universally.  For just as we need not trivialize Gospel by legalizing a set of religious rules, likewise we need not trivialize Christ by literalizing a set of sacred stories.

All are accepted and embraced by existence as Father.  All possess the conscious inner spark of Holy Spirit.  And because of this, the good news exclamation is that ALL have the capacity to know and express human goodness as the presence of Christ in our lives in spite of the crosses and turmoils we face.  This is our salvation and feast!

In Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, [neither religious nor secular, neither believer nor skeptic,] for you are all one in Christ”  –Galatians 3:28.












Friday, August 23, 2013

This I Trust


This I Trust

Why must I believe certain spectacular or supernatural things in order to participate in Christian gospel?  Can’t the fullness of Christian gospel be preached also in secular tongue?

For I trust the experience of a divine embrace in the universal embrace of existence itself.

I trust the experience of a holy presence in the still and profound inner light of my soul.

And I trust the experience of healing in life through the teachings of Jesus and the stories about him.

In short:  I trust the presence of God in the temple of existence around me (as Father).  I trust the presence of God at the altar of consciousness inside me (as Spirit).  And I trust the incarnation of God in the blessings and on the cross of the human condition (as Son).  Moreover, I trust the rebirth of life that comes from connecting the divine centers of our hearts to the work of our humble mortal hands (i.e. Resurrection).  And I trust that all humans share some kind of faith like this for the collective cause of creating more compassion, justice, and peace in our world (as Kingdom).


So I ask, what set of spectacular beliefs could make this salvation more complete?


Indeed, trust even in a blessed afterlife if you choose.  But surely that would be found likewise in an open experience of trusting, not as a reward that can be earned for holding certain sets of beliefs.

As for me, I plan to embrace death as I have embraced life, with trust.  At the end of a lifetime of experiencing the sure but always tentative embrace of existence and consciousness I hope to experience death with the same full and open trust which I have found to transcend all guarantees in the first place.

For I have found that the promise of Christian gospel is in the experience of trust itself.













Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Holy Spirit, in Every Tongue


Holy Spirit invites us to get past the pissing contest between Jew and Gentile, between my religion and yours, and just start living out the universal way of Love that Jesus lived.

Those who wish to once again limit Holy Spirit to Pharisitical litmus tests do a disservice.  They reduce the Love of Jesus down to the size of their own. But that’s okay, love is still love regardless. Better some love than none. Yet, better still FULL love than just some.

Holy Spirit takes the compassion, justice, and peace for which Jesus died and names it and resurrects it in every tongue and tribe. In this way the Spirit and Gospel of Christ is spread to all the corners of the earth, not by making doctrinal ditto heads, but by making his universal Love grow in ever greater diversity.











Sunday, April 28, 2013

Faith is like having sex


Faith is like having sex
You gotta feel it to do it
And you gotta do it to feel it
Anything less is just fakin'.






















Do you believe in God?



Do you believe in God?  Great!
What if I told you that I believe in God too
Just not in the way you might
Would that be okay?

But what if my belief in God
Is too different
From your belief in God?
Would one of us need to give up rights to the term?

Are you an unbeliever?  Great!
What if I told you that I don’t believe in God either
At least not in the conventional sense
Would that be okay?

But what if my unbelief
Was more nuanced
Than your unbelief?  Or yours more than mine?
Would one of us have to concede a belief in God after all?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yet what if belief or unbelief is completely irrelevant
To the reality of God’s existence or nonexistence?
What if faith still works like faith
Regardless if we believe in a God or not?

What if right is still right, wrong is still wrong
Grey is still grey, and “beats me!” is still “beats me!”?
What if hope is still hope, love is still love, and trying is still trying
No matter how we use our faith?  –as long as we use it

What if faith is as universal
As our limits and shortcomings
And learning to love was the only real choice we ever had in the first place?
Would that give us an all-inclusive meaning to the struggles of life?

Would that pretty much describe God in a nut shell?
Or humanity?
Or grace?
Or all of the above?

In the end words DO have meaning
And ‘God’ is no small word
Question is, is there a Word
Bigger than how we might think about ‘God’?

If there is, do any of us really have the right to define it?
To color it?  To wrap it up in a box?
Postmark it for Jews and gentiles
But not for heathens or heretics?

Given what “God” means simply by us saying it
Isn’t it still the holy grail of human language?

An utterance for every knee and tongue
Too sublime to bow or confess a thing
Other than what faith would give us
In the very moment of its sudden and glottal stop!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So what if faith took living
Rather than believing?

And God took faith
Rather than confessing?

Perhaps that would give us all
Only one thing left to do:

Live by loving others
Die in the throes of struggle
And hope to God that that was more important
Than what we believed.











Immovable Text



Scripture is not authority
Its inspiration
Otherwise
Why keep quoting it and not just do it once and for all?

I know the love of Jesus
Not because the Bible tells me so
But because I feel it in my heart

No book can do that
It just so happens
That what I read resonates
With what’s already in me

In deed, Divine Love transcends
Not only scripture
But the Christian story itself

So to be truly inspired
Holy Word must be borne in every trough
It must bear the deepest and darkest plot of love
Not just for some stories, but for all

And when this Love has done its work
We nonetheless insist that it must die
On ink and paper, buried inside immovable text!

And yet the Gospel truth
Is that between the blowing and crinkling pages of life
This Word rises to live again and again
Each day in our hearts.













Faith is a Two-way Street




To be clear
We atheists don’t reject
All the truly amazing and wonderful things about God
We just feel
That all these amazing and wonderful things
Are freely available without a God

Now
If you want to accuse us atheists
Of still believing in SOME kind of God
On account of this
I suppose then we DO have the right
To say critical things about God after all

All in all, faith is a two-way street
What you praise
I might scoff
And I’m sorry if that rubs a sore spot
But the rules say we all got to drive here
So let’s at least mind the center line shall we

By the way, what if ‘God’ is the road itself?













“G” “o” “d”



God is a word
That names the object of our faith
So
Believe
Or
Don’t believe
Just
Be good to your faith
God will thank you for it
And the rest of us will too.
Peace.











Religious Journey




Religion itself is a good thing
But the kind of unquestioning literalistic certainty
Is what turns our religious ideas of God
From a loving creator
Into a bigoted tyrant
And us into his unwitting accomplices.

So make doubt part of your religion.

Doubt everything that doesn’t sit right with you
And especially those things that sit TOO well
And then hold on
Your idea of God is going to start doing cartwheels
But don’t worry
Religious faith is made for this kind of journey.

"no one puts new wine into old wineskins"   -Mark 2:22

"we should not think that the nature of the divine is like gold or silver or stone, an image which can be formed by the art and thought of humans"   -Acts 17:29











Thursday, April 25, 2013

when heaven comes down to earth




In today’s world
Why should religion still be defined by superstition?
Why should spirituality still require a belief in the supernatural?

Today
We know we have an inner world, and an outer world
Our conscious minds, and our cosmos
At long last, that’s all we have data for; thoughts and things

And so our inner data has given us the insights of psychology
And our outer data has shown us the laws of physics
And yet science itself has shown us
That these are not two worlds, but one
One coin, with two sides

So why should we still imagine an extra third world
To make sense of the amazing two-sided one we’re clearly limited to?
Why should we keep imagining some extra heavenly realm that we have no data for?

Isn’t it about time we found religion without superstition?
Isn’t it about time we found spirituality without the supernatural?
Isn’t it about time we found God right here, right now, gleaming with reality?

Can’t God just be the great unity of the reality inside us with the reality outside us?
Can’t God just be the way the majesty of the universe relates to the wonder of our hearts?
And vice versa?

Can’t we just be still and know that God is simply the reality of reality?
And that reality itself will always hold and reveal the truth and goodness we seek
Even though we may lose track of it sometimes –inside or out

Thus, in today’s world
Shouldn’t religion simply be the outer practice of the inner good we find and cherish?
And spirituality, the collective science of how we can do this together on one planet?

Perhaps today
Can finally be the day
When heaven comes down to earth

But then again, this has been preached for two-thousand years
So maybe, could this, just maybe, be the return of Christ for our age?
Last time:  freedom from the legalistic trappings of Law and sin
This time:  freedom from the literalizing of Lore and superstition!
And yet at all times the same Kingdom, always at hand.

Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”     -Matt. 28:20












Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Backwoods Redneck Un-believin’ Gospel




Ain’t nothin wrong with your soul
Only thing corruptible is the mind
Nothing but a brain’s belief
In a tricksy curse-love God that wrecks a soul's sedan

Ain’t no stain on your heart neither
For the most part, sin’s just a occupational hazard of learnin is all
And what we learn is, well –we gotta lot of growin to do
Tell you a little secret, sin’s but a prerequisite to love

Ain’t no hell either, nope
Hell’s just a place made up by grudgeful folks
Tryin not to feel that way
Shucks, hell ain’t nothin more than just a bad way to be

And there ain’t no God, sorry to say
Well… none ‘cept the one you believe in I 'spose
Just so happens we all gotta believe in somethin
So, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.  Deal?

And I do hate to tell you, there ain’t no pearly gates neither
Heaven’s just a kind blissful band-aid on account of our petrified fear of death
Nobody wanna die.  That’s the God's-honest truth
But ain’t nobody ever come back I know of, to holler out an "all-clear!"

Sheeit!  They say there was this one guy
Somethin bout a holy death wish on account your wretched soul
Say he’s un-dead as Elvis too
Just if’n you believe

Problem is, ain’t no belief sly enough to really fool the heart
But you feel free to confess it so; go on up to heaven when you die, go on now
Me, I’ll take my heav’n right here, with all its bumps and bruises if’n you don’t mind
Heaven's just a matter of being right with the world as it is, yup, right down to your bones.

Well, I suppose there ain’t no point in belaboring all this
I ‘spect you’ll get along alright, spite this little ol’ talk from me
Cain’t help it my friend
I likes to ruffle feathers a bit is all, I find it keeps a soul honest

Heck!  For what its worth, I’ll say this too
God bless you my friend, God bless.











No one has ever seen God


I.      To say who or what God is
Is like saying you know what’s beyond the edge of the universe
Or what’s smaller than a subatomic particle
Its like saying you know what’s straighter than a line, or rounder than a circle
II.      The term ‘God’ can be used literally
Only to refer to the great necessity of existence
As for who or what God is beyond existence
No person, or book, or thing can truly say
III.      All we can say is what God is like
Thus ‘God’ is the greatest metaphor of all existence
To affirm the reality
Of both our private and shared divine experiences
IV.      For to deny divine experience as genuine
Is to make God but a caricature of goodness
But to say what ultimately makes divinity itself
Is to make God an idol of our minds
V.      The mistake is that we end up worshiping a mere idea of God
Rather than wondering at existence
Basking in our blessings
And living a life thankful for all we touch and feel
VI.      This is why I follow the Way of Jesus
For Jesus was the great iconoclast of all our idols of God
He saved us from the follies of any law-bound or likewise captive God
And for this he became our liberating Messiah, our living Christ
VII.      Thus our sacrifice of faith
Is that we bury our best ideas of God with Christ
And when in two or three days time we find that life divine still rises in our midst
We finally believe
VIII.      That nothing on earth nor in any heaven can separate us from the love of God
Nothing
And certainly no idea of God, wrathful or holy alike
Can banish grace or shackle our souls
IX.      For the Spirit of Christ is not only the resurrection of life itself
It is the perennial re-birth of goodness in all that exists, that is –in God
And for this we worship, in spite of What we do not know
And work to build a just and peaceful Kingdom of these limited yet living stones!
No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.   - I John 4:12











Thursday, April 18, 2013

Altars, not Idols – a Repurposing of ‘God’

For me, atheism is not about intolerance toward other people’s belief in a God.  Nor is it about rejecting all theology out of hand.  In fact, I consider myself a Christian-atheist.  And as an atheist, it is my desire to see the term ‘God’ repurposed upon the very faith we find in Christ.
How can ‘God’ be repurposed?
For me, atheism is simply a protest against all mental idols of God.  It is a rejection that any belief in a God can be held as holding God itself.  Atheism denies a ‘God up there’ by affirming only what is right here.  If anything divine can be found right here, so be it.  But it cannot be held as God.  Nor can we synthesize a God from what we find, for this is the definition of what an idol is.
So what are we to do with the divine experiences we do know?  In lieu of mental idols, I suggest instead we as humans make mental altars.
What is a mental altar?  Whereas a mental idol claims knowledge of a God beyond our natural human limits.  A mental altar simply acknowledges and affirms divine experience and mystery as at hand.  Upon a mental altar we may affirm our most heart-felt and holy experiences, both for ourselves and for each other.  And yet we may or may not use the notion of ‘God’ to reference such phenomena.  Either way, ‘God’ must not become an idol to us, nor a counter-idol against human faith.  For no human altar is absolute.
Moreover, a mental altar accepts the distinct limits of the dualistic nature of our human condition.  The studies of epistemology and metaphysics show this duality clearly.  In short, this duality is that we may experience the divine both inside and outside ourselves.  Yet neither our world outside nor our hearts inside are ever sufficient to encompass what divinity might be in and of itself.
The repurposing:  And yet it seems there must be an ultimate unity to this duality we are limited to.  Otherwise this duality should not appear so consistent upon what we know, what exists, and how we find ourselves diced up in it all.  Alas such ultimate unity is only a guess.  But if we can accept our duality, then perhaps ‘God’ can be this unity to us.  That only by denying God upon our own negating duality do we transcend the limits of our altars.  In this way our soul-fledging altars become our sacred space for all spiritual seeking and sacrament.
Thus faith in God is admitting that we know our altar only, and not God per se.  And yet the amazing grace is that this altar is our very point of contact to whatever the divine might be.  This altar becomes the faith-point from which to live life more fully and pursue the good in spite of what ails us.  After all, isn’t this what the New Covenant is all about?  Grace, by faith.
If we as humans can train ourselves and our religions to accept these limits and work within these tensions, then I believe God can become a very real way for us to share and live-out our spiritual journeys in love and in harmony with one another.
So let us each place our struggled notions of God squarely upon the altars of our lives.  Let us stand courageously in the cleft as our certainties are sacrificed in pure and open faith.  Let us rise with scented smoke as our shackles are accepted by the flame and consumed.  For we ourselves become this living sacrifice.  And as the embers of grace glow gently in our hearts, let us at last be free of our idols of God.











Thursday, January 24, 2013

An ode to atheism


It is important for us to deny God
To deny the conventional theist, monotheistic God

Because only in this way
Can we be proven wrong
So to be fully cleansed of all our mental idols
And begin to find God instead in the nearest and most natural of ways

To find God immediately
Where our universe and our experiences blink
Where our bodies and our minds make us humanly one
Where our flesh and our faith truly incarnate a divine spirit

We must deny God beyond the stars
So to grasp God at our finger tips
We must berate God in the throes of ecstasy
So to breathe God in all our mundane moments

For the denial of God
Is the beginning of wisdom
How else but in this way
Can such loss become the very greatest of what we fear

It is important for us to deny God
For only in this way can we in deed find, as Tillich said, God above God.