Reaching for the Stars or Plowing the Ground

But Moses protested, “If I go to the people of Israel and tell them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ they won’t believe me. They will ask, ‘Which god are you talking about? What is his name?’ Then what should I tell them?” God replied, “I Am the One Who Always Is. Just tell them, ‘I Am has sent me to you’.” Exodus 3:13 & 14

“I Am That I Am” has been translated in many different ways. Consider the following: “The Unborn One.” “God gave birth from within himself to a reasoning power.” “The Ground of All Being.” “I am, that is who I am.” “I am the One who is.” “I am that which is.” “I am what I am.” “I am becoming, being, and still working.” “God is something always active and within His activity He reveals himself.” See: “Being and Hayah” by Ariga Tetsutaro and “Existential-Hayatological Theism” by William L. Power.

Power says, Exodus 3:14 “…has been interpreted by many to support the notion of the primacy of being over a sense of action and becoming and a sense of temporal events and significant history. The Hebrew verb haya, which classical theology translated and interpreted with the help of Greek notions of on, being, and onta, particular actual existing things [ontology], came to influence Christian theology and therefore helped to undermine a more appropriate representation of God and His relation to and with the world.”

This error of representation was the basis on which some theologians used “Being” rather than “human existence” as the horizon of interpreting God’s nature. Wm. Power renders Exodus 3:14 in the following ways: “I am the one who is present,” I am the one who acts and is acted upon,” “I am the one who is present to and with you,” and “I am with you as I was with your fathers.”

Questions

In his book, Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl wrote, “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.” We all are questioned by life and we know that it is God who questions and we who must answer for ourselves. Responsibility is difficult and there is no way a responsible person can avoid this. What is life really about? What are we really here to do?

These are big questions. Nobody can pretend to have the answers for anyone else. As Viktor Frankl once said, it is like asking a Chess Grandmaster what THE best move in the game of Chess is. The answer is - it depends. It depends on the specifics of who is playing whom, the situation on the board, and a myriad other factors. Likewise, the answers to these questions depend upon the person who is asking them. Nevertheless, it’s vital that you seek the specific answers for your individual life. Without true meaning to your life, anything you do or become is ultimately hollow and without any depth of satisfaction. However long it takes, the answers must be found.

This is why I took seriously the question of a young lady who asked me some time ago why I believe in God. I felt that she was “searching” for something, maybe something that would give her a sense of fulfillment; maybe she was looking for a bigger purpose than her work. She asked why she should believe in God when I couldn’t prove that God exists either by scientific means or by reason (logic). There were perhaps two assumptions behind her question: first, without proof of God’s existence, why bother with religion and spiritual meaning because God doesn’t exist. On the other hand, she may have been assuming that life’s meaning carried the weight of something much larger than she could imagine. I thought then of St. Anselm who defined God “as one greater than which cannot be imagined or conceived.”

A five-year old child once asked, “Daddy, where’s God?” You will notice the difference in this question and the one asked by the young lady. The young lady was trying to confirm her unbelief or searching for answers to an empty life, while the child – who believed already – just wanted to know how to experience God’s revelation. This was not a question based on doubt and asking for scientific or logical proof; rather, it was a question about how to understand and experience God’s presence.

For the religious person, it is quite natural to turn to the sources of one’s faith for understanding and meaning. I can’t imagine looking any where else. In faith we discover the truth that sustains ordinary living, truth conceived not in a logical or scientific sense, but in a theo-cultural sense of God’s love and presence with us. Truth gains its universal authority from God who is always present and interacting within His creation. Truth, goodness, and ethical principles make up the nourishment of the human community. I think we must agree that within the human ferment of dialogue with God and others, we discover the meaning and principles that guide our lives.

Foundations

Every person, no matter how rational or objective, has a frame of reference that gives meaning to his or her beliefs and behavior. We usually gain this capacity at home and have it reinforced by our church and extended family. Our responsibility is to grow this capacity throughout our lives and leverage as a force for caring for others. For many this is an interactive process, not a static and impersonal principle. It is distinctly human and rests on a flexible foundation. Reason, science, spirituality, religion, common sense, and human experience provide the key multiple dynamics of both Christian and non-Christian ways of living. And we should understand that we don’t always pick and choose the beliefs that guide our lives; rather, they sometimes choose us. Our births are a testimony to this deficiency of choice. We are reared within various un-chosen moral currents whose flow significantly affects our lives. This fact magnifies the importance of the Christian witness in the world and the many benevolent programs developed by church families.

As creatures of reason, we are able to evaluate some of our beliefs and inherited behaviors; throw off some and add new ones. For the most part, we remain bound to the general beliefs that stamped our behavior early in life—common minds adhering to common values, and this is okay as long as we continue to inhale the richness and variety of the human ferment. We are challenged by God’s creative energy to plumb the depths of our unexamined lives, there plow its ground, and perhaps unearth a new dimension of our spiritual lives.

Given the challenges of life, it’s secularizing and dehumanizing influences, it’s no wonder that we struggle against God and against those who would try to keep us in our place? What we perceive as our reality is a reflection of trans-personal principles developed in our relationship with God and others. We should realize that Christianity is not only about “born-again” or “twice-born” Christians, because we are re-born again and again in our relationship with God and others. This Trinitarian idea is more than doctrine or creed; rather, it is an active social principle of rebirth and revelation.

Shadow Bags

We are often trapped within ideas and beliefs from our past. These beliefs literally create our reality; they are the lenses through which we interpret the world. But sometimes that which we think we understand, we really don’t comprehend; they are shadows that reveal our limited knowledge, shallow experiences; and all of this traps us in a limited view of God and others. In their book, Creating Community Anywhere, Carolyn Shaffer and Kristen Anundsen comment, “The problem is a common one for groups of all sizes … that identify themselves with high aims. They strive so hard to be ideal that they deny, and throw into that invisible shadow bag, anything in themselves or their group that does not fit.”

Every person wears at least two kinds of shadow masks that deflect attention from deeper issues and imbalances. The first usually appears shiny and bright; the second is often dark and menacing. Our tendency is to believe that we’re wearing the bright mask while others are wearing the dark and menacing one. These shadows conceal our natural connections with others. They are artificial and inauthentic. We need to expose them for what they are. We can never find wholeness if some of our pieces are missing. What we put into our shadow bag, intentionally or unintentionally, can be destructive. Shadows act like psychic immune systems, telling us everything is okay while masking important internal feelings and attitudes.

George Soros, in his book Open Society, Reforming Global Capitalism, advises us to be careful what we put into our shadow bag under the name of truth. He observes, “The recognition of our fallibility is what makes a society open; but it is not sufficient, by itself, to keep society together. Something else is needed—some concern for others, some shared values. These values have to be infused by the recognition of our fallibility, but they cannot be derived from it by logic.” Our challenge is to examine our relationships with each other and discover the God who is interactive, who understands, and provides wisdom and knowledge for living vigorous ethical lives. There too we might recover what Charles Taylor labeled “the horizon of our significance,” the recognition and understanding of which is perhaps our greatest challenge.

The Interactive God

Perhaps what we have failed to understand is that God speaks to us in the language of our own culture and it is within our culture that our spirituality emerges. Our spiritual intelligence is perhaps the best resource we have for engaging the world. God engages us in the here and now; God is always becoming and his spiritual force is both His and our creative power. Paul Weiss, in his book The God We Seek, is convinced that we are “ensouled beings with a conscience.” He says, “Faith is the assurance that God will use, assess, and complete a person’s concern for what he believes to be eternal.” In reality, God not only is the foundation of our lives and the creator, but works with us as a persuasive force and a loving reality in the ongoing process of human creation.

In Exodus 3:14 God says, “I am the one who is present, who acts and is acted upon, who is present to and with you; I am with you as I was with your fathers.” God is the living God who is forever doing for and suffering with His creation and it is God on whom his creation depends for its existence and ultimate value. The God of the scriptures is not only the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of all humankind, but He is the God of the entire world, the Cosmos.

The Trinitarian doctrine identifies God as the creator (father), redeemer (son), and sanctifier (spirit). God is viewed as the Father, the two hands of God as the Son and the Spirit, or the Word (Logos, reason of God) and Wisdom of God (Sophia). And as children of God we share in this theo-social experience. God is a personal god who speaks to us and is still creating and affecting the world through us. God’s nature is in His everlasting becoming. Within God these relationships are engaged in creation, redemption, and sanctification to maximize good in the world and minimize or eliminate evil. From this we learn that the experiences that we have and share with each other are how we reveal ourselves and give meaning to our lives. It is God working in and through us. Sharing authenticates our connection to God as a part of his creative power.

Relationships are the way we think; they connect life to life and are the foundations of God’s creative power.