Author: JOHN
To: Steve & Bob
It seems we are settling into certain self-characterizations
that I find very interesting. Bob is
perhaps the scholar/supplicant, earnestly examining the scriptures to try and
separate what is truly holy from what has been corrupted. Steve is perhaps the compassionate latter-day
disciple, sincerely desiring to share the pearl of great value he has
found. John is...what... the aging (but
apparently proud) former hippie, having little flashbacks to his intermittent
visions of God?
Steve:
Your latest remarks are really excellent. They help move us away from lesser (though I
think still important) differences and touch on some core issues of
belief. To some of your questions I can
only respond that I simply don't know the answer, and I think no one does. But I will try to make a few remarks that
are at least relevant.
You said: "Maybe
God enters into a relationship with us at different levels, based on our
need." I couldn't be more in
agreement. This is another way of
saying what I was trying to say when I used the analogy of people trying to get
to the same place from different starting points.
I said before that in my view, Jesus is one door, one of
several and perhaps even many doors, to the Kingdom. You force me to take that hypothesis a further step and ask the
logical question: Who is the
"door" that is called "the Christ" for? My answer would be that He is for those who
are drawn to Him. That may seem
somewhat circular, but it may be the best answer I can give.
One learns a lot of things from being a parent. One thing you learn pretty early is that
your children are not necessarily going to become interested in the same things
that are interesting or important to you. Yet, you want to expose them to many things which you feel are of proven
value to both yourself and others, in hopes of sharing the joy you have taken
from those things. And so the good
parent "puts things in the path" of his children. He makes sure to show his children many
things, some very concrete and some more abstract: musical instruments, books, heroes of his own generation, the
wonders of nature, sports, and so on. Some of these things "take" and some don't. Eventually, the child becomes his own mature
person and pursues the things that give him or her joy and fulfillment.
I believe that God put Jesus "in our path" so that
those of us who are most effectively "taught" through the
"Christ" idea would have this door through which to move toward
God. When it comes to approaching God,
some people (perhaps most) are unmoved by abstractions, analogies, or
unembodied spiritual images. What is
effective for them is something more grounded in the kinds of relationships
with which they are familiar in this life: parent/child, brother/sister, friend, etc.
Other people are more likely to be drawn to God through other
avenues. There are people for whom
nature is enough to inspire in them the sense of awe that all of us should feel
toward God. There are people who are
naturally drawn to look for God within themselves (where, as I have said
before, I think He does reside) though such practices as meditation.
For me, I guess I would have to say that Jesus comes with too
much baggage. It is not of His own
making. The baggage I am referring to includes doubts about: what he actually said and did, how close the
"church" that has grown up around Him actually is to what He
intended, the actions and words and beliefs of many of his
"ministers" and followers today, the historical results of men's
attempts to implement their idea of Christianity, other things having to do
with the 2000 years since Jesus. (More
on baggage later) I would have to add
that God in human form for me is a concept I find self-contradictory (for
reasons I think I have touched on already to some degree) and one that causes
doubts to arise, even when I sincerely try to dispel them.
If there are people out there who really do have a
"personal relationship with Christ" (a phrase one hears a lot), then
I envy them, I really do. Sadly, even
if they do, it seems that such a relationship is necessarily and by definition
a personal, or interior thing. I have
heard a number of people say they felt such a bond or communication, but how
could such a thing possibly be demonstrated to another person? Perhaps their faith is of a higher caliber
than mine, and my failure to feel what they feel is my own fault. Is seeing believing, or is believing
seeing? But I have also known people
who saw things that simply were not true, I know from some intense personal
experiences involving friends that our minds and hearts can sometimes fool
themselves.
For me, the highest or best contact I have ever felt myself to
have had with the spiritual realm has come -- and I admit it has come only
rarely -- during periods of meditation. Using the age-old practices that are part and parcel of non-christian
religions such as Buddhism, Taoism, etc, I have occasionally been able to stop
the "interior monologue" and approach what might be described as an
"empty vessel". From these
experiences I have concluded that it is mostly our "egos" that stand
between us and God, but that we are not completely locked into that situation.
If I were forced to choose between teaching my children about
Jesus and teaching them to meditate, I would have to choose the latter, simply
because I myself have had more "success" with it. But I don't have to choose. I'm trying to be the good parent (and Bob is
obviously trying to be) who puts many important things in his child's path,
INCLUDING Jesus.
Baggage:
One of the problems that a Christian these days is likely to
have in trying to share the "good news" with people like Bob and me
is this: we never know, at the
beginning anyway, to whom we're talking. That is, what "kind" of Christian are we are talking to? Are we talking to a Billy Graham or a Jimmy
Swaggart? Are we talking to a Jimmy Carter
or a Jim Baker? Are we talking to a
John Spong or a Charles Colson, and which Charles Colson, pre-prison or
post-prison? Are we talking to Steve or David Jeremiah?
I remember watching a "Christian" program on
TV. I believe the speaker/minister was
named Dr. David Jeremiah. He was an
impressive speaker, speaking from a beautiful large church. He sounded educated, spoke persuasively,
used a sophisticated vocabulary, appeared refined in dress and demeanor, and
obviously had an impressive knowledge of the Bible. The church was full of very normal looking people, listening
intently. I made all these observations
in the first few minutes, and so I
decided to hang around and see what his message was, which I did for the full
hour of the program.
For the next hour I was told in intense graphic detail what was
going to happen to me, as a person who had not accepted Jesus as my personal
savior, in the "tribulation", which I was assured would come any day
and probably soon. I was informed that
when that day does come, Dr. Jeremiah and all his followers are going to simply
disappear from the earth into the loving arms of God, leaving the rest of us to
endure a horrifying Armageddon, wherein we will be tortured by the minions of
Satan before being tossed upon burning brimstone (he actually used the word
brimstone and meant it literally) for eternity. You are perhaps aware that there is a best-selling series of
books by a Christian author, at least one of which was released as a movie,
on this same subject.
This is folly! I won't
pull any punches and say "from my point of view". No, I say it straight out: this is folly, pure and simple. How do I know? My answer would be that the little bit of God that is within me
leaps up and rejects it. But there are
apparently millions and millions of people who believe this
horrific vision, and they are sending their money to the Dr. Jeremiahs to help
spread his message of fear. My
conclusion is what Bob implied but never quite said in his Circuit City
analogy: THESE Christians are talking
me out of buying into Christianity. It's like that bumper sticker I told you about: "Jesus, save me from your
followers."
Something for Bob:
I have to say there appears to be one area where we do part
company. You seem to imply that God
needs to learn some things, from us. To
me, that is putting God on a rather low pedestal. Would that be you, personally, Bob, that God needs to learn
from? If not, who? And could you give me an example of
something that God has learned or might need to learn from humans? Are you perhaps suggesting that God has
evolved from the jealous, vengeful God of the old testament into something
"better" today because of the centuries of interaction with men? I would like some clarification of what you
mean by this concept.
Another one of my crazy analogies:
The way an old fashioned television works is something like this: at the back of the TV tube, a “gun” fires a
constant stream of electrons forward onto the screen. The screen itself is made
up of thousands of tiny pixels, which are tiny cells something like the cells
of a wasp’s nest, only pin-point small and lined up in perfect rows from top to
bottom. Each cell is filled with a special light-sensitive phosphor which, when
hit by the electrons, can be made to light up dimly or brightly and in one of
the basic colors.
The electron gun is very fast, both in firing electrons and in
moving its target from one phosphor cell to the next. It moves across all the cells of the top row, then the second
row, the third and so on until it completes the whole circuit of screen cells,
sending a programmed sequence of electrons (based on the received broadcast
signal) to the whole array of cells many times in one second. It is way faster than the human eye can
differentiate, so that the result is a series of still pictures changing rapidly,
just as the frames of movie film do. If
you take a photo of a TV screen with a fast camera, you can stop the electron
beam in it’s track and you will see a bright point or line of cells somewhere
on the screen.
It only takes about 25 “frames” a second to fool the eye into
seeing a moving image, but in a TV each of those frames has to be created by
the electron gun’s individual, sequential stimulation of each and every one of
those thousands of cells. To our slow
brains, it appears that the entire screen is lit up constantly, and that the
image is “live” action. It is pretty
darn miraculous that it works at all, and that a TV can last for many
years. It’s a marvel of engineering,
and of realization of what can be accomplished by fooling the senses with pure
speed.
I like to think that our tiny individual consciousnesses (in
relation to God’s) work something like those phosphor cells, and God is like
the electron gun. God is living all our
lives simultaneously, but also one at a time. He is also living the lives of
every animal and insect and plant.
Now, I don’t mean to imply that He is programming or
controlling us, but that He is "driving" our very existence with the
force of his consciousness. He is
experiencing the life of each and every one of these “cells” called humans,
which he has created, millisecond by millisecond. God is so “fast” he can attend to every one of us, understand and
observe all our situations and responses “simultaneously."
And He can also sit back and look at the big picture on the
screen of humanity. He's hoping for an
uplifting show, about how we are evolving toward Him. But so far, it probably looks like a mess of a plot, alternating
between tragedy, soap opera, and a comedy of errors.
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