SpiritBlog

I am a Christian.  I have grown up in a faith tradition that reveals God in the context of the Resurrection and the Holy Spirit.  The expression of the deity through the messianic figure of Christ – the Spirit translated to human form and the implications that expression has for the world – has become the fulcrum for my spiritual life.

Since I was very small I have struggled and prayed about the image of a God who could at once be loving and forgiving while being angry and condemning.  Normal as that may seem for human behavior I could not reconcile the message of transforming love I heard in the Gospels with a God who resorted to a human kind of retribution.  And that was the message I was getting from Christianity.  My way or the Highway.  Or better yet, His road or Death: 

9: Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor sexual perverts, 10: nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.                                           I Corinthians 6

My Christian brethren believe in original sin and that the only way to cleanse that sin is through acceptance of Christ in their lives.  In the 5th Century, St. Augustine of Hippo articulated this dogma richly for the Catholic Church and his writings were also enthusiastically read in later years by Protestants.

Original Sin is not a new concept.  Rather it is shared by Jew, Christian and Muslim who all tell the same basic Garden of Eden story.  With no resolution of the Fall from Grace, the only way out has to be, for Christians, Jesus, for Jews, the potential Messiah and for Muslims, the prophet Mohammed and the Koran.

But I'm not a Creationist.  As such, I also don't believe in Original Sin.  And if I don't believe in Original Sin, how can I possibly be a Christian?  I mean, what good is Jesus anyway if I don't have to be washed clean of Eve and Adam's transgressions?

These are the questions I asked myself as I entered into a philosophical conundrum and spiritual back alley out of which it seemed impossible to find a way.

Then I encountered Transcendentalism.  In his essay the Over-Soul, Ralph Waldo Emerson articulates in a 19th-century romantic manner a concept similar to one I had been thinking and praying about for years:

[It is the]  Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character, and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty.  We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.  Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.

This Over-soul, which I translate as the Holy Spirit, is part of all of us.  Here we begin to see the reason that Christ came into this world with the revelation of the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment.

Becomes God.   God became man in Jesus so that man could recognize the power of the Holy Spirit in their lives.  The Holy Spirit dwells in all of us and connects us to God.  We become part of God and, therefore, become God.  A difficult and perhaps heretical concept for some but what a wonderful thought.  If we ourselves are truly "made in God's image," then by extension we are part of God, just as an artist considers her artwork to be a manifestation of her Self in a new form.

The position men have given to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position of authority. It characterizes themselves. It cannot alter the eternal facts. Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, it is no follower; it never appeals from itself. It believes in itself. Before the immense possibilities of man, all mere experience, all past biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks away. 

I am not suggesting here that by recognizing the connection of the Holy Spirit among all of us that we lose the essential responsibility to lead lives of value and worth.  On the contrary.  We are called through this revelation to lead lives worthy of the indwelling the the Holy Spirit.

What Emerson is saying and what I believe is that Jesus is not Daddy standing over us and wagging his finger telling us BEHAVE OR ELSE.  Rather Jesus has delivered the Good News of Redemption.  Not from sin but from slavery.  The slavery of the burden of Original Sin has been lifted and the gift of Grace and Knowledge of our connectedness, one to another and to God, has been bestowed upon us.

The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it. Then is it glad, young, and nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not called religious, but it is innocent.

… man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his life, and be content with all places and with any service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it, and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart.

The Transcendentalists were severe idealists whose hopes for humankind were dashed by the excesses of World War I.  Nonetheless, what Emerson and others had to say still speaks to me and others about a way to cope with our extraordinarily complex world in which we are living.

The day in 1998 I stood on the Temple Mount and put my hand on the rock that legend says Abraham was stopped by God from sacrificing Isaac I knew that there was no question whatsoever that God was real.  And that God, Allah, was real for the Muslim men lounging in the mosque next to me as I stood in prayer, and for the Jews just below me who were standing at the Wailing Wall and for the Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists just a few hundred miles to the east.  God was with me that day as surely as my companions were with me.  I was connected to them and to Him and we all knew the same thing:  that there is an unbroken thread that connects all of us to God and that each of us must follow that thread back to Him in our own way.

That's the purpose of this Blog. 

To help others find their own pathway back to God, because, as Emerson says, we are all "contained" in the Holy Spirit.