Category Archives: spiritual Evolution
A Universal Christ
Christianity is the most radical of all world religions
Franciscan sister and scientist Ilia Delio focuses on the theology of the incarnation and the universal nature of the Christ mystery:
The Christian message is that God has become flesh [sarx in Greek or “matter”]—not a part of God or one aspect of God but the whole infinite, eternal God Creator has become matter. The claim—God has become flesh—is so radical that it is virtually unthinkable and illogical. Christianity is the most radical of all world religions because it takes matter seriously as the home of divinity. [1]
So does everyone have to become Christian to know the Christ? Absolutely not. Christ is more than Jesus. Christ is the communion of divine personal love expressed in every created form of reality—every star, leaf, bird, fish, tree, rabbit, and human person. Everything is christified because everything expresses divine love incarnate. However, Jesus Christ is the “thisness” of God, so what Jesus is by nature everything else is by grace (divine love). We are not God, but every single person is born out of the love of God, expresses this love in [their] unique personal form, and has the capacity to be united with God…. Because Jesus is the Christ, every human is already reconciled with every other human in the mystery of the divine, so that Christ is more than Jesus alone. Christ is the whole of reality bound in a union of love.
We are transformed by experiencing the presence of Christ in all things.
Eileen: (And all people.)
I believe this. But find expressing it difficult without it becoming so complex that only theologians can “get” it. In the fifty-eight years since I experienced the incredible unconditional Love of God fleshed out in Jesus, my view of Jesus and Christianity has been expanded, rather than changed, until I realized that we have mostly missed the point of Jesus. Our importance is as a part of the whole…..we are part of God with God’s Spirit within us, but we limit the Spirit because of fear. Fear is literally the root of all evil. It’s the root of Musk’s need for power and my need for pleasure as escapes from the reality of our human vulnerability. We are fragile physical beings in a huge universe beyond even our understanding, never-the-less, our control. Unconsciously, we are all aware that the possibility of heartbreaking disaster lurks in the next minute. We do all we can to make this life pain free……our idea of heaven. We miss the point of Jesus. We want Him to be a “get out of this life’s possibility of being hell free” card. And we consider Him our key to the spiritual country club of escape from it. And we miss the point of both His life journey and His death as the prototype for ours. He grew spiritually. He became aware of the need to balance achievement with simple kindness through his mom. He was literally pushed into the increased danger of becoming known for doing miracles by His mom’s caring about a family’s social embarrassment. He was challenged over and over to love the least of these (lepers, tax collectors, fallen women, Roman Soldiers, people unwilling to help themselves, cowardly best friends, and the leaders of His own religion who had Him tortured and killed) and even God when He felt God had abandoned Him.
This life is not meant to be heaven. It is school. It is the journey from Self as number one, to being willing to lay down our lives for not only those who are different from us, but those that would kill us. That takes Growth through Grace with a capital G! Ultimately it takes a willingness to die to what we value most in our lives and ourselves.
This may not sound like the “good news,” but it’s a letting go that ultimately frees us from the fear that controls and corrupts us, so that we can ultimately Love all others unconditionally.
Jesus Chose Love Over Power
Jesus chose love over power. And paid the price. Jesus fleshed out the Love of God. That was his WAY and the WAY we are called to also.
The early world of dog eat dog, of the fallen get left behind, of only the physically strong survive began to evolve into partnerships, into family, into tribe, into country, now into world, and soon into universe. It grows past hunter/gatherer to social networks of different skills working for the whole. Eventually we will all need each other across our differences, in fact because of our differences.
In our current world we often see greed as the root of all evil, but greed is just a way to power and power is still seen as safety.
Jesus was not about safety. Jesus lay down his life. He chose to be vulnerable even knowing the consequences. Because he knew that death was not the end. And survival is not the goal. Love is.
Jesus being fully human and fully divine is a paradox and our minds don’t deal with paradoxes well.
The problem for us is identifying with both. Divine implies bigger than life. And the human Jesus showed us what that means in the resurrection. Being human doesn’t mean bad or evil. It means “unfinished.” We come into the world dependent and needy and greedy. With the grace of knowing there is more than survival and pleasure we can become able to love, to value ourselves and others equally because life is not about personal survival but about humanity becoming Love which is Divine.
Humanity has the seed of the Divine within …….the Spirit of God , of Love. Like the fig tree we can yield the fruit of that Spirit. But it’s a spiritual journey from need to Love and that takes the grace of being Loved. And that’s where Jesus comes in. The journey of life is a hard one with hard choices and without the grace of knowing Love up close and personal it’s impossible. But we are different from one another from birth, so the journey won’t be exactly the same for us. But it is always a journey from need to Love.
For me that has been graced by knowing that imperfect and unfinished as I am, I am Loved by the creator of all , the whole, the great I AM and Jesus fleshed both that Love and the WAY , (the choices) to become Loving out for me.
I don’t personally think a creator, a father, a mother, would only have one way of loving and giving grace to love, so billions of their children would never know that Love. But for me it has been Jesus. I could not have come this far without that grace of being known and Loved. I don’t think we come into the world equal in ability, opportunity, freedom, cultures, so we are not cookie cutter children of God. Each of us comes with different strengths and weaknesses; physical, mental, emotional, situational, cultural, etc. which is what makes judging impossible.
The seed of the Spirit is in us. What awakens it and strengthens it will differ, like with Cornelius and his family. No one has a monopoly on God or grace. We can share our source of Grace, such as Jesus, but unless we Love like Jesus, it will not find soft fertile ground.
Scripture contradicts itself, such as the difference in the Gospel accounts of Jesus carrying or needing help carrying His Cross. The Gospel of John says Jesus did not need help carrying His cross. When I first hit a time when I felt I simply could not go on, I opened to the story of Simon of Cyrene helping Jesus carry his cross and realized some times we all need help and got an immediate phone call offering the help I needed. Years later when feeling overwhelmed again by circumstances, I opened to the Gospel of John that said Jesus carried his own cross and heard that as God telling me that now His grace was sufficient. And it was.
The Spirit speaks to us through the Scriptures in different ways at different times in our journeys. Do not make a God of one part of Scripture. Our personal journey’s from need to Love are different from each other’s and even at different times in our own lives. Jesus’s life is the WORD of God fleshed out for us and different people at different times need to hear different things. Do not set a Scripture in Stone and make a God of it.
Ultimately, each day has challenges to grow in Love in our own personal journey. But not necessarily in the same way as our parents, our pastor, or our best friend, but always in one of the ways and choices that Jesus made sometimes through tears, heartbreak, frustration, and even anger…..but ending with Love. “Father, forgiven them. They know not what they do.”
Hope or Delusion
No person, no group, religious or otherwise, knows All the truth,
Only the truth, even with the help of God.
That would make us equal to God.
It would also lock us into outdated ways of understanding
both the world and God.
Humanity is a work in progress.
Sometimes when I’m wondering about humanity and
whether we could actually be evolving, I get hopeful that maybe
in a few millenniums, we may evolve enough to love as well as dogs do.
We Are Growing Spiritually Until Our Last Breath.
An Evolving Faith
Pastor and author Molly Baskette describes how Jesus lived from a place of growth and inclusion instead of certainty and scapegoating, and calls us to do the same:
All claims to the contrary, Jesus did not preach from a place of rigid binaries and judgments but from a place of continual becoming. He befriended outcasts and lived on the margins of society while staying in relationship with wealthy and powerful people, some of whom became patrons and disciples. He lived in a patriarchal society, but let women correct him and expand his understanding of his mission. Innocent of the trumped-up charges, he allowed himself to be murdered by state violence to expose the injustice of that violence. He asked us to love our enemies, and to bless those who curse us [Luke 6:27–28]. He warned that those who lived by the sword would die by it [Matthew 26:52].
The churches I’ve served strive to follow Jesus in this “third way”: neither returning evil for evil nor caving in to it. Our God does not hate all the same people we do, nor does our God particularly want us to be rich or admired. Our faith, frail as it is sometimes, is also flexible. It is self-correcting as we have profound encounters with people who are different from us and are exposed to new experiences and ideas. If we are willing to be humble, we can continuously root out our own biases, the weeds of white supremacy that are deeply seeded into the soil of our culture, religion, and country.
Staying in the liminal place of holy uncertainty is deeply uncomfortable. But certainty in the life of faith doesn’t serve us well. At some point, the idea or theology or God-image we have adopted may become provably false. Then we’ll have to decide to double down on it or abandon it, which may feel like abandoning God or faith altogether, and leave us entirely unmoored. [1]
For Father Richard, evolutionary thinking and faith are inherently linked:
Evolutionary thinking is, for me, the very core concept of faith, where we trust that God alone steers this mysterious universe, where there is clearly much hidden from us and much still before us—and where “eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and the human heart has not conceived, what God has prepared for those who love God” (1 Corinthians 2:9).
Evolutionary thinking is contemplative thinking. It leaves the full field of the future in God’s hands and agrees to humbly hold the present with what it only tentatively knows for sure. Evolutionary thinking agrees to knowing and not knowing simultaneously. It sends us on a trajectory, where the ride is itself the destination, and the goal is never clearly in sight. To stay on the ride, to trust the trajectory, to know it is moving, and moving somewhere always better, is just another way to describe faith. We are all in evolution all the time, it seems to me.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 