"What if God was One of Us?"
The bold headline of a free tabloid grabbed me.
So I picked it up and took it home. It turned out to be the Arts
and Entertainment section of the Eugene Weekly.
What they did was collect a bunch of statements about concepts of God, who is God, what is divine, how does the divine relate to humans.
I counted 42 responses, several from religious
professionals, most from regular people.
It was an impressive read. How often do people besides preachers
talk about “God?”
Of the responses there were only two that connect to traditional Christian or biblical thought. One writer started out:
“When we accept that Christ’s blood was shed for our sins…”Already I knew this response was not going to lead to a helpful vision of the divine.
Clearly, the so-called “Christian” idea of God is not the God of the day.
Here are some other lead lines of those who responded:
“She’s the original mother of all…”I tried to think how I might begin an answer. I did not find myself declaring belief in the God of “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Nor did I write belief in the “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The first image that came to my mind on reading this is my sense that God is the “Operating System” of the universe, in whom—or which—we live and move and have our being. Within the system is the mysterious process we know as life, of which we are—amazingly—a conscious, sentient part. Already I am over my head and admire those who dare to put down and publish an opinion about the Divine.“God is a word used to point to what will always be beyond words…”
“Mother nature is the great nurturer…”
“The Divine is the seed father of all living entities…”
“God is not a person, God is Spirit, The Spirit that creates things out of itself…”
“You are an enormous mystery…”
“I find God in my garden…”
“I do believe in the God of the Bible, I believe that He is holy and cannot tolerate
sin.”“Life is true purpose, which is the basis of Creative Life Spirit…”
“The Divine is energy, the energy that the cosmos is composed of…”
“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao…”
“I never think about God as a ‘being,’ a ‘who,” or even a “what…”
“God is that sense of following inner and outer nature, of observing what’s
happening, what announces itself.”“God is the octave. More particularly, God is the mathematics ‘behind’ the
octave…”