Heart of Matter: “Preaching a Sky God”
July 2
“If religion is a cosmic and personal phenomenon and God symbolizes the interior depth of consciousness, then how do we still preach and teach a sky God?”
Ilia Delio, The Not-Yet God, Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Relational Whole
2 de julio
“Si la religión es un fenómeno cósmico y personal y Dios simboliza la profundidad interior de la conciencia, entonces ¿cómo es que todavía predicamos y enseñamos a un Dios celeste?”
Ilia Delio, The Not-Yet God, Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Relational Whole
What is being asked?
What is being moved?
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Heart of Matter: “The Divine Entanglement”
“While panentheism is a helpful concept, the language of pantheism and panentheism is based on concepts of ‘being’ and ‘nature’ that can lead to misguided images of distinct beings in…
“…(H)ow do we still teach and preach a sky God?” One might pose the question in an alternative manner: should we move beyond and if so how.
It would seem that real enlightenment, the test of truth, requires that all relevant elements of a question are considered properly and integrated in appropriate balance, free of bias. Ironically, the elements have been with us but preached and taught, even imposed, without proper proper balance and with bias.
‘Bias’ is a lens that selects, distorts, limits and stagnates. “Knowledge” no longer begets new knowledge. It must resist to survive. Body is disparaged to highlight spirit; the elan of sexuality is castigated to rationalize chastity. Is this not the existential “original sin”, warned against by the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil”? The ‘war on secularism’ which preoccupies so many hierarchs is a prime example. “Evangelization” in this context, this mentality, is inevitably ‘crusade’. We have perverted Genesis I, because Genesis II supports our historical bias. We elevate the limitation of language to support patriarchy: God is not only ‘sky’ but ‘male’.
Unfortunately, reaction to bias often results in its own bias and consequently a new ‘imbalance’ and the imposition of a new pseudo ‘logic’ that must be maintained by authority rather than reason or conviction.
To paraphrase “Pogo”, we are doing the New Testament with an Old Testament mind. To illustrate, the Gospel of John begins with the same words as Genesis: “In the beginning…”. John is continuity elevated with the particular evolutionary reality that Jesus represents: “…was the Word….and the Word became flesh….”. Incarnation. Intelligence itself enfleshed in time. Intelligence that embraces and includes the “Word” and the He who even I can relate to. “Intelligence” tells us that “Our Father” is a concession to the limitation of language; “Sky God” is as real as the ‘sun rising and setting’.
Intelligence is the door to science of the earth and the cosmos. Intelligence, not absolutism is the route to the Word and the word (as in McLuhan’s preoccupation with incarnation: the medium is the message). The challenge to Church is to serve incarnate intelligence both divine and temporal, to facilitate their ‘meeting’. To do so it must learn, to teach and preach the dissection of bias and stereotype, be courageous to repair their consequences and be prepared for new ‘revelation’, to recapture incarnation.
“God symbolizes the interior depth of consciousness”? I would appreciate an expansion of this concept. It seems to me that God does not symbolize anything. In my ‘literalist’ mind, that would imply a preeminence of created consciousness over the Creator? There may be some benefit from perceiving ‘the interior depth of consciousness’ as symbolic of God though, but even there, it is more than a symbol it is in its essence a particularly significant participation in and ‘pathway toward’ God. Help.
In this context, I would like to remember the Portuguese Jesuit, Luís Archer.
Between 1943 and 1960 he completed his degrees in biological sciences, philosophy and theology. In 1964, he enrolled at Georgetown University to study Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, having completed his PhD in Molecular Genetics at that institution in 1967.
Some, upon listening to his serene, well-founded and tolerant public interventions, noted with admiration the tranquility with which Archer, at the end of an intense day of work and scientific discussion, took off his laboratory coat to get dressed and celebrate the liturgy, right that there was no conflict or incompatibility between the two converging worlds.
Page 26 of your new book you say you’ll refer to Jung and Teilhard as pantheistic. I hope this is a typographical error. I don’t see either of them as pantheistic. Please explain.
“Sky” is a synonym for what “is out there” . the great beyond, et. al. and……it is so easy to attribute “God” to this place. And, in discussing God as the maker of al things seen and unseen (Apostles Creed). The student’s next question is – naturally – where is God. Personally, I would answer “God is everywhere”.
From this point, the student is likely to ask “What is God like?” And, now the reader has an open field which I will not explore.
The key is to engender a curiosity as to where we came from. IMHO
Is this saying God is a symbol, or that God is both transcendent as well as imminent? The distinction is important.
What s being moved? The consciousness of Beingness is being unveiled. In this phenomena only humans are free to resist, that we are doing, individally and collectively. Our fear drives this.
We are being asked to believe our God-hearts, have faith, let go, and love the person next to us. Love is our salvation.
Religion persists in preaching the sky god myth as it takes away responsibility for engaging in complex earthly decisions that build community.
I gravitated to Quakerism after Catholicism mainly for the silence and the simple message that ‘ there is that if God in everyone.’ Catches has done a poor job of teaching the Trinity and how a Trinidadian God – by nature, by ‘design’ is in relationship with everything and everyone. When human beings experience true, unconditional love, then we want to radiate that love in kind.
This question relates to things I often think about. So many of our prayers and other statements refer to God as “up” in heaven or up somewhere. This still seems to reflect old Biblical cosmology looking to some overhead “firmament.” Indeed do we not believe God is somehow everywhere?