Reality and Me

The Cosmos or Universe with its evolving and ever changing galaxies and stars and even life on this Planet Earth has been gradually and increasingly discovered by us humans, especially in the last several hundred years as a totally interrelated whole that we call Reality. It’s all around us. We are embedded in it. We are particular human beings evolved to this moment of time and place. Each of us has a capability of awareness of self, of a unique identity, and an awareness of the “me” within. For me. I also experience something “more” than the observed reality, and that to me is God.  For me, God is that reality. but also transcends reality. The entire Universe is sacred.  Reality is that part of God that we can see, that is gradually being revealed to us humans.  God being in that Reality means that God is also within me and has been all my life.

The stories in the Bible and in the sacred books of other religions are the record of God’s revelation of Reality to all of us humans. And there have been special humans throughout history with special gifts of understanding and feelings and closeness to God who have in themselves revealed God to us. For those us as Christians, Jesus Christ is the one who shows us how to be fully human.  The disciples described it as the resurrected Jesus who entered their lives, transforming them, and it is the resurrected Jesus who enters our lives today to be God’s living and transforming presence.  Those words are not words of explanation.  They are part of what I can only call a  “wonder-full” mystery.

We humans have also evolved only recently, and we still have many of the strong protective instincts of our animal ancestors within us. But we as humans have also evolved with a frontal cortex in our brain that provides us with awareness of ourselves and others together with feelings of compassion, justice, and love, plus giving us the capability of choice in controlling our animal instincts. But our world situation today shows us that we have yet to evolve very far from those animal instincts.

That is our challenge as humans: to let that presence of God within us speak to us, through us, and beyond us. We are the ones to care for others over our self-centeredness. We are the ones to care for the Earth over our greediness. We are the ones to recognize that we are all dependent on one another, and we are the ones to see that we are a part of all of life, and that we are an integral part of the entire Universe!

As a species, homo sapiens, we now know that God in Reality is telling us that we must change our ways of interacting with each other and with all the other life around us, or of how we are treating the Earth and our environment that is the very source of our being. We can no longer ignore our polluting of the oceans and of the atmosphere, nor ignore our destruction of the rain forests that are the source of the oxygen so essential in the air we breath, nor ignore the rapid consumption of resources from the earth itself. This has become a moral question. Each of us must accept our role in reality. It is only through us that God can speak. Will we listen and act? The alternative may well be the extinction of our species!

Loren Bullock
December, 7, 2017