To me God is not “out there” or “up there”, but rather is in the reality that I see all around me, as well as in the “me” that is within me, identifying me as a part of all of life. What then is prayer for me? I can no longer think of it as request or petition for someone to fix things, or someone to intervene for me or to change or to protect me from some natural process.
First of all, prayer to me is awareness – an awareness of that inward “me,” that mystical sense that I am a part of something more than my body or even my thoughts. An awareness that God is within me. But it is also an awareness of those around me, recognizing that they also have an inner awareness, that God is within them too. It is in those relationships that I belong to a community, a community that includes all of life. I am an integral part of this living planet we call Earth – even a part of the galaxies and stars and the entire universe . I am made of atoms and molecules that were part of the stars themselves. I am part of something unimaginably grand. I belong!
With this awareness comes reverence – reverence for the God within me, reverence for all of life, reverence for the universe itself. And with reverence comes feelings – feelings of compassion, feelings of concern, feelings of love. Prayer still includes the traditional components of adoration and thanksgiving, but not to an external being asking for intervention. Prayer is a time of contemplation, a time of acceptance, a time of listening. Prayer is in those moments of awareness of the love and the suffering in the community around me, as well as an awareness of the larger communities of human beings and their sufferings – being aware that we are all related to and dependent on each other. And I am beginning to realize that shared awareness of God within us can very well have a healing power within us all, a power that can change us.
Prayer is also a time of confession and commitment. Prayer can give us good feelings, but it should also make us uncomfortable. There is too much suffering in our world, much of which is our own doing, and we human beings are the only ones who can actively respond to that suffering. Prayer becomes complete only when I am prodded and reminded that it is I who must act, must do, must respond, must wash more feet, must strive to become more fully human. And those actions themselves become prayer.
I am all too aware of how often I am falling short of these words that I have written.
Loren Bullock
revised August 9, 2013, September 22, 2016
(I still consider this as a draft, a work in progress)
Excerpt from Val Webb’s Stepping Out With the Sacred – Human Attempts to Engage the Divine Continuum Publishing Group, 2010. Chapter 16, “Engaging the Sacred in the World” pp. 208-10, 219-20.
“Jesus shows us how to live abundantly in this world. Some people are so caught up with the idea that Jesus died for our sins (something Jesus did not spell out in the forms it takes in traditional Christianity) that they weigh Jesus’ worth only in terms of his death. The theological question becomes, did Jesus, and those who followed him to death for a cause, live in order to die, or did they die because they chose to live abundantly. When Jesus is valued only as a man born to die as a Divine pawn, we have totally missed the way he lived.
“Sally McFague calls for a whole new way of living in this world and engaging the Sacred here and now. It is not about longing for our “real” home in heaven as if we are somehow trapped in this earthly home, the Gnostic idea the early Church rejected. It is not about wallowing in our sinfulness and fretting about our personal salvation in order to keep our name on the heavenly list and ensure that as many others as possible get on that list, even when ignoring their sufferings in real life. “We have a place and a vocation: our place is planet earth, and our vocation is working with God toward the flourishing of all life in our home”, McFague says. “If salvation is living appropriately on our planet, living as the one creature who can consciously help bring about God’s beloved community, then sin is living in way opposed to that goal. Living a lie is living a selfish life; living the truth is living a deified life. The first assumes that life is found in the self; the second, that life is found in God.” [McFague Life Abundant, p. 20]
“Such thinking presupposes that the Sacred is within the world, rather that located off somewhere else. It focuses on the Divine Energy, infilling and energizing everything as its Ground of Being. “There is not a single place in all the corners of the world”, Shinto teaching says, “where God is absent.” [Omoto Kyo, Michi-no-Shiori, quoted in Krishna, One Earth, One Sky, One Humankind, p. 20] “Heaven” – where God’s realm is – is here and now, the Divine is within us as John’s Gospel says. Every crevice, every person, and every event is filled with the Divine-at work in what Thomas Merton described as “the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it or not.” [quoted in King, The Search for Spirituality, p. 78] Religious scholar Ursula King prefers this metaphor of the”cosmic dance animated by the life-giving breath of the Spirit” to that of ‘journey’, the more common description for the spiritual life. Dance is not solitary, and it is also accompanied by music and rhythm, making it more dynamic:
While we dance, we also touch each other closely. We enjoy the sheer presence of another person, grow closer physically and emotionally, feel the sense of energy, delight, and fun that accompany the exuberance of dancing. Thus it seems an appropriate metaphor to speak about the dance of life that involves body, mind, and soul – our whole being. And life’s dance is always interwoven with the dance of the Spirit. [King The Search for Spirituality p. 79]
This move from the solitary journey to the intense, colorful, involvement with others in the dance switches on lights in our minds and turns us from contemplating ourselves in our solitary corner to facing a world that demands our presence and invites us into the action.
The largest setting for life’s dance is the vast web of life, the continually ongoing process of universal becoming. We are a part of the immense rhythm of being born and dying, integral to the evolutionary history of the cosmos itself. [King p. 79]
The answer to where and how we engage the Divine unfolds before us, free of sacred props, idols, saints, and institutions. ‘The one who is more awesome than all the galaxies in the universe and nearer to us than our own breath” is inescapably part of this dance in which we all whirl and laugh. [King p.79]
“In contemporary cosmology, where everything is engaged in the universe’s interconnected dance of life, we can no longer name evil as the work of an extraneous Devil or something “acquired” by humans through some ancient fruit-eating story, and thus avoid taking full responsibility for it. We can no longer shrug off injustice here and now by saying there will be justice in heaven. We need to enter into the messiness of the world as co-workers with the Sacred for transformation, choosing, in each moment, wholeness for everything in the universe rather than alienation that leads to destruction and violence. If we believe in something we call the Sacred, contemporary cosmology tells us that It has to be part of this one indivisible, dynamic whole where there are no dancers, only the dance.
“As to what happens beyond death, this too must be described within this cosmic whole. The Hebrew creation story said that we came from dust and return to dust, something they observed in real life. The new cosmology tells us that we came, like everything else, from stardust. If that is where we return, we will remain part of the cosmic whole, whatever that might mean. As Albert Einstein said, “I feel myself so much a part of everything living that I am not the least concerned with the beginning or ending of the concrete existence of any one person in this eternal flow.” [Spong Eternal Life p 29] To me speculation about life beyond this world is unfruitful because we cannot know what is beyond death, just as we cannot imagine what “before birth” was like. This is not lack of faith – it is reality. It is not a denial of anything but openness to that which we cannot know. . . Those who long for death wish to be “with God”, but that is already the reality for those who see the Sacred in this world.
“In his book on eternal life, Bishop Spong says: “I prepare for death by living. My commitment is to live as completely as I can and to drink in the sweetness which that particular day has to offer. While I am alive, I will plumb life’s depths, scale life’s heights, and share my life and my love with those who are fellow pilgrims with me in my time and space. When I die, I will rest my case in the “being” of which I am a part. That is where faith has taken me” [Spong Eternal Life p 211].”
February 12, 2011
I have recently been rereading Freeman Dyson’s Disturbing The Universe, first published in 1980 but still amazingly current. Dyson is now 88, a renowned theoretical physicist and mathematician, for many years as Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., retiring in 1994. He is famous for his work in quantum mechanics, nuclear weapons design and policy, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He was the winner in 2000 of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. This is not a book about physics, but about life and religion and about us, for Dyson is a devout Christian. Amazon has inexpensive copies available of a 2001 reissue. His Infinite in All Directions (1988) is also outstanding. Here are some quotes from Freeman Dyson. They are enough to get us thinking for today.
“Both as a scientist and as a religious person, I am accustomed to living with uncertainty. Science is exciting because it is full of unsolved mysteries, and religion is exciting for the same reason. The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe.”
“God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.”
“Sharing the food is to me more important than arguing about beliefs. Jesus, according to the gospels, thought so too.”
“I do not claim any ability to read God’s mind. I am sure of only one thing. When we look at the glory of stars and galaxies in the sky and the glory of forests and flowers in the living world around us, it is evident that God loves diversity. Perhaps the universe is constructed according to a principle of maximum diversity.”
“The principle of maximum diversity says that the laws of nature, and the initial conditions at the beginning of time, are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth. This is the confession of faith of a scientific heretic. Perhaps I may claim as evidence for progress in religion the fact that we no longer burn heretics.”
Loren Bullock
rev. 11/19/2011
Organized Religion
Organized religion! What a fearful phrase this is when one stops to think about it, and how calamitous that Christians should have to come to find themselves committed to its defense. That the church has a concern with religion – or with any other aspect of life – no one would doubt. That it must be organized – and efficiently organized – is equally clear. But that Christianity should be equated in the public mind, inside as well as outside the Church, with ‘organized religion’ merely shows how far we have departed from the New Testament. For the last thing the Church exists for is an organization for the religious. Its charter is to be the servant of the world.
Honest To God by John A.T. Robinson (1963), p. 133
Religion’s Task
The task of religion is not to turn us into proper believers. It is to deepen the personal within us, to embrace the power of life, to expand our consciousness that we might see thing our eyes do not normally see. It is to seek a humanity that is not governed by the need for security, but is expressed in the ability to give ourselves away.
Eternal Life by John Shelby Spong (2009), p. 186
Stephen Hawking, British theoretical physicist and author of A Brief History of Time (1988), was diagnosed with degenerative motor neuron disease at age 21. He has a history of drawing criticism for his comments on religion. His 2010 book The Grand Design provoked a backlash, including chief rabbi Isaac Lord Sacks, for arguing there was no need for a divine force to explain the creation of the universe. Hawking did it again recently in an interview published May 16, 2011, in the Guardian newspaper:
“I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I am in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computer parts. That is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
What Hawking is referring to is a very old yet still common picture of God as an external being somewhere (heaven) who some time ago manipulated something and “created” the universe and life and us. And at times he interjects himself again into the workings of his creation. This is a recurring picture of God throughout the Bible, especially in the earlier stories. Moreover, the vocabulary of the Bible uses words of an ancient three-tiered cosmology of (1) heaven “up there” where the gods live, (2) earth “here’ where we and the animals live, and (3) the underworld “down below,” all places relatively near by. That cosmology has now been replaced with a universe of vast distances and time spans, of galaxies and stars, of DNA and the evolution of life. As a result, more recent theology together with modern biblical scholarship presents us with a changing understanding of that earlier picture of God and even of the Bible itself.
We speak of the Bible as “the word of God.” But no longer does that necessarily mean the Bible as the “words” of God. It is increasingly recognized that the words of the Bible are human words with all their limitations of language. But behind those words are very real God experiences by human beings over hundreds of years – experiences that still continue to this day. The stories in the Bible are thus human attempts to interpret those experiences, and to find meaning and direction for their own lives. And that meaning and direction can still guide us today. But we no longer should take the stories as literal history or biography, although there is clearly history and biography underneath them.
That is unsettling to those who still see the Bible as the literal, inerrant, words of God, and accept heaven as an after-life reward and hell as a punishment for our behavior in “this life.” But I understand and recognize that religion is a human construct that developed when humans evolved with a self-consciousness and a self awareness in space and time that also included an awareness that we will die. Religion became essential for humans to cope with that awareness. But even within our new cosmology, our religion still insists that there is more to life and more to me than just atoms and energy. God is more than a divine force. So is there still a place for the idea of heaven?
Heaven was considered as the dwelling place of God, and so for us as humans, heaven was the place for us to be “with God” after we die. But we can no longer locate heaven within space and time any more than we can locate God within space and time. Yet space and time are an integral part of the universe of stars and galaxies and also of life itself. To me, it is no longer meaningful to say that God created this universe, but rather God IS that creation. God is in the structure, in the energy, the motion, in the mathematical relationships that make up the universe. And God is also in life itself, in the “dance of the atoms” that make up each unit of life – even including me!
And so for me, heaven does exist! It is not a place. It is in the love that we experience in relationships. Relationships within family and all of life. Relationships with nature with all its complexity and order and beauty. It is in the love that we can experience each day if we open our eyes and ears and hearts to it. And it is through that love that we see and hear and feel and know and experience God.
So yes, Stephen Hawking, heaven is not a future place for our used computer parts. It is that part of me – and you – that exists right now and is eternal.
Loren Bullock
May 24, 2011
For most of our human ancestors, it was a mysterious and unpredictable world that they lived in. It could only be understood in terms of gods or God acting and intervening and affecting us and our lives. As a result, humans lived in a more or less “religious culture” in which everything was related to religious experience and religious explanations and religious controls. People lived their daily lives very conscious, even fearful, of God’s controlling presence and effect on their every action. God was the “explanation” of what they saw around them and of what was happening to them. Within this religious culture, it is not surprising that much of the art that developed was religious in nature and theme. For example, in Europe by the Middle Ages, paintings, sculpture, and music predominantly used Biblical scenes and texts and were usually created by and for the Church. It was part of the total religious experience of that time.
But within the past two to three hundred years, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Hawking and others have fundamentally changed the way we understand and look at the world. Forces, energy, quarks, and DNA have given us a new and amazing and coherent picture of our world as we now see and understand it. And for many, God is no longer needed as an “explanation.” As a result, many look at Raphael’s paintings and listen to Bach’s music differently – without the close association with religious meaning and understanding.
Are we perhaps missing something today? Are we unable to see or unable to hear much of what is in those great artistic works? A whole new school of “art for art’s sake” has grown up in our current culture. We go to museums and concert halls rather than churches to see and hear these masterpieces. How do they speak to us today?
For those of us who are trying to live a Christian life, what we see and hear with our physical senses is only part of the experiencing of our world, for we recognize that there is “more.” The experience of knowing God in all creation, of knowing God in Jesus in history, and of knowing God as spirit within each of us makes a difference as we look and listen and touch. “Seeing and hearing religiously” means that we are actively participating in the experience as a God-centered person reaching out to our full potential as a human being.
Thus with our eyes, we see God’s glory around us, whether a woodland spring, or a majestic oak tree, or a starry night, or the panorama of a Grand Canyon. Or see the touch of God’s hand in the brush strokes in a painting, or recognize the pointing of a church spire, or sense God’s spirit when we look into another person’s face, or accept the smile of a baby as God’s smile. We hear God’s angels singing directly to us whenever we hear Mozart or Bach, knowing that their music was created as a gift to God.
Loren Bullock
June 24, 2011
“Deer in the forest caring for their young; the strong, well-clad, well-fed bears; the lively throng of squirrels; the blessed birds, great and small, stirring and sweetening the groves; and the clouds of happy insects filling the sky with [a] joyous hum as part and parcel of the down-pouring sunshine . . . the plant people, and the glad streams singing their way to the sea. . . . When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.” [John Muir, Notebook, July 27, 1869]
On that “summer afternoon in the High Sierras, John Muir, the California naturalist wrote {of} an intuition that has been a cornerstone of conservation thinking ever since. . . . Muir realized that each part of nature was dependent on other parts, and that those parts were connected to yet other parts, in a network that, if taken to its logical conclusion, would encompass the whole.
“Interestingly, the same idea seems also to apply to cities. Each citizen is dependent on other citizens, like the species in nature, and those citizens and their interdependencies taken together make the city itself. A city without its millions of connections, formed of the informal one-on-one relationships conducted in the course of daily life, begins to decay. John Donne, the seventeenth-century poet, had the same idea, though in a different context when he wrote: ‘No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’”
The above paragraphs are from Mannahatta, A Natural History of New York City, by Eric W. Sanderson, New York 2009, pp 171, 190.
In this book, Sanderson has recreated Manhattan as it looked in 1609 when Henry Hudson first entered New York harbor. The above quotation is from the chapter in which he describes the computational model he has developed to show all the connections within nature – trees, animals, people, streams, hills, soil, etc, which are necessary to describe the whole. And as he indicates, it applies to us today.
Do we not also see the larger picture here as to who we are? It is in these vast networks of relationships among all things, all living things, our earth, our universe, that we see the hand of our God. And as humans, the wonderful mystery is that we can even experience that touch of God within us – in our own relationships to everyone and everything around us. We are not alone. We are part of something grand. We are connected.
Loren Bullock
July 18, 2009
We Methodists have a very special heritage in John Wesley’s story of an experience that changed his life. In 1738, John, an ordained priest in the Church of England, had just returned to London, discouraged and depressed after two years of a failed mission to Savannah, Geogia, in the American colonies. On Wednesday, May 24, 1738, he was in London – and here are his own words from his Journal for that day:
“In the evening I went very unwillingly to a [Moravian] society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter to nine while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.
“I began to pray with all my might for those who had in a most especial manner despitefully used me and persecuted me. I then testified openly to all there what I now felt in my heart.”
And the next day, in his Journal, he continued,
“Being again at St. Paul’s in the afternoon, I could taste the good word of God in the anthem which began, ‘My song shall be always of the loving kindness of the Lord . . .”
It was that heart-warming experience that changed his preaching and changed England. His Methodist Societies multiplied in villages and towns all over England. When his detractors prevented him from preaching in the churches, he began to preach outdoors. And Methodist Societies spread in the colonies. In Baltimore, the Lovely Lane Methodist Meeting house was built in 1774, at what is now 206 East Redwood Street, near present Mechanics Hall. Ten years later on December 24, 1784, with Wesley’s approval, eighty-three of the American Methodist itinerant preachers met in the Lovely Lane Meeting House for the famous Christmas Conference creating a new denomination, called the Methodist Episcopal Church, with Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury as co-superintendents – who later assumed the titles of Bishop. In 1786 the Lovely Lane congregation moved to nearby Light Street, and in 1884, 1½ miles north on St. Paul Street, the large First Methodist Episcopal Church was built, in a Romanesque style with a tall square bell tower all in gray granite. It is today known as the Lovely Lane United Methodist Church, the “Mother Church of American Methodism.” [The “United” comes from the 1968 merger of the Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren Churches.]
John Wesley’s heart-warming experience is still key for Methodists. It is the reason our Methodist emblem has the tall red flame alongside the cross. It reminds us of God’s flaming presence within each of us and gives each of us the charge to “wash more feet.”
Loren Bullock
November 21, 2011
BACKGROUND: John Wesley in Savannah 1736-1737
In his Journal, in May 1738, John Wesley refers to “those who had in a most especial manner despitefully used me and persecuted me.” This undoubtedly refers to the happenings in Savannah that forced him to leave to return to England at the end of 1737. They were clearly on his mind when he went to the meeting in Aldersgate Street. Here is what happened, much of which he described in his Journal.
In Savannah, Wesley was to be a missionary to the native Americans and pastor of the Savannah Church of England parish. It was a difficult assignment. Wesley’s stiff high churchmanship met with little success with the native Americans and also antagonized the local parish. During the four-month voyage from England to Savannah (October 17, 1735 – February 8, 1736), Wesley became romantically involved with Sophia Hopkey who was returning to Savannah on the same ship. On the advice of a Moravian minister in whom he confided, Wesley broke off the relationship with Sophia who subsequently married a William Williamson. But that was not the end of his involvement with Sophia.
In Savannah, Sophia of course was one of Wesley’s parishioners. Things came to a head when Wesley refused Sophia the sacrament of Holy Communion, but would not publish his reasons, thus marring her reputation in the community. Sophia and her new husband filed suit, and a warrant was issued against Wesley for defaming Sophia in public without due cause. That Sophia was the niece of the Savannah’s chief magistrate, Thomas Causton, probably contributed to the action. Wesley was arrested and brought before a bailiff, but believing the matter to be ecclesiastical, Wesley did not acknowledge the court’s power. Wesley appeared before several courts, and when Causton indicated that he would continue charges, Wesley made it known that he intended to return to England. Williamson joined in raising charges against Wesley to prevent him from leaving the colony, but on November 3, 1737, starting before dawn, Wesley managed to escape by walking four days with three other men the forty miles to Beaufort , South Carolina, then getting a boat to Charleston, South Carolina, where he took a ship on November 22, 1737, arriving in England a little over two months later on February 1, 1738.
No wonder that he was discouraged and depressed when he dropped in at Aldersgate three months later in May.
Grief is a human emotion that all of us can experience at one time or another. It is an intense feeling, usually of loss of a loved one – a parent, a child, a friend. It can also result from a misfortune or injury. It is very personal. The word grief comes from the Latin word gravis, meaning “weighty.” Grief is indeed weighty. It can weigh us down. It creates a sadness, and can even cause depression. It hurts. And for some people, it can last a long time. We probably never “get over” our grief, although in time, the intensity of it can diminish as we “move on” with our lives.
Grief is part of being human. Since it is caused by the loss of a relationship, the most effective solace probably comes from other relationships, from friends and family especially. And since grief is closely related to memories, new relationships and new experiences that create new memories can often help to assuage the hurt. We proceed to live with loss, with grief. It is a human experience.
This raises a question. Does God feel grief? Does God grieve? Does God feel sadness?
In spite of God’s transcendence – his total “otherness” – we are compelled to describe God in human terms, to give him human attributes. The early Bible stories tell of his walking and talking to humans. We hear of his anger, of his jealousy. We describe his actions as being from the hand of God. We even tend to picture him as Charleton Heston! Later stories tell of God’s love for us. He is to be thought of as a father. Can we also describe God as grieving?
A grieving God! Are we just giving him another human attribute? Or is it not the other way around! Grief is an attribute of God that he has also implanted into us. There is evidence that animals also show grief. It is a part of the relationships that are a part of life itself. As living creatures we are bound up in relationships to others, and it is in relationships that we can see and feel and understand God. For God’s relationship to us is all tied up in our relationships with those around us. And when any relationship is broken, there is grief. Even our relationship with God is too easily broken by our own thoughts and actions. So God too must be grieving at all broken relationships. My own grief must pale against the grief that God feels.
When a child dies, we still hear the expression, “It was God’s will!” Nonsense! God’s natural laws are at work, but God doesn’t “will” that child to die. God grieves along with me. I am not alone in my grief. That makes all the difference to me as I deal with my grief. God shares my grief!
Grief comes because of relationships, and love is the ultimate expression of relationship. Grief, then, is a companion to love. They go together. Without love, there would be no grief. It is only through grief, therefore, that we can fully understand love. And by recognizing God’s grief, we can also begin to understand the amazing mystery of God’s love.
Loren Bullock
December 19, 2003
M Loren Bullock 