Brian’s Reflection: Monday, February 9, 2009

Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.

                                       …..

The experience of God, or in any case the
possibility of experiencing God, is innate.

- Alice Walker, author, born on this day, 1944


Alice Walker. A remarkable woman. But, I choose her today because she verbalizes a “reality” about “God”. A “reality” that I believe. And a “reality” about the manner in which “God” works.

Her comment about having “brought God in with me” is a beautiful expression of the meaning of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation – “Emmanuel”, God with us. Most Christians don’t take this seriously - that “God” has always been with us, within us. There is no such thing as “humanity” separate from “God”. God did not come to dwell within us at the moment of the Biblical story of the birth of Jesus to the woman Mary. That lovely story is an ageless expression of the mysterious truth that the human race became just that when human Consciousness “knew” who and what we truly are.

Alice Walker is correct, I believe. To “experience God” is co-terminus with the emergence of human consciousness. It is innate – because there is no such thing as “humanness” without the indwelling of the energy that generates Being.

The great sadness is that the human race falls so short of its destiny, its Reality. This is no one’s “fault” but our own. We are free beings. We can choose our paths, our behaviour, our beliefs. Thinking anthropomorphically, there is nothing that so saddens God’s heart than that we human beings persist in setting our sights so low. We were made to be “little lower than the angels” ….. but we most often have chosen ingloriousness.

“Faith” is about, simply, choosing what we shall believe as the guiding principles of our lives, and to believe in the possibility of their coming to fruition. Christianity asks us to choose to be “like God” – created in the image of Unconditional Love, and to live out this truth daily, to the best of our abilities and by the work of that great Mystery called “Divine Grace”.

Any understanding of “God”, any concept of the “nature” of God, we “bring in”. These understandings and concepts come from nowhere but from our hearts and minds and spirits. For this is where “God dwells” - not anywhere “out there”, but rather “in there”. The implication of the doctrine of the Incarnation is that “God” has no home but “in us”.

If we seek “God”, including the meaning of our Life, then we must look within. To the Innateness. If “God” is not innate, it is a false “God” we seek.

Brian+