Searcing for God # 47

I am usually ‘slow’ to join the party of conventional thought, perception, attitude and belief.

I have resisted as long as I possibly can, denouncing the theology of Original Sin, the belief that all of humanity is cursed with the stain of evil, apparently justified by the Augustinian interpretation, supported by others, that The Fall is the moral, ethical, theological and spiritual starting point of and for humanity.

The thought… ‘how can both the cliché that ‘God don’t make no junk’ and that God created us in his image be congruent with the notion of Original Sin?… has rambled through my cranium for decades. Some, likely mostly men, attempted to square that circle many centuries ago…..a project that, at least finally for this scribe, no longer holds either water or credibility.

Defining sin is one of  the most problematic and enigmatic challenges facing the human race, if it needs a formal, written, proclaimed and punished definition at all. And the implications, repercussions, residual fears, anxieties and self-loathings that have at least a portion of their seeding and gestation in the theology of Original Sin could legitimately been considered to lie at the heart of human history.

Strewn with the blood and bodies, the ink and weaponry of hate, contempt, jealousy, deceit, excess ambition, neurosis and even psychosis, history forms a very dark mirror into which we all have to peer, whether or not we are comfortable with the challenge. Empirical and literal narratives, written primarily by victors in all forms of human conflict, comprise the archives, the tombstones, the museums the libraries and both the human collective conscious and collective unconscious.

We each are awash in blood, shame, infamy, deception of both self and others, and are hourly, daily, monthly and yearly attempting to shed the stain and the shame and the guilt of those wounds in a process that seems only to enhance our need for and even obsession for more ‘self-justification. The number and degree of human conflicts seem only to escalate as our awareness of their nefarious nature is enhanced significantly by the 24-7-365 obsession we all have with the purveyors of what is called ‘news’.

And what if we are ensnared on our own petard: the petard of a theological notion that is both errant, unjustifiable and unsustainable?

OF course, the establishment Christian churches could not and would not accede to anything close to a positive concurrence with that ‘what if’. Traditional Christian theology is steeped in the archetype of the Crucifixion and the salvation from sin in and through the shedding of the blood and life of Jesus. The premise holds as the imprimatur of and for those who ‘believe’ in the historical and the mythical iterations of the New Testament gospels. And the theology, bridging various denominations in the Christian world, has been taught, re-taught,  preached, and re-preached by those who have qualified, been certified and ordained as clergy in the various ecclesial institutions. Belief, the concept of accepting the truth of the story, the implications of being saved from our personal sins, and the testifying to that faith has been the hallmark of both protestant and Roman Catholic religions for centuries.

Supplement that forgiveness with the added commitment to spend eternity in heaven with God and all others who have ‘been saved’ and/or ‘have converted’ to the theology of ‘resurrection, rebirth, transformation and eternal life. The package is a highly radioactive, seductive, provocative and powerful impulsion for many millions who seek to reconcile their lives with God, in and through their faith in Jesus Christ Resurrected.

Having attended hundreds of church services that breathed and sang, nodded and even applauded this story, never once have I been prompted or felt an impulse to take that walk to the front of the sanctuary, or the stadium to identify with those who were demonstrating their ‘conversion.’ Many moments through eight decades, I have wondered if the ‘imposter’ archetype applies to me for my resistance to the theology and the practice and the social blessing that ensues such public conversions.

Now, at the place where the ineffability and unknowability of God, the mystery of God has a prominent place in my thought-feeling-experience-perception of the universe, I am feeling slightly less ‘imposterish’ and am a little more open to the notion that not knowing about the certitude of such a salvation process, linked to a privatized notion of sin, while the world drowns in its/our own self-sabotage, I wonder if we need to take a step back from the urgency of such a dramatic and, for those who have entered and confirmed their ‘conversion’ certainty, and re-think the notion that salvation for the whole world may not have been intended to have a one-person-by-one-person application.

What if a gestalt, a collective conscious and collective unconscious awareness that we indeed are ‘in this together’ and face what can only be described as an existential crisis, (even for those who are not existentialists)? What if rather than Original Sin, we are empowered with, by and from a kind of innate inheritance that rather than claiming to know God, claims rather to know ‘evil’.

The phrase, you will know when the ‘right person comes along’ or  ‘when the house feels right’ or when ‘things are in a flow’ have a ring and a perception that something beyond cognition, intellect and even social confirmation lingers in each situation, if we are open and confident enough to be ready to ‘see’ it and to ‘respond’ to it? Our lives are much more than our answers on examinations, and diseases in our gut, and stipends on our trust accounts, and births, confirmations and marriages on our ancestry pages. There is another ‘phase’ or ‘hidden mystery’ to which we may or may not have conscious ‘access’ to its meaning and/or purpose.

And given that the universe of belief in a deity itself, is a stretch far beyond our cognitive, perceptive, emotive and social consciousness, this ‘otherness’ of some kind of synchronicity, ‘stars-aligning’ or improbable surprises over which we have neither control nor comprehension, seems to have some ‘connection’ or relationship to whatever or whomever of however that deity might be.

The church as leader, followed by a plethora  of public institutions, academic faculties, professional practitioners, and rules and regulations have together formed a formidable phalanx of warriors to combat evil. And, as the cliché asks, ‘How is that monstrous edifice working for you?

Has the Original Sin concept not become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Are we not issuing evidence in torrents and tsunamis that we are capable of such heinous, detestable and hateful evil, some of which is apparently so egregious as to have been both untried and unexpected, and for which we are certainly ill-prepared?

Blaming the other guy, as is our shared complicity, is generating precisely the inverse of what it is intended to generate…more intensity in both the evil and in the self-declared impunity for those embedded in the evils. It emboldens those engaged in the worst evils, and fails to take account of our shared conviction that only ‘others’ can and will commit evil.

We may certainly not have access to the mind of God, although some profess to have ‘insider’ information and credible information as they see it. What we do have, however, and this may cause discomfort, anxiety and even significant distress, is a kind of inner awareness to recognize, to name, to identify, and to confront evil, whether it is originated by us ourselves, or by others.

And that innate certainty, a certainty which knows neither national, nor religious, nor ideological, nor generational, nor cultural nor ethnic boundaries, could just be the common trait, bond, shared identity, and transformative ‘perception’ and awareness that we all share. If we were each and everyone, everywhere, all ages, social and academic and economic and political statuses, all faiths, to acknowledge that inherent metaphoric DNA, cand when we ‘see something say something’ a reductionistic cliché for bumper sticker purposes, we could even shift the playing field from favouring those who are determined to do evil to a field that makes doing evil very difficult.

Instead of the occasional ‘whistle-blower’ for whom we have to institute laws for protection from the revenge of the establishment whose evil they have and will continue to expose, we could all accept the challenge, and the opportunity to engage in a different, certainly unconventional by the last two thousand years of history, way of seeing ourselves, and the evils that surround us and threaten to take us down, every day.

This vision is not a political movement! It is not a denominational conversion call! It is not an ideological deposition for the ‘plaintiff’ or a counter-argument for the defence. It is not an academically certified, credentialled and verified degree project for which one must pass through the academic institutional hoops. None of us is ‘unqualified,’ ‘inadequate,’ ‘uncertified,’ or either inappropriate or incompetent to open our own eyes to a very different way of seeing and appreciating our identity. And that identity has for millions been hidden behind a cloud of ‘fear of embarrassment, fear of reprisals, fear of revenge and outright ‘lethal retaliation’ for opening our mouths.

Writing more laws in more law books, following exhaustive debate in political circles and governments will only challenge those committed to doing evil to enhance the use of their imagination to prove that they are ‘smarter’ than the rest of us. It is not laws we need, especially as we can all see that many if not all of the important ones are being abrogated by the hour.

Intervening non-violently to counter evil by force does not mean taking up military arms, waging war, or even imposing tariffs or sanctions on our enemies. It does not and need not result in arms production and sales that put a weapon in the hands of millions, ‘as false protection’…..the only shield and spear we need is already in our minds, our hearts and our imaginations….the truth.

If Tolstoy’s reading and rendering of the Sermon on the Mount has any relevance, significance and potency, the time for that relevance, significance and potency is now!

It is not a matter of converting bad people to being Good’ before God! It is not a matter of some new intellectual or scientific research project! It is not a program of ‘food aid for the starving’ from the United Nations! It is not a new economic fiscal or monetary policy from the Federal Reserve, or the European Bank, or the Bric Bank. It is not a matter of the supremacy of the Chinese over the Americans, or of the Russians over the Ukrainians, or the Jews over the Palestinians.

There is a levelling aspect to a universally inherited imaginative DNA that finds the muscle it needs to begin to express itself. There are already thousands of especially young people who, like Greta Sundberg, and Malala Yousafzai, and thousands of others who, upon seeing an evil have chosen to confront it non-violently with force.

Before them, Mandela and Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were all moved to articulate the relevance, significant and potency of the Tolstoy homily to their people in their time. Of course, each of these men and young women have their circles of influence, all of which need to be highlighted. We need to begin the process of identifying those who have already crossed the line between complicit silence in the face of evil, evil that no one can dispute stares us in the face, and start championing them, rather than muddying the waters further by micro-reporting on the evils of those who are intent on gaining complete control of the world stage.

Perhaps it is in our silence and complicity and blindness to our own inherent consciousness and unconsciousness of evil, more than in our overt revenge and hatred, bigotries and exclusions, our defamations and our pettiness that bespeaks our own self-sabotage and evil.

We are blessed with a different vision, and the courage to enact and embody its promise.