Adapting to God’s Unfolding
Creation
It is difficult to deny that there
are truths for us to acknowledge by what is observable and consistent in God’s
ever evolving creation. One is that God is incomprehensible being infinite and eternal.
Others are: He is loving, compassionate, understanding, and divinely forgiving.
His creations are perfect; nevertheless, many of us reject this, at least
behaviorally, when reality is beyond our limited abilities to understand or
contrary to life styles we have chosen. Humans have been given freewill with
the capacity to disobey or obey Him, adore or dishonor Him, and while we are
finite, some of us act as if we are infinite, even gods. For purposes of this article,
there is one truth that we all seem to disregard to varying degrees: God’s
direction to love, protect, care for, forgive, and truly treat all others as
equals. Another thing, among the billions of solar systems in our galaxies and
billions of galaxies in the universe, to our knowledge, we humans are His only
creation given the gift to say no to
Him, or to love Him back by living yes.
These are interesting times, much like
times in the past with problems and misunderstandings left unresolved that often
lead to perverted conflicts and inhuman relations. I think that many of our church leaders today
do not appreciate the depth of discontent, alienation, and antagonism that
people desiring spirituality and religions based on love, compassion, and
mutual communications are experiencing. Too often these leaders are distracted
by self-interests, hierarchical and authoritarian positioning, and dogmatic
polemics disregarding what the church itself, the congregation, believes that God
wants us to do, live by what He said and did. Living spiritually has been often
overshadowed by excessive rules and rituals, as well as, theological,
epistemological, psychological, and ontological disagreements, even burning at
the stakes.
The world is always evolving, which
means changing culturally, experientially, and behaviorally due to our
increasing ability to see and understand, although limitedly, the ways of God’s
creations. The reality that change and adapting to it is inherently in the
nature of creation not always seen as obvious or perhaps, it is seen but not readily
accepted by many. How can there not be a corresponding adapting and changing of
our cultures and conduct to comply with the unfolding of human nature? How can
we retain the old interpretations of truths in creation that are not in keeping
with those now being shown to us by God? Some of us rigidly adhere to what they
claim are truths, interpreted literally or metaphorically, that are based primarily
on archaic views of nature. Of course, essential realities such as, love,
compassion, and forgiveness are Divine truths; therefore, they are constant
even though no one can comprehend them completely.
The earth being flat and people not being
equal certainly do not fit the glimpses of the Eternal that God has revealed to
us. Because we can see these as mistakes from the past in the present, it is
intended that we honestly accept them as untrue, even deceptive. How then can
hate, being racist, torturing, striving for a disparity between the obscenely
rich and painfully poor be justified? Who can honestly deny that the Eternal
God is beyond our capacity to understand except for what He reveals to us? Yet,
we pathetic finite and arrogant humans do just that.
Examples of humans living within the whole of nature
that needs to be examined to see what of our orthodoxies and canons need
examination include: an honest definition that human life begins at conception
while human beings begin when the mind itself can function intuitively or in
awareness regardless of how primitive that functioning may be; an acceptance
that God has for His reasons chose to have eleven or more percent of us humans
genetically homosexual, and being consistent with what we understand of His
nature to be is love, all humans including homosexuals are loveable and should
be loved as His creations; a true acceptance based on logic and empirical
evidence that women being maternally unique are, at least, equal in rights and
social governance making paternalism invalid. All but the culturally deceived
or insecure cannot accept that women are blessed by nature to cooperate spiritually
and materialistically with the Holy Spirit; consequently, they cannot be impure
or less than men. As is obvious by
listening and observing the caring and conflicts that exist today, we must
accept that the Eternal, Our Lord, does not change reality to fit human
interpretations, but instead our cultures, laws, social order, and ecological
conditions must adapt and change continuously to comply with God’s ceaseless
creativity. Always searching for whatever truth we may be able to recognize,
and to follow the words and examples of what Jesus the Lord said and did is the
perfect model for what we humans must do to have love and compassion for others
and ourselves.
Religions, for example, often posit their own authority,
rules, and rituals as dogma and canon law. Too often, their pronouncements have
sounded as if “God made another mistake” which they have to correct. This they
justify stating that God established a hierarchy of generalists directed by
oligarchical leadership to make their own rules and to disregard those of Jesus.
I find no words in the gospel giving the authority of Peter being passed on to
any other leaders in our churches. The conflicting positions taken and the aberrant
behaviors of the clerics and others in churches over the years suggest that
their performance is likely to be inconsistent with what Our Lord awarded us
disciples. The rationale for having a church administrative, even a theological
structure of synergistic discussion is understandable due to the theological
and management problems of the first centuries; however, the practice of old
cultures and their traditional leadership of males passing on authority to
males that was expected to become orthodox is invalid, proven to be
self-limiting, and a shunt to the energy required for healthy organizational change.
In the first centuries of church history, actually in our time as well, there
are heretical practices dispersed and rapidly expanding geographical
communities with misogynistic, male insecure, Judaic, Hellenistic, and
Manichean influences. Of note, the male primacy in the early churches and
empires continue to maintain sexual biases of inequality today.
Giving early church leaders who were
fearful and threatened by heretical anarchy spreading among different areas at
that time the benefit of the doubt, they followed their educational and
cultural reasoning which was dualistic, stoic, and empirical. Ah, but today so
many have strayed and empowered to the point that, at least, I hear, “God made
another mistake.”
