Easter 2019. The Too Small God.

The Cosmic Christ - Toledo Cathedral.

A good man dies in the most horrible way because his father (God) requires his sacrifice in order to atone for human sin.

This is the wholly unsupportable Christian orthodoxy that we have lived with for more than seven hundred years. No wonder people turn away from churches in droves now that it is no longer a community requirement to attend. Only the ego can support such a theory and only the tribe can maintain it.

It is not the point of the crucifixion and it never was. And it's not just me saying that. Great theologians such as John Duns Scotus and St. Bonaventure have been saying it for centuries. It has always been part of the Franciscan Orthodoxy and, now, Richard Rohr, says it magnificently in his new book The Universal Christ.

In a nutshell, all this "substitutionary penal atonement" came about because of theories by St. Augustine (354-430 CE) and Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109 CE). It's important to emphasise that these were only theories - but they were gobbled up by Christianity like chocolate eggs at Easter - because they fitted so neatly into the ego's desire for blaming and shaming. If you can make other people wrong, you really don't have to do anything about the plank in your own eye. And you can worship Jesus Christ and thank him while doing diddly-squat about following him, healing and loving as he did. N.B. Jesus never once asked us to worship him. He did ask us to follow him.

St. Augustine came up with the theory of "original sin" — that humanity is born sinful because of Adam and Eve's disobedience and that Jesus died to save us from that. From what I've read, his point appeared to be that Jesus had saved us from that so it was over ... but good old Christianity preferred to pick up the idea and run with it. Blaming people and making them wrong is just so much fun, isn't it?

Incidentally, Judaism has no concept of original sin so it's fairly unlikely that the human known as Jesus did either.

St. Anselm's theory was that "a price had to be paid to restore God's honour and it needed to be paid to God the Father by one who was equally divine." (Cur Deus Homo? 1094-98). The ego is fully programmed to leap onto this kind of idea and promote it - that authority is angry, punative and violent and that we must either fight and resist it (atheism) or appease it even if that means rejecting or killing "unbelievers" (fundamental religion). For both sides this makes the genuine spiritual journey impossible. As Richard Rohr writes, "why would you love or trust or desire to be with such a God?" (The Universal Christ.)

Franciscans, on the other hand (and I would call myself 100% a Franciscan), do not see the incarnation of the Divine in a human body and the crucifixion as a reaction to sin. We see the cross as a freely chosen revelation of God's love. God is spilling Its own blood to reach out to us and tell us that It understands and experiences our pain with us.

Life on Earth is painful. Where there is love there will always be loss and sorrow. Where there is food to find or grow, there will be hard work and sometimes injury. Where there is a child to be born, there will be blood and pain. That is not a punishment; that is just how physical life is. And God is in there with us, living it with us and helping us when we remember to be conscious enough to allow that.

God is not a distant authority figure who could choose to stop our suffering but won't (like our abusive parent/teacher/boss). God is in us, in creatures, in plants, in the land, in the water, in the air, in the fire. The choices WE make are God's choices. That's what free will means. The message of the Hebrew Testament prophets is, again and again, that God may be astonished and even horrified by our choices but that God will love us through everything. Don't believe me, read Samuel and Jeremiah ... and read them as metaphor for your own life because then they will make sense.

The whole Eden story is about teaching humanity about choice - we can choose good or evil - and every day, we do.  What's more, we choose what we (or more accurately, our egos) believe to be what is good and what is evil. And like Adam and Eve we deal with it by blaming others ("The woman gave me the fruit"/"the serpent tricked me" Gen. 3:12) instead of taking responsibility for our own beliefs and actions.

Look at the rage over the donations to restore Notre Dame for example. The energy of blaming and shaming those who choose to give to restore a building rather than to the rainforests or corals or poverty is far more damaging to the life-force of the whole planet than the wealthy's well-intentioned donations. It is entirely possible that our pollution of the planet follows directly on from our culture of blame and hatred — particularly of those who have wealth and whom we deny that we envy so we can feel virtuous for criticising for their choices — and we could heal the Earth simply through the long-term application of love.

Richard Rohr again: "A religion based on necessary or required sacrifices, required primarily of Jesus and later the underclass, is just not glorious enough for, hopeful enough for, or even befitting the marvelous creation that we are a part of. To those who cling to Anselm's understanding, I would say, as J. B. Phillips wrote so many years ago, 'Your God is too small.'

"Far too many evils have been committed in history under the manipulative cry of 'sacrifice,' usually violent and necessary sacrifice for an always 'noble' cause. But I believe Jesus utterly undoes the very notion of sacrificial requirements for God to love us — first in himself and in all of us. 'Go, learn the meaning of the words, what I want is mercy, not sacrifice' (Matt. 9:13, 12:7).

"It is not God who is violent. We are.
It is that God demands suffering of humans. We do." (The Universal Christ.)

So, what is the point of the crucifixion and the resurrection? It is transformational not transactional. We all suffer "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" ... and by dying to that suffering, "Father, forgive them; they don't know what they are doing"  (allowing it rather than resisting it or fighting people over it or blaming people for not saving us from it), then resurrection is a done deal. How? Because we let go of our own judgement of the situation and allow Grace in.

I can't say it any better than Richard does:

"The cross was the price Jesus paid for living in a 'mixed' world which is both human and divine, simultaneously broken and utterly whole. He hung between a good thief and a bad thief, between heaven and earth, inside of both humanity and divinity, a male body with a feminine soul, utterly whole and yet utterly disfigured...

"... Jesus the Christ agreed to carry the mystery of universal suffering. He allowed it to change him ('resurrection') and, it is to be hoped, us, so that we would be free from the endless cycle of projecting our pain elsewhere or remaining trapped inside of it...

"...We are indeed saved by the cross — more than we realise. The people who hold contradictions and resolve them in themselves are the saviours of the world. They are the only real agents of transformation, reconciliation and newness.

"Christians are meant to be the visible compassion of God on earth." (The Universal Christ.)

Thank you for reading to the end. Happy Easter.

Esprit d'Escalier Or Some Ramblings About God.

"You seem like an intelligent woman," said the atheist to the vicar when they'd both come off stage. "Why don't you just use your brain and see that there's nothing."

Of course I couldn't think of a reply — at least, not one that wouldn't have been equally as arrogant — but esprit d'escalier has been working on it ever since.

In case you don't know it, esprit d'escalier means 'the inspiration of the staircase' referring to the clever replies we can all come up with once we are leaving the building and it's too late.

I know a lot — a LOT — of people don't believe in God but, trust me, your brain has nothing to do with it. That's because God does not exist. God is beyond existence. God is in the spaces between us and our thoughts.

Can I prove that? No, of course not. The whole point of faith is that it is faith. It is intangible and it lives in just those spaces. Proof lives in the physical world and nowhere else.

Possibly, oddly, I don't give a rap whether you believe me or not. That's because I have experienced God, I have known Grace, I have shared time and space with the Divine and I have waded through cosmic seas of awe adrift in the bliss of union. And I am certain that I will do the same - and more - again.

And if that's all sanctimonious wanky bollox to you, then fair enough. I believe what I believe and I know what I know and what you believe is none of my business. All I want for you is that you are happy and even that is probably grossly presumptive of me.

The trouble with using your brain about God is that what we are generally taught about God simply cannot compute in a world where we are beginning to understand the enormity of the Universe. Any conventional belief in God will seem ludicrous and the non-believer will throw the baby out with the admittedly ghastly bathwater. That's the bathwater that is willing to condemn some super-intelligent furry sound-wave in a distant galaxy to hell because it doesn't believe in some bloke who lived on Earth for 33 years and (in the words of Douglas Adams) whom we nailed to a tree because he went around saying how good it would be to be nice to people for a change.

I believe much the same as many atheists do. I don't believe in the God that they don't believe in. I can't. God is not that old man up in the sky, nor the mean bastard of many religions. God is not small or tribal.

If God Is, then God must be at least as big as the Universe which means that It is the God of every single aspect of that Universe. God can be nothing like the small God of Christianity, Islam, Judaism or any other religion. Those are local interpretations (and sometimes useful, sometimes not) of a much greater Source.

This idea of hell is frankly ridiculous anyway: it's simply not sustainable. Just suppose for a moment that you actually got to heaven but someone you loved went to hell. How could you possibly experience heaven? You couldn't; you would also be in hell because your heart would be breaking.

I may do some more rambling about all that kind of stuff and why people need to believe in the idea that God wants to punish us another time...

I've long believed that Dark Matter is Spirit - and the Holy Spirit is part of God; inexplicable, ineffable, incomprehensible. We are not meant to know with our small and limited brains. But if we are lucky, we can know with our souls and, if we ever want to discover what that's like, then I think we have to learn how to find the space between us and our thoughts.

That's why I attempt to meditate every day. Even after 20 years I sometimes resist it but it is when I stop the thinking, even for a few moments, and find that space, that God can reveal Itself to me. Of course, incredible sunrises or sunsets, the sparkling night sky and moments of terror can do the same but it's nice to show up on a regular basis just to say, "I'm here; what are the miracles today?"

And if the atheist should ask me again, I'm going to have to try and compress all that into just one sentence.

Or, I could just smile and say nothing, like I did the first time.