Well here we are, in the heart of summer. I guess the question we have to ask ourselves is this, does our summer have a heart. Is it beating. Is it doing what summers are supposed to do, refresh us, restore us, give us and the earth itself new life.
For me it is. Carolyn and I just returned from a week in France. Actually, we never know where we are going to go on summer vacation until the All Souls Auction in February. Though we end up contributing to our outreach programs, this is self-serving on our part. For about half price you can go almost anywhere, there are so many possibilities. Of course, you have to be willing to go almost anywhere, because, if, like Carolyn, you bid things up, eventually no one is going to bid higher, and there you are - this year was France.
It's been twenty five years since either of us was in France, and we had a wonderful time. Over three days we walked 18 miles in Paris. We drove through the Loire Valley and Bordeaux, and then spent two days in Biarritz. It was exquisite, relaxing, and rejeuvenating. It reminded me, in part, of what summer is all about.
We restore ourselves. We re-create: that's what recreation means, recreation. And we reflect. On who we are. On how we can become better. On what really matters.
The rest of the summer, I am going to be working on my new book, a book about meaning and about God. Over the past week and many weeks before I have been reflecting about this. And so this morning, I want to share some preliminary reflections on God. To aid in these reflections I shall employ three tools, a magnifying glass, a prism, and a holograph. But first a few words on truth in religion.
Truth in religion is like truth in poetry. Though limited by the depth and field of our vision, we are driven to make sense of the greatest, most inscrutable masterpiece of all, the creation. So we tell stories, formulate hypotheses, develop schools of thought, and pass our partial wisdom down from generation to generation. Every religion, philosophy, ideology, and scientific world view is a critical school with the creation as its text. We all are interpreters of the poetry of God.
To complicate things further, not only are we interpreters, we are part of the poem itself.
People sometimes say to me they don't believe in God. I ask them to tell me a little about the God they don't believe in, because I probably don't believe in "him" either. I don't believe in the great father in the sky armed with a bolt of lightning aimed at the heart of his adversaries. I don't believe in a God that saves some people from airplane crashes, earthquakes, or hurricanes, while grinding others to dust under his merciless heel. I don't believe in a God who glibly chooses sides, and then brings in the heavy artillery. If the God they disbelieve in is anything like the God I disbelieve in, their God is too small.
Often, the God they disbelieve in is the traditional Judeo-Christian God: transcendent, immaterial, immutable, just, demanding, often even cruel.
Centuries ago, with the Copernican revolution, for many thoughtful people this God was overthrown. We were displaced from the center of the universe, God's image underwent a transformation, issuing in a metaphor that suited itself to this new world view. Enter God the watchmaker, who created the world, wound it up, set it ticking, and then withdrew to another corner of the universe. This is the God of the deists, our religious forbears, a god still transcendent but no longer personal - icy and remote.
Today, we are witness to another scientific revolution, one as profound as that initiated by Copernicus half a millennium ago. Put in terms of God's transcendence, having moved from one transcendent God to another (first Lord and judge, then absentee architect), we now encounter a reflexive God, co-creator with us in an unfolding, intricate drama of hitherto unimaginable complexity. This God is not immutable, not unchanging, but ever-changing, reaching, and growing, even as we change and reach and grow. No longer actors, we are participants in God's drama.
More sharply to distinguish the features of transcendent and reflexive divinity, reflect upon three contrasting images drawn from optical technology: the magnifying glass, the prism, and the holograph.
With a magnifying glass, on a sunny day you can go outdoors, focus the otherwise imperceptible rays of the sun on some dry leaves, and they will catch fire. The rays of the sun beat down everywhere, of course, but lacking the focus offered by the glass they are not transformed into a tangible power that can ignite tinder into burning ash.
According to this model, two things are required for God's power to evidence itself. First, the human soul must be prepared. Even as wet leaves would not ignite in response to the sun's rays, an unreceptive soul would prove immune to the outpouring of God's grace. Second, God's presence must be focused. In traditional Christian parlance, the magnifying glass which focuses God's presence upon a receptive soul is the gospel.
This metaphor offers a "hot" model of the way God might become manifest to the human soul. It also explains why God's presence is not universally felt across all of human experience. God is with us always, but lacking focus and our own receptivity, we lack evidence. On the other hand, those who experience God through the glass of the gospel are set afire by the holy spirit and transformed, even as dry leaves are ignited and transformed by the focusing of the sun's rays through a magnifying glass.
The prism offers a different, cooler model, by which God - still transcendent-might be experienced objectively. Here the light is caught by the prism and broken into its component parts. These too are not evident without the aid of an instrument, in this case not the gospel but the human mind, through which life's manifold appearances are filtered in search of some pattern to explain not only their complexity, but also their symmetry and orderliness.
The cool model has long been a favorite among rationalists. During the Enlightenment, it led to the argument from design. Focused through the prism of thought, the spectrum of reality was perceived as so intricate and orderly as to demand the original efforts of a creative mind.
Thomas Jefferson held this view. Upon the discovery of mammoth skeletons, he and his enlightened friends lavished a considerable amount of money and effort searching for live mammoths in North America, basing their confidence on the conviction that mammoths could not be extinct or the perfect balance of God's dispensation - which demanded a living mammoth in the west for every living elephant in the east - would be unimaginably disrupted.
If the hot view of God tends, in the West at least, toward a personal God who invokes a pietistic response in the hearts of his children, the cool view elicits a distant and respecfful reverence for a much more impersonal divine master of ceremonies. By worshipping this God, many of our own Unitarian forbears earned the epithet (now shared with Episcopalians) of "God's frozen people."
The third image, that of the holograph, is both hot and cool. It differs from the other models even as they resemble one another, offering a reflexive rather than transcendent image for God. The holograph works in conjunction with a laser, which records images on a photo-plate made up of thousands of tiny lenses. The result is a three-dimensional hologram, like those you have seen in the Haunted House at Disneyland, or on your charge card. Mysteriously, if the photo-plate is broken to bits and only a single shard of the original is employed for projection, the entire image, though faint, will be replicated.
Our bodies too are holographic. Each of our cells contains the full genetic coding or DNA for our whole being, itself an even more telling metaphor for the reflexive nature of God: The Realm of God is in a mustard seed; the Father and I are one; Atman (individual consciousness) and Brahman (universal consciousness) are one; the realm of God is within you.
As with Paul's image of the cosmic Christ (one body, many members, each with the same signature of divinity), the holograph suggests God's reflexive nature in a way that transforms our relationship not only with God, but with one another as well "The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion," Albert Einstein writes, "covering both the natural and the spiritual. It should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, as a meaningful unity." Perhaps, just perhaps, every living thing is imprinted with the DNA of God. For this vision, epiphanies abound. They always have.
In 1899, Vincent van Gogh opened the door of the asylum at St. Remy, beheld the firmament, "The Starry Night," and saw a masterpiece: nature trembling, dancing with energy; maker swirling, pulsating; star-stuff; an orange crescent moon; the sensuous purple hills; and a simple village church, its steeple reaching tentatively into the vivid sky.
In 1926, Admiral Richard Byrd gazed out upon an Antarctic sunset near the Bay of Whales, the day dying, the night being born, and heard the music of the spheres: "It was enough to catch that rhythm, momentarily, to be myself a part of it. In that instant I could feel no doubt our oneness with the universe .... It was a feeling that transcended reason, that went to the heart of our despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos."
And in 1946, Hungarian author Hans Habe, interned by the Nazis during the war, arrived in America and ventured out one silvery evening, the sky gleaming like a frozen lake, to greet "the passersby ... the houses on the road, the cows in the pastures, butterflies in the air, the earth that was fragrant and the heavens that were so close to me. I tried to find someone whom I could help. Never was anyone in rags so rich."
Three nights, not unlike every night. Three epiphanies of the creator as expressed through the creation, the greatest masterpiece of them all. Amen Happy summer to you all. I love you and God bless. Copyright AllSouls 1998.