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I believe in the redemptive power of selfless love, and I call that God. God is love – a force that is both awesome and intimate, a force that transcends human cognition and perception, a force that remolds our primal and egocentric instincts into something quite grand and generous.
I believe that “original sin” is a metaphor for that nasty stuff in our DNA that pushes us to condemn each other and to create contemptuous boundaries of “us-versus-them” thinking and warring. Similarly, I understand divine love as that force that reminds us that we live within the one realm of God, a commonwealth in which the well-being of each is inextricably interlinked with the well-being of all. The organism is not healthy unless all the individual parts are healthy. When we realize that, we will come to celebrate rather than condemn those petty surface differences of age, sex, race, ethnic background, sexual orientation, and the like.
As a Christian, I see Jesus as s perfect example of how this power of selfless love can be used to open the hearts and minds of others so that we can learn to recognize our interdependence upon each other. The parable of the Good Samaritan, in which the decent traveler was saved by a disreputable foreigner rather than the so-called respectable people of his own culture, is a perfect illustration of how we are indebted to people whom we would rather ignore entirely.
In considering this and other such stories of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, I have come to realize that a fastest path to finding God is through celebrating vulnerability. God’s presence is more often found in our weakness and woundedness than it is in our security and confidence. And, when we admit our emptiness and helplessness to ourselves and each other, we open our hearts and minds to discover God’s presence in new ways.
I understand the Trinity as a symbol for the divine that takes so many diverse forms as to be related but unrecognizable, much as steam, water, and ice are different forms of the same substance. This Trinitarian God is a creator who has given us gifts beyond all reckoning, an intimate friend that walks side-by-side with us, a volition that encourages us in ways that are so inspirational as to seem miraculous. Or another metaphor: God the creator, God the son, and God the Holy Spirit are different aspects of love (paternal, fraternal, and agape). They reassure me that God is for me, God is with me, and God is within me. God the creator is for me, because he or she is my parent, my protector, my shield. God the son is with me as another member of the human community, laughing and crying, challenging and comforting, hurting and yearning in the same way that I and my friends and family do on a daily basis – but always with selfless love. God the Holy Spirit is the grace and gentleness and glory that come from within me – and all of us – and extends out to others when we act with God’s love in our hearts.
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