God is More than a Concept by Which We Overcome Our Own Pain

Yes, John Lennon stated years ago in "God" that "God is a concept by which we measure our own pain." It need not remain so. God is many things to many people. Your conception of or experience with God is as different than your fingerprints are different from the person in the next room.

Tonight I wanted God to save me more than He's ever saved or helped or healed me before. You know what his answer was to my great surprise. He said, "heal yourself. Help yourself. Save yourself." That was not the answer I was looking for, but it might just be the answer that will do until God in His mercy blesses me with His supernatural healing, help and salvation. I actually smiled when the realization came. Of course, it's so simple. If no one else can or will take care of and watch out for me, then who better than myself. If my parents are too old or too sick to care for me, I have to care for myself. If other relatives are too busy, too sick or too challenged themselves to care for me, then who better to care for me than myself? Of course, I can always use a helping hand by some compassionate person who has the gift of giving aid to others in need. And, with God's grace or favor, I will endeavor to be a helping hand when some person in need is brought into my life.

The Lord our God is One. Blessed be the name of the Lord for his mercy endures for ever.

Blessings for the new year whatever year you happen to be reading this.

More to come--

Living in the Material World

As much as I would like to live only in a spiritual realm I find that there is more to life than reading the bible and praying. I've often asked God to enable me to "pray without ceasing" as Paul counsels us to do. I imagined that praying al the time--within reason--would solve most of my problems, both spiritual and material. There will always be some problems that linger on since we live in an imperfect and material world. There have been days or weeks in the past five years when I was literally hanging on by a prayer. I'm grateful to God for his care.

During the past five years I've ignored imperfections in my life that others do not. For most of my life I've had to ignore imperfections and I think that's one of the reasons I'm still here. Some of my companions and friends can't say the same, both the privileged and the underprivileged. Only I carry on without them. It's true when they say that one should never envy anyone because one does not always have all the facts about a particular person. Many of those I envied are no longer here to be envied. I'm thankful that I'm still here to say so.

Lately, however, I've started to pay more attention to the imperfections in my life and trying to take action, more or less. Notwithstanding, I continue to seek God each day as is my custom via bible study and prayer. Things are gradually changing around me, but I still go through the spiritual exercises because I am a creature of habit. I know that God will bless me; he always has. Others may not recognize me as I change and adapt and more realistically deal with the challenges in my life. Nevertheless, I continue to seek the best of all possible worlds in this life and in the next.

It is my prayer that you also find what you are looking for this year.

The Evolution of God?

My God is not a God of death; he is a God of life. However, since the creators of sophisticated robotic medical equipment are responsible for faulty product if something disastrous should occur, can our God be held liable for the death we see all around us since time began?

Yes, it is true that our God created all things perfect, but since he allows--for a variety of complicated reasons--for things to go on as they do, then, in a way, he has to take responsibility for the imperfections of our otherwise perfect world.

Let's face it, if God wanted to stop all pain and death right now, he could. God's hands are not tied. There must be valid reasons why so many negative realities continue to exist. Let's try to analyze what some of them might be.

Some conservative Christians believe that God allows the controversy between good and evil to continue to protect man's free will. Conservatively speaking, you have to admit that 6,000 years is ample time to show that God offers humankind his way or the other fellow's way.

Progressively speaking, however, we are not talking about 6,000 but millions of years for this cosmic struggle between good and evil to have been resolved.

This brings us to the subject that the title hints at. Does God bring about life, humankind's life specifically, through the death that is essential for natural selection and the survival of the species? It is, after all, only the strong that survive to procreate and pass on their genes to the next generation. How can a God of love possibly be responsible for a system that uses death in order to bring about life and complex organisms?

The Bible account is very simple: God creates all of our reality in six days and rests on the seventh day. For those who have a problem with such simplicity, then the only other option is that God used evolution, and before that--the Big Bang--to create our world and the cosmos. Because this would make God the author of death--and life--such a paradigm is not consistent with a God of love.

The third possibility we will not focus on very much other than to state, for the occasional agnostic who may wander in by chance, that evolution, life, death, etc., have nothing whatsoever to do with God, only with humankind.

So where does that leave us? Perplexed? Frustrated? Despairing? Not at all; there is a fourth explanation. We all think this is all happening to us. This dream called life, death, rebirth. The incredible reality is that we are dreamers twisting and turning--sometimes smiling and laughing--through a long dreamlike state called life and death. One day we will awaken and learn who God really is and why all this death and life and rebirth were necessary.

Until then, look to God and worship him for the hour of his judgment has come.

Either or ...

Either humanity is in control of its future, for better or worse, or God is in control of it, for the good of all concerned.

Either we create our own reality daily or God creates it for us, including having created it in the distant past before any life began.

Either we're "getting better all the time day by day" by focusing on a positive outcome to our lives as Emil Coue believed or we "can do all things through Christ who strengthens" us."

What is Real? Anything?

When I first read about the idea that we might be a computer simulation I thought that it was a bit much and that someone had nothing better to do than speculate about the nature of reality. It's odd that all of this speculation goes hand in hand with cutting-edge technology. If one day, lets say, science perfects teleportation, then that will become the paradigm with which to redefine reality, or what we think reality is.

If one day we're here one moment and light years away in a flash, philosophers might start to wonder if we were ever here to begin with, or if when we got to where we were going would we still be the same person, or would we ever be that person again, if we teleported back from whence we came.

Of course even Plato questioned whether this was the true reality or whether it was a shadow of the ideal model somewhere in some perfect sphere beyond our reach. I've sometimes thought that the apostle Paul must have read much of Plato when he spoke of "looking through a glass darkly."

Please click on the title of this post to read the original New York Times article, Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch, by John Tierney that got me to thinking about the views I've expressed here.

Living between Time

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven (1971) has influenced my perception of life more than I care to admit. The gist of the story is that reality is transformed by what the hero dreams. His psychoanalyst suggests ridding the world of racism. When he dreams about that, he awakens to a world where all of humanity is now gray-skinned. This and many other startling changes are brought about by his lucid dreaming.

Through the years, I didn't consciously think of that novel which I read at 15 or 16. I once caught a PBS adaptation (1980) which delighted me by its distillation into quite a completely different story from what I had imagined it to be. Nevertheless, for about 20+ years I've had the odd suspicion that some elements of life have changed ever so slightly than from what I clearly remember them to be.

One of the earliest occurrences was being completely befuddled at finding that a chord or motif that I had been so certain existed in the Beatles' Hey Jude, did not, in fact, exist. I imagined that I was mistaken, but in my mind I could still hear the other version that I had been familiar with. Now this is before bootlegs became widely available on the Internet and in Greenwhich Village rare records stores. It saddened me that I remembered a version of this famous song, that, in fact, no longer existed, or perhaps, never existed.

Another startling occurrence deals with a book that I have been reading since I was eleven, October the First is Too Late (1966) by the astronomer/mathematician/philosopher Fred Hoyle. I've read this perhaps four or five times in my life. The last time I read it I was astounded by the fact that a encounter between the hero and a historical/mythical person that I had vivid memories of having read many times before, suddenly had disappeared from this only paperback copy that I have always used to reread this story. I tried rereading it in case I had missed this significant encounter, but, alas, it was not to be found. I have a feeling that if I were to read this book again I might either find this missing scene again, or perhaps new ones missing, or--even more perplexing--a scene that I know I had never read during the previous readings of this unique book.

The latest occurrence of this personal phenomenon was when I recently learned of Ingmar Bergman's death. This stunned me more than you'd imagine, as I distinctly remember reading that Fanny and Alexander (1982) was his last film. I never heard anything else about Ingmar Bergman until this past month when all the news agencies reported his death at a ripe old age. Now the confusion may be that, yes, this film was in fact his last film, and his Swan Song, as far as feature films are concerned. He, however, continued making other kinds of films, mostly for Swedish TV. Now as much as I loved his work, and as much as I have immersed myself, obsessively at times, you'd think I would have read at least a review or two in the ensuing years, but that was not the case. Not until he died did I see anything in print in any of the major film or cultural media about this singular director. To my mind, this was indeed proof, that the reality I remembered quite certainly that Bergman died some time in the early 1980s, had, in fact, changed.

These are only two glaring situations in my recollection that illustrate this point. There have been, in fact, many others, including meeting people that no one else remembers, but I remember them because they left a huge impact on me. I always ignored these inconsistencies with other people's memories until I was able to reveal to relatives or close friends things they had said to me, 20 or 25 years ago, that upon some reflection, they admitted that they very well could have said that, but it was long gone from their memory. This gave me some assurance that if I remembered statements or situations in family member's lives or in those of close friends, perhaps I remembered other realities that others no longer remembered at all.

I'm not sure what this phenomenon is called. I thought briefly of how fascinated I used to be with the concept of déjà vu until until I read that it had nothing to do whatsoever with a mystical reality, but rather that it was caused by a trick of the mind. For years I often had episodes of déjà vu and they delighted and perplexed me greatly. Since learning that this phenomenon is a trick of the mind, I no longer experience episodes of déjà vu .

Recently I read in the New York Times that one major cosmologist believes that we change our evolutionary and cosmological past by what we collectively choose to remember or imagine it to be. This was both startling and comforting. I'm still looking for this recent quote, but, it seems to elude me the way other memories or recalled incidences have done for more than 20 years.

Perhaps one day I will remember that I wrote this post, but will find that no one read it or recalls it, and even more problematic, I will find no copy of it either here or in my hard copy binder of blog posts I've written.

Real but not "in-your-face" Real

What would reasonable people think of you if you told them you’ve been talking to and learning about and thinking about three people since you were a little child, but had never actually seen or heard or touched these three people? It sounds a bit unsettling, does it not?

There are people who have done just that, but don’t think of these three people in the same way as they do, say, their close friends, husband or wife, children or parents. They think of these three people as being, somehow, “other.” Yes, of course, they will tell you these three people are real, but in a way, not as real as their other significant others, the ones they can see, touch and hear.

The other day, it dawned on me how I have spent an entire lifetime mostly thinking about these three people as “other,” and not as very real, in-your-face real. It made me think how I could have thought so much about them, for decades now, but somehow categorized them in an alternate, less real and tangible reality, that of the spiritual. Even though I’ve never seen them, touched them or heard them as you hear a child’s laughter, they are just as real and inhabit a very real world or realm.

I hoped at times that they had decided to make themselves “in-your-face” real, instead of physically removed, audibly unheard, tactilely unperceived. How different and yet familiar it would be for each of them, or at least, one of them, to appear when I wanted to see, hear or touch that person. That would make a world of difference. Of course, that was not how they wish my encounters with them to be. Historical accounts tell of a time when one of them was heard audibly by thousands of people and still, hours or days later, the “in-your-face” encounter might just as well not have happened. Then, of course, there are the various accounts of one of them walking, talking and touching and being touched by hundreds, and yet, hours, days or weeks later, the “in-your-face” encounter might just as well not have happened. So I’m left with the perplexing reality that seeing, hearing and touching a very real person does not guarantee you have a valid, lasting and significant relationship with that person. I’ve heard, seen and touched people I thought I’d hear, see and touch as long as my life should last, and they have since disappeared into the shadows of time and emotion.

Still, how uncanny and unbelievable to be so obsessed and to spend so much of my waking and dream life focused on the three in question: God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.