There is always more to every story. Each moment is multidimensional. Nonphysical reality is constantly bearing in on our physical world. Inspiration births action, ideas become things. In this post we examine our ability to see these two dimensions and tie it to our sense of apathy toward seeing. Why do we prefer to live anesthetized to reality and insist on being disappointed? We examine an allegory that depicts the wisdom to get beyond our externals.
Even though we all know something about love, we are all still confused by it. In this post and podcast I try and expand our ideas about love. We must graduate from the notion that there are different kinds of love and embrace the scale of a singular love with many dimensions. As we do, we will also encounter a new paradigm for God. All this love in the world and all along we thought it was us.
We often think of our culture as a mile wide and an inch deep. How do we go deeper into love? What if our love has plateaued? What can we learn about how vertical love and horizontal love interact? In this podcast and post I share the only path I know of to go deeper into love, and that is the same pattern that God uses with us.
What does it mean when we are told that “God is Love?” No person on our planet will doubt the existence of love, but some doubt the existence of God. We’ve all been told that the love of God is something other than the love we have for each other and our things. In this post, I challenge that assertion and begin to lay the groundwork for how the love of God shows up in and as our very lives. This dramatically changes the picture of God that we’ve been given and introduces us to an obtainable belief that can be experienced and seen by all people.
Today this conclusion examines the parable of the wedding feast. This story alone could garner an entire series, but the focus today is the mirror message to the earlier parable of the workers in the vineyard. In this post I will show how anger and retribution are too small to be the operating framework of God. Anger exists, but it is reserved for that which is false, or in God’s view, “non-existent.” Love is the only power strong enough to displace our deeply entrenched affair with externals and self promotion. If we welcome generosity, we enter the state of heaven. We enter a kingdom where the present rules of getting even no longer apply.
I decided to put off the conclusion of this post one week so that I can provide for you the necessary framework to really gain the wider perspective I am providing in this series. We will never gain a solid theology without a solid anthropology. John Calvin said: “Without the knowledge of self, there is no knowledge of God.” For this reason, I am providing you the framework to discern our False self from our True self. Our ego, our pride, our false self promotion are not who we “truly” are, they are who we are in our falseness. In this post I unpack Merton’s words; “The false self is the self that God can know nothing about.” and why that is pivotal in grasping the other half of Jesus’ teaching about justice and distinctions.
We’ve now explored how we came to believe that God is mad, and we have also seen why so many people need to have an angry God. It all comes down to our understanding of JUSTICE. In this weeks post and podcast, I share Jesus’ parable on the workers in the vineyard and how this is a metaphor that explains the justice of Heaven. Restoration and retribution are two very different forms of justice and Jesus explains that the closer you are to one, the further you are to the other. This throws a huge kink in our religious systems if we don’t have the pieces to sort it all out. Fortunately, Jesus give us those in next weeks post.
We continue this series and explore why some people want and even need an angry God. In this podcast you’ll be shown how we take our dualistic approach to the world and create either/or, binary systems that pit us against each other instead of move us toward oneness. We hold tightly to our distinctions because we believe deep down that God will be mad if we hold them otherwise. This has a debilitating affect on our own spiritual growth and on the entire world.
The subject of whether God is mad at us is highly divisive. People feel very strong about their perspectives. Is God angry with us? If so, why? In this post I begin a short series where I take on this subject by examining the implications of having an angry God, namely that such a being requires appeasement. Appeasement=religious practice. If we then look at substitutionary atonement in the Christian faith, we need to ask a sobering question: “If Jesus bore the punishment for all our sins, how can God still be mad at us?” Our answer is a gauge telling us how deep we are within a culture or institution of fear.
Thirst is potentially life threatening. It is a form of physical suffering that requires the satisfaction of water or we will die. A thirsty person is never at their best. In this podcast I show how thirst is a common metaphor for our souls. Like physical thirst, our soul-based thirst puts us into dire situations, where we seek satisfaction from things that won’t cut it. Perhaps seeing people as thirsty is a better way to view others than seeing them as stupid. Thirst is the suffering that happens when we skim over the depth that is our life. Fortunately, for all of us, there is satisfaction.