There are no unimportant human beings. Not one. Every human being is a working out of history, of science, of metaphysics, of time and space itself. The tiniest stories among us bring the “great” ones into sharp relief. We give each other meaning.
Glory be to God Almighty, the only one to see each of these stories, the only One to value each of them, and remember each one in love.
Praise God!
Praise Parent, Child & Holy Spirit! Alleluia, O Lord!
Praise God in the highest heavens! Praise God in the lowest depths!
Oh Lord, hear our prayer. Let us see Your glory in our lives. Give us the foxfire in the night, Oh Lord, that we may follow it. Alleluia! Amen.
Then the angel pointed to the sun. And I could see from its surface arose a meridian, unto a belt, and the belt began to move, to spin, spin with speed unimaginable.
“Observe the souls,” the angel told me.
From which the Nazarene took up a soul and held it to the spinning belt, like a jeweler’s wheel, burnishing and polishing, abrading away all imperfections, whisking them away like skin under a rotary brush. I could tell the soul was in agony, but then it was over. The Nazarene took the new-polished soul and set in in the sky, among the stars. And when the angels beheld the beauty of those stars, and all the stars around them, they hid their eyes in awe.
Then I asked the angel “What is the number of souls that shall not be polished into gems?”
“None,” came the reply.
“What is the number of souls that shall become gems without the polishing?”
“None,” came the replay.
“And what is the soul that shall be polished next?”
Their answer was to lay hands upon me, to drag me toward the sun. It loomed before me, the spinning meridian. And I was handed over into the will of the Jeweler, to his terrific and awesome work.
He said this so that what he had said might come true: “Father, I have not lost even one of those you gave me.” (John 18:9)
One night at dinner my ten-year-old daughter said “Why does God loves everybody? Humans are evil!”
I can’t argue with her diagnosis. From the oppression of the poor to individual lies and cruelties, humans give evidence of evil every day. On the battlefields men murder each other, in the offices flourish adultery and deceit. At a certain point one despairs of the idea of human good.
But we look at the Gospels and we see Jesus with an enormous heart, greeting the range of humanity with a word of love.
Why does God do this?
Because God knows us, both individually and collectively, better than we know ourselves. God sees all of us.
Which does not excuse our evil. God hates our evil more than we do, can have no tolerance for it, because God knows evil hurts us, the ones whom God loves. Divine justice is not the product of ignorance or prejudice, but of perfect knowledge. God knows the wonder of creation more than we ever can, what it is and what it could be, what it will be.
There is no one, not one, that God does love. To preach otherwise is to make Heaven into Studio 54, to cast God as Steve Rubell. This is hideous. But, Alleluia, God is God, and God is Love.
We hate things, hate each other, because we see things only partially. If we could see as God sees, we also could love everyone. If God loses anyone, God is not God, because it would mean God’s love was less than perfect. Likewise, we are called to be perfect and not lose anyone, as much as we can in this fallen, imperfect world. We are commanded to love each other as God loves us. Love is the ballast in this world.
I look at this week and wonder if we are on the verge of a great increase in human evil. This will not stop the love of God. It cannot. It never has.
The level of red blood cells is in the blood is regulated by the kidneys. Like a Japanese shishi-odishi, if the level of red blood cells flowing through the filters in those organs is too low, a stream of a protein called erythropoietin begins to flow. When that protein reaches the source of blood cells—that is, the bones—then production of primitive red blood cells (reticulocytes) increases.
This is a most strange and Rube Goldbergish mechanism for such a vital function. If we are to posit a Creator God that willed it to be this way, we would have to say that God would be equally strange.
The more we explore our own body, all the way down to the molecular level, the more alien we seem. If we are made in the image of a God, that God must be alien as well. We struggle to understand both ourselves and our Creator.
To talk of the Almighty as a being or a force is to kneecap our understanding from the very first. Only God is God, and nothing but God is like God. Alleluia.
Inferring from the world, there would be no need to think God is Love. We can know that only by revelation—so far. But with time, with growing knowledge, we may finally see how we get from erythropoietin flowing down a kidney to the complete victory of Love.
But first God must be alien. We cannot skip past that time. We will know God, we will not know God, we will fear God, we will love God. All through this process, God will love us, but we will not understand what that means—until the completion.
Until then, the shishi-odishi will knock the moments, as the reticulocytes are born.
Then the woman left her water jar, went back to the town, and said to the people there, “Come and see the man who told me everything I have ever done.”
-John 4:28-29
When he was passing through Samaria, Jesus met a woman by a well. Now this was at noon, a time when no decent woman would have been at a well. She was regarded as a whore. This woman also was a Samaritan, of a group considered outcasts by the Jewish people. So in Jesus’s context, she was outcast twice over, because she was a Samaritan and because she was a whore.
But Jesus did not treat her as an outcast. He spoke with her, face to face. He treated her questions with respect. And when she returned to the Samaritan village, the woman spoke in amazement of how this man who claimed to be the Messiah had come to her in friendship.
Jesus knew the Samaritan woman. He knew Zacchaeus, the tax collector, and invited himself to dinner. He knew the apostle Nathanael, telling him “I saw you under the fig tree.” He knew the children, and spoke with them in openess. Jesus met no one as a stranger. Each person he encountered, he knew.
The ideas expressed in the work “Reality Rises Like the Mist” are in no way connected with Christian doctrine. They stand on their own and can be accepted or rejected by anyone, regardless of religious belief. But I say to you that the Christian religion has always been a powerful witness to me that every human being matters. The idea that each person is important and that God knows each person are not, for me, related in any logical sense. I do not think people are important because God knows them; I do not think God knows people because they are important. But for me the two ideas walk beside each other, they hold each other up, they encourage each other.
Because God does know each of us. From our mother’s womb, God knows us. God knows us, right down to the jugular vein, right down to our enteric nervous system. Every thing we’ve done, every thought we’ve had, our deep secrets we cannot tell another human, all these things are plain to God. We cannot surprise God. We cannot offend God, we cannot disgust God, because those things are human emotions and depend on surprise. God sees us coming, everything we do. And God loves us anyway.
God knows the homeless. God knows the sex offender. God knows the terrified. God knows all, even unto the Eleanor Rigbys of the world, those individuals ignored by all their fellow humans. Every one is valuable to God. The hairs of our heads are all numbered, and each number is known to God.
So even as God knows and loves each of us, let us seek to know and love each other, as God loves us. None of us are truly strangers, for we all share a mutual acquaintance.
As Marvin Gaye once sang:
God is my friend
Jesus is my friend
And when we call in Him for mercy,
He’ll be merciful, my friend
All he asks of us, I know
Is we give each other love
Amen
According to what WordPress tells me, someone recently found this blog by Googling “Are cyanobacteria from God?”
Google directed them here because of this post and because of many posts mentioning God. But I have no actual post relevant to those search terms. I felt bad because whoever they were, they did not receive an answer for their question.
So, as far as I can, I will answer it now.
Are cyanobacteria from God?
There’s two ways to begin this inquiry. First is the possibility that cyanobacteria specifically are from God. That is: is most of creation theologically neutral or even negative, but cyanobacteria are a specific agent of God’s will, a means, like Jesus, by which the Holy One wrought a definite work upon reality?
Now cyanobacteria were, by general scientific consensus, the source of earth’s oxygen atmosphere. Several billions years ago, cynaobacteria metabolized the carbon dioxide then blanketing the world on such a scale, and for so long, that it produced an oxygen-heavy environment. So we could say that the relative barrenness of the world prior to the creation of that oxygen was an aspect of the world’s fallenness. In that scenario, oxygen was necessary so that organisms capable of redemption might evolve. This makes the creation of the oxygen atmosphere the first step in salvation history, and therefore cyanobacteria are most definitely from God.
I must admit I am not inclined toward that idea.
I would consider the holiness or lack thereof of cyanobacteria in the larger context of the holiness or lack thereof of nature in general. I wrote a post on another blog about that once. Put simply, I’ve always had a strong sense that nature was from God, but the picture of nature developed via science over the past five hundred years or so shows it to be amoral—that is, in effect, evil.
In that scheme, cyanobacteria are no more or less good or evil or amoral than any other organism. They simply are, just like any other organism. Though they had a special and interesting role in natural history, there is nothing to distinguish them from their fellow organisms.
Therefore, if there is God, cyanobacteria are as much from God as anything else. Like all other organisms, they are fallen—they are not entirely as God intended. God’s will is that the lion will lie down with the lamb. What that means in terms of cyanobacteria is unclear. Perhaps it means that, after Judgment Day, when the universe is restored, they will cease to emit toxins fatal to many other animals. We can’t know.
So to give you a firm answer, unknown searcher: Yes, cyanobacteria are from God. All the plankton and protists are from God. All creatures and all things are from God. Not to remain as they are. Not to remain fallen. But all to be redeemed, to be remade as they were made, to go back to God. And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.
Text: Genesis 32:22-32
Brothers and sisters, I’m going to begin this morning on an interactive note. I ask all of you: describe God. What is an attribute of our god?
(Answers. Folks said “Awesome” “All-knowing” “Loving” etc.)
OK, show of hands here: was anyone going to say: “Our God mugs people. Our God waits for folks in a deserted place, and when he finds them, he jumps out and starts whaling on them?”
Nobody?
Well, the scripture disagrees with you.
The old revelations are dead. If there is a God, if It wishes to be known, It must give us a new revelation. There must be APOKALYPSIS, Unveiling of the Mystery.
Which is exactly what is happening.
Have you ever read Genesis and wonder what methods of evil those of Noah’s time must have practiced, to draw such wrath? Have you ever read Revelation and wondered what new ways of sin must be discovered, to draw a contrast with all the horrors of human history?
Well, guess what–you’re living it! The past century has been that laboratory of evil. The Holocaust, the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, the world wars and the ravaging of nature, the grasp on the hilt of the nuclear sword–this is it. These are the abominations that herald a new message from God, come in wrath.
The Unprecedented Era is the Apocalypse, the Unveiling. The powers of God and Devil have been placed in the hands of humanity, and we tremble at the opportunity. God has hidden His Face on purpose, to test us. From this trial will burst forth fearsome equations, the final Knowledge. We live in the End Times. We are the End, each of us. We live the End. We plunge forth towards our Ordeal, our Harrowing.
(And the wonderful thing is that this works in both religious and secular sense. In the religious, if there is a cosmic truth, it will be revealed. In the secular, if there is no cosmic truth, it will be found anyway. Some system will be proclaimed as truth.)
I guess part of the reason I’m a theist is that I think the people I know are so wonderful they deserve to have a God to witness them. And if they are so wonderful, it can be reasonably extrapolated that all people are so wonderful. And if all people are so wonderful, then how much greater is the God who made them in His image?
(This is not intended to be a statement of Quineite-severe logic, just so we’re clear.)
The Library You See in Dreams 