Your Image Of God

I’m a believer. Not the uptight fundamentalist type. I’m well over the idea of God as an old man in the skies waving a magic wand. But I believe. I have a cosmology that helps me to live into the infinite vastness of this great mystery.

I imagine a tantric dance between what is quiet, perfect and still and what is full, unfolding manifestation. What we might call the “ground of being” and what we might call “evolution.”

I don’t just hold these as intellectual abstractions. I seek to be in relationship with the divine. I work with the names and forms of teachers and deities. I look where other humans have looked before and I aim to see myself as an integral part of it all.

I don’t have any need to push these ideas on anyone. But I do agree with the Richard Rohr quote that Casper ter Kuile recently shared:

Good theology is still important. Your image of God creates you. You become the God you worship. If your God is an eternal torturer, then torture is validated. If God is presented in the image of a king, then we’ll all want to be kings. If God is love and relationality that creates a very different kind of humanity.

Secularism has been a liberating force. But it also left us with a false binary. You are either a religious fundamentalist of some stripe or other, or you are a rational person who is part of a cosmic accident. Today, thankfully, we have the rise of the “spiritual but not religious” crowd that is doing all sort of things to tend to our spiritual longing.

The question matters. Even if you are not a believer. Like Wade Davis says, we, each of us humans, each of our cultures, all of us are caught in the same predicament, trying to answer the same question - “how did we get here and why are we here?”

Your answer to that question is impacting how you live. It is impacting what you contribute to our culture. And it is impacting your commitment to the future.