Another View 2-5

Wonder with me how things would change were we to see ourselves, human beings, as the “bridge between heaven and earth.” This would require a shift for most of us, rearranging our anthropology. We might have to imagine a “higher” view of human nature than most of us have inherited. The “given view” that has attached itself through cultural religious bias envisages we humans as poor earthly creatures who have rebelled against Heaven (Eden, as the image here), and have misappropriated for ourselves some personal image that has enthroned the divine in human likeness.

In thus re-casting things in our image, we have gotten carried away, overturning the true hierarchy of being, the real order of things, having forgotten that God created us in God’s image and likeness -- which has somehow intensified our self-confidence (or is it arrogance?) and we invert this, making spiritual contraband of God’s trust.

One of the fun things I get to watch is how people formulate their own private theologies to suit their own constructs upon which to build, most of the time, a very artificial and mostly surface faith. Much like an architect would build a Cathedral, we humans take our “thoughts” or “concepts” -- mostly empirical in nature (rational, in other words) -- as the materials of our construction. Focused on the magnificence and logical symmetry of our ideal edifice, we are distracted from whether it conforms to the actual “order of things.”

This becomes the artless temptation whose hidden cause and material is pride. Having become attached to the fruits of our intelligence, we humans begin to love our creations as ourselves. We over-identify with them, enclosing ourselves in them. When this happens, no human intervention can help. If one refuses to renounce what one believes to be “riches,” the mind and the heart remain disparate and irreconcilable. The bridge collapses.

Rising to such supralogical spheres of knowledge and thought, they are at best the smoke and mirrors of our own created image of God, in whose likeness we have made God just like me. Looking to only ourselves as the solitary image, we make it possible for ourselves to forget God, and God’s inner reality. Here is lost our own sense of the sacred, drowned in a pool of impermanence and transience. Here we become enslaved to a lower nature, imagining and creating our own destinies.

Interestingly enough, within is this nostalgia -- for the longing now incarcerated within our solitary image -- it has nuances of the True Sacred, the true Eternal. There is the turning and turning of our hearts is to satisfy this hunger for the True Sacred. Our artificial creation leaves us with an infernal emptiness. Our inner awareness is that our creation, and the material of that creation, are superficial.

What has been lost is that the Uncreated Energies of the Divine has risked everything, becoming Created Energies, whereby our Likeness is the remembrance that we are the reflection of those Divine Qualities, and so much has God’s longing now become a trust.

All of our lives we discover the depths and riches that are the derivative Divine now entrusted to us, incarnated as blessing into the aliveness that the world experiences through human beings as divine Presence. We become the opening through which God collides with the world. It is why human beings will always be the aperture through which another sees their own best and their own good. When another says, “I want to be just like you when I grow up,” its not that we’ve become some God (though egoic tendencies push to prevail). They are saying, most likely, “In you, I experience God.” Now, true, that may not be within their awareness, but it is one of these Divine Qualities to which they are now attracted, and are responding to their own deepest longing -- for holiness.

There is the true bridge. What does this holiness look like? It looks like those Divine Qualities pouring forth into the world, through us, yet another incarnation of Spirit’s visitation to transform any given moment. It becomes a Divine encounter. To somehow not acknowledge these Divine Qualities as the outpouring of a Great Love is to deceive, to lie even, to oneself. The pretense is it is mine -- “I did this, I made this, I created this.” Lost is gratitude, for no blessing given or received, can be self-created. It is a refusal to own the Divine Sacred, and when ownership falls to self-infatuation, we have in that moment begun to “unmake” creation. The distortion parades as artificiality, and it is not an inauthentic self, and others experience this deficit.

So -- are we then not possessors of any uniqueness? Are we only prototypes of a Creator, only a mirror of the Divine Qualities and Names? Have we our own archetype, as well? These are great questions, and will serve as the wonder of yet Another View.