Theological Musings

by C. Grey Austin, Ph.D.

Installment XXVI -- March 1999

The opportunity to present the message at Unity East Center for Universal Truth in Pickerington, Ohio on February 14, 1999 was a challenge to consolidate my ideas and experience into a single statement. Suitable to the date and to the message is the title: "You’re Divine, Valentine"

Readings:

Thomas Berry is a Roman Catholic priest, a monk and a college teacher of the history of religions who became, in later life, a committed ecologist. In a recent interview [Parabola, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1999] he was asked, "Does our relation to nature connect with our inner human development?" This is his response:

"The outer world is necessary for the inner world; they’re not two worlds but a single world with two aspects: the outer and the inner. If we don’t have certain outer experiences, we don’t have certain inner experiences, or at least we don’t have them in a profound way. We need the sun, the moon, the stars, the rivers, the mountains and the trees, the flowers, the birds, the song of the birds, the fish of the sea, to evoke a world of mystery, to evoke the sacred. It gives us a sense of awe. This is a response to the cosmic liturgy, since the universe itself is a sacred liturgy. Humans become religious by joining the religion of the universe. Apart from that, our souls shrivel and our imagination is dulled. If we lived on the moon our imagination would be as flat as the moon, our emotions would be dull, and our sense of the divine would reflect the lunar landscape. The experience of the beauty and grandeur of the outer world is totally necessary."

And these are the words of Meister Eckhart, a Christian mystic and heretic who lived in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as translated by Matthew Fox:

"Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God, and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God. If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature – even a caterpillar – I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God is every creature."

"You’re Divine, Valentine"

I invite you to come with me on my quest for an understanding of God. It will carry us across galaxies and universes and through fifteen billion years of evolution, and so there will not be time for details. We’re hitting the high spots, connecting the dots, in the biggest possible picture, then hoping to discover where humankind finds meaning in that picture. When Unity people say, "There is only one Presence and one Power in the universe and in my life," what is that Presence and Power?

The story begins with my dissatisfaction with the idea of a God who, person-like, can be persuaded by prayer or worship or good deeds to favor certain persons, but not others, with protection, continued good health, or miraculous cures. I did not believe that God decides when some shall die and some shall live. Later I discovered that Charles Fillmore called such a God "capricious," and one in which he also did not believe.

I remembered that, fifty years ago in theological school, I had been taught that God is "that which is supremely significant and ultimately real," so I began to search the sciences, which deal in reality, to tell me what they know. I found order, cause and effect, natural laws of gravity and electromagnetism and weak and strong nuclear forces, and consistent chemical reactions, and I found that when we look through an electron microscope at the particles of energy that make up matter we see the same orbital patterns in the tiniest structures that we see through the largest telescopes. Micro and macro echo each other, and patterns of reality express in holograms and fractals. And there is great consistency and order. Everything is connected, and it has a simple and elegant beauty.

But wait, that’s too easy. There is also Heisenburg’s Principle of Uncertainty, and Chaos Theory, and Prigogine’s theory that periodically reality shakes itself into new patterns, that this is how reality evolves. Behind the consistency is mystery. Scientists can reconstruct evolution back to within nanoseconds of the Big Bang, but whatever there was earlier is a mystery. Einstein and others have wanted to find a unified field theory, a single theory that would explain everything, but if there is such an explanation it remains a mystery. Out at the edge of science, physics fades into metaphysics, fact becomes faith. Cause and effect may work, but we all know that our actions have unintended consequences. We cannot predict outcomes. Reality is both a beautiful wholeness and a beautiful mystery.

In the biological sciences we find great webs of inter-connections, an ecology in which everything is dependent upon everything else, and the greatest dependency of all is to be found in photosynthesis, the process by which sunlight is transformed into plant life and growth, and indirectly into our life and growth. But the life sciences, too, fade into mystery when we try to find deeper explanations.

So it is with how the universe has evolved since the great fireball. A gradual cooling brought the delineation of galaxies and universes and planets; continents separated from oceans; natural laws and forces and patterns structured the process. Then, mysteriously, came life. Ken Wilber, one of my mentors, notes that each phase of evolution incorporates the previous one and adds new elements. "[M]atter and minerals were taken up and included in plant life, which then added the capacities for growth and reproduction. These capacities were taken up and included in animal life, which then added the capacities for mobility and an emotional and sexual life. Those capacities were taken up and included in humans, which then added the capabilities for rational and conceptual thought. Nothing is lost. All is retained, enfolded, included, and embraced in each successive step." Wilber finds no reason to believe that evolution stops here, rather that we are in motion toward the next step.

Some would look at all this and find a plan and conclude that only a master planner could have thought this into being, but that’s a guess. An interesting one, to be sure, but I am satisfied to just accept reality as I find it, without the supernatural overtones of a Creator God. That, for me, is more of the Mystery.

And I conclude that the Universe is a friendly, benevolent place. It accommodates life and encourages growth, as long as we do not spoil it.

The world’s religions have come about as people in various cultures have tried their hands at connecting the dots, at explaining the mysteries. In the West, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam point to a distant God out there, up there, who set everything in motion and who, sometimes, dips in and stirs the pot. In the East, in contrast with the West, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism tell us that to find ultimate reality, we must "Look within." Parallel with, though long before, our scientists, they testify to the oneness of the inner with the outer.

They also tell us to give up trying to define God. To define is a Western trait, a way of saying, "if it’s this, it is not that," a way of putting God in a box. In the East about as close to definition as they come is to say, "I am that, you are that, all this is that, and that’s all there is." The Western approach is either/or; the Eastern approach is both/and. The Yin-Yang symbol represents the concept that what we in the West call opposites – male/female, dark/light, human/divine, natural/supernatural -- are embraced in a larger whole. The focus is wholeness, oneness. We might call it "Unity."

For that matter, there are those within the Western religions, mystics and Gnostics, whose spiritual insights are closer to Eastern than to Western thought, who tell us of their awareness that they are one with the divine.

Another set of dots also leads us within, as we discover that the psychology of Carl Jung reinforces what Eastern philosophy teaches. Jung identifies the Self (capital S) as that inner core of being that Hindus call "Atman," Buddhists call "Buddha" or "the Buddha-self," Taoists call "the Tao," and Christians call "the Christ" or "the Christ-self."

Then came my personal breakthrough. Barb and I were vacationing in northern Michigan, in a small cabin by the Little Platte River. We had dinner at the Hungry Tummy restaurant in the little town of Beulah. While we seldom eat rich desserts, we rationalized that it was OK because we were on vacation. My French Silk pie was sinfully delicious, but hardly conducive to sleep. So all night long, through some combination of waking, dozing, dreaming, thinking, and meditating, I was focused on this theological journey of mine, and in the morning I had five categories of affirmations. I was able to write them out quickly, without my usual groping for words. I filled five pages, each affirmation beginning "I am one with…." These are the lead affirmations from each section:

          1. I am one with all that exists and all that has ever existed.

          2. I am one with all life, past, present, and future.

          3. I am one with all humankind.

          4. I am one with all facets of my self.

          5. I am one with all that is supremely significant and ultimately real.
              Those eternal sources and forces and energies that constitute
              how the universe works, and that I call "God," find expression
              in me…. I am one with God. I AM.

It was truly a spiritual experience, and I feel intense emotion whenever I think about it or talk about it. [For the complete statement of my "French Silk Connection," see Installment 16.]

What is reality? What is included in this wholeness? The world’s great wisdom traditions come together at this point. Some call it the "Perennial Philosophy," or the "Great Chain of Being." It is the concept that reality consists of matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit. And the next step in evolution, the step beyond where we are now, is, I believe, to expand our consciousness and our living into the dimension of spirit – to the realization that we are not only matter, body, and mind, but spirit as well. Spirit is our nature and our home, our reality. Not that we leave behind the realms of the body and the mind, but that we find in them that all-pervading quality of spirit, that we find the sacred in the ordinary.

How do we do that, you ask? By opening ourselves to the ways of knowing that lead us within, to our spirituality, to our own divinity. We get along fine in the material world with the knowledge we gain through our five senses and rational thought, but to find and express spirit, to become enlightened, we need to trust intuition, imagination, insight, and dreams.

I had set out to define reality, ultimate reality, only to find that the mystery of reality defies definition, and so the choice is ours. We work from the clues we receive, and we identify, or create, our own reality. We can limit ourselves to what we can see, hear, touch, smell and taste, or we can look for deeper reality. It is a matter of perspective; faith is a way of seeing.

If I look at a rock, I see it as inert, heavy, solid, and dense. If a physicist looks at the same rock, he or she will perceive a multitude of tiny sub-atomic particles moving at tremendous speeds within that same space. If that rock happens to be a Petoskey Stone which I have collected from the shore of Lake Michigan, then it takes on another dimension, another meaning. A Petoskey Stone is a fossil rock showing the hexagonal patterns of Colony Coral that existed as a very early form of life in the warm, salt sea that covered northern Michigan 350 million years ago. (I carry one in my pocket to remind me that I am a part of that long and continuing evolution.) So, how I see reality is a matter of perspective: I can choose to see a rock as an inert part of the landscape, or as an atomic dance, or as an ancestor.

Similarly, I can choose to see myself as an insignificant speck in an overwhelmingly large universe, or as a "sinner," as my religions upbringing taught me, or as a manifestation of an ultimately divine mystery. And which of these self-descriptions I choose will affect my self-esteem, my relationships, and my contributions to the welfare of others. I choose the path that lets me greet another person with "Namaste," which is a Hindu way of saying, "The divinity in me greets the divinity in you."

From all of my searching, then, I have come to think of God as the divine mystery that is expressed in the wholeness of all that exists and in the goodness of growth and beauty, and that I understand as the essence of life, love, and being. I find that essence to be the binding and bonding force for health and wholeness that animates and activates me, just as it permeates and creates the conditions for health and wholeness in the rest of the universe. I am one with all that, with all that is, at the very heart of all that is.

Our human ways of expressing that divinity are in nurturing, creating, acting with compassion, trusting, and loving.

And so I greet you today with my own form of "Namaste" – "You’re divine, Valentine."


  (Copyright 1999 by C. Grey Austin, all rights reserved.)

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