Let's begin where Christians inevitably begin -- with the teachings and example of Jesus. Jesus was an historical figure of great influence. That influence was (is) so significant that it was later said of him (as it was in other cultures of other religious leaders) that he had a miraculous conception and a bodily resurrection. That influence is so great that two thousand years later millions of people gather in his name to worship and to serve as he taught. He lives on in his teachings and his example and in the spirit that infuses the communities of his followers.

He taught us how to live an abundant life. He taught and lived unconditional love, forgiveness, service as an expression of love NO MATTER WHAT, self-love as a condition of love for others, love as a healing force, meekness (acknowledging powerlessness, giving up control) as a quality that is rewarded, grace (finding the gift) that permeates life, love (as a replacement for law) as the basis for ethical living, courage to lovingly oppose violence and injustice, and new life that comes as one dies to the old. (This is not all that he taught, but much of the essence.)

I believe that Jesus was fully human, that he had no more access to a higher power than you and I have, and that he lived the epitome of human life -- that he lived the completely aware and actualized life. That life is available to us but it requires an openness, a focus, a total commitment that only comes to one who finds wholeness (salvation). Or, perhaps better to say, one finds wholeness by being as open, focused and committed as Jesus was.

Jesus inherited a concept of a God who had been considered by his Jewish tradition to be patriarch, creator, lord, an avenging and punishing god, a tribal, provincial god who favored a certain people, an active agent in history, a miracle worker who made the sun stand still and the Red Sea dry up, a giver of laws, as well as, later, one who cared for justice and mercy. When Jesus spoke of God, however, he said "God is spirit," "God is love," and "When you have seen me, you have seen (all the) God (there is)." [To be sure, I have taken a liberty with that last quotation, but in my view Jesus may very well have recognized that "God" is the hub of a great cultural/religious myth that grew up out of tribal folklore. We now know of the multiple documents that came out of the oral tradition and became the sources for the first five books of the Bible.] The evolution of religious ideas through the Old Testament had moved toward a more inclusive, more just, less legalistic vision of God, and Jesus now modelled an even more evolved concept -- a God who is not an entity at all but a euphemism for the spirit of unconditional love that permeates the community of those who practice it. Jesus became that spirit incarnate. He furnished continuity with an established tradition, while amending its most cherished concepts. His followers, in their agreement with that continuity, called him "Messiah," "Anointed One," "the Christ."

God is not, then, a being who acts in history and who intervenes in the natural processes of the universe. (Although the spirit of love generated by a community does play a role in the making of history, God as a force independent of humankind does not.)

Then what is the setting for our lives, including our spiritual experiences? Traditionally, we have believed that God created a good world in which sinful man would live out a quest for salvation. Yet it is also a world in which "acts of God" destroy lives and property. It is a world in which "the rain (pain) falls on the just and the unjust alike." As Job learned, goodness is not necessarily rewarded. In my first "Musings," I suggested that the way the universe works is value-neutral and that humankind creates religion as an overlay of meaning.

Now, after more reading and thinking, prompted by some responses to my earlier statement, I find that there is some scientific evidence that can be understood to describe a physical and psychological environment that has a bias toward pattern, order, balance, health and wholeness. (There is also evidence of randomness and uncertainty, but these appear somehow in the economy of modern physics not to be inconsistent with order and pattern.) I am not enough of a scientist to be able to explain what I have read, but analogies are suggested between the positive and negative charges in the atomic structure of matter and Jung's concept of polarities in the psyche. The resulting tension, in both the physical and the psychological constructs, causes movement, activity around an "attractive Center." The balancing of opposites requires energy, both physical and psychic. All energy flows between polar opposites. There is never a settling into the center, but a kind of permanent disequilibrium which requires that the search for balance and the center continues. There is a principle of complementarity that drives the process. Perhaps it is that search for balance that has been called homeostasis. (See The Web of the Universe: Jung, the "New Physics" and Human Spirituality by John Hitchcock. Paulist Press, 1991.)

Physically, the process, however inadequately described, has a built-in kind of liveliness, which, according to Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine, means that everything is alive with surprises and is on a twitchy, searching, self-aware, self-organizing, upward journey. Such living systems periodically break into severe twitching and appear to fall apart. But they don't. It is at such vibrating times that living systems (humans, chemical solutions, whole societies) are shaking themselves to higher ground. Further, he says, transition to higher ground is universally accompanied by turbulence. Apparent disharmony is the way that every living thing re-jiggles itself into new levels of development.

Energy flowing between opposites is also a way of describing Jung's theory of how we move toward fuller "awakeness." We become more fully conscious, more self-aware, as we gradually move from repressing one of a set of opposites, to the gathering of energy around that opposite, and undergoing the pain of gradually bringing the opposites into a balance of life-activity. These opposites may be light and shadow, masculine and feminine, mind and heart, introversion and extroversion, self and other, etc. Jung spoke of the "rub and jostle" of the process as a good and necessary part of becoming a more complete human being. We "shake ourselves to higher ground" in Prigogine's terms.

From another scientific perspective, Stephen Jay Gould, in Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (W. W. Norton, 1989), questions whether there can be said to be any intention in how the universe works and he cites the number of families of species that has "been allowed" to die out. He suggests that human beings were not the predestined result of evolution, that if some natural cataclysm had wiped out "our" branch of the family tree, something other than humankind as we know it would have emerged. Doesn't that shake up our theology!! I can live with that. I can't possibly know whether it was this way or that, only that it was, and this is where I am now. After these excursions into physical implications for the metaphysical, I am ready to affirm that while there may be nothing inevitable about evolution and progress toward higher levels of development, there do exist natural (including psychic) processes by which we can, if we choose to be open to them, move to greater degrees of self-awareness and self-realization, and thus transform ourselves and society into something better. The way the universe works is user-friendly, though not inevitably so. We may choose to go with it or against it.

I find in this material a kind of unitary view of reality, and it is important to me to believe that there is a single fabric of truth. To be sure, at this level of science the language is analogical rather than empirically descriptive. It borders on metaphysics; it has implications for spirituality -- as Jung (and Christian mystics) tells us that the closer we approach self-awareness, the closer we are to the God within. It is this process of centering, grounding, connecting and being fully awake that I identify as spirituality. It is generic, not name-brand, spirituality.

When I look at the world in this way, then I see that Jesus was teaching us an attitude and a methodology for ascertaining how the universe works and going with the positive flow, the forces for health and wholeness, that we find there. There is much about giving up control, letting go, finding the courage to change what we can, along with the serenity to accept the many things we cannot change, taking the risk of loving unconditionally, finding the gift in what comes to us, and in this way, opening ourselves to the synchronicity that Jung posited as an alternative to causality.

If we wish to think in traditional terms, then I think of the immanent God, God within, as Jung and the mystics do, and the transcendent God as the essence of spiritual community, of the collective unconscious, of the sense that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts when we draw together in the cause of unconditional love.

I am comfortable using these terms because they bind me to the community in which I find love and support. I can say "God" is a wonderfully useful euphemism for the just, the true and the beautiful, for the spiritual essence that I find when I feel grounded, centered, and connected. Having learned to think of scripture as metaphor, of religion as myth (not fairy tale, but a beautifully poetic set of analogies, allegories, and parables that portray the deepest human experiences), I can embrace the tradition is which I was and am nurtured.

I could, on the other hand, note that this God is a name I have given to experiences that are entirely human and recognize that this god has no existence except as I (we) affirm that existence.

In choosing the former over the latter, I affirm the power of poetry over logic and the power of community over individualism. Poetry conveys meaning beyond our literal reach.

In reading about the "new physics," I find interesting indications of a greater affinity with Eastern thought than with Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Western thought, beginning with the Plato-Aristotle debates as well as with Old Testament sources, has taken a linear, either/or, subject/object, good/evil, superior/subordinate, cause/effect approach to the issue of opposites, while Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism have taken a Yin/Yang approach to the acceptance of opposites in a single reality which is understood as circular. In another vein, Buddhism's emphasis on suffering and the Buddha's self-description, "I am awake," are echoed in Jung's thesis that self-awareness comes through the pain of dealing with the opposites. Sometimes I get a hint that those portions of the Gospels that are most clearly the account of what Jesus taught are less linear, less black/white than most of the rest of the Bible. Was he, perhaps, living in that crossroads of the ancient world, influenced by Eastern thought? Is there less difference between Jesus' teachings and Eastern thought than his followers have led us to believe?

But, harking back to earlier paragraphs, if God is not doing it, what a marvelous, majestic humankind we are!! We, in the very largest sense, have taken a universe as we found it, and, all of our blunders and mistakes notwithstanding, have created patterns of meaning that permit us to live abundantly, have discovered in our separated cultures common meanings and archetypes, and have even created gods and goddesses to explain it and to keep away the fearful dark. If only we can keep from destroying it. And we can, I believe, by connecting with the positive forces and processes of the universe (another word for God?), and with one another (another word for God?), and find there a power greater than ourselves, though not other than the spirit and energy of our collective selves.

We have always used the word "God" to refer to the mystery that we have not yet penetrated. So, for now, and for purposes of further consideration, I am willing to use "God" to mean spirit of the unconditionally loving community; forces for health and wholeness; energy that flows in justice, truth and beauty; and further increments of still-to-be-discovered wisdom.

And I need to recognize that proud and tall though we stand in our human empowerment, mystery requires humility.