Becoming God's Beloved Rather than Gods Ourselves

On living into our promise as eternal children of spirit and refusing immortality

“Create in love, as you were created in Love.”— Zeus Yiamouyiannis

“We are designed with great capacity for God, and the nature of personality is that it always wants more and more”— Oswald Chambers

To be certain of God means that we are delightfully uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. That is generally said with a sigh of sadness., but it should be rather an expression of breathless unexpectedness. It is exactly the state of mind we should be in spiritually, a state of expectant wonder, like a child.— Oswald Chambers, p. 688, The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers

Ahh, humans… this delightful, maddening combination of opposites: spirituality and personality, virtue and vice, best intentions and meanest actions, compassion and denial, love and contempt, and God’s will versus our own will to be gods. It should be impossible for these things to exist together, and yet they do within us, almost as normally as making a cup of coffee or tea in the morning. Shouldn’t this reality itself be a cause for wonder about the crazy, miraculous nature of our human “being”.

I am intimately familiar with this contradiction from being “God’s” child (possessed by God) and aspiring to be a god unto myself, i.e. attempting to possess or supplant God. After all, as Zeus, I am named after a heavenly father, the Greek king of the gods on Olympus. In the past, I have sought to achieve standing through significant achievement in the athletic and intellectual realms. A successful varsity fencing career, state finals pole vault, rowing wins, valedictorian of my high school class, Ph.D., etc. made me neither a god nor even a super-human. These passed like water under a bridge. Yet, today I have begun to grow into a child-like spiritual power that makes my former “adult” accomplishments (irony intended) to be mere “child’s play.”

For what are worldly money, fame, power when stacked up against the eternal love of God from which we both emanate AND enter as spirits on this earth. For all creation are ultimately God’s children are they not, even the angels and demons, divine creator beings and succubi, even the most depraved and the more exalted of us.

⁴³ “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵ so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.— Jesus in Matthew 5: 43-45, ESV

So if God loves all creation, if accomplishments do not guarantee “heaven,” if sins do not guarantee eternal hell, and if God shines and rains on the just and unjust alike, then what is our purpose “under heaven”?

Simply put: Our purpose is to live into our birthright as divine children learning to be blessed, spiritually mature, more deeply loving, more deeply creative human beings. In this process, falseness and temporariness fall away, and truth and eternity show themselves, without need for our meddling. We are the grateful recipients of heaven, not its makers, but we CAN create our own forms of heaven in how we love one another, EVEN our enemies, even as we stand up to abusers and refuse to enable their harm and cruelty. In embracing this purpose we celebrate God’s creation of us in God’s own image and we enter a divine creative order which is always of, by, and for love.

To do other would be delusion and folly. Our attempts at a specious immortality will always crumble into oblivion. Who cares a hundred years from now, if you had some building named after you? No one connects it with you even if you had it named after you when you are alive! For Love itself is the only lasting legacy. It is written in the hearts of all you touch by your love in a language that cannot be erased. Certainly the sentimental emotions associated with kindness and love will fade and disappear but Love itself is eternal, and serves as a lasting legacy to all who serve it.

I am not God; God is ME (through the Holy Spirit)!

A divine insight struck me the other day as I was walking: “I am not God or even a god. God is me.” I am of, from, and for the creative, loving substance of God, transmitted by the Holy Spirit. And, as such, I am invited to be creative and loving in the beloved image in which I am created. I am ever included and connected, unless I separate from my own spiritual nature, which is, at root, God’s nature. Does this automatically make me a saint? Heck no! This makes me a spiritual human with all the capacity to be a saint (given the inheritances of heaven) and all the tendencies to be a sinner (given the pulls of the world). And it is this productive conversation that creates deep value, adventure, and an opportunity for courage and conviction in the conduct of my life.

“I” am not “being courageous”, for I do not belong to myself. I belong to God. With God at the center of my life, I am “being courage itself”. I no longer pretend I am outside of myself and outside of God’s kingdom as a “doer” trying to prove my competitive worth, but a participant in a cosmic “deed,” a dancer offering my own unique, divine genius, a contribution birthed in love and devoted to the blossoming of the cosmos.

Jesus is not God; God is Jesus (through Christ love and consciousness)

This should never have been a controversy, if we were but to listen to Jesus himself. Jesus is both the Son (Child) of God and the Son of Man, as are we. Should there be any doubt, Jesus himself said he was “sent by his Father” (^“For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me”— John 6:38, NIV) and that he is “ascending” to his Father:

¹⁷ Jesus said to [Mary Magdalene], “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Jesus did not say, “I am God” but rather I am ascending to God, to “my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” You don’t send yourself or ascend to yourself any more than you birth yourself. You are sent from, go to, and are reborn of something else. This arrogant conceit that we are somehow “self-made” denies all evidence of mystical inter-being, where my own breath, the earthly embodiment of spirit-life, is made possible from the oxygen created by plants!

Now, have I LIVED INTO my fully divine and fully human nature as Jesus apparently did— a complete integration of my human nature with my spiritual nature, under the holistic, loving leadership of the Holy Spirit? No, not even close! (Though, I think I do okay on a good day :0)…) I am in process, I am learning, and thank heavens there is plenty of blessed space and time for that. (NO we are not simply “one and done” in this life, but have nearly infinite possibilities for the full integration of humanity and divinity demonstrated in the Christ figure. Please read my other posts on this.)

The Father/Mother is not God; God is the Father/Mother (through creative divinity)

We (and the entire physical world) “descend”, i.e. are sent (“born”/created) from the Father through what the Greeks call the Logos or the“Word.” We are born of the Mother as humans on this planet Earth. The Father’s Logos is like a seed, and the Mother’s womb of creation is as the earth, watered and illuminated by the spirit of the God. It is no surprise to me that the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) in Genesis 1:26, talks about Elohim (a Divine Council) that made “male and female” in “their” image (^{26 “}Then Elohim said, “Let us make humans in our image, in our likeness”— NOG Bible). If one is to interpret this directly, we are created by divine beings, with male and female characteristics who were themselves, created by God.

In mystic spirituality, one experiences reunion with God, through a process of conscious “ascension” through spiritual grace. We choose this for ourselves but the actual work is done IN us, NOT BY US, but by the receptivity of our hearts and our chosen yielding to the benevolent “water” of God, a process sometimes symbolized by baptism. In this ascension back to unified, undifferentiated God-Love or Christ consciousness “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28). There is therefore, no hatred, hierarchy, labeling, competition, or comparisons of put-downs of any type.

In the Beginning…

It is said: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1 ESV). In other words, in the beginning there was no creation.)The Word and God were One, i.e. the Word was unspoken, and the world and humans were uncreated and nonexistent. The Word was spoken as the primal act of creation. Creation was breathed into life as the world, as a seed enters the womb and starts the process of growing and birthing a baby into existence. This baby and all life is distinct from God in nearly every way, but, still. we are forever joined and of the substance and image of God. Hence God is that baby, but that baby is not God.

Just like a baby in the womb, we are sustained and made alive by a spiritual umbilical cord bringing spiritual “nutrients” and nurturance from our creator. We are contained within the body of God as uncreated, until we are born into the world. As above so below. Before we were created, we were with God, so was Jesus Christ, and so was the Father/Mother of the Trinity. Once we were created, we could create and disperse God’s substance and blessing according to our alignment with God’s intention through our spirit.

Once the Word is spoken into existence, it is a creation of God and no longer God. Yet it can create a re-connection, a union with God through a surrender to living intention.

We become one spirit with God as we become one flesh with our spouse or committed partner. We do this by openness, vulnerability, and permeability, which brings us beyond our separated selves, which allows that other person to both enter us and enfold us, as we enter and enfold them. Our need for immortality vanishes in the light of eternity.

We try so hard to capture God, that we forget we are born from God and always included in God’s spiritual, unending love. We look at suffering as “created” by God, but the opposite is true. We create our own suffering, and God offers the opportunity of Grace and Prayer through active Faith to remedy the suffering.

So, in summary, we are not God. God is us. We cannot “climb toward God” (the exoteric approach); we must let God as Love dwell and live within in the active auspices of our spirit acting of its own accord with us agreeing to its demands and blessings. Jesus or any other divine “Son” is not God. God is Jesus. Creator beings, heavenly Fathers and Mothers, are not God. God is the Father and Mother both. Once we realize this, then we are not struggling to “do life.” We ARE Life! And our opportunity is to let life course through us in the universal medium of life called Love. Or we can separate from Love and become absolutely desperate and alone, trying vainly through compensations to achieve a sense of worth we already eternally contain.

What fools these mortals be! That they should strive for immortality, when they were made of, by, and from the eternal! What insanity, indeed, that they should want to achieve on their own by their own lowly means what they are already granted by the most high.

Instead let us embrace our inheritance, and rather than fighting, struggling, and drowning, let us “create in love as we were created in love” such that our life challenges are healthy, inviting, and creative rather than unhealthy, debilitating, and destructive. Let us receive and share blessings and learn and experience the joy of being as fully divine and and as fully human as we can allow yourselves to be. As we do that, we shall awaken a pervasive and deep joy that will be heard throughout the heavens as the culmination and grateful response to the great gifts given us.

All blessings, Zeus