To Belong to God, or to Insist God Belongs To You

That is the question

NOTE: This is part of a series attempting to get Christianity out of the doctrinal closet it has locked itself into, and make it available in powerful, honoring ways to those who are and are not Christian. From a universal Christian mystic tradition, I am attempting to counter the bigotry and war that have polluted not only Christianity but many of the major religions. I am naming this project and accompanying book provocatively and somewhat ironically: “How to Be a REAL Christian” (TM) in an attempt to chart a new, collaborative way forward that loves everyone and excludes no one.

“God‘s chosen people are always those who choose to belong to God, and never those who claim that God belongs to them, and especially those that use their alleged ownership of God to abuse others and promote their supremacism.”— Zeus Yiamouyiannis

Shakespeare raised the eternal question about human existence:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep…

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?

I raise the same kind of question about spiritual purpose and being. Do I self-immolate the ego (and its “enforcer,” the intellectual mind)? Do I die to the small self? Will I be reborn in spirit if I choose this? What will come of this consequential movement of faith? I cannot know until I surrender to that faith.

I cannot contain the future and the love and wisdom of something as large and wise as God’s intention or divine wisdom. I only know that I must exceed myself, if I am to come to my desire. And I know that I cannot do this from the same smallness that longs for closeness with the divine, but does not know how to approach the divine. So now I know: I must open myself and let the divine approach me, and trust the divine to fulfill my soul’s unquenched desire. In Christian lingo this is called being the “bride of Christ” and it applies to both men and women!

An insight

An insight that came to me while walking in nature today:

I have no doubt whatsoever, both that this body and this mind, and this being that I am, cannot begin to contain God. But I have every faith knowledge, and certainty that God has more than enough to contain all of me, the deepest farthest, most broken and most ascendant parts of myself as well as that of all creation. For my God is my creator, and my Creator is my beloved, and I am my Creator’s beloved in eternity. ALL OF CREATION is so beloved, nothing to be defiled, everything to be deeply, honored with reference and respect and love until the end of time and beyond.

Though my deep desire for God remains unquenched by my own inadequate efforts, this desire is by no means unrequited. Quite the opposite! God’s desires to reach me are vast and deep, intimate and blazing in their kind, powerful effectiveness.

Just today, walking back from a bank (where I started the process of of transferring money to cover the rent of the estranged son of my ex-wife), I simply felt something shift and open. I could feel the center of my being come alive as a real presence in my life and in the world— like a long-away friend returning with gifts yet to be opened. Here is how I explained it to my friend, Kim, after asking to talk about this experience.

I got cut to the core spiritually in a good way while walking back to my mom’s house. It was so profound but also so subtle, ordinary, and non dramatic/heroic. I didn’t need the fanfare to do its job. It shows me how much religious practice is captured by a lack of spontaneity and imagination around faith— of how faith comes into being literally and figuratively. When untethered and unoccupied, spirit has room to enter and make some changes!

God cuts into me and opens a core I never knew I had. My ego peels and burns away in the light of the divine, not by my own efforts but by a ravenous splendor. A calm, assured spiritual fire enters into me and changes who I am. My image of myself drops away, including the image myself as a good person and a good Christian, to be replaced by a wordless Reality always inviting me deeper and higher, away from the wanderings and wonderings of my worried and sometimes-anxious mind.

Churches offer only substitutes in the end. Solace. Prayer. Song. Praise. But transformation? Only God and Spirit can provide that, and only when one is undistracted by substitutional practices, and only when we surrender our ideas of God, and allow God to enter in God’s own way, not when we merely play our ideas of God out.

I am God’s; God is not mine

The main problem with institutional religion, is that pretty much every example out there attempts to own God, and tell God what to do, while pretending to worship God. It has gotten so bad that these religions even project fear, shame, guilt, and war upon God as God’s instruments of “obedience”. Many imply that such violence is somehow blessed and righteous. Others simply excuse and ignore the passages in the Old Testament that not only allow but DEMAND genocide of neighboring people not “of your tribe.”

Every one of us in our spiritual “guts”, even those who supposedly believe this, know this is wrong, but they make excuses: “Well this is the word of God.” “Well how can we really understand the will of God… There must be some reason for these passages.”

To this I say, “Do you REALLY believe, that any human pen or thought can capture even a sliver of God’s love and greatness? No! We were anointed with the one and only Holy Spirit as a gift of God, which lives in us as a PRESIDING presence over anything we attempt to create from our own devices, no matter how inspired. The Holy Spirit is God in us, and therefor it is the most authoritative:

These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. — 1 Corinthians 2:10.

That spirit means that we are “owned” by God and owing to God’s grace for our very biological life and existence, to say nothing of our spiritual well-being and vitality. Any attempt to use God to defile God’s creation, to murder or spite God’s creation is apart from God and therefore of the realm of the satanic, that temptation to put the world above spirit, as happened in the Gospels, when the actual Satan character tries to tempt Jesus in the Gospels with worldly food, approval, and power.

We all know in our hearts it is not simply morally wrong to murder children in Palestine, but spiritually abominable. No amount of Bible quoting and excusing can erase the inalterable fact of God’s care and requirement of our care of God’s creation.

Let us start, first and foremost, with out own beings, to rid ourselves of the addictions, insults, and assaults on our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls, and then let us “clear house” in the world to make room for God’s love to be manifest, unclouded by religious excuses and dogma, and coming straight from the heart of hearts unapologetically and unfiltered by the mind. ‘

All blessings, Zeus