A Shining Frame, Their Great Original Proclaim

so, what is God?  we want to believe in a god who is focused on us, our needs, our desires, our problems.  when we look at the vastness of the universe and the small role we play in it, we cannot even fathom a god from whose mind everything sprang, much less expect such a god to be human-centric unless it is a god that we've created for ourselves.  God has to be so much more than that.  it is easier to say that there is no creator-god and to believe that everything that has come to be resulted from forces we don't yet fully understand.  it seems to me just as reasonable to believe that those forces are what God is, the source of the beginning of everything, the first cause.

perhaps the buddhist approach is best: we simply ignore the question of whether there is a creator-god or not and proceed to live our lives as best we can, seeking to understand ourselves and to relate to one another in the most compassionate way possible.  after all, that is the highest goal of most religions or at least of those worth following.  if a religion doesn't help us to get along with and help each other, of what use is it?  i suppose that is my basic approach to my christian religion.  i see in jesus someone who turned from traditions that made life less tolerable and espoused an ethic that taught us to love one another, to do good to one another, to reject prejudices that belittled women and those who were different from the dominant society, to choose nonviolence over violence and generosity over greed, someone who was worth following.

i don't worship jesus, i seek to be his disciple.  i worship God as the cause of all that is, the source of all goodness, the great mind that is beyond all imagining.  as joseph addison wrote in 1712  in an essay that introduced his poem, "the spacious firmament on high.": "The Supreme Being has made the best arguments for his own existence in the formation of the heavens and the earth, and these are arguments which a man of sense cannot forbear attending to who is out of the noise and hurry of human affairs,"

if we worship a god, may it be a God of reason and mystery, a God that is larger than our imagining, a God who inspires our own imagination.  may we express our worship through the way in which we treat God's creation, seeking to preserve the gifts of the natural world rather than exploiting them to satisfy our own greed.  may we see in each creature a reflection of the mind of God and seek to do good to all that lives and breathes.  shalom.