Bishop Donlon recently asked me to affirm what I thought was the essential nature of God. The answer, of course is LOVE! His love of, and for us is unconditional love, and when He came to be among us in the form of the Son of Man, he told us that Love of God and love of one another were THE primary commandments we are to follow. Of course, the other eight of the ten Moses brought to an already fallen people (they were busy crafting golden images, having tired of waiting) are unquestionably vital to the establishment and sustaining of any society. Can we not see the opposite result all around us?
I posed the question to him; “what of the child born into the ghetto of Chicago with an abusive father and a drug addicted mother? Perhaps, at an early age to see his little sister gunned down in a drive-by gang shooting? Tough circumstances in which any seed of love has to push its way through the topsoil of societal filth into the sunlight of hope. Indeed, but this happens not just in Chicago, but in the lowliest and least hopeful places that are to be found around the globe. Hopelessness is the poison through which evil tries to extend the darkness by which it expects to extinguish the light of God. It will not succeed in the long run, but the question is how many will fall under its power, never to surface? As Christians, we know the final chapter, just as we know the hardship and battle that will precede our relief from the struggle. Within that struggle however, lays another challenging question as to whether as Christians we are merely exercising our free will, or are we among the few whom God has so destined? If we are the select then we have to ask what kind of loving God is willing to discard billions to eternal separation from him? If it is purely our exercise of our free will to choose Him, what kind of game are we playing? Celestial Yahtzee; if we throw all sixes are we in? Anything less and, too bad….Sorry! I don’t personally find the concepts of free will and destiny to be mutually exclusive. I believe we are granted free will within the context of a larger Destiny within which and across we move through the choices we make. I believe that God encodes within us the desire to seek love and to extend love to others, just as He encodes within us the desire to seek to know Him. In our mortal journey we may well set off on a wrong path, or diverge from a right path based on the many factors that will influence our life from birth to death. I speak of the three dimensions of our mortal being; body, mind and spirit. For many, perhaps most of us, our spirit is likely to be the last to begin to mature. Bishop Donlon suggested that these are concurrent elements of our being, but I argue that while the Triune God can exists in all three aspects of His being at the same time, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; we can’t. Our humanity doesn’t permit us to come into this world fully evolved in all three, if we did, we would be fully in our faith at all times with no need for the refining nature of our time in a broken and fallen world. God, yes! God is pure, unconditional love, but we are not pure beings, that time has come and gone and we exist among the wreckage of the Fall from which we are to extricate a dim spirit and help it to grow.
Another question he asked is, “what is the nature of our soul, and when do we receive it?” Now there, as they say is a sticky wicket; one that we see at the very heart of the great controversy; Pro-life or, Pro-choice! I leave the answers to each individual wrestling with any particular circumstance, and will try to address my own conclusions. I am also not going to delve into any theological argument about the Guf, the Talmudic Repository of Souls which must be emptied before the Messiah will come. I presume that an Omnipotent God can produce as many souls as He sees fit, for whatever reason/purpose may suit Him. Far be it for me or anyone to argue one way or another on that one, but I do believe that we are infused with our soul at the time of our conception. I doubt that God waits for some magical moment during our metamorphosis from zygote to fetus to full-fledged baby. I absolutely believe that our soul is a fundamental part of our DNA; our genetic makeup or, if you like the God Gene, that which predisposes us to seek the One who created us. As we will discuss in a later posts, such genetic mysteries are becoming more and more clearly unraveled, and we seem to be moving closer and closer to narrowing the gap between science and faith. I say “faith” rather than religion because I believe God speaks to us through faith, while religion is a manifestation of Man’s attempt to commune with God. Needless to say, and as history teaches only too well, when Man enters the equation, self-interest and distortion are not far behind.
I asked the good Bishop if he thought the “imprint” God places on our soul would be pure, or does it also carry the potential for failure, for disobedience and rejection of Him. I think he said that he believes that our soul carries the divine imprint of God, but that our humanity and influences of nature and nurture are the corrosive forces that corrupt it. That strikes me as sound argument and I think it fits with some of the other thoughts I express here. As we mature in our faith, even though we remain challenged and in a condition that will see us falling away from God in what seems an unending roller-coaster oscillation in-and-out of God’s wish for us, the one thing I believe we can agree is clear; we have a responsibility to help lift others from darkness into the light of faith. Of course, there is no one way in which we exercise that responsibility, we are after all each but one member of the body of God’s church here on earth.