Saint Dominic
I woke up yesterday morning singing the song, Dominique (Dominique) , which you may remember was originally a French song, by the Belgian Singing Nun, Soeur Sourire, but I was singing the English version:
“Never asking for reward
He just talks about the Lord
He just talks about the Lord”
I knew that it was time I wrote another blog, and I knew what the subject had to be – God.
I know that the term, the Lord, causes problems for some people, because it paints a certain picture of God as the masculine deity, about whom many of us learned from our patriarchal religions. This God can be a little off-putting for some people, because he reminds them of the God of wrath from the Old Testament – the one who smites, and scourges. Even the French version of “bon Dieu”, literally “good God”, is often translated as the good Lord, and is based on the Roman Catholic Church’s understanding of who or what that is, which may not be attractive to everyone.
The problem with most religions is that they tend to define God in a certain way, and if you can’t accept that version of God, you may not be accepted as a part of the faith.
I am reminded of a time when I applied to volunteer to visit people in prison through a Christian volunteer organisation. My application was rejected because I was unable to sign a form, declaring that my beliefs matched their beliefs of what it meant to be a Christian. Specifically, I couldn’t say that I believed that their interpretation of John 14:6 was true for me, that there was no other path to God, but through Jesus.
Since that time, I have not considered myself a Christian, even though I had been raised a Christian, I believe in Jesus Christ, and I believe in God. If, to be a Christian is to have a narrow view of God, then I cannot be a Christian.
I believe that most religions try to put God in a little box, but, in my view, God is limitless, as we all are, in truth.
The quote from Abraham in the Abraham-Hicks newsletter 7th October 2008, read:
When that which is God – or that which is that which man calls “God” – is being understood by man, man has to translate it into the format he understands. But this Energy—this Source that man is giving the label of “God”, cannot be quantified in any thing that man understands. And as man attempts to do it, the distortions are enormous.
I watched an episode of The Waltons recently, during which John-Boy was asked to give a sermon, while their Baptist minister was away on his honeymoon. After seeking advice and inspiration from many sources, including big fat books from the library, he ended up speaking about the differences between everyone’s ideas of what God is. His Grandma found God in the pages of the Old Testament; his Grandpa spoke to God in the open air on the mountain top; and his father, who expected the roof to fall in whenever he set foot in a church, carried his God around with him in his heart. John-Boy explained to the congregation that God was just like his earthly father, because you could always go to him with your problems, and he would always listen.
I have often wondered about people’s understanding of God as a father, an idea I know arises from The Bible. Jesus refers to God as Abba, the personal term for father. Yet, many ancient religions thought of the creator as feminine, perhaps because of the human understanding that it is the feminine form of life on Earth which we see producing new life. If I had to make a calculated guess, I would assign no gender to God, yet knowing that God is the All in All, I would need to allow God to be all genders as well.
If there are so many different views of God in the Walton family of Baptists, it wouldn’t surprise me, if, throughout the world, there are 7 billion different views of God. (Why, even the song, Dominique, has many different versions: ( Dominique Versions )
In his book, How to Know God, Deepak Chopra explains that our experience of God is based on our experience of the world. The experience of God evolves through seven stages, from God the Protector, who keeps us safe when our every concern is about survival, to the God of Pure Being – “I am”, when we have reached a level of unbounded unity.
Perhaps if we take another look at John 14:6 from a higher level of understanding, we may understand how to include all of the rest of those 7 billion people who may have otherwise been excluded by a narrow Christian view.
As I understand it, Jesus would have spoken Aramaic, so I therefore thought it prudent to quote a translation of the Aramaic Bible:
“Yeshua (Jesus in Aramaic) said to him, “I AM THE LIVING GOD, The Way and The Truth and The Life; no man comes to my Father but by me alone.”
I believe that, in order to understand what Jesus meant by this, we have to look at the rest of John 14:
14:7 “”If you had known me, you also would have known my Father,…”
14:11 “…I am in my Father and my Father in me…”
14:20 “…I am in my Father and you are in me and I am in you.”
Perhaps, in order to fully understand all of this we have to go back to God’s conversation with Moses in Exodus 3:13-14 (King James Version):
“And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?
And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you.”
In John 14, Jesus declares himself the Living God (6), that if you knew him, you would know God (7), that God and he are one (11), and that you, he, and God are one (20).
Perhaps Jesus is saying that to truly know God, you have to understand that I AM God, that God is the great I AM. Perhaps to truly come to God, you have to stand up and say: “I am the Living God”, just as Jesus did. Perhaps to truly come to God, you have to understand that you are the way, the truth and the life, just as Jesus did. Perhaps to truly come to God, you have to understand that you are one with God, and all of the rest of the 7 billion people on the planet. Perhaps to truly come to God, you have to understand your unbounded unity with All That Is.
I don’t believe that we all have to have the same view of God, because each of us has a different experience of God, and each of us is in a different stage of evolution, from the person who needs a God of Protection, to the person who becomes the I Am God of Pure Being. I wouldn’t be surprised if, during each of our lives, we fall backwards down the evolutionary scale, finding ourselves in need of the different aspects of God, during some stages in our lives.
As each of us journeys on this Earth as the Living God, each of us is in God, and God is in each of us. I believe we experience ourselves as the Living God when we can be love (the way), think love (the truth), and act with love in all that we do (the life), just as Jesus could. Could it be that, when Jesus said that one could only come to the Father through him, he meant that you first had to become the Living God, the Son, before you could have a real experience of God, the Father?
For, we are all humans attempting to experience being God, whilst we are all parts of God experiencing being human.
We begin to understand that, in this world of duality, it is our relationship to other examples of the Living God, which demonstrates our experience of ourselves as the Living God. Regardless of our gender, we each contain parts of the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine, even though we may be more male or more female. Yet, when we unite with another example of the Living God as an expression of the Living God, we create the greatest example we are likely to find of unbounded unity – the I Am God of Pure Being.
I would be interested to hear about your view of God, whether any of this resonates with you or not.
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