Seeing God in the Mundane (plus a Q&A session)

For those who were at service on Sunday, September 23, 2012, a few comments to jog your memory:

Just as Robert Frost took the path less traveled, we trod off the beaten path yesterday.  Our service had two parts: some comments from me and then a question and answer period in which the congregation had an opportunity to ask “spiritually based” questions.

In part one of the service we trod the unbeaten path with my asking, “Can you see a reflection of God in the mundane; in the inanimate?”

One of the examples I gave of seeing the inanimate in a “God-reflecting” light was my eyeglasses.

I can see myself as having a vision problem that needs to be fixed… which is what my corrective lenses will do.  In this perspective I hold there is a problem.  I believe the subconscious message with, “I have a problem” is that there is something wrong with me.  That’s not a message I want my subconscious to be entertaining.

Alternately I can ask myself, “How do eyeglasses reflect God?”  The answer for me is, “Where vision is limited, applying God will bring things into focus.”  This is a dramatically different message for the subconscious.  First of all, there is no hidden message that I have a problem… that something is wrong with me.  Instead there is a “God-cognizant” awareness present… that adding God in my life brings clarity and sharpness of vision.

Perhaps you’d like to give it a try yourself?  How can you see the inanimate as reflecting God?  The power of an exercise like this is that we begin to expand our awareness of the presence of God; we begin to recognize that we can, in everything, find a connection to (or reminder of) God.

In part two of the service I entertained questions.  Here are two questions, and answers in summary form.

Question: “I struggle reconciling the idea that God is omnipotent and lets suffering continue without stopping it.”

Answer (as I see it): When we anthropomorphize God we tend to see things backwards.  The idea that we are made in the image and after the likeness of God becomes interpreted as, “God has human characteristics,” rather than as, “I am spirit, whole, complete, and eternal”

When we attribute human characteristics to God we then believe that God analyses behavior as good or bad, right or wrong according to “His” perspective; punishes what is “wrong” and rewards what is “right.”

At the same time we attribute God as being love and as being all powerful, and we don’t understand why an all powerful, all loving God would allow man’s inhumanity to man.

The very question of why God allows this is a statement that we are victims of the whim of God.  This, again, is a human based perspective… seeing God from a societal standpoint: when we don’t follow the rules the Judge will punish us, and the Judge also has the power to order people stop what they are doing.  Except in this case God, because God is all powerful, God can make people stop act in an unloving way.

The answer lies in a shift in awareness.  If we are made in the image and after the likeness of God, and God is Love, and if God (Love) is all powerful then we possess the power of Love, too.

Here, then is my answer, in short: The power of Love, when applied according to its nature heals and harmonizes.  The power of love withheld, which we call fear (aka: attack) results man’s inhumanity to man.

The application of the resolution of man’s inhumanity to man lies in the hands of man, not God.  The resolving power comes from God, not man.

Question: I have a hard time seeing the point of view of “the other side” in the politics of the upcoming election.  Sometimes I can’t even stand to listen to them.  What should I do?

Answer (as I see it): Vote and forgive… forgive being the operative word.  Charles Fillmore defined forgiveness as, “A process of giving up the false for the true.” 

Once again, this is a spiritually based answer, not a worldly based answer of good and bad, right and wrong.

We are all trying to find inner peace in a world of constant disrupt and we have varying ideas of how to go about this.

My best suggestion in relation to anything that upsets us is to forgive. Look beyond the false to the true in this case means extend forgiveness to your ideas about right and wrong, good and bad.  That way you are forgiving yourself for your judgments against_______, because it’s our judgments that make us uncomfortable, not the perspectives of others.