Unity

I believe there is a tremendous unity in the Body of Christ, the many divisions of practice and emphasis notwithstanding.

It is really very simple. There are those who are learning the way of living life in His righteousness. These folks either know or are knowing through learning the way of Christ in the spirit and a divine view of righteousness flowing only from Jesus Christ. Such a state supplies and guides the soul with all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

Then there are those who are simply seeking to establish righteousness through their own effort of choice to abide by law. The use of spiritual terms and scripture are espoused in elaborate constructs of righteousness matrices, but these hearts trust not the in-dwelling Presence through the Holy Spirit.

Unity occurs among the former group; posturing and strife are the hallmarks of the latter. Many will think this simplistic, and point to places where there is mixture of both trusting Christ within and self-trust. For this reason, I think, Peter told those who heard his call to faith, "walk out your salvation with fear and trembling." Practicing the Presence is not something automatic but a function of our exercise of faith. There is a learning curve, if you will allow.

Accepting none of us is perfect in trusting Him in all things all the time--for such confession and forgivenness exist--the question reduces to what do we embrace, Jesus Christ or our human understanding?

The Great I Am

Our Father delivered His name to us through Moses: the Great I Am. Jesus is called the Living Word.

I have always found it fascinating that God reveals Himself as a small, functional being verb and His Son, likewise is associated with abstractions.

God is the generative power of the universe, the central core, the connective sinew...He is all there is. Yet, He did not choose magnificent terms to speak from the burning bush to identify Himself. Instead He revealed He is the Identity of all cognition.

His Son, as the Living Word reveals the nature of human identity, which is our ability to form mental concepts and label the abstract with nouns and verbs. The words Jesus uttered and the understandings those who walked with Him delivered to us about Him are the essence of true humanity, or what we may conceive of as God's intention for His creation.

We are little I am's. We are small identities playing with the abstract reality of the power of thought. Focused on ourselves, we only identify with the death of sin from the Fall. Redeemed by Christ and born of the spirit, (at the very least an abstraction of thought foreign to all earth-bound thinking) our identity becomes tied to the source of life.

Consider self talk. Listen over all thought. What follows the "I am" statements we make or more pointedly we simply think: words of earthly, self-related logic or those in which meanings spring as pure water for life from the Identity at the center of the universe?

A Common Exchange over Change

The black-white segregated world I knew as kid, the one that closed the local swimming pool rather than integrate in submission to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is radically changed. Radical does not mean swift. It has taken forty-five years.

In a sultry, stifling Atlanta, Georgia summer of '64 , I sulked over the prejudices of my parents and the community at large keeping me from swapping a quarter for an afternoon in that pool. All summers in the deep South I remember stifled in more ways than the experience of the oppressive humidity. Alas, the only places to escape the heat waving off car hoods and pavement was browsing comic books off the rack in the air-conditioned drug store or the city pool. Mr. McCurdy, the pharmacist, would only allow a nine year old to peruse the comics for a brief time without a glare and the pool, filled with that glorious crystal water, lay locked behind an eight foot high, chain-link fence. Mr. McCurdy did allow blacks to enter the drug store for their prescriptions through the back door. In that time defined by one hundred hating years between blacks and whites where the oppression of people was never escaped, what I witnessed four days ago would have been unthinkable even in a comic book fantasy.

We stopped for a break and fill-up at the cheapest station on our I-40 journey through eastern North Carolina. After paying at the pump, I entered the convenience mart for coffee. My daughter wanted some, as well. I shared the floor space before the multiple carafes and cappuccino machine with an American women of coffee-tone skin, about fifteen years my senior. She and I did the polite reach-around-one-another-while-honoring-personal-space dance, as she needed sugar from near the same spot I filled my daughter's cup with French vanilla; then we both needed lids at the same time.

Moments later, I stood behind her in the check-out line. The cashier of European descent might have been described as flesh-toned forty-five years ago, as if the woman in front of me purchasing coffee were not covered in flesh. The cashier announced the total owed for two coffees by the matron in front of me, who proceeded to count out the amount in change. A bare few moments passed, not enough mind you, to need a human breaking an awkward silence but enough to hold a comment.

"I like the Christmas mouse on your shirt," offered the cashier. (Yes, it is the middle of February, but you know those matrons can spit in the wind and wear purple.) My check-out line companion nodded acknowledgment of the compliment but finished counting. She looked the cashier in the eye while passing the handful of change, who answered while taking the change with an unusual, "Thank you." What made those last words unusual was the warmth I thought I detected.

Verifying the emotional level I sensed from the cashier, the matron replied genuinely, "You have a blessed day."

I stepped up to the counter feeling that moment, feeling the honesty and the nature of it. I recognized something in the spirit of the moment totally alien to what I knew about exchanges between people of varied colors in 1964. The cognitive words I spoke to the cashier became only a vehicle for a deeper bit of human involvement. I wanted to add to the spirit in which she had addressed the lady wearing a Christmas mouse, and whom then responded in kind to an opening which intended more than civility.

The incident was brief, warm and common. In that moment I saw a hint of the supernatural. I suspect both women are Christians--not a risky presumption in the Bible-belt. Even if that is not so, the supernatural element is that humans who have proven their separation from God in countless ways, including the racial hatred in which my youth steeped, choose to move beyond social civilities and enter genuine care in the common exchanges of life.

Yes, racism exists to this day. The Dixie war flag is seen occasionally flying in front of private houses. Such anachronisms do not alter the social change I am glad to be experiencing.

Soul and Spirit

These two words are vital, literally. That is the word vital is a part of the Greek definitions of both words. These two words are at the core of what we know as life beyond are biological existence.

I accept these words as distinct but inseparable by human understanding. I base this on the word of the Lord Jesus. We must be born a second time of spirit, hence the phrase "born again." I think that being born of the spirit marks the beginning of our intimate relationship in spirit with God. I cannot argue effectively from the scripture there was no spirit in a person before being born of the spirit, but I think that is the case. Even if that is not true, being born of the spirit must mark the start of something new based on spirit. This event marks the divide between soul and spirit.

I accept the soul is the vital force that is our eternal being. It is known by us as we experience our thoughts and feelings. These two, mind and heart, are a function of the soul. The soul is tied to the body. The body holds the soul temporarily during this life. The soul embraces spirit to draw upon the life therein.

The Holy Spirit is a like a wind. The soul is so structured that it needs "spirit" to be full of life. The soul is born of the Spirit of God or it remains attached to the only other spirit-like entity that exists, the spirit of the anti-Christ. These two opposed spirits are all there is to animate the soul fully.

Your thoughts?

Help Explore the Next Line of Thought

There are two words I find valuable in articulating the state of being in-dwelt by the Living God:

Soul and Spirit.

How do you think about these two words in relation to faith?
Are they synonymous?
Are they related but inseparable?
Are they distinct from one another?

I hope you will comment.

Passion. Passion! Passion?

I listened to the preacher, this Sunday past. He had much passion. Even to several very moving moments when the beauty of his words describing the commitment on the part of our Father to humanity quivered in his voice box and flooded his eyes.

Twenty years ago, my eyes would have flooded, too, in a sympathetic, “Amen, amen!”

Passion alone once called to my soul, when the Word of Truth was praised and exalted. If a drop of the blood of Christ could be alluded to or lifted up for the congregation to consider; and this done in what I considered completely biblical exegesis, I was in that moment ready to weep and shout and dance! The unsurpassed beauty of the sweet, powerful glory of redemption waved above a congregation’s head, the banner of God’s wondrous love, riveted my heart. There could be no doubt, in my mind, the speaker was anointed. I have been redeemed from much, literally. How could I not respond at that “depth” of level?

In retrospect, my emotional response secured my cognitive understanding that the speaker was “of the Lord” or “in the spirit”. Two phrases I bandied about easily. There existed a lingo I understood within the context of both our immediate group and a larger, evangelical group with which I identified.

“Is passion deep commitment?” I ask now. In many cases they are related, I think. Yet, I wonder how they work together within a group dynamic and within an individual framework as well. What do others, you dear reader for one, think about the power of passion? What are its positive and negative characteristics?

On bumper stickers and my areas of interest

The subtitle of this blog indicates some of my varied interests.

I often read bumper-stickers that intend an imaginative one-liner as a common statement for all people. Most of us in the US have probably seen a bumper sticker that says something to the effect of, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience."

I liked that as soon as I saw it. Over time and a bit of reflection, however, I see the intended inference as a limited view of our humanity and hardly a common thread of truth the 6.6 billion of us can mutually accept. Sticker-bumped statements are not usually regarded as truths held by us all anyway, eh? There are some people who would deny there is a spiritual dimension to our humanity. There are some who see it according to the first thought, humans having a spiritual experience, and some who adhere to the ending expression of spiritual beings having a human experience.

Add to that three-way divide of perspective the great variety of connotations attached to the meanings of words by 6.6 bil. individuals, the further extrapolations which result from the working imaginations of said multiple individuals and stir in the arguments about the nature of an unprovable, supernatural dimension among those who accept its existence and...well... there would seem to be no possible commonality of thought among us on the above bumper sticker message. We are lost in a wild wood.

Yet, I have a bent of using my imagination to think about the supernatural, while I am very aware of what a common human I am, and I thought a blog would be an interesting way to explore the mix of all that together adding some variety of thought from readers (assuming I eventually attract one or three).

Oh, here's an interesting tidbit. When I checked to see what the current population estimates are to include for this post, I also researched population estimates for 1967--I was 12 and entering seventh grade. It was about 3.3 bil., then; world population has doubled in the last forty years of my life.