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How did you come to believe what you currently believe about the nature of ultimate reality? Were your beliefs strongly influenced by what you were taught as a child? Have you discover new ideas that have influenced your thinking?
And is your mind still open to new ideas? That’s probably the most important question. Unitarian Universalist Principles affirms the free and open search for truth and meaning and encourages spiritual growth in our congregations. Our faith tradition proclaims that revelation is not sealed, but continuous. New information, insights, wisdom, and experiences come our way to challenge our assumptions.
I’m always fascinated by people’s religious journeys, so I’ll share the highlights of mine with you. Perhaps you’ll find some common threads, but whether you do or not, I invite you to keep your own journey in mind as you listen to mine.
My parents weren’t churchgoers, but in Leesburg, FL in 1954, we said the Lord’s Prayer in school every morning and on Mondays, the teacher asked us to raise our hands if we had gone to Sunday School the day before. It soon became clear to me that NOT raising your hand was NOT okay. So, as a kindergartener, I started asking my parents to take me to Sunday School.
We visited several churches before settling on the Methodist Church on Main Street. It had a big Sunday School with lots of kids and it was within walking distance from home. They accompanied me a few times until they were sure I was settled and could find my way there and back, and then I was on my own at the Methodist Church. I loved it. I loved the songs. “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” “Jesus Loves Me, This I know.” “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands.”
I loved the Bible stories. ...about the baby Jesus; ...that little guy, David who slew the giant; ...Noah building the ark and saving all those animals. It was all fascinating.
I loved the services in the big church, too. The stained glass windows; the huge sanctuary and the beautiful wooden pews, pulpit, rails, choir loft, and ceiling amazed me. The organ and choir music transported me. I didn’t understand a lot of what the minister was talking about, but I loved his voice, especially when he prayed and spoke very quietly. There was a sense of mystery and wonder for me about the whole experience. I loved being there.
That Methodist Church became my spiritual home. And it was something I needed very much as I was growing up, because to tell you the truth, my my parents had many worries and my home life wasn’t very nurturing. I kind of think I would have become a bit of a wayward child if not for that church.
But, as happened to so many of us who eventually become Unitarian Universalists, I had a crisis of faith, a “dark night of the soul” if you will. You see, I was devout. I had answered numerous altar calls and accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior, read the Bible and prayed and followed the rules as best I could. But when I was twelve and there was a significant family crisis, all my fervent prayers and attempts to bargain with God didn’t help. God was absent, or at least silent, and I was on my own.
And I could no longer believe that Jesus loved me; that God’s eye was on the sparrow and he was watching out for me. I had trusted in the Lord, taken him for my savior, and he let me down. I think at some level, even as a young teen, I knew that my understanding of Christian doctrine was overly simplistic, but even the more sophisticated analysis I learned as I got older didn’t make sense to me. So eventually, I drifted away altogether.
Fast forward to the mid-1970s. I was divorced, had a four year old daughter, and was engaged to remarry. My then fiancé had grown up in a Unitarian Church and wanted to get married by a Unitarian minister. We discovered the Unitarian Church of Rockville, MD, not far from home, and made an appointment to meet the minister about our wedding. We liked him so much that we decided to give the church a try.
The Unitarian Church of Rockville was very different from the Methodist Church I had grown up in. No pews, no stained glass windows, no organ, and Bible readings only occasionally. But it still felt like church. There was a choir and we sang hymns or folk songs. Most services had readings, meditation (which seemed a lot like prayer) and a sermon.
But what really hooked me was that it was not only okay to question, it was expected. I was expected to figure out what I believed for myself. And that was a serious thing. And I didn’t need to hurry up and figure it out. I wasn’t expected to suddenly know once and for all. Belief was presented as an ongoing, learning, growing experience of life. Or, as Yogi Bera said, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over!”
We had adult religious education programs to help us figure it out. Over time, the services offered many different philosophical, ethical and theological perspectives. It was all fascinating grist for my mental and spiritual mill that expanded my understanding about what was deeply meaningful in life.
It was the 1970s and 80s and there were serious conversations about real life issues of the day like women’s consciousness raising groups to question the status quo about gender roles and self-image, and both study and direct engagement with social issues like the civil rights movement, Viet Nam veterans concerns, and the growing problem of hunger in our community.
As an aside here -- We often hear people say that Unitarian Universalists can believe anything they want, but that isn’t really true. We are encouraged to believe what we truly can believe, with our minds as well as our hearts, not just what we want to believe. If I could believe, as in ‘was capable of actually believing’, anything I want, I would certainly believe those sweet stories I was taught as a child about Jesus loving me and God taking care of me and about eternal joy in heaven when the trials and tribulations of this life are over. What could be better than that? But I can’t, in all honesty and good faith, believe those things. And we’re also encouraged to take seriously the implications of our beliefs. What do our values require of us? But I digress…
Back to my journey: I felt a combination of coming home and liberation. I was coming home to a faith based community of people who cared about each other and were concerned about ultimate things. And I was liberated from a creed and doctrines I could no longer believe. It wasn’t long before our family was very much a part of that Unitarian congregation and I was on a journey to figure out just was I could believe about the nature of the universe, my own moral compass, and my greater purpose in life.
Fast forward again to 1982. I’m still very active in the Unitarian Church of Rockville. I’ve been the acting Director of Religious Education for a few months in the wake of our Minister of Religious Education accepting a call to another congregation. And, I’ve experienced my own call to ministry.
I didn’t have a college degree at that point and the requirements to become a Unitarian Universalist minister included a Bachelors, a ninety hour Masters of Divinity, a year’s congregational internship, and 400 hours of clinical pastoral education in an institutional setting. So from 1982 to 1990, I was a full time student, the mom and wife for my family, and an active volunteer in my church. It was hard, hectic and demanding. But it was also an extremely expanding, enriching and deepening eight years.
I started out with a dual major in Religion and Philosophy. Because I knew I was continuing on to seminary where I would get an immersion in Biblical studies and Christian thought, I concentrated on the non-Christian religions for the religion part of my degree. The Eastern religions, ancient earth-based religions, and even Judaism gave me a much broader perspective on the whole notion of the sacred.
When we got to the Existentialists in the philosophy department, and then the Transcendentalists, I began to put it together for myself. I had heard about the Transcendentalists in church, about Emerson and Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. But I didn’t really understand it from the brief sermons and short readings we occasionally heard. I didn’t have enough background to really get it.
Then I learned about Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme and something they called “the New Story.” And then there was Matthew Fox, the Catholic priest who got excited about the New Story and turned orthodox Catholic theology on its head, writing a book called Original Blessing.
The Christian doctrine of original sin was the reason we needed Christ – to redeem us from original sin. In Original Blessing, Fox agreed with Berry and Swimme that we are all part of God, not separate, and not born of sin. The term these folks used that best described what seems right to me was “panentheism.”
Panentheism says that god is in all things and all things are in god. God is not a conscious being, but the energy or life force that makes everything to be and become. God is an easy word for it, but certainly not necessary. Other ways of naming this energy or life force are “ground of all being,” “ultimate reality,” “transcendent mystery and wonder,” “Spirit of Life,” and so on. You can find many ways of expressing this in our hymnal. But it really doesn’t matter whether there is a name or not.
The best way I can explain my panentheistic beliefs is from the perspective of the New Story al la Brian Swimme, Thomas Berry, Matthew Fox and many others. First a few very brief readings to set the context and then I’ll tell you why this is compelling to me.
READING I Brian Swimme,
He is a physicist who calls himself a mathematical cosmologist. He is author of The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, The Universe Story (with Thomas Berry), among other works, and here he’s talking about the “big bang.”
Our ancestry stretches back through the lifeforms and into the stars, back to the beginnings of the primeval fireball. This universe is a single, multiform, energetic unfolding of matter, mind, intelligence and life. All of this is new. None of the great figures of human history were aware of this. Not Plato, not Aristotle, or the Hebrew prophets, or Confucius, or Leibniz, or Newton, or any other world-maker. We are the first generation to live with an empirical view of the origin of the universe. We are the first humans to look into the night sky and see the birth of stars, the birth of galaxies, the birth of cosmos as a whole. Our future as a species will be forged within this new story of the world.
READING II from “The Spirit in Technology” by Tom Mahon in the Wall Street Journal in 1996. He is responding to the New Story and how it reframes the notion of god.
.....True spirituality is an exquisite awareness of the interconnection of all things. And the connection of connections, the network of networks, the bond of all bonds is the phenomenon we call God, an old English word meaning "the good."
Instead of picturing God as a medieval monarch on a marble throne, imagine God as the living awareness in the space between the atoms, "empty" space that makes up about 99.99% of the universe. Thinking of God that way gets us past some of the great theological divides of the past. Is God immanent or transcendent, internal or external, composed or compassionate? Like the question of whether the atom is wave or particle, the answer is: yes.
READING III Miriam Therese MacGillis, OP, Director, Genesis Farm, an environmental center founded by Dominican Sisters.
The universe has a spiritual dimension and has from the beginning. When people come to understand that their spirit, their soul, their inner essence is a dimension of a larger, universal, inner mystery, they have a sense of connection that is profound. They realize they have come directly from some sacred, mysterious source––call it God, call it whatever you will, but that connection is intrinsic and nothing can change it.
Here’s my take on how this all happened and what it means for me:
In the beginning, there was an explosion from a seed of infinite energy, what we call the Big Bang. Eventually, stars and planets were born creating galaxies.
On our planet, planet Earth, life appeared in the form of microscopic self-replicating, carbon-based collections of atoms.
Life here evolved over billions of years. Continents moved; seas rose and fell; the atmosphere changed. Millions of species of life appeared. Many became extinct while others adapted and survived, including our forbearers.
Eventually, as humans became conscious of themselves and developed language, they made up stories to understand how they came to be: Adam and Eve and the serpent; First Woman and Coyote; the first parents, Geb and Nut; the great cosmic egg containing ying and yang. And finally, in our own time, humans came up with this New Story about the cosmic explosion, the Big Bang.
The New Story has three important advantages over the stories that have preceded it.
The first advantage is quite practical - it works. Scientists test the story in every way they can think of: powerful telescopes, spectroscopes and radiation detectors, and a huge particle-accelerating machines to see what happened in the first moments of the Big Bang.
And though theorized for many years, the Higgs Boson Particle was confirmed in 2012 by the Large Hadron Collider. Higgs Boson is called is the God particle by many – that empty space between the atoms which makes creation possible. Scientists keep testing their theories, trying to prove the New Story wrong, and whenever they do, the story is modified. It’s not a fixed story for all time, but an ongoing revelation.
The second advantage of this story is that it’s a universal story. In this modern version it was originally a product of Western science and cosmology, but it has become the story of all scientifically educated people throughout the world. Scientists of all cultures exchange ideas freely and use the same criteria of verification and falsification. And the heart of this New Story – the unity and interdependence of all things – is also found within many of the world’s religions, so it has resonance through time.
Of course, there are fundamentalists of many different persuasions throughout the world who are trying to hold on to the past, to protect and conserve their old stories. The evolution of thought is a slow and often painful process. Hope lies in the New Story and its potential to unify our different cultures.
And the third advantage is this very thing, it unites and integrates us within the whole of existence. The New Story’s narrative of how we came to be emphasizes the inter-connectedness of all things, including all people.
Some of the old stories, especially ours in Western culture, put human beings above the rest of life and give us dominion over the millions of other creatures of the Earth. We’re seeing now how destructive that perspective is.
The New Story shows us that we, and all of life, are part of the unfolding of space and time. It teaches us our oneness – our biological affinity - with all that is. It teaches us that we must respect and protect all of life, not exploit it for our own purposes. We must learn to live in harmony with the whole of life.
Now, I’m not really scientifically minded. I am fascinated, but if you ask me to explain anything beyond this basic understanding, I’ll get tongue tied. It was my study of Eastern and ancient earth based religions, plus the more cosmological approach of Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, that allowed me to get anything at all out of articles about quantum physics and news flashes about new discoveries.
The ancient creation stories of all cultures are precious for the deep truths they explore and try to explain and for the wisdom embodied in them. What is compelling to me is that science and many traditional religions converge to tell a story that is universal, open to ongoing revelation, and points to the interconnectedness of all things.
So, to summarize, panentheism is the best “ism” to describe my beliefs and the New Story is the most compelling accounting of how Life came to be and continues to evolve. I believe that all life is an integrated wholeness and I believe in a Life Force, an energy or whatever, that is in and through all things and which enlivens life.
I find poetry and wisdom in many elements of old stories from all cultures, even the Christianity I embraced as a child. Sometimes it just feels good to call this Life Force God, to imagine that it holds me in the metaphorical palm of its metaphorical hand, and that it metaphorically loves me.
After all, it is clear that this force upholds and supports life -- not each individual little life, but Life itself of which I am an integral part. In the ‘big picture’ sense, isn’t that what love really is, so why not just say that God is love?
And is your mind still open to new ideas? That’s probably the most important question. Unitarian Universalist Principles affirms the free and open search for truth and meaning and encourages spiritual growth in our congregations. Our faith tradition proclaims that revelation is not sealed, but continuous. New information, insights, wisdom, and experiences come our way to challenge our assumptions.
I’m always fascinated by people’s religious journeys, so I’ll share the highlights of mine with you. Perhaps you’ll find some common threads, but whether you do or not, I invite you to keep your own journey in mind as you listen to mine.
My parents weren’t churchgoers, but in Leesburg, FL in 1954, we said the Lord’s Prayer in school every morning and on Mondays, the teacher asked us to raise our hands if we had gone to Sunday School the day before. It soon became clear to me that NOT raising your hand was NOT okay. So, as a kindergartener, I started asking my parents to take me to Sunday School.
We visited several churches before settling on the Methodist Church on Main Street. It had a big Sunday School with lots of kids and it was within walking distance from home. They accompanied me a few times until they were sure I was settled and could find my way there and back, and then I was on my own at the Methodist Church. I loved it. I loved the songs. “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” “Jesus Loves Me, This I know.” “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands.”
I loved the Bible stories. ...about the baby Jesus; ...that little guy, David who slew the giant; ...Noah building the ark and saving all those animals. It was all fascinating.
I loved the services in the big church, too. The stained glass windows; the huge sanctuary and the beautiful wooden pews, pulpit, rails, choir loft, and ceiling amazed me. The organ and choir music transported me. I didn’t understand a lot of what the minister was talking about, but I loved his voice, especially when he prayed and spoke very quietly. There was a sense of mystery and wonder for me about the whole experience. I loved being there.
That Methodist Church became my spiritual home. And it was something I needed very much as I was growing up, because to tell you the truth, my my parents had many worries and my home life wasn’t very nurturing. I kind of think I would have become a bit of a wayward child if not for that church.
But, as happened to so many of us who eventually become Unitarian Universalists, I had a crisis of faith, a “dark night of the soul” if you will. You see, I was devout. I had answered numerous altar calls and accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior, read the Bible and prayed and followed the rules as best I could. But when I was twelve and there was a significant family crisis, all my fervent prayers and attempts to bargain with God didn’t help. God was absent, or at least silent, and I was on my own.
And I could no longer believe that Jesus loved me; that God’s eye was on the sparrow and he was watching out for me. I had trusted in the Lord, taken him for my savior, and he let me down. I think at some level, even as a young teen, I knew that my understanding of Christian doctrine was overly simplistic, but even the more sophisticated analysis I learned as I got older didn’t make sense to me. So eventually, I drifted away altogether.
Fast forward to the mid-1970s. I was divorced, had a four year old daughter, and was engaged to remarry. My then fiancé had grown up in a Unitarian Church and wanted to get married by a Unitarian minister. We discovered the Unitarian Church of Rockville, MD, not far from home, and made an appointment to meet the minister about our wedding. We liked him so much that we decided to give the church a try.
The Unitarian Church of Rockville was very different from the Methodist Church I had grown up in. No pews, no stained glass windows, no organ, and Bible readings only occasionally. But it still felt like church. There was a choir and we sang hymns or folk songs. Most services had readings, meditation (which seemed a lot like prayer) and a sermon.
But what really hooked me was that it was not only okay to question, it was expected. I was expected to figure out what I believed for myself. And that was a serious thing. And I didn’t need to hurry up and figure it out. I wasn’t expected to suddenly know once and for all. Belief was presented as an ongoing, learning, growing experience of life. Or, as Yogi Bera said, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over!”
We had adult religious education programs to help us figure it out. Over time, the services offered many different philosophical, ethical and theological perspectives. It was all fascinating grist for my mental and spiritual mill that expanded my understanding about what was deeply meaningful in life.
It was the 1970s and 80s and there were serious conversations about real life issues of the day like women’s consciousness raising groups to question the status quo about gender roles and self-image, and both study and direct engagement with social issues like the civil rights movement, Viet Nam veterans concerns, and the growing problem of hunger in our community.
As an aside here -- We often hear people say that Unitarian Universalists can believe anything they want, but that isn’t really true. We are encouraged to believe what we truly can believe, with our minds as well as our hearts, not just what we want to believe. If I could believe, as in ‘was capable of actually believing’, anything I want, I would certainly believe those sweet stories I was taught as a child about Jesus loving me and God taking care of me and about eternal joy in heaven when the trials and tribulations of this life are over. What could be better than that? But I can’t, in all honesty and good faith, believe those things. And we’re also encouraged to take seriously the implications of our beliefs. What do our values require of us? But I digress…
Back to my journey: I felt a combination of coming home and liberation. I was coming home to a faith based community of people who cared about each other and were concerned about ultimate things. And I was liberated from a creed and doctrines I could no longer believe. It wasn’t long before our family was very much a part of that Unitarian congregation and I was on a journey to figure out just was I could believe about the nature of the universe, my own moral compass, and my greater purpose in life.
Fast forward again to 1982. I’m still very active in the Unitarian Church of Rockville. I’ve been the acting Director of Religious Education for a few months in the wake of our Minister of Religious Education accepting a call to another congregation. And, I’ve experienced my own call to ministry.
I didn’t have a college degree at that point and the requirements to become a Unitarian Universalist minister included a Bachelors, a ninety hour Masters of Divinity, a year’s congregational internship, and 400 hours of clinical pastoral education in an institutional setting. So from 1982 to 1990, I was a full time student, the mom and wife for my family, and an active volunteer in my church. It was hard, hectic and demanding. But it was also an extremely expanding, enriching and deepening eight years.
I started out with a dual major in Religion and Philosophy. Because I knew I was continuing on to seminary where I would get an immersion in Biblical studies and Christian thought, I concentrated on the non-Christian religions for the religion part of my degree. The Eastern religions, ancient earth-based religions, and even Judaism gave me a much broader perspective on the whole notion of the sacred.
When we got to the Existentialists in the philosophy department, and then the Transcendentalists, I began to put it together for myself. I had heard about the Transcendentalists in church, about Emerson and Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. But I didn’t really understand it from the brief sermons and short readings we occasionally heard. I didn’t have enough background to really get it.
Then I learned about Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme and something they called “the New Story.” And then there was Matthew Fox, the Catholic priest who got excited about the New Story and turned orthodox Catholic theology on its head, writing a book called Original Blessing.
The Christian doctrine of original sin was the reason we needed Christ – to redeem us from original sin. In Original Blessing, Fox agreed with Berry and Swimme that we are all part of God, not separate, and not born of sin. The term these folks used that best described what seems right to me was “panentheism.”
Panentheism says that god is in all things and all things are in god. God is not a conscious being, but the energy or life force that makes everything to be and become. God is an easy word for it, but certainly not necessary. Other ways of naming this energy or life force are “ground of all being,” “ultimate reality,” “transcendent mystery and wonder,” “Spirit of Life,” and so on. You can find many ways of expressing this in our hymnal. But it really doesn’t matter whether there is a name or not.
The best way I can explain my panentheistic beliefs is from the perspective of the New Story al la Brian Swimme, Thomas Berry, Matthew Fox and many others. First a few very brief readings to set the context and then I’ll tell you why this is compelling to me.
READING I Brian Swimme,
He is a physicist who calls himself a mathematical cosmologist. He is author of The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, The Universe Story (with Thomas Berry), among other works, and here he’s talking about the “big bang.”
Our ancestry stretches back through the lifeforms and into the stars, back to the beginnings of the primeval fireball. This universe is a single, multiform, energetic unfolding of matter, mind, intelligence and life. All of this is new. None of the great figures of human history were aware of this. Not Plato, not Aristotle, or the Hebrew prophets, or Confucius, or Leibniz, or Newton, or any other world-maker. We are the first generation to live with an empirical view of the origin of the universe. We are the first humans to look into the night sky and see the birth of stars, the birth of galaxies, the birth of cosmos as a whole. Our future as a species will be forged within this new story of the world.
READING II from “The Spirit in Technology” by Tom Mahon in the Wall Street Journal in 1996. He is responding to the New Story and how it reframes the notion of god.
.....True spirituality is an exquisite awareness of the interconnection of all things. And the connection of connections, the network of networks, the bond of all bonds is the phenomenon we call God, an old English word meaning "the good."
Instead of picturing God as a medieval monarch on a marble throne, imagine God as the living awareness in the space between the atoms, "empty" space that makes up about 99.99% of the universe. Thinking of God that way gets us past some of the great theological divides of the past. Is God immanent or transcendent, internal or external, composed or compassionate? Like the question of whether the atom is wave or particle, the answer is: yes.
READING III Miriam Therese MacGillis, OP, Director, Genesis Farm, an environmental center founded by Dominican Sisters.
The universe has a spiritual dimension and has from the beginning. When people come to understand that their spirit, their soul, their inner essence is a dimension of a larger, universal, inner mystery, they have a sense of connection that is profound. They realize they have come directly from some sacred, mysterious source––call it God, call it whatever you will, but that connection is intrinsic and nothing can change it.
Here’s my take on how this all happened and what it means for me:
In the beginning, there was an explosion from a seed of infinite energy, what we call the Big Bang. Eventually, stars and planets were born creating galaxies.
On our planet, planet Earth, life appeared in the form of microscopic self-replicating, carbon-based collections of atoms.
Life here evolved over billions of years. Continents moved; seas rose and fell; the atmosphere changed. Millions of species of life appeared. Many became extinct while others adapted and survived, including our forbearers.
Eventually, as humans became conscious of themselves and developed language, they made up stories to understand how they came to be: Adam and Eve and the serpent; First Woman and Coyote; the first parents, Geb and Nut; the great cosmic egg containing ying and yang. And finally, in our own time, humans came up with this New Story about the cosmic explosion, the Big Bang.
The New Story has three important advantages over the stories that have preceded it.
The first advantage is quite practical - it works. Scientists test the story in every way they can think of: powerful telescopes, spectroscopes and radiation detectors, and a huge particle-accelerating machines to see what happened in the first moments of the Big Bang.
And though theorized for many years, the Higgs Boson Particle was confirmed in 2012 by the Large Hadron Collider. Higgs Boson is called is the God particle by many – that empty space between the atoms which makes creation possible. Scientists keep testing their theories, trying to prove the New Story wrong, and whenever they do, the story is modified. It’s not a fixed story for all time, but an ongoing revelation.
The second advantage of this story is that it’s a universal story. In this modern version it was originally a product of Western science and cosmology, but it has become the story of all scientifically educated people throughout the world. Scientists of all cultures exchange ideas freely and use the same criteria of verification and falsification. And the heart of this New Story – the unity and interdependence of all things – is also found within many of the world’s religions, so it has resonance through time.
Of course, there are fundamentalists of many different persuasions throughout the world who are trying to hold on to the past, to protect and conserve their old stories. The evolution of thought is a slow and often painful process. Hope lies in the New Story and its potential to unify our different cultures.
And the third advantage is this very thing, it unites and integrates us within the whole of existence. The New Story’s narrative of how we came to be emphasizes the inter-connectedness of all things, including all people.
Some of the old stories, especially ours in Western culture, put human beings above the rest of life and give us dominion over the millions of other creatures of the Earth. We’re seeing now how destructive that perspective is.
The New Story shows us that we, and all of life, are part of the unfolding of space and time. It teaches us our oneness – our biological affinity - with all that is. It teaches us that we must respect and protect all of life, not exploit it for our own purposes. We must learn to live in harmony with the whole of life.
Now, I’m not really scientifically minded. I am fascinated, but if you ask me to explain anything beyond this basic understanding, I’ll get tongue tied. It was my study of Eastern and ancient earth based religions, plus the more cosmological approach of Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, that allowed me to get anything at all out of articles about quantum physics and news flashes about new discoveries.
The ancient creation stories of all cultures are precious for the deep truths they explore and try to explain and for the wisdom embodied in them. What is compelling to me is that science and many traditional religions converge to tell a story that is universal, open to ongoing revelation, and points to the interconnectedness of all things.
So, to summarize, panentheism is the best “ism” to describe my beliefs and the New Story is the most compelling accounting of how Life came to be and continues to evolve. I believe that all life is an integrated wholeness and I believe in a Life Force, an energy or whatever, that is in and through all things and which enlivens life.
I find poetry and wisdom in many elements of old stories from all cultures, even the Christianity I embraced as a child. Sometimes it just feels good to call this Life Force God, to imagine that it holds me in the metaphorical palm of its metaphorical hand, and that it metaphorically loves me.
After all, it is clear that this force upholds and supports life -- not each individual little life, but Life itself of which I am an integral part. In the ‘big picture’ sense, isn’t that what love really is, so why not just say that God is love?