A New Christmas Story – God in 3D

Christianity’s familiar and beautiful Christmas story depicts a heavenly father sending his son to be born into the world to save people from their despair, and then later sends the Holy Spirit to comfort and guide them. This is a warm image of God as a loving father, a self-giving son, and an ever-present, encouraging Spirit.

The Holy Trinity by Luca Rossetti

However, this traditional story only portrays a one-dimensional God – where the metaphors of personal relationship are limited to the male images of father and son and a gender-neutral “spirit” (although feminine in both Hebrew and Greek). It is true that God is revealed in these images. It is also partial. Today’s cosmically informed world longs for a God who is bigger than “the man upstairs,” closer and more real to us personally than just an ancient story, and more like us than only a heroic figure from the past.

Integral Christianity gives us a God, not only beside us in the personal dimension, but also a God who is at the same time in the transpersonal dimension—beyond us. And at the same time a dimension of God who is within us—being us. This is a God in 3D!

GOD IN THREE DIMENSIONS

God Beyond Us

The new Christmas story pictures a God in 3D. These three dimensions of God begin with the Infinite Face of God, who is everywhere, in everything, and beyond us, too. This is the awesome I AM revealed to Moses as Being Itself! The incarnation of God becoming flesh and dwelling among us starts with all matter and mystery, bigger than we can comprehend with our minds.

God Beside Us

This God-Beyond-Us, is born into this world in a breakthrough way as Jesus of Nazareth. A baby boy grows up to embrace and manifest his own humanity and divinity, lives, dies, and lives again to walk as the Intimate Face of God —God-Beside-Us.

God Being Us

Today, this Jesus continues to lovingly whisper into our souls, releasing the living water whose eternal source dwells in us in our innermost being as us (John 7:38). This holy spirit living water can now be understood, in a new way, not available to first century understanding, as awakened consciousness.

This higher, unity consciousness magnificently reveals that every person, like Jesus, carries the divine image within them as the Inner Face of God — God-Being-Us. As Hafiz says, “When no one is looking, and I want to kiss God, I just lift my own hand to my mouth.”

Since it is the Christmas season, I will focus on Jesus as an expression of the Intimate Face of God, However, remember that this intimate God is also at the same time an Infinite God-Beyond-Us and an Inner God-Being-Us. This is God in 3D!

A New Understanding of Jesus

For Christians, God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus. This is freeing for those who have been given the picture of a Jesus who excludes people who don’t believe and follow the correct rules. Sometimes the New Testament says such things. Let’s first address this unfortunate, all-too-common picture of Jesus.

Jesus was a universal person living in a specific time and place. His adoring followers made claims about him that he did not make about himself. The language of love often says to our beloved partner, “You are the most beautiful woman in the world,” or ‘You are the most handsome man who has ever lived.” So, too, the early Christians, lost in their passionate love for Jesus and saved from small ideas, called Jesus the only son of God. In the ancient world, rulers were often said to have been born of a virgin and called son of God. It was natural to understand Jesus in these terms in that culture and incorporate this into the stories about him.

Yet, Jesus called himself son of man and, as pointed out in the Gospel of Thomas as well as the four canonical gospels, we too are all called sons and daughters of God.

While Integral Christians find that God is beautifully defined by Jesus, we know that God is not confined to Jesus. We are comfortable following Jesus while affirming other loving spiritual paths and persons, being enriched by them. We model how all traditional religions can evolve to higher levels without having to leave their unique path. Jesus didn’t dismiss his religion. Instead, he offered a more evolved version of it for his time. It is still evolving today. His model is relevant for all religious traditions today.

Writers of New Testament sometimes left the universality of Jesus and regressed to a narrow understanding of him. When they do, we can then confidently follow Jesus’ own model for interpreting his bible, the Hebrew scriptures. He embraced parts of it, ignored parts of it, and rejected parts of it – namely, those portrayals of God that were less than loving. Jesus said, “You have been taught to love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say that you should love your enemy, too.” To follow Jesus is to make him the discerner of all things biblical and reject those things that are less that Christ-like.

Once we let go of all claims to exclusivity and narrow theologies, we can embrace God’s light in many loving paths. We can embrace a truly universal Jesus whose title “Christ” is the Christian symbol for everything. Christ flows through all creation by whatever name. Then we can genuinely enjoy the lovely stories around the birth of Jesus as pictures of adoration and love.

Jesus is central in the Christian tradition in our understanding and experience of God. However, even in the Christian path, the Intimate Dimension of Emmanuel, God beside us, goes beyond Jesus and includes all the meaningful ways God may come close to us such as Mother, Father, Beloved, Sacred Presence, Holy One, Lover, and, the description Jesus himself preferred—Friend. Even Jesus did not personally limit his divine guidance to the One he called Abba, but sought heavenly guidance from his long-dead heroes, Moses and Elijah on the mountaintop of transfiguration. Mother Teresa found it in the desperate folks living in the gutters of Calcutta. Saint Francis found it in the birds and animals of the forest. We can find this intimate dimension of God and divine guidance in any meaningful relationship.

In the new Christmas story, the God of Three Dimensions came from beyond us, to walk beside us, to bring alive the reality of God as us. That’s the wonder of God in 3D!

An Integral Trinity might look like this:

A 3D Christmas reflects that Infinite Cosmic Mystery as God-Beyond-Us came to walk as God-Beside Us in Jesus to reveal that we, too, are God-Being-Us in the living waters of awakened consciousness.

People of all religious traditions and those of none can join Christians as we celebrate the birth of Jesus. As a prototype of evolved humanity, he came to tell us all that, as our deepest, truest Self, we are timeless, transcendent spirits walking an earthly path for a brief lifetime in the span of eternity.

Dear Lord Jesus Christ, thank you for coming into our world to show us who we are in this stunning story of cosmic love. 

“God is the comic shepherd who gets more of a kick out of that one lost sheep once he finds it again than out of the ninety and nine who had the good sense not to get lost in the first place. God is the eccentric host who, when the country-club crowd all turned out to have other things more important to do than come live it up with him, goes out into the skid rows and soup kitchens and charity wards and brings home a freak show. The man with no legs who sells shoelaces at the corner. The old woman in the moth-eaten fur coat who makes her daily rounds of the garbage cans. The old wino with his pint in a brown paper bag. The pusher, the whore, the village idiot who stands at the blinker light waving his hand as the cars go by. They are seated at the damask-laid table in the great hall. The candles are all lit and the champagne glasses filled. At a sign from the host, the musicians in their gallery strike up “Amazing Grace.”

― Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale