Resurrecting God – A New Creation Story
Part One
Is God dead?
Hopefully, more and more, yes! In a world where people are turning away from a traditional God, we can stop trying to keep the old God on life support, and let him die. Then, in place of the no longer credible god we had invented, we can discover the resurrected God, the God after God.
To claim today that “God is dead” is to say many of the old stories and metaphors about the Christian God don’t work anymore. At some point, many of our old myths and metaphors must be reinterpreted, replaced, or even discarded if we are going to continue to evolve in our understanding and experience of God. That is called “deconstruction.” It is a necessary part of growing up spiritually. It can be a dark night unless we have been taught to expect it
Deconstruction
One does not move into the next stage of the Christian faith without going through the struggle of deconstruction. This is the pulling apart one’s belief system to see where it is no longer helpful but harmful in our journey of following Jesus. This most often occurs around issues of a literally true Bible, the idea of eternal torment, Jesus dying to satisfy God’s wrath, and the institutional church.
The Bible itself is the story of God being deconstructed from a sometimes loving, sometimes angry, vengeful God to the reconstructed numinous, loving God of Jesus. Jesus proclaimed that we must lose (deconstruct) our most valued ideas and our very “self” identity before we can find the ideas and self that are closer to divine reality. Then he went and did it – literally. He went to the physical cross, having gone through the inner cross in Gethsemane. Only after the stripping, the deconstruction of our false self by traveling through the narrow path of the cross, comes resurrection. Or, as our topic here would have it, only then comes reconstruction!
Some, maybe many, stop with deconstruction. That’s the end of the road because it appears to them that God really is dead. Too bad, because the most exciting part is just ahead. Deconstruction is God’s idea to help us reach spiritual maturity. That maturity is what the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls our “second naiveté.” Those who reach this stage of life display a mindset that approaches what some call “nonduality.” This is a greater, child-like willingness to embrace the paradoxes and mystery of the spiritual life.
A Resurrected God with Three Faces
My last two books are all about reformulating Christianity into an integrated viewpoint. Integral Christianity is reconstructed Christianity. I take the parts of traditional Christianity that we might want to keep, let go of the rest, and move on to new interpretations. Jesus meant it when he said, “I have much more to teach you, but you are not ready for it yet” (John 16:12). It’s been two thousand years, and I keep telling him, “We’re ready! We’re ready!”
The world does not need a new religion but rather new versions of the previous religions. Ken Wilber has opened the way for that with his “three faces of spirit.” Wilber is the most widely translated academic writer in America, with 25 books translated into some 30 foreign languages. At ICN we augment Wilber’s integral perspective with those of Jorge Ferrer and Jean Gebser.
Wilber’s three faces of spirit or God are based on his four quadrants of Integral Theory: third-person “It” and “Its” combined, as when we talk about someone or something; second-person “We,” as when we talk to someone; and first-person “I,” as when we talk as someone. These combine to make what Wilber calls the “Big Three.” I recognized that Jesus embraced this when talked about God, to God, and as God. Jesus radically opened the way for us to do the same. Whenever Jesus talked about God, behind whatever form of God he was referencing was always the Infinite Being of Moses’ I AM. Therefore, we, too, may talk about the Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us, to the Intimate Face of God-Beside-Us, and as the Inner Face of God-Being-us.
Most of the primary approaches to the divine in various religions and spirituality focus on one or two of these faces. A reconstructed “integral God” begins with incorporating and valuing all three faces in an evolved Trinity.
To start at the most superficial level, it doesn’t help that the traditional image of Trinity is two men and a bird. Of course, we all know those are “just” artists’ images based on some biblical clues. But as Jung says, “Deep transformation happens primarily in the presence of images. They alone can touch the unconscious - in one invasive and healing reconfiguration of the soul.” We pay great attention to images at ICN and put much effort into finding those that seem to have psychospiritual energy.
The traditional image of the Trinity makes God a closed system of three “persons” who have a great time loving each other but are traditionally separated from us by a great gulf of imagined original sin. It is dualistic in that there is God the Trinity, and then there is us.
The traditional Trinity is highly masculine and patriarchal. I don’t know about the bird, but Father and Son appear to be males. Some theologians find rich and deep things from classical trinitarian thinking. However, since it is framed in the hidden language of theology, it is seldom accessible to most.
Through our groups and practices at ICN, we seek to make the experience of all three faces more apparent and accessible. Additionally, a reconstructed Christianity with a resurrected God requires new stories and metaphors.
A natural place to begin is at the beginning, with the story of creation. In this series, I will seek to retell it from the three perspectives of God that Jesus talked about.
What would a reconstructed Creation story look like told from the viewpoint of each of the Three Faces of God?
Finding the Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us in Science
Perhaps we should let science tell the story of creation from the perspective of the Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us. The unique and fascinating contribution of science is not in proposing a definitive answer to how the cosmos came into existence but in its ability to investigate the question using scientific methods and tools. Science may approach a solution to the origin of the universe, but we still have no idea if an absolute answer can ever be found.
Artist rendition of the Big Bang — Photo by David A. Aguilar
What we have found so far in the standard Big Bang theory is, in the beginning, the distance between everything was zero, and before that, there was nothing. Time itself has no meaning as a concept before that. More sophisticated models which take quantum effects into account and use elements from string theory that argue things must have begun at a certain distance apart. These models lead to the possibility of a universe before the big bang. There was a big bang in such models, but it was not the beginning of everything but only a transition, resembling an intense explosion.
The universe is enormous, probably infinite. There are far more stars than grains of sand on all the shores of the earth! It also seems the universe is expanding. Into what? Since nothing surrounds the universe, it is expanding into nothing! Or perhaps, into more Mystery.
Very little of the universe is visible matter, only about five percent. This is made up of stars and gas (mostly hydrogen), all bound together by gravity into galaxies. Another quarter of the universe is dark matter. New research reveals that galaxies are connected by dark matter bridges, constituting a sort of “skeleton” for the universe. The remaining constituent of the universe, “dark energy,” is spread uniformly throughout the entire universe. Talk about a mystery beyond us – wow!
Science has given us the beauty of evolution
The most well-known application of evolution is the Darwinian concept of a gradual process of small random variations being acted on by natural selection. This leads to the creative process in developing the myriad of species in the plant and animal kingdom. The current theory seems to be a combination of Darwin and “abrupt speciation.” This is the break in a lineage that occurs through genetic mutations, chromosomal aberrations or other evolutionary mechanisms that cause reproductively isolated individuals to establish a new species.
But there is an application of the meaning of evolution to our lived lives that Ilia Delio writes about:
We have not accepted evolution as our story. We treat evolution as a conversational theory or something that belongs to science, as if science is something separate from us and outside our range of experience. Politically, we have fiefdoms and kingdoms; socially, we have tribes and cults; religiously, we have hierarchy and patriarchy. There is nothing [structurally] that sustains, supports, or nurtures human evolution.
By evolution, I mean simply that change is integral to life. We are becoming something that is not yet known. To live in evolution is to let go of structures that prevent convergence and deepening of consciousness and assume new structures that are consonant with creativity, inspiration, and development.
Experiencing God-Beyond-Us
To let science explore creation’s origins does not mean we cannot do our own mystical explorations of the Face of God-Beyond-Us. The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar says that much of the scientific study of the evolution of religion is on theology-based doctrinal religions. He sees this is a narrow way of studying the phenomenon because it ignores the fact that, in most human history, religions have had a shamanic-like form. By shamanic, Dunbar means religions of experience that commonly involve trance and travel in spirit worlds. While the theology-based forms are only a few thousand years old and characteristic of post-agricultural societies, Dunbar argues that the shamanic forms date back 500,000 years.
Whole-Body Mystical Awakening integrates the shamanic journey into the unknown beyond with the Three Faces of God. We can experience the journey and, during or afterward, reflect on its meaning for us. The experience of the presence of Jesus, spiritual companions, and oneness is a shamanic experience.
Moments of oneness beyond us can look like this:
• A feeling of closeness and unity to all that surrounds us.
• A momentary burst of love and gratitude with cherished friends.
• The awe experienced when gazing up at the stars.
• A sudden awareness that strangers in the grocery store are our brothers and sisters.
• The realization that others have many of the same dreams and heartaches that we have.
• A state of neither wanting nor needing anything.
• The deep knowing that everything is going to be okay.
With life’s changes and disappointments, the Mystery encourages us to grow up into resilient, maturing beings of light in touch with all the inner and collective divine spiritual resources of oneness available for us. Connecting with God, divine presences, and our spiritual community are elegant solutions to life’s challenges.
We can find a spiritual community where the Jesus that is teaching us more is welcomed. Being a part of a collective, such as a WeSpace group that intentionally practices oneness through the heart and whole-body is a powerful way to open to the unified, nondual field of reality.
Whole-Body Mystical Awakening collaborative practice gives us direct exposure to the oneness that already exists within us but that appears to be beyond us until we experience it.
The following practice may be familiar to WeSpacers, but this time do it in the light of the previous thoughts.
Practice: A journey to oneness beyond us
Sink down into your heart where you find the Face of God-Beside-You as your friend, companion, and guide in whatever form is meaningful to you. Sinking deeply into the love and bliss of your heart space, you can experience the union of your heart and God’s heart. This can then extend to the union of the living hearts of all human reality.
Move to your feet and sink into that grounding space. Let the Christic energy from your material body and cosmos move you into oneness with all material reality.
Rest in your gut space where the Face of God-Being-You resides as your deepest identity. Sink into and out into all of divine reality.
Move to your head space and rest in the deep stillness there. Move up and out to the transcendent space, resting in the Face of God-Beyond-You