We have not to do with a God who is off there above the sky, who can deal with us only through the violation of physical law. We have instead a God in whom we live and move and are, whose being opens into ours and ours into his, who is the very life of our lives, the matrix of our personality; and there is no separation between us unless we make it ourselves.
~Rufus Matthew Jones (1863-1948)
Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands—remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in His flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that He might create in Himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And He came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through Him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In Him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.
~ paul, The Least of The Apostles, in Ephesians 2
Oh beloved, it is true. We are home. But everything in our (this postmodern world’s) experience, tells us that we are not. We have been told, for some 21 centuries by our Greek taskmasters that the realm of forms and ideals is somewhere else. And in this nearly true thought, we have defaulted to some horribly dangerous ways of seeing our relationship to the spiritual world.
We bandy about terms like sacred and secular, and we talk about keeping ourselves separate from the world. And again, while there is a difference between the things that are purely of Him – and that they are not of this fallen cosmos – they are not somewhere else.
Paul said it best in his quoting poets like Aratus and Epimenides in Acts 17:
Said quite simply: We are not alone. Rather, our current existence forms merely a subset of the real. We can pretty clearly understand the three dimensions we see. And we can layer in time without too much effort. We even have the sense of a couple more dimensions to our existence, even though they feel a bit tenuous.
However, it seems clear in both Scripture – and now in a growing body of scientific thought – that we live in a rich and luxurious multidimensional fabric that is made up of at least six (and probably 10 or more) dimensions. So, said more simply: it makes much more sense to believe that the spiritual is not something far away or amorphous. But rather, that the spiritual is that which is fully real.
The dangers of us believing the lie of dualism are many, and they have gotten us to where we are today. Our societies and our theology have taken on a mechanistic, transactional, textual and legalistic feel. One simple example is in that we have separated ourselves from even the responsibility of understanding the Scriptures, as this has become the job of an artificial class of persons called pastors and priests.
Now surely, the spiritual is different from our common experience. It is just that we have to understand that a spiritual experience is not isolated from our common dealings in life. Rather, what this fool of a writer is trying to say that life (read all of it), is just life. And if we will allow it, simply by opening up our being to the reality, we will find that the less tangible aspects of our existence can and will pour into even the most mundane of our activities.
But back to the problem… The insidious nature of our separating the spiritual from the physical world is becoming easier to see in the closing acts the West is playing out. The same thing happened at the beginning of the Dark Ages. As the spiritual was cast onto some other (and unreachable) side, the mind was elevated to a place of deification.
However, what quickly happened was the fall of the Roman Empire. As people began to understand that the mind is no (read not ever) a substitute for the Wisdom of The Almighty, Rome plunged itself into debauchery and corruption. We can see the same thing happening today – but why?
Can we see it? The answer is simple. When we removed the spiritual (read place where life really is) from our sphere, the only thing that was left was the mind. And while the mind is an exquisitely beautiful processor of information, it is a terrible creator of good ideas on its own. And, as it happened in Rome, it is happening in the West today.
We have come to the end of believing in the mind, and instead of a change in our thinking, to re-include the the truth of the spiritual, we have again given ourselves over to the only thing that is left: the flesh. We gorge ourselves on emptiness and wind and curves and bright, shiny things. Nothing holds any meaning except to bring stimulation to our pleasure centers.
The problem is simple, and the answer is simple too. However, the choosing to believe and obey the truth is difficult. We need to come back to the understanding that we humans are not all we thought we were. Homo sapiens is a mess – and the only hope is to become the Homo novi which G_d has made possible through His Son.
The signs are all around that our dualist approach is a disaster. Christ even gave us an incredible sign that there is now no separation between the Presence of G_d in this world and the new creation by tearing the enormous veil in the temple, by means of the trans-eternal scream “It is finished!” at His death on The Cross.
So, what if we saw things as they really are? Life is just life. G_d is not far away. And the spiritual is something that is not different – rather, it is simply a completion of who we really are. What if our entire lives were drenched in worship and the rhythms of His Grace? Could this fool of a writer be so bold as to say that everything in life would be different. We would be whole and free and real.
Tonight is your night beloved. Time to realize that it is within Him that we live and move and have your being.
