Is the “God of our fathers” — that is, the God in which our ancestors believed — able and equipped to serve humanity in the 21st Century…or do we need a “new God”? That is the question that events of our time places before our species.
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NOTE: Saturday is Prose & Poetry Day here on the blog, a time to take a moment once a week to relax the mind, open the heart, and access the soul through the gift of prose from one of the many books of The New Spirituality, and through the poetry of m. Claire, author of the forthcoming volume, Silent Sacred Holy Deeply: Heart.
For this week’s prose we offer…the first in a series of excerpts from Tomorrow’s God…
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Chapter One
THE GREATEST BLASPHEMY
We need a new God.
I know.
No. I’m serious. We need a new God. The old God isn’t working anymore.
The old one never worked.
Some people think it did.
They were not looking at the world around them.
They weren’t?
Not honestly. Not comprehensively. They were seeing only what they wanted to see.
They were not seeing the cruelty and the fighting and the killing that was going on in God’s name. They were not seeing the separation and the oppression and the fear and the utter dysfunction. Or, worse yet, they were seeing it and they played into it. They used it as a means of controlling the people.
In truth the old God, Yesterday’s God, might have made individual lives work here and there—perhaps even many of them—but that God was never able to create a just society or a joyful, harmonious civilization, to say nothing of a peaceful world. And that God can’t do that even today.
Even today, with all your powers of instant communication and total connection and advanced comprehension and increased awareness and sophisticated technology and marvelous miracles, you can’t produce the simple, humble experience for which humanity has yearned from the beginning of time.
You can’t produce peace.
I know.
You can’t produce lasting joy.
I know.
And the God in whom you believe can’t, either.
Why? Why? Why can’t all the best efforts of humanity and all the help we’ve begged for, and received from God, produce this result?
Because the God in whom you believe isn’t real. The God in whom you believe is made up. It is a God you created out of thin air, having nothing to do with Ultimate Reality
.
Well, there’s a challenging thought. That’s just about the greatest blasphemy
.
All great truth begins as blasphemy.
The time to challenge your most sacred beliefs is at hand. If you don’t challenge your beliefs soon, your beliefs are going to challenge you.
This book is meant to be challenging.
This book is meant to save the world.
Will it?
That’s up to the world.
Why? Why isn’t it up to you? If you’re God, why isn’t it up to you?
Because my function is not to save the world. My function is to create it.
And after you create it, you don’t care what happens?
I care what happens as much as you do.
No, you don’t. If you care what happens as much as we do, you won’t let the world destroy itself.
You mean if I care what happens more than you do. If I care what happens as much as you do, I will let the world destroy itself, because that’s exactly what you are doing.
Since I care only as much as you do, the world in which you live may very well be destroyed. At the very least, life as you now know it could be irrevocably altered. And if that’s what happens, I will let it happen.
Why? Why won’t you do something to stop it?
Because you won’t.
We can’t. You can. You’re God. You can do what humans cannot.
Your statement is inaccurate. I can, and YOU can. But I will not, unless you do.
Why not? What kind of a God are you?
The best kind there is. The only kind there is. The kind who gives you free will, and who will never, ever interfere with that.
Not even to save us from ourselves?
If I saved you from yourselves, then you wouldn’t BE “yourselves,” but only a slave to me. You would not have free will. Your will would be free only until you did something that I did not want you to do. Then, I would stop the exercise of your free will and make you do what I want you to do.
Of course you would. If you were half the God that humans think you are, you would stop us from destroying ourselves. You would do what is best for us. You would make us do what is best for us.
By whose assessment, and by whose definition?
What?
“Best” by whose assessment, and “us” by whose definition?
By yours. By your assessment. By your definition. You would define what is meant by the term “us,” you would decide what is “best” for us, and then you would make what is “best” happen for all of “us.” We depend on you to do this. That’s what God is for.
Really? Is that what you think?
(Next Saturday, installment #2 from Tomorrow’s God.)
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This week’s gift of poetry
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We wake this morning empty,
yes?
As if the cup that stands
in the Solar Plexus
was tipped
in the Night
while
we slept.
yes?
That as the day unfolds
This Love will
come to fill Us
while
we Live.
And these words appear before Us,
yes?
As if the cup we spoke of
has become The Chalice
held in the hands
of God.
As if what has been tipped
was never emptied
and
therefore
never lost.
*
And these words appear before Us,
yes?
(Exalted – m. claire – copyright 2007 – all rights reserved)
For more of the work of this new poetic voice you are invited to visit www.mclairepoet.com.
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