Throughout the world today every human society is struggling with the whole realm of meaningful symbols. This is as true of families seen as single social units as it is of nations or whole cultures that have many units. The meal table has disappeared as a practice for many urban families. In segments of society where the practice continues, it frequently exists only in a perfunctory form or in an economy that is fading from the mainstream of the surrounding society. At the cultural level there is the loss of a center ­­ no one place where life images are freighted. The result is a plethora of images and a life style that heads in several directions at once.

The underlying human contradiction is a struggle with mythology ­­ an inclusive, historical story about the way life is. What the world is we live in, what it means to be a self or a full human being, how that humanness is lived out responsibly relative to the moral issue of our day, and what human associations and covenants will freight meaning over a whole life time ­­ these are the questions to which Twentieth Century people have few answers as individuals or as groups.

In the lives of a few individuals and a few small groups where a lifelong mythology is operative; they lack a life­pervasive, socially relevant symbol system that keeps their myth alive. In the centuries when India lived extensively out of the Vedic mythologies, the life in a village was filled with temples, rituals and a multitude of symbols that on a daily basis communicated the life images of the society. In medieval Europe the great cathedrals and all the activation associated with them filled people's lives with holistic images.

Television, movies and an avalanche of paperbacks provide many life images, even significant images that portray and illumine the deeps of what it means to be a human being. They are the temples of our day. But where is the unity? And to what degree can a society have manyness and diversity and still grasp itself as a social entity at all? How do you decide between the conflicting images or between profoundly human images and trash? Is there not what the ancients called the demonic ­­ those life images that are attractive and compelling but finally reduced, restrictive and destructive to human life. Racial superiority, male dominance, fascist atrocities, and shallow sensationalism are but a few demons needing to be exorcised in our day. The temple is cluttered and fragmented. Images that inject greater depths of meaning and unifying enlivenment into life are precious few and usually short-lived.

This sets the stage on which to raise the question of God. What can we base our lives on? What reality other than ourselves do we point to as the Final Reality out of which all things come and into which all things go? If in fact there is across the world today a common understanding of what it means to be human, what anchor point holds it in being? Among all the many life images available, how do I discern among them day by day? What guides my whole life so that there is a direction to what I do with myself? It is naming the name of God that in the past has called society into being. The global. secular society is forging such a name.

Simply to say, the 'Mystery', is inadequate. As secular people we talk of God as the Mystery to keep ourselves sane during a time when no name for God seems adequate. Where mystery is present only indicates where God has been encountered. Mystery is not God. We encounter awe in our lives, but the Awe is not God. Where God is, awe is present. Where awe is, the possibility of the God­relation is present. But not necessarily.

I once walked across a high railroad bridge. It swayed. I looked over the rail. A river was some 300 feet below. I experienced awe. It did not occur to me that God did it or was present. It could have, I suppose. The God­relation comes when my life is called forth anew. Or society's life is reconciled. Maybe if on the bridge my whole vocation had opened before me, I would have been experiencing God and known itl If I was experiencing God, I certainly did not know it at the time. The One is not the awe itself. Awe is what happens when the One is glorified, is worshipped, adored. Also the awe happens when we glorify the One. "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will among men (or unity among the Many).

All sorts of mystical and kooky life styles are emerging. Those who relate to life in a final way from the image of life as mystery remain obtuse to us. Unless their audience is somehow able to associate the image to a previous worldview, their language sounds like gibberish. Within that same community there is a universe of discourse that allows such language to be intelligible.

Previous concepts of God have lost their power for most people today. This is not because they have never heard of God as a reality in their lives. They have heard the name of God but associate the word with 'good relations' or 'someday life will be better' or 'all the values of Western civilization rolled into one' or a number of other reduced or distorted understandings of life. As a result many people have rejected the name of ' God' as a life significating image. Those who find the name of God meaningful too often live a life style disrelated to the actual world that the God who is God has given them and is continuing to create all around them.

In the final analysis life itself raises the question of God. It is not raised by an intellectual puzzle or a philosophical debate. Nor is it raised in a detached or dispassionate way. It is raised in the midst of our everyday life. When my family is taken away from me by tragedy, in agony I ask life, myself or anyone who will listen: Why? What goes on here? Is being a human being really worth it after all? If life comes and goes in such a willy­nilly fashion, is life finally only a capricious game? If the life we live answers this question 'yes', then we have decided to name the final reality of our lives, 'Chance'!

In the life of faith the final reality goes by many names all of which point to the same final reality. We say 'Our Father'­the one out of whom all things come and into which all things go. We say creator and sustainer of all of life. The ancients in the Church have said that this One has a number of attributes. This One is omnipresent ­­ exists everywhere all at once and is not confined to one place nor synonymous with any concept or idea or way of life we humans articulate or embody. This One is omnipotent ­­ all powerful, no other reality withstands or supersedes this One as a source of existence. This One is omniscient ­­ all knowing. All forms of consciousness humans together is only a small portion of this infinite source of wisdom, a fathomless reservoir.

We are witnessing in our day a transmutation of the name the people of God have given this final reality. It was Jesus of Nazareth, called the Christ, who put the name, 'Our Father', into history as a name we hays used in a meaningful way. The name not only connotes the mayor attributes of God but also issues in a life style among the faithful that exemplifies profound humanness, especially in the mode of forgiveness.

The women's revolution is challenging the name 'Father' as an adequate name for the final reality in our day. Whether the proponents of that revolution are entirely aware of it or not, whether any of us like the fact that it is being challenged or not, by the apparently simple mechanism of changing the personal pronoun from 'he' to 'we' or '(s)he' or 'they' or 'one' or whatever the human relationship to selfhood is being altered. It may seem quite benign at first to go from 'chairman' to 'chairperson', but in fact such a simple alteration of language shifts social symbolism in a profoundly dramatic way. By extension our name for God as the Father is also being challenged. I am who my God is. And what name I give that God reveals my own final relationship to life. It is the basic expression of my selfhood.

Historically, the name of God has gone through several other transmutations. One of the earliest Hebrew names, 'Elohim', is a plural form. Did these ancient people once see the Godhead as being more than one? In ancient Babylonia the creation myths dramatize male and female consorts engaged in the process of bringing existence into being. In many of the world cultures the primary deity was a female who had dominance over the male gods. The Isis and Osiris myth in ancient Egypt clearly has Isis, the female god, as the one who finally reigned. Co-partnership in creation is the sociological form emerging in our day due to the female revolution. Our name for God coincides with this grasp of final reality and of selfhood.

Another Hebrew name for God was 'Yahweh' or 'Jehovah'. This name presumably grew out of an extended period of time in which the Hebrew people stood in deep awe at giving God any name at all. To name a reality for them was to control that reality. Naming had serious repercussions for the one who did the naming.

To curse a fellow human being resulted in being cursed unless the one who spoke the curse bowed quickly to the ground and allowed the rebounding curse to pass quickly ever her or his head. How often have any of us regretted the repercussions from an ill­advised remark? How long did it take to live down the results? It frequently takes a lifetime to live down the repercussions from an inadvertancY or an indiscretion.

Naming God for the Hebrews was a far more awesome venture. Finally, they simply said, 'Is', or 'the One who is, was and ever shall be'. In the Hebrew language it was written 'YHWH' ­­ centuries later the vowel points were put in to distinguish sounds giving us 'Yahweh', or transliterated into English 'Jehovah'.

The word 'God' has pointed to the final ultimate reality in the languages of the Western and Middle Eastern cultures: God, Gott, Deus, Theos, Allah. They are merely verbal symbols. Yet each one is pointing not to any 'not me' but to that reality that is 'finally' not me'. In the Subcontinent (India) and in the Graeco­Roman world, 'god' also referred to an exceptional human being: 'that man is a god', 'there goes a god'. Even today in India if someone has been the bearer of power and new life in a village the people say: 'You are a god'.

It is said that Chinese culture has not believed in a supreme being. There is 'Heaven' or 'Sky' that does in fact rule over people's fortune (also called, 'The Dragon'). The final reality, we may say, is 'Benevolence' or 'Universal Good Will'. 'Good Fortune' in the Chinese world of North and Southeast Asia has become reduced to monetary good will and fortune. But Tao or the Way originally and predominantly even today is all inclusive, it is 'All pervasive Well­being' ­­ finally not too different as an ontological image or concept from the 'All Loving Diving Being' worshipped by Christians in the last 150 years. But Tao is finally what runs all of life. Tao has simply never been personified in quite the same way as in Arabic­European images and concepts. Tao, to many people, is more 'a response to' final reality rather than 'an existence that is' final reality. Is this much different from saying, 'I am who my God is'. The life style, the ethic of living the Way discloses what final reality is for people.

The problem is not whether or not such a reality exists. It is the problem in our day of not having an adequate metabilt out of which to point to God or to any final relationship. We simply leave God out, as it were. It is in part a problem of language or poetry or an inclusive mythology that relates all that is to all else that is including the intangibles as well as he tangibles. In a day when we could say, "God's in His heaven and all is right with the world," such a metabilt existed. In a world turned upside down with no grasp of the wrath of God, the capriciousness or even willfulness of God, such a mythology is wish dreaming. Most people today are bewildered or angry or even rebellious against the times because they cannot understand why their world is constantly being upset.

But the problem is greater than this. We cannot simply return to the metabilt of previous ages. The whole picture has shifted. Awe and mystery are found in the center of life today, in the mundane, in the secular world we are living in. Only our reduced metabilts, inherited or created, prevent us from experiencing and acknowledging the mystery's awesome presence. The emerging paradigm is a paradigm without a center, without rulership from the top down. It should not surprise us in the least that a great cathedral or temple fails to communicate to us the all­pervasive awesomeness of life once experienced by our forefathers. The metabilt in that cathedral or temple is not our metabilt. Its metabilt is out of synch with our daily experience of life.

God is the final reality. It is going on now today. It has always been going on. And always will be going on. And this 'it' is transformed into 'he' or 'she' a person at the moment that reality becomes my final reality ­­ the One I finally live before. Because we do live in a desacralized world, I suspect for most people the final remains, 'it'. We are denuded even of our own 'mystery, depth, and greatness' due to the fact that we cannot take a personal relationship to the final reality of the way life is, Therefore, our name for what is going on is 'Enemy'.

We today have both the greatest opportunity and the greatest temptation ever known to human existence. The opportunity is to be finally and personally related to the awesome source of all mystery (within the smallest atom as well as the farthest expanse through and beyond the Black Holes). Instead we are tempted to reduce all our relations and therefore our final relationship to mundane existence and a­manageable context. Such human robotics, if embraced, condemn us to being wanderers, a sort of nomadic automatons constantly pursuing new fascinating mundanities which themselves appear to be infinite. It is a temptation to be what was once called the state of being 'lost'. Even a godless existence is related to God, to final reality as it were. The choice we have is being self­consciously and personally related to God or not.

God cannot be confined to any thing. This One creates all things including the Church. Over and over again this One has created and smashed His / Her own creations and created them anew. We cannot honor God so long as we remain attached to any creature as though that creature were final reality. If I have to be American or Baptist or my family or my position and finally have to be these relationships, barring all others, I cannot love God. God is God. There is no other. All other relationships coma and go. They die. This relationship is yet in being even when I myself go. Even if the earth, the universe, all else goes this One exists.

I do not care if some say, 'God is dead'. All they mean is that some small, reduced image they and those who taught them have is dead, meaningless and no longer freights significance to life. The One whom I adore is beyond all such images and concepts and never was synonymous with any image any human being had of that O One.

In is curious indeed how one becomes finally related to this One. More curious yet is how one comes to adore this One. It would seem today as it has been in the past that we humans come to know we are finally related to this Final Reality only through someone else or some group of someone elses. The Few who rise above their manyness and embrace the One life understanding or posture present in life are Few who take us on the Journey towards embracing this One. This One is the One in the One, if you please.

I call it the One in the One as an image of God as seen in the profound ecumenism emerging around the world today. In the midst of a diverse pluriform global society is one common human life understanding. This One is at the center of that humanness, yet distinct from the common understanding. This One is the One in the One. (a diagram follows)

My relation to the One in the one humanness we are may have begun out of my romanticism. I met someone who represented the Few. I got excited. I saw a fascinating future for the world, for others, for myself. I pursued my fascination. Being romantic itself is not bad. It is for some of us, a first step toward inclusive responsibility. It is romanticism that is a perversion when it becomes the only, the final life style I can or will live. When that happens, then I keep on pursuing the next fascination and the next and the next. Once more I become a lost human being, a lost soul.

We may also come to the Few as Stoics. "I happened into this way of life. I am here. So I will stay here and make the best of it." Or we come as desperate people. We have nowhere else to go. Or we come out of some great self­interest, a better way of life, a way to get out of my crummy village or my crummy Job or my marriage or whatever. We may even have been sent by our bosses or sent to represent some group. The motives are fathomless. As such they neither provide an excuse to back out or an impetus to go on or to do better.

In fact, seen through the eyes of faith, any or all of these are 'God acting in our daily lives'. This confessional statement is poetry, is a way of talking, that allows people to grasp how we humans are and always have been finally related to Final Reality. Being consciously related to that reality as Final is the issue, and consciously embracing this One as the source of my life radically depends on my free choice. This free choice does not make me related to the Final Reality. The choice makes the already existing relationship to the Final Reality. People in the past said that they were 'led' into a life of faith. They said, 'This is God's will for my life.' Wonderful poetry for saying that union with God, with the One in the One, is really a reunion, a being reconciled with the Ground of Being from whom I have become and remain estranged or separated.

The adoration of God is purely and simply the decision that this reunion is your life stance. 'Here I stand. I can do no other.' That statement once enabled a man, called Luther, to decide for himself and many about him how history was to go. And Luther's particular life made a difference in history ­­ a huge difference to Christian people and through them to history itself. When you decide that God is and that 50d is your final relationship to life, you have named the Name. You have privately at least found Yourself.

The issue for us is not whether we will or have said this privately to ourselves. The issue for most of us in the spirit movement today is how do we say this publicly in our day. Not only do our knees shake and we break out in a cold sweat but even given the courage, language fails us. What verbal symbols freight the life posture we have in fact taken? It is much like a man who faced a similar dilemma. He had emerged from a tradition that had an inclusive mythology and language into a culture that apparently did not. So he looked around for whatever was at hand and saw this statue, "To the Unknown Godn. "There, that is the God I worship," Paul said, This a methodology that we can learn from, me­thinks. We name the One in the One from whatever stuff is at hand.

But the issue goes a level deeper. It is in fact for us a life­and­death issue. Knowing God, knowing the One in the One, is one thing. It sustains you in yourself whether you ever adequately proclaim so or not. Loving God is the level deeper. Adoring God is quite another thing. Yearning for the existence of this One is yet another leap in spirit consciousness. And finally knowing God is not enough for the long haul. It is certainly not enough if you decide to do anything with our life. It is most definitely not enough if you have decided to bend history. Very simply, if you do not love and adore the One in the One, you will not stand. You will sooner or later fade away. You will be one who is cared for rather than being one who cares.

You see, this One is a constant interpreter of history, of your history. The very vicissitudes, attacks on your integrity, pain, internal factions you face ­­ all of these are but indications that the One in the One loves you, cares for you and runs the universe. Certainly you are clear when you love this One that YOU do not run the universe. "Though He slay me, yet will I praise His name." That phrase is spoken standing in the state of being we call glorification.

To adore or love God do we always move through the Dark Night of the Soul and the Long March of Love to the level deeper? Do we in the midst of the Dark Night/Long March as sanctified ones somehow take another turn to ADORE the One drives us on, who sears our being with an Eternal Flame? Only sanctified people can love God, or adore the One in the One.

To adore God is not to control Him or to own Him. Human beings in a sense create history as co­creators with this One. In our day we are more aware of our power over life and death than ever before in history. But this is only a new found discovery in the human dignity and freed given bv this One. This One alone creates ­ radically creates ­ from nothing all that is. Or better put for our modern ears: Wherever history is being created is the activity of this One. The Holy Other is Wholly Other. Naming God may come to us as a rational activity, using our intellect to formulate concepts and words. But God is utter irrationality. This One is beyond our sanity. Certainly it would be true to say that our belief in God is not God. Our beliefs are only our feeble attempts to grasp, to point to the One who is beyond us.

It is amazing beyond precedent how we human beings are capable again and again, century after century, of turning our own puny creations into idols, that is, representations that point to Final Reality. Still more amazing is our relentless capacity of forgetting, losing eight of or even turning off our awareness of Final Reality itself.

One of the great benefits of the 20th Century is what is happening tc our idols. Liberalism has died. Hooray! It would seem that it is no longer possible for any of our idealized principles to be more important than the circumstances or the people involved. The death of liberalism has ended the notion that abstract visions or dreams are disembodied values good in themselves. Who would even want an idea that cannot be embodied or lived out or?

Those who yearn for primal community but cannot work with other human beings and certainly not with people they look down on are caught in an ineffective and unworkable position. Those who seek global unity but constantly find themselves embroiled in petty disputes and themselves are fomenters of factions and disputes are violators of their own hopes and dreams. We continually deepen our state of separation. We become our own worst enemies. With every attack on the illusions of others goes an illusion you find yourself caught more deeply in the universal spider web of illusion. Liberalism is dead, not because we do not find ourselves caught in it. We do. It is dead because we all know when we are caught in it and day by day we do not in fact break out of it into a human mode, the mode of adoring God.

Adoration of the One in the One calls us to this new human mode. It as yet has no name. It may be seen in the way we do in fact operate when we are operating effectively and authentically. It is a mode of partnership with nature and with one another. Co­creatorhood with the One yet acknowledging our own creatureliness has come to be possible for all peoples. Co­creators as male and female together is one element in the style lived out of this mode.

Another poetic way to grasp this mode is to see that the Other World is in this world. It has always been the case, I suppose. But it is more pronounced and more acutely and consciously present to us the Secular Age. In the midst of mundaneity, in the midst of our great sciences and scientific achievements, in the midst of our fabulous technology is spirit. Spirit is consciousness. Spirit is where mystery breaks through to you. Spirit is where care is most manifested in human lives. Spirit is where human wholeness, fulfillment and happiness is found even where our agonies and imperfections are most evident to us. The Other World is where you live or the mode YOU live out of when you adore God.

The problem is most of us spend our time creating and maintaining representations of the Other World. God, the One in the One, smashes every representation of the Other World we create. Be it friendship, be it power, be it a love­relationship, be it satisfaction, be it a philosophy, be it sex, be it keeping things practical and day by day ­­ all of these representations only block our way from living in and out of the Other World. God smashes them.

Living in the other World amidst this world is to be like God. We become united with the One in the One in so far as we embody this mode. This is what various cultures are pointing to when they say of some people: 'he is a god' or 'she is a goddess'. These people are those in whose presence we are in awe. The God­man or the God­woman inspire us with profound awareness and make possible to everyone around them profound humanness.

This is not merely being human. This is being humanness in its fullest expression. Our temptation is to deny the humanness of such people. We make them our leaders and thereby destroy their own humanity. We turn them into sex objects and reduce them into sources of our own pleasures. They become things or objects to us. We often take God­men and insist they be good guys versus all the bad guys we know. Or we elevate them into some humanly confineable presence or category - "Mr. President". I suppose we do so in order to avoid the claim they make on our lives. It also keeps the world functioning in a powerful way.

We sometimes deal with being God­persons by talking about when we "find ourselves", or when we "get our act together", or "realize our full potential". These are contemporary phrases that at least point in the direction of our becoming united with the One in the One. The Hindus say such people are bodhisatvas or avatars. What if in our day this human mode is in fact available to every man, woman or child in every culture? It has always been available to all. It has now become essential to our global humanity. The local man revolution requires it of everyone. We can no longer defer it only to a few or to someone on top. "As the Father and I are one so are you one with me and the Father." This paraphrase claimed this possibility long ago. It is now reaching its full potential. Our one unforgivable sin before all other sins is refusing to be the God­men or the God­women we are

The way such a mode has been created and maintained in the past has been through acts of worship. This is no doubt one of the most difficult and awkward activities in which postmodern people as postmodern people engage themselves. It is easy for some of us, apparently, to cease being postmodern for brief intervals of time and to worship in the ways relevant within other metabilts using the old poetry and experiencing a relation to the Beyond.

During times of impending social crisis even more of us cling to the old forms. I choose to think that the return to evangelical Christianity in America or the presence of fanatical Muslims in other countries are themselves indicators of an impending breakthrough. We are about to experience a profoundly new religious mode. It is still "about ton for me, for one simple reason. The old poetries, however meaningful and rich in wisdom they may be, do not Jibe with the real world, the everyday world around us.

The worship life we seek will extol, honor and infuse wonder into our mundane world. It will not war against or deny it as "back to religion" movements do. Adoring God ]~ our worship. It is not added on to our lives. We adore the One in the One but we lack adequate ritual. We lack the ritual that allows us to re­enter a time of social structure and inclusive care for all the people.

We have lost a sense of the transcendent in our day ­­ not because we are scientific. Science created a new universe for us. But it appears for the moment to be a diversion, a fascination that beckons us away from focusing our attention on the Other World. Science has in fact opened up mystery, freedom, vehicles for care and fulfillment for all People.

Unless we recover transcendence in our scientific, technological, information society all attempts at profound symbolization will be partial, incomplete and unsatisfactory. Unless we learn to worship (that is, adore the One in the One), we dare not tamper with "natural theology" which is the transposition of classical wisdom into a secular mode. Symbol comes first and primary. It is key to all social transformation. We are creating a new social vehicle. Unless we symbolize it, name it and call it into final relationship with Final Reality, 1 it will not fully be in being.

The spirit movement in our day is going to the masses of planet earth­­4,000,000 human settlements in its villages and cities. But we individually will not get there unless we adore the One in the One. Unless we worship God and God alone, we will fall by the wayside clutching some favorite value or person or belief from which we will not detach ourselves. This worship is not merely a subjective feeling or thought process. It is being embodied in ritual and symbol and icon and myth. That is to say, wherever the ritual process in people's lives embodies the dynamics the dynamics we have named ­­ in that process the adoration of God is taking Place.

Only the mystery beyond all mysteries is God. We dare not call people merely to follow our ideas or our beliefs about God. To be God­persons we must call people to follow God, or to follow us ~g we follow God! The temple for our day, as in the past, Points beyond ourselves. It has ways of representing all the saints. But these saints point beyond themselves or their ideas or beliefs or noble practices. They find ways of pointing to the One in the One. And the Temple is now being created and maintained by the priestly Few who not only know that to be the Way but who live that way.

David McCleskey