[Oe List ...] Salmon: Response to R. Wm's Earthrise

Wed Dec 8 16:56:54 CST 2010

Randy you're a dandy!
    Thanks for your reflection on the activity of God. Your image of a "penetrating God" was new language for me--I plan to steal it--as one infamous politician puts in, "You betcha!" 
    You did remind me of our recent God conversations. It is hard to believe that I wrote a short treatise on the topic and then let it moulder until it might now just be moldy. I've not been one to do this. 
    Just a couple of places to push your thinking. You write:
". . . life tends to be revealed as the raw reality it is, and we are exposed as the incomplete creatures we are. . . "
    Most recently, my thinker is exploring the notion that we are created to live the humane and gracious life while working for justice and mercy. 
    Our human situation is that our self-consciousness is in denial of this purpose; we tend to name our self-reality using worldly definitions. The signal that this is so is that life is "revealed as raw." John Wesley writes that we are asleep and can't awaken on our own. It is the purpose of the Awake (i.e., the church) to do this work of awakening sleeping souls. Apparently, the Buddah also had this in mind.   
     Our actual human experience is that we are more often Awake (living the humane and gracious life) but are not self-conscious enough to give it a name; actually, we are nicer people than we give ourselves credit. This was the wonder of RS-1, it gave us four names that point to the Awakened Life. 
    Concerning the experience of God as the "Penetrator," actually is nothing more than the experience of waking up!
    The Jesus-story of our RS-1 faith is the demonstration of what it means to die to living the unawakened life, and when we do, then we experience it as a resurrection. Remember? Jesus is the one who arrives in a "space ship" (or hits us over the head with a football while walking at night across a playing field) who jumps out and yells, "WAKE UP!" and then zooms off. 
    I've found Weatherhead's little book on the Will of God continues to be informative: God's will is experienced as the "Intentional Will" (We are supposed to live the awakened life), the "Circumstantial Will" (God rushes in to make good things happen to bad people or good things happen to good people a la Kushner and Frankl; it is worldly life that makes bad things happen to good people!), and the "Ultimate Will" (we can not help but fulfill our intended creation--just as a cow/rock/bird fulfills its purpose). 
    What this really assumes is a Creation-less God; the experience of Awakening is what we name as the experience of God. 
    Does this stir any juices for you. 
    Thanks for the stimulus. 
    Bill Salmon

----- Original Message ----- 
From: R Williams 
To: earthrise 
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2010 1:44 PM
Subject: [earthrise] Witness

      Elizabeth Edwards died yesterday at age 61, after surviving the death of her 16 year old son, suffering her husband's infidelity, and doing hand-to-hand combat with cancer for six years.  On the news last evening they ran one of her recent interviews in which she said, "My God is not an intervening God," and that she had not, could not, would not ask God to cure her of her illness, but would live her life as it was as fully and meaningfully as she could.  

      Elizabeth's statement really grabbed me.  Even though I have for sometime intellectually ascribed to the proposition, hearing it from her lips forced me to reflect on my own experience of a God who does not intervene.  Here's what I've come up with so far.

      The "promise" God makes, as I talk about it, is that regardless of the hand we're dealt and the limits imposed, meaningful living in the midst of whatever "it" is, is possible.  As some of us used to say, the situation is never the problem.  If that be true, then why would God intervene to change something that had already been pronounced "good" and rife with possibility?
      As the Apostle Paul put it, nothing can separate us from the love of God.  At the end of the day, how could anything improve on that?

      Then I thought, God may not be an intervening God, but my experience is, God is a "penetrating" God.  God may not change situations, but God does break into our conscious lives in such as way as to denude us of pretense and offer us the opportunity to relate to any circumstance as one wrought with infinte creative possibility.  Paul Tillich called this happening the grace event.  When it happens life tends to be revealed as the raw reality it is, and we are exposed as the incomplete creatures we are, in the midst of which we are given the option to relate to it all as good.  So again, why intervention?

      Finally, God may not be an intervening God, but as the writer of Revelations said, God is always making everything new--a renewing, creating God.  Life, and my life, is not a done deal.  Life constantly moves toward more life, the future is continuously unfolding, and that which is ceaselessly emerging in the course of being itself wants to emerge from and within my being as well.  And I, in my incompleteness, am called to participate as a co-creator in the emerging world until it, and I, and we, are all whole.  Elizabeth Edwards seemed to know that.  I wonder if she ever went to RS-1?

      I am Randy Williams, striving to appropriate and embody RS-1 for now over 40 years.

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