I have been asked to share more of my personal faith.
The two words, ecumenical and Christian, are inseparable in my faith. While I confess to being a Chrisitian in the ways I outline here, it is not in an exclusive way. I am decidedly not what today is being called a “Christian nationalist,” and in fact my convictions are in profound contradiction to that. I affirm an ecumenical commitment in the sense that my faith is decidedly not exclusive in terms of the language of any one religious tradition but shared with the best elements of many others, as well.
When I first, as an adult, entered the Christian faith and chose to enter graduate theological seminary, the spirit of ecumenicism was strong in the world, and my chosen denomination, the United Church of Christ, had been recently recast by a merger of the Congregational Church and the Evangelical and Reformed Church. But this ecumenical climate changed dramatically with the rise of a “postmodernism” that contended divisions are superior to finding common ground.
I believe in God. I am convinced that what the term, God, or the ultimate God, the God above the Gods, refers to is an actual reality and not a mental construct. I mean this in the sense that Einstein said “I believe in the God of Spinoza.” This is not a reductionist notion of God, one which paints him for the sake of storytelling or primitive imagery as a distinct person in the sky, a patriarchal figure or tribal leader. This notion of God I point to is one with the massive and infinitely complex universe that we are only beginning to appreciate. It is a universe so vast in its scale that it is impossible to comprehend, and yet that vastness also extends to the infinitely microscopic level, where atoms that make up our very physical existence are by 99.9 percent empty and where wave functions, more than particles, are the basis for reality as we know it so far.
In this incredible universe, with its manifestations on our planet Earth exhibiting the richest and more amazing possible diversities of things and laws being cause for deep and profound gratitude by those of us who find ourselves as the most advanced of sentient beings here, we enjoy the amazing gift of being able to witness and reflect upon this creation, and to live, to live with consciousness, perhaps the greatest possible gift.
God, as we humans have sought to appreciate over eons of recorded history, is of the nature of the creator of all this, according to laws that we are only just beginning to grasp, laws that operate on a deeper level than ones governing our day-to-day lives, that even Einstein was amazed by and could not understand. The best we can do is advance our thinking in pursuit of the lawfulness of this all while remaining in awe of this world and its stunning beauty.
Prayer, in my view, is not about wanting things, so much as to bring one’s own consciousness and behavior into line with the best intentions that God has for one’s life. It is about an internal conversation in the form of a petition from the finite seeking the infinite as a guide for living. I see the Lord’s Prayer as an affirmation, not as a request. These simple things are not what we ask of God, but what we affirm God to be.
Jesus Christ puts a human face on God and instructs us on how we should conduct our lives. The testimony of his life shows us that fully participating in God’s world is not devoid of struggle and pain, or death, but comes within and through all of the limitations and restrictions that being alive and growing up and through this world present to us. His is a testament to the power of love, above all: to compassion, to empathy, to giving a damn about the least among us. His is an affirmation that amidst all this creation in which we find ourselves, the way forward in his universe embraces the challenges of loving, caring and going the extra mile.
