When we compare just about any of our experiences with someone else's, we are confronted by similarity and difference. So what do we feel about the Divine in our lives? Does it have any meaning for you at all? If so, is it personal, or just some kind of spiritual force? If it's personal, does it have a sense of gender as in God or Goddess? And a final question: to what do you attribute any answers you might have to the previous questions - a particular religious experience, a general conviction that this is simply how it is, or just your faith in what you have been taught by people you trust, which seems to have worked out in your life?
My personal view and some explanation of it goes like this.
The only religious experiences I have had are vague in character, but no less convincing for that. I have been given glimpses of something much too vast in scope for me to think of it as a person. However, the whole emanation of it is devastatingly unconditional love, and that's it. No exhortations as to what I should believe or what I should be; just the real presence of unconditional love at the heart of everything, including me. Vague, as I said, because that's where it stops.
It seems to me that our experience of the Divine, if we have one, is tailored to our idividual needs or temperament. Tailored by us or by the divine as an external entity?
Some people view this as a monumental exercise in wishful thinking. We need a deity for various reasons, so we individually create one (him/her/it). Put rather more charitably, the divine is a projection of something within us - at best, our highest aspirations; at worst an inner voice that gives us sanction from on high to indulge our particular psychosis.
I feel a lot more to say coming on: Does the Deity have agency in the universe, or does free will preclude it, and/or is the deity we believe in only allowed to do good things?
If you sense my confusion, you're dead right. But, in back of all this, I know my confusion's OK because of the in some ways huge, but in some ways extremely unspecific, thing I do believe. This may be a mini series, or may be addressed via comments.
Peace
Reg
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Reg,
ReplyDeleteI'm vastly interested in hearing more. I am unclear as well about defining the Divine. How does our experience inform our definitions and how would we experience it if we'd never been culturally inundated with specific images of specific religions? Can we ever know that? And how can we ever get to know truth? Big questions, I know. Thanks for trying to answer them somehow.
Thanks MOI. I should explain to anyone else reading this that MOI is responsible for rekindling my interest in spirituality, both my own and generally. MOI's blog:
ReplyDeletehttp://mysteryofiniquity.wordpress.com
contains a wide variety of articulate posts, reflecting one person's experience of Christianity in its various guises, faith and belief. Much of it is clearly based on a lot of background reading, which is why I always feel faintly nervous when MOI comes to visit. My musings are supported by nothing save my life experience so far, and my curiosity and wish to make somewhat better sense of it by looking more honestly at it, and taking the opinions of others on board.
As to your comment MOI, I will certainly keep asking these questions, of others and myself, until I get answers that totally satisfy me. This will never happen of course, since many of these questions are at once fascinating and unanswerable, at least from our present human perspective. So, on this blog or elsewhere, this may well go on for some time.
blessings
Reg
Why thank you Reg. I hope your blog goes on for some time as well. MOI
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