I am who I am...

My profile says, "Ask and you shall know..." Well, it has been asked. "What are you?" That was the question. The answer is many. The answer also depends on who you ask. If you ask some of my Christian friends, I am a heretic. If you ask some of my atheist friends, I am a lunatic. If you ask my closest friends, they are never quite sure how to answer that question. If you ask me, I am a Christian. I have even heard myself called an atheistic christian.

First, I need to explain that, when I say "God," I am not refering to an old man who lives just above the clouds and is freakishly good at parlor tricks. I use the word "God" because I have no other name for this experience. We have all experienced moments in our lives when our words seemed to fail us, and we could do nothing more than stand in absolute awe of Life. I have experienced this when standing on the beach at twilight as the first stars became visible, when sitting beside a mountain stream in the forest-filtered sunlight, or lying in a tube being pulled across a massive lake behind my dad's boat. I know the science. I know what makes the stars shine and what makes a tree grow. I know how lakes are formed. None of that diminishes the wonder and beauty of all that surrounds me. An old Native American proverb acknowledges that, "The Wind that gave me my first breath also received my last sigh." I believe that we (every living thing on this planet) are far more connected than we have yet realized. Our lives, our words, our thoughts, our actions affect everyone and everything around us. Faith, for me, is trust in that connection. The Source of that awe, the Ground of Being, is what I call God. God (whatever that is) is where words fail and Life is experienced.

I am a Christian in that I am convinced that something happened in the life of Jesus of Nazareth that people were able to see Light revealed in his life. He was a deeply devout Jew. His philosophy was primitive, as he clearly believed in a supernatural, theistic diety, somewhere "up there" just beyond the sky, who would periodically intervene in human history. That explanation no longer holds water, but I believe that he was right on point with his interpretation of the way to live. Jesus was a radical revolutionary. He truly and deeply loved every person he ever met. This Jesus, whom I call Christ, not because of some delusion of a God in Heaven just beyond the sky who requires bloodshed to restore us to some perfect state that we never had but because I see in his life the very meaning of life revealed, lived and taught a love for his fellow man that crossed all barriers. Race, creed and class paled to insignificance in the shadow of this life. The diseased, the poor, the mentally-ill, the outcast, these were his friends. His interpretaion, and sometimes outright changing, of the law had him sideways of the religious authorities and eventually landed him on death row. Imagine how vastly different the world would look if we actually loved others (friend and enemy alike) as ourselves. What could be accomplished in terms of cleaning our environment, feeding our hungry, healing our sick, and sheltering our homeless if we would simply, and honestly, love each other? The Kingdom of God is not some city in the damn sky! It is here, now, in the dirt and the muck of everyday life. It is seen in the innocence of childhood, in the waves on the shore, in the man who gives up his life to save a stranger's, in the mountain spring, but also in the homeless shelters, in the asylums, in the jailhouses, nursing homes and hospitals. The Kingdom of God does break in to history regularly, but there is nothing supernatural about it, except that most people do not consider it "natural" to love the entire world so much that you would give up everything you have for the life of another. We have, as Jimmy Buffett would say, "... twenty-four hours, maybe sixty good years, it's really not that long a stay." Our lives consist of many small decisions that, in the end, either leave this world a better or worse place than when we found it. I have heard it said that, when we die, we die "into God." That has nothing to do with an irrational idea of some sort of afterlife. We die (as everything does) into the very Ground of Being, the Source of Life. We return from whence we came and continue nourishing new life. Life isn't a holding pattern until we get to "a better place." Life is our chance to make this a better place.