Spirituality - Thoughts

I am placing here various thoughts and insights as they occur to me. None of what follows are essays, although many such thoughts could become the core of an essay. For now, they are just thoughts that I feel represent insight.

 I will add to them periodically, as they find me, and as I have the time & opportunity to record them.

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We are not sheep!

It is tempting to say that Jesus used a bad metaphor; but there is absolutely no metaphor that Jesus could have used that would have been sufficient to convey what he needed to communicate, not because God is not omniscient or omnipotent, but because we are not. We will misinterpret everything, all the time. God speaks, but we hear, and what we hear is ourselves, interpreting (or normally misinterpreting) God's words, primarily because of the nuances we impart to them.

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Why is it that we are all forever squabbling, hurting & warring on each other? Even Christians upon Christians! It is because we are small, petty things. “It” is always about “me” or "us" . . . or "them"; be that an individual, a church, a denomination, a religion, a nation, or a race.

We need to get beyond all that; beyond our self-defining doctrines and worship practices when we claim to be pointing to God. Even the generation overlapping the life of Jesus, inherited nearly 5,000  plus years or more of historic misinterpretations of truth; and we have inherited all that plus the Gosples and 8,000 verses in the Epistles that probably would not have been necessary if Christians, even then, were not misinterpreting scripture and squabbling about it. It just will not stop!

So what are we to do? Just stop trying to be true to Jesus' mission to humankind? No; we need to put the squabbling into perspective.

The issue is not what makes a Christian a “true” Christian; it is what beliefs, understandings, and practices do ALL Christians (and other "peoples of the book," Buddhists, Hindus, and Indigenous Peoples around the world for that matter) share in common? That points to God; not some God that is encapsulated in our writings or the tenets of a religion. It is the living God in the real world, where we know each other according to our fruits; not according to our words, which are far too easily misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misconstrued.

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