"So, what's so Christian about all this? After all....(#3)

 


you've hardly mentioned Jesus, the Christ?" A fair enough question, but this little blog is only a message in a bottle cast upon an electronic sea, in the hopes of aiding other seekers, and meant to be neither an exhaustive treatment of various methods of truly encountering the living God, nor is it a theological treatise.

I will simply state the obvious. God created creation, to include us, so that God could lavish his love upon it and us, and it and us return that love and share it into all eternity.

Our first parents failed in this simple thing, and we, their children, have continued the same broken and rough path ever since. God went out of his way to encounter us in his chosen people, and was generally ignored and rebuffed again and again, but still God reached out, providing sure stepping stones back to God, his laws and ordinances, if only the advice were taken....cue yawns and derisive laughter from most of humanity.

As Christians, we believe there was one final, and for all time, step which was taken. God became man to show us his love in a human face, to demonstrate in that flesh his total and undying love for us, again reiterating that one greatest commandment from which all others flow, the Sh'ma Yisrael, "Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is One. And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might."

These are pretty clear words, both from Moses and from Jesus, and strange and sad that they are ignored, or lazily treated to the mental addendum of, "well, of course, they did not mean that LITERALLY."...really? the GREATEST commandment?...  One thing is clear. Jesus totally lived up to that commandment, while the rest of us must always fall short to lesser or greater degrees, and generally the greater by a good margin.

It is the trying which matters, and to never stop trying, as it is by the trying by which we improve, and to beg forgiveness from our Creator for each and every failure, and to beg for and trust in his help in overcoming our own shortcomings, shortcomings we will never recognize without rigorous self-examination and confessing of same.

Christians believe God established a Church in order to aid us in this goal and to preserve his teachings unadulterated. The ancient Churches believe he gave us his Sacraments and ordained Bishops and Priests to confect and disburse these Sacraments, with the summit and source Sacrament being the very body and blood, soul and divinity of Jesus himself to nourish us in our struggles on the journey from birth, through life and through death to union with him.

But, they all are aids provided by God with one ultimate goal.....our union in love with him at every level of our being. It must be pointed out that not even the Sacraments, which actually contain what they also symbolize, can be fully effective without our consenting will as demonstrated by our returned love. Minus that love on our own parts, it is exceptionally rash to assume that anyone will be united with God at death, when they have ignored him in life. 

Otherwise, it is as if we are spoiled children demanding an inheritance from parents which we despised for a lifetime, or an unfaithful husband or wife demanding wedded bliss while withholding love, affection, or even time, from a devoted and loving spouse. THEY might be willing, but could we ever find a way to truly accept what they offer, or would we be twisting it into a horrible parody in our greed?

So, despite not spending much time on Christological and theological matters which always fly off the rails whenever self-styled intellectuals start their hair splittings, it is assumed straight off that desire for God (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) is at the center of these yearnings, where every human has a very large God-shaped hole in their heart which only God can fill, and which humans, in trying to fill that infinitely large hole with generally shabby, or misused and thereby warped things of the world, has led to immeasurable misery and death for all of human history.

With preliminaries out of the way, the next post or two shall deal with the nuts and bolts of simple resources to aid the seeker in experiencing God, so that they need not take my word for anything at all. When you know and experience God, things become much clearer, including those pesky commandments, the scriptures, the meaning of life and death, the nature of heaven and hell, and even this poor abused world and its sad and misdirected inhabitants.

(photo compliments of Jason Strull at Unsplash.com)

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