There is a message in the Bible that God (and those who speak for him) keep trying to tell the people. God tells it to Moses, who tells it to the children of Israel. Most of the prophets also are found trying to make the people understand. Jesus tried through stories, his healing works and his explanations of them, to make the people understand. Most of the time they didn’t.
The message has to do with the relation of the power of God with the goings on of the world. God is found giving the message of being the great I AM – in other words, Life, The Event Going On, That Which Is Interesting, That Which Sustains – that upon which our attention is designed to be focused. The misinterpretation of the message is that God is the thing that sometimes has the power to make the things in our life go in a favorable way. In other words, instead of God being the event, the circumstances of the world – issues such as food, shelter, wealth and social position – are seen as the event. Then God is seen as a force that can manipulate those things.
In the Bible, whenever people get the message right – when they see God as The Event – then things also go right for them in terms of their circumstances. They get their needs met – for survival, security, and prosperity. But whenever they get it wrong – when they think their security and prosperity are based on their food, shelter, army strength, etc, then they lose those things. So God, and the prophets, keep telling them: it’s not the things. It’s God.
It’s still a hard message for us to get. I think this is because we struggle to grasp what God actually is. The Bible language makes it easy enough to visualize God as an authoritarian, jealous figure, who doesn’t want us to pay attention to anything but him, although there may be other interesting things that would vie for our attention. When I read it that way, especially if I imagine God to be represented by the voice of some church institutions, I naturally bridle at the implied lack of freedom and the possible boredom such obedience would require.
On the other hand, if I can make my thought of God big enough, the command to attend to God is transformed. If I grasp that God is Life, I hear Life saying: Life is The Event – pay attention to it, learn all about it, be true to it. Live with all the vibrancy that Life offers. Don’t be stopped by the limitations of what you thought before were essential material conditions for your existence. Trust Life to guide you beyond what you thought was possible.
Like the Children of Israel, I have had definitive experiences of the presence and power of God. In those moments, I feel Spirit as tangible substance, as aliveness, as regenerative power. I think, of course this is what we’re about. We’re about joy itself, not about the material conditions sold as prerequisites to joy. Then, like the Children of Israel, I let my focus shift. I think, for example, that the e-mail in which I received the message of joy is the source of joy, and start checking my e-mail obsessively, and feeling let down when another message hasn’t arrived. Then I have to try to get back in right relation to Truth.
And so it goes. The challenge is simple, but all-encompassing. The lesson is there to be studied, but it is the practice that brings the mastery.
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