Fire consumes, and releases energy, and the heat rises. What is it saying about the Creator?
Trees spring to life and die each year. What story does that tell us?
Seeds die before a plant is born. Why does there always have to be a death before there can be life?
Reproduction takes two. Rain falls from the sky and soaks into the earth. The moon lines up perfectly with the earth so that from time to time it perfectly covers the sun. Where there is no light, there is darkness. Gravity makes it possible for us to walk upright. The surface of water is constantly in a state of change.
On and on it goes.
Why is it all this way? The earth is perhaps God's greatest Storyteller. The oldest, most prolific Storyteller of all.
God could have made things so differently, but He chose to do it this way, and He chose to give it a voice.
He also chose to give us eyes, ears, skin, a nose, and a tongue. These are the ways that we hear the story the world has to tell.
You can know so much about a person from the things they make. It works that way because we leave a part of ourselves in the things we create (not the things we manufacture--that's another thing entirely). God hid Himself in His creation, like a woman hides herself in a quilt that she lovingly creates. After she's long been gone, you can still look at that quilt and "see" grandma in it. It speaks of her.
It's the same phenomenon with nature. It speaks of Him. God's ways can be seen. His desires can be grasped. I might even go so far as to say, His presence can be felt--in all of the created world.
...what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain...For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. (From Paul's letter to the Roman believers)
We may not hear the voice of God yet. But something tells me it's good practice to "listen" to that which speaks of Him.
How close are you willing to get to pantheism?
ReplyDeleteThe danger of reacting negatively to the ideas of pan-theism is in saying that something is NOT God. That there is some object that does not embody His presence or His image.
ReplyDeleteAnd thus, in reacting, we separate the secular from the sacred. This is a separation that God never intended.
The spiritual and the physical. The visible and the invisible. The Creator and the creation. They are one (or are in the process of being made one once again).
I go back to the old lady's quilt. She's in there. And her grandchildren snuggle up under it, feel it, look at the stitching, and they feel Grandma in it. She continues to tell them how much she loves them through it.
She's in there.
It's almost a perfect analogy, except that God keeps working on His quilt day after day, even when we aren't looking. And if you look very closely, His needles look like little tiny people, like Nehemiah.
The quilt is all around us, wrapping us in His love and His messages. It's the Word, it's Truth, it's Life. It is both visible and invisible. We can hardly open our eyes without seeing it.
If we use this definition of pantheism:
"God is everything and everything is God...the world is either identical with God or in some way a self-expression of his nature"
then I'm a pan-theist. But I think self-acclaimed pan-theists walk away from the idea that God is a "person" and that He can relate in "personal ways." In that respect, I'm a Theist.
But I get a real bad rash from temporary tattoos. I'd rather just talk about the stories of nature and the stories of our lives.