I invite you to think.  I invite you to experience the challenge of the Mystery of God.  Please reply when you can and lets take a journey together–not to “solve” the Mystery, but to join in the Fellowship of the Mystery. (humm-sounds like a good book title.)

If I had been raised in the Eastern “Religions”, I probably would have been a Zen Buddhist Monk.  I had a bent to the spiritual, intuitive, invisible side of life.  The MYSTERIOUS.  But I wasn’t born in the East.  I was raised in white, Anglo-Saxon, mid-America, where the only question anyone “spiritual” had to answer was, “Are you going to join the Roman Catholics or the United Methodists?  There wasn’t any other “choices”, and one of those choices was “wrong”.  It has taken me 40 years to see the truth that was hidden in both the Catholic Tradition and the Methodist Socialism.  It has taken 40 years to see that one wasn’t “wrong”, let alone one “right”.  So if that is true, if we can make the statement:

“There is no right or wrong, there is only God”,

how do we get there?  How did I get there?  How do we get our children there after years of “don’t do this, don’t do that, why did you do that?”.  How do we lead, guide, demonstrate “the way” to truth after so many years of covering it up?

We first have to establish where we are.  Where are you?  Are you just a product of your circumstances?  Are you fulfilling the calling, gifting, bent, what ever you call the things in life that make you well up with satisfaction and harmony?  Or are you maintaining?  Maintaining is one of those words that just isn’t meant to be a part of our lives.  Remember the sayings that basically say you aren’t lukewarm–you’re either hot or cold.  Or your High School football coach who said if you weren’t giving 100% you might as well go home.  What was all that all or nothing rhetoric?  It comes from one of our basic human needs: to be loved. 

Love is not a four letter word (figuratively).  It is not something we do.  It is not an action.  It is who we are.  It is how we are made.  We can feel loved, we can act loved, we can make love; but until we are love, we are but spectators and not participants in life.  Spectators can’t affect the outcome of a game or match (other than a little mob mentality of cheering for victory or defeat).  Even that (cheering) is participation in the spectator-ism, not in the match.  It has no “experience” to change our individual lives.  It can be educational.  It can be arousing to the senses and emotion.  It can be habitual.  But it can not make a difference in the outcome of our match.  Because it is their match, not ours.  We have not begun to be love until we are being ourselves–participants.  When we are spectators, we are being someone/something else.  We are wishing we were them.  We are saying we are wrong, we are bad, they are right, they are good.  I will watch them in order to see what is good so I may do the same.  Don’t wait–participate.

Only then can we begin to experience love.  By and though those experiences we begin to see life as a bunch of people who get together and love each other.  It is only in that participation we can effect the world.  It is only in that interaction with humans, we begin to experience God.  It is only with the experience of God that life makes any sense.  It is then we realize God has been participating in us, loving us, always–forever–still–even now–especially now.  God…Us.  God…Me.   God…I.  God…Love.

With a little experience of God and the timeless love of God, right and wrong become inconsequential.  Right and wrong become spectator stuff.  With God, love, us–people become who they are.  There is nothing apart from God.  There is no spoon, there are no spectators–there only IS.