I Am Headed for Hell...
"The Kingdom of the Father is spread all over the earth
and men do not see it." (Gospel of Thomas, 113)
1.
My dear friend, as you are concerned about my soul, I offer this reply. I offer it to all Evangelical Christians across this land who believe that religion can only take one form, a strictly limited one for sure, and intend to impose it upon the whole nation. I speak as a fellow Christian from a faith that grew right along side of yours, though you may not know much about it since the patriarchs of your tradition tried with great fervor and some success to stamp it out. I am a Quaker. The Quakers were one of the Non-Conformist churches of 17th century Europe who refused to embrace the creeds and confessions of Protestant orthodoxy.
Quakers have no written creed. They profess that Christ is an Inward Light who dwells in every human heart, and the revelation of his Spirit is continuous. For Quakers, revelation is not limited to the Bible, for it pours forth wherever we have eyes to see it. In every star and every green leaf, in the sparkling of raindrops or the eyes of a hungry child, there is revelation and the word of God incarnate. The book of nature is as sacred as any scripture.
This last point is the reason for naming my epistle, Logos and Nature. I find myself too theologically clumsy to separate the genius of one from the other, and I experience such an essential relation between them, that I am forced to consider ecology the moment I mention Christ the Word. For Christ is the Logos personified, the supreme blueprint of creation, "through whom all things were made" (Jn. 1). Christ the Logos is the cosmic mind at rest, whose very thought is natural law.
Ecology means knowledge of home: oikia-logos in Greek. Oikia means home. Logos means knowledge or word. Knowing our home is knowing our ground, our earthly habitat.
We cannot live ecologically until we feel at home here on earth, and in this body. Do we feel at home on planet earth? Do we know our home? Do we know our bodies? Is our mind ever at rest in its ground, this earthly flesh? Or are we estranged from the very planet we walk on, conflicted about bodily processes like eating and sex and growing old?
We eat too much then starve ourselves. We obsess over sex and then over guilt about sex. We pump our muscles into "iron" because we can't stand the natural softness of our bellies. We treat th planet as we treat our bodies, exploiting land, forests, and streams to turn raw materials into cash. Why do we regard nature as raw until she's been man-handled?
We hide birth, old age, and death in clean, white clinical rooms. And if we are religious, we can't wait to get off this planet into the clean white rooms of heaven. Why do we not feel at home in nature's lap, like our brothers and sisters in more primal earth-centered cultures?
2.
During the Endarkenment of the 17th century (some call it the Enlightenment), Western culture divorced itself from mother earth. Science and Protestantism, the two major trends of this period, joined forces to separate the rational soul from nature. Of course the estrangement of nature from the soul began with Plato in ancient Greece, but the divorce was finalized in modern Europe's mechanistic world view, where the universe was regarded as a vast machine; and God, through the agency of reason, was its mechanic. Thus the title of the book that inaugurated the age, Kepler's Celestial Mechanics.
The new paradigm for describing reality was scientific method: the process of attaining perfect objectivity by reducing nature to an inanimate object under laboratory conditions. What are lab conditions? They are conditions where the only intelligence is the mind of the observer, for the object observed has become inanimate. We must kill the object and lay it on a table before the mind. No wonder that, until recently, most of what we know about health and medicine has been gleaned from corpses!
Francis Bacon, father of this scientific method, wrote in his Novum Organum that we should "torture mother nature for her secrets". Descartes declared in his Discourse On Method #6, "We shall be masters and owners of nature." Thus they distorted the commandment of God to Adam, "Take dominion over the earth." Nature was no longer an animate mystery to be revered but a thing, only useful when dead, dissected, and dispirited. Once dead, nature could be lain on conveyor belts in factories, the raw material for industry. Celebrating the absolute schism between subject and object, between spirit and nature, Descartes concluded that Truth is only found in "clear and distinct ideas," not in the external material world. The beauty in the woods and streams was worthless to him.
Following the new paradigm of science, Protestant theology also divorced nature from the soul. It accomplished this gloomy exorcism by denying the mysteries of a more holistic Christianity. Medieval mystics had found God not only in the second person of the Trinity but in the first: as absolute Being, the very ground of Creation. St. Bernard told his monks, the settlers of Western Europe, "You will find more laboring in the woods than you ever will among books: trees and stones will teach you what you can never learn from any master!" Hildegaard of Bingen (12th C.) praised every particle of dust as a "glittering glistening mirror" of divinity. Meister Eckhart wrote, "Every creature is a word of God and a book about God."
But with the Protestant mainstream, defined by Calvin and Luther, mystical communion with nature was lost. The awe of experiencing God as cosmos, "all in all" to use St. Paul's phrase, was suppressed. Mystics were burned as witches. God was reduced to an abstract and rational belief. The Word of God was no longer written in the green sap of creation, but in dogma.
Protestantism disenchanted the earth, neutered its creative energy, and caged the Spirit in creeds. As the earth was diminished by Protestant dogma, so was the human brain. Theology confined Truth to the left frontal cortex where the world could be clinically distilled into verbal abstractions. Since then, without even realizing it, Christians have lived in a cerebral ghetto, cut off from the richness of the ancestral brain, and from other modes of intelligence like intuition, imagination, the self-healing wisdom of the body, and the wonder of communion with nature. With such an intellectualized spirituality, no wonder many Christians are more concerned with heaven and hell than with life on earth.
3.
Enough of heaven and hell! It's time to re-enchant this world with divinity, and put the soul back into nature. The re-enchantment has already begun in twentieth century science, leaving theology far behind. The new physics poses fundamental questions about the relation of subject and object, consciousness and matter, similar to the questions of ancient mystics. Einstein wrote, "The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research." Sir James Jeans, a founder of modern physics, stated that "the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine." Nobel physicist Arthur Eddington heralded the reunion of matter and consciousness: "The stuff of the universe is mind-stuff!"
Then what is the task of theology in the age of the new physics? Cease preaching dogma and start listening to mystics! We Christians must ripen. We must evolve. We must expand our mission: from being born-again Christians to being cosmic Christians. Born-again Christians are born again once. Cosmic Christians are born again each moment, each breath! "God is creating the entire cosmos fully and totally in this present now," said Meister Eckhart. Said Paul the Apostile: "Behold, all is made new!"
To become a cosmic Christian is to grow out of the need to define our lives through dogma, into a need to marvel without words. In pure marvel, our prayers change from petitions to meditations. Human words grow quiet, and we begin to hear the Word of God. The Logos.
The Word of God does not address us in theological concepts: those are human words. The Word is not a thought but a presence. Its truth is not in the intellect, but in the unity of body, mind and environment, harmonized in the radiance of the present moment. We'll need to study, not the Christian philosophers, but the Christian mystics: Meister Eckhart, Hildegaard of Bingen, Theresa of Avila, Teilhard de Chardin -- great but obscure names waiting to be written in our childrens' textbooks -- names like Howard Thurman, the black Quaker-educated Christian who made a profound impression on Martin Luther King. In his biography, Thurman wrote: "As a child, the boundaries of my life spilled over into the mystery of the ocean and the wonder of the dark nights and the wooing of the wind, until the breath of nature and my own breath seemed to be one."
When we see God newly revealed each moment, in sea wave and salt breeze, we'll realize that revelation didn't end at the Council of Nicea, or in the last page of the Bible. We won't be limited by creeds, which are always someone else's descriptions of God. We'll be free to learn from Asian and Third World religions the meditative, artistic, ritual processes that connect our souls directly with the Spirit of nature. We'll see that God reveals herself in non-Western and non-masculine forms just to keep us humble. She will goad and trouble us to move from judgment to celebration, from sect to community. And then we'll discover the truth: Other religions remind us of wisdom once known in the early Church.
4.
Prior to the Nicene Council of 325 AD, Christianity was a diverse, experimental, progressive movement, sparkling with mystical experience, rich with visionary practices of meditation which liberated the spirit and celebrated creation. Christians were inspired by Wisdom, and not yet fettered by creed. This golden age ended when the Roman emperor, Constantine, convened the Bishops at Nicea to suppress all forms of worship that were not useful in gaining political control. They closed the canon of scriptures. They condemned as heretics those who did not conform to their new Trinitarian doctrine. In the three years following this council, the Roman Church slaughtered more Christians than the Roman Empire had killed in the previous 300 years.
Let a new golden age begin now! Proclaim an age for cosmic Christians. They shall no longer confine themselves to books and pews, but burst open old doors and traipse through forests, learning to re-enchant the earth. The Christ Spirit is green. She calls to us, "Come away into the wilderness by yourselves and rest awhile" (Mk 6:31). In wilderness Jesus fasted, and like a Lakato warrior wandered on his vision quest for forty days and nights. Led by Her, the Spirit, Jesus pointed to lilies of the field, birds of the air, stones that shout. Like a tribal shaman, Jesus heard the voice of the elements, the praise-song of creation.
In the remainder of this essay, I will capitalize the word, Creation. For every berry on a twig is full of God, the artist shining through her art. Whether you are a Christian mystic, a Buddhist meditator, a Hindu Yogi, or a Native American shaman, if you enter deeply into a single syllable sung by the thrush, a single dew drop on a violet, a moment of stillness at the end of your own breath, you will fall at the feet of one and the same Creator, feel the pulse of one Spirit, and grow intoxicated with the love of Christ, the Logos.
In such ordinary sacraments, near any country road, Christ touches and heals your heart through nature. You encounter his Lordship in the loam when you plant a tulip bulb. You hear his name in the gentle stir of ten thousand pine needles. If you live in a Christian culture, you hear your breath sighing his name, Jesus. In India, you hear the same breath, Shiva. In Thailand, Buddho. In the silence of the sage brush in South Dakota, you hear Wakan Tanka. One Lord whispers the divine name in all these voices. That name is the Logos.
5.
When we pray, God does not listen to our words at all. God hears only the amplitude and frequency of our love. The cosmic Christian of the coming age will never limit God to a single name and form. We shall not fossilize the Spirit in a single moment of history. The image of the white-robed first-century Rabbi touching and healing the people, lovely as that image may be, is but a single frame, a cross-section, of revelation's eternal continuum. Jesus himself promised, "Lo I AM with you, even until the end of the ages." In what form is he with us? In that white-robed Palestinian form? Or in tongues of formless fire that fall upon us after the Ascension of his body? (Acts 2:3)
The distinctive quality of the Holy Spirit, Christ's post-Ascension form, is its formlessness. Thus Spirit pervades all nature as the breath of the Logos. The Spirit is here in the dust of the down-town streets, and in the furthest star-clouded nebula; here in a photon of light, or in a neuro-peptide molecule of your brain as you think this very thought. This intimate continuum of Divine Personhood awakens at each point in time and space. Space itself is spiritually awake! Nowhere is Christ not born, and never is Christ more than one moment old!
This is no fantasy, my friend, but a fact of physics. Your own body is a cloud of electromagnetism that is as spiritual as it is physical. Your human flesh is an electrical surge, an ocean of abstract waves rising from the silent vacuum at creation's source. Every particle of your body rings with the music of the spheres, echoing throughout the cosmos. You are made of immaterial intelligence, pure mathematics incarnate as matter. Thus writes Freeman Dyson, one of our great astro-physicists:
Even to a hardened theoretical physicist it remains perpetually astonishing that our solid world of trees and stones can be built of quantum fields and nothing else. The quantum field seems far too fluid and insubstantial to be the basic stuff of the universe. Yet we have learned gradually to accept the fact.
Founding quantum physicist, Sir James Jeans, marvels that we live in "a world created out of pure intelligence." That intelligence, as we have noted above, the early Christians called the Logos. Modern physics is a but commentary on the prologue to The Fourth Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word." In fact, the relationship between John's Gospel and quantum physics was explicitly stated by one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, Werner Heisenburg. In a lecture delivered on September 4, 1958, he said:
For modern natural science there is no longer, in the beginning, the material object: but form, mathematical symmetry. And since mathematical structure is by definition an intellectual content, we could say, 'In the beginning was the word' - the Logos.
Even as the Word becomes incarnate in a particle of matter, it remains a wave, connected to the boundless sea of universal intelligence. Thus, the flesh as flesh does not lose its spiritual essence: it remains, quite literally, an infinite radiance. The electrons of your body are particles, but they are also waves of something far more vast than your physical frame. Here is the British physicist, Paul Davies, describing "the infinite self-energy of the electron" in his book, The Matter Myth:
Picture, then, the electron immersed in a shimmering bath of evanescent quantum energy, intense near the electron but dwindling steadily with distance. This restless, seething ferment of virtual photons is, in fact, precisely the electron's electric field described in quantum language... The energy of this photon activity surrounding an electron can be computed. The answer proves, unnervingly, to be infinite.
Your body is myriad electrons, countless infinities of light! Jesus was not the only incarnation of the Logos. He was simply showing you who you really are. Yes, he said, "I am the light of the world." But he also said, "You are the light of the world."
A hundred years ago, if I declared, "Every particle of my body is unlimited, resonating throughout the cosmos," I would be called a mystic or a madman. Today we know that this is an accurate statement of the quantum physical world. According to Bell's Theorem (1964), each local particle is an excited wave of an all-pervading field. The non-local field, of which this particle is an excitation, gives rise to every other particle in space. This local particle cannot be separated in essence from particles in far distant galaxies. They are all vibrations of one continuum. In a simple but accurate analogy: each wave of the sea is, at its base, the entire ocean, and is therefor every other wave. Thus the great physicist Arthur Eddington declared, "When the electron vibrates, the whole universe shakes!"
Your body is this universal dance. Right here on this sacred earth, you are the all in all. Why don't you get intimate with the divine source of the cosmos, which is in fact the deep center of each particle in every atom of your flesh? It is an incontestable truth of astronomy that every one of your protons was once inside a star. If you are at home in your body, if you know who you really are, you can reach out and move those galaxies. This may sound presumptuous, so we'll let Jesus say it: "If you have faith as a mustard seed you shall say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it shall move; and nothing shall be impossible to you."(Mt 17:20)
6.
Quantum physics calls creation's source the unified field. Greek philosophy called it the Logos. The Bible called it I AM. I AM is the most precise name because the energy at creation's source is consciousness itself.
The universe springs from the silent depths of I AM. For those whose hearts are open, there will come a sea-change in Christianity, a transformation of perspective that will frighten some, delight others. In the new faith-paradigm, cosmic Christians will know in themselves the source of creation, the very I AM who spoke through Jesus. We will taste and see that I AM living today. We will no longer feel estranged from nature, for I AM the very essence of the earth, pulsating in each atom. I AM all and in all.
When Jesus said, I AM, was he referring to a localized human form, or to the God in every one of us? Was He not a wave referring to the sea? Was the I AM in Jesus not the I AM in you? And was this not the same I AM revealed to Moses in the fire of Mount Sinai? "I AM THAT I AM!" (Ex. 3:14)
When fully awake, we can only say: "I AM Jesus, and Jesus is I," even if they crucify us for heresy. But when asleep, I mis-identify my infinite AM with finite concepts and transient moods. True prayer happens when I sink deep into AM, entering the baptismal golden stream of the Logos. In the courage of prayer, I refuse to end the sentence, "I AM....." I refuse to predicate a finite noun upon my infinite being. I refuse to say, "I am a doctor, I am an American, I am a Christian." My life is transubstantiated from the weight of a noun to a weightless verb: I refuse to turn myself into a thing. Immersed in AM, I return like a radiant river to the ocean of Christ: Christ in me, who is also Christ in you, the hope of glory. (Col. 1:27)
7.
Meeting Jesus at the empty tomb, Mary Magdalene reached out to grasp him. But he said, "Do not touch me!" Have you ever wondered why?
He did not want her to mistake what I AM for his body. For the same reason, he told his disciples, "Before Abraham was, I AM." He was telling us not to worship a particular form, a robe and beard and sandals, in a finite moment of history. He was telling us not to turn him into a thing, an idol. He was urging us to enter the consuming fire, I AM: a formless fire that never destroys, but gives birth continually.
Then Yahweh spoke to you from the midst of the fire: you heard the sound of words but you saw no form... So watch yourselves carefully, since you did not see any form on the day Yahweh spoke to you from the midst of the fire, lest you act corruptly and make a graven image for yourselves in the form of any figure! (Dt. 4:12-16)
The central passage in all of Western scripture, these words of Moses teach the Christian never to worship an image of Jesus, whether that image is on an alter or in the mind. For even a mental picture of Jesus is a form and a thing. St. Paul reminds us, "Even if we did once know Christ in the flesh, that is not how we know him now."(2 Cor. 5:16). The thought of Jesus is the last idol to be thrown into the fire!
Then how can we know Jesus now? His flesh was crucified: now know him in your flesh. His Spirit poured out: now know him in your spirit. His blood soaked the ground: now know him in the earth at your feet. An old Celtic blessing invokes "Christ before you, Christ behind you, Christ above you and beneath you, to the left and right of you, Christ in all."
This stick of wood, this acre of earth, this planet, galaxy, every un-miracle of the commonplace, is filled with divine radiance, the glory of the Logos: Christ in the smallest seed, in the eye of the homeless child, in the motionless explosion of a rose, Christ at your fingertips, here, in a piece of bread.
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