God's Passion

As anthropologist and priest Tielhard de Chardin expressed so brilliantly, life in the universe is no accident -- no one time collision of random factors that led eventually to humankind's appearance on this lovely planet circling an insignificant yellow star, out on the edge of a very common galaxy, with nothing to set it off from several hundred million island universes. We can hardly imagine how life established a foothold here, amidst the billions of crashing meteor strikes, millions of rumbling volcanoes and eons of acid rain in a poisonous atmosphere. We do know that free radicals and electricity are colliding continually throughout the Cosmos, creating basic building blocks of protein, under enormous pressure to burst through every seam on every viable world, into existence in every possible environment. Of course, as children of the stars we simply cannot boast that God created the cosmos for us alone, when one planet around an insignificant yellow sun would have been quite enough for our needs.

Everything exists because God's deepest passion has always been life, life in every nook and cranny of our world. From the mountain peaks to the depths of the seas, life of every shape and style emerges constantly. Life seems to ooze out of the very pores of Mother Earth. The six or eight billion year old record of fossils in the rocks is staggering in volume and complexity. When Jard was in graduate school and teaching science in the Cincinnati school system, he’d occasionally take the kids fossil hunting with picks and hammers along the creeks that carved passages through the chalk bed of the vast, primordial Mississippian Sea. The white deposits are hundreds of feet thick with the skeletal remains of creatures that look like everything from twigs to trilobites and a great many one to two inch long beaks of prehistoric squids. One year, a nearby farmer plowed up a giant squid’s beak over four feet long. Even the biology professors at the University of Cincinnati, where we were studying at the time, had trouble estimating how long its arms must have been. Perhaps, one of them finally ventured a guess, tentacles of sixty or more feet! God indeed is the Seminal Spirit and Cosmic Creator of all matter and all that has followed according to the basic principle of Continuous Creation.

Here now is our crucial point about cosmic origins, about stars and humans for men and women who want to make their lives count for something meaningful rather than merely secular and temporal.

When God’s processes of Continuous Creation produced our species through cosmic alchemy, we retained the metaphysical -- the spiritual nature of God and the Cosmos from which we came. No other species became so self-aware, with spiritual yearnings that go far beyond our physical and psychological needs. We are the only philosophical species. Like no other creatures -- we are sentient, we know that we know. We think constantly about thinking and consistent find spiritual sources of meaning and belonging or we go spiritually bankrupt.

We ponder being alive, wondering who we are, why we exist and where we are going. After making a bad choice and receiving punishment, no dog lays awake all night agonizing over what an evil thing he has done. To think about good and evil is a human concept. So is success and failure. It is our conscience, a vital part of the spiritual unconscious of which Frankl wrote, that actively seeks more than bread and circuses, more than power, possessions, prestige and pleasure. We live within the physical and through the psychological. but we dare not neglect our philosophical/spiritual needs or we wither and blow away as rootless tumbleweeds vanish in a barren desert.

Until we connect consciously to God by developing a purposeful and permanent spiritual relationship, we remain fragile individuals trying to navigate our little boats on a desperately complex voyage that stretches from eternity to eternity with very little security while traversing the void. And it is from this challenge in an age of incessant change that the many life-style frustrations of our era come to bedevil us!

Fortunately, God, the Continuous Creator and Lord of the Cosmos in whom we live and move and have our being, is the all-powerful, all wise and all-pervasive spirit who knows, understands and loves all persons. In other words;

God cares about you and all of your loved ones, although multitudes freeze God out of their lives until they are unhappy, frustrated and in desperate spiritual straits. Then, with their souls wounded, they turn to any number of self-defeating ways in a futile search to make psychology successful. Karen Horney in her brilliant book, the Neurotic Personality Of Our Time wrote --

“A great many neurotic men and women will do anything to be loved except to become loveable.”

God’s obvious passion is life; life beyond comprehension developing continually in every nook and cranny of Earth. Off the coast of southeastern New Guinea, two great tropical ocean currents collide and swirl and intermingle water so warm it is almost like a broth. This vast soup bowl is filled with incredible living creatures, thousands of which have yet to be discovered and classified by scientists. Some of them change from plants to animals and back again during their life cycles. Spiders have been found hunting prey atop Mt. Everest and incredible yard long eel-like creatures make their living feeding on bacteria spewed from the throats of volcanic vents in the eternal night and crushing pressure under two or three miles of Pacific Ocean water. And of course, the faster we create antibiotic medications to slay dangerous bacteria, they faster their strongest survivors adapt to the poison and render it useless as a medication. Nothing in life remains static, although we humans do indeed despise change in almost any form, unless it is to our immediate and obvious advantage. And even then we still have difficulties when adapting to anything new.

There is little doubt, to us anyway, that life forms continuously develop beyond our limited vision to populate the entire Cosmos, according to scientific principles of which God is the divine author. Astronomers have now identified more planets beyond our solar system than within it. And we do understand that God the universe throbs with God's passion for life; life under intense pressure to burst through at every seam in every viable environment, on every borning world. This is no little fly-by-night operation we are invited to join but the very purpose of existence! God’s passion is why there is something here, within our grasp and sight rather than nothing existing at all. If we foolishly reject psychospiritual wisdom and practices or just ignore God through ignorance, we are missing the main element of a successful and spiritual lifestyle. For the health of our souls, we must meet the cosmic needs that we all have inherited through the Lord of Life.

Despite the quarrels of some fearful persons within formal religion and academic research, there never has been any real conflict between spiritual wisdom and scientific knowledge. There is nothing that should cause spiritually minded persons to cower in the stagnant backwaters of research, education, the arts, commerce and government. Of course, science considers the how of cosmic creation while religion deals with the why of our extraordinary cosmos.

Mini-Quiz
Have you ever felt yourself connected with God in a personal manner?

How do you see God’s passion for life being manifested today?


Author's Bio

Jard & Roberta DeVille; published psychology books, seminars & psychological assessment instruments. NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST was a best seller. He & Roberta wrote 'LOVERS FOR LIFE' and other courses/books together. She's been a wonderful teacher in Minneapolis for many years. He’s considered by many to be America’s foremost leadership scholar. Visit http://www.fulfillmentforum.com for Free E-Book Courses and Internet Business Tools.

YOUR SOUL AND YOUR BELIEFS - LOGOTHERAPY FOR FULFILLMENT

For as long as humankind has left a written record, men and women have thought of themselves as having a soul -- or even as being a living soul who came out of the Cosmos in some mysterious manner. This crucial aspect of personhood is still perceived as the key element of our inner life by theologians, philosophers and most existential scholars -- often with the assumption that only creatures with self-introspective abilities can exist in an altered state even after death. Roberta can remember the grief she felt as a youngster when her parents explained that her badly wounded dog wasn’t going to be in heaven -- poor Tippy had no soul to carry on after his demise!

She was desolate as a child but obviously has matured to understand more clearly what theologians and philosophers mean when they speak of the soul as the central factor of human personality. Of course, most persons spend little or no time pondering how and why the soul originated in the complex creature-self or unified body/spirit personality humans have evolved to become. Unfortunately, a great many women and men fail to understand there are often choices we should make and service we must offer to others for nothing more rewarding than the health of our intangible but always active souls. The very perceptive Ernest Becker wrote;

It really doesn’t matter if we discover that our inner assumptions about human nature and the world, our self-awareness in language, art, laughter and tears, is built into ourselves genetically or socially. We still haven’t discovered the inner forces of evolution that have led to our character development in ways that no other mammal shares. But it is this development in a human mammal capable of introspection, that we still mean by the word ‘soul.’ The soul remains the mysterious life force for each person, with the inner dynamisms and pulsations of existence.

In other words, the soul is at the heart of our self-awareness, is the crucial element of the creature-self aspect of each personality. The soul is the seat of spiritual virtues, positive attitudes, high expectations, mature beliefs and responsible choices and through it humans yearn to make sense of life and love, of significance, rage, guilt and violence. This causes thoughtful men and women to ponder the purpose of their lives according to their values and expectations. Our ancestors always created superstitions, traditions and philosophies in order to understand life in a pre-scientific era and to rely on theologies and ideologies to justify what they planned to accomplish. Of course from our human beginnings on the Savannah of Africa, some women and men were open minded and generous while others were closed minded and grasping. Some people loved others and other persons seemed incapable of offering love or support to anyone beyond their own supporters. Obviously, this crucial aspect of life is what we are concerned with.

Earlier scientists, physicians and psychologists, who were themselves maturing beyond myths and superstitions to understand life and matter through scientific methods, assumed that while humans were often confused and conflicted, they would live more successful lives guided by scholarship than by worn down religious traditions and ideologies. Superstitious beliefs, they assumed, would soon be banished. Men and women would surely learn how to live without the myth of a supernatural God insulating them from reality. Fearful and illogical humans would choose to live in a rational manner because the scholars were pointing out their many idiosyncrasies and irrational decisions. Boy -- did the early scientists ever underestimate the staying power of subjective human expectations and beliefs! Jard sat beside Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square one day and debated the nature of his flight around the world from Singapore with a twenty year old member of the Flat Earth Society. The young woman insisted that he had actually flown around the rim of a plate shaped world! Since he had seen the curvature of the earth from thirty-five thousand feet, he was not persuaded by the charming if somewhat ideological girl. When teaching psychology at Olivet College, he once had several Creation Science true believing students walk out of a class session when he pointed out that the resistance microbes develop to anti-biotic medications is a form of evolution occurring before our eyes. The ideological youngsters had no intention of learning anything about science -- their minds were already closed to anything new unless it fit into their constricted world-view.

One major problem in psychology arose because that Freud and many of his contemporaries had imbibed deeply of the secular philosophy of Nihilism. This mind-set is the disastrous belief in disbelief, the assumption that all values are relative, that real politik comes out the barrel of a gun and the ordinary people should be used or even abused by the aristocratic elite that controls every nation. Nihilism is the wretched philosophy of meaninglessness that focused Germany’s aggressive attitude through five bloody wars, destroyed its peasant farmers through the Industrial Revolution and orchestrated six million additional victims during the Holocaust in less than a century. The mind set that Germany was superior to all other nations, that it had a divine right to dominate Europe, was embedded in its national anthem -- Deutsland Uber Alles -- ‘Germany above everything else.’

Humans have always been prone to violence in our relationships, as a brief reading of history, scripture or the Greek tragedies reveal very well, but our ancestors always understood that war and the sacrifice of their sons and the destruction of their homes and crops was evil and spiritually bankrupt. Warfare and heroism is far more glamorous and heroic at a distance than up close and bloody. It was very hard to convince a farmer that watching a band of pillaging horsemen abscond with his family’s winter food supply was some great boon to society in the long run. Only powerful aggressors who planned to personally benefit from slaughter have justified war. They still do, as they sacrifice ordinary men and women and their wealth in order to serve their nefarious purposes!

Only in the last few centuries have philosophers and theologians, usually in the service of narcissistic rulers, rationalized aggression as somehow beneficial to a society and blessed by God. Only recently have the spin doctors of America created a bloddy,war,relationships to justify rapine and raiding, of maiming and murder. The spin doctors of society understand that fear and greed always sell better than faith, hope and love, that mind-bending propaganda in an era of televised images can step by step seduce naïve people into virtually any kind of self-defeating behavior.