Kate Tempest performs her poem ‘End Times’

THEME Two Faces of the One God –the One Life Force
THOUGHTS FOR REFLECTION
1. Darkness is the womb of the light, nothingness the womb of all things.

… some of us grew up with parents — who for reasons of their own — were not attuned to us properly when we were children. As a consequence, we did not have had a childhood in which we were aided in understanding our emotions and our experience of reality. Instead of having our experience of the world mirrored and explained, we were put in the role of mirroring and explaining our parent’s experience of the world to them. Maybe God can only be conscious of the world when we are aware and reflecting the world back? Maybe that is what the Biblical text meant when it said that humanity was created in the image of the divine?

Covenant, the promise that humans, especially those who understand our mortality, receive from the Eternal One. Co-creation, the promise that our thoughts, decisions and actions during the regular course of the day matter. We either choose to be aligned in the ways of Spirit or we choose not to be. Sometimes our awareness of what we are choosing is conscious and sometimes it is not. When our choices are aligned in Spirit’s ways, we bring about God’s kin’dom, which is something of great value to earth.

Christianity without an omnipotent god, without a divine savior, without an afterlife? In this bold and hopeful book, theologian Daniel C. Maguire writes that traditional, supernatural aspects of Christianity can be comforting, but are increasingly questionable.

Ever ponder the miracle of life? Or perhaps wonder about the evolution of intelligence? In Shots of Awe, “Performance Philosopher” Jason Silva chases his inspiration addiction as he explores these topics and more.

God is the love that feeds my soul;
God is the love that makes me whole;
God is the love that flows from me;
God is the love that sets me free.

“God is not a noun, that demands to be defined, God is a verb that invites us to live, to love, and to be” ~John Shelby Spong

The God of Genesis was almost omnipotent. But his extreme potency and his immortal nature prevented him from having the one ability he needed most in order to fully experience and enjoy the companionship of the human beings he had created: vulnerability.

THEME: The unravelling that relates everything to each other.

For the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies
For the love which from our birth over and around us lies
Lord of all to you we raise this our hymn of grateful praise

THOUGHTS FOR REFLECTION
1. In the beyond lies the everywhere, in the within dwells our heaven.
2. The only heaven God lives in is the heaven that is everywhere; for God is not limited to any time or space, but is present in all equally.

As a result of this brief overview, the astonishing brilliance of Jesus of Nazareth as a wisdom teacher can be witnessed in the stable pattern that underpins all of his most memorable parables, where what is holy in one context can suddenly become blasphemous, and what is blasphemous in the same context can suddenly become holy. With these paradoxical reversals of meaning and expectation, the formal structure of Jesus’ original teachings can be shown to interrupt the conditions of possibility of the Western metaphysics of presence, and the age-old attempt to anchor a pre-given and independently existing reality, while simultaneously disclosing to us an insight into the mind of the historical Jesus and his challenging vision of the Kingdom of God.

For me and for the many who no longer hold those stories as sacred, the cost is simply too high. The potential for posthumous reward or damnation has too often drained life of its beauty, wealth, diversity, and joy and the norms of civil society that are reinforced are often not in the best interests of humanity or, at least, significant swaths of it. So we need a way forward.

The truth is no one really has any idea what we mean when we use the term God. And when we use he and she or father or even “father/mother” we are just using terms that the ancient people used. We have to remember that they thought the world was flat and God was in the sky. They believed we could see god through the dome they believed covered the earth at night when they were in fact looking at stars that may have been 300 million miles away. They may very well have been “seeing” light from a star that had burned out several million years before.