After the Fall – God is love in faith in action

 

"Foodman" (2021 Yinka Shonibare*) illustrates "by sweat of the brow"

Eating of fruit from the forbidden tree caused separation of Adam/Eve from God; banishment but not eternal damnation. Time and time, again, God’s justice is meant to put things back into the proper order; realignment, not retribution or vengeance in its purpose. To judge is the step needed to make adjustments that reform or lead to repentance (turning away from the error of one’s way). The other kind of judgement – not to discern and decide, but rather to condemn and penalize, does not serve God’s justice by which right(eous) relationship between Creator and creatures is restored.

Taking the model of parent and child among mortals, by forcing the child to remain dependent and constrained from free passage into the World, a fully formed love cannot grow. Only by letting go of the child little by little can the parent hope that the child will come back in love voluntarily. Equally of God and the Garden of Eden: only by ejecting them from the Garden can they truly come to seek after God of their own free will.

During weekly Bible study of these lines in Genesis one guy wondered why God allowed the Fall to happen. Where is the part in the Lord’s Prayer about “lead us not into temptation”? Another guy offered the interpretation that past, present, and future are equally present at the same time for the infinite being of God. So the Fall was not the end of the story, but only the beginning. Yes, the root of human mortality and burdens begins with the forbidden fruit, but then all the rest of the generations and “begats” lead to the events of the New Testament and the centuries since then.

Humans want a series of tangible reference points, unmoving moments of accountability, things to aim for. Static snapshots in the life of Jesus, or in the Genesis stories and elsewhere can be imagined and held firm eternally. But God is about process, something that contradicts the snapshot way of thinking through things. What to us looks like a rigid situation is a transition or process in God’s larger process and long view. One consequence of God being a process and not a statue is that the governing, master principle that guides the hand of the Creator is love; “God is love” (1 John, chapter 4:8). For his Adam/Eve the loving thing to do is let go of them, allow them to sin, have faith that they will eventually feel lonesome for God and will seek after Him and please Him.

If we accept that “God is Love,” and that he allowed events to lead to a Fallen World (indeed, allowed Lucifer to do his worst), then it follows that what matters most is love; not outcomes, not results, not fixed blueprints for what the world should look like. The process (governed by lovingkindness; Metta) and attitude (hearts made soft) lead the way forward, not knowing exactly how things will turn out. As such, when love is in the driver’s seat, it takes faith to go onward day by day, never knowing the destination, the route, or signs of having arrived. In other words, always saying YES to opportunities to express love among strangers and friends opens up ever more connections, relationships, and possibilities. This is the reverse of what managers, administrators, and other human authorities learn to do when attempting to reach a certain goal. Rather than branching into more and more possibilities, the principle is to say NO in order to narrow down the choices until at last only one way of processing is streamlined. 

In other words, God’s way (love’s way) is NOT to control but to let go so that voluntary relationships thrive instead of contractual and obligatory ones. Love’s way is NOT to foreclose possible relationships but to open up more and more connections. The result of the Love Way is to have a consistent principle of governing decisions and direction of travel, but without a fixed destination. That sort of business model, organizational culture, or mission statement may not attract many investors, but it is what makes God the Creator (not humans in charge of things).

*see original, full-size photo at https://flickr.com/photos/anthroview/51980654224 

Us versus Them restated as "we together"

Early August 2020 the guest on the weekly radio show, "On Being," was the poet Marilyn Nelson, in a rebroadcast of the original 2017 conversation with host Krista Tippett. She compares God seekers who expect to find God and God-at-work somewhere outside themselves ("magic mentality") to the people who see God at work in all places and times, including in their own selves ("alliance mentality").

Image search result for 'Marilyn Nelson poet' (8/2020)

Quoting the interview (full text link appended, below), she says:

I think people who have a “magic mentality” believe that God is something out there that we have to find to connect with and people who have an “alliance mentality” know that God is inside of us and in our connections with each other and with the world, that God exists within and between, not exterior to us, but within us and between us. I think that’s what he was trying to say... There is no separation. We are a part of God. That’s — isn’t that the ecstatic experience? We recognize that. And some people know that just naturally. Other people have to learn it. [emphasis added]

Other authors and thinkers from the Stewards of Earth tradition in Abrahamic religions have said something similar with regard to perceptions in public about "nature" versus society, or  "the natural world" ---as if the definition of "nature" consists of everything apart from human lives. Whereas industrialized, Western societies have cultivated an imaginary separation of human (cultural and technologically mediated) environment from all of the land and waters that people require to live, other societies have viewed the human/non-human boundary as much blurrier and movable. One instance of the "nature" concept being cut-off from human life comes from the translation into Japanese from the English concept of "nature." There was no exact pre-existing Japanese word, so a new one was coined, ShiZen (the kanji character 'shi' means "of itself" and 'zen' means something like "wild vitality").

In the particular phrase, above, "We are a part of God," there is a poetic double-meaning, or perhaps it is best described as ironic reflection. One meaning is "a part" or one of many pieces that all together contributes to the whole. Another meaning, this time a clever pun, is "apart" or separated from the rest. Taking the spoken word and transcribing it as "We are a part of God" means that we cannot be separated from God since we are integral to what and who and why God is. But taking the spoken word and transcribing it as "We are apart of God" means that we stand outside of God's ways and spend our waking hours seeking a way back in.

[from https://onbeing.org/programs/marilyn-nelson-communal-pondering-in-a-noisy-world/#transcript ]

God is Love; but Love is God, too?

The rhetorical masters of ancient Greece listed all the persuasive moves and structures in a person's speaking. One of these is called Antimetabole, the flip-floping of word order to come up with a sometimes refreshing or sometimes startling inversion: God is Love; Love is God. (ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν)

The passage in 1 John 4:19 is what the Tuesday Men's Bible Study read and riffed on today. Instead of quoting the familiar KJV or NIV, though, here is BibleGateway.com where many versions of the text can be displayed side by side, or simply looked up individually. Looking at the HWP, Hawai'ian Pigin, currently only published for the New Testament gives an unfamiliar voice to these familiar words about "love is..." The spelling is phonetic (e.g. brudda =brother) and there are a few Polynesian words that might not be known to most English readers (e.g. ohana =community/family). But by sounding out (speaking aloud) the text, the passage will bring to mind John's words. Even though HWP will be inconvenient, requiring slow pace and careful sounding-out the words, there is a directness, raw and earthy embrace of the heart of the meaning that is worth the effort (click the image for full-size view):

1 Johns 4:19 from https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numba+1+From+John+4&version=HWP

Love has so many senses in English. In the Greek of the New Testament there are the four distinct words (philial =brotherly love, eros =marital love, agape =community love or charitable, storge= family love). But in our consumer 2019 there is love of country, NASCAR, wood smoke, pristine snowfall, as well. Like so many other instances of physical experience in the material world, any given element or relationship structure can be perverted to misuse or abuse the thing, too. So there will be cases of false love; something that might resemble love at first blush, but --like the concept of Truthiness (seems like Truth, but in the end not so)-- these manifestations turn out to be mistaken, lacking the essential life that makes the love true in the "God is Love" sense of sincere, abiding, firm, and so on.

So with that caution about being vigilant to discern love from love-ish imposters, there is some merit is taking "God is Love" and turning it around to say that "Love is God," that is, in the small ways and big ways that one's day is peppered with situations the exhibit and express love between people at play, at work, fully immersed in creative effort or in a casual moment of joy or reflection; in all these glimpses of Love, there, too, is God. God is present when Love is present. Where there is Love, so, too, there is God. Looking at the world at hand today and the worlds seen in mass media far away or from times long ago, suddenly all the instances of love stand for God's place, side by side in those blessed times. Turning the argument upside down by acrobatic logical gymnastics and saying, "where there is no love, there is no God" ignores the idea of ever-present God, in good times and bad; in sickness and in health, in prosperity and in poverty.

In the end, despite the shortcomings of playing around with rhetoric and logical, linear verbiage, this "God is Love; Love is God" exercise does stimulate a fresh vision: that every time a feeling of affection, esteem, and connection arises, it can be a reminder of God's own basis for relating to the creatures of the Earth, whether the two-legged kind, or the many, many other kinds. Since most people grow accustomed to a certain manner of thinking, and routines of response, by flip-flopping the "God is Love" phrase there comes a chance to re-think, re-view, and re-embrace that foundational way of being in the world. Similarly, the unfamiliarity of a Bible translation like HWP can spur a person to re-think, re-view, and re-embrace one's relationship to The Word.