Hello friends.
This is Mark Gladman,
Also known as Brother Frederick James,
Your friendly neighborhood monk in dogs.
Welcome to another series.
God.
Is.
So let me introduce you to where we're going to go over the next 30 days.
There's some sentences that we can try and spend our whole lives completing,
And I think this is one of them.
Is.
I wonder how you would finish it?
There's a lot of options.
You could choose God as good.
God is love,
God is just,
God is holy.
God is everywhere,
Maybe some of you are thinking God is watching.
Or maybe God is with us and who knows how many others.
And we learn these sentences.
At different phases of our lives,
Some of them we learnt as children.
Some of them we hear.
In prayers and liturgies or songs and when you think about them.
You.
Begin to build your theology.
Your understanding of God around how you answer that question.
Sooner or later though.
We find that we've become so familiar with the sentence.
That we stop noticing the God who's at the other end of it.
Now,
I've often said.
.
.
When I'm teaching that no matter who you are,
It's not so much the question.
.
.
Do you believe in God?
But what do you imagine or what do you think of when you say the word?
God because as I've just mentioned the God we imagine shapes our understanding of God,
Our theology.
That's how that works,
It begins to shape.
The world we inhabit as a result of that too.
So,
For instance,
If God is primarily a divine policeman.
Then the universe becomes a place of surveillance and not a really nice place to be,
If God is a judge in your mind.
Spirituality can become an attempt to keep ourselves on the right side of the law.
You know what I mean?
If we think of God as some sort of distant creator,
Then you can go through life feeling that you and everything around you has just been completely abandoned.
Or if in your head God is like an angry father,
Who you have to please to keep on your side.
Then all of a sudden things like grace become something that we have to persuade.
God to give us.
And funny enough,
I think the bigger problem.
.
.
That some people have stopped believing in God,
I think it's that their response to the question God is.
Have created images in which God is maybe too small.
The gods that we might have created in our mind might be too small,
Or the understanding of gods too small.
The question is,
Well,
What if God is more?
Next 30 days.
We're going to play with that question.
Use the word play there deliberately.
Some of the most serious work that we can do in understanding God can begin when we become willing to ask questions.
Without immediately needing to control where they take us or thinking that doing so is wrong.
So for the next 30 days,
We're going to leave the sentence unfinished.
God is.
And then we're going to listen.
Things like God is mystery.
God is presence,
God is grace,
God is love,
God is relationship,
God is beauty,
God is life,
God is in all things.
God is beyond all things.
God is silence.
God is freedom.
God is invitation.
God is the good we do.
God is?
Fill in the blank.
And what we're not trying to do here is produce.
A new list of what we might say these are correct descriptions of God.
We're actually going to use these to try and stretch our imagination because I don't think God is a thing.
Somewhere inside the universe.
And I don't think God is the biggest object in existence.
And I don't think God is a supernatural version of who we are,
Just bigger,
Stronger,
Older and more powerful either.
If the Christian traditions to be acknowledged as having a bit of a say.
God isn't even adequately described as a being.
Alongside all other beings that exist.
Of the mystery.
In whom all things have their being.
And those two things are very,
Very different.
It was Paul.
Saint Paul in the book of Acts chapter 17.
Standing in Athens.
Reaching for language that is absolutely beautiful.
When he said,
In God we live and we move and we have our being.
Just think about that,
In God we live.
If we live in God,
That changes things.
And so Christianity even then makes an even more extraordinary claim.
This mystery.
Becomes flesh.
The word becomes human,
God comes close enough to touch,
So suddenly.
.
.
If we want to know what God's like,
We don't have to begin with some sort of abstract,
Detached definition.
We can begin with Jesus.
The way Jesus looks at people.
The people that he notices,
The people that he touches,
The ones he eats with.
The people he forgives,
The people he refuses to exclude.
The way Jesus responds to suffering.
The way he refuses to use power in the way that the world expects that power to be used.
The way he gives himself away.
Which,
When you think about it,
Is why the sentence God is love is so much more radical than we just sometimes allow it to be.
We say it so often.
God is love.
This is a real heavy claim.
God is God.
Love.
So not something God does.
Love tells us about the very heart of reality.
So you can see already how powerful.
This next 30 days could be.
And so while this journey,
Though,
Is going to involve some learning,
It's also going to involve,
I suspect,
Just as much unlearning.
Unlearning the God who lives above us up in the clouds somewhere.
I'm learning the God who keeps score.
I'm learning the God.
.
.
Who needs to be persuaded to forgive.
And learning the God.
Who's fundamentally against us.
Unlearning the God who's absent.
Until we manage to become sufficient.
Or approved.
In some way,
Shape or form.
And all the while.
We're going to discover that underneath some of those images has always been another God waiting.
The God who was already there,
Never absent.
The God whose grace came before.
Anything we did.
The God in whom we already live and move and have our being.
The God whom Jesus reveals.
Not through domination and power,
But through self-giving love and sacrifice.
The God who is somehow both closer than our breath and beyond everything.
That we could imagine.
Don't think that this is going to be a theology course.
There'll be some theology here.
There'll be scripture,
Some contemplative practices.
I'm going to share some things that I call feel notes,
Which are my personal reflections of things that have happened to me on certain days as I've worked through the development of this material.
But there's also going to be some ideas.
That might make you feel uncomfortable,
And there'll probably be moments when I wander into territory where you think,
Mark,
Have you completely lost the plot?
Possibly you will,
But.
.
.
I'm happy to risk a larger question than settle too quickly for a smaller God.
So we're going to draw from scripture and from Christian mysticism.
We'll wander through theology and philosophy.
We'll listen for resonances within Benedictine spirituality.
I'm sorry about that,
But that's just who I am.
That's my jam.
And we're going to allow Jesus to sit alongside some surprisingly ancient wisdom.
We're going to explore the strange territory where Christianity begins asking questions about consciousness,
Reality,
Incarnation,
Presence,
Love and being.
And every now and then we're going to borrow the eyes of people who aren't neatly inside our theological tradition,
Because sometimes someone standing outside our familiar room can point a window.
That we haven't noticed.
And so if we're going to do this,
All I ask is that we have one firm rule that we never have to resolve everything.
And in fact,
We probably shouldn't.
Mystery isn't something to be solved.
Mysteries an invitation to go deeper and beyond.
So if something unsettles you,
Don't rush to reject it.
Or explain it.
And if something delights you,
Don't rush to accept it without thinking it through deeply and turn it into some sort of doctrine to live by.
Everything you hear,
Sit with it,
Pray with it,
Walk with it.
Argue with it if you need to.
Let scripture argue back.
Let Jesus complicate your assumptions.
Let silence have a word and let ordinary life become part of the conversation.
Because the goal isn't that in 30 days time you'll have a better definition of God.
But what I do hope you will have is a larger capacity to notice all the places where God has been,
And yet we often miss.
So here we go 30 days and for each of those 30 days we're going to finish the sentence.
And then leave it unfinished.
God is and I'll hedge a bit.
That when we put.
.
.
After those words,
Whatever we put there won't be anywhere near as important as what happens to us when we realize that whatever we put there,
God is still more.
Okay,
So take a breath.
Leave any certainties that you have at the door because they might be a little bit too small for the journey.
Bring your questions,
Bring your curiosity,
Bring your doubts,
Your wonder.
And if you can.
.
.
Bring the God you think you know.
Because we're going to see what happens tomorrow as we start the journey and make room for more.
May our ears be open.
May the scales come away from our eyes.
May our hearts be free to accept the seeds that come and plant themselves,
That they'll spout forth beautiful fruit in our lives and through us the lives of others.
And may grace,
Peace and love go with us as we do this together,
Today and always.
Amen.
You might be able to tell I'm very excited about this series and I'm so excited to share it with you.
Let's begin.
I look forward to seeing you tomorrow as we explore God is together.
Until then.
Grace and Peace.
Bye for now.
