SPONG: Part 2
by SteveFollowing up on Spong’s comments on mysticism:
“…the time has arrived when we need to stop forever the human attempt to see God as the supernatural or divine parent figure, to acknowledge that this is a religious drive for security and that we now need to embrace a new possibility. Perhaps the mystical dimension of recognizing that we are part of who God is and what God is, and that God is part of who we are and what we are, is the place to begin…. When I step into this place , I see God in non-personal ways. Please note that non-personal does not mean impersonal. It means that the holy cannot be bound by the personal. “Personal” is a human category. Only by transcending personal terms entirely can we open ourselves to the recognition that there is a source of life that flows through all living things but comes to self-consciousness in human life alone. That souce of life is now, for me at least, a part of who God is. This means that the more deeply I live, the more God becomes identified with my life.” (Eternal Life: A New Vision, by John Shelby Spong. p. 161. HarperOne, 2009)
Spong often writes, “Live fully, love wastefully, be all you can be.” Believing that since God is the author of life, we best honor God by living that life to the fullest; because God is the author or love, we honor God when we love wastefully and extravagantly; because God is the Ground of All Being (Tillich), we honor God when we live up to our human potential. There, my friends, is a philosophy for life.
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