ENLARGING THE GARDEN, PART II. . .

What have you done with the garden entrusted to you? –Antonio Machado

 One of the ‘gardens’ that we humans have been entrusted with is the garden we call ‘intellect’ or ‘mind.’  Our intellect and its capacities continue to evolve and develop.  How our intellects develop is crucial to how the garden called ‘earth’ will evolve or devolve.  It is crucial to remember that everything is either evolving or devolving; ‘steady state’ occurs when there is ‘death.’

Consider if you will, gentle reader, that we humans tend to take great pride in our capacity to know yet, is there anything that we know – anything at all – that has not changed (evolved or devolved) in the course of our lives?  I have two adult-children.  Their love for me has evolved – more breadth and depth; they ‘love me differently today than when they were one and two year olds.

Evolution and devolution provide us an opportunity to understand ourselves and embrace ourselves as continual learners (whether or not we embrace this opportunity depends upon what we choose).  If we choose to embrace continual learning as primary then choosing to be knowers becomes secondary.  As a species, we humans cannot, it seems, stop ourselves from seeking, searching and learning.  We cannot stop from changing (think: either we evolve or devolve).  For example: No matter how hard we try we will ‘age’.  As we age (evolve or devolve) our story changes.

Now consider this if you will, gentle reader: God’s story changes as well.  For example, we have had to re-learn creation and know it now not as something that has happened once but is a continual process.  God didn’t just create ‘in the beginning,’ God continues to create (we call this evolution); at times we are co-creators with God.

There has been a steady movement, a ‘push, ’toward deepening consciousness, increasing complexity (think: technology for example) and diversity.  If I am, if you are, if we are searchers and seekers today, more than ever before, we are seeking to understand that the universe is a single, continuous event happening every moment and this requires us to embrace an evolving (radical?) interpretation of who and how our God is.

Huston Smith (one of my favorite authors – gentle reader, you might check out his book, The World’s Religions) reflecting on our efforts to speak of God, wrote: Minds, taken in their ordinary surface sense, are the wrong kind of instrument for the undertaking.  The effect, as a result, is like trying to ladle the ocean with a net, or lasso the wind with a rope.  The awe-inspiring prayer of Shankara, the Thomas Aquinas of Hinduism, begins with the invocation, ‘Oh Thou, before whom all words recoil.’ 

Perhaps we should always write and speak the word GOD in caps, bold, and italics, to remind us that in fact we don’t know what we are really talking about!

God wants us to know that life is a series of beginnings. –Bernie Siegel