Whole Earth God

The God I Talk To

One of the biggest beefs modern people have with the Bible is its idea of a personal God. A scientifically-informed, secular sensibility can sometimes tolerate the idea of a supreme being, so long as it is identical with evolution, or life force, or perhaps pure being or pure spirit. But give it a proper name and a personality and those same people will flee from it as far away as they can get. It doesn’t make sense to them that there is some proverbial white bearded guy in the sky who cares about them personally and listens to what they say, occasionally offering special protections, favors, or rewards. Such a God just doesn’t wash with science. As a modern person you have to go out pretty far on a limb where your basic working belief system is concerned in order to believe in such a God.

And yet, many people do. I am always surprised at how compartmentalized most of us are. A conservative Christian who wouldn’t be caught dead reading Darwin nevertheless makes liberal use of the fruits of that science which tells him that Genesis is fairy tale and his God simply isn’t so. The person who has no inclination whatsoever to call Jesus his personal savior nevertheless still cries out to him—and with complete sincerity—during a moment of genuine distress. Naturally, there are still technophobic fundamentalists who’d rather read the Bible than go on-line, and secular humanists who wouldn’t cry out to Jesus if their heads were on fire. But most of us fall somewhere in between. We may not be entirely comfortable with the idea of a personal God, but after all it’s pretty hard to think of God in ways that aren’t personal. Our lives are personal, our hopes and wishes are personal, and our fears are personal, too.

My way of understanding God is that he/she/it is not personal—I’m the personal one. I’m the one who needs to relate, and to be related to. Therefore, how I think of God has everything to do with who I am and what I need, and nothing to do with God. I don’t have any idea who or what God is. I don’t even know if He is a “he,” or even a “who.” And I don’t believe anyone else does either. I only know that I need someone to listen to me. I only know I need to be heard. I only know that when I most truly need to be listened to and heard, that is the very moment when I speak the most honestly and most deeply, because there are things I will say to God that I won’t say to anyone else—not even to myself.

"In the Beginning Was The Conversation." – Jn 1:1 (Erasmus)

Human beings have always used innovation in technology to help them come together around conversation and community.  Prehistoric humans, using their discovery of fire, created smoke signals to call out to one another. With their earliest hand tools, they fashioned drums to sound out their messages. Most often, their sight and sound inventions were used to gather them together from across great distances.  Coming together, face-to-face, they spoke to each other of life, just as they lived it.  And they listened to their lives to learn the meaning of what they were experiencing.

WholeEarthGOD.com is a small strand in humankind's most recent technological innovation–the World-Wide Web.  This weblog is one of the places where people who are communicating by Internet can gather to explore what that connection itself means for them and for the world, now and in the future. 

WholeEarthGOD.com is not about making religious beliefs into  virtual reality. Rather, we are discovering together how best to use the connections we now have, and the new ones that are on the way.  We trust that our conversations will offer an experience of connectedness and community that will support and sustain that which moves your life forward for the sake of your own life and for the sake of the life of all beings on the planet. 

Weekly Woodstock #1

"And God Saw That It Was Good"

In chapter one of Genesis, the author tells the story of how our world began-heaven and earth, light and darkness, grass and herb, sea creature, winged creatures, beasts of the earth, and lastly humankind.  "And God saw that it was good," says the author.  In fact, seven times the phrase "it was good" appears in the opening section of the Bible.

What is God seeing and feeling when he says this?  That was the question we wrestled with last week in our Woodstock Buddhist Bible Study group: What does God mean by "good"?

"How we define good as human beings is our perceptual frame for reality," observes Clark.  "But that frame is necessarily quite small in comparison to all that is, and so there's the need here, at the very beginning of the Bible, to break it open and get as big a picture of reality as we can."