Whole Earth God

Street Prophets Review of HOW TO BELIEVE IN GOD: Whether You Believe in Religion or Not

Visit Street Prophets to read Rain's review of HOW TO BELIEVE IN GOD: Whether You Believe in Religion or Not. There's also an interesting dicussion in progress on that site. If you've never visited Street Prophets, have a look around. It's part of the Dailykos community that served as a political watchdog and news source during the past several years and continues to be one of the most active blogs on the web today.

Created By Stories

Human beings are storytellers.  We create and tell stories--both, to each other and to ourselves--each and every day.  There isn't a moment that goes by when we're not telling stories.  Stories tell us what we value, what we long for, and what we fear.  They can serve to bring us closer together, or they can split us or keep us apart.  In a biological sense, stories serve to wire and rewire our neurological systems, from the moment we are born, perhaps until the moment that we die.

Thus stories create us as much as we create them.  We are our stories and our stories are us. 

I don't know exactly how it happens, but often we mistake the old stories--those we have been told by our families, churches, friends, or schools, and that we've been repeating to ourselves for generations--for fact.

When this happens, our particular "reading" of a story becomes a lens through which we view the rest of life.  But most of us aren't aware of the lenses we wear.

Talking to the Whole Earth God

Recently, a lot of people have been asking me the same question: "If God is virtually indistinguishable from the planetary ecosystem, how do I get prayer out of that? How do I talk to that?" Fair enough. But I can't answer that question in a traditional way, because "Whole Earth God" isn't a traditional model.

There are no experts when it comes to the Whole Earth God. There are no priests, no masters, and no saints. There is no ideal to fulfill and no wise formula to follow. There aren't even any guidelines or suggestions. No one is going to be abandoned  by Whole Earth God based on what they do or fail to do. And we don't talk to that God in order to be included in his plan of salvation. We already are. Everything is. We talk to him in order to widen the range of our own understanding--to bring that understanding into alignment with the Whole.

In HOW TO BELIEVE IN GOD, I used the image of tossing a thimble into the sea. If you go down the to shore and scoop up a thimble's worth of seawater, it' true that you have a little bit of the ocean in your thimble. But if you then proceed into an ashram, a mosque, a synagogue, or a church, and you say to the people there, "Come witness the majesty and power of the ocean," well, then, the only thing sadder than that would be if the people there believed you and never made the journey to see the ocean for themselves. A better model is to take that thimble--that tiny vessel--down to the shoreline and throw it into the sea. There it is contained by the very thing it couldn't contain within itself. There, at last, if finds the answer to its questions and its home.