COSMOS, CHRISTOS, & CONSCIOUSNESS

Courtney Roberts, M.A.

 

The Only Relationship

 

That Matters

 

            Every one of us longs to be truly loved, not only for who we are, and for who we could be (with a bit of help) but also, in spite of everything we’re not.  At the very core of our being, hidden within our heart of hearts, is an endless, aching need; an insatiable longing for a divine complement to our own obvious incompleteness, the soul mate whose unconditional love makes us whole.  And yet, we find ourselves alone, amidst a worldwide, pan-historic epidemic of loneliness.  

Is there some comfort in the sad truth that we are, all of us, alone together?



                

    

     Consider some of the astonishing lengths to which we go to try to fill this need.  How many of us are driven by obsessive thoughts of romance and marriage (sometimes the loneliest state of all)?  How many of us revel in fantasy, pornography, and the sex trade (almost as lonely as some marriages)?  

     How many of us, right now, are over our heads in some intimate  relationship that is more aggravating than fulfilling, but we can’t let go, because we are afraid of being alone and continue to cling to an inexplicable, unconscious expectation that somehow, with enough pressure, this person will eventually change into exactly who we think they should be? 

In the mad rush for true love, denial never dies, and bitterness and isolation remain popular options.  One result is that millions of us disappear into ambitious ‘workaholism,’ either to escape going home to the disappointments of our personal lives, or in the mad hope of ultimately achieving love through the stunning success we have made of ourselves.  Then there are the eating disorders.

At the risk of sounding too cynical, even those in what appear to be the happiest families, surrounded by generations of intimate relations, still struggle with loneliness.  In their heart of hearts, they often feel misunderstood and unappreciated by the very ones they love the most.  They may not tell you this, but you would scarce believe the things they will open up and tell an astrologer who really listens.   

 

 

 

            So why is it that each of us is born with this overwhelming need for love and understanding that no human being can ever fulfil?  Let’s turn the question around.  Have we ever truly and completely loved anyone else in the way that we know we deserve to be loved?  Ah hah!  If we really want to be honest, we would have to admit that most of us are not even capable of giving the very love we most desire for ourselves.  So what lies behind this seemingly irrational need?

 

There's a God-shaped hole in all of us,

And it's a void only He can fill

(Plumb, from God-shaped Hole) http://www.plumbinfo.com/flash.html

 

Perhaps the closest we might come to that unconditional love we so desire is in the love of a parent for their child.  Many’s the heroic sacrifice that parents must make, inspired by their love for their children, and perhaps that early experience of infant dependency lies at the root of our adult need for true love.  Perhaps – but parenting skills vary, and so does the security each child feels in the care received, whereas our romantic expectations for true love often far outstrip the indulgence of even the most devoted parent. 

I believe that’s because ultimately, in our outsized longing for love, we are actually experiencing the soul’s desire to be reunited with its source.  And what is that source, the parent, if you will, of the soul?  That would be the very ground of our being; that which we, for lack of any better term, call ‘God.’
 

 

 

I tend to shy away from the word ‘God,’ myself.  While it works fine in many cases, it can also bring all kinds of backwards, medieval definitions to mind.  It’s been my experience that many intelligent, highly ethical people will automatically reject anything, even the most sublime moral sentiments, if they are expressed in the same sentence with that word.  Such is the extent of religious malpractice among us, although I fear the fault lies somewhere within ourselves.

 

At the same time, I have also found that many people who associate negative ideas with the word ‘God,’ will, if pressed, readily accede to belief in some kind of higher power, universal mind, mother goddess, guiding light, cosmic consciousness, divine fate, etc. and whatever.  Most people have some sort of definition they can live with, even if they are loathe to call it ‘God,’ and at the end of the day, all we can ever talk about is definitions; not the thing itself.  We can no more hope to grasp the ultimate meaning of it all with our petty human minds, using mere words for signs and symbols, than a horse can hope to learn calculus.  And while most people know better than to waste any time trying to teach a horse calculus, we continue to pump a lot of energy and ego into arguing about our own precious, personal, definitions of God, as if it mattered.

 

That’s what I love about Alcoholics Anonymous (For the record, my name is Courtney and I’m not an alcoholic. I just really appreciate AA). I mean, apart from helping millions of alcoholics find sobriety, what I really love is that they do it by encouraging them to develop a relationship with ‘the God of their understanding.’  They don’t presume to define God for anyone, and that’s a radical departure from business as usual.  Standard human religious behaviour usually involves telling people exactly what to believe and do, and to insist upon compliance before granting acceptance.  The founders of AA did exactly the opposite, and the result has been a profound and unreserved blessing for all humanity.

 

Your Soul Mate Is Looking For You, Too

 

So I would ask you to at least briefly consider the following – that your endless, aching need for true love, for a soul mate who perfectly understands and loves you, is an indication of something more than just a need to breed.  It is your soul longing to be reunited with its source.  It is the immortal core of your being longing to go home, to return to the very ground of being itself.  And that, for lack of a better term, I will call ‘God,’ but please feel free to call it anything that works for you.  And please call it often.

I’m certainly not discounting the possibility you may find true love and have a very happy marriage.  I really hope you do, and you will always find in me a true believer in true love.  But all of our relationships benefit when we are in proper relationship with the source of our own soul.

 

 Sadly, most of us are too caught up in our own longing to even notice that the God of my understanding already loves us more than we love ourselves, and far better than any mere mortal ever loved another.  He/she/it pursues us relentlessly, understands us completely, forgives us generously, and is passionately committed to our perfect happiness and fulfilment.       

 

T. G. of Y. U. has known and loved you from the very beginning, and calls to you constantly from the core of your being.  T.G. of Y.U. deeply desires a more intimate and meaningful relationship with you.

 

                  So who was it you were looking for, anyways? 

 

T.G. of Y.U. (the post-modern tetragrammaton? http://www.answers.com/topic/tetragrammaton)

 

 

          Matthew, True Love, and Taxes

 

Many of us have a definition of ‘God’ that is remote and majestic, existing far above human cares and concerns.  We might wonder how ‘God’ could ever be interested in us in any personal way.  The very thought may be unsettling, as if we were exalting themselves in order to attract ‘God’s’ attention.  That kind of humility is touching, but consider this:

 

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.

“Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?  Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!”

“Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. Even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.  So do not fear; you are more valuable than many sparrows.” (New American Standard)

                                            

We can be reasonably sure that’s the way Jesus saw it, T. G. of H. U.  With these words from the Gospel of Mathew, he presents ‘God’ as very approachable, and as very interested in helping us in our personal lives.  He even encourages us to come to T. G. of H. U. with our petty human wants and needs, as if ‘God’ actually wants to hear all that. Come on, even our best friends don’t want to hear all that! 

 

What Jesus doesn’t do is describe ‘God’ as some remote or judgmental authority figure on a throne. That’s a very human image, isn’t it?  Jesus describes a loving and tender parent who is passionately interested in our lives, and who already knows more about us than any earthly father.

So where did we get all these other ideas about our unworthiness to draw near to ‘God’s’ throne?  Probably from man.  For instance, why does ‘God’ need a throne? Humans like sitting on thrones, and human concepts like that might be the worst thing that ever happened to ‘God’s’ reputation.  Have you ever seen that great bumper sticker that says, “Dear Lord, please save me…from your followers!”

 

 

      "I treasure the word Christian, and refuse to abandon it to the Falwells, the Robertsons, and the Ratzingers of the world."     John Shelby Spong

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_Spong

 

 

In the Gospels, Jesus was always kind and forgiving to the average sinner, to people like you or me.  But he was relentlessly hard on the religious hypocrites of his day, the scribes and the Pharisees.  These were the people who thought they had it all figured out, and lorded their righteousness over their neighbours.  One of the many things Jesus accused them of was teaching the doctrines of man as the commandments of God. 

 Think about it. How much of orthodox or fundamentalist Christianity is a matter of teaching the doctrines of man as the commandments of God? 

                           And who is fit to judge?   

 

 

Your answers to those questions may reveal more about your own personality than they do about the ultimate truth.  Are you the kind of person who relies on external authority to justify your choices? Or do you trust your own heart?  Obviously, within the broad spectrum of human nature, many of us are on either extreme, as well as all points in between.  In that sense, many of our religious differences are actually personality differences, and as such, do tell us a lot about ourselves.  


So now, I will tell you a little about myself.  I wrote above “We can be reasonably sure that’s the way Jesus saw it,” after quoting his words from the American Standard Version of the Gospel of Matthew.  By that, I mean that while we could never prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus actually said this, there is good reason to believe that he probably at least said something very much like it. 

 

The truth is, we’re not entirely sure who wrote the Gospel of Matthew, much less who edited it, and how often.

We have some extant quotes, from 1st-4th century Church fathers like St. Jerome, Eusebius, Ignatius, Irenaeus, and Epiphanius, to the affect that ‘Matthew’, who we assume to be one of the 12, collected the sayings, or logia, of Jesus, and wrote them down in the Aramaic language to be read among the Jewish converts.  Just as an aside, Jerome and Epiphanius also mention that there were at least two different versions of the gospel of Matthew, and at least one of them was lost.

 

There is some confusion over the identity of Matthew in the Gospels. ‘Matthew’ is traditionally assumed to be the same Levi, the son of Alphaeus, whom Mark (2:14) describes as being called by Jesus as he sat collecting taxes for the Romans.  The problem is, Mark lists the twelve in the next chapter (3:14-19) and includes Matthew, along with James the son of Alpheus, with no mention of Levi.  Luke calls the publican/disciple Levi as well.  It is only the Gospel of Matthew that definitely identifies both the publican and disciple as Matthew, and opinons vary as to why. Tradition consistently equates the two, assuming that Levi had two names, but it is a bit confusing. 

 

Oddly enough, the canonized version of the Gospel of Matthew contains more references to money than any of the other gospels, and more specific references to different types of coinage in circulation at the time.  Whoever wrote the narrative had a keener awareness of currency than your average evangelist!

 

 

About that narrative – it may well have been a later addition to ‘Matthew’s’ original collection of the sayings of Jesus.  The current consensus opinion among serious Biblical scholars (as opposed to fundamentalists) is that the earliest source for the three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, & Luke) was some collection of the sayings of Jesus.  It may have started out as oral tradition, or, perhaps one of the more literate apostles was taking notes as they went along, if not shortly thereafter. Certainly, a tax collector would have been more likely to do this than say, a fisherman, but who knows?

 

The consensus opinion is not without its serious detractors – indeed, there is no position in serious Biblical scholarship that is without its detractors - and arguments continue over whether the ‘Logia of Matthew’ constitute the same thing as the mysterious ‘Q’ source for the sayings, which has long been posited but never found.  At the end of the day, we are left with the realization that the synoptic Gospels originated amongst the earliest disciples out of some collection of the sayings of Jesus.  The narratives, the genealogies, that stuff about the rock on which he would build his church, even the Magi and the Star of Bethlehem; they’re all probably later additions, often by editors who chose to remain nameless.  And as for the so-called ‘Gospel of John’ – don’t even get me started!

 

 

Bearing all of that in mind, the sayings of Jesus, as presented in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark were a literary product of the earliest church, which consisted of at least some people who had actually heard Jesus say them in the first place. They are probably more authentic than not, and they do give us rare insight into Jesus and T. G. of H. U.  But if that kind of reasoning doesn’t do it for you, read them and check your heart.  How do his words make you feel?

 

                                              

 

That’s how the fisher of men hooked me, back when I was a surly, thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.  In the aftermath of confirmation and the onset of puberty, I took it upon myself to read that collection of the original Logia we now know as the Sermon on the Mount.  Those words made my heart beat high within me, for he taught with authority, not as the scribes and the Pharisees.  Even with all the man-made accretions and deletions, his voice still reached me, down through the ages.  Like the sheep who know the Master’s voice, something deep within me responded to the callof the Good Shepherd.  

So by all means, read what we have of the Logia, and see how it makes you feel.

 

 

     Obviously, I’m no fundamentalist. The Bible is a flawed, man-made document, and we have made it out to be much more than it is, usually to suit our own purposes. I can only say that the Logia of Jesus in Matthew and Mark are probably the earliest and most authentic parts of the New Testament.  Beyond that, I like to think I know enough about typical human religious behaviour to suspect a fair amount of tampering and the insertion of many a hidden agenda. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read the Bible, because there is incredibly inspired writing in there as well.  But if you really want to know what the earliest Christians were all about, in all their diverse splendour, you might be better off searching out the Nag Hammadi cache.  So that tells you something about me.

 

And if you really want to experience true love that lasts forever, you might be better off searching out your own heart, and listening for the call of T. G. of Y. U.  You might find yourself already deep within the most intimate, satisfying, personal relationship imaginable.  Every one of us desperately longs for what God alone can give.  If you are searching for a true friend, with the kind of loving insight that sees right past your faults into your fullest potential, and whose love is strong enough to bring out the best in you, then look within, to T. G. of Y. U.  And in the process, you might find the way that Jesus describes T.G. of H. U. to be really helpful.  It’s worth a look.