Changing Everything

Dave Brisbin 2.6.22 A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it…from Frank Herbert’s Dune. But we won’t see the truth of this until we first see the process. Ancient Hebrews called God’s spirit ruach: breath, wind, and spirit all at once. Defined by motion. A process. Ancient Christians called God trinity, which they best defined as a blur of constant interaction, a relational process within God. A belief about God is a mental snapshot that stops the process. This is where we miss the bus: thinking about God as something that can be thought about—God’s action as events completed in time. Living things are defined by motion, so God and life are in constant motion; they will never be understood by thinking about them. If we want to see them as they are, we need to change everything we think we know about seeing. Only by letting go of our thoughts, thought itself, accepting the flow, can we know what it means to be alive in God’s presence. Jesus’ mega-metaphor for the Way to God is the Kingdom of Heaven. It’s not too much of a stretch to say he spent his entire life defining kingdom, so knowing what he meant is the first step to changing everything. Jesus says it’s not out there somewhere, but unseen within and among us. Not a thing bound in space and time but a quality of life to be lived. He says it’s like being born again, like a small child or a seed growing in a garden, like selling everything to buy a field with a treasure. Kingdom is the process of diminishing before growing, being vulnerable to be connectable, shedding everything that stops the process so we can experience the flow as we did before we learned to be ashamed. If kingdom is a quality of life now, not a reward later—that changes everything. If what makes us vulnerable makes us beautiful—that changes everything. If we can live as we did before shame made us feel unworthy, no longer striving for what we already possess—that changes everything. Unstops the process, kingdom, the flow of God’s presence herenow.