Ch. 9 The GOD-Centric Conversation (continued)
GOD-centric Intra-Religious Conversation
Before we embark on conversations with members of different faith communities, we need to look at our own religious tradition. I have alluded to this GOD-centric tenet multiple times but now I will declare it straightforwardly: To be GOD-centric means that we must put our good and fair God of love first ~ before any aspect of our religious tradition that contradicts God's lovingness, goodness, or fairness. You have read those words before but what I am saying is going to be radical for some of us. We must filter out or reframe all aspects of our religion that do not support God as loving, good, and fair. Any claims of exclusivity will have to go since exclusivity does not connote fairness. There will be no chosen people and no holy book that is inerrant. God does not literally send floods or plagues or help any group of people win a war or a ball game. God does not behave badly or unfairly and God does not provide any of us cover for behaving badly or unfairly. This filtering and reframing process may be emotionally difficult but please keep in your heart the truth that God really is loving, good, and fair so God does not want to be portrayed in ways that do not celebrate these qualities which God shares with us and desires for us to share with each other. We are doing God a great service when will filter out claims that God is spiteful, immoral, unfair, or vain. God is a force of love so let us speak of God, properly, as love.
It is very important that GOD-centric persons filter and reframe only their own religious tradition with which they are most familiar and about which they may grow defensive if a person from another religious tradition performed the filtering. So GOD-centric Christians will filter and reframe Christianity and the Bible but will leave the filtering of Islam and the Qur'an to GOD-centric Muslims. As a teenager, I intuitively filtered Roman Catholicism through the lens of goodness and fairness. As an adult, I befriended a very dear but very conservative Christian man whose literal and inerrant viewpoint led me to read the Bible cover to cover so I would know firsthand what it said so I could better understand what he believed. During my first effort, I became so depressed by the many biblical passages that suggested God was not loving, good, and fair that I gave up. When I took up the Bible again, I decided to perform the same filtering process, separating the passages that support our good and fair God of love from those that do not, which I now have asked of us all. If you are so inclined, you are welcome to look over my naive effort at www.freelancemonkette.com/liberaldevotional.html It bears repeating that the focus of this process is not to devolve into yet more nitpicking about this or that verse but rather to separate the wheat from the chaff, the loving from the unloving, the good from the bad, the fair from the unfair, leaving us with rich traditions that are truly worthy of our good and fair God of love.
Once those aspects of our religious traditions that disparage God have been cleared away or reframed, we will be left with a tradition of beauty which will require no apologetics because it will consistently glorify our good and fair God of love. We will be able to share that beauty inside our hearts, our communities of faith, and with members of different communities of faith. When we discuss God with another GOD-centric person, we will know that we are sharing love for the same God. We will not be caught in a tug of war over whose deity is best so we will be able to focus our energy on sharing the diverse ways that we experience, ritualize, celebrate, heighten, deepen, and transform ourselves into a closer image and embodiment of God's love. Won't it be a relief to replace interfaith bickering with an agreed upon shared love of a good and fair God? Won't it be a comfort to know that you love the same good and fair God of love as your neighbor from another faith tradition? Won't it be exciting to learn about how other faith traditions practice their love of God and to share how you express your love of this same good and fair God? We have a transformative adventure ahead of us!
