Within the Christian tradition, the Bible teaches that all people, both male and female, are made in God’s image (Gen 1: 27). This suggests that all people are children of God. But how can this be when we see humans say and do so many things that are not reflective of God’s character? As the Bible says so well, we can tell by people’s actions if they are children of God or children of the devil (1 John 3:10). In this blog, I plan to explore what it means for people to have a Divine nature and how these spiritual dynamics manifest in our lives. In better understanding the dynamics of our Divine nature, we can then theorize more accurately how this human Divine nature falls causing people to think, say, and do terrible things. This will be the topic of next month's blog. So lets turn to the theme of this blog, what does it mean for humans to have a Divine nature? Let me highlight 8 aspects of humanity's Divine nature.
2. Divine Nature arises within the Human Soul. I have come to realize that being born in God’s image means that we, as humans, have the potential to experience life as God experiences life, that is, our experience of life and God’s experience of our life can be one and the same. In making this claim, I am risking “anthropoligizing” God, that is, reducing God to human experience or making God in my human image. And yet, what makes humans different from other animals is what is called the human soul, the field of human consciousness that is connected to our physical body. This human soul aspect of humanity is what makes it possible for us to notice all the different aspects of life including our experiences of God’s spirit. It seems logical to claim then that the Divine nature of humanity manifests or is revealed through our soul’s experience of life. So which aspects of our experiences of our life are also experiences of God’s spirit manifesting in our soul? 3. Divine Nature as Child-like. Often when we answer this question, we look toward certain adults known as spiritual giants like Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Moses, etc. or saints or gurus from our various religious traditions as models of how to live from one’s Divine nature. But within the Christian tradition, Jesus invites us to look in the opposite direction. He “called a child, whom he put among them, and said, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven’” (Matt. 18: 2-4). As I noted in my July blog, developmental psychologists have discovered that the human soul passes through four major stages of fallenness. By the time we are adults, we experience life primarily through four major dualisms or filters: the subject/object lens, the life/death and past/present/future lens, the mind/body lens, and the good/bad lens. As a result, adults find it hard to sense a oneness with life, others, and God; find it hard to experience the Present Moment where all sacred occurrences arise; find it hard to perceive Spirit outside our thinking minds within our heart and body; find it hard to see God at work within all aspects of life, not just the good but also the bad. Yet, young children spend most of their life living from this place of oneness, the Present Moment, in their bodies, and having little sense of good and evil prejudgment. No wonder Jesus encouraged his listeners to become like little children for he sees this child-like state of consciousness as reflecting the image of God within humans. This means that when we experience life freely, as children do, with curiosity and openness and no coping patterns active, those moments in our lives reflect times when we are participating in God’s nature, when our experience of life reflects an aspect of God’s experience of life. 4. Divine Nature as Unconditional Loving. Another aspect of God’s character that is dominant within the Bible is God’s unconditional love. Apostle Paul describes God’s love is in this way: “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Cor. 13:4-7). Jesus pushes this Divine love even further by insisting that as children of God, we should “love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us for God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matt 5: 44-45). For many years, I struggled as a Christian about what it means to practice God’s unconditional love in my life. It was not until I became a psychotherapist where I had to create a counselling space filled with nonjudgement for my clients that I finally realized that unconditional love cannot contain any sense of cognitive judgement. Schools of psychotherapy stress the necessity of unconditional positive regard when working with counselling clients. This has been re-enforced during my 15 years of being part of a Diamond Approach spiritual work school where I have realized over and over again the truth that unconditional love cannot contain any notion of mental rejection. But there is a catch here. We cannot make unconditional love arise through human effort; it is not possible. Unconditional love only emerges from deep within our soul from God. We have to learn to allow this unconditional love to arise within us and then allow this love to flow into our lives to those around us. Every time we allow this unconditional love to flow through us to others or ourselves, we are participating in God’s Divine nature. 5. Divine Nature is Truth focus. Some Christians have struggled with this notion that God’s unconditional love does not include judgement for it challenges many aspects of their theology. However, when one reviews the Biblical myth of the Human fall (Gen 3) in the Bible, it is evident that judgement of good and evil is the root of all human sin. Upon eating the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the humans (Adam and Eve) began to judge all their experiences into good or bad categories, including their experience of nakedness. Since they no longer were able to experience God’s unconditional love or Divine grace flowing in their lives, they began to cover their bodies and souls up with clothes and other mental structures so people could no longer see their vulnerability. One could call the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as the Tree of Judgement or the Tree of Conditional Love. Every time you find yourselves mentally judging any experience into good or bad categories, you know you are not living from your Divine Nature. However, at the experiential level of life, we do experience some aspects of life as joyful, life-giving, positive, or good while other aspects are painful, life-denying, negative, or evil. Clearly, there are good and evil moments in life and so the question remains, how is God’s spirit tied to these very differing experiences of life? Since God does not morally judge these dynamics, that is, eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, then how does God’s spirit emerge from these experiences? Instead of moral judgement, it comes down to the issue of truth. Jesus understood truth as not connected to what is right or wrong. Rather truth is all about freedom and life. Jesus taught his followers, “you will know the truth for the truth will set you free” (John 8: 32). If we, upon hearing truth, do not feel our heart say “yes” through the freeing sensation of softening or relaxing in our heart/soul, then this truth is not the truth that God wants us to hear at this moment. As I have heard many times on my Diamond Approach retreats, our heart functions like a compass around truth. A heart tells us when something is true (softens) or not true (hardens/contracts). This means that when we encounter “good” and “bad” experiences, we need to ask ourselves, “what is the truth that God wants us to learn from both types of experiences?” Not all good experiences are necessarily good nor bad experiences necessarily bad. However, if we can understand the deeper truths behind each of our experiences, these truths will always lead us to greater freedom and life. When we live our lives based on what our heart reveals as true for us in the moment, we are living from our Divine Nature. 6. Divine Nature is tied to our experience of oneness. This oneness aspect of Divine nature arises when we experience a oneness with nature or God as we watch a sunset or listen to the waves on the beach or experience a close connection with a friend. Developmental psychologists have found that babies and very young children naturally sense this sense of oneness with reality for their minds don’t yet experience life through a subject/object lens. Once that subject/object lens hardens, we mentally experience other, life, and God as external to us which means it is very hard for us to sense our Divine nature where we are connected to everything at the experiential level. Yet, that oneness with life and God is what Jesus is getting at when he says God is the vine grower, he is the vine, and we are the branches. “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15: 5). When we feel this sense of abiding or oneness, those are times when we are aligned with God, when our human soul is connected with God's Divine nature. What this suggests is that God’s Divine nature flows within and beyond the individual sense of self. This may sound strange to us for we are very individualistic in our thinking about how we experience life. But as many psychotherapists know, the therapeutic relationship involves not just two independent souls (counsellor and client), but also a counselling field that arises between them that makes it possible for counsellors to feel and sense their client’s experience to some extent. In other words, the Divine nature exists not just within our individual souls but also within the counselling field. As Christians, we have Biblical teachings that state this truth, although rarely is it interpreted in this way. For example, in terms of marriage, the Bible teaches that “two shall become one flesh” (Gen 2: 24). Often this oneness is interpreted in terms of the sexual union, but I think this union is also true at the soul level when couples are closely connected to one another. They are sensitive to each other thoughts, feelings, and experiences; they are sensitive to the Divine nature of their partner. This common soul is not just true for married couples but for any set of people who are close to each other including families and friendships. Another Biblical example of this broader notion of soul is highlighted when Jesus says to his followers, “when two or three of you are gathered in my name, I am there among you” (Matt 18:20). When we, as a group of people, are attuned to the present moment, the place where the Sacred is noticed, we will share a common experience with one another of the Divine. This is the purpose of caring small groups or worship services within our religious institutions. This common soul that arises among individuals is why the Bible calls the church the Body of Christ. When a Christian community is functioning at its best, there is congruence between the Divine nature of this communal soul and the activities of God’s spirit within this congregation. Within this larger communal soul, there are still individual souls but when these individual souls are experiencing this sense of oneness, the boundaries of these individual souls are very permeable. This permeability allows the experience of Divine nature in the larger communal to flow into the various individual souls. 7. The Different Qualities of Divine Nature. This Divine nature that we experience in our soul has many different qualities. Sometimes in the Bible, these qualities are seen as the character of God. A common expression of God’s character in the Old Testament is that God is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Ex. 34.6). Sometimes these qualities are seen as fruits of God’s Holy Spirit including “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal. 5: 22-23a). We also see in the human Jesus, as portrayed in the Bible, character traits that reflect other qualities of Divine nature including compassion, grace, faith, trust, wisdom, power, strength, etc. Within the Diamond Approach, a sacred psychology, the qualities of Compassion, Strength, Power/Peace, Joy, and Will are seen as the key qualities of Essence along with Love and Truth. Love and Truth are qualities that are always present and flowing within Divine nature while other qualities are more responsive, that is, they arise in response to certain experiences in life. The Diamond Approach has helped me understand what some of these relationships are that exist between life experience and Divine nature. The chart below captures some of these key relationships. 8. Divine Nature is eternal and everlasting. God is often described in the Bible as “eternal” or “everlasting” (Ps 90:2). This means that God’s presence has no beginning or end. In other words, God’s spirit is always active and present in our lives even though we may not sense it, just like the sun that is always shining on our earthly world regardless of what the weather maybe. This sun metaphor provides an accurate of understanding of the eternal and everlasting nature of God’s love and truth. However, for responsive divine qualities around compassion or strength, the concept of gravitational field works better. While the field of gravity is affecting us all the time, we are oblivious to its presence until we drop something or lose our balance and fall. It is then that we see the affects of gravity.
This is true about the essential quality of compassion. Divine compassion is always flowing within our lives but we don’t feel it until we experience pain, hurt, or suffering in our lives. Then, this eternal or everlasting compassionate nature of God emerges into our awareness. The same pattern happens with the Divine quality of Strength. This Strength is always flowing within our life but we are unaware of it until we see injustice or someone disregards our voice, or sense of boundaries or truth. Then, suddenly this eternal anger-like strength of God emerges into our consciousness which causes us to speak our truth or defend our boundaries, or the people we care about. Conclusion Throughout this blog, we have investigated different aspects of Divine nature and how it manifests within our human experience. We have highlighted the following:
Seeing how every human being has a Divine nature, how is it possible that humans often think, say, or do things that are quite hurtful and bad. How can children of God do such terrible things that have nothing do with their Divine nature? That will be the topic of my next blog. Questions to Ponder: 1. When have you experienced the child-like aspects (no judgement, freedom, playful, curious, etc.) of your Divine nature? What was it like? 2. When have you noticed unconditional life flowing in your love toward others or yourself? What was it like? How was it different from other times you have received or shown love? 3. When have you discovered the gift of discovering a truth that sets you free? How is this experience of truth different then the experience that comes from being judged? 4. When have you felt the oneness that can arise between us and nature, others, or God? What was that like for you? 5. I have listed many different qualities of True nature (compassion, strength, power, love, truth, oneness, joy, peace, steadfastness, value, grace, kindness, generosity, self control, etc.). Which ones arise often in your life? Which ones don't? Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
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