YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE GOD LOVES [Su, 8-21-22]

 

“God loves each of us as though there is only one of us.” Augustine of Hippo said that, and it’s true.

I refuse to call him “Saint” Augustine, though, because he did the Christian church hundreds of years of damage with his interpretation of the Trinity. Who could possibly think that claiming there is only one God but that “He” is actually three would make God easier to understand?

And also because his Roman legalism caused him to proclaim that original sin is physical and so is transferred from one generation to another by sex. As Lee Hays once said, “That set sex back a thousand years.”

However, he is quite right about God treating each of us as though we are the only one, because we are. Each of us has an anterior cingulate in the brain. That’s the site of what John Wesley called prevenient [preventing] grace, loosely mistranslated as “conscience.” That is what some brain researchers call “the god spot,” where our religious impulses reside. It literally has billions of neurons, electrical impulses, chemicals, etc. Just as DNA is totally individual, so is the anterior cingulate. With all those billions of parts, not one of them is like any other.

 

Which means that no one experiences God in the same way as anyone else. God has to treat each of us individually, because we are totally individual. Each of us has a unique relationship to God. If your spiritual experience is different from mine, well, of course. God is not “one size fits all.”

When it seems to you that your relationship to God is one of a kind, you’re not bragging, or being self-centered. You’re just understanding the way God chooses to relate to us…one person at a time.

I used to criticize the C. Austin Mills hymn, “In the Garden.” It sounded like the worst of Protestant individualism. “The joy we share, as we tarry there, none other has ever known.” None other!?! Well, yes. Doesn’t mean other folks don’t share joy with God, but that particular joy, in that particular anterior cingulate, yeah… that is shared only with God.

Billions of universes in the world, so there can’t be one God? Or any God at all? Hogwash. God isn’t too busy because there are billions. You’re the only one God deals with. Right where you are. In your brain.

 

I might add that God probably has more questions about you than you have about God.

John Robert McFarland

The native Americans were on the right track when they said that wherever you are, you are at the center of the universe, and Borden Parker Bowne was on the right track, way back in 1876, with his theology that he called “Personalism.”