God does not exist: God insists

This set me thinking about the nature and origin of the powerful images shaping my life, and so I began looking into the Gospels.  The ewe-boy who had been shaping so much of my life seemed to have much in common with the Jesus of the narratives in his simplicity, his essential goodness and natural drawing-power.

Two or three years later I tentatively ventured to a Eucharist in a local church.  I found that the liturgy had been somewhat changed since my boyhood, but the music, symbols and language took hold of me.  On subsequent Sundays I began to feel I was worshipping in the midst of a great cloud of people from the past and from the future and from many lands: boundaries of time and space dissolved to give a sense of oneness with all humanity.  We were like those who, in my dream, perpetually moved around the perimeter of the forest clearing with the circular patch of sunlight at their centre.

And so my journey has continued ever since.  After a week of tiring, often thankless and depressing or angering life in the outer world, the Eucharist gives new strength and awareness of the abiding centre from which I draw life.  I come away refreshed, with inspiration to face the world without pretences and defences during the coming week, like the ewe-boy.

God as the Insistent Reality

As the seat of will, memory and other functions, the ego is indispensable for every human personality to live effectively in the world.  The great lie that the ego tells, however, is that it can be in and of itself.  It was born as a constellation of energy derived from – and sustained by – an infinite and eternal tide in the collective unconscious of humanity.

If the ego accepts this indebtedness for its very being it can begin to dismantle its defences, to admit that it cannot be without relationship.  When it strips down closer to the authenticity of the ewe-boy it encounters, at least in some small ways, the genuine Other from which it came and others who also came from there.  And while the authentic life makes one more vulnerable it also opens one to a more abundant stream of love and peace.

And so Matthew Arnold's exhortation to "be true to one another" is an invitation to insist who you really are. "Truth", regarded from this viewpoint, is a way of being rather than an object or logical conception.  Put a little differently, truth is the eternal demand that we accept that the ground of our being is beyond individual ego-life and common to all humanity.  I call that ground of my being "God".  God is not a supernatural entity, does not exist.  But God insists in the collective unconscious, and from God I (ego) came.  To be true to this insistent reality I offer these thoughts for your consideration.