Universal Family

We enter the family of God with the faith of a little child, but that faith lacks the discernment and power of the faith of the adult child. When the thicket of problems becomes too difficult for our tools, when our resistance to the divine way or the earthly obstacles to our living the will of God mount up, then our faith moves from receptive mode to active mode--wholehearted adult faith. There's the power to overcome self-doubt. God does so much for us, but we alone must make the decisions that launch action. Let's go for it! In doing so, we gain the assurance that we need of the truth of faith. The soul knows.

Righteousness gets a bad name because of two distortions: legalistic religion that tries to control matters that should be left to individual freedom, and self-righteous swagger with its hostility toward for broad classes of humanity.

When Jesus assured us, "Happy are those who hunger and thirst for happiness," he had something different in mind. He was pointing the way to the beautiful wholeness of righteousness. The hunger and thirst is stage one. The divine gift of righteousness is stage two. Isaiah: "My soul shall rejoice in the love of my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation and covered me with the robe of his righteousness." Stage three requires us to learn an expanded concept of morality that wisely coordinates an understanding of the truth of universe process as it takes place on this evolutionary world with an understanding of the meaning of the relevant truths of spiritual experience: love and mercy, worship and service, joy and liberty, faith and assurance, and so on. When we learn to live in such truth-coordination, we exhibit the beautiful wholeness of righteousness.

Social service defined: readiness to do good to anyone with any kind of need. It is common for love to be preferential in a way that is not based on our quality in the brotherhood of man/siblinghood of humankind. But everything changes when we recognize the spiritual core of our creation as personalities--unique, mysterious, and constant through change--each one a masterpiece of the Creator's art, whom our Father indwells by his spirit.

On this basis we begin to serve with the following motivation: We serve our Father in the persons of those whom he indwells by his spirit.

And thus we become ready to serve in a way that reveals God's love and mercy for the whole person.

When we say "God" we refer to the awesome Creator. But a full concept of God includes his intimate and personal relationship with us. He is also our Father and our friend.

Increasingly realizing this in our spiritual experience, we can more readily embrace the evidences of a friendly universe.

When we establish our core identity in the truth of our being a son or daughter of God, we have gone a long way to ending whatever craziness may have infected us. We can enjoy the beauty of nature and the arts, including healthy pleasures and uplifting recreation. And we can lead a life dominated by goodness and make a more effective contribution to the progress of sanity in our world.

We start physical life as a one-celled zygote. We start the development of our mind in complete ignorance. Why should we expect that our physical and mental development gives us advanced standing as we begin our spiritual journey?

Turning to him as his child, we can discover God as our Father. We thus discover a central truth of the Creator and the core of our own identity.

As a both-and thinker who sometimes recognize an either-or, I see that (1) there can be no peace between light (divine truth) and darkness (rebellion against God). But (2) countless other conflicts arise in which we can make tremendous progress if we mobilize different attitudes and tactics, such as we can learn from Marshall Rosenberg's methods of nonviolent communication and Thomas Aquinas's method of discussing disputed questions.

How can someone who used to avoid social service start to become a server of all?