God and Nature: The Church's Achilles Heel in Modern Society

Past lives, or the lack of experience with it, is bound up in our theology of death. Christianity is in opposition to death. But death occurs all the time. As humans, we live off death. The plants we eat, the cows we kill, the forests we slaughter for post-it notes and toilet paper. You cannot live without killing something.

Our objectification of reality has made it easy to ignore this fact. We are special. God gave us this reality to do with what we like. The only important thing is human life. We were left to manage reality. Even when we say grace in thanksgiving at supper, we are thanking God for Providing for us from this world of molecules arranged to give us the sustenance of human life, so that our consciousness can grow in spiritual life.

Historically this wasn’t such a huge problem. All but a few were farmers who lived with the land and the animals. That is why the Church had such a problem rooting out heresies and earth religions. People lived daily with the earth, and less from their minds. So it was difficult to get their attention focused on the refined intellectualisms of theology.

But today it is a different story. With the majority of the population living in suburbs, dependent solely on money to survive, in dwellings of scientific comforts, we are removed from most things natural. Such artificial living is so removed from nature, that it could be argued we live in a ‘pure mind culture.’ This is unique. Historically, it was only kings and princes who needed to use their minds as much as we do to prioritize, manipulate, analyze constantly. We have replaced an invisible God with our faith in invisible numbers to ensure our security. Numbers are just a thought, a logic. Someone once observed that there are three perfections in the universe: myth, music and mathematics. If you consider it, math has replaced myth in our pursuit of perfection. Logic, equation-thinking using numbers and concepts to arrange reality to control outcomes for our benefit, is the foundation of our thought.

We are completely dependent on numbers. Science is the process of converting simple observation of reality into numbers and equations to gain control over the phenomenon. Our cars and refridgerators would not work without the numbers science has gained control of. Business is just about one thing, the quarterly number known as profit. Millions of actions by thousands of people in one company, each process analyzed and reduced to statistics to produce the variables in the equation to produce the final number for the stock market to judge. We work for numbers, money, in the simple contract between workers and employer. From those numbers we survive. Without numbers we are dead. Grocery stores are businesses in a supply chain that is totally dependent on numbers to coordinate the delivery and processing of food from the chemical valleys of factory farms, through the trucking, processing and distribution of that food ultimately to our dinner table. Even fundamentalists take this all for granted.

Do we realize how artificial this all is? Do we realize that it is the simple agreement on the meaning of numbers between individuals that allows this to happen? Is there still any memory of the stock market crash of 1929 to realize that it rests on the fickle psychology of fear and greed of the stock market? We think we have enough depth built into the system now for our security, but remember the hurricane of New Orleans? As India and China become modern numbers cultures, what will the instability of their rapid journey do to us as our economic survival is integrated with their’s? We had 200 years from the Industrial Revolution to adjust to a bourgeois society. How rocky was that? World Wars I & II, and communism were both products of this. We shreak in horror that Iran is just now beginning this journey, with a nuclear bomb.

Our modern confidence doesn’t even ask the question anymore, what is natural man? Who wants to live like our ancestors did with death all around us, chronic disease, hunger? History is a nightmare we would rather forget. It completes mind culture’s removal from the experience of surviving through a direct relationship with nature. The West is the top ten percent of the world’s population. We are the aristocrats of the world. Like aristocrats, we do not know how our food got on our table for us. All we know is that the servants delivered it.

The dominant mind is about control for our safety, security, and freedom from suffering. It is about management, manipulating what we can see with our eyes. Figuring out natural phenomena so that we control it, and not the other way around. How does this type of thinking infect all of our intellectual processes?

Paul McCartney recently visited the annual seal hunt off Newfoundland to shreak in horror at the death. I’m sure he must be a vegetarian. He wants to stop death of innocents by ugly man who just wants profit. But I’m sure his famous bass guitar is made from wood from the rainforest. His wealth allows a lifestyle of high consumption. And the air pollution from the jet he took to Newfoundland is now acid rain causing global warming. Total disconnect.

Environmentalism is a joke, of course. It is based on managing the earth like we do everything else. It makes us feel in control. Greenpeace saves the whales from Japanese trawlers but does little to shut down the jobs of aluminum workers in Quebec, whose smelter sends so much pollution into the feeding grounds of whales in the St. Lawrence River that cancer will kill more whales eventually than a trawler ever could. Nothing is whole, even in the good intentions of environmentalists. Its all the same mental game of following your heart while the mind dominates the structure of your agenda. Recycling makes us feel good, as we divert our garbage from the dump back to the factories to use more pollution to create more things. Its senseless how we delude ourselves. All to avoid the death of our lifestyle.

Conceptual equation-thinking, numbers, math, from the scientific revelation of the ‘paradigm,’ concepts filter out into every other discpline making the rout by the mind over wholeness complete. We are mind-man. This is the fundamental problem. This is the approach we take to our theology of death despite the actual spiritual experience of Christ in our lives and the Promise we analyze in the New Testament. We can figure it out, control it, manipulate it, transform it to suit our needs. Nothing is whole. Reality is God, humans, and inert matter. This is the gross thrust of our culture, and the gross thrust of theology filtering out to the congregations. Its all about controlling death and pain. The Church set up the question, and now competes with secularism on the issue. How do we control death?

It is not how we control death, but how do we control human death. We care about the rainforest, not for the rainforest itself, but what its loss will do to the global environment, and thus our survival. We are so human centered, removed from real contact with nature for our survival, that death has spiralled into the conceptual realm in countless ways. We put our beloved dog to death to put him out of his misery. We keep human vegetables alive at all costs. Its about our humanity. It shows how limited our spirituality really is, when humans are the only spirit we acknowledge in our struggle with death. Who cares about anything else, really. As long as its death doesn’t create our death. And its so easy now, as we sit in our traffic jams, listening to music, surrounded by the concrete jungle of skyscrapers, getting our priorities done over the cell phone.

But Christianity offers a full life in God. Death is conquered. The passage through this life leads to a better life. This is the confines, the parameters of our relationship with death, in all practical measure. We can point to a theology of animals and plants. Its there, on the bookshelf. But we are talking about minorities who have read it, let alone absorbed it and put it into action. My minister dad actively relates to nature through his garden and disdaining modernity’s infinite packaging to sell its man-tainted processed food and infinite gadgets. But he operates on the same old assumptions about the nature of reality, God-created for our use, reverent and thankful, even an acknowledgement of equality with it. Living with the earth instead of dominating it. But that is based on the separation of human from nature, just like our distinct separation from God however immanent He is. It is the structure of our perception, the structure of meaning and thought, what we are born into. How we interpret experience. The full life of God is for the human. Our relationship with God is defined by the services He provides for us, in all ways, including the dust of Creation. We live as if we are still the center of the universe, despite the Hubble telescope, the electron microscope, and the global village. We try to discern the reality of God from this human-centered need to feel secure. Its about gaining control.

Yet death surrounds us. And we can’t conquer it. We are killing ‘the environment’ and there is nothing we can do about it. The man-made famines are easy to stop. But what happens when the critical mass of devastation begins to affect the stabiltiy of the biosphere. Have you seen what Hurricane Katrina and the Iran scares have done to the price of oil? Both natural and human, out-of-control, rocking the economy. Israel plays with fire now, in a powder-keg of post-9/11 Islam. And the polar ice caps are melting. If we stopped polluting today, yesterday’s pollution’s effects won’t be felt for another 20 years. We’re cooked. Death surrounds us. Let’s talk about a full life in Christ. Share and help everyone. Get all individuals through this life in one piece so that they can share in the joys of God despite this life. There is an essential disconnect here. No one’s piecing it together in the popular imagination. Death stalks us, but it is safely out of mind, under control in our hospitals, abbatoirs, funeral parlors and television.

We have to dig deeper in our archaelogy of ‘who we are.’ Buried in the ruins that we build on top of is a keystone. If we remove it, it will mean destruction of much that we have built. But it is essential. In the broken heart is God. In the broken heart is God’s broken heart. God knowing death, facing the Void, the Truth in the Lies that He wants to come out. Such sadness in God right now. His Children, so far removed in their blind devotion to mind. Can anyone hear? Are there any hearts that have learned how to hear over the ages? How to counteract the ravages of mind culture? He Gives a few things to help us realize who we are and what is reality. We can either take it or leave it. It is our choice. Just like the Jews hearing Jesus for the first time. Stay in the security of the conventional, socially approved Temple. Or risk going against what is allowed, against all reason, because the Temple, the conventional, could not explain Jesus. It was easy to believe in Jesus, having seen Him in action. Much harder when He’s just a story back in time. But we have the comfort of convention to place our experience of the sacred in a safe place.

Past lives is a massive paradigm shift for the Church. So is acknowledging more spirits than just God, souls and the devil. We don’t know Creation, so we cannot understand what it truly means ‘God is All.’ These are the baby steps the Church needs to make right now. Other spiritual truths will come from it. They are well-known outside of the Church, and the Roman Catholic Church still has deep within its vaults the truth of much of it.

The shock of exorcisms still rankles the public. And the reality of ‘saints’ helping us seems far-fetched. The chasm of other truths still faces us. Little can we realize that we are living in heaven right now, that our souls live in two places at once, such is the dominance of time-and-space in our consciousness. Few realize that in our deepest sleep, when our bodies are at their lowest point, our souls are being ‘refreshed’ in its other home. Then we wake up in this reality again, with strange poetic memories of dreams.

It is bizarre to think that we can be living two lives at one time. It makes the theologian go cross-eyed. If we realized that one human life can have one, two, up to three souls occupy it during a lifetime, what does that do to our Salvation theories? What is the purpose of such piggy-backing by souls on our lives? Are we just being used? What is the relation between the life and the soul then? If our whole consciousness does not survive, just the experience taken by the soul, then what is the human’s purpose in sacrificing the pain of Christian demands when the life is going nowhere after death anyway, only the soul? Then, who are we? If human life is sacred, but finite, then should we also infuse some new wisdom into the nature of nature?

If we can commune with our dead ancestors, should we listen? Or ignore them, and just listen to God? What is the relationship between the genetic heritage and the soul that has lived many lives? Both bring their own issues with them. Everything opens up when a little spiritual light is shone on mind-man. It creates instability in us, these strange things. How do we brush them off? How did we brush off science when it disagreed with the Church’s view of reality in Gallileo’s time?

People are hungry for more spiritual knowledge outside of the human. The Church is not. The Church has a responsibility, having come to know God through Christ, to anchor explorations into spiritual reality beyond humans in the actuality of God. If the Church does not acknowledge this responsibility it will wither in its circular, self-referencing theology. It must recognize who and what it is as a civilized institution, subject to the limitation of the dominant mind, suffer the death from this truth, and then emerge to fullfil its destiny. Without this, death becomes it.

Don’t trust me. Let the Holy Spirit work on this one within you.