Something my father said when I was very young made an impression on me that has lasted throughout my life. On the surface, his words were unremarkable, but they sowed a seed that quickly took root in my thinking, and what has sprung from that has overshadowed my views of humankind, the individual soul, and God ever since. As I recall it, I must have said something to him (I couldn’t have been more than five) that indicated I wanted answers from him to certain questions about God that he assured me were matters beyond his ken. What he then said is what I regard as a kernel of “spiritual direction”: “All of us are children where God is concerned.” I was taken aback by that revelation, which no doubt is why it has stuck in my memory all these decades. The alarming idea that he was a child like me, that his apparent great age (he was in his thirties at the time) was more apparent than real, seemed then – and does still – to put many “religious” things in proper perspective. I suspect this insight (that we are all children) underlies why I am untroubled by the thought that the Bible is (as John Calvin – someone I rarely cite otherwise – put it) God’s “baby talk,” and that we should expect to see throughout it a developing, not a fully mature, picture of God. As, indeed, we do; the New Testament explicitly points to a state of perfection yet to arrive. The human race is still in its minority, far from maturity; revelation has unfolded gradually to meet the conditions of our evolving consciousness. “But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away” (1 Cor. 13:10; KJV). It’s also why I believe, without any difficulty, that each of us recapitulates in our personal growth, first, the childish credulity we see in Adam and Eve, then the temptation and “fall,” the exile from Eden, and the subsequent lessons learned in the wilderness by Abraham and his descendants. We know this story implicitly because we all tend to mirror it individually as well as collectively; it is psychologically beyond dispute. And like our spiritual forebears before us, we are passing through a “vale of soul-making.” [1] Every one of us begins at the beginning, inevitably goes astray (“sins”), usually many times in a single lifetime, and – if one is restored and willing, coming to his or her senses like the Prodigal – presses on toward a destination that can only be revealed as one gradually matures. It’s also why I believe, I’m sure, the grand vision expressed by the Apostle Paul, in which he describes (in three phases) how the destiny of all humanity (now in its babyhood) and all creation will be completed in a union with the Source of all existence:
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