Understanding the world’s great religions and spiritual traditions is not an academic pursuit. It is a participatory sport! True study of the Way lies not in answering the great questions, but in asking them. Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? Yet after many years of meditation and Zen practice, I have become less interested in the questions: Who is God?, Where is God?”, or Why doesn’t God…?. The question that I have grown to ask and appreciate is: What is God? And how can I live my life in this way? Continue reading “What is God?: A Reflection on Purim and Divinity”
Wrestling with God in the 21st Century: Ally or Adversary?
I often reflect on the place of God in the 21st century. In this postmodern age of hyperrationality absent truth and meaning, it feels as if God is dying. Still, I am not yet ready – and will never be ready – to say Kaddish for God.
Each generation and individual person must struggle passionately with God and self and find our own unique way to do so, because it is not God’s life on the line, but ours.
While we don’t wrestle with emanations of God along the riverbank, like Jacob, we wrestle with the Divine each and every day – in each moment – through accepting our strength and limitation, struggling with our demons and seeing the Divine face in them, embracing life – our life – as it is with all of its complexities, and acting in the most compassionate way we know how.
Continue reading “Wrestling with God in the 21st Century: Ally or Adversary?”