People love to talk about God. Some people even love to talk TO God. And a few people even love to talk WITH God.
Our “classmate” Deb Reilly talks to God a lot. I know, because she told me so, right there in yesterday’s Comment Section. And Deb added a note that I found fascinating. Said she…

I know you have been taught that we choose our life circumstances. I respectfully disagree. I believe we do choose how we adapt and grow in those circumstances.

So Deb and I have a disagreement. But it is not a small one, theologically speaking. So, with no intention at any level to get into an “argument” with Deb…let’s explore the differences in how she and I hold the experience of Life.
I believe and know that we do choose our life circumstances. Indeed, we create them. Deb disagrees, and feels, I surmise, that we are subjected to our life circumstances, that we are given them, or walk into them or arrive at them or somehow or other confront them as a natural process of Life Itself — a process over which we have no control, save in our response to it.
So one theological viewpoint has it that we are, in a sense, the “victim” of our circumstance, while another holds that we are the “creator” of it. One says that we are not responsible for the space we are in and the situations in which we find ourselves, the other says that we are totally responsible.
Theologically, the first viewpoint…that we are, in a sense, “victims” of our circumstances…must necessarily derive from a Theology of Separation. That is, a theology which says that — while God may be “with” us (to help us safely on our journey), God is not actually one with us. We are not “at cause” in the matter of our life situations, but — presumably — God is.
The second viewpoint…that we are, in a sense, “creators” of our circumstance…must necessarily derive from a Theology of Unity. That is, a theology which says that God is not only traveling “with” us, but IN us AS us. That is, there is no separation or division between us and God.
The question, at its basis, has to do with “Who is At Cause in the matter of how Life presents Itself to us?” All of us face life challenges, but the theological inquiry is: Why? We can answer this inquiry with a simple (and simplistic) statement: “That’s just the way Life is.” Or we can answer it with a more-or-less standard traditional theological statement, “God never gives us more than we can handle,” which seems to suggest that God is the cause of the challenges we face. Or we can answer it with a statement from the New Spirituality, “We are the cause of our own lives, in every respect”…a statement that suggests that we ourselves create the challenges with which we are confronted in human life.
This statement is perhaps the most difficult for most believers in a more traditional theology to embrace or accept. And tomorrow, we will look at why…and we will explore the statement itself more deeply.
Why would anybody create, deliberately, the conditions of Life in which so many humans live? Why would anybody “create” living the lives of the suffering in Darfur? Or the child raped at age nine? Or the man terribly beaten in the park? Or the oppressed and suffering anywhere?
Yet what if the creation is not “deliberate”? Does that make it any less our creation? What is the process by which we create — if, indeed, we actually do so?
And if we do not, if God is, indeed, the Creator…why would God create, deliberately, the conditions of Life in which so many humans live? Why would God “create” the lives of the suffering in Darfur? Or the child raped at age nine? Or the man terribly beaten in the park? Or the oppressed and suffering anywhere?
Yet what if the creation is not “deliberate”? Does that make it any less God’s creation? What is the process by which God creates — if, indeed, God actually does so?
These are the important questions that most of today’s religions appear reluctant to engagingly address. “Mysterious are the ways of the Lord,” they seem to say.
So what about you? What about our class members?
Today, I will ask the class members to give us their thoughts on these two viewpoints about Life, and our relationship to God, and God’s relationship to us, and the whole interplay that we call This Earthly Experience, and how God creates. Did God create just the Beginning, and let it go at that? Or does God create in our everyday lives?
Let those be our questions of the day.