Wanting the Ridiculous

I used to imagine God as an image I got from a Taoist book.  It’s the idea that we are all God; that God decided to become multiple, many beings and inhabit the entire world.  But, we forget that we’re God, except in certain moments, and we certainly forget that other people (and beings) are God, too.  That has been my guiding metaphor for God for the last several years—a God that is part of us and with us, in which we live, love and hurt.

Now I realize that that God can be Christ for me.  Maybe it isn’t how Christ is for everyone, but it certainly is very close to how Anglicans describe Christ.  Christ is with us always, has always been and will always be.  The story of Jesus’ human manifestation, with the virgin birth, the miracles, the death and the resurrection is there to illustrate that Christ is with us.  Not believing in the virgin birth and the resurrection doesn’t mean that Christ isn’t with you.  But, believing in it makes the whole thing a little bit sweeter, more human, and more mysterious.  I don’t just want to believe that Jesus was an important teacher who was close to God, or even was a human man who realized his “god-self” fully and lived as an example to us.  I want to believe that Jesus was a conscious part of God (the God that is in all of us that we forget about), who became flesh to illustrate a point to us all, in the most dramatic, surprising and mysterious way that we cannot still comprehend.  I WANT the mystery of it.  I want the audaciousness, the ridiculousness, the unbelievable.  I want to be humbled by the story.

I want this because I want a path to get to God, somehow.  I know I can’t understand God, or approach God, but Christ gives us a connection, a reminder of the God within ourselves.  Christ is the way, the truth and the light.  Although I can’t comprehend the entire mystery of Christ, I can relate to parts of it.  Because God became human, we can identify with God a little bit.  Christ makes God real for us and begs us to act upon that realness.  It’s not enough to live in philosophical ideas of how we’re all parts of God that forgot about being God.  I need to live in Christ, a person whose story we can follow, whose pain and love we can feel, and look for Christ in others.  I need something personal.  So, now I’m beginning to understand what it means to “take Christ into your heart”.  It’s still kind of scary.  But, it’s also compelling and very necessary to me.  I need it.  The ridiculousness of it makes me need it even more.