THE POSITION OF MATURITY

An Interfaith Reflection by David Sparenberg

There are now three major monotheisms on our planet Earth. A goodly number of persons who profess themselves believers are adherents to one or another of these monotheisms.

Our communications technologies inform us that we have access to unprecedented possibilities for knowledge, growth, listening and speaking. Yet too often our politics and religions are in arrears of these technologies. This is an untenable situation and the consequences of the disparities are often dire.

Now and again a messenger arrives to remind us that we are one family, that Earth is our one only home, that the God of Christians, Moslems and Jews is the same God; with the different faiths but fruit from the same root; and that this shared God is One God. For the most part, however, the faithful remain in the spiritual immaturity of narcissism, sectarianism and the resulting distrust, bigotry, frictions, factions and virulent hostilities leading on unto death, not into life.

The maturity of God is the Oneness of God in the profundity of dynamic and creative love, transcending polarities and transforming those contradictions which otherwise retard the presence of action into the absence of reaction. The maturity of God is the state of integral soul making that summons us into mimesis.

In interface, the maturity of humanity is in the response-ability of integral soul making on the plane of the physical. Within the maturation of our spiritual evolution, the unific perfection of the soul of God is reflected. The essence of this condition is expressed in the prophetic promise which presents a living image of human destiny in a dynamic of development, and in our grasp of the Kingdom of God as within and between, as being present, yet always awaiting.

The foundation of this maturation is the life of compassion—compassion as compassionate denouncement and compassion as compassionate affirmation. It is only within the communion of compassion and the community of the compassionate that the God of pathos in search of humanity can be received.

Living this position of maturity, we would come to the center of that circle which is centerless because of life being centered everywhere. While short of this mark, we are ever failing before the summoning necessity of the hour of decision in which we exist. And yet at that, some failures contain partial progressions, while others, the anti-events of the inhuman, the atrocities, are monumental regressions.

Close on to thirty years ago, I had come into my consciousness a number of related poems. One of these poems is entitled MAN OF PEACE. Here now is that poem:

I am neither Christian, Moslem
nor Jew.
But I am one who has come
out from the voice of God.
I am not the hand
that strikes the drum,
nor again the singing drumhead.
But I am the sound
of the drum on the air.

In the eyes of the blind man,
I am his light;
to the lips of thirsty,
a taste of water.

Being neither truly
light nor water, sound or word,
I am the mere suggestion
of seeing and slaking.

Being unworthy
to serve as the finger,
I am the shadow of the finger’s nail.

I inscribe the message
that is taught me
on the dust of the world.

This was written during a period of personal spiritual awakening, or maybe I should call it my time of soul making, my time of identity reclamation. Now, 2007, after so many years, it is a disquieting irony that the vision of the words remains urgently relevant in our world of increasing conflicts, of crusading fundamentalisms, fanatical hatreds, mad greed and unholy terror. But that being so, let us ask the question: Is the perception of the poem too difficult, too great of an expectation for courage in union with humility to be democratized and lived out as a world changing power in a world where power excludes the true attainment of democracy?

My first response is to counter with yet another question. Before rejection is concluded out of cynicism or apathy, let us ask: What are the alternatives? We already know. Wrong choices are broadcast daily on the news; the inauthentic is ensanguined and ubiquitous; the blowback of deceit displays itself routinely in the details of carnage, as the politics of betrayal. Yes, I do mean to say betrayal. Because I am aware that by betraying the evolution of our humanity through violence and injustice, even if committed in the name of faith, we are in fact betraying God.

What then is to be done? I am certainly not advocating for people to abandon their churches, mosques or synagogues. But I am pleading with those who hear me to rise above malicious rivalries where questions of life and death are at issue and to free within the democratized nobility of human maturation. For the position of maturation exceeds mere tolerance with the will to embrace and hence can tolerate no barriers or prohibitions against unconditional love and the fearlessness which the life of compassion requires. For those who are prepared to give more, there is the way of itinerate healing.

In the maturation of God is the freedom of the democratization of divine revelation—the eternal openness of the prophetic promise as dialogic presence. And in the maturation of humanity is the democratization of universal deliverance out of historical exile and enslavement, and into the universal dynamic of the mutuality of the love of God.

In the simplest words I find possible, here is what the position is. Beyond these words, lives everything. And the outcome of life is ever to be decided by billions of not yet rendered choices.

ALL FLOWERS

All tongues
that have hymned God
are beautiful.
All places
sanctified to the worship of One
are beautiful.

All races
all deeds done
all faces that have shone with love
shine
and are beautiful.

Harsh world
turn not away
into the hour of adversity
but flower
into God’s maturity.

All flowers…
all flowering
is beautiful.

(c) 2007 David Sparenberg

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