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i am Love or i am Chaos ...and I AM

Updated: Apr 26




A Personal Update: Easter 2025


These reflections were initially written on Easter, April 20, 2025, my 898th day of living soberly, re-committed to following Jesus; admittedly, within poverty of spirit and heart as I long for a day when I once again love Jesus first, as no other and my neighbor as Jesus loves me. Perhaps starting this time with Joetta, my nearest neighbor with whom I am entangled—in a tapestry of experience, relations, values, joy, sorrow—meaningfully. 


In the last year, last 40 years really, I've been re-thinking how we humans 'become.'


How i am, how you are.



Alfred North Whitehead 1 was my first introduction to the idea of Jesus Christ as the Cosmic Christ—The Eternal Son, whom St. John calls "The Word." Building upon the Greek's "Logos" or 'primal energy, wisdom', St. John's Word is God The Creator, making real in time/space the inter-dependent, inter-active nature of the Trinity of God. Yet, 40 years ago my western need to keep nature and metaphysics in their unique boxes blinded me to the possibilities that what science—including theoretical physics, especially Quantum Physics—is attempting to pick apart or re-imagine is getting at the same reality as 'faith traditions' in describing essential spirit; which I now refer to as spiritual-materialism. It was Richard Rohr's descriptive of the 'Cosmic Christ' that gave me permission to re-discover Paul's Christ; "For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1: 16-17 NIV). (Well Richard Rohr and a couple of decades among 1st nations communities).


It wasn't until this last decade in my linear time that the beauty and wonder of the Cosmic Christ began to dawn upon me, The Eternal Son of the Father inter-penetrating the Cosmos, living both within and beyond every event of time and space, light matter and dark matter. So, in my thirties Whitehead's image of Christ within the very process of creation was tucked away, part of an apparently random and emergent universe in which consciousness is the sum total of all sentient and pre-sentient experience. I felt then and now of that singular idea; 'How disappointing theistic evolution seems'. Perhaps true, but limited inside just another box—the Cosmos. Further, naturalistic evolution's premise of ever increasing complexity creating entangled meaning seemed unlikely given nature's tendency toward entropy, the equally powerful decoupling, disintegration that also seems afoot. I know, there's the Jesus idea to keep entropy in check. Good that Jesus plays a small part. Hence, tucked away. I was not smart enough to critique these ideas but intuitively was dissatisfied, even so. Still, one thing Whitehead (Einsteinian physics really) gave me: The idea that at its center, the universe responds to, indeed requires a person, relational experiences inter-connected that appear to focus, inter-weave and unite all matter and time into what sentient persons can only describe as 'meaning.'


Catching up with I AM

This Easter I am three years removed from the entropy of my own soul; the dark matter of hypocrisy that had become my night and day. I was scheduled for surgery, a simple outpatient procedure designed to restore my broken right nostril to an open unobstructed breathing capacity; finally ending the long sleepless nights of the last two years, no longer able to use my sleep apnea machine. However, following a successful surgery I could not, without the support of 100% oxygen, retain sufficient levels to assure I would wake up once asleep, given the lingering affects of anesthesia.  Once more the vulnerability of my 71 years experience lay over my heart. Friday night, after eating an excellent dinner I stayed up late hoping I could maybe get two to four hours good sleep. No such luck. What I did get though was a concert of early Christian rock inter-woven with my devotionals. 2 So I worshiped. Listened.


In the last six months I've watched more interviews with theoretical physicists than I have in the whole of my life. I've discovered that a shift is taking place as we humans wrestle with the new and ancient insights given in the faith traditions, psychology, the ground breaking panorama of the Webb telescope, A-I and 21st century re-debate between Einstein and Niels Bohr about the mechanistic or perhaps spiritual reality that explains how, for example:

  • A quantum entanglement between two disparate events, never the less resulting in instantaneous likeness shaped in the same events, responding to the same data, yet light years or perhaps miles, apart?, or;

  • How the smallest of entangled events seem to clearly anticipate a future event, not yet experienced in linear time, but somehow reflected in the 'entangled' reality, a priori, or;

  • How an A-I experiment, without pre-programed software, reflects a dialogue between the Quantum computer's A-I and the universe, resulting in questions and theories not yet explored; the focusing question for us who are human, being; How did these two realities (?) (entities ?) become entangled?, or;

  • A universe whose surprises, entropy, chaos, initiates a corresponding Presence which transforms negative energy to positive, entropy into a creative dance and rebirth.


On Thursday, April the 19th, 2025, just under 2,000 years since the question of the shaken twelve, "is it i, Lord?" was passed around the table of vulnerable disciples. I was deep into a discussion between Canadian Psychologist Jordan Peterson and Irish Mathematician, Philosopher and Christian Apologist John Lennox. 3 The most significant insight in all, as they discussed the nature of naturalistic verses spiritual interpretations of reality, was Dr. Lennox's suggestion that reality, he believes, is ultimately Personal, narrative; what he recalled the Apostle John referencing as 'The Word'—the ultimate meta-narrative possible. 


I reflected once again upon the sorrow I've created in my selfish sin, on my own entanglement with Joetta, my lovely wife and am once more reminded that if:

  • The universe is shaped by perception, ours and The Creators, and;

  • Tribal 1st Nations communities, including Israel, are right in saying our chosen defilement of  the Moral Presence of God results in a spiraling entropy, chaos released, affecting not only persons in relation but the very land itself, the texture of the cosmos, then;

My own sin against my wife, my family, the Church inevitably spirals toward entropy creating a world of wrong and pain quite apart from, though not divorced from, my choices. My choices have inter-generational, inter-social corruptive impact.


So on this Sunday evening of Easter I am especially grateful for Jesus, who in my times and space (Terra forma), shed his own blood allowing wholeness to overcome brokenness, meaning to replace empty space, life to to unwrite the death quanta I have created—holding in himself all that i am till Christ has re-written our familial, church, inter-active narrative, for "what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him (or her) purify themselves, just as he (she) is pure" (I John 3: 2b-3, NIV).  Jesus is "the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible... For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross (Colossians 1: 15-16, 20 NIV). In short, Jesus rewrites our narrative—all our narratives, for "he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation—if only, we respond and "do not move from the hope held out in the gospel" (Colossians 1: 22-23, NIV).


------------Some thoughts about human life-------------

And so it was these reflections, thoughts, feelings, sorrow and thankfulness, together with a renewed sense of mortality made real in surgery with minor complication, that I wrote:


"i am", removed from "I AM", becomes an increasingly inhuman environment, inevitably; felt as meaningless. It is a swirling chaos where power rules, big brother reigns. On the other hand, i am, living in relation to I AM, is human making as reverence for all life, releases each of us to discover the nature of what is, however delightful and painful.


What increasingly emerges in us and between us is the reality that truth and life are gifts of/from the Creator. We've been gifted by an unseen, Knowable Presence. Both its unseen and knowable reality are necessary to our becoming, just as "not yet" and "entirely given over to love" are the entangling chords that create us—together and individually. 


We feel so intangible because we are. We are not the hardware as we in our pride imagine, no matter how many gymnastics we do. We are, instead, the interpretative 'software' that is our emergent life. In biology it is a coded DNA. In physics it is "entanglement." In Christ it is 'i am" knowing "I AM". 


Like an early AI creation we so easily assume more than we are capable of perceiving, in any context large enough to give us life or truth or the way through. These are the stuff of our journey and the joy is when we receive the insight that is anxiety releasing, as it is life-giving.


  • Truth is A Person.

  • Life is A Person.

  • The way of life is in A Person, who is knowable inter-personally.


Love between God and ourselves helps us to see in the chaotic swirl of the cosmos a mystery worth unwrapping.  If, or more accurately, when I have turned away I've inevitably entered a world where i am left in a naturalistic cosmos where chaos rules, power and talent the way to achieved ends, mostly illusion. The end of such is a self-focused isolation from what is profoundly true and life-giving. My way is lost in a world of 'not yet,' now freely chosen, fed ...an ever darker world of hypocrisy. 


In this space I have hurt so many. I cannot fix any of it, only return to the only narrative large enough to satisfy the unquenchable thirst for meaning.


"Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible (Narrative) tells me so.

Little ones to him belong.

i am weak, but He (I AM) is strong."


Blessings!

Terry 04/20/2025 (Resurrection Day)


1 Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher. He created the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which has been applied in a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology. (Source--Wikipedia)


2 Worship following Jesus Death (20 centuries later or perhaps not, if linear time is only a function of perception)


3 The Video's that sourced this blog:


"Jordan Peterson Gets Emotional Discussing Christ"


"Quantum Mechanics Just Revealed a Scientific Reason for God's Omnipresence"

 
 
 

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