Listening While Whistling a Tune
Image from latest issue of Thema: for the spiritually curious,
free e-journal from West Virginia Institute for Spirituality
During my spiritual direction training, I listened to a lecture about salvation theology versus blessings theology. They are quite different views of the meaning of Biblical truth.
Salvation theology is Old Testament full of the God of wrath and judgement. It is a fear-based understanding of human beings as sinners who must atone, who must repent, who must tread the straight and narrow path of the Ten Commandments to get to this elevated place called heaven.
Blessings theology is New Testament full of the love of Christ who seeks to heal, to grow, to bring people into wholeness and community. It is love-based and grounds us in the NOW of our days. It is about birth of the soul. It is about not being afraid of dying. It is about resurrection after death.
t seems to me that we are both/and people who participate in the universality of sin, and also of the potential of our souls in relation to others to grow into unique individuals whose experiences, both difficult and beautiful, grow the depth of our awareness and ability to love.
We start out in the world as little infants in the center of a maze that we must somehow get through. The maze represents the turmoil, the ups and downs, and the ins and outs of life. This maze of desperate struggle represents a theology of salvation, full of fear where we are often trying to find our way to make smooth the path to some goal that is outside the confines of the maze.
We are also little infants in the center of this maze, not trying to escape, but expanding in awareness, growing in soul, until we are able to both be within the maze and outside in a realm hidden in a cloud of unknowing. Perhaps this is the realm of heaven: a timeless place of universal awareness and peace.
I am an editor for Thema, a free bi-monthly e-magazine, for the spiritually curious.
