I was asked the question as to whether I am a Christian or not. My answer was going to define me and determine whether I would qualify to be part of this particular organization. I thought about this carefully. It was not an easy question to answer.
If the definition of a Christian is one who has received baptism and or is a believer in the teachings of Jesus Christ, then yes I can claim that I am a Christian!
But I feel that the definition is more multifaceted than that. When Jesus’s disciples were confused about the laws of the Jewish faith that should still be followed and which could be left behind, they asked Him to clarify. In Mark 12, 30-31, His answer was “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. And the second is this: Love your neighbour as much as you love yourself. One these two commandments hang all the laws and the prophets.” Yes, I claim that as my Truth as well!
Yet, I wish to go deeper. First of all, Who is the Lord my God? I know that God is not some great entity out there in deep space. I know that God is Omnipotent, Omniscience and Omnipresent. God, in our limited understand is Love.
What this means to me is that God is everything there is, and there is nothing that God is not. God created the Universe up to and beyond our human vision and understanding. God is a great mystery! I like to call this “The Divine Source of Everything That Is” God has no gender, per se, rather God is in all things gender, so I will refer to It as Divine Source.
If Divine Source is Everything, seen and unseen, then It’s energy is in all of us – IS all of us as well as all form that we perceive with our senses. Max Plank, a German theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1918, that there is no matter at all, only energy.
When I was in grade 12 chemistry, I learned about the relative distance between an atom and its closest electron, and I was amazed by all that empty space. Nature despises a vacuum, so what was in that empty space? What prevented everything from collapsing into itself? What is it that maintains everything in its form? That was when I perceived Divine Source to be the Space between the atoms. Of course, I know now It is also the atoms and electrons themselves.
So if this be true, no thing or anyone is separate from Divine Source. The Everything that Is abides within me, within everyone and within all of creation. That is my definition of the Lord my God and I love Divine Source with all my heart, mind and strength.
Now, who is my neighbour?
In Luke 10: 25-37, we are told the story of The Good Samaritan. I am sure we are all familiar with the story. What a kind man, we would be tempted to think. Let’s go a little deeper and understand what it meant for the Samaritan to help this Jewish man.
“Although the Samaritans were distant descendants of the northern tribes of Israel, the Jews considered them impure because their ancestors had intermarried with foreign immigrants and honoured foreign gods.” They were considered as half-breeds and therefore despised by the pure blood Jews. So for a Samaritan to stop to aid a Jewish man beaten on the side of the road, had greater impact of the audiences of Jesus’s time than it would on ours.
But we could look at it in the context of our time. A black man aiding and caring for a member of the Ku Klux Clan. A homeless man giving what he has to a wealthy person who may have been involved in an accident. An immigrant reaching out to one who wishes to deport those of foreign birth.
I know Divine Source is in all things and sees all injustices and knows the bigger picture, but I as a human, struggle with what I see as acts committed in the name of Christ that hurts, humiliates, denies care and support to other human beings who are perceived to be beneath them. It hurts my heart, but I do the best I can within my sphere of influence to do what I can when something comes across my consciousness, to help.
There are people in my life that don’t chime in harmony with me, but I attempt to see them as Divine Source sees them and their actions, with unconditional love. I fall very short of that ideal, but I am also aware of my shortcomings and turn within to ask for forgiveness.
I don’t know if I qualify as a Christian in the eyes of some, but I know that Divine Source has known me before I was formed in my mother’s womb and I am grateful for my limited understanding of what that means.