Titanic Post

Nicolaus Copernicus (19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was the first astronomer to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology, which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe. His epochal book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), published in 1543 just before he died, is often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy and the defining epiphany that began the Scientific Revolution. His heliocentric model, with the sun at the center of the universe, demonstrated that the observed motions of celestial objects can be explained without putting the Earth at rest in the center of the universe. His work stimulated further scientific investigations, becoming a landmark in the history of modern science that is now often referred to as the Copernican Revolution.

Wikipedia

What I would like to suggest is that it is time, in Christianity, for a kind of Copernican Revolution that, curiously enough, brings us closer to the spirituality of Jesus.

We live in a world of competing religious ideas or, perhaps put more at the heart of it, apparently differing views. I would say that they are perhaps different like the same sentence spoken in French, English, Japanese and any of the other languages. They are speaking of something with words that are filtered through cultural bias and slant. What is at the base of many of these religious approaches? That is the question we must ask and answer truthfully and directly.

We cannot expect God in any real way to favor a particular religion and a specific place and time, as religion by and large tends to be geographical when you look at the numbers of devotees or followers. It makes no sense, as the later Christians said, that tens of millions born before Jesus plus those who have never heard his name, much less adding in those who otherwise did not profess their identity as a Christian, were going to spend eternity in Hell.

How do we deal with the fact that God speaks differing languages to others? As an example of the vast compassion and love of God who, thankfully, is not bound by our own prejudices, limitations, love of being exclusive, and more.

However, there is one additional factor, one that is what the metaphor fora Copernican Revolution calls for and one alluded to in my opening line.

A true revolution, the kind that Jesus termed the Kingdom of Heaven which was both within and around us if we had but eyes to see and hears to hear, flies in the face of established Christian thought as it veered away from Jesus’ spirit and teaching.  Jesus has been the center of things in the Church and in Christianity, when, in reality (or Reality) just as the earth was supplanted by the sun as the center of the Universe (from our point of view, of course), at the center of our universe must be God, not the dogmatic attempt to tie Jesus in and make him a kind of disguise for God, a notion he protested with his very soul .   “Why do you call me good? There is none good but the Father?” among other comments and actions.

How would Christianity be if God was at the center of your Universe? How would you feel about others, perhaps a Vedantist/Hindu, who also has God (as he or she can feel and know) in the center of his life as all else moves around it in celestial orbit? Would you see a different language of God and a follower of that to be akin to you, a fellow seeker whose journey is to be encouraged and supported, not denigrated and belittled as less than your own “right” way?

Since I was a child, meaning as early on as I can remember, my prayers were straight to God, my sense of Presence that appeared in my later years was felt to be that as opposed to a Jesus or a Buddha or a Krishna. I also, later, found myself awed not by God favoring my team, as it were, (white, United States of America, my particular Church), but, rather, the startling universal compassion  which Jesus spoke of constantly and said was right here and right now available to us.

So, perhaps it is not time. Perhaps it does not speak to you.  All that is fine.  But for myself, anyway, the power of a Christian’s Copernican Revolution is Jesus’ desired revolution in the vision and Presence in this world.

May you find Peace,
Brian