A Stunning Development

 

A Stunning Development

November 28, 2025

Something of remarkable if somewhat obscure importance happened recently. This year marks the 1,700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, held across the Bosporus from Constantinople in the year 325 CE. The Council, the first of seven ancient Ecumenical Councils, is important mostly because it formulated the Nicene Creed. In its original form, that creed read:Top of Form

 Bottom of Form

We believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
begotten from the Father before all ages,
God from God,
Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made;
of the same essence as the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven;
he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary,
and was made human.
He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered and was buried.
The third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again with glory
to judge the living and the dead.
His kingdom will never end.

And we believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord, the giver of life.
He proceeds from the Father,
and with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.
He spoke through the prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.
We affirm one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look forward to the resurrection of the dead,
and to life in the world to come. Amen.

The Nicene Creed is important first of all because it is one of the earliest expressions of the substance, or at least what the church at the time contended to be the substance, of the Christian faith. To this day, Christians around the world recite it in worship. I belong to a Christian denomination that prides itself on being noncreedal, so we don’t recite it is worship. Still, it remains a foundational document of the Christian faith today, 1,700 years after it was written.

Now, the most important part of the Nicene Creed for my purposes here is the statement that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father.” That’s particularly important because over the centuries after 325, Christians in western Europe, but not in eastern Europe or the eastern Mediterranean, changed it. Without calling another ecumenical council to change it, they began to say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from “the Father filioque,”  that is, from the Father “and the Son.” That is not what the Creed originally said, and eastern Orthodox Christianity has never accepted it.

Now, we needn’t get into the weeds of what difference it makes theologically to say the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father” or “from the Father and the Son.” That theological distinction is, in any event, something most contemporary Christians of whatever stripe neither understand nor care about at all. What matters for our purposes is that “the filioque,” the insertion of the phrase “and the Son” into the Nicene  Creed, became one of only two theological differences between Eastern Orthodox Christianity and westernChristianity.[i]

The filioque, as the reference to “the Father and the Son” is always called, became one ot the two theological issues that led to the schism between Constantinople and Rome. In 1054 CE, the Pope excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated the Pope. The filioque has remained a bone of contention between Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholic Christianity ever since.

Then, very recently, something remarkable happened. Pope Leo XIV said and did a couple of things that are revolutionary in the context of the East-West split over the filioque. He referred to the Nicene Creed without the filioque as the foundational statement of the Christian faith. And he recited the Creed with the Patriarch of Constantinople without the filioque! We contemporary, Protestant Christians probably want to say: So what?

Well, in the context of the centuries old split between Eastern and Western Christianity, so a great deal. For many centuries, no Pope has recognized the Nicene Creed without the filioque as a legitimate expression of the Christian faith. Now Pope Leo XIV appears to have done so. The Roman Catholic Church essentially never makes that kind of change in its foundational theology. That Church teaches that it is infallible in its theological stances. To change that theology is to admit that the Church had made a mistake in the past, something that it contends is impossible because of the alleged relationship between the Church and God.

Now, the Roman Catholic Church has not officially changed its position on the filioque. The Church still uses the Creed with the filioque not without it. But the Pope has at least very nearly conceded that the Nicene Creed without the filioque is a legitimate expression of the Christian faith. In the context of the well over

 one thousand years long split between Eastern and Western Christianity in which the filioque played a major role, the Pope doing that is indeed revolutionary. Will it lead to anything? It’s too early to say. Still, I find it hard to underestimate the importance of what the Pope has done.

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[i] The other was the Pope’s claim of superiority over the other Patriarchs of the Church, the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Constantinople. It needn’t concern us here.

On Ken Burns' Documentary "The American Revolution"

 

On Ken Burns’ Documentary “The American Revolution”

November 21, 2025

 

I just finished watching Ken Burns’ series The American Revolution. It was, of course, brilliant, for Ken Burns is always brilliant. Burns’ documentary does a wonderful job of telling the story of the American war for independence from Britain. It’s brilliant and wonderful in large part because it tells the truth. It does not give us the whitewashed version of American history that those of my generation got in school. It takes the issue of slavery head on. It exposes the barbarity of people on both sides of the fight. It presents American good guys and bad guys. It makes George Washington mostly a hero but also speaks of his holding enslaved persons, insisting that any enslaved person who had turned to the British for their freedom be returned to their former owner, and the way he could be brutal and unjust himself. At the very end there’s a mention of someone named Morgan who, we’re told, largely financed the revolution while making himself rich at the same time. But he appears only at the very end. It seems that if he truly did finance the revolution, Burns could have paid more attention to him

One thing I learned, of which I had no prior knowledge, was the extent to which the American revolution was also a civil war. As in the Civil War that would begin decades later, brother fought against brother, neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend. I had not known how many American loyalists there were. There were hordes of them, and some of them fought violently alongside the British soldiers. It seems we really could call the American Revolution our country’s first Civil War.

Burns also stress the extent to which the “Patriots” depended on help first from the French, then from the Spanish and the Dutch. Those powers, of course, weren’t fighting for American liberty, they were fighting because they saw Britain as their enemy. Still, Burns says that the American rebels would have lost the war without the aid of the French.

Burns lays bare the extent to which white Americans intended even during the revolution completely to displace Indian nations and take their land. At least some of the Indians knew that that was what white American settlers intended. So they fought for the British if only because the British were the Americans’ enemy. Of course, the Patriots won the war; and now Native Americans control only a tiny, tiny fraction of the land they had before we white Americans took it away from them.

Burns presents America and the American Revolution as both noble and evil. The Patriots nobly advanced notions of freedom and equality; but, of course, they never came close to living into those ideals. At least in the southern states, those that would eventually seek to secede from the union, white slaveowners fought every attempt to abolish slavery, not that there were that many of those attempts anywhere. Burns doesn’t mention it explicitly, but one visual he uses shows the phrase “three-fifths” in the Constitution, the provision that said that a slave counted as three-fifths of a human being for purposes of establishing the size of the population. He says the Constitution was a series of compromises, which of course it was and is. The “three-fifths” provision is one of those compromises. It was evil, and we can thank God that it is no longer in effect.

I suppose it has always been true that there is both nobility and evil in the United States of America. Racism is our original sin, and it was on full display during the Revolution. We haven’t overcome it yet. We have other sins. Patriarchy, androcentrism, and misogyny. An addiction to guns and violence. A capitalist economy that keeps millions of people poor so a few people can be obscenely rich. Xenophobia, on which Donald Trump is playing in a purely fascist way today. Sacrificing the environment to wealth. Nearly complete indifference at the federal level to the evils of lack of health care and a living wage from which so many Americans suffer.

It seems that a great many people around the world see only the nobility of American ideals and the country’s wealth when they look at us. Far too many American see only those things too. But all of that evil, at least most of which has been with us from the beginning, is still there. The right wing of American politics does what it can to stop educating schoolchildren in the truth of American history and American reality. We must see that they fail. Sure. We can and should celebrate our commitment to freedom and equality. I lived for a year in a place with no such commitment (Soviet Russia), and, I have to tell you, that place was horribly bleak and depressed. But we will never learn from our history until our people know our history, something far too few of them have any interest in doing.

So thank you, Ken Burns and you enormous group of coworkers for producing your series on the American Revolution. Perhaps it will do at least a little bit to open our people’s eyes to the truth of our history. Get them to deal with facts not with the propagandistic ideology so many of them take for the truth. May it be so.

 

A Brilliant Piece on War

 This evening I watched a PBS program titled American Heart in World War I, A Carnegie Hall Tribute. At first I couldn’t stop thinking about singing in Carnegie Hall with John Rutter back in 2018. But this program was brilliantly done. It focused on a few individual stories and on one particular battle, the Argonne-Meuse offensive. But it did a brilliant job of conveying the tragedy and loss of war as well as the heroism. It used a lot of music, most of it from around the time of American involvement in World War I, especially the music of a Black composer I’d never heard of named Europe. The program was powerful and heartbreaking. It respected the people who fought in that war, especially those wounded in it, which, I imagine, was just about everyone in one way or another, but it certainly did not glorify war. At the beginning it made it clear that no one really knows why that war was fought at all. It was one of the best pieces on war I have ever seen. I highly recommend it. 

Nonviolence? Really?

 

Nonviolence? Really?

November 7, 2025

Turn the other cheek. Give your coat as well. Go also the second mile. Matthew 5:38-42. Love your enemies. Matthew 5:44. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. Matthew 26:52. These verses, especially those from Matthew 5, don’t actually mean what most people take them to mean. They don’t command meek passivity in the face of evil. If you want to know more about that truth see Walter Wink’s book The Powers That Be, especially the chapter titled “Jesus’ Third Way.” Still, there is no doubt that Jesus taught and lived nonviolence. He never told us to accept evil, but he told us never to resist it violently. Jesus wouldn’t even let his followers use violence in an attempt to save him from crucifixion. Violence is not Jesus’ way. It isn’t Jesus’ way because it isn’t God’s way. It must, therefore, never be our way. I have taught, preached, and written about Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence for decades. I have said that while I have colleagues who see their primary call from God being work for justice or ecological sanity, I see my call from God to be primarily the advocacy of Jesus’ way of nonviolence.

I still believe that to be true, I guess. But. But this morning I saw something that, frankly, has caused me to have my doubts. This morning I received a mass email to which I’ve subscribed from Diana Butler Bass. If you don’t know who Diana Butler Bass is, don’t worry about it. She’s a prolific Christian writer, but who she is doesn’t matter for my purposes here. In this morning’s email she attacked the notion of empire at length, saying, correctly, that Jesus opposed the Romen Empire every way he could (except, I would add, with violence).

Then Bass gave a statistic I hadn’t heard before, citing an article from the New Yorker as her source for it. We all know that early in his current term as president the American fascist Donald Trump brought in the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and together they took an illegal and immoral hatchet to the federal government. Among the unconscionable, sinful things they did was to destroy the American programs that provided vital, life-supporting aid to the poor people of Africa. They basically shut down USAID, and agency that was the primary provider of that aid. I knew they’d done that. I’d heard the predictions of the harm what they had done would cause.

I’d heard, but I didn’t really know. Not until this morning. In Bass’ email I read that since Trump and Musk destroyed USAID, something like 600,000 Africans, most of them children, have died because they lost life-saving aid from the United States. Six hundred thousand men, women, and (mostly) children dead. Men, women and children who would still be alive but for the American fascists Trump and Musk (who, by the way, isn’t actually American but African). That’s the population of a good-sized American city. It’s more than the population of one of our states (Wyoming). It’s more than the number of American casualties in World War II, as horrific as that casualty number truly is.

And, of course, that’s not all the deaths Trump and his would-be brownshirts have caused and are planning to cause. Trump’s gross mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic during his first term in office caused an unknown but huge number of avoidable deaths. Now he wants to cut food and medical care off from millions of Americans. After all, to him, if you need a bit of help to live, you don’t deserve to live. The horrors of the two Trump administrations just go on and on, with no end in sight. I mean, we won’t even get to vote against Trump and his MAGA allies again for another year. In the meantime, and probably even thereafter, Trump’s killing of innocent people in service of a fascist ideology and our country’s billionaires will continue.

As I read Bass’ piece this morning and thought of all the other death Trump has caused and has set out to cause in the future I thought: Nonviolence? Really? I mean, millions of Americans support the son-of-a-bitch (no offense to female dogs intended), and the rest of us sit here, wring our hands, write essays no one will read, occasionally go to an anti-Trump demonstration, vote against Republicans when we get the chance, and otherwise do jack shit to get rid of Trump and his fascist minions. Folks, for perhaps the first time in my life, this morning I felt that violence may after all be needful. Perhaps violence is the answer. Perhaps violence is the only answer.

Now, I am not here to advocate violence. I am a Christian. I am even an ordained Christian pastor. Not a Christian Nationalist Christian, for those so-called Christians aren’t really Christians in any meaningful sense at all. A real Christian. A Christian who believes that to be Christian is to follow Jesus in every way we can, and that includes perhaps first of all following his teaching  and example of nonviolence. It means to know it when we can’t bring ourselves to follow Jesus and to pray for forgiveness for our failure to do so.

I am here to say that sticking to Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence isn’t easy. The temptation to resort to violence in an attempt to solve problems to which there seems to be no other solution is strong to say the least. Being nonviolent can make it feel like we’re not doing anything, or at least not doing enough, to fight demonic evil like Donald Trump.[1] And according to the standards of the world, we aren’t.

But here’s the thing. God does not call us to live according to the standards of the world. And though Jesus once said that his yoke was easy, Matthew 11:30, he also said deny yourself and take my cross upon you, Matthew 16:24. There is, of course, nothing easy about taking on an instrument of torture and execution like a cross. And human experience, or at least my human experience, tells me that truly following Jesus is rarely actually as easy as we would like it to be.

We humans always want moral decisions to be easy. We’re much more comfortable with black and white, yes/no questions than we are with most of the question life actually presents us with. Those questions are more often difficult than they are easy. Sure, it’s easy to say don’t murder, and that one is always simply true and has no actual nuance to it.

But never use violence, not even to defeat diabolical evil? That one is nothing but nuance. By that I mean that when we obey Jesus’ commandment never to use violence, there are tradeoffs. We have to give up our human belief that using violence would actually solve the problem. We have to live with frustration that comes from the fact that nonviolence can seem so ineffective as a solution to evil, at least in the short term. We may have to live with the charge from more worldly people that we’re cowards for not using violence. Or that we’re complicit in the perpetuation of evil because we will not take up arms against it.

Today I’m frustrated as hell that I can’t take up a weapon and go to war against MAGA, but I know that I can’t. I know that I mustn’t. I know that I can’t and that I mustn’t because I am a Christian. And so I know that I won’t. I am not by nature a violet person in any event; but, even if I were, Jesus would tell me “Oh no you don’t! No violence, Sorenson. Period.” So I won’t. Ever. No matter what. And I’ll live with what feels like the moral ambiguity of that decision trusting that the decision is not actually morally ambiguous at all but is rather God’s way and therefore must be my way.

So. Nonviolence? Really? Yes really. Yes nonetheless. Yes despite how it feels in difficult times. Yes, despite what can feel for all the world like moral ambiguity. Yes despite what the world says. Yes despite what other so-called Christians say. Nonviolence is God’s way. That really is all there is to it. And because it is God’s way, it must be our way too. That’s all there is to it too. Sticking to nonviolence isn’t easy. In our culture with its mania over guns and the military it isn’t popular. But: Nonviolence? Really? Yes really, So be it.

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[1] Every time I write something like that, my quite extensive knowledge of Soviet history (I have a PhD in Russian history and lived in Soviet Russia for a year doing PhD research) comes to mind. When Stalin ruled the USSR, writing things like that about him would get you sent to the Gulag at best if not get you a bullet in the back of the head. I scream about Trump being a fascist and an existential threat to my country, and he is both of those things. Still, I am glad that saying those things won’t get me imprisoned or killed, not yet at least.

Sometimes Even the Good Ones Get It Wrong

 

Sometimes Even the Good Ones Get It Wrong

November 2, 2025

I know a Christian church pastor, no names or other identifying information here, of whom I am quite fond. They are a very good preacher.[1] As far as I know, they are a very good person. They are personable and pleasant. On the whole, I am quite satisfied with them. I mean nothing here as anything to detract from them as a good church pastor.

But. But at church this morning I had not one but a couple objections to what they did, didn’t say, and said. So I’ve titled this peace “Sometimes Even the Good Ones Get It Wrong.” The pastor of whom I write here is one of the good ones. Yet, of course, the best of us make mistakes. I am prideful enough to believe (to know, actually) that I am a much better than average preacher and pastor, but I would never claim never to have made mistakes. I know a whole lot better than that. Like every other preacher and pastor, I’m human. That means I am far from perfect, and so is the pastor about whom I write in this piece. Here, then, are the things to which I object about their service this morning.

Today was a Communion Sunday. The pastor in question presided at the sacrament. I love the sacrament of the Eucharist. Presiding at it has been one of the joys of time as a parish pastor and of the times I have been able to preside at it since my retirement. There are not many ways in which I am a traditionalist, yet I am a traditionalist in at least some ways when it comes to the Eucharist though I will never hold with a closed table. When I preside at the sacrament I always say “This is the Lord’s table, it is not our table, and all are welcome here….” I believe that truth with every fiber of my faith, and I will never deny or reject it.

There is, however, something about traditional Christian liturgy that matters here. In any worship service that includes the Eucharist, the sacrament is, or at least ought to be, the highlight of the service. Everything else leads up to it. After the Eucharist as the climax of the service, the presiding officer may have the people sing a hymn and give a closing benediction, but at that point the service ends and the people are sent out into the world with the good news of Jesus, his teaching, and his resurrection. There’s nothing more to say. Nothing more to do. Putting the sacrament earlier in the service just diminishes its significance, its central role in Christian worship.

Yet at the church to which I refer, the pastors usually, though not quite always, put the Eucharist early in the service. They make it the first significant thing that happens after the people are gathered and called to worship. I know why they do it. They do it because they want the church’s children to be able to participate in the sacrament, and they dismiss the children, such as are there (which usually isn’t many), to what they call “faith formation” and churches usually call “Sunday School” quite early in the service.

When I was church pastor, I always had the children’s education people bring the kids back into the sanctuary for the sacrament near the end of the service. Yes, that’s a bit awkward. Yes, it takes a bit of coordination between the faith formation leaders and the flow of the service. It’s not easy, but it can be done. I’ve done it a great many times.

Yet the lead pastor of the church I’m discussing, not the pastor I’m critiquing here, has established the pattern of putting the sacrament early in the service so they don’t have to coordinate calling the young people back into the sanctuary to participate in it. That’s what the pastor did this morning. I don’t know if they would do it differently if it were entirely up to them. I rather doubt it, but I don’t know. What I do know is that they followed the lead pastor’s model this morning. And I know that that is just flat liturgically wrong. It diminishes the importance and power of the Eucharist, something no Christian worship leader has any business doing.

Then there’s an issue around what we call the “words of institution.” The sacrament and the words that we say when performing it are nearly two millennia old. They connect us with countless Christians who celebrate the sacrament today and with countless more who have celebrated it in the past. The words of the sacrament include what are called the “words of institution.” They are: :”After supper he took the bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them saying ‘Take, eat, this is my body broken for you. So often as you eat of it, do so in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup, blessed it, and give it to them saying ‘Take, drink. This is the cup of the new covenant in my blood. So often as you drink of it, do so in remembrance of me.’” In the Roman Catholic ritual there is almost something magical about these words. They are the point at which the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. There isn’t anything magical about them in the theology of my Protestant tradition, but they are still important. They are what makes the sacrament a sacrament and not just a ritual. To me and, I believe, to all sacramental traditionalists, it is important that they be said properly and completely.

This morning, the pastor in question didn’t say them properly and completely. For both the bread and the wine, she left out “give.” She had it that Jesus “took” and “blessed” the bread and the cup, but she didn’t have him giving it to his disciples. I’m sorry, pastor. That’s just wrong. There is a specific movement built into the sacrament. It appears in its full form in reference to the bread. It goes: “Took, blessed, broke, gave.” It’s a four-part movement. It concludes with Jesus giving the bread to the gathered disciples. Without “give,” the disciples aren’t involved at all. Neither are we. Dear pastor, you really shouldn’t have left “give” out.

They we come to the sermon this pastor gave this morning. They really are a good preacher, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. But this morning they were talking about the story of
Tamar in Genesis. Look that story up if you’re curious about the details, but the important part of the story for my purposes right now is that in centers around something called the law of levirate marriage. Levirate marriage is an ancient Hebrew law that says that if a man is married but dies without leaving a male heir, the deceased man’s eldest surviving brother shall marry his widow and with her produce a male heir not for himself but for his deceased brother. That male child becomes the deceased brother’s heir, not the heir of the child’s biological father.

This law arose and was practiced (if it was in fact practiced at all) in a highly patriarchal society. In that society and its culture, men mattered, women, for the most part at least, did not. Hebrew scripture is full of admonitions for the people to care for widows, but there was little if any law that dealt with that issue.

The law had many provisions dealing with property rights and inheritance. Under that law, only men had the right to own property. Hebrew culture considered it vitally important that real property remain within the owner’s family, more specifically, in the owner’s direct line of descent. That’s what the law of levirate marriage was all about. Yes, it involved a woman, a widow actually; but it was about a family’s property rights not about the protection of women.

This  morning the pastor in question got the law of levirate marriage all wrong. She did mention the property succession issue briefly, but she talked far more about the law being in place to protect widows. She said its purpose and function were to keep a widow within her deceased’s husband’s family and thus to avoid her becoming alone and without means of support. She said that Tamar did what she did to protect herself by reconnecting herself with her former father-in-law’s family. Perhaps she used the applicable law in that way, but that simply is not what the law was about. This morning, this pastor just got it wrong. It seems to me that she was reading something into the relevant law that she would like for there to be there. I get that. I wish ancient Hebrew law cared about women a lot more than it did, but it just didn’t. Our pastor in question was just wrong here.

Now, of course, all of us preachers make mistakes. I have quite liked the pastor in question in the past, and I still do. But here’s a thing about being a preacher listening to preachers. We all evaluate. We all judge. It’s not so much that we want to. It’s just that we’ve done what the preacher we’re listening is doing. We’re trained and experienced in what she’s doing. We know more about what she’s talking about than most (if not quite all) lay people do. Try as we might, most of us just can’t turn off our judgment function. I didn’t turn mine off this morning. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps we all should be able to, but I’m hardly the only preacher I’ve heard say we can’t do it. So be it.

This morning, this preacher got more than one thing wrong. That doesn’t make them a bad preacher. Most of the time they’re quite a good preacher. It doesn’t make them a bad pastor. I’m quite sure they’re a good pastor. But sometimes even the good ones get it wrong. That’s what this pastor did this morning. God bless her, and God bless all of us who dare to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. God knows we all need grace to cover our mistakes.

 

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[1] This pastor uses “they/their” as their pronouns. I’m old, and I’m old enough that I have the devil’s own time making those pronouns anything but plural, but here they are used as singulars, so I will use them for this person too..

On Consciousness

 

On Consciousness

October 23, 2025

 

Just now I was looking online at someone’s list of the 12 most beautiful cities in Europe. I went through the list and said that I’ve been in 8 of them. But then I thought: What does it mean to say that “I” have been in 8 of them? That feels right, but it was an 11 year old Tom Sorenson who was in Paris. The only one of them I’ve been in since 1975 is Edinburgh. I was there about three months ago on a choir tour. So I ask: What does “I” mean? Who am or what is “I”? I’m not sure even the philosophers or scientists have an answer to that one, but it seems to me that “I” has to refer to a continuance of consciousness. Yes, in a sense, there is also a continuance of physical being. That 11 year old Tom Sorenson’s physical body has evolved into today’s 79 year old Tom Sorenson’s physical body though those two bodies sure don’t look much alike. Tom Sorenson’s consciousness has changed a lot less if it has changed at all. I think it is that consciousness that is the “I” when I say “I”.

OK, but what is consciousness? Online definitions mostly use the word “awareness” or the phrase “being aware” of something. But what is it that is “aware?” Is it merely a function of the brain? Certainly, the brain is involved. A person can be unconscious and still be alive. Our brain takes us through sleep as an altered type of consciousness, one both our bodies and our minds seem to need though the reasons we need it aren’t at all clear.

Yet the brain is a physical object. It is an organ made up of particular tissues that seem to function in particular ways. And it can stop functioning normally while a person is still alive. Does an “I” cease to be when a person is unconscious, say, in a coma? We wouldn’t say no. We’d think the person in the coma is the same person who was there before going into a coma. Now, perhaps a person in a coma is still conscious at some level. They say such a person actually can hear people talk to them, they just can’t respond. So though consciousness has changed, it hasn’t stopped, it hasn’t disappeared.

How does the brain as a physical object produce consciousness? After all, as far as we know, objects that are merely physical have no consciousness. They aren’t “aware” in any sense at all. Yet animals are all aware at some level, and plants may be too. How does consciousness-less matter become conscious?

The only answer I can come up with to that question is: Spirit. But what is “spirit?” MSN Copilot defines it as “the nonphysical part of a person which is the seat of emotions and character; the soul,” and “those qualities regarded as forming the definitive or typical elements in the character of a person….” So according to these definitions, “spirit” is something nonphysical in a person that somehow functions within the person or the “qualities” that that functioning produces.

OK, but how can something that is “nonphysical” function? How can it do anything? The only answer I can come up with to that question is that “spirit” is an ultimate reality behind every physical thing that is. In ways beyond our understanding, spirit gives rise to physicality while remaining beyond physicality or at least distinct from it. Yet it functions in and through physicality, or at least in and through animate physicality, to produce consciousness. What’s “animate physicality?” Perhaps it is just something physical that has been “animated” by the presence of spirit within it. We could say, I think, that animate physicality is something physical brought to consciousness by the presence of spirit.

Now, there are, of course, unanswerable questions about spirit. We might be able, more or less, to describe it or to describe how we experience it or describe what we think it does. Beyond that, however, we run out of language for it. We cannot even begin to know where it comes from. Did it have a beginning? Will it have an end? Did something, or some force, greater than spirit create it? If not, where indeed does it come from? If so, what is that greater something? Here, it seems to me, we’ve run into the limits of human knowledge, which are the limits of human language. That our knowledge and language have limits doesn’t mean there is nothing real beyond them. It just means that we can never fully know or express in any fully adequate way what the something beyond them is.

Which, perhaps, is why we call that something that subsists beyond human knowledge and language “God.” “God” is indeed our primary word for that which lies beyond human language and human knowledge but which we can nonetheless experience if we are open to experiencing it. It’s not just our primary word for that reality, it is a symbol of that transcendent reality. It points beyond itself to that reality and connects us with that reality in an intimate way, or at least it does those things if we are open to it doing them.

We have another word we use for the reality I’m trying to write about here. That word is Spirit. We say that God is Spirit, and we mean that God is at least an active yet ineffable reality among us. Yet God isn’t just among us. God is within us. So what is consciousness? It is the presence of Spirit, that is, of God in every conscious being. Or if not exactly God in every conscious being, then it is a consequence of God acting on and perhaps in every being.

Now, what I’ve said here amount to this: We don’t know and probably can’t know how inanimate matter becomes conscious, that is, becomes sensate. So we say it has to do with spirit, and spirit is essentially God. In saying these things, we sort of answer my original question about what consciousness is, and we sort of haven’t. We have moved the inquiry from the human brain to God, but who is God? Why is there God? Where does God come from? Those, my friends are simply unanswerable questions. Far too people who say they believe in God understand this truth, but the final answer to every question about God is: We don’t know, and more than that, we can’t know. “Belief” in God is not about having knowledge. It is accepting that there is something, however we may conceptualize that something, so far beyond us that we just can’t know everything we’d like to know about it.

So if “belief” in God isn’t about knowledge, what is it about? It is about trust. It is about trusting that a reality we can’t know but can, if we’re open to it, experience, is in fact real. I call myself a man of faith. Heck, I’m even a seminary trained and ordained Christian minister. But I don’t claim to “know” who God really is. I don’t claim to be able to “know” who God really is. Yet I have experienced a presence in my life that I can only call “God.” So have billions upon billions of other people over the course of human existence. I can’t know, but I can, and do, trust that this experience of a reality beyond our ordinary physical reality is indeed real. I can, and do, live trusting that this experience does not deceive me. That is what faith is. That is where my consideration of consciousness has led me.

There is one line of thought that this analysis raises for me that I want to mention here. It’s this: What is death? It is first of all the cessation of the physical processes of a formerly living being. But is it more than that? Humans have believed that it is more than that for millennia. Humans who have spoken of something more after death have generally expressed their belief that more by talking about “life after death.”

Here's how I’m thinking about it today. Death is consciousness returning to consciousness. Because each person’s consciousness arises from a far more universal consciousness that we call God, each person’s consciousness is inextricably tied to that universal consciousness. To put the same truth another way, each person’s spirit is inextricably tied to universal spirit. And what is universal spirit but God? Because we are conscious beings, we can know that we are inextricably tied to God. When we die, we return to God.

Now, I don’t claim to know what that returning to universal consciousness, or to spirit, or to God actually looks like. No one has ever died, then come back to tell us what death was like.[1] Does the consciousness that returns to consciousness retain our personal identity? I trust so, and I’ve had one experience that tells me yes.[2] I trust that powerful experience too. I just don’t claim to “know” anything about life after death.[3] We can, I think, have a purely human, and therefore purely conditional, certainty about consciousness returning to consciousness when the body dies. That, for me, is mostly what death is—consciousness returning to consciousness.

So what is consciousness? It is the awareness a physical body has of itself and its surroundings (or at least what it takes to be its surroundings). It arises not from physical matter (as most scientists would try to prove that it does by talking about neurons and electrical impulses) but from its intimate connection with infinite spirit, with God. Beyond that, it is that part of a human being that continues throughout the person’s life. My consciousness is why I can say I’ve been to Paris though I haven’t been there for 67 years. That’s where all of my musings and ramblings here have led me. So be it.

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[1] Jesus died and came back to life, or so we Christians confess. But though he did talk to his disciples after his resurrection, he didn’t, as far as we know, talk to them about life after death. As devout Jews, most of them probably didn’t believe in any meaningful life after death anyway. I am also here dismissing “near death experiences” precisely because they are “near death” experiences not death experiences. If you’ve had one that is meaningful for you, great. I’m just not prepared to draw any universal conclusions from those experiences.

[2] Years ago, as I was a complete emotional wreck because I was on my way to have a beloved dog (onto whom I had probably projected a lot of other grief) put down, I experienced my late wife appearing to me for a second or two to say “It’s all right. I’m here waiting for him.” Though this experience lasted but a second or two, it was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. It happened something like 14 years ago, and it feels like it happened yesterday.

[3] By “to know” I mean to have absolute certainty about some reality, to have no doubt about that reality. When I say we cannot know God, that’s what I mean. We can never have absolute certainty about God, nor can we ever be free from doubt about God. We can claim absolute certainty, and we can deny having doubt, about God. A great many people do; but if they really believe it when they say it, they are deceiving themselves or not being entirely honest.

Some Thoughts On Division

 

I like Rev. Rafael Warnock a lot. He’s the pastor of a famous church in Atlanta and one of Georgia’s two senators in DC. But I just saw something he’s supposed to have said that troubles me. He said the MAGA idiots, my phrase not his, are trying to divide us so they can rule us. I have two problems with putting the problem we face that way. First, we’re already divided and have been for decades. The divisions have gotten sharper perhaps, though they were awfully sharp during the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam war. Trump certainly does want us divided, and he does everything he can to keep us divided. But he doesn’t have to try to divide us. That’s already done.

Second, I don’t want to be united with MAGA, I want MAGA and its fascist ideology destroyed and driven out of American life. Nonviolently, as I always think I have to say, but destroyed and driven out nonetheless. What would it even mean for me to be united with the likes of Donald Trump and his ill-intentioned, incompetent hangers on? I’m sure I don’t know. I suppose I could, at some level at least, respect people who see things differently than I do. I don’t despise Carolyn Eslick though I think her politics are all wrong. But, as far as I  know, Carolyn’s not a fascist. Donald Trump is. All of supporters either are fascists themselves or are willing to sit on their asses while Trump takes the country fascist; and I want nothing whatsoever positive to do with them. I want them crushed, I sure as hell don’t want them to become my allies or I theirs. I will not compromise with fascism, and I will not respect fascists or those who, for whatever reasons, could do something to stop fascism but don’t.

So yes, Trump works to keep us divided, but that isn’t hard. We were already divided when he found us. And at least in today’s America, division isn’t the problem. The fascism of one side of the divide is the problem. Perhaps we could regain what looked more like unity at times in the past, though this country was never all that unified except perhaps in World Wars I and II. But that unity will be bought at an astronomically high price if it doesn’t come in large part through destruction of the MAGA movement and the utter disgrace of Donald Trump.