That's So Second Millennium

Source Energy. Also, more or less equivalently, Jen Sincero will say "the Universe" with or without capitals. Source Energy / the Universe are of course terms for God; see also Higher Power in Twelve Step circles.

That's rather interesting, isn't it... why do contemporary spiritual movements feel such a desire to get away from the word God? I'd argue that a lot of it is that the bulk of Christians have lost sight of the great insights of the first millennium and a half of Christian thought. Christianity had to spring from Judaism. Judaism is founded on faith in a God that transcends any visible form. Eventually Greek philosophy caught up with this idea, and of course Indian, Chinese, and other sages had various versions of this insight as well. Christianity is founded on this idea of a completely transcendent God, and the theologians from the first to fifteenth centuries elaborated possible understandings of this transcendent God, built on both the record of Scripture and the thinking of philosophers.

This approach had its problems and could be over-intellectualized, but the reaction was worse. A competition between Protestants and Catholics to be more literal in their treatment of the Bible erupted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and we are still living with the consequences. If you're not careful, you can forget that God is transcendent. If you've forgotten philosophy and hang your life on the double handful of Scripture passages that serve as proof texts for your subsect, it's easy to think of God as a pagan god: an old man in a chair in the clouds somewhere, probably grumpy and looking for an excuse to pin you with a lightning bolt.

That's not the Christian God. That's not the Catholic God. That God is Being Itself, present full force at every point in spacetime, completely consistent in the way It Thinks about and Loves Its creations.

That's what makes the Incarnation that we are still celebrating so crazy, of course; any pagan god could have a son, but for Being Itself to have a Son is quite another thing.

Of course, if you've learned any quantum physics at all, clearly the Universe or its Creator are pretty crazy by our lights anyway...

CNAG is the Catholic-New Age Glossary... not backed by Webster's or any other authority. These meditations are here on That's So Second Millennium because they are an attempt to find maximum harmony between different strands of psychology and spirituality as they are being explored and lived out in Western culture today. It flows from a respect for people's reasons for doing what they do and thinking what they think.