giving life

I recently read a book that contained the phrase "the Father is that which gives life." These words supposedly came from the mouth of Jesus of Nazareth as he preached to his disciples(from a book by Leo Tolstoy titled The Gospels in Brief). I do not know if the wording got jumbled in translation (this phrase started as Greek then became Russian and finally was translated into English) but it seems a little awkward to me. Because the sentence begins with the noun Father, it seems to me that it should also use the pronoun he. In which case it would read, "the Father is he who gives life." But this is not how it reads. The phrase purposely uses the words that which when referring to the Father, which has the peculiar effect of completely abstracting the idea of the Father. It seems to be saying that anything which gives life can be called a Father. I suppose that this is not that much of a reach. Humans create life all the time when they have children. But I am going to take a wild guess that this is not the context in which we are working. We must remember that these words were spoken with GOD in mind. Now I know that we are dealing with various translations of the bible and a writer who may have taken a little liberty in writing his book, but I think it is fun to play around with this idea a bit.

In the bible, Jesus continually refers to God as his father. He also continually refers to himself as the son of man. I do not think many people would argue these last two points, even if they disagree with what is being said (all one has to do is read these words in the bible). Now, there are a number of interpretations to what Jesus was saying and what he really meant. One is that Jesus is THE son of God, in which case he was completely unique and was here on earth to divinely save us from sin. This interpretation is pretty popular seeing as about 1 billion Christians around the world claim to believe this idea. But what if we think about the above phrase, that "the Father is that which gives life," and interpret what Jesus was saying a little differently. What if he was really saying that every time we give life, or every time we create something, we are effectively acting as the father. In which case, we as humans are God and Jesus, as the son of man, is divine in the sense that he best represents what is best in all of us, mainly that he continually brings life to those around him.

This inevitably makes me think about all the times that Jesus proclaims the coming of the kingdom of God. If we go with interpretation number two, then we do not have to believe that the coming of the kingdom of God means angels and judgment and so on, but that in using the teachings of Jesus that bring life to others and ourselves we are bringing the kingdom of God to earth through our own life-giving creations. To me this is a pretty cool idea, because then we do not have to wait for anyone else to do good things for us, but we do the good things ourselves. It is empowering (and for me a little more realistic).

Finally, it makes me think about our Art Days that we have once each month at the Center. Some people may say that doing art is impractical, that it does not teach the men useful skills for reassimilating into society. But I beg to differ. Each time we get together we sit down, we explore ourselves (the last time reflecting on how we see ourselves) and then we put our ideas and feelings onto paper. We create works of art that are beautiful because they are pieces of ourselves. I believe that each time we do this we are finding the divine in ourselves and then sharing it with each other. To me there is nothing more effective than this to working toward reassimilation. Because if we can see God in each other, in concrete ways, then we can do anything.