“Most peoples of the world are concerned with how things came into being. Creation stories contain within them a conception of the natural or initial order of things. By articulating how things were in the beginning … they make a basic statement about their relationship with nature and about their perception of the source of power in the universe.” ~ Peggy Reeves Sanday

The imagery is clear - the Temple may have been lost, but there’s a new way of thinking about reality. What if the whole earth was God’s temple - and we humans were the image of God in that Global Temple?

Now it doesn’t matter where we are - we still hold serenity in our hearts and we are invulnerable because we can never really be taken away from our God ever again.

“Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them. In truth, at first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, called Gaia”

“Spiritual emptiness doesn’t lead to resignation or depression; on the contrary, it gives hope and frees us from the anxiety of having to be in control. Some people can’t fly in an airplane because it asks for a degree of trust they can’t muster. Similarly, some people can’t be religious because they feel such a strong need to know and to be in control. The solution is to tread more lightly on the earth, to be more hollow than solid, to trust more and to believe less.”

“I've spent my whole life searching desperately To find out that grace requires nothing of me” ~ “One” by Sleeping At Last

“First the fall, and then the recovery from the fall, and both are the mercy of God.” ~ Julian of Norwich

Turns out your enemies might not “get what’s coming to them after all”. Even worse, God might love them instead. No wonder the early believers were roundly mocked for worshipping such a supposedly weak God.

But if we only understand the incarnation as what happened long ago when Jesus walked the earth, and we don’t learn to universalise that truth into to seeing the incarnated God present in every face we see, then all we have is junk religion and we have not been liberated.

“But we never really wanted freedom did we? We just wanted to know what the rules were so we could figure out how to win the game.”