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I’ve believed in unity forever. This wasn’t just a suspicion but a mysticism inspired by Bible verses like:
“In God we live and move and have our being.”
“that they may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.”
“He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
“God was in Christ reconciling the whole world to himself.”
My contemplations found these Biblical affirmations. The Bible encouraged me to view reality so but the church emphasizes separation from God rather than unity with all things.
An important part of theology is creation- the pouring out from the center creating a separated diversity of multitudes. But another part is reconciliation- the return to the center of all things.
Worship emphasizes separation, not union.
Barth wrote:
“Look how Michelangelo has depicted the Creation of Eve: in the fullness of her charm and beauty she rises slowly, posing herself in the fatal attitude of worship. Notice the Creator’s warning arm and careworn, saddened eyes, as He replies to Eve’s gesture of adoration. She is manifestly behaving as she ought not. Eve, and we must honor her as the first religious personality, was the first to set herself against God, the first to worship Him; but, inasmuch as SHE worshiped HIM, she was separated from Him in a manner at once terrible and presumptuous. Tragic because, when men, knowing good and evil, become like God, when their direct relation with Him gives birth to independent action, then all direct relationship is broken off.”
This doesn’t dismiss our existential feelings of alienation that inspires worship but hopefully encourages a mystical apprehension that enjoys the unity of all things.