Yesterday evening I had supper with a friend of mine, who is a Christian pastor.  He lent me a book by another pastor that extolled the idea of Universalism, the notion that all people end up in Heaven.  He figured that since I was a Unitarian Universalist that I would endorse this idea.  I reminded him that very few UU's use the idea of Heaven and Hell in their personal spirituality. "In fact," I said, "I do not use them myself. I much prefer the position that Jesus took on the subject."  This is where the conversation got interesting.  I won't go into the rest of what was said.  I will however relate the basic idea that, I believe, Jesus held too.  I doubt it included the notions of Heaven and Hell.

Jesus said, "Before Abraham was, I am."  (Abraham is the Patriarch of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions. He predated Jesus by 1800 years.)   What was Jesus talking about?  In stark terms, it means that Jesus did not consider himself to be a being.  He understood his true identity to be Being itself. It is very likely that he also meant to extend that concept of Being for all of life, not just people and, almost certainly, not just for himself. Putting it in words that I often use: Life is not what we live.  Life is what we are.

Let's unpack the idea of being Life instead of being a life.  This is a metaphysics that is far older than Christianity.  As far as we can tell, it first appeared in the Hindu Vedas and may have predated Christianity by 1500 years.  To be Life is, in the words of the "Bhagavad Gita," to be "indestructible and eternal."  That sounds pretty good.  On the other hand, it means that you are not your body.  You are not your personality. You are not your brain or your mind or a soul.  You are simply one of the many faces of God.  (Here, God equals Life.) To be Life is to be constant change. One is being constantly born and constantly dying. (This should not be confused with reincarnation.)  If Jesus was saying that he was one of the many faces of God, one can see how there would be much confusion in a society where the dominant culture was one of a Patriarchal, entirely-other God, who sat on a heavenly throne somewhere up there.

Interestingly, the idea of being Life and not just a life seems to erupt spontaneously out of the West as well. Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, felt the world had "only one soul." (Read: one life.) Neo-Platonism, as set forth by the philosopher Plotinus, carries strong intimations of this same idea.  The mystics of both Christian and Muslim traditions (Meister Eckhart and Rumi, to name just two of many) felt that their true identity was God. Twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich talked about the Eternal Now and The Ground of Being.  In fact, the idea of being Life or being Being shows up so much in Western thought that Huxley named it the Perennial philosophy.  The Gaia Principle is a very close derivative.  In the GP, our true identity is this planet.  What we do to it, we do to ourselves.  Putting it yet another way, just as a tree flowers, so the Universe (insert your name here)s. 

So the bottom line is this:  Here is another very old and very respected idea that as UU's we can, if we choose, use as a symbol or the poetic to express our religious feelings.

It should be noted that, according to the Book of John, immediately after uttering the words, "Before Abraham was, I am," the crowd started throwing stones at Jesus.  Fortunately, there were no stones readily available at the restaurant, where my friend and I were sharing supper. We, as we always do, parted on the warmest possible terms.

 Jim McConnell