To have seen me is to have seen the Father,
so how can you say, “Let us see the Father”?
Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?
John 14: 9,10.
The God of love does more than simply experience feelings. Though feelings have a life of their own, just as the Spirit blows where it will, love is more than a feeling. A person is more than a channel for the flow of Spirit. Feelings do not determine what is done with them. To be a person is to join awareness and choice. God experiences the flowing movement of Spirit, and God decides what to do with what is being felt. A person is not determined by the Spirit being felt. A person chooses how to express the emotion so that it is an authentic revelation of love.
Incarnation happens through every choice to reveal how Spirit is moving at the moment. This is how Jesus is the revelation of God, and how I am, and how you are. Every person at every moment has the opportunity to make the word flesh. I do it when I choose to reveal the meaning of God’s movement within me. I do it by saying who I am.
When I was studying theology and took a course in the Old Testament, the professor, Marcel Gervais, provided me with another revolutionary insight. The foundational event for the Jewish people was the Exodus. It began with Moses’ experience at the burning bush. Here was a former member of the power elite, once able to control others with his thoughts about what was right. That image of himself was shattered when he discovered he was born a slave. Lost and wandering, he experienced something that boggled his mind. A bush was burning – and not! Moses recognized the experience of the sacred, and entered an intimate personal relationship.
God told him he was not a slave – and nor were his people. They were free. Moses was to tell them this and lead them into freedom. Moses said he needed a name for God that would be powerful enough to scare the powers-that-were into letting them go. God said, “I am who I say I am”. He gave Moses the divine essence of personal freedom. It was enough to change the consciousness of a whole people.
Many generations later, Gervais said, God’s revelation to Moses became the core of the self-understanding of Jesus. When Jesus used the name of God in reference to himself, he was accused of blasphemy. Such accusations gave the would be power brokers no power over Jesus. They did not get to say who he was. This divine power was given to him in his intimate relationship with the infinite God, a relationship so tender that he called God, Abba, that is something like, Daddy Dear.
I am who I say I am! This is the power of co-creation with which I join whenever I choose what to do with the energy stirring within me. I allow awareness of my experience of Spirit in this moment. I feel the meaning of the love within my relationship(s) right now. I choose how I reveal the love that I am embodying. I am who I say I am. I am the revelation of God.
I am not saying that you have to agree with my thoughts, nor that you must see God in me. I am saying that you do not get to tell me who God is for me. You are not the judge of my experience of God, nor I of yours. I can only say who I am. However, if we allow ourselves to enter into a relationship of emotional honesty, if we allow the Spirit of love to flow between us, then we will discover the revelation of God in each other. Indeed, our relationship itself will be for us a revelation of God.
(excerpted from Feeling with God; complete article is at http://www.feelingeverything.com/articles/Feeling_with_God.html)
