The Divine Life
C. Gourgey, Ph.D.
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Matthew 6:19-21
In a recent Bible class the topic of reincarnation arose. Someone made what I thought was an excellent point. She said we cannot learn in a single lifetime all that we need to know to be spiritually complete. That is very true, so I started giving that some thought. I am not arguing here either for or against reincarnation - I respect the belief even if it’s one I may not necessarily share. But I hope the following reflections will take us beyond that.
If we just consider reincarnation for an instant, can we know with certainty of anyone, either currently or at any time in history, who has completed the cycle of lifetimes and has nothing left to learn? I don’t think so. At least I can’t think of any (with one possible exception). I don’t think any number of lifetimes is really enough - especially since we normally don’t remember previous lives, which vastly limits our ability to learn from them.
The one exception is Jesus. Only Jesus manifested without distortion the true image of God in which we were all created, but which is obscured in the rest of us in varying degrees by our sinfulness, selfishness, and other imperfections. If reincarnation is indeed needed for spiritual completion, only Jesus would not require it, nor is it conceivable that Jesus is the reincarnation of some other previous human life. Though we are all called upon to reflect God’s image in our own being, Jesus alone made that image clearly discernible. This may be why the Bible calls Jesus God’s “unique” (not “only-begotten”; that is a mistranslation from the Greek) son.
I think this plays into the purpose of creation. God is pure and absolute goodness. But without a created world, that goodness remains invisible. God’s goodness needs to be known. The process of God’s becoming known through the manifestation of God’s goodness may be thought of as the realization of the divine life. Each of us is just a tiny pinpoint in the unfolding of this life. None of us needs to become perfect - none of us is doing this alone. We are all together contributors to the realization of the divine life, and each of us has a significant, though necessarily finite, role. The Talmud states: “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to withdraw from it.” We need not and cannot reach perfection, nor does God require it of us, but we still need to keep striving for it. In that way we are serving God.
But how do we know we are serving God? This is where Jesus helps us. Jesus reveals to us the unadulterated image of God, the standard to which we should aspire. While we cannot become Jesus, we can approach ever more closely the standard that he set. He is like a magnet; we are iron filings drawn toward him and to what we truly are. We have the freedom either to contribute to this flow toward God or to resist it. Jesus is the standard by which that is to be judged. And we are familiar with many of its characteristics: notably kindness, compassion, and the call for justice. These are eternal qualities. They connect us to eternal life. And we know this because Christ has revealed it to us in his own being.
We still have to account for the existence of evil. Animals are not evil; they are what they are. But human beings are capable of evil because we know what good is, and can decide against it. The tree in the garden from which God did not want us to eat, that of “the knowledge of good and evil,” represents self-awareness. With self-awareness comes the knowledge of what is good, what is evil, and the ability to choose between them. And that is the path to suffering. Metaphorically speaking, by prohibiting the tree God wanted to protect us from that, but it is in our nature as human beings, just “a little lower than the angels.” not to remain forever in blissful ignorance but to reach the state of awareness in which the decision for evil becomes possible. The Bible describes this level of awareness and its consequences as the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the blissful innocence of Eden.
This means we can either cooperate with the flow of the divine life, or we can oppose it. And Jesus set the standard by which we know when we are cooperating with it. As realized in acts of kindness, the spreading of mercy, compassion, and justice represent the realization of the divine life in the created world. And as Jesus taught us (“Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven”), this connects us to eternal life. But what if we refuse to cooperate with the flow of the divine life?
The first parable in Matthew 25 tells us. Five wise virgins prepared themselves for eternal life, by bringing oil for their lamps when they went out to meet the bridegroom. Oil is what gives the lamps light. Without oil there is no light. These five young women prepared for the kingdom by bringing light into the world. But then there were five foolish ones, who brought no oil and had no light. The door was shut leaving them outside. They could not participate in God’s kingdom. It was as if they had disappeared.
The parable tells us that when we cooperate with the flow of divine life, when we try to bring light into the world, we are recognized in eternity and our lives attain significance beyond the temporal world. But those who live their lives only for themselves, or even worse, who live by exploiting and hating others, will have nowhere to go. They are eternally forgotten. This, rather than a literal hell of fire, may be the fate of those who have dropped out of the divine life. And that may be bad enough. As Jesus said in other parables, they do not enter the banquet hall.
Most of us fall somewhere in between. We are all odd mixtures of light and darkness to varying degrees. But if we are committed to the light, to approximating as well as we can the Christ standard, then and only then may we hope that our darkness will be eternally forgotten and that enough of our being will remain to behold eternal life. What is the basis for this hope? The nature of God as revealed in Jewish scripture and in Jesus as the Christ: goodness, love, and justice.
At the time of this writing it seems the country may be entering a period of immense danger. Forces of hatred and vindictiveness are assaulting the national consciousness. We will need a faith that can withstand the threat and see us through. Perhaps this awareness of the unfolding of the divine life even - and even necessarily - in a world fraught with evil can offer us a refuge. In such a world, every act of kindness not only eases someone’s burden however slightly, it also makes God more visible in the world. And that is the purpose of creation: to make it possible for God to be known.
And so the aim of the divine life is not the perfection of each individual life but the perfection of creation. Toward that end we are each individual participants, complementing each other. Our source of hope is that by deciding for goodness we can be conscious of our part in this redemptive process. The more of God’s image that we manifest in our own being, the more we allow God to respond to us. This is especially necessary in a world overcome by dark forces. It is in such a world that the divine call to us matters most.