Christianity believes that God belittled Himself by becoming a man. For me, this is a very interesting idea. He consciously downplays and becomes a mere mortal. Does God want to embrace a human life by living it? Perhaps everything that happened to God down on earth is nothing more than a myth, a metaphor, but the idea itself is amazing, brilliant, that God reduces Himself to the size of a man. When God speaks of Jesus Christ, He says that having taken this shape, He humbles Himself. This is how the concept of the Son of God was put into life.
Christianity often repeats that God is alive, that He is the same as anyone of us. It might be an otherwise spoken Buddhist concept: we can all become a Buddha, we are somewhat «Gods’. This very idea is expressed in Christianity in such understandable words! Jesus Christ reminds us that every person is God, a little God. All people are sons of God. The Son of God is not only about Jesus Christ, but about each of us. And we are all parts of the whole – the Divine. Christian Saint Athanasius said that God became man so that we might become God.
In my understanding, Jesus Christ is no doubt a man. But the question is different – did He resurrect? This is unknown. What is resurrection? This means that on the third day, His flash changed, the dead body was filled with life again, and He ascended to heaven. This is what I don’t understand, it looks like a metaphor. Just like the words of the Holy Scriptures saying we will all resurrect. In other words, will we all live again, again and again, endlessly? It seems to me that the idea of resurrection suggested in the sacred writings of the Church Fathers is the words about our life coming after death. If we leave out mythology, everything becomes clear and logical: in different guises, the soul will live forever.
Jesus Christ, apparently, was the wisest of the wisest. Buddha. The power of His awareness reaches incredible heights. How was He born? Who gave birth to Him? Is the Mother of God symbolized by a beautiful mom who was just a human, a woman? Or is She a creature of the same heights as Her Son? For the Mother of God ascended to heaven after death. Is this phenomenon described in Buddhism as escaping the wheel of samsara? A way out of the vicious circle of rebirths to an incomprehensible other level available only to enlightened people. What will happen to Them next? It is unknown, it is the secret of mankind, the biggest secret that is not revealed to anyone in their lifetime. And there is no need for that. This knowledge must remain a mystery, because in that is how God wants us – each one of us – to look for our own answer. If we are given this chance, we ourselves will open it while we are alive.
Who Is the God?
When I say God, I mean some kind of energy guiding us through life. It’s just logical for me to call it a God, but I don’t mean a specific God – an old man sitting in the clouds. Of course not.
We are His children. I do believe in this: we are children of God, and He guides us as if we were the little ones. Do you remember the Parable of the Prodigal Son? The son left his father and run through all his inherited wealth, but later, he came back saying he had been wrong. This is my favourite parable. Because it is accurate in describing our relationship with God. We make mistakes, and God guides us mercifully, pointing us at our mistakes, and embraces us as we are, with all our missteps. Just like in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, where the father accepts the young man, notwithstanding his dissolute life and his sins; the father gave him the best clothes and did everything for him, for he is a father. That’s what the God does to anyone of us.
We often make mistakes out of ignorance, we do not understand. The so-called retribution – in fact, forgiveness – can be stretched out in time and come up 20, 30, 40 years later. A person can understand where they misstepped only at the close of their days. God has already let me understand my wrong decisions.
In my opinion, the problem with Christianity is that, according to it, God is separate from a man, on its own, and a man is all by himself. There is a big mystery here. According to Buddhism, God is «we’. We are God. In Buddhism, absolutely all events, all tangible things are the integral whole. It is only divided into different parts, and one of these parts is God in the Christian world.
God in the Christian world is also part of a structure of which we know nothing. We don’t know what it is. But He exists. It’s hard for me to put into words what I have understood. The presence of God in everything can be expressed by the word «divinity’. Also, the presence of God in everything can be called «influence’. You change depending on what you read today, with whom you spoke today. Through our environment, we change and influence each other. Everything in the world correlates. Without relationships, there would be no world. All our material and spiritual values exist only in relation to other things. It is important.
Buddhism says that everything exists only because of relationships, because everything is interconnected. Every smallest thing, a mental or material one, is connected with another thing. Nothing is for no reason. This connection creates the material and spiritual world, their interconnection creates our worlds. If not for this relationship, there would be «nothing’. The human brain is unable to imagine this «nothing’. It’s incredibly hard to imagine. It is more than emptiness. So, the world is «something’.
The relationship of all elements, material and spiritual, all this at once is God, that’s how I see it. After all, if it didn’t exist, there would be «nothing’. World as emptiness? But the world is not empty, the world exists. So, it is not empty. And this «non-emptiness’, it is there.
Christianity is one of the absolutely beautiful religions, it gives us the life rules that explain our existence in this world. It gives us these rules in the form of signs, synchronicity, or mystical things.
But there are, perhaps, other worlds living by other rules. We can neither see them nor understand them. Maybe someday we will discover other worlds. But first, we need to tackle our world. In relation to our world, we are still children. Therefore, God does not give us more, He gives according to our strength and understanding.
And here is where a conflict arises: the personal God, who is well known to us from Christianity, He is not the only one existing in the world. He is just a part of the world. And everything connected with Him, the divine, which we, say in Christianity, or in Buddhism, or in Hinduism, know about God, is only what we know about Him through the lens of our world. In another world, we would know something else. All we can say about God is that He is there and He exists. And the God that we know in Christianity and other religions is our illusions, our projections, our fantasies that help us live. These are explanations that are available to us, that we can perceive with our minds.
He is definitely a father. This is what the Buddha says. He is a mother, in the person of the Mother of God, Her features, sacrifice, compassion. That is, God is my father and mother. And here is what I did not understand for a long time: He is my true friend. Not only a father, but also a friend who speaks to me as an equal. This is a serious thought.
Over the years of illness, God became the closest one to me. Without God, I now do not live at all. He is the only one that keeps me on this planet. Yes, of course, caring for my children keeps me going. But I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t have God.
I have realized that I wouldn’t live without Him.
Throughout my illness, all these years, I have been coping with life only in connection with God. He makes sense even of the most difficult days and gives lots of hope. The more so His help. This is the real miracle! And I believe that miracles happen to everyone, I just can see them, because a body part of mine (it’s not clear which one) is set to catch signs and notice miracles. It might be intuition. But these signs help me live. That’s for sure.
For me, God is alive. And I believe in a personal God.
The Shape of God
In every religion, the existence of God takes its own form. The word «form’ is very important. The fact is that it does not necessarily stand for the