Amidst the dazzling exhalation of exploding supernovae and the passionate in-breath of black holes, galaxies whirl wildly while God, vastly smiling, spins on one centripetal toe at the center of all, shouting, “WTF is going on?!”
I proclaim the ignorance of God. This proclamation of God’s ignorance is an act of faith. I am comforted by the proposition that the universe is out of control. God simply watches the random glory of spontaneous evolution in perpetual wonder, with no idea where it comes from or where it’s going.
No God whom I could possibly worship is in the control business. I do not live in a robot universe. As God’s greatest gift to me is the gift of free will, so God’s greatest gift to nature is chaos, the fractal poetry of chance, the random beauty of evolutionary self-design.
The notion that Biblical prophets predicted the future is a common misunderstanding. The Hebrew word naviʾ, a loan word from the Akkadian nabū, originally meant to call, to summon, not to predict. The Hebrew prophet saw where present trends might take their people, and called them to ethical/spiritual transformation now. The prophet’s call was not a time-line, but a cry for the turning of hearts, based on an assumption that our future is not predicted in stone, but predicated on the way we treat one another in the present moment. Thus Jonah prophesied the destruction of Ninevah. Yet the people of Ninevah repented, changed their behavior, and saved their city. Was the prophecy wrong?
Those who claim to predict the future are the enemies of your freedom. If you go to an intuitive, astrologer, preacher or guru to learn your future, you disdain God’s greatest gift, the gift of Un-Knowing. Not knowing is our blessedness. Not knowing makes us equals in God’s democracy. The ruin of democracy is the claim of the few to know our future. They may be religious leaders, scientists or politicians, but make no mistake: if they claim to predict your future, they are robbers and thieves (John 10:8).
Jesus’ followers asked him when the kingdom of heaven would come on earth. He replied, “No one knows the date or the hour” (Mat 24:36).
The true guru is the one who, when you inquire about your future, replies, “I don’t know.” Then you gaze into the inter-galactic vastness of the master’s eyes, bathe in the well of Presence, and know beyond doubt that everything will be OK, just as it is right now.
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