September 12, 2005

• The nature of God

[Message received two weeks after Hurricane Katrina]

Your God and our God embraces the totality of all that has been created.

Each of you in your own way seeks to understand what it means to be in the presence of a loving and caring God, for you know that God is not a person, and yet you seek ways of feeling personally connected to that Spirit Center. You want to know if God truly cares, if God is truly in control, if God reigns over all of creation, if God is concerned about the suffering of human beings and other life forms. In other words, each of you in your own way wonders about the human traits that you assign to the Spirit Center. When there is such suffering and such loss and such grieving and such fear, what is it that the Spirit Center, God, actually expresses, feels, understands? It is difficult for you to see God in the face of such suffering and loss.

You know that God is not a male or female or both. You know that God is not a human being, and yet it is important for you to realize that as you experience these emotions, they are part of the creation. They are a part of the creation because they belong to all that God is. You know that God is love, and you know that it is your destiny, as it is for all human beings, ultimately to become love. Because God has created what it means to be loving, God understands what it means to be loving. There is a consciousness. There is a love. There is an awareness by God of a lack of love, for there is an awareness of the gulf that exists between where creation is and where creation is destined. Consequently, the God Center, the Spirit Center, is by definition aware of all.

When you are loving, when you are compassionate, you are aware of the need to be loving, to be compassionate. That awareness does not exist with you alone. It exists because God has placed that reality within the totality of creation. In knowing what it means to be sad, you are not experiencing that emotion in a vacuum. Experiencing sadness, experiencing grief is possible because you have been given that capacity by God. You have been given those emotions because God understands those emotions.

Even though there is a desire to mold your understanding of God according to your understanding of human nature, there is a bit of truth to your perception. When you experience pain, the Spirit Center that is God recognizes that experience, and when you pray for strength, the strength-giving life force of God that is always there is able to enter your lives. We say that God’s presence is strength-giving. It is not a form of life that has no understanding, no connection to your own.

You were created to learn to become loving. Where does that love come from? It is not love if it is just an intellectual concept, if it is just a theoretical idea. Love exists because Love exists. It is not something which is thought to be valuable…it is a part of creation. Therefore, we can say absolutely that there is a kind of spiritual understanding of what it means to be desperate, to be frightened, to be angry, to be sad, to rejoice. God is not a vengeful spirit. God is not motivated by spite, but the Spirit Center is aware of that part of creation that is not yet fully love, that is not yet fully peace.

The history of humanity can be understood in part by an attempt to understand the nature of the Creator. For each group of human beings throughout your existence, there have been attempts to link God’s personality to human traits. It is only natural that such efforts are pursued, but you should not for a moment believe that God is as impersonal as the wind or a drop of rain. There is a spiritual connection between God and you. You are endowed with souls. Those souls have emotion. Those souls have a personality. Those souls have a consciousness. There would be no purpose for such characteristics if they were not also shared with God. There is no purpose in your becoming loving if there is ultimately no such presence as Love. There is no purpose in giving of yourselves to others if there is not a Spirit Center that understands what sacrifice and compassion and giving are worth.

You are being asked in your lives to become what is essentially God. You are asked to be godly to become God, just as you are asked to be loving to become Love. The reality of God is that there is a consciousness to God that embodies, in its way, all that you individually and corporately seek that is good. Every trait that you seek to become is a description in part of the God Center. God, therefore, is not an objective force of nature, nothing more, nothing less. God is a consciousness just as we, your guides, are a consciousness. We communicate with one another through love. We value one another. We wish to serve one another, just as we wish to serve you. These traits have meaning only because they reflect a part of what God is.

Perhaps it is helpful just to think that God is. Everything that you seek that is positive is what God is. To become loving and ultimately achieve a state of love is attaining what God is. Becoming peaceful so that you may become peace is developing into what God is. God creates, but God also cares. Although the Spirit Center is not human any more than we are human, you, we and God share these traits. You can accept our love even though you know we are not living human lives. We exist in a different dimension, strictly spiritual. If you can accept that we are loving and wish to help you in your journey, although we are not human, how can you not accept the same traits in God? You are not placing human characteristics upon us. It is God that places those characteristics upon you and us.

All that you seek is all that God is. Your lives are directed toward God. Your lives are directed toward a balance. This balance we have spoken of before. It is God who is the center of that balance, and it is the nature of that balance to broaden, to increase, to expand. It is the nature of love to broaden and increase and expand. When you are loving toward an individual, you will experience a loving response in one form or another. That love has become expanded. That is the nature of love. When you are compassionate toward another, another may learn what it means to be compassionate, and in turn will be compassionate. The compassion has increased, it has spread. If you are peaceful, others will ultimately feel that peace, and peace has been expanded. All of these characteristics that you associate with being godly expand. That is their nature, that is their destiny.

When you question how God responds to the suffering you know of so well, you should have faith that God responds as you respond, in love and peace and compassion. These are not responses that belong to you alone. Let love grow. Let love be a reflection—a reflection of your own objectives in life and a reflection of God’s love —for it is in God that love resides, and it is from God that love expands and reaches ever wider circles. In your being loving, in your being peaceful, you are serving to expand God’s love and God’s peace. Be glad in your understanding a part of the nature of God, because that understanding provides the very context you need to become godly.

You are blessed in your understanding of what it means to reflect God. We are blessed in your recognition of God’s worldly presence and God’s presence in the dance of all life. Rejoice in the dance! Rejoice in the blessings!

Amen.