A Drop in the Bucket

At the beginning of my conscious spiritual journey 55 years ago, I believed that my purpose in life was to be a student of god. Yes, god, small g. While the Spirit is compassionate in the face of our ignorance, the experience that I sought was not the Father of Jesus.

As a student, each new understanding was another drop in the bucket, so that, by inference, when the bucket was full of drops, my under- standing would be full of the knowledge of god, but sadly I now realize every drop was impure, flawed by the absence of Awe. As a student interested in a comprehensive understanding based on the belief that knowing god is the equivalent of pleasing god, every drop of the
knowledge of god produces a certain familiarity not conducive to either the Spirit’s reality or my progress as a lover of Her. Awe is the acceptance of the truth that no one can know YHWH.

Eventually, I grew, and my understanding, gained by my experience of Her, I came to see more fully. Then, rather than Spirit as a quantifiable resource, like a bucket full of water made up of many drops of knowledge, into which I could dip at will, I understand my relationship with Her more akin to floating on an inner tube in the middle of the Spirits’ vast ocean. Floating on that vast ocean, I knew that there was no way that I could ever be wet with every drop of that sea, but I could at least rest in the truth that I might always be wet all over, with the knowledge of the Spirit. Closer to the truth, but still flawed.

“And now?”

I no longer believe that the knowledge of god is, or ever was, the goal of the Creator Spirit, the lover of my self. While knowledge of a beloved is a necessary step toward any loving relationship, it is only a step along the way. Knowing is not loving, and believing in what you believe that you know is no substitute for the intimacy for which the human-kind is created by Her and for Her.

C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity,

“God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself [sic]. [She Herself] is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other.”

Now, I see myself as a Traveler, like you, on a cosmic journey, drawn toward a locus whose location I am not entirely clear about, and while I am unsure how I will get there, I trust that I will because I trust Her. I no longer seek to understand god, but to experience Her. These days, I am more comfortable with a different metaphor, which I glean from the garden narrative of the Hebrews in the first three chapters of Genesis. It begins for me with an obvious and simple truth. Walking with Her creatures, the human-kind, in the garden, in the cool of the day wasn’t a one-time event. It is the model of Her hope and vision for the human-kind.

This is the model for the relationship: the enjoyment of one another’s company as lovers, learning to know and so trust one another in a mutually pleasing environment, simply because She desires us and because we see that she is lovely in every way, and so, discovering in one another mutual attraction, we have fallen in Love with Her. She created human-kind to live permanently in the beauty of Her presence, as partners in Love and responsibility to all of the work of Her hands, and to dwell with Her always in the garden we share.

We, the human-kind, were and are created for Her presence like the fish kind was created for water. Yes, the fish is in the water, and the water is in the fish. Our pleasure is to be in the Spirit, and it is the Spirit’s good pleasure to be in us. To the fish, water is the source of the abundance of life, and taken out of the water, cut off from the source of that abundant life, they die.

So it is also for the human-kind.