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Cover: "Under The Skin"

Freedom Of The Heart

By Volker Schunck

Published by Volker Schunck at Smashwords

Copyright 2015 Volker Schunck

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the freedom of the heart comes from the heart of silence
Table of Contents

Copyright

Table of Contents

About me

Preface

Belief

Now

The rich young man

The Logos

Jesus' resurrection

Celebrating Christmas with Meister Eckhart

The one Human

Beam me up, Scotty!

Pentecost

Another dimension

God and the humans - a parable

About doing nothing

God is one.

King of hearts

Thoreau

Improvisations

The Matrix

About God's absence

Credo: God in Creation

Credo: God in Christ

Credo: God in Humans

The Freedom of the heart comes from the heart of silence

Jesus hangs on the cross

Jesus is risen
About me

I live in Dresden, Germany. I was a merchant and then I studied theology - without degree. Through my engagement with Zen I became aware of the Christian mysticism. Meanwhile I go my own way. Believe is not a thinking but a being. It is important to me, not to live lost in thought, but to live aware and intensely.

My Christian faith and my experiences in meditation influence my everyday life, in which I try to be attentive. My books arise from this spirit too.

Table of Contents
Preface

How can one live today? How can one live in a society that is in a digital flush, and in which its people have become disoriented?

In a time where everyone thinks only of himself, and it has become suspicious to speak of "values" which one still searches for so desperately. The picture- and information-flood of television and Internet fascinates and dazzles our hearts at the same time. We are alienated from ourselves and from God. It is hard for God, from whom we should not make an image, and who is invisible, in our media age, which is dominated by images. Our hearts need silence to come back to ourselves again - and to God too. Out of this silence we learn to listen and to see again. The life and sermons of Jesus offer a way out of our misery. For God is near and heaven is in you!

God bless you!

Yours Volker

Table of Contents
Belief

Let me tell you something. I have the same thoughts for a few weeks: It becomes clearer to me that how I as "Volker Schunck" experience God and how I believe in God is unique. "John Q. Public" certainly believes and experiences God totally different than I do. So everything what I say about God is subjective and no objective truth. And so the different religions are only different views on one and the same God. If I had been born and grown up in Turkey or Pakistan I would definitely be a Muslim. If my parents had been Jewish I would have become Jewish. If I had been grown up in India, I guess I would believe in Brahma, Vishnu or Shiva. As an Hindu I would believe in reincarnation and I would not believe to see after death the face of God how it is described in the bible. But the longer you study the religions the more obvious it is how similar the religions are to each other. The religions arose for primeval times because humans made experiences with God in their special cultural environment. These experiences are told verbally over thousands of years from one generation to the next. Sometimes these narratives were written down. In the same way special rites and cultic celebrations were passed on until the present day. Look at the church services. You see, I as a Christian have not the right to proclaim an absolute truth claim neither any other religion.

The 3 monotheistic religions, which still adore one God: the jewish religion, the Islam and the Christian religion are joined in their history of origin close together. The Islam and the Jewish faith see both to have their roots in the ancestor Abraham. And the Christian faith has been arisen from the Jewish faith. Apart from that these 3 religions have developed in different directions, e.g. the Christian faith doesn't believe in "Mohammed" and "Jesus Christ" is in the Islam only a prophet and not the son of God, except for that there is a lot what these religions connects. In my opinion there is more what they connects than what they separates. Therefore I feel closer to a religious turk than to a so-called western atheist. As I believe in God depends on the environment in which I grew up. So I'm a Christian to the core and that constitutes me as "Volker Schunck". I want you to respect this! Well, I'm interested in how you believe in God and maybe we can learn from each other. But please don't try to evangelise me. I promise you I won't try to evangelise you too.

What do I mean by learning from each other? I can learn from other religions. Zen-Meditation which is practiced primarily in Buddhism has very enriched my life and my life as a Christian. You will ever find areas where the religions overlap but there are also areas where I can't follow and which don't feel good for my christian conscience. This is a personal border which I have to respect.

We always select in the daily life. This or that cellphone, travelling to India, Europe or staying at home. And this is similar to the religions, which always selected right from the start what is compatible to their belief and what is not.

Look at the Christian religion which selected since the beginning what can be absorbed from other religions and how statements from the Jewish and pagan environment can be combined with the Christian faith. As well the Jewish faith: the creation account in the Old Testament - the verbal tradition was written down between 600-500 B.C.- is similar to the Gilgamesch Epos and other creation accounts in the pagan environment of Israel. Some were absorbed, some were transcribed and put into relation to the Jewish God. And this freedom I have today too: to combine different religious offers and to build a religion which fits me. Traditionalists call such a behaviour insulting "Patchwork-Religion". But I can't find this approach in any way bad. This is the normal course of life. This is the evolution of Religion, which has to meet the challenge to transform itself to survive without betraying and abandoning it's core. But take it easy. Follow your heart. Maybe your church kicks you out, no matter! Who wants to decide what I have to believe? There is nobody, no person, no church, no God who can command what I have to believe.

Do you really think that there is a God who commands you to believe in him? To believe in God means to love him and to trust in him. Does anybody believe that love is possible on command? No! Every jerk knows that love can't be commanded. Love neither can't be commanded nor be bought. It's a free gift.

we seem to mistake you God for water

Muslims Jews and Christians

which everybody can store in his own jar

but the mystic recognizes

that you are light

and that you enlighten

in every glass another color

the one light

of your goodness love freedom and justice

so you satisfy our thirst for life

Table of Contents
Now

These days are full of darkness. Not because of the winter, not because of the worldwide economic crisis, but we walk through the darkness because our roots into the eternal are cut. Maybe by bad experiences, maybe that only what is visible is of value for us. We are lost, if we don't see through this moment of momentariness. We have to see deeper, or let me say, we have to learn to become sensitive to see the eternal light through this very moment.

Primarily eternity doesn't mean to prolong the timeline endless into the past and into the future but means a special quality of live. This quality doesn't care about seconds, minutes and hours, but glimmers constantly like the shining light of the sun through the clouds through every boring moment of our little lives. It needs practice and an open heart to recognize this eternal Now. We have to learn to put this very moment in relation to our whole life.

How old are you now? 20, 40, 60 or much older? Every next second you can die. Don't fool yourself with statistics. Taste this very precious moment. It is holy, it is unique. And this Now is not different from the Now when Jesus was born. Only a few looked up from their work and their daily routine, during the other hadn't the sensitivity to see that behind their problems and sorrows is a light which tries to come through into their hearts. These who could see identify this Godly light with a man from flesh and blood. The one who is so intimate with God that God's light shines through him into the world and therefore he is called "Son of God". Listen how it is described in John Chapter 1:

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

2 He was with God in the beginning.

3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

4 In him was life, and that life was the light of men.

5 The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.

10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognise him.

11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

12 Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God-

13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

It may sound paradoxical, but it makes no difference to us that this light came 2000 years before our lifetime or right now in this moment. It's the same divine light wanting to shine in us. It is the same light in the past, the present and the future. It is the one and only moment in which God wants to be born in our hearts as the eternal light, the true light that is full of glory, grace and truth.

Let me say it less pompously: The very human Jesus is coming to cast out the darkness and to enlighten my heart with joy - right now.

Table of Contents
The rich young man

Today I talk about The Rich Young Man in Matthew 19.

16 Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?

17 Why do you ask me about what is good? Jesus replied. There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, obey the commandments.

18 Which ones? the man enquired. Jesus replied, 'Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony,

19 honour your father and mother,' and 'love your neighbour as yourself.'

20 All these I have kept, the young man said. What do I still lack?

21 Jesus answered, If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.

22 When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.

23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go throug the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

25 When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, Who then can be saved?

26 Jesus looked at them and said, With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.

It seems to me that this young man perfectly fits in our today's society. He is totally familiar with the fact that nothing is for free and you have to pay for everything. To say "what good thing must I do to get eternal life" sounds to me like "what I have to pay to get eternal life". Well he doesn't want to pay with money but he thinks that eternal life is something you can earn with your good deeds. His head is full of religious knowledge, a lot of mind-stuff which is a hindrance to see the reality with his heart. Jesus cites the ten commandments but only these which say something about the relation between humans among each other. Whereas Jesus keeps quiet about the other five commandments concerning the relation between God and men. I guess there are a few reasons why Jesus doesn't give this seeking guy a direct answer. First because of the holiness of God. Jesus doesn't want to tear down the name of God to the level of wheeling and dealing. It is blasphemic to think in such a way of God.

Remember Matthew 21,12-13: _Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money-changers and the benches of those selling doves. It is written, he said to them, 'My house will be called a house of prayer,' but you are making it a 'den of robbers'._

Similar to this the young man thinks he can buy eternal life. He knows everything about God. And he knows nothing. He knows it and he doesn't know it at the same time. He learned the answers years ago and stored it beside the other mind stuff in his head. It's such a paradox: he learned it by heart but this knowledge never reached his heart. He is trapped in his mind who simulates him that the rules between men and God are the same like the rules in the society. But you can recognize God only with your heart and not rational in a cause-and-effect chain. You can't believe in God with your head. There must happen something in you, in your heart. And this is a free gift, a Godsend. The eyes of the heart have to be opened. The more you know about God intellectually the more you press him into a form and make an image of him. You make God to an object of your mind what makes it nearly impossible to be one with the One.

Jesus corners the young man with the demand to sell his whole property and to give his whole money to the poor, because he recognizes the weak point of this young man. It is easy to follow the commandments skin deep and not by heart, but it is hard when you have to let loose something to what your heart is clinging. This man clings on visible things in which he thinks to find security, love, carelessness and freedom. But deep inside money or religious affords or any other material things can't give him what he is looking for. Remember, therefore he was coming to Jesus.

Because he is afraid he is attached to visible substitutes for God and misses the point. He doesn't know God because he heard and read so much about him that he can't make own experiences with him. To experience God is similar to learn how to swim. You can use your whole life water wings. But please don't tell around that you know the water.

You first experience that you can trust in the water when you let go all theory and any other security.

And you will make the experience to be one with the One and to be safe.

Table of Contents
The Logos

Hello! I want to talk to you about a text from the christian tradition, which is maybe one of the most beautiful you can find in the bible. But probably one of the most difficult to understand. In places he is similar to a koan. A koan is used in Zen as an object for meditation. Popular koans are e.g. "Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?" or "What is your original face before your parents were born?". For most of the koans rational solutions are wrong. The real sense is behind the literal sense and only can get intuitively, without words.

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

2 He was with God in the beginning.

3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

4 In him was life, and that life was the light of men.

5 The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

6 There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John.

7 He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe.

8 He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.

9 The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.

10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.

11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

12 Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God-

13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

15 John testifies concerning him. He cries out, saying, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.'"

16 From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another.

Originally this text was a song, which was sung by the early Christians and than it found its way in the gospel of John. The author put it at the beginning of his gospel and made some explanatory comments, where he thought it is necessary. So e.g. the verses 6-8 are extensions about which I don't talk, because they are not important for our issue.

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

2 He was with God in the beginning.

3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

4 In him was life, and that life was the light of men.

5 The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. In the beginning was the word, and the word was God himself. This was in the beginning.

There where everything started such is described in the Genesis: " 1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." We aren't informed about the word (in Greek: Logos) exactly at this point, so that you may ask curiously: What is it with the Logos and his relation to God? Was the Logos first and than God? But than it would be wrong to say God was the Logos. And who has the power and who is bigger? Is God bigger than the Logos, because he made the world through him? And do the early Christians really mean only the beginning of our creation when they talked about the beginning? Or do they mean with "beginning" the beginning of God? Is it thinkable that God made himself sometimes - so to speak out of nothing? But how is this possible? What is when this mean that God always creates himself, just starts always again with himself? God as an eternal beginning so to speak? An unthinkable thought, which astonished us. God and the Logos: not two not one. A Koan! We remember: For most of the koans rational solutions are wrong. But the text doesn't stay here longer but the Christians go on singing their praise for the Logos, for their God, whom they experience as light and life. In darkness no man can live. Without light no life. Something that already a child knows. But not so fast. There isn't written "the Logos was the light through which men can live" but "that life which was in him was the light of men". That's a difference, which leaves the commonplace "without light no live" far behind. In this Logos you can find life of quite a different quality. In other words: This Logos is a life of quite a different quality. The Logos and his life: not two not one. Life of quite a different quality: light-life. But this light isn't a light what we know in any other way from our visual surroundings and how it is described in the Genesis:

14 And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years,

15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.

Actually this deals for Johannes about more than to say: "That way the world becomes." A light-life which the darkness of this world hasn't understand. The Greek verb also allows the translation "hasn't capture" it. Such as here is talked or sang about the Logos who is equated to God and seemed to be something is called by the theology mythological speech. The term myth appeared in a bad light by Rudolf Bultmann, because it got the sound of being untrue and seemed to be in contradiction to reality. But the myth has its own truth. Also Bultmann blamed the texts of the bible to reflect a mythological view of the world that modern people who use electric light and radio sets can't share. They still hadn't internet in the sixties. Without going into details, I want to ask Bultmann: In which way else can you talk about God than in the myth? What terms, words and symbols else do we have to talk about / from God? Aren't we connected to the archetypes and symbols of our ancestors in history, which of course we have to put in a relation to our existential problems nowadays?! In spite of this: Isn't the speech of "God" by itself very mythical, but Bultmann isn't against this. What would be, when you use the neutral term "being" instead of "God", needn't we to dress off this term in the same way from its myth, which laid around it over the years? Is a philosophic myth really more neutral and better than a Jewish-Christian one or a gnostic redeemer-myth?

Let me summarize: I go on using the mystic terms of the biblical texts, put them into relation to our reality nowadays and search for new expressions where these symbols seemed to be too difficult to understand.

We bear in mind: The Logos is a life which implies a special light for men. The light shines in the darkness and can't be understand or be captured from it.

The community goes on singing from this special light:

9 The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.

10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.

11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

12 Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God-

13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.

The first verse, verse 9, is mostly ignored. Presumably therefore because its content is so unheard and doesn't fit at all in the tradition of the church. But don't worry I'm going to mention it later again.

The Logos is on the way. Attention! Now I'm talking mythological. He comes above there out of heaven down into this world. The world don't recognize him (the pagans are meant by this) and his own doesn't receive him, this is a pointed remark against the Jews, but there is a third group, those who believe in his name, to whom the writers of the text number themselves among exclusively.

Attention dear brothers and sisters! And I don't mean you my dear readers, but you dear early Christians, be careful not to forget in your enthusiasm the people around you. You are no better people than the Jews or the Pagans, who not yet can sing your song with you. You say that you received the Logos with an open heart.

Have you forgotten that every man who is coming into the world receives the light of the Logos, how it is written in v 9: The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.

It's not as simple as that! Don't think in terms of black and white. You often can hear in evangelical churches the phrase: "I have decided for Jesus." Good luck for Jesus. This sounds like I would decide to purchase this or that product. The red or the green shoes? Or still the brown one? Little later to be able to belief is compared with a birth. People are born to belief from God (V 13). Isn't that unbelievable? And who is the leading actor at a birth? The mother or the child? Don't we recognize the contrast to the phrase: I have decided for Jesus.

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

15 John testifies concerning him. He cries out, saying, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.'"

16 From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another.

You almost are raced round by this verses. That goes so fast that you hardly are able to come with. Glory, grace, truth, grace. It's to me like to meet a friend who is talking with bright eyes about his new girlfriend. First we maybe smile about him, but later we envy him and we think: Such a girl I want to meet too, what a lucky dog. These text seems to me to be similar to this: A love-song to and for the Logos the incarnated God. In that you can't exaggerate, because the words always will lag behind what they shall describe. If these early Christians would reflect about their feelings, as we like to do it, presumably they would say: This joy, this burning in my heart, I must put it into words and tell everybody or I will burst. But they don't reflect about it, because they are so glad. Like we, when we suddenly fall in love. But this joy didn't stay for a long time. This light may still shine in the catacombs, where they met backdoor to celebrate and to adore the invisible presence of their Christ with and in bread and wine. A few generations later, presumably already there was a need to write this verses down, this first love was gone. How can we get such a deep joy? By reading this text hundred of times and when we look up every important word in Wikipedia? No, when we believe that, we still don't get the text. That's the point: we can do nothing. Even if we wait for the birth of the Logos in our open hearts, the main thing doesn't happen by us.

God, let us fall in love with you and give everyone the faith which fits him. Amen

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Jesus' resurrection

In the room of the doctor for onkology hangs a cross with the body of the cruzified. Surely no suprise in a catholic hospital. Here I' m with my mother. She is ill with cancer. The cross touches me. I remember stories of the bible around the death of Jesus. Gethsemane: the desperate crying Jesus who struggels with God and feeling restless abandoned from him. The dark night of the soul. I remember the lots of chemotherapies, the sprouting of hope and the going out of hope. Cancer is not overcome. The dark night of the soul. God, let this cup pass from me. But we are not alone, that becomes clear. Jesus himself went the way until the end. He drank the bitter cup of suffer. My mother didn't become healthy again. When my father was dying one year later I put a cruzifix and a candle beside his bed. "You are not alone." The horrorface of death now has become a human face. I don' t need to be afraid.

Now I can understand the words of the disciples of Jesus totally different and deeper. I can speak with their words or I can find my own words. They experienced personally that Jesus is not dead but risen.

The discussions about the empty grave are narrow-minded. If it really was empty the one take it as a proof for the resurrection. The others think the grave was empty because his disciples stole his dead body or the women of the third day would have visited the wrong grave. To theirs opinion that are arguments against resurrection. But it's about totally other dimensions. It's about God's reality of which you cannot even talk about big enough. We say: Life and death are in God's hands, but God himself is life and death. And again and again: Life, life, life.

The disciples knew themselves as "died with Christ". We are died with Christ - and rose again. Marcus was still Marcus and Martha still Martha, but also still not. Died and rose again - in this life. The experience of Christ put everything around. At first it's not about a physical dying and making alive again of the body after death by God or the infinitive living of the soul as Volker Schunck or Kathleen Smith, but it's about dying during lifetime. I don't get that. No, this can't be understood intellectually and the words and pictures may lag behind. The power of life which the disciples experienced after the death of Jesus filled them with the sureness: Jesus is not dead, but he is alive. Filled with the Holy Spirit they must talk about their experiences.

God himself transformed them through their encounter with Jesus. They understood against the background of the Jewish religion not until after Jesus' death his sermons and his handling with people. Jesus makes no difference to the humans. Whether sinners, prostitutes, junkies, bankers or on welfare, high society or drags of society. He loves them all equally and gives them back their dignity. And something else they get: God cannot see blood any longer. He is tired of your bloddy sacrifices. This still knew the prophets of the Old Testament. And now once and for all: Look how this man Jesus lives and speaks - this way God is with you. "For in him all the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form." The horizon of the disciples has been widened suddenly.

God is the way he is exemplified for us through Jesus. Mercy instead of justice. Love the new rightousness. God shows his human face. It's not about "an eye for an eye" or a "tooth for a tooth", but about the helplessness of the victim, that even ff someone strikes him on the right cheek, he turns the other to him. The mainstream doesn't understand that - then and now. Who criticizes the religious and political system is being put away. Then such a consistant way like Jesus' ended at the cross. Today in mobbing of church or society. The german theologians Hans Küng and Eugen Drewermann are being kicked off by the church and a child abuser gets promoted to a superintendent because he shuts up and doesn't protest against the system.

The death of Jesus was fast pressed in a religious frame. And this religious frame was the Jewish religion. Since the Old Testament it can be seen: God is not a bloddy God of revenge who must be calmed down by a bloddy sacrifice, but God wants the hearts of the humans - of his humans - as a sacrifice. So the prophets understand the sacrifices in a deeper sense. A mechanical sacrifice is useless, when human doesn't love God with body and soul. Religious exercises, meditation, bible reading, confessions, a religious lifestyle or a flawless character. Nothing can impress God. Nothing, totally nothing, can improve our image infront of God. You not even need a doubtless faith. What we live, we live not by ourselves but by God. Christ lives in us, or the Holy Spirit lives in us, or God lives in us. I hardly can understand myself. But I know the more I'am nearer to myself the nearer I'am to God. "He must increase, I must decrease." Died with Christ. Rose with Christ. A lifetime is not enough to get that.

The great hermeneutic Gadamer says at the end of his life this simple sentence which a student can say at the beginning: Hermeneutic is the art of understanding. His understanding has been become from an intellectual understanding of a student to a being. This simple sentence hides the effort of thinking of a whole life.

The brasilian star architect Oscar Niemeyer who created over 600 buildings and who founded an own style of art comes to the conclusion at the age of 100: Life is a whiff.

It's easy to tear this or that verse out of the biblical or historical context: "Believe it or you will be lost". To understand biblical truth you need a lifetime like the two old men needed to understand life. And this own effort of understanding nobody can do for us. Neither the authors of the bible nor the church. At the end:

Jesus lives. Death lost his horror - and life too, because resurrection means: living beyond life and death in the presence of God. Eternal life, sheltered and hidden in God. So I live no longer, but Christ lives in me.

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Celebrating Christmas with Meister Eckhart

"Actually I am quite different, but seldom I get around with it."

Doesn't suit this quote perfectly for the stress of christmas this year? So much to do, I don't know what to do first. Then you wack out quickly and you are glad when christmas is over. Yes, actually I only wanted a few quiet days for me or being together in all silence with my family. Instead of that I am eaten up by my grief, because I live only in the past and the celebrations in the family circle are overloaded with expectations. We hear from advertising: Christmas is decided under the tree.

So isn't there what was wished...

But there are still quite different expectations. Finally being a safe family again, and then everybody gets on everybodies nerves, like last year, because of all unfulfilled expectations.

Yes, actually I am quite different... But I by myself don't know how.

But from time to time, when I am totally alone and jog into the beginning daylight, or when I lie in the bathtub and when I'm all for me, than I have a clue, who I could be.

No, to say it this way is wrong, because that's sounds like that I could be, if I only wanted. "But you not really want it", could somebody say.

No, it is rather so, as if someone would be hidden in me, whom I can only recognize in this special moments of presence and thoughtless silence. This someone, this other person, is my actual I, my true self.

Who wants to whittle out a figure of a chunk of wood, must peel away the needless. The artwork is hidden in the unhewn, rough chunk.

I don't need more but less to be myself. Less of everything. What this less means, everybody has to decide for himself.

For that Meister Eckhart says "Gelazenheit" - with z. That is "serenity" in English. The originally german meaning is the inner attitude of letting or letting be. Eckhart means that you have to let loose things and imaginations to become essential. And that happens when I am alone: at jogging, in the bathtub - or if it pleases God.

Meister Eckhart calls that "Abgeschiedenheit" - loneliness.

There in the loneliness I step back from myself, to see, to hear, to feel. It cannot be expressed in words.

Christmas is less. Christmas is not decided under the tree, but Christmas is decided in our hearts.

Let us listen again to Meister Eckhart: "Who is at home in all spaces, is God's worth, and who stays one in all times, to whom God is present, and in whom all creatures are coming to silent, in whom God bears his only begotten Son."

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The one Human

The one human is being born. He breezes in, he breezes out, he is awake, he sleeps, he eats, drinks, he digests and he excretes. He laughs and cries, he is patient and angry. Then the consciousness awakes in him: I am one with God. That's something new. That is scandalous and inappropriate. At least there and then, when and where he lives. For Jewish ears and hearts at his time, at any time, this is insolent and blasphemous. And at least unintelligible for non-Jewish. God and humans - as different as heaven and earth. Or finally it's fulfilled what had been a long time known, what then was forgotten, what was believed and what was not understood: _So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him. (Gen 1:27: NIV)_

The name of the one human is not Adam but Jesus. Being one with God. That is the true nature of human. We have forgotten this. We have forgotten God, and we have forgotten ourselves. The one human: Jesus Christ. Heaven stands open. And Jesus of whom John the Babtist says: _But one more powerful than I will come and he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire_ (Lk 3:16), this Jesus himself becomes fulfilled with the Holy Spirit. (look Joh 1:32-34) That testifies John the Baptist.

Is that a proof? That is no proof. Do you need proofs?

The modern Sisyphos carries heavily at the stone, who once was thrown into the sea of world-history. At the peak of knowledge it runs like sand through the fingers of the mind, rolls itself away of every having. And then? A new try.

From distance Sisyphos looks like a man who is carrying a cross. How long? A lifetime.

God willing his mind breaks in pieces and his heart starts to understand: The being human of Christ is my true nature. I am called to be one with God. Only this way my life finds its fulfillment.

In other words: _"He must increase, but I must decrease." ((Joh 3:30) KJV) Or: "... I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." ((Gal 2:20) NIV)_

At the peak of knowledge YOU run like sand through the fingers of my mind, you roll yourself away of every having.

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Beam me up, Scotty!

"Beam me up, Scotty!" from Star Trek became a part of the common language.

Maybe such associations to "Ascension Day" are a bit disrespectful. Throughout Germany the original meaning of this holiday has taken a backseat, and the vernacular calls it "Father's Day" or "Men's Day", on which men go out into nature with a beer box to make party. Others are happy about a day off.

What fewest know is that the Ascension hasn't the highlighted meaning for the evangelists too. Matthew and Mark do not report on it, but John and Luke in his Gospel and his Acts already. In Mark's Gospel the Ascension has been simply added by the tradition 200 years later, to give it a more appropriate ending like the other Gospels, as it is said in the footnote of the Luther Bible. In other words, because the story about Jesus so simply is told nicer. What a leaving! Like in a science fiction movie.

The risen Christ enters another dimension to clear the stage for another actor. The period of the man Jesus, whom God has gone under the skin in order to show humans his human nature, is over. But God does not change. God remains caring about his humans and warmly connected to them. So do not be afraid, God could now because Jesus is no longer living on earth, change his friendly face. This is guaranteed by Jesus, whose work continues even after his death. Indeed no longer on the earth, no, even better, from the highest point. This means: "He sits at the right hand of God."

The other actor who now enters the world stage, is the Holy Spirit of God who lives in the hearts of his disciples to comfort them, and to act through them. That we celebrate Pentecost.

So we cannot pray tired of life: "Beam us up, God!" \- Jesus afterwards, but now we are asked, we, whom God has gone as the Holy Spirit under the skins, to live authentic in this world instead of Jesus like he, between hatred and greed, between meaningless prosperity and bitter poverty.

Followers

You let Yourself strike twice.

You give away Your last shirt.

You run after the lost.

Your crown is not of gold.

Your throne is the gutter.

Your hands and Your heart are broken.

So how can we live different as like sheep among wolves?

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Pentecost

Today Christian Churches are celebrating Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit and I tell you the truth: I stand with empty hands and a lame tongue in front of you. Why is it so difficult to talk about the Holy Spirit?

Most of us know the story: After the resurrection of Christ the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit and started praying in different tongues. So the bible tells us. But "What?" or better to ask "Who?" is the Holy Spirit? When you ask the church history about the Holy Spirit you open a great door to dogmatic and church historical questions. The first Christians didn't seem to have such problems with the Holy Spirit, what you can see in the liturgy of the early services. New Christians were baptized in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This phrase found its way into the bible. What was crystal clear for these people from scratch of Christian history became a problem for the Christians a few generations later. Why?

On the one hand: The early Christians were grounded as former religious Jews in the Jewish tradition and where not so familiar with philosophical problems.

On the other hand there wasn't a great need to put into words what they were experiencing. They celebrated God in their services with singing psalms, worshipping and praying. When they break the bread in memory of Jesus' last supper they feel the presence of the Lord directly. "He is midst of us". And they were sure that they will see the Lord again in their lifetimes. But Jesus didn't come back and frustrated their hopes. The feast was over and the Christians had to orientate in an environment of different other religions and spiritual streamings like the Gnosis. Last but not least a lot of questions arose to determine the relation to the Jewish Religion. The Torah (also known as 5 books Moses), the Prophets and the Writings - the Jewish so called Tanak was accepted since the beginning of the Christian church as word of God. But they had to give account in front of the other religions and themselves about their identity as Christians. Letters between the single house churches circulated and special letters like these from Paul became more important. By and by different letters got the status of holy scriptures because they established themselves in the daily life of the churches and it became obvious that their authority wasn't established only in a single person like Paul or Peter but that their authority came from God himself. These texts were inspired by the Holy Spirit. And they became the criterion for authenticity for these letters and scriptures which followed. Even a scripture with the name Gospel of Thomas didn't achieved the standard which tried to slip into the church with an important name.

This was just a rough outline of the development of the early church, how it got its identity and scriptures.

The church fathers were forced by so called heretics like Marcion and Montanus to close the canon of the holy scriptures and they decided what should belong to the bible and what the content of the Christian faith was / is. This was about the year 180. Also in the 2nd Century the first official Credos were written down to repel the Heretics. The church fathers were inspired by different phrases of the bible. In the 4th Century the trinity of God was constituted in the first council of Nicäa. The church fathers reasoned by analogy from the visible world to God to explain the trinity of God. But these analogies aren't very helpful. E.g. God is like water in different states of existence: water, ice, smoke. Or God is like a fork with 3 teeth. Every comparison between God and the visible world must fail because God's reality trancends every imagination.We speak about God as Father and Son with concrete imaginations and think: Oh yes I got it, because I know s.th. about the relation between father and son and their roles in the world. So we think it is easy to understand who God is: God is father and son in the most perfect way as it is possible. The Holy Spirit isn't someone who we can grab in the same way. The early church fathers struggled about the question if the Holy Spirit only comes from the father or in the same way from the son. At this issue the church breaks into east and west church. So let's say the Holy Spirit is a space in our understanding.

In my personal Christian socialization two Verses about the Holy Spirit got an important influence on me. I remember how we discussed in our prayer group our hearts full of fear about the one sin against the Holy Spirit which never can be forgiven (Mt 12:31f). The other verse was about the inspiration of the holy scriptures by the Holy Spirit (2 Tim 3,16), which often was a hindrance to understand the real meaning of the text, because it was forbidden to relativize the written words due to their social and historical context (e.g. Is woman's social role in church and society determined by the words of the bible until today?).

Another story about inspiration in my childhood: The preacher who didn't need a cheat sheet seemed to be more inspired and influenced by the Holy Spirit than the poor guy who hadn't such a great gift of self-confidence to speak in front of hundreds of people and need to read his sermon.

The early Christians discovered that the Holy Spirit causes love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control in God's children. Furthermore the Holy Spirit is the driving power for the gospel through the world's history. He is the one who prevents that the words of the bible and the credos get dry and meaningless. And his creativity was involved by creating the world.

And last but not least he lives in us like in the first Pentecost preachers, who were filled with the Holy Spirit, what means not less than God himself lives in us. So we have a very intimate relation to God which can't be described with words. Who can say it better than Paul:

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.

God, so often I don't realize your presence, distracted by the world and it's temptations. Please forgive me. Please help me God to feel your nearness and to live in intimacy with you. Amen

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Another dimension

I'm standing in the dark hallway. I'm 5 years old. I see through the gray glass of the door. I only see outlines. The light shines in the dark hallway and warm on my child's face. Soon it's time. Then the little bell sounds from inside. The Christ Child has arrived. Then I can enter. I'm waiting, excited and full of anticipation.

Seldom we experience "heaven on earth". Perhaps when we are in love and we float in "seventh heaven", or if fate loves us and we can know: Fate has a face and a name.

But mostly we stand in the dark hallway of this life, are ensnared in worries, illness and the businesses of this world. The light that shines from another dimension in our everyday life, we usually don't notice. We don't have time and the heads full of existence stuff, so that we do not realize what the bell was tolled.

Actually, even if we don't want to accept it and displace it, our lives dangle on a string. Always. If we get away with a hair's breadth again, because our guardian angels are on the ball, when a car carelessly drives past the Tram although people are dropping out, when we again cheat death after a long illness, then we remember how fragile our lives are.

Perhaps all our work, race and running for life, that eludes us in its fullness, the greedier we grab for it, is only a running away from death. Why did Jesus not run away, when he realized what his enemies were plaining with him? And he was afraid.

But Jesus already experienced in this life the dimension of eternity. Jesus lived in the basic trust in God's presence. Live today and don't worry about the future. Even in the future is the omnipresent God, presence. And Jesus knew that the human does not live by bread alone, what the human constitutes is not flesh and blood, but the human has an identity beyond all earthly needs. When our "little bell sounds", we can enter, Christ is there.

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God and the humans - a parable

Still again a view decades of eternity were passing by and God was bored.

Where are the good old days when I created the whole cosmos with planets, plants, animal and... oh yes, humans. The human, what a disappointment. I wanted to create a counterpart for me, according to my image, to whom I can chat and chum up. Instead he doesn't care about me at all. And those who say they would love me slaughter animals, for they think, I would like blood. The poor animals.

The human, he gives me a lot of trouble. And somehow I simply don't understand him. I meant it well and now this: the humans forgot me, love money, power and Eros, this I didn't expect.

And God stands up from his throne, one hand on his back, because he has been sitting in his almightiness there such a long time and his back aches a little. He looks at the calendar and then in his wardrobe. Now he has everything what he needs and God hits the road. Now he is just a little bit nervous. Who cares, what can happen to me, he thinks.

God has taken off his almightiness and has put it on his throne, somehow the whole earth must continue to rotate, and there where he wants to go, it would only disturb him.

And God does something, what only God can do. The humans indeed pretend that they also can do and pretend to be God, but of course everybody knows, that this is pure nonsense. But Got can change his identity. Just so. He becomes a human.

He learns a proper trade, how it befits, goes to the Synagogue to the services and has forgotten himself as God. He left his almightiness, I'm repeating myself, because of equal opportunity, but his main characteristic traits, his goodness, his inner freedom and boundless love, of them he thought, maybe it is not bad, when I take them with me to earth, maybe I can remind through them the humans on something. Let's see.

And at the beginning it's going quite well. He talks of God and what the basic in life is: love. And not only this, he exemplifies how you can live as human a fulfilling life. And that only works in harmony with God and your fellow human.

But the lovely fellow human...

Indeed the simple people ran after him, but the better society was not so enthused of him. The religious establishment, which of course knows God better than he knows himself, doesn't like his gospel at all. At the end God has backup against the wall. The crowd which first hyped him, drops him like a hot potato.

To the cross with you, you good human. We feel bad, when we see you. We are quite satisfied with our mediocrity. We prefer to be in a rut and would like to be left alone.

And God's love is kicked in the mud of the road. But some humans with a childlike heart don't let him down. Still they can't avoid the worst: God is nailed as a human to the cross.

Everything seems to be lost, at least according to human standards. Here, everything is completely different. And it seems, humanly speaking, that even God would have learned something: How it is to be a human.

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Jesus Christ

They have torn out your thoughts with a sharp barbwire. Your beautiful, red mouth, which only can say love, freedom, goodness and God, they have beaten mute.

Oh Jesus, my hero, so no hero looks like!

You let yourself lead mute to the slaughter house, human among humans. HUMANS? Is who acts in this way still a human? Has the human beast, that tortures and is pleased, that kills and triumphs, not lost any right to the human-name? In your eyes I see all the humans slaughtered in public, abused and broken in dark back rooms, skinned and strung to the drums of the mighty.

Had you broken away to India! But you cannot help it. You cannot be a human without drinking fully the bitterness of life.

You Son of God, you exhaled your life in us. What do I understand of my, what of God's real being without you? Eye and ear cannot know God.

The spirit of the time is ego, drive and money. Your spirit is love, freedom and goodness. Your spirit is the Spirit of God.

Where are you, Jesus? What is your Christ-name against your being?

At the right hand of God? Yes!

Risen in your humans? Yes!

And every leaf in the wind bears your name, every last breath is yours. I can hear your voice in every cry of the tortured creature.

Enlighten us, Lord, that we realize with every fiber of our being our destiny: being you, being a human - God's image.

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About doing nothing

Doers, people who know what they want, who have a goal and take actively things in hand are in great demand in our society. And I am myself someone who open first one or two windows in the crowded tram, while many only apathetic sit in the heat and do nothing. Or when the flowers hang their heads you take the watering-can. It's that simple!

Many people, and these are often the most successful, act their whole life according such simple action patterns. They may even be lucky. Only in interpersonal relationships you cannot simply act straight on. It's about depth, emotions and first contact with yourself. How many are successful in their profession and cannot cope with their leisure or with their awaited retirement and don't know what to do with themselves, with their partners or life at all. Even in the church and christian community, where one might think, there it's quite different, because it's all about God and the essential, the active assistant stands in the foreground. There are always the same, may it because of craving for recognition or feelings of inferiority, who are keen for positions like in clubs and do more than what is good for them. "Can't answer no" and to overestimate the own strength are known, but you only know it for others and not for yourself, main causes of burnout. We do many things, mean well, but in the end nothing comes out of it. Recently I talked in an art supply store with a professional painter about the best material (brushes and paints), to paint good paintings. His answer: It is not so much the material that matters, but your own seeing.

To be able to paint, first I must learn to see. Learn to see, to understand what I want to paint. Understand what is the essence of this tree, the essence of this face. Take a step back, become quiet inside... - forget how to paint trees, forget how to paint faces. "This tree," "this face" is new, unique. Be silent, see and understand... Then I can act.

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God is one.

Introduction:

Mr. Miller is 52 years old and works with passion in his job as a baker. Because he has off in the afternoon, if it is possible, he plays soccer with his children. Every fortnight on Wednesday he meets his buddies from the fishing-club to share experiences. In his leisure he goes as often as possible in the gym.

His wife is 45 years old. She works as a tram driver and calls herself Jacobi since she lives seperated from her husband. To recreate from her exhausting job she sits, when the schedule permits it, at her potter's wheel and makes pottery. The children live with her. Once a week she guides elderly people in water gym. When she was a teenager she brings different cups home, but she didn't make it as a professional swimmer.

Here we have two typical biographies of modern people, apart from I have invented them, you can find at every corner. Personalities which are grounded and fulfill their roles as best as possible and as they are expected to. For his customers Mr. Miller is the baker, who is nice and bakes good rolls and bread. The same Mrs. Jacobi. She is respected as gym teacher in the indoor swimming pool by the elderly because of her direct and hearty manner. Such as Mrs. Jacobi shows us the exercises nobody else does. So the opinion of the majority of the participants. It doesn't even occur to them that she is a tram driver in normal life. And how she lets go herself in the indoor swimming hall, hardly nobody knows her this way at her job. Because her job requires precision and concentration, therefore she cannot fall out of her role.

Perhaps you have read in my blog that I am engaged since some time how one can believe in God today, and who or what "this God" actually is. And how and if one can describe God even with words. My creeds deliver a reference for that.

The classical division of a creed is: I believe in God, the father, the son, the Holy Spirit (e.g. Apostles' Creed). And therefore I put my creeds also in three strophes. The last version I learnt by heart.

I believe in God,

creator and father who loves us.

One with creation, he isn't absorbed by her.

Who is free because, his spirit blows where he wants.

One with Christ, he shows us his heart.

I believe in Christ,

God's son and whole human, who frees us.

One with God, he is light in darkness.

Who is killed because darkness hates light.

One with the Holy Spirit, he lives in God's light.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

God's light and life, who comforts us.

One with God, he makes us to whole humans.

Who is in us, therefore we are light in darkness.

One with Christ, we live in God's light.

What was strange to me was, even though it was very easy to keep the first two strophes (father, son) in my mind, that I had a real mental block with the third strophe, which is about the Holy Spirit: "Who (God the father) is free because his spirit blows where he wants to." sounds comprehensible to me and so to speak "natural". The Holy Spirit is just the Spirit of the father. Also "One with the Holy Spirit, he (Christ) lives in God's light." "One with God, he (the Holy Spirit) makes us to whole humans."

The imagination that the Risen One lives together with the Holy Spirit and the father is classical trinitarian. But the phrase about the Holy Spirit which highlighted verbally the oneness of the Holy Spirit with God achieves almost the vice versa: It seems to me that not the oneness of the Holy Spirit with God is highlighted, but just the seemingly difference between God and the Holy Spirit.

Why is that? This is because I have assumed like the traditionell creeds which have orientated at the trinity doctrin of Tertullian (ca. 2nd-3rd cent.) that the Holy Spirit is a person of its own, just as the father is an own person of the trinity. To clarify the relationship between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit logically, he uses the term "persona". He describes the Trinity of God as the relationship of three "personae":

God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.

"Persona" is a term from the pagan Roman theater. There the actors wear masks: personae. Therefore, our word "person" comes. For the actors of antiquity the masks were different roles, which one and the same actor could play. For us today, a person is an independent human, an independent personality.

Who is God? Certainly not a God who is composed of three persons like a puzzle:

Father + Son + Holy Spirit = God.

No! The concept of a person as well as the mathematical way of thinking is not appropriate.

Perhaps you were wondering to find two relatively boring biographies of two quite normal people under the headline "God is one." It was about painting a picture, that I can now use as an example.

Certainly, I don't claim that God is like Mr. Miller or Mrs. Jacobi, but how both of them were noticed by their environment in their role as baker and tram driver, as member in the fishing club or as gym teacher, so it is to all of us, when we notice and recognize God in a special manner.

The authors of the bible experienced God in a particular manner through the prophets and through Jesus.One could say, they have experienced God in a particular role. They experienced God as creator and connect this with his spirit (Gen 1: "And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.") They experienced God through the prophets which were full of God's spirit, and very first they experienced God as father through Jesus. The disciples of Jesus recognized in Jesus that he is the son of God.

It is strange: As we have seen at Mr. Miller and Mrs. Jacob, although they fulfill their roles in their jobs and in private totally, there is something that is left over. Mr. Miller indeed is in the gym totally Mr. Miller in the gym, but although Mr. Miller is totally in his bakery he seems to be there a totally different man as in the gym. We know that from first hand. That's because of our roles.They standardize our behaviour. And our personality shines through this norm, like a light that enlightens a paper lantern from inside out.

God is one. From jewish-christian point of view he is being experienced in the role of the father, the Holy Spirit and the creator. His being, his personality shines like a candle through each of this different roles. So: we cannot divide God onto different persons of the trinity, God father here, God the son there, God the Holy Spirit elsewhere. God is one and cannot be described appropriately with the trinitarian concept. Eternity steps into space and time.

The mystery of Christ: God joins himself in a unique way from eternity to eternity with a human, who lives in space and time. Eternity enters space and time. The invisible God is made visible through Jesus. Because God wants it. Against every wrong image of God.

Words like father, son, creator and Holy Spirit may have a meaning at certain places of our spiritual way. When we sense and experience the great numinous You, whose dark light shines in our inmost brighter than every sun...

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King of Hearts

What a spectacle. The crowd is not to control, shouting, screaming. People throw their clothes on the dust of the road, _"Hosanna, blessed be he who comes in the name of the Lord!"_

They make way for the one who sits on a colt and enters Jerusalem. What a symbolic staging! Jesus lets himself bring a colt of a donkey by the disciples and rides like a king to Jerusalem, as it is described in the prophet Zechariah 9:9:

Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

But what kind of a king? A king without war horse, a king without crown, a king with no clothes, a king without a castle. What must that be for a kingdom? A king on a donkey, a king with a crown of thorns, a naked king, a king with a castle in the air.

We remember that the especial task for Jesus was to proclaim the dawning kingdom of God. Be it by words or deeds. "The time has come," he said. _"The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!" (Mk 1:15)_

Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, his appearance in front of the people has something of a performance. He speaks most likely from the kingdom of God in riddles: "so that people do not understand him" (Mt 13:10-17), his disciples understand him anyway, that is what Jesus assumes, when he speaks of God's kingdom, or of heaven on earth.

If you want to see God's kingdom, you have to stop thinking like adults with the head, but you have to think like a child with your heart. Then you even recognize God. Don't you see how simple all is? God is in your midst. You yourselves are heaven on earth.

The simplest, the obvious is too complicated for the "big" and "smart" adults who have settled in the world. Because they have money and power they cannot realize God.

Listen, the kingdom of God is not a historical factor, nothing what you see on a map, nothing that has to do with power, rather with powerlessness, nothing that you can define in words, rather a being than a talking.

Look, God's kingdom is within you. (Luke 17:21)

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Thoreau

Currently the sun is shining, the sky is clear and blue and I'm in a positive and optimistic mood. I'm surrounded by young male and female students in the library of the university of Dresden, which are ambitious and looking forward into their - hopefully - well paid futures. That's my impression.

But I have a different point of view, maybe a more realistic one. I'm not in a midlifecrisis which is coming towards the surface, when men are between 40 and 50. My great heroe Thoreau was 28 when he wrote "Walden" his influencing and famous diary of his experiences with simple live at the time, when he lived on a low budget and alone in the forests of Maine. I don't want and can't compare myself in any way with him, but what he says about the society and his contemporaries reminds me absolutely like a prophetic vision of our nowadays situation.

On one side it's relaxing and funny when he is complaining about the new built railroad, which he is able to hear through the forest. His point is the noise and the fast speed of it, what actually represents his critique of the beginnings of the industrial revolution. Gee, isn't that very comforting, nothing changes.

On the other side it is frightening that we have no idea of the intensity and awareness of life in the beginning of the 19 th century. We have no measure for it but we can only compare the awareness of life today with our own childhood.

So Thoreau himself wasn't lucky in his society where people clung to there property, bound in debt, working all day long, alienated to themselves. In my opinion we have to be very careful, if we compare today with then, but I have a vague clue that this farmers about whom Theoreau writes, have a better contact with life than ourselves. Let it say me this way: we are much more alienated to ourselves then Thoreau's contemporaries.

When I sit a long time infront of the computer and go back into nature I need a few minutes to come back from my head into the three-dimensional room. It's like leaving a noisy room, where your senses get benumed, into silence - to yourself.

And I could add a lot of examples in how many ways we become alienated from ourselves and we unconsiously let this happen, as children of our time. We become seduced, don't realize it, vice versa, we are happy about every distraction.

I appreciate Thoreau, because he had a sense for what was happening around him. He was awake for society but first of all: for his own needs. His nearly two years in Walden where he retreated from society sharpened his view and feelings for himself and what's going wrong at his time.

Earlier I wrote that we have to be careful by comparing now and than, and therefore it's not a catastrophe that we don't have the opportunity to live two years in the greenwood. I guess it's enough to get again in contact with ourselves that we recognize our current mood. How you feel right now? We are always on the run, always busy. Do we actually understand and feel where we are at that moment and in our lives?

Time is running out. What are ten years?

I say it frankly: I do no longer feel well in this society. Maybe I have the same feelings for this society like Thoreau in which I cannot compare.

I don't want to be the killjoy, but for me it is hurting to see the decrease of values in the western world. First of all I don't mean the die off of the churches, which failed to transform the message of Christ and his God by clinging on old dogmatic axioms as "crime and punishment", but I mean the alienation of people from themselves and nature as a part of it. The loss of ourselves is the reason that most of us are selfish and egoistic, only interested in their own profit. The next get preyed, God has become unknown in his own creation. Rather we follow the Pied Pipers which promise what they cannot give: a meaningful and fulfilling live. I'm not afraid of death, but I suffer when I see the humans around me, which live there lives on earth as if there would be no end.

And the running and buying and watching TV and Computer and searching for new stuff seems for me to be endless. There is nothing material or immaterial like fame and reputation what we can keep longer than a lifespan.

Besides: What else has value beyound the border of life than a friendly smile for our next, a helping hand for the old woman, a visit of a murder in prison and a heart which lives in God's presence. Nothing else.

Wake up, all together. Life is unbelievable precious and very short. Live as intense as possible. Live with nature. Listen to your feelings. Don't fear anything - love instead. Be tender to yourself and willing to forgive yourself. Live in harmony with yourselve. As you treat yourself as you treat your next. Is he really that different from you?

"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity... Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler." (Thoreau)

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Improvisations

All is one. Everything keeps its identity. Body and mind are in the time. Every form is a soup bubble of time. Identity goes deeper. We are God's faces. God is a term. God is the only reality. The human as a body in which the soul and the mind are kept as in a vessel. Anything outside of this body, his environment. On another level of consciousness, I don't say on a higher because it could be a deeper one, in the sense of deeper understanding, it becomes clear, inside and outside is only a matter of perspective.

A thought experiment: A human who loses a leg. Is he therefore less himself? A human who comes down with dementia. Is he therefore less himself? Even when he changes so that we don't mean to recognize him, does he not stay the same in core he was before? If we lose everything we have, are we then less ourselves?

Is it not rather as if the ice of a glacier melts away and the bare rock appears?

Soul as identity.

We are children of eternity incarnated in space and time. The own perspective is relative and in space and time. In order not to think to craziness it is important to build in a playful element in our own thoughts. In plain English: Become like children (Jesus).

Names (so terms) are all hollow words. To be conscious: "I am relative" means dying. Every day new. Thinking is not the final truth. A mind who thinks until it gets raw and to inconclusiveness is not senseless. Not until it finally hits the wall and is broken by itself, can be achieved a new level of consciousness, a new deepness of consciousness.

An extension of consciousness is not only a matter of the brain but concerns the whole human. When the mind breaks at reality, this insight is extremely mortifying and shows it its own relativity and normality (nothing fancy).

In reality the mind is extremely useful, when it breaks at its own or the common logic (A+B=C), and gets not confused. Yes indeed: it is something great and vivid and has the heartbeat of eternity inside, when the mind itself has thought to death, and it nevertheless has the ability to view the breaking of its thinking and world view from an aloof perspective, and to rise like a phoenix out of the ruins of its own logic.

Now it realizes, that the back-breaking thinking in terms, which the formal logic has annihilated with reality, and what it supposed to be death, was necessary to enable new life. This realization is a being not a thinking. Not to see the wood for the trees. The trees are cut. The ground is visible, concrete and not different from what I am.

Religions are a vivid expression of heartrending experiences with the reality, which transcends our being, and with whom we anyway are interwoven in a mysterious way. A religion which clings fearfully to traditions of words, deeds and cult (keyword: dogmas) is doomed.

There is no substitute for own experiences, own action. Only what I experience myself then I can believe. "From Hearsay" is not only at court too little. This bigger reality is not the sum of the universe, stars, planets, suns, Milky Ways, people, dogs, water, plants and stones included, not a monolithic pabulum of being. This reality indeed reveals itself in manifold beauty in front of our hearts, we are indeed a part of it, but this is the big You, that transcends our thinking and feeling in space and time. So we are a part of this eternal You, which enfolds him/her/itself in space and time.

We get revealed by our bodily death. All that we think, what constitutes us as humans: our bodies including our brains, our memories, our mind, knowledge, ideas, feelings and experiences fade away like every other material possession, which only was borrowed too. Our real identity, which for us in the space-time only, if at all, is only fragmentary visible, is not only conserved beyond the veil, but let us experience who we really are. _For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. (Paul)_

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The Matrix

Every few months I watch the trilogy "The Matrix" by "The Wachowski Brothers" (1999-2003). Certainly I've watched it more than 5 times. At the beginning First I was fascinated by the action and fight scenes which have drawn me in its spell, but in addition to that I have the feeling that there is something described, what I know intuitively for a long time. On a specific level the film describes our reality.

The basic question of the film is a deeply philosophical. What is reality? Is only what I can perceive with my senses, real, or is my senses only dangled a reality, while "reality" happens on a completely different level. Who is a bit familiar with philosophy, may feel immediately recalled at Plato's "theory of Forms / Ideas". Or even at Buddhism. Real is not what I can perceive with my senses, because everything in time and space is empty because transitory. Life is more than what I can perceive with my senses.

Morpheus also believes that, who is on the search for the by the oracel prophesied chosen one. He is like John the Baptist from the Christian tradition, which prepares the way for the Savior, whom he claims to have found in "Neo". But Neo himself doubts that he is the chosen one. He lacks faith in himself. Only slowly he grows into his role. Just in time, at the last second, the consciousness is awakened in him, I am the chosen one. He must first go through the experience of his own death, to be then brought back to life by the love of Trinity, who has been prophesied by the oracle, that she will fall in love with the chosen one.

What is it about? The machines which first served the humans, have developed so far that they no longer serve the humans but control them. After a great war between humans and machines the sun on which solar energy the machines depend has been obscured, the machines discovered the humans for itselves as an energy source. On giant fields people are wired in a nutrient solution and serve the machines as an energy supplier. For them humans are not more than a battery.

Humans' lives, what they consider to be life, takes place only in the matrix, which is only a virtual space, but in which humans live in the illusion of real life. The not yet wired people who are born in freedom and still know the reality, and the no longer wired, liberated humans live in the city Zion, which is located within the Earth. But Zion is threatened, and the machines are digging with terrifying speed towards Zion through the earth to destroy the last free humans. And they are numerous: 250,000. For every human in Zion a machine. So many? Yes, because that is exactly the thinking of a machine, such as Morpheus noticed. Will the chosen one make it to free the world from the domination of the machines and to save Zion?

The Senator, who draws off two additional ships from the defense line of Zion, so the contact to the oracle can be maintained, knows: It's more than just a physical battle between human and machine. The victory is ultimately decided not by human power, but on a spiritual level.

What is the human? Sure, no energy supplier for machines. But not only brain that moves and lives in virtual worlds through the power of thought. Morpheus, who believes solid like a rock in the chosen one, against all appearances, reveals that the human is not only body and mind but also heart or soul.

The movie "The Matrix" is a child of the Internet age. It describes and warns against the dominance of virtual realities and spaces, as they exist in this form only since the Internet. Moreover, he criticized the alienation of the human in his trinity of body, soul and spirit by the industrialized and technological world. As a further alienation of the human is anticipated, and the computer will keep going on to draw the humans under its spell, "The Matrix" is a criticism of existing situations and a prophetic warning in the future. "The Matrix" is not explicitly a Christian film, even if the savior figure "Neo", who wants to liberate humans from the bondage of machines to their actual humanity, offers such an interpretation. Even if we become acquainted in the figure of the "architect" with the creator of the matrix, so he is only the creator of this virtual reality and not of life itself. The film gets along without a Creator God.

In addition "The Matrix" includes a number of allusions to Buddhism, everything is based on the principle of "cause and effect", "Karma" is mentioned, but interestingly, this causal thinking is only used by the actors of the matrix, the chosen one "Neo" decides against this principle and acts as it tells him his heart: He is against all reason, unreasonable, out of love. He risks his life to save Morpheus against "the truth" of the "oracle", who had "predicted" that either he or Morpheus would stay alive. Neo does not care about this prophecy, but acts like a real Saviour, according to his own heart. And both survive. As the life of his girlfriend Trinity is at stake, and the architect deceives him he could either save Zion - thus 250,000 people - or Trinity, he decides out of love for Trinity. What will be with Zion, I will not reveal here.

As I have already indicated at the beginning, "The Matrix" is a film that has more to offer than technically top-class action cinema, what indeed reveals itself to the viewer only after repeated viewing.

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About God's Absence

Recently I saw "The Grey" by Joe Carnaham with Liam Neeson. Neeson just acted in better films, e.g. Schindlers List as Oskar Schindler.

What is it about? The workers of an oilcompany in Alaska have an aircrash in the wildernis on their way back home. The few who survive try to survive in the cold, inhospitable nature. They are pursued by a pack of wolves and little by little killed or die for other reasons. A film critic wrote: "The Grey, despite moments of sublimity, is as predictable as a funeral. " (David Edelstein, nymag.com)

What still stayed memorable in my memory, is the desperate cry of Neeson against the sky after he lost his last companion:"God do something, earn you that I believe in you."

At the beginning of the film it is shown how Neeson steals away with his rifle from the noisy pub atmosphere into the cold nature to shoot himself a bullet through his head there in the darkness. But something stops him. For a movie an unusual beginning. The key character in the movie: a depressed, potential suicide. Later we learn from a dialogue: "My wife left me."

In several overlays we are taken into Neeson's intellectual world. He remembers his wife, both lying in a bed on a bright summer day, dived in warm light, and she says to him: "Do not be afraid."

Throughout the entire plot you believe that Neeson has been left by his wife - and lives. In the last memory sequence where his wife is found a drip is visible, as you know it from hospitals to give infusions. First now the viewer gets it: Neeson has not therefore wanted to take his life at the beginning of the film, because his wife has left him on purpose, but died from a serious illness. There it is almost a miracle how Neeson pulls himself together after the plane crash, and tries to lead the group of survivors into freedom.

Afterwards I learned on Wikipedia that Neeson lost his wife in real life, three years before the film was made. Perhaps his cry to God: "God do something, earn you that I believe in you." is so credible, because it has an autobiographical background.

Yes God, where are you? Where are you when people are tortured, when children were ill-treated and forced into prostitution, when people's hearts grow cold and stick at nothing? And I could certainly extend the list endless, with millions of individual fates who perished and perish in Auschwitz and todays totalitarianism.

I don't know and cannot give an answer. Not so fast, not in a sweeping blow, which just all satisfies. But I just notice, that the suffering in the world is not a proof that God does not exist.

I remember how I even in deepest suffering didn't lost my mind, but made a deep experience of being, which transcended the images of God in my mind. This are nearly to much words for this, so to speak, existential experience.

Of course that is a very private statement, what I make here and you can hold against me that one cannot prove anything with such a subjective remark. Yes indeed, that you really can't. But life is always subjective, at least it's about the human. When it's about loving, suffering, dying, mourning, doubting, believing. What do you want to say objective about that? You could present statistics about weddings and funerals, about entering and leaving a church. But who is helped by that?

Isn't it strange that even the people who belief in God and suffer at a deadly desease, rather experience comfort and help by their belief, instead of ending their belief in God? Well, you could say: a drowning man will clutch at a straw. But that is it not.

"Earn you, that I believe in you." Neeson says.

Paradoxically this desperate exclamation is already a prayer. Neeson doesn't talk to himself but to God.

When we ask: "Where are you God in all this suffering?" we also have to ask: "Where are you, human? Where is your humanity?" Insteed we are woolf to the other human (homo homini lupus (Hobbes)) and point accusing to God, where we don't follow our task which is simply and easy to be a human.

It's not about putting off sufferers to an afterlife, like in ancient times the poor, where they will get their just pay, but when we ask for God, when we speak of God, we also talk about another dimension of life which reaches over the bodyly death. You may call this dimension as eternity, or you may speak about the immortality of the soul. I like to use the term identity, which the human keeps beyond death. How this identity exactly looks like I understandably cannot explain closer.

The question of the suffering in this world before God's face, gets a different perspective, if one assumes that this is often wonderful, often beautiful, but also painful and tearful life - just as caterpillar-life - is terminated by death, and will be raised in the dimension of a butterfly's life.

Since a very long time in the Judeo-Christian tradition is a touch of immortality in the air. First vague, but then over the centuries more and more clear, the hope for a life after death has been developed. Who belongs to the eternal God, whom God does not surrender to death.

But who now belongs to? Really only the super pious? Certainly not.

Sometimes I think that as a selection criterion the heartiness of the individual human is deciding, so the degree of love, which he has brought toward his next. Then again, I think, how can there be a measure of love? And God who loves us beyond measure, how should he have a selection criterion of who belongs and who does not?

Then my heart wants a hell for the Hitlers and Stalins, the child molesters and torturers, so that everything is just and the victims are expiated. But vengeance is such a thing. You cannot make a disgraced and killed life again safe and sound, by killing the offender. And then you do the same as what the offender has done: you have extinguished a life.

We realize: beyond death, one can only believe and suspect, anything binding provable cannot be said. That's like trying to prove God.

I asked how all the suffering in this world is possible, and a loving God stands aside and does nothing, whereas we would have acted, if we had the power. I gave an insight into personal borderline experiences in which I experienced God existentially. I pointed out that people in suffering experience by their faith rather comfort and help than no longer to believe in God from one day to another. Then I asked you to consider, that we often give to quickly God the responsibility for the state of things, instead of fulfilling our responsibility as human beings and act human. After that I put our small, time-limited human existence into the great space of eternity, and tried to achieve a change of perspective that makes the suffering indeed not painless, but perhaps more acceptable.

What I have still not even mentioned is that life just is as it is. And this life flows between the banks of joy and sorrow. (Nisargadatta Maharaj)

Whether I do believe or do not believe in God, I'm born into this life, in this body, from these parents, in these social circumstances, with this gene pool, and now it's up to me what I'm doing with it. Whether I am physically disabled or have the body of a high-performance athlete, it depends on me, what I make myself out of my life. We can last a lifetime cursing our fate like a fishwife, raise bitter our fists to the sky, blame God for everything and everyone, but to live a fullfiled life, lies in our own hands. It's about how we meet the challenge of our lives. May the changes be distributed differently, something always goes, with or without a handicap.

I often talk with older people, who often have a physical disability but are still in good spirits and full of life. They have made friends with their lives. "I'm really still fine. See over there, the blind man, If I had no more eyes light, that would be bad. "

They have got used to become old, maybe even hobble on two prostheses through life and still be happy. Such people are real life artist!

Have I now answered the question for God, who seems to be absent, when one looks at the suffering in this world, finally satisfactorily? Yes - at least as far as I'm concerned.

For this question, everybody can only answer for him/herself. And not once and for all.

And if I sit tomorrow paralyzed in a wheelchair, the questions may start again. But such is life.

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Credo: God in Creation

I believe in God, emptiness and life, who loves us.

One with the universe, he is not absorbed by it.

Who is free, because his spirit blows where he wants.

One with Christ, we see his fullness.

I believe in Christ, God's real human, who frees us.

One with God, he was light in darkness.

Who was crucified, because darkness hates light.

One with God, he lives in his light.

I believe in God, spirit and life, who comforts us.

One with God, we become real humans.

Who is in us, therefore we are light in darkness.

One with God, we live in his light.

To put this mystery "God" in words we say: God is emptiness. Emptiness is the largest, deepest and widest, what I can say of him at that moment. And this emptiness is a creative emptiness.

Would God not be, no life would be. In every moment God is creative and vivid. The pulse of the creative life of God is pulsing through the whole universe like through a big body. Even more: God's creativity is the origin of our lives, of human and animal, stone and tree, our milky-way and far away galaxies, the origin of space and time, but God himself is without origin. Would God have an origin, we would say that God has a beginning. What has a beginning also has an end. God is eternal, that means God's reality, although he pulses with his life through the temporal universe, is of his own kind (sui generis). That God is life, could be easily misunderstood, when one think, God is life as we usually know it.

But do we really know life? To be born, eat and drink, grow up, take up a profession, raise children, grow old and die?! Therefore we say a lot more about God: God loves, us - and what he creates out of himself in his love. God's emptiness, God's creativity that arises in and out of this emptiness, that is new again and again, is his love.

Well, how do we know that this is so? We know that first through the one real human: Christ. For in him this love becomes visible and tangible for us humans. A human like you and me. He was so much one with God, that some of his contemporaries have seen God in him and through him.

To ask: how is this possible? How is such a human possible where we still know the people? is obvious. But this is God's mystery, which we humans cannot understand. This is the mystery of Christ. Just this much: He was open and empty for God.

God's emptiness that is his always new arising love, is the space for the eternal possibilities of God. And therefore we say: God's emptiness is his fullness.

And this fullness has found space in Christ. But the fullness of God, the fullness of his love, has not enough space in one human. It is flowing over, out and out, so the humans have experienced God through Christ.

To experience God through Christ, means to be freed of regulations, laws and commandments which are man-made. To follow him means to follow him to freedom. To follow him into freedom means to become empty. To become empty of images of God and images of humans, to become empty of worries and dreams regarding the past and the future.

In this space God's love can grow and bloom. Another word for God's love, which came through Christ in this world, is light. Light dispels the darkness. God's light is his life, his emptiness and his love. But God's light is not like sunlight or the light of a candle, but God's light is darkness. It glows within us, it comforts, gives us peace and makes us whole. It grows and flowers inside. God's light is his spirit, his emptiness, his love, his fullness.

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Credo: God in Christ

I believe in God, emptiness and life, who loves us.

One with the universe, he is not absorbed by it.

Who is free, because his spirit blows where he wants.

One with Christ, we see his fullness.

I believe in Christ, God's real human, who frees us.

One with God, he was light in darkness.

Who was crucified, because darkness hates light.

One with God, he lives in his light.

I believe in God, spirit and life, who comforts us.

One with God, we become real humans.

Who is in us, therefore we are light in darkness.

One with God, we live in his light.

Because I believe in Christ, I can again believe in the humans. I can again believe in the humans, although I know myself. My weaknesses, my selfishness, my doubt, my unbelief. Sometimes I walk through my life like through dense fog, 'm hopeless where I should have to believe. But I have not to believe if I cannot. For since Christ I know that God is different from us humans. Around here: do something for me, then I do something for you. Stick to the religious precepts and commandments, than God loves you. But with this idea of God Jesus makes once and for all an end. Because Jesus knew: God is like a father to the humans, because he is our Creator, and he loves us unconditionally. Like Christ lived in the consciousness: I am one with the eternal God, so we are originally intended to be one with God. But we are just not aware of it. We are like the prodigal son in the parable of the same name, who equipped with a great heritage, leaves his father and goes out into the colorful, enticing glittering world. Selfishly we live greedy our lives at the costs of others and at the costs of creation, hold for life what is impermanent and dead and take us our lives. What a crazy confusion: We take what we can get: money, power, success and sex, because we take having for being and thereby we mulct us of the real life that we can only live in unity with God.

Christ frees us to real life, in which he not only exemplifies this life to us, but is this life _himself_ in his unity with God. Christ is selflessly empty for the fullness of God, and is thus only a real human, really himself, because God can be anything in him. He finds his identity in the fact that God is identical with him. At, in and through Jesus we learn who and what God is like.

To believe in Christ means to follow in his footsteps to freedom. One says: "The longest journey begins with a single step" and "the journey is the destination". Once we have gone off the essential is already done. We remember: the Father's heart loves us just as we are. Therefore, any ambitious or fearful effort, any attempt to please God in any way or to make it right for him, is not only pointless, but only makes obvious that we have not yet understood how God means it with us.

A human like Christ, who knows God like no other is perceived by most in this world as a spinner and troublemaker. Even the most pious believe him to be a blasphemer, because he leaves the worn out path of the Jewish religion and questions the existing laws and regulations. If people listen to his sermons and begin to believe him, someone like Jesus is dangerous for the existing system.

But his sermons are the least what the powerful have to fear. Those who are in power only perceive the apparent and hear only what they are able to hear. They think only in power categories and cling dried out to the religious status quo.

The ordinary people who have powerlessly nothing to lose look deeper. There is one who is different. One who is not crazy different, but one who is different in a good way. We notice this, because he does not only talk differently, but because he deals with us differently. Suddenly the whore experiences attention, the merciless tax collector grace, which is leprous becomes a Who and is healed by the love of Christ.

Christ, who not only preaches a new time, the newly dawning Kingdom of God, but also embodies himselfself, exemplifies God's righteousness to the humans in flesh and blood. God's justice always consists of love and not formally to adhere to laws. It's God always all about the hearts of humans, but they misunderstood him. "Those who love God keep his commandments." they have turned into "Who keeps the commandments loves God." But you can formally hold even externally with a cold heart the commandments without that God means anything to you, to have a religious reputation among the people. And that seems to have been the case at the time of Jesus in the religious elite. Such a religious system that has a similiar hunger for power than the Roman occupying power, even if the religious leaders pretend to be pious, can only be described as darkness. How unbearable and threatening for the powerful must have been the occurrence of Christ.

Who makes his political deals in the darkness of dark backrooms for a long time, do not notice how much his life space decreases with the subtle progressive fossilization of his heart. He even believes the achieved status quo to be the will of God.

But who joins himself open and trusting with Jesus like his disciples, to whom Jesus is light in darkness. The traditionalists, however, try to preserve the original for life and death, because they cannot realize that the new, what is dawning in Jesus is precisely that what they are actually looking to preserve. With a good conscience and a right-believing heart they do not recognize the one who revealed God's heart to them, but for fear of him, who is threatening their Orthodox identity that only turns around themselves, they beat the savior Christ to the cross to hang on their false image of God, because their false identities are still all what is left.

Therefore it is tragic that they _just kill the one_ , who actually represents their salvation, because he exemplifies with his life how God means it to them. They should be able to jump over their own shadows. Because of fear they take the last possibility, wash their hands clean in the stream of misunderstood tradition, and murder the one who opens the door for them to God.

Naturally Christ's death was a big catastrophe for his friends. Those, who hoped to be freed by Jesus of the Roman occupying power, probably left him earlier, because they recognized, that that what Jesus meant with his speech of the new realm of God just was about something else than pagan power. But his real friends...

Actually, one has to marvel how it came to be that Christ after his only three years lasting public activity was not filed by the world's history after his death, because there were still other messiahs at the time of Jesus of which we know nothing anymore. You may marvel how it comes that a small group of simple no-names has developed into a world-church that tries to go in the footsteps of the carpenter.

And indeed, something happens that probably the fewest have expected, even they knew Jesus and his deeds and words. There, something wonderful happens. The human God brings Jesus, the human, out of death. He let him rise from the dead. This seemingly unbelievable cannot be proved. But for those who know Christ and those who know him, know God, it is almost a natural matter of course, that God doesn't leave in death the human he loves, but raise him into the dimension of eternity.

It is told how the disciples have personal contact with Jesus after they found the grave empty, talk to him, even touch his wounds with their own hands, and how Jesus breaks the bread for the disciples who go to Emmaus, like before his death, who don't recognize him and that he suddenly disappears in front of them. What really has happened, if some story is only a clarification of what the disciples experienced inwardly after the death of Jesus, we do not know.

Anyway, that what has happened after Jesus' death, made of despondent and desperate people, those who have not only brought happily the name of Christ into the world, who even fearless let themselves killed for this name, but such who have completely been changed by God's Spirit - like Paul, who was a persecutor of Christians and became a follower of Christ. That the matter of Jesus continues, is in God's hands. Even after Jesus' death God has not changed and remains faithfully to his humans.

Christ, who has gone up to heaven after his raising, now sits at the right hand of God, which means that he also can stand up as human for the humans by God after his death. On the other hand this means that the humanity of God is not only a three-year episode in world history that has passed after the death of Jesus, but God remains as Jesus has exemplified him to us.

Thereby it does little to the point, how the ancient imagery express real space. The ancient mythological idea "God in heaven above - the human on the earth below" is so deeply rooted in our hearts that even the Copernican turn is barely able to reach the deep layers of our psychic imagery. So both may coexist: our knowledge of the astronomical facts, and our feeling that God is up there somewhere invisible in heaven.

What happened next? The disciples of Jesus concluded from the statements of Jesus that he would come back to earth again in their lifetime in order to take them to heaven. That are ideas which we hardly can understand today. But the Parousia of Christ did not happen and they had to settle down in the world as Christians, as such they were perceived and named by the world.

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Credo: God in Humans

I believe in God, emptiness and life, who loves us.

One with the universe, he is not absorbed by it.

Who is free, because his spirit blows where he wants.

One with Christ, we see his fullness.

I believe in Christ, God's real human, who frees us.

One with God, he was light in darkness.

Who was crucified, because darkness hates light.

One with God, he lives in his light.

I believe in God, spirit and life, who comforts us.

One with God, we become real humans.

Who is in us, therefore we are light in darkness.

One with God, we live in his light.

It is remarkable that we still have today in 2014 the mind and and the energy to tell here and almost everywhere in the world that stories, that are handed down to us in the Bible about God and Jesus Christ. Why is that? The reason is that they not only report the past, what is perhaps still of interest to historians, but these ancient texts dealing with timeless issues that affect us people living today in our existence.

Who am I? Is there a God? How can I still live today in a world of materialism at all? Am I not more than my genes? What is life all about? Why isn't my hunger for life satisfied by what I buy? Why do I feel stressed and empty, like burned out?

Many of us are looking in the wrong places, some for a lifetime. Many try to numb their inner emptiness through work and pleasure. We have lost the right measure. Many benumb themselves with the socially accepted drug alcohol. When Obama thought out loud about the legalization of Cannabis, he cited studies that have shown that the consumption of Cannabis is not worse than alcohol consumption, something like a murmur seemed to go through the world with the tenor, yes then Cannabis cannot be so bad. But that just shows how blunted we are to a drug which is widely accepted in society and is advertised publicly. Many young people have lost themselves in the drug Crystal, from which they might even hope to get mystical experiences, but at what cost?

In addition, we hardly see ourselves in a position to correct the distorted image of the reality that the television burns for hours every day in our heads, because we allow it. We let us cheat: happy is who has money and can buy this or that. Benumbed and hypnotized we expose ourselves to these daily brainwashing and are incapacitated to perceive our own reality, our own needs and feelings. Instead, we suck other people's feelings from talk shows and soap operas with which we identify ourselves and live a replacement life by believing what there is played for us. We live, but what we think, feel and do has hardly anything to do with ourselves. Since it is no wonder that we hardly can know and understand ourselves. We have forgotten where we come from, who we are, and that we must die. Life is not a 24/7-sale-show.

It costs something to find our lives. Some first need to lose all their material possessions by a natural disaster to realize: Main thing, we are still alive. Yes, and then? Business as usual? Or do we use the incurred loss and question our current concept of life? Do we now realize how much we have defined us through our possession?

And so any loss, whether the mentioned material, the loss of our job or that of a loved one, throws us back on ourselves and our own mortality. Some are beginning to ask for God. Some lose their belief in God or their belief is changing and deepening.

The crucifixion of Jesus must have been a traumatic experience of loss for the disciples of Jesus. And who him-/ herself has lost a him or her beloved one will be able to understand when they say: we have died with Christ. This feeling probably is acquainted with every mourner: being paralyzed from death and grief, as if oneself is buried down there. How surprising, how new this certainty of the disciples, no, Jesus is not dead and out of the world, but Jesus is risen and lives forever in the presence of God. The same Holy Spirit of God who was in Jesus is in us now and leave us not in death, but let us resurrect with Christ. This is not easy to understand, even for those who believe in God. We know from our everyday language the phrase: the deceased lives on in his children. Perhaps this saying has its origin there.

Their experience of comfort, strength and vitality has reminded the disciples of the promises of Jesus again: "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them." (Matthew 18:20), "I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth..." (John 14:16-17).

Yes, Jesus is alive in his disciples by God's Spirit. That's something different then to say that the deceased lives on in his children. Because that only means that he lives on genetic or in his offspring's memory with what he has said and done. When we say Jesus lives by God's Spirit inside us, we mean a dimension that transcend our understanding, and in which we may take part. Those who go the Jesus-Way have experienced for centuries, that God's Spirit makes us similar to Christ.

At the beginning I asked, why we still have a mind and the energy to say 2000 year old Bible texts into the present. That depends on the same experience what have already made the disciples shortly after Jesus' resurrection, that God lives as Holy Spirit in us. These statements must sound absurd and adventurous for those who are not Christians. But they are really natural to whom, who is able to believe in God. He experiences God, where he is surprised by himself, where others hate him and he is unable to return the hate and can only feel love and understanding for his opponent. Where he suddenly hears and sees himself saying and doing things, he would not have expected by himself, whether he intervenes with courage against discrimination, or he risks his life for a drowning child. Or we read the stories in the Bible that are written in the same spirit and we understand the context, we see daylight, and we are personal touched inwardly. These are all examples, which we can normally experience on a human level, but where we realize that God had a hand in it.

Many questions regarding the Holy Spirit of God could be asked like, if only Christians _have_ the Holy Spirit (even so to ask seems wrong to me), because they say, that the Spirit of God drives that are children of God (Romans 8:14), or also so-called non-Christians?

I can't answer these questions and will not even try, because experience has shown that such attempts only lead to wild speculation, which bring nothing to anyone and harm rather than help. I just believe that the Spirit of God is free and blows where he wants. (see John 3:8)

However, I think it is much more important to make aware to those who follow the Jesus-Way - including myself - that now _we are_ instead of Jesus, God's faces in this world. The humans do not need a religious zeal, no fundamentalist insistence on an absolute truth claim, but our humanity.

At all times the hope and certainty were burning in Christians, that they live on after their physical death together with Christ in the presence of God. The first Christians even imagined that they be turned alive at the second coming of Christ and will be raptured with him in heaven.

The latter may seem hard to imagine, especially if you immerse in the picture language of Revelation, where it is described how Jesus comes riding up on a white horse from heaven high. Well, so one has imagined in antiquity, as the world goes down. And for centuries humans were strenghtened and encouraged by these images during the persecutions of Christians.

The modern man may smile at such statements and mean very little to them. But it is obvious that the earth, which we spurn ecologically, sometime breaks apart. Since the invention of the atomic bomb and climate change the Apokalyse has come terrifyingly close. Therefore it is worthwhile to delve into the - sometimes difficult to understand - symbolic language of Revelation.

We should not fool ourselves, even if there has been great progresses in the Western world by the achievements of science and improved living conditions to prolong our life span, that we continue to live forever in this body. Most unfortunately, we are able to displace our death. We push the idea of death aside, live a superficial life without appreciating life properly. We get upset over little things and forget how precious life is. But even the most fulfilled and conscious lived life on this earth sometime comes to an end. With the same belief with which I believe in God, I believe that the human is more than his body and has a soul or identity that is hidden in him invisible to the human eye, and eternal. But it is more than a belief, it is a kind of certainty, of the same quality as I also believe in God. A certainty that goes beyond a purely intellectual "hold-as-true" of any biblical statements about life after death. This certainty is a kind of experience of being that can hard be put into words. Just as if I am talking to a person, and I begin to see through his facade, and I suddenly have the feeling: Gosh, I know you. But not unmasking and compromising in a negative sense but realising in a positive sense: You and I are not so different, although we apparently we don't like in this each other here in this conversation, I feel who you really are. On another level we are even as humans one through Christ. All this is done non-verbally and in rare moments.

I know the people, and especially myself, and I know how multifaceted are the life and individual life stories, and I am wary to divide people into good and evil, in Christians or non-Christians, in redeemed and unredeemed. I know Buddhists and Muslims who are more convincing in their humanity than many Christians. Can it not be that they confess in their own way and with their piety God, even if they, like the Buddhists, do not believe in God at all? And do not search those who mistake having with being in their own manner actually God, but only that they don't have yet understood that? We Christians should not make our hearts too tight and should not think to have a patent on truth.

Sometimes I guess something of God's greatness and the fact that, as I see him is just an eye-blink, as he really is. And if you try to put together all experiences of all humans, who belong to a religion or not, it seems to me that we cannot fathom God's depths. The different religions appear to me like facets of a diamond, which although gets warmed through and touched by the light of the sun cannot hold it and reflect the mutually complementary light of God, each in its own way, in a variety of colors.

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The freedom of the heart comes from the heart of silence.

Who or what is the human? Who or what am I? Do we ask this question consciously? Or are we driven in the drive of society? To ask this question is a good beginning. We are aware, when we try to concentrate us seriously: "Who am I?", that this doesn't work with a MP3-player on the head because it's just hard to concentrate with loud music. When we are thinking about something, we say: "Be quiet for a moment!", when someone is disturbing us, while we wanted to be alone in silence. But then, when we get a moment of rest, because we find somewhere a place to be alone, suddenly it's unbelievable hard to concentrate to the question: "Who am I?" Because then we recognize what a fluttering thing our brains are. Constantly some thoughts and images are arising in our heads and we think: "I don't have time, even so much to do, I can't just sit here doing nothing." This way we are children of our time, driven from outside and from inside. We are at the mercy of the demands of society: "Am I to fat, to thin, am I good looking, do I have enough money, will I lose my job, what did the boss mean with his overtone, why didn't show my man any reaction to my new dress, maybe he is cheating me, am I still attractive for him, because I have become older, am I still attractive at all?

These are all thoughts and questions that arise in our minds and hearts and make us restless and distract us from the real question: "Who am I?"

When we are any longer in silence - I don't mean that we have to meditate instead of 10 or 20 minutes, 30 minutes or 40 minutes, but I think that we have to deal for years with this issue in order to come to a result, from afar looms an answer.

So how then is the result? Yes, the result might be something like this: There is no result. Nothing you can name with words. And now, because the question is broken, I'm aware that I cannot answer the question with the mind. Therefore not, because I am more than my mind. And more than my body. But on the way of silence something else has happened, when I get rid of myself, because I'am "already dead" for myself, then I really live.

Another word for silence is emptiness. The more I get rid of myself, the more God can be something in me. That means John, when he says: "He must increase, but I must decrease." (Jn 3:30) That is the way to my actual, real being a human. The way of healing. That is the way, which Christ is gone.

"Who am I?" Christ says: _"I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it." (Rv 2:17)_

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Jesus hangs on the cross

Jesus hangs on the cross. Unthinkable!

He was accused to be a glutton and a drunkard, because of his joy of life, a friend of tax collectors and prostitutes. No ascetic like John, who lived more badly of honey and locusts in the desert. For many of his contemporaries Jesus was \- as we would say today - a punk, who took it easy. And now this! The feast is over. The young, full of life man is betrayed and sold.

What are already 30 years? So it should not have come. A human who wouldn't even harm a fly and who feels attracted to whom, who are the bottom of society. "Being religious is something else," so thought the establishment. And "Birds of a feather, flock together". But Jesus does not care about his reputation. He does not look at the bad image of a human, but he looks deeper. He knows the humans, see their inner turmoil and their being driven by lust and money, "Listen yet, so you're not. I see you as God sees you. Turn back from your wrong way. Just as you live you are alienated from yourself and God. No, I don't condemn you. Do return, God meant you different. "Jesus lives with the outcasts, touches the untouchables and makes them healthy in body and soul. Jesus, who is one of us, and yet quite different than we are. He is magnanimous, where we are small minded, he is free from himself, because God is his only drive, where we are captured, because drive and money dominate our lives. Jesus, the real human in which God becomes reality, while we have only an inkling, hardly hope, that we are actually quite different than how we live.

But the time of Jesus comes to an end. It was almost too good to be true. Jesus, a foretaste of "heaven on earth", a moment of the "dawning kingdom of God" is obtained from the practical constraints of society. In the end, the bureaucrats of religion triumph and agitate the mob against Jesus. The mass is manipulable. First they praised the miracle worker Jesus, as he is shown to them by Pilate - no, this way no hero looks - the "Hosanna" quickly becomes to "Crucify him." Another one is released: Barabbas, a rebel and a murderer - a real man, a winner - so one is wanted by the mob. But Jesus...

Jesus experiences all facets of human life. In Gethsemane he struggles in tears with God, abandoned by his friends, who prefer to sleep. He begs them to stay awake. But it does not help, they do not know what hour has come. They fall asleep again, while their Messiah suffers fear of death. How bitter. His friends leave him alone. After the tortures of arrest and questioning, he carries the beam of his cross to the place of execution - spat upon, mocked, betrayed and sold out of all. How lonely can a human be?

There is nothing anymore in him, not a glimmer of hope, no faith. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Even God who was everything for Jesus, seems to have turned away from him. Why God? Why don't you act? Why don't you send your angels and take this one human, your son, from the cross?

But Jesus does not get any extra treatment. He must taste the bitterness of life to the dregs. Being afraid, to feel abandoned by God, cry, lose face, suffer. On the cross. A human who is at the end. For has he all forgotten what he preached? If even his belief is dieing down? They don't understand him. They kill him. But God...

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Jesus is risen

Jesus is dead. They killed him on the cross. Him, the one human. The women who want to anoint Jesus to pay him the last honour, were only busy with one thing on their way to the tomb: How do we get rolled away the great stone which closes the tomb? Worries. As they get closer they are surprised, the stone is already rolled away.

"As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.

"Don't be alarmed," he said. "You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him.

But go, tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.' "

Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid." (Mark 16:5-8)

The women experience the unbelievable to the gooseflesh. The people wanted to put an end to Jesus, but God puts an end to death and arouses Jesus from the dead. Since Jesus' resurrection we can know by faith that the human is more than flesh and blood. Death cannot harm our real identity anymore, for Christ is risen.

Originally the Gospel of Mark ended with "because they were afraid". "But that's not a nice ending" thought the editors of the Gospel in the 2nd century and they added still other reports of the Risen from the other Gospels. But we just cannot prove the resurrection of Jesus, because it goes beyond our sensory perception. Our hands cannot grasp, our eyes cannot believe what there is happening, for God's reality shatters our everyday world of experience.

Here Mark is silent, where the other Evangelists seem still want to prove the resurrection of Jesus with many words. Mark is silent and keeps the mystery of Christ. In view of the resurrection he is like Moses approaching the burning bush, and to whom God speaks:

"Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground." And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. (Ex 3)

When God's reality breaks into our little everyday lives, when God's eternity lets the time stand still, fear and trembling enter us - but also great joy.

Christ, You live.

Death is only a gate.

Eternity Your being.

The cross lies like a shadow behind You.

Joy Your garment.

The darkness runs away from You.

Love Your nature.

Christ, You live.

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