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Breath of Life

Started by David Pinnegar, January 25, 2013, 04:47:29 PM

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David Pinnegar

Hi!

The silence of this forum recently is testimony to the indifference and irrelevance perceived by people towards organs and the places that they inhabit.

I have been quiet recently in gestation of a book trying to excite people about the God of Life. For the number of people who turn up at funerals, and hope that they might not go to hell just because they think they have not been bad, it's apparent that God to most people is only a god of death and the afterlife that perhaps they are worried might even exist.

But God is not the god of death, nor an irrelevant god of nothing in a sphere we cannot see. John Chapter 1, and Islam itself, tells us that God is the God of Life.

I'm trying to bring the God of Life alive in the book possibly so that people can bring God alive in their lives.

If any forum members might be interested in seeing a draft, or drafts in the course of writing, I'd happily send them a copy on email.

Most people, I suspect, try to envisage God as a being. A being is a person, to them, and "Our Father _which_ art in heaven" has been forgotten and changed to "who". Whatever, which or who is an object. But the being who is "I am" is not "I" but "I am". This is a verb, a being that does something, a process. This may allow for other perspectives of god which may be more universal than our personification has permitted.

In the course of writing, a superb book has appeared on my desk - "The Gifts of the Jews - How a tribe of desert nomads changed the way everyone thinks and feels" and it is fascinating. Whilst I had concluded in the need to look for God as a process, which we see everywhere and universally happening, Thomas Cahill also makes the case for God as a verb, and in particular as a conjugation of the verb "to be". Yahweh, he points out, is misunderstood as Jahovah and is better considered as YHWH.

Perhaps as you read this, breathe in through your mouth. As you do so the passage of air might suck your tongue towards the roof of your mouth. Breathe out. Can you now hear EeaHey, YhWh? The breath of life.

This is so fascinating as Edmund Szekerley translating John in "The Peace of Jesus Christ" translates the first verses as "In the beginning was the sound" . . .

The sound of the breath of life.

All those people who are having their bodies deep frozen when they die . . . really how are any of them going to be reanimated. Does anyone really think that "scientists" can breathe into them the breath of life?

Perhaps imagine that life on earth is extinguished, perhaps as in Pompeii, and in 10000 years time visitors from another planet dig us up. Imagine the couple engaged in flagrante to be found as merely a confused conjunction of bones. We don't know what life forms from outer space will be digging us up in 10000 years time but they might not have bodies like ours, nor have any understanding of sex. How could they possibly imagine the bond of flesh that connects the lovers?

It's in this way that in not passing on to our children and grandchildren the idea of God nor, even if we do, the tradition and understanding of how to read a parable, that we are leaving to our future generations only the driest of bones from which they will find it difficult to imagine, let alone decode, the fullness of life.

Best wishes,

David P