FFWPU Seminars 08/24/11 part 2

Died and I realised that because my body dominated my mind, my body in that sense killed the inspiration. I realised that's why I couldn't write anything else, and it took me ages to get back to the point where I could pick up the train of thought. So, religious life then is all about getting this mind-body unity. The mind is subject, the body is object. Learning how to invest all these natural desires and make them spiritual is essential, so they don't become greedy, lazy, or lustful. Instead, all these physical desires become invested with spiritual meaning and become expressions of beauty, truth, and goodness. I said, you know, God then is a God of emotion, intellect, and will. Emotion is about how we feel, and we also have emotional intellect and will. If we grow up and become mature and complete, we become one with God. Our feelings align with how God feels, and our natural desires to pursue beauty with our intellect lead us to think and naturally pursue truth. At our will, if it's in line with God, then a mature person naturally pursues goodness. A good person naturally creates beauty and appreciates beauty, pursues truth, and wants to live a good life and create goodness. This then is the fulfilment of the first blessing.

To become like a true teacher, I said whatever we think, whether we like it or not, we create and express our character by everything we think, say, and do. Let's have a look at some people who've engaged in a bit of self-creation. Take the story of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, if you remember where he created himself, except the things he did didn't appear on his face like they do for normal people but actually appeared in this painting. All the bad things he did then appeared in the painting. You can see a person engaged in a bit of body sculpture, self-creation. Sorry, what I said is not really photoshopped. I spent ages trying to find the most extreme example I could on Google. Maybe I should find one a little bit less extreme but more believable. Of course, ladies tend to decorate their faces to create a certain kind of impression, and through creating an impression, they elicit a certain kind of reaction in people. It's all about post-modern creating oneself. That bloke down at the bottom there again created himself in that way, projecting a certain kind of image. That's on the outside, but it's also the same on the inside. We are very much responsible for creating the kind of person that we are and that we become.

The second blessing, to multiply, is the ability to create a family. Whether we like it or not, we form relationships with other people, and often these relationships are an expression of the kind of person that we are. A certain kind of person we associate with. I get my glasses out here; I'm getting a bit old. Anyway, this is a traditional Christian teaching as well. Maximus the Confessor said the love of God and the love of men are not two loves but aspects of the same unifying love. The family then is a place where we experience love. You're born as a child, a baby, and we experience love from our parents. As children, we naturally respond to that love, responding to the smiles we're given. It's just natural; we don't think about it. We just naturally respond to the love that we receive from our parents and siblings. We learn to love our parents, and if we have brothers and sisters, we learn to relate to our older and younger siblings in a certain kind of way. It's through the relationships we have with our parents and siblings that contributes a huge amount to the way in which our character and personality develop.

Partly, it's to do with our genes, but a huge amount is to do with the quality of the relationships we have with our parents and siblings. This forms the kind of person that we are, the kind of script and ideas we have running around in our heads. If we feel unconditionally loved, appreciated, and valued by our parents, we feel loved. We feel like our life has value, that we are worth loving and deserve to be loved. But if, on the other hand, we don't feel loved and cared about by our parents, we feel a certain coldness. There, we feel a certain lack of self-esteem and self-value. A lot of the way we feel about ourselves comes from what we feel from our parents and also what we hear our parents saying about us. This idea has run around in my head for ages. It's this love that God wants us to experience in the family. Through love, we experience the greatest joy as a husband and wife, or parents and children, or brothers and sisters. We can experience the greatest joy.

As John Christopher said, when husband and wife are united in marriage, they are no longer seen as something earthly but as the image of God himself. The image of God isn't any single individual; in traditional Christian doctrine, the husband and wife each express the masculinity and femininity of God. So, husband and wife together are the image of God. Not just a man or a woman, but united in oneness and complementary oneness—that is the image of God. One of the most surprising things I came across in the New Testament was this from the letter of John: if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is made complete in us. What's the implication of that? If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is made complete in us. The implication is that without us, God is incomplete. Without us, God's love cannot be completed. That is really amazing. The almighty, infinite, all-powerful, all-knowing God who created the universe cannot have his love complete without us. Isn't that amazing? Without an object to respond to his love, this then is the value of marriage and the value of having a family. Through having a family, we can experience God's love.

I remember my mother would say to me, 'You'll never understand how much we worried about you, how much we've done for you, how much we care about you, etc., until you have children of your own.' It's true; we can never understand God's love for us as a parent until we have children of our own. Then we can think, 'Oh, I must have driven God round the bend.' Now I can understand; I must have driven my parents crazy. How do they have the patience to do all this? It's only when one has children oneself that one starts to appreciate one's own parents more deeply. It's only having children of our own that we understand God more deeply. If God wants us to understand and become like him, we have to have the same sort of experiences that he has had. Then we can understand his heart, and we can understand him, and he can understand us. He wants us to be able to experience everything that he's experienced so that we have the capacity to have this kind of deep relationship with him. He has to put us through this kind of course. Through fulfilling these three blessings, we can become like him. We can become godlike and have the capacity to have that kind of relationship with God. So, that's why the family business is important. To fulfil the second blessing, it's about developing human relationships in the family, friendships, and also at work, in society, and the community. All sorts of relationships we have with other people are opportunities where we can develop our capacity.