Letter to Bishop Spong...

Shirley Krogstad from Hendersonville, North Carolina, writes:


If you had to name one "belief" of yours that has evolved or grown the most
over the last ten years, what would it be?.............. Dear Shirley,


Since my whole belief system is deeply interrelated that is not an easy
question to answer. I like the story told about an elderly bishop who remarked,
"The older I get, the more deeply I believe but the less beliefs I have." That
is exactly what I feel.

To answer your question more specifically, however, I believe it would be the
way I think about God. God is no longer a person, a being or an entity to me.
God is rather a presence in whom, to use words attributed to St. Paul, "I live
and move and have my being." The "old man in the sky" was the first image to
go, then the heavenly judge who kept record books and finally the father figure
who desired praise and whose mercy I implored. The invasive, external heavenly
deity faded and new images began to intrude themselves into my consciousness.

The interesting thing to me was that while these old images were fading, the
God intensity within me remained steady and steadfast. Today I am a
God-intoxicated person, but my definition of God is anything but crisp and well
defined. I struggle to find words big enough to use when I try to talk about
God. God to me is now more of an experience of transcendence, or perhaps the
source of life, the source of love and the ground of all being. An experience
to me is vastly different from a being who might be described externally.
People hear these concepts sometimes as simply words. I hear them, however as a
call to transcend all human limits and all human boundaries. God to me is a
call to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that I can be.

A redefined Jesus still stands at the center of my God experience. He is not
the one sent to be my savior, redeemer or rescuer. Jesus is not to God what
Clark Kent is to Superman, a deity masquerading as a human being. He is rather a
God presence through whom I am empowered to be open to the life, love and being
that flows through me.

I now call myself a mystic because in my understanding of God I have gone
beyond words into a kind of wordless wonder, awe and mystery. This is not where
I was a decade ago. I doubt if it will be where I am a decade from now, but it
is where I am today and it represents the evolving, growing frontier of where I
was ten years ago.
Thanks for asking.
John Shelby Spong