The Absence of Peace of Mind

Great quote sent to me by my friend Kit from a book she just finished reading:

"The call of the God experienced in Christ is simply a call to be all that each of us is -- a call to offer, through the being of our humanity, the gift of God to all people by building a world in which everyone can live more fully, love more wastefully and have the courage to be all that they can be. That is how we live out the presence of God.

God is about living, about loving and about being. The call of Jesus is thus not a call to be religious. It's not a call to escape life's traumas, to find security, to possess peace of mind. All of those things are invitations to a life-contracting idolatry. The call of God through Jesus is a call to be fully human, to embrace insecurity without building protective fences, to accept the absence of peace of mind as a requirement of humanity.

It is to see that God is the experience of life, love and being who is met at the edges of an expanded humanity. That is surely what the author of the Fourth Gospel meant when he quoted Jesus as proclaiming that his purpose was that they might have life and have it abundantly."

- John Shelby Spong, Jesus for the non-religious : recovering the divine at the heart of the human