Have we forgotten the
divine within everyone?

Speaking of Religion
The Rev. Dr. Tim Griffin

God became man so that man might become man — St. Athanasius
God sees His own form in the mirror of man … since all the divine names are ascribed to him — Ibn al-‘Arabi

It seems that each religious tradition has a sense that human nature, and indeed each human being, is inherently divine.
St. Paul, for example, admonished the early Christians to "put on Christ," and he maintained that "it is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me."
We see a similar understanding in the account of creation from the book of Genesis, where it is said that human beings are created in God’s image and likeness. Nor is this insight limited to the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).
We find much the same idea in the well known Hindu assertion that "Atman (the human soul) is Brahman (God)" and in the Buddha’s exclamation at the moment of his enlightenment: "Wonder of wonders! Intrinsically all living beings are Buddhas (enlightened beings) endowed with wisdom and virtue, but because people’s minds have become inverted through delusive thinking, they fail to perceive this."
So if, as religious traditions tell us, we are already so closely related to the divine, how is it that we have made such a mess of things? Because, as the Buddha noted, our minds have become deluded.
We fail to see that we are already inherently perfect — already inherently and intimately related to God. In other words, we forget. We forget who we are and who created us, and consequently we begin to scramble after this and that in order to provide ourselves more security.
In the process, we come to see our neighbors as our enemies and our siblings as competitors for the Earth’s resources. We cling and hoard and kill in order to ensure that we have enough, and we justify our behavior by appealing to an economics of scarcity. All the while, some have more than they could possibly use while others do not even have what they need.
This is the reason that religious traditions teach us to look within, and it is why in the Abrahamic traditions such great emphasis is placed on remembrance. We are called to remember who God is and God’s saving actions.
And at the same time and equally as important, we are called to remember who we are. We are called to remember that God has acted on our behalf, that God has created us, breathed life into us, and that we are, beneath all our grasping insecurity, filled with God.
Of course, remembering this — remembering that we are of God and therefore divine in our own right — is not simply a cognitive operation. It is rather a matter of our very being, and therefore the remembrance that is called for is not simply a matter of reciting certain pieces of scripture or taking part in a particular ritual, except insofar as these actions transform our hearts and minds, thereby occasioning a transformation of our very way of seeing and being in the world.
In other words, except insofar as our rituals and recitations lead us to see the same divinity in others that we find in ourselves, to loosen our selfish groping after more and more, to share what we have so others might have enough, they are not helping us to remember God or who we are. In fact, our rituals and recitations often make matters worse because rather than opening our hearts and minds to reality, we often bring the economy of scarcity to our religious life as well.
When this happens, we begin to see God and salvation as limited commodities as well, and we hear people taking sides against one another, each claiming to possess the "true religion" and the "only means of salvation."
This is the soil from which radicalism and fundamentalism is born, and it is all the more deceptive because we justify our forgetfulness of who God is and who we are in the name of God.
So is the answer to give up on religion? Absolutely not because religious traditions help us to remember God and who we are. But we must remember — and our traditions should teach this as well — that our traditions, rituals and recitations are not God, and they cannot contain the whole truth about God. May we always remember that. ••
Father Tim Griffin is priest-in-charge at the St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, at 1946 Welsh Road in Bustleton.