About Me

My photo
I am a pastor and a clinical psychotherapist. My life's passion is defining healthiness from a human perspective and paralleling it to the holiness of God, divine perspective. Shifting perspectives creates a paradigm that is alongside of rather than over and against. The parakalein of God and the paradoxes of humanity are redefined. Humanity is all about winning and yet we are losing ground everywhere. Divinity is all about letting go of the desire to win and the fear of loss. The Divine embraces the world with loving care regardless of anything.

Search This Blog

Duplicity vs Multiplicity

Posted by Don Paine

I was sitting in a room with a person struggling with their understanding of a God who let's tragedies happen in the world.  It reminded me of the left hand of God and the right hand of God debate in seminary days.  Wow that is going back a ways. If God is a loving God and has all power why does God not intervene and keep tragedies from happening in our world.  Is God duplicitous, capricious, disconnected, unaware or just unconcerned?  To maintain a belief in God that is love while experiencing things that hurt like hell makes no sense to most of us.  Duplicity drives some away form God and church while others stay in church and ignore the duplicity of doing.  Is this hell or is this heaven?

Parts of life and the brain seem to point to double bind or duplicity.  In a right wrong world we are set up to think of inconsistencies or consistencies.  Opposing positions on things from how to squeeze the tooth paste to how to bring peace to our divided world are all about the union of opposites.  One side wins while the other loses.  That alone is duplicitous as everyone wants to win, no one wants to lose.  The system that sets up duplicity serves the maintaining of duplicity and the frustration goes on.

The multiplicity of parts maintains that the issue needs not be about winning but stopping to care for all parts without concern for winning, not about union of opposites but of communion of opposites.  When polarized parts that appear duplicitous are equally welcomed, embraced and respected, the multiplicity of parts allows for harmony of oppositional parts not in that one wins and the other loses but in that all are valued.  A balanced system has less competitiveness and more compassion.  Pathologizing duplicity is replaced by empathizing multiplicity.

The God who seems to hate and love me at different times as different things happen to me becomes the God who welcomes all parts, all thoughts and feelings, all experiences and interpretations and interpolations of those experiences as equally respected and respectfully welcomed.  This is an extravagant welcoming of all parts and parallels the UCC (United Church of Christ's current world wide focus of widening the welcome.

Some will judge this "wide welcome of multiplicity" deceptive and misleading.  Just like some of the religious leaders of Jesus' day interpreted Jesu to be of the devil when in fact he was confronting the duplicity of the religious leaders of his day.

The narrow way for those people is the way as they have defined it.   Everyone else is of the wide way of destruction.  Do you hear the duplicity here or there or everywhere.  In multiplicity, all ways are welcome, if they lead to love and peace. This is an unusual, unique, and narrow way of thinking that few people come to believe in.  Is the wide way of "welcoming all ways" really the way that leads to destruction or is the narrow way of rejecting all ways but mine (the right way) the way that really has and continues to lead to destruction.

Are we ready for a new narrow way!  Or will the system continue to destroy itself while resisting to change the systemic problem.

The multiplicity of the mind invites us all to get into our right minds toward each other.  The right mind is not about right verses left but about right attitudes and attributions.  It is about having a "right heart" toward all parts of all people of all groups for all to know and walk in peace.

Is it a narrow way to be the only group calling all people to respectfulness and resiliency.  Multiplicity of parts calls us all to mature responsiveness and mutual respectfulness.   It includes empathetic embracing of all views, all belief systems, all people regardless of anything another with compassion.  It also includes and embracing empathetic responses to all people.  It does not pathologize any person or group for the purpose of negating, denigrating, or devaluing that group.  It is lovingly embracing with empathy all people not in a whimsical indifference to moral or ethical values but due to willful and disciplined  commitment to the covenant of respectfulness and responsibleness toward all.

Multiplicity broadens the welcome to an extensive and extravagant quality and kind of covenant of care that.  As God welcomes all people and invites all people to know and experience love and peace in an internal and eternal way.  God's love is not just unconditional it is also about acceptance-laden, agenda-less amore.

Multiplicity removes duplicity from being a problem into being the reality we all live in.  Multiplicity does not win over duplicity it dissolves the need to win in the embryonic fluid of acceptance and nurturance.  This leads to a rebirth, redemption, and resurgence of energy in the system.

So is is a narrow way that leads to nurturance or is it a wide way that leads to destruction or is it exactly the opposite.  The wide welcome is the narrow way that few embrace.  The narrow way as so many define it results in massive destruction in the name of, you name it.

Open wide!  Do not leave yourself wide open.  They sound duplicitous.  In the multiplicity of all things they are looking at the same thing in different ways and appreciate the value of both.

Multiplicity multiplies the blessing for all.

God bless our world

0 comments:

Post a Comment