Though I am no expert on the path of mystical Judaism called Kabbalah, my thinking about God has been profoundly shaped by it. This is because I happened upon Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, teacher of Kabbalah, in the mid-2010s, in an OnBeing interview where he narrated an illustration of God that gave contour and language to images impacting my own heart and mind. This image arrived like a long-awaited messenger, weaving together threads of thought, intuition, and longing I’d had for some time. In his interview with Krista Tippett, Kushner said…
“There are two ways to understand our relationship with God. I’m going to say right up front that they are both just metaphors, relax. Just metaphors. The first one, picture a big circle and the big circle represents God. And then picture below it a very tiny little circle. And that represents you in the world. And because the big circle is above the little circle, it’s naturally hierarchical, and therefore it’s generically masculine and welcome to Western religion. …OK. That’s the one we all know, and you and all your—all of our listeners could easily talk at length about that. Now I’m going to give you another metaphor….” {Read remainder of article on Patheos HERE.}
I love the concept of everyone having a part in healing the world simply by healing that part of the world that is within our reach. If we all did that, we could pretty much cover the whole world.
I love Dr. Remen's explanation that we are all here to heal the world. We could certainly use a lot of that.