Like Father? Many Christians of a liberal or New Age persuasion find Yahweh to be a considerable embarrassment. You just about have to be an orthodox Jew to find the old Man likeable, and even they seem to like nothing more than to argue with Him.

Once Jesus comes on the scene, he steals the show. Yahweh becomes an abstract deity, a backstop for a son, who only with some difficulty could get himself unnailed from the cross. Unless you had spent those forty years chasing Yahweh’s UFO out in the Sinai, it is easy to become forgetful of the old Man.

I would argue that Yahweh is more than a theological backstop for the Son. For one thing He provides the necessary setup. Jesus could not have been any other father's son. In that sense, Jesus was not a self-made man. The father had to play the straight man for the son's routine, which could then be vastly more subtle.

It is now at the Eschaton that the father comes back into his own, in a somewhat different capacity. Instead of just being the son's father, he is now the husband of the son's mother. This is of course where the Protestant Deists will want to jump the ship. And then it gets worse. Yahweh turns out to be just one of the sires to the cosmic matrix. The Queen of heaven necessarily has numerous consorts. This is polytheism with a vengeance. Monotheism is preserved only in the form of monogyny. Those darn Papists were right after all, Mary is a big deal, the biggest one of them all.

Here is where we can get into hot water. We come back to the problem of separation. Jesus only had one father, of course, but what about the rest of us. All of us have the same mother, spiritually speaking, but did we all have the same father, and what if we did not?

We have to take the cosmological perspective once again. We are back to the cosmos with the big yin and the little yang’s, Yahweh being one of the latter and thereby having a certain hegemony over our world history that is focussed upon the Christ event. But the other sky god's cannot be left out of this picture, even though they have a somewhat lesser role to play, because each of them has their own world, as Yahweh has this one.

Our world is special among all the conceived worlds. We are special because we are such a cosmix. It is because we are such a mixture that our universal salvation in Christ becomes absolutely cruxial. In any of the other, more homogeneous worlds, a savior may not be necessary. We are the cosmopolitan world, and we may not all have the same father but we do have the same savior, and of course the same spiritual mother.

It is only through Jesus that we can find ourselves. We find what we hold in common with humanity and what is different. Jesus is our universal mirror and prism. We are his rainbow coalition, his rainbow children.

If we look elsewhere for our self-discovery we will revert to tribalism and genocide at the Eschaton. It is with respect to Jesus that we will save or damn ourselves. The Christ event is the deepest point in history, and that is where we will discover our deeper identities beneath our tribal origins.

It is through our wild and mongrel stock that the other more homogeneous worlds will be spiritually 'reseeded' in the post eschaton events. This will happen for all of us -- those who take to the skies and those who remain with the Earth. Those of us who become the new sky people will have a further differentiation according to the worlds with which we shall then become involved in whatever fashion. All of this will entail the loosening of our physical and biological bonds in a gradual manner, hopefully.

This is the way in which the cosmos recycles its energies and rejuvenates its spirit. Each of us will have a definite role to play in the drama that is now unfolding. Our final patience is very important, lest we push ourselves off the cosmic stage.

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rev. 4/12/97