GOD DOES NOT WANT US TO BE RICH
Míceál Ledwith.

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Several well-known preachers in the United States today attract phenomenal crowds to their weekly services, despite the country-wide decline in religious practice. What appears to be the main attraction? Apparently telling the congregation that God wants them to be rich.

This line of thought is certainly a very welcome change from the old doom, gloom, hell fire and brimstone message. It is also a major relief from so much emphasis on suffering and guilt in many mainline Christian Churches. This has made it difficult today to think of Christianity, or of Jesus himself, in any other terms than the suffering savior, which was always a prospect to dizzy and appall.

The speeches and writings of today's most successful preachers are replete with statements describing a human-style God. God will or will not be pleased with us, or will be angry or disappointed, or that we should ponder things on God's timetable not ours, discover God's will or plan in life for us, etc. Is it really true that God is perusing all of these options for us and assessing our responses? It's a picture that comes uncomfortably close to an exasperating senior family member who justifies his interference in our lives on the grounds that it's for our own good.

So before we traipse off once a week to joyfully affirm God wants us to be rich, we should pause long enough to ask ourselves some serious questions.

That God is perfect has always been a central belief of the major religious traditions. Simply put, that means that God lacks nothing or God would not be God. If this is a cornerstone belief for everyone it's rather curious to notice that the majority of believers spend most of their lives denying this very belief in practice. If God needs anything from me, or is disappointed by anything I do, most assuredly God could not perfect, but must be needy, insecure and probably despotic.

This is poles apart from saying that God and the divine have no place in my everyday life and that God doesn't give a hoot what I do. The very opposite is true, but we can't really begin to see in what sense that is true until we take a long hard look at what our image of God is like.

In the quantum world what comes to us in life is magnetized by what we accept as true. The motive of acceptance can range from acute fear to the most profound love. It is as simple as that. If the quantum theories offer one of the best insights we have to date about the nature of the universe in which we live, then we have to ask is there really room any more for a picture of God caring about everything we do like the unwelcome attentions of a busybody senior relative? Or is there room for the endless litany of blame we love to lay at God's feet. "How could God have taken away my loved one?" "I didn't deserve this;" Why didn't you answer my fervent and desperate prayer?

As long as we insist on thinking of God as some sort of human being enlarged who sits in judgment 24/7, plotting planning, scheming, testing and observing our performance then we should know that we are flying in the face of the evidence about how the universe functions.

If quantum theory gives us a look into the nature of reality, it must also give us a clue to the nature of the being who set it into place, and the picture of the human being enlarged, which is most peoples version of God, is as far away as can be imagined from how it is legitimate to picture God in the quantum age.

The nature of reality is not loaded one way or the other. It is neutral, awaiting our observation through the attitudes we accept.

Presumably this is also an indication of what God's intention was for us. There is a sense in which we can truly speak about "God's plan" for us, and there is a sense in which it would utterly miss the mark to do so. For it seems clear that God wants us to explore the potentials of this material realm, and it is equally true that what we express will come back to us magnified, guided by the same process. That should demonstrate a seriousness of purpose much better than any prospect of Hell fire for wrongdoing could ever do!

So in a quantum understanding of the world does it make any sense any more to speak of God in such homely ways as anxiously assessing the result of each and every decision we make? God and the power of God is certainly immersed in my life but not after the fashion of someone who intervenes from the outside, but rather at the deepest possible level where the very fabric of what I do and think is construed. No human agency could ever do that, and it does no service to God, but the opposite, to conceive of God in human terms. To say God is pleased, displeased, sad, angry or happy at what I do, may well be comforting or frightening, but we should know it is using words where they do not and cannot ever fit. God wants us to explore the potentials of this material realm. "He" has no plan beyond that for us, and we ourselves will reap the harvest of what we ourselves sow.

Does God want us to be rich? No. It makes no sense to say that in this perspective, just as it equally makes no sense to say that God wants us to be poor, or anything else in between for that matter. If it has been drummed into us all our lives that we were doing God some sort of favor by staying poor, then assuredly it comes as a distinct relief to be told God actually wants us to be rich. But no real advance in understanding has come. One belief is no more accurate than the other, and tragically we have come no nearer to understanding the mechanisms of manifestation. All we've done Is swing to the opposite side with the pendulum. The swing is a welcome change from the awful scenery of the past, but no more than that, and in the swing we have failed to grasp how the mechanisms of manifestation function, and what the mindset of the being who brought them and us into existence truly is.

There is no such thing as "my lot in life" except the one that I am myself now creating, and since every action has a reaction what we create is going to manifest more of the same to me: misfortune and suffering if that's what I am doling out to others or to myself, gladness and joy and yes, even wealth, if that is the sprit in which I choose to operate.

Such knowledge will not fill the pews on a Sunday morning nearly as well as the message that God wants us to be rich. And the reason is that most of us are distinctly uncomfortable with realizing the awesome creative power which every person who walks this earth has, even if some do not know of any other way to use it except to manifest homelessness under a bridge, or poverty, or fabulous wealth or power or sterling service for the uplifting of humanity. It all comes from the same source and it all depends on what we believe to be true, but it is all equally the same power, except some people are better than others at confining their thoughts to encompass only wonderful things.

We fear the power we really have because of the responsibility it brings and the realization that we are fooling ourselves if we ever blame anything or anybody again. We far prefer to believe we are going to be taken care of by the Great Parent in the Sky, who has replaced the loving parents most of us were lucky enough to have had when we were children. The irony is that that Great Parent actually is taking care of us and responding to our choices 24/7, but not from the skies. And the penny has not yet dropped to let us realize that the care of the Great Parent is channeled precisely into the ways in which we direct it by our everyday acceptance, and not according to any pre-determined plan by God.

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