Article in Stretton Focus, August 2012
In answer to the above question, you could give your name and address, and maybe produce a birth certificate. It all depends on who is asking the question. You could be asking it of yourself – who am I? That is the most profound question anyone can ask of themselves: but where do we look for an answer?
You could look to your family tree and find out your line of descent. This would trace your ancestry back as far as you can go. Not many would be able to go back as far as Adam and Eve: but even then, who are they? Where do they come from?
Going back to some imagined beginning of life, you enter the realm of mystery and myth. Religions would say that we are the children of God. That’s as far back as you can go, because it’s not possible to say where God comes from.
God just is. God is our word for the fact of existence. God does not exist like we do, as an objective being. God is the Ground of all Being – and those of us who do exist, can try to work out our relationship with the Ground of our being. Various world religions have their different ways of doing this: and people are free (or should be) to choose whichever appeals to them.
There is a secular alternative, wherein you can see yourself as ‘a child of the Universe’. The Universe has given you birth, just as it has given life to all people and to all living things.
We can see ourselves as part of the Universe (are we not stardust, and made of the same basic ‘stuff’ as everything else?).
Where the Universe comes from, or is going to we don’t know: but if we are part of it, we could commit ourselves to it, in the faith and hope that all will be well?
The religious way and the secular way are not all that different. They are dealing with the same mystery that confronts us all – who are we? What is the meaning and purpose of life? How best should we live our lives?
If you choose the religious option, you will certainly be challenged to aim for the highest and best that you are capable of being. You are a child of God: God is love, and in God lies the fulfilment of who you are.
Even if you choose the secular option, you can still have the same aim of being your best and highest self, and look for you resources wherever you can find them.
Donald Horsfield
