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In her book entitled “The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three,” Cynthia Bourgeault exposes what she calls the San Andreas Fault within the Country of the Heart. After the feedback and conversations stemming from last week’s haymaker “Your Monotheism may actually be Atheism,” I felt it important to install a curb where many of you have driven over the precipice.

Spirituality requires a new way to see the world. Like Nicodemus, our external observation will never tell the story of transcendent inner experience. We must be “born again” (spiritual seeing) or we cannot see the kingdom of God (John 3:3). Ritual and theology are the favorite toys of religion designed to explain and deliver us as close as possible to the ineffable, unsayable, immeasurable ground of all being. Consciousness is as close as science can get to that “something more” and even then science cannot agree on it’s essence.

Said in simpler terms, we can’t see what we can’t see. We are myopic. We depend on metaphor to describe that which is beyond our interpretive horizon. The entire evolution of human consciousness, the history of all world religions and the emerging metaphysical discoveries have all fallen into the gravitational pull of a particular idea that has truncated our maturity, progress, and further evolution. That idea that Cynthia so brilliantly employs I will now share with you through terms common to this audience.

When a car goes by, the sound waves drop in tone as they lengthen out and move further from their source. Similarly, as light passes, the light wave lengthens and moves toward the red spectrum as it moves from its source. This is known as the doppler affect of “redshift” and this is how our cosmos is measured and has been determined to be expanding away from the “big bang.”

In a similar yet unconscious fashion, our metaphysical grasp of the cosmos has almost unanimously adopted a similar proposition. On one end of the spectrum we have matter and on the other end we have spirit. This binary framework is the backdrop of how we all initially try and understand spirituality. It is why so many struggled with last weeks post and podcast. If we are grounded in the material, then the spiritual seems absurd, and if we are grounded in the spiritual, the material is deemed superfluous. Both frameworks presuppose a bias of moving away (often downward) from our source in a “redshift” pattern, thus any path back to source our spirituality is a path back up or ascent.

Cynthia’s “San Andreas Fault” is unearthed when we view humanity’s spiritual practices. With few exceptions, all spirituality is seen as ascent, or a climb out or a return to source. The fundamental monkey wrench in the system was Christianity’s early belief in “blue shift,” or the source coming to us, joining us, living and moving through and in us. What this means is the tonality of light and sound is actually rising in pitch, not falling. Something massive is arriving. That something is the ineffable, indescribable, ground of all being that we intuit but cannot see with common eyes. For early Christianity this was true spirituality shared by all comers, not a new religion for a few.

Because modern Christianity along with almost all world religions have been lulled into the gravitation pull of cosmological redshift, the resulting binary worldview means that it can no longer see itself as the “blueshift” alternative to “redshift” religion and has simply settled into “redshift” patterns along with all others. In other words, most Christians see the world as moving away from God and getting worse and the only hope is an evacuation strategy where God will rescue very few from ultimate destruction. Since the “blueshift” of incarnation is invisible, truncated, or missing entirely from the modern faith, it ultimately remains atheistic toward the Kenotic (self-emptying) narrative of Source moving toward us, thus monotheism is often just a nuanced atheism. Monotheism lacks trinitarian flow or dynamism.

Like I said earlier, we need a new set of eyes if we are to see. Blueshift (source moving toward us) changes everything. Blueshift eliminates the need for a path back to Source by reorienting the soul like a satellite dish to receive the ever increasing, unavoidable, incoming transmission. Richard Rohr is always saying that if there is a God, then he/she must be bigger than the known cosmos. Under the binary of a redshift, diminishing framework, religion is incapable of capturing such a deity and remains atheistic toward such a notion. Instead we are left with malleable, hand crafted idols, or immoveable theological grids, religious practices and traditions that result in our “gods” waring with one another in an endless contest of might. This scenario makes us like Elijah where we only want God to “come down” in order to consume the enemy. We’ve missed entirely the kenosis (self-emptying) dynamism of our Source coming to us at an ever narrowing wavelength (blueshift).

If we would see God, the discovery is not found in religion, nor in some stairway to heaven through the evolution of human consciousness. Seeing God or finding Source is discovering that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us.“Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” (Matthew 3:2, 4:17, 10:7) This isn’t the sin centered, totally depraved belief system that gets us to heaven one day, rather it is the true meaning of repentance (metanoia) which is to rethink, or see things differently.

Blueshift occurs when we begin to see ourselves as the beloved of God in whom God is pleased to dwell. The Good News is that blueshift has occurred, God or Source has come to all people. It is our atheism, that insists this is only for a few.