Henotheistic

I just love it when I find someone has already figured out something I am struggling with. If nothing else, it always reinforces the idea that heaven would be a library with all the books, understandable in all the languages, and never being hungry, tired or uncomfortable while reading.

Having reached another change point in my personal growth, I am pleased to find this term.

Henotheistic - "I shall use the term henotheistic to characterize a pattern of faith and identity in which one invests deeply in a transcending center of value and power, finding in it a focal unity of personality and outlook, but this center is inappropriate, false, not something of ultimate concern." Fowler (p20 in my particular book)

It even uses my favorite word - inappropriate.

But I think much of my life has been in this place, continually "upgrading" my ultimate concerns. It is certainly true that you don't start with anything really worthy of the word ultimate.

In particular, "In this more noble form of henotheistic faith, identiy is found in losing the self in the service of a transcendingly important, if finite, cause."(21) Which goes a long long way in describing why I keep having the feeling of being knocked off my feet when I do things.

And I realize, in a way that I couldn't before, that all the places and activities and causes I have placed my whole heart into have been human things - since I am no environmentalist to place it in Gaia or some other thing that disappoints. Mine have always been people oriented, since I am so people oriented. And the church didn't cut it, and civil service doesn't cut it, and disaster relief doesn't cut it, so I am completely unsure what the next step is in finding God as my ultimate concern except, maybe, it has something to do with that star - which I am going to laugh and laugh when I find out it was a stationary satellite.

I feel a whole new spiritual autobiography coming on, in a year or two. Someday I might even write the whole thing out, but thankfully, I've got decades left to come to something worth writing about.