I believe that there is a transcending reality present in the very heart of life. I name that reality God. I believe that this reality has a bias toward life and wholeness and that its presence is experienced as that which calls us beyond all of our fearful and fragile human limits. I believe that this reality can be found in all that is but that it reaches self-consciousness and the capability of being named, communed with and recognized in human life. I believe that heaven, the domain in which this reality has traditionally been domiciled, is not a place but a symbol standing for the limitlessness of Being itself. I believe that this realm of heaven is entered whenever the barriers that seem to bind human life into something less than that for which it is capable are set aside. I believe in Jesus, called Messiah, or Christ. I believe that in his life this transcendent reality has been revealed so completely that it caused people to refer to him as God's only son. The burning God intensity was so real in him that I look at his life and say, "In you I see the meaning of God, so for me you are both Lord and Christ." I believe that Jesus was a God presence, a powerful experience of the reality of that Ground of Being undergirding us all at the very depths of life. Bishop John Shelby Spong

Psychotherapist, Ordained Interfaith Contemplative Minister