Re-Membering

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
Paul, 1 Corinthians 12:12-13

In the movie "The Wizard of Oz" just after the Winged Monkeys have attacked Dorothy and her three friends, Scarecrow lies torn apart by the Winged Monkeys while Tin Man and Lion try to put him back together.

SCARECROW

Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!

TIN MAN

Oh! Well, what happened to you?

SCARECROW

They tore my legs off, and they threw them

over there! Then they took my chest out,

and they threw it over there!

TIN MAN

Well, that's you all over.

LION

They sure knocked the stuffings out of you, didn't they?

SCARECROW

Don't stand there talking! Put me together!

We've got to find Dorothy!

TIN MAN

Now, let' s see -- this goes -- Oh, I wish

I were better at puzzles.

LION

Wait a minute. This is the left one. He

walks bad enough already.

TIN MAN

Oh, poor Dorothy. We may never see her

again.

SCARECROW

Who do you suppose they were? And where did

they take her? A fine thing - to go to

pieces at a time like this!

TIN MAN

Now, now, don't fret.

SCARECROW

Oh, dear, dear.

TIN MAN

We'll get you together!

Sometimes I wonder if perhaps we do to God what the Winged Monkeys did to Scarecrow. I wonder if God doesn't lie strewn about with Jews over there, Hindus over here, Muslims in between, and Christians all over the place as Catholics, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, Pentecostals, etc., infinitum. 


I wonder if perhaps in our various religions we keep confusing remembering God with recalling our particular understanding and experience of God as if it were the only, or best, understanding. In doing so we leave all others strewn about. Instead of re-membering God we dis-member God.


It appears to me this is exactly what Paul was telling the people of Corinth in his letter to them, and to us, as that letter is passed down as scripture.  It appears to me the re-membering of God is also an underlying, if not central, part of most spiritual traditions once religious and sectarian trappings are taken away.  

To use another "...Oz" analogy, when the curtain of religion is pulled away we may very well see our particular "great and powerful" God as an illusion.  But in doing so we discover and begin to re-member the multiplicity of God as the very fabric of Creation - Whole, Complete and One.