Native Americans have a pan-en-theistic orientation to the divine, a perspective shared by many contemporary religious liberals, both Christian and non Christian. I think of Marcus Borg, and I think of George Tinker. Different approaches to God in whom we live and move and have our being, both sharing the understanding of the divine as immanent and transcendent, and incarnate in all creatures of this creative cosmos. This orientation is not some new theological idea, dreamed up by desperate theologians in the face of the crisis of theological theism, or the objections of materialism. We have here a prayer that witnesses a panentheist orientation from eleven century China.
Chang Tsai was Chinese administrative official in eleventh century,
That's a thousand years ago.
He put this inscription on his office wall.
Heaven is my father,
And earth is my mother
And even such a small creature
as I finds an intimate place in their midst.
That which extends throughout the universe,
I regard as my body
And that which powers the universe,
I regard as my power.
All people are my brothers and sisters
And all things are my companion.
This is from my scrapbooks, if I ripped it off from some source let me know.
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