Roberta Grimes

Your Spiritual Time

Posted by Roberta Grimes • July 13, 2024 • 14 Comments
Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way!
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind.
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!

Oh yes, I can make it now, the pain is gone.
All of the bad feelings have disappeared.
Here is that rainbow I’ve been praying for!
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
Look all around, there’s nothing but blue skies.
Look straight ahead, there’s nothing but blue skies!
– Johnny Nash (1940-2020), from “I Can See Clearly Now” (1972).

The blog post that we gave to you last week was a labor of love for my beloved Thomas. Perhaps it was that for Jesus as well, although He lives His eternal life more privately. To be frank, I didn’t realize when my spirit guide asked me to search on “sin” in Biblegateway.com, the online searchable Bible, precisely what I was going to find that Jesus had said about sin during His entire earthly ministry. My memory had been, however, just what you saw from us last week, so when I did my search, I found no surprises. Jesus did indeed amazingly trivialize even the very concept of sin while He was here among us and teaching on earth.

Jesus did to sin pretty much what John Fitzgerald Kennedy did to fedora hats in 1960. During the whole first half of the twentieth century, and even during all of the Great Depression, no respectable man in the Western world would consider himself to be fully dressed without a suit and tie, an overcoat, and one of those stylish fedora hats! But JFK was elected President in 1960, and he didn’t like to mess up his hair, so I don’t think that he ever once in his life was willing to wear a fedora hat, not even to his Inauguration. So then within months after JFK’s election to the American Presidency, fedoras immediately and completely and forever no longer mattered at all.  

Jesus’s trivialization of the concept of sin was not quite so extreme as what JFK did to the concept of fedora hats, but it was close. Jesus simply reduced sin to its proper readily forgivable place, which is very far below God’s love in importance. And therefore, Jesus made the breaking of human religious rules to be now only minor and trivial, and quite readily instantly forgivable. But even that was a tremendous and a downright shocking step for Jesus to take in the first-century Hebrew world! I think it is hard now really for us to fully appreciate just how alarming Jesus’s teachings were to those who first heard them.

Those teachings must have hit people more or less the way the nineteen-sixties hit the world of the Fifties, only perhaps even more so. I was there in the Sixties. I remember it well! The nineteen-sixties were a wonderful time to be young, and if you are younger than maybe seventy years old now, I can only tell you that you missed something big. Oh yes, it also was awful in its way, what with the Vietnam War and the draft and the sense that whatever the previous culture had been, it was gone like a shot and it would never come back. But to be young at a sudden cultural hinge-point, and to realize that what you are witnessing is huge, also is a wonderful and glorious feeling, provided that the cultural hinge happens peacefully. As Jesus said, “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already blazing!” (LK 12:49)

Yes indeed, Jesus came to earth to kindle a major cultural and spiritual hinge, a cleansing fire of great modernization. When Jesus was on earth, He was the very model of a nineteen-sixties radical, a brilliant young man impatient with all the old ideas and all the old ways, and full of new ideas that were so extreme that they made you gape in amazement. I knew some radical young men in the Sixties. One of them was even my boyfriend. And they rather reminded me of Jesus, so on fire as they were with their big new ideas, and impatient as they were to transform the world. What they were peddling in the Sixties was a blend of socialism and communism, and I listened, but they were too extreme for me! I did try pot, although I never inhaled. And when my boyfriend urged me to come with him to California and join the Revolution, although I did love him, that was a bridge too far. I do think, though, that two thousand years ago, sitting on that hillside and hearing the extremely radical words of the Sermon on the Mount for the first time from the radical young man that Jesus was, even as un-radical as I was when I was young, I think that perhaps I would have gone for His particular brand of Big New Ideas.

A lot of people went for Jesus’s Big New Ideas! What He was preaching was a deep freedom of mind that was brand-new in the ancient world. It was freedom from all religious fears and constraints, and the notion of replacing it all with a radical forgiveness and love from God that was beyond anything that anyone ever had heretofore imagined. When Jesus was asked by a clergyman who was trying to test Him what was the foremost commandment, He didn’t name any of the hundreds of religious rules in the Hebrews’ religious rulebook, the Talmud. Instead He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40).

Wow, so that’s it? That really is all? Jesus does away with every one of those old rigid busybody religious rules, and He tells us that God truly does perfectly love and forgive us, without our having to pay attention to any of the rest of that religious nonsense? The only law now is that we must love God, and also we must love our fellow man? It was hard at first for people to believe that they really could be hearing Jesus right. And then Jesus performed miracles, and He died on the cross, and He rose from the dead to prove that our lives really will be eternal, and bit by bit His Word and His message began to catch fire and spread among men. And His Apostles patiently reinforced His words. So that really is It, then? For real? You mean it? Okay! Then I’m in! It is no wonder at all that with Jesus’s Apostles teaching as itinerant preachers, Jesus’s new Way spread so rapidly in the centuries after His death and resurrection, all the way around the Mediterranean Sea and as far away as Rome. Jesus’s Way had millions of devoted followers by the time the Roman armies set out to crush all aspects of His new movement but the one that Constantine decided eventually to make his own. And that one, of course, Constantine felt that He could use as a fear-based means of control. Constantine affirmed the central teaching of the strain that he preferred, which was that Jesus had died on the cross as a sin-offering. Then Constantine held the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE to formalize his new Christian religion, and to create its Bible that was based on the Hebrew Law and the Prophets, where he included Jesus’s teachings as well.

This notion of Jesus as a Sixties-era radical is not only mine. Others also have seen the resemblance, but I never realized how perfect it is until a commenter to our post last week suggested that the Sixties-era song “I Can See Clearly Now” might make a good frame-verse. And then one of the classes that I am currently teaching happened to be studying Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. There we all were, sitting on that hillside and listening to Jesus, and I thought, Omigod, there it is. Of course! He was creating a cultural hinge! Jesus even said it at the time!  

If it were not for Constantine’s destruction of Jesus’s Way, and his foolish creation of yet one more old-style religion in its place, surely long before now the whole world could have been following Jesus’s radical spiritual movement, which was brand-new two thousand years ago and based solely in God’s pure forgiveness and love!

As it is, however, we have been stuck with Roman Christianity for the past two thousand years. Like all religions, Christianity is fear-based and not love-based, and that is especially true in the case of Catholicism, and indeed also true of nearly all of the forty-two-thousand-odd versions of Christianity that are in existence today.  So as it is presently practiced, Christianity is hopelessly unable to be of much spiritual use to its faithful. Even if any uplifting love-based spiritual practice that was taught by Jesus might have been followed, it would have been weighed down and circumvented by every strictly practicing Christian’s overwhelming religious terrors. Down through the ages, however, there have been Desert Fathers and Mothers, and then monks and nuns, those living apart from the church’s fear-based teachings who have studied only the Lord’s words, and they have modeled after His teachings their very simple lives being lived apart from the world. And as we have said elsewhere, Jesus Himself has spent the past seventeen hundred years on the third astral level, and in devoted, single-minded service to the post-death healing of the hundreds of millions who have been damaged by Roman Christianity.

And meanwhile, as my Thomas is fond of reminding me, Jesus has become generally the most famous, the most popular, and considered the most influential person of all time. This is true, even though Jesus has not lived on earth for more than two thousand years! That is the one useful thing that Constantine’s religion actually has done for us: it has spread the precious name of Jesus in the most favorable possible terms far and wide. And as the religion that bears Jesus’s name but ignores what He taught at last is fading, we who love Jesus and who best understand the teachings that He gave to us as He originally taught them, free and untarnished by Roman Christianity’s fears, can begin at last to follow His true Way. We can make His Way the basis of our own spiritual lives. And then we can teach it to the world.

So, how can we begin at last to learn and to follow the Lord’s Way ourselves? Well, it’s simple, but it does require that you set aside some time each day to be with Jesus in God’s presence on that Judean hill. This must be your time alone with them in spirit. Ideally, it will be half an hour or more as your day is winding down. And do this every day! Habit is the secret to creating transformation.

You might experiment to see what works best for you. Here is what some people who want to immerse themselves in the Lord’s Word so they can better grow spiritually have found works well for them:

• Leave off attendance at any Christian church, if you have not already done that. Even the sight of bare crucifixes can trigger residual feelings of  Christian guilt which are so habitual that you may not even be consciously aware of them.
• Print the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 5-7, in a print-size that is comfortable for you to read, and perhaps laminate it. You might do this with other favorite Gospel speeches by Jesus as well, and keep this reading material beside a comfortable chair in a private corner.
• Welcome both God and Jesus into your mind. It can be best if you have a simple, short prayer to say, such as, “Dear God, dear Jesus, please help me to ever better understand and to ever more perfectly live my life according to these Gospel words…”
• Read quietly aloud anything from a couple of paragraphs to as much as half a page, and really listen while you read. Mark with a paper clip the place where you leave off each day.
• Sit with your eyes closed on that Judean hill and consider with God and with Jesus what you have just read. If other thoughts come, don’t fight them, but simply let them go. If thoughts feel at all negative, use the forgiveness mantra as you ease them from your mind: “I love you, I bless you, I forgive, and I release.”
• After a while, you will feel that you have given this exercise enough time for tonight. It may be only ten minutes at first, but soon it will become effortlessly longer until it is as much as forty-five minutes. Slowly open your eyes. Thank God, and thank Jesus for having spent this time with you by saying aloud something like, “Thank you, Father! Thank you, Brother Jesus for helping me to better understand your words and helping me use them to better grow spiritually!”

You might eventually add other spiritual practices too, and perhaps some which involve more active sharing with others, as God might call you to do that. Always be listening to God’s voice within. But the certainty of Jesus’s voice on that hill always will be there to guide you.

My dear one, each day is yours to use as you might wish to use it. Yesterday is gone, and tomorrow is never promised, but still, we have this precious day. And we have the gift of this moment, which is why we call it “the Present.” So, why not begin a practice now of choosing to share some few minutes of each day that remains of your earthly life with God, and with Jesus? Yes, they are very busy. But as I say at the end of each of my podcasts, you in particular are God’s best-beloved child. And saying that to you each week never was my own idea….

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Here is that rainbow I’ve been praying for.
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
– Johnny Nash (1940-2020), from “I Can See Clearly Now” (1972)