Author: Roberta Grimes

His Way Alone (#1)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Oh Lord, my God,
When I, in awesome wonder,
Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made,
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed,

 Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!

And when I think that God, His Son not sparing,
Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in.
That on the cross, my burden gladly bearing,
He bled and died to take away my sin,

Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!
– Stuart Keene Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1949)

This beautiful frame-hymn expresses in two primary stanzas the impossible conundrum that lies at the heart of the entire Christian religion. Christianity teaches us that the genuine God is infinitely powerful and loves each of us completely! And yet, Christianity also teaches us that God is flat unable to forgive us for even our most trivial sins unless God first receives the sin-sacrifice of God’s Own Son’s brutal crucifixion. Having recently graduated from majoring in early Christian history in college not long before I took my Catholic conversion lessons in preparation for my marriage (which marriage has, with God’s help, lasted for fifty-two years now and counting), I naturally had a lot of trouble accepting this paradoxical set of teachings. And yet, back then, I was going to have to accept the Catholic certainty that an infinitely loving God still needs that sacrifice or God cannot forgive us, or else I could not convert to Catholicism. No Catholic conversion would have meant no marriage to my Edward, and I was so very much in love! So, I crossed my fingers behind my back, and I lied to the priest. Fortunately, God didn’t seem to mind. Then for decades thereafter, I tried my best to be a good Catholic for my husband’s sake.

This impossible conundrum remains at the heart of the Christian religion, even today. Here is a Quora answer given to that same key unanswerable question that nearly wrecked my marriage. It was given by someone who clearly never has read the Gospel words of Jesus! The question someone asked was precisely the same question that the priest who converted me to Catholicism fifty years ago could not answer for me. Someone asked, “Why did God send His Son to die for our sins, when God has infinite power so He could just have outright forgiven us?” I will not embarrass the responder, who presumably has Christian credentials, by giving you her name. But her long and absurd answer to the questioner on Quora was this:

“God does not have the power to just say ‘we are all forgiven.’ Why not? Because God does not have the power to deny the standard of justice He Himself put in place. He cannot deny Himself. Ever. Forgiveness must meet God’s perfect standard of justice and forgiveness must be extended from that upon which it is based. So, on what is forgiveness based? Saying I am sorry? No. Neither is forgiveness just handed out all willy-nilly from a place of sentimentality. God’s four cardinal attributes are love, power, justice, and wisdom. Neither comes before or after the other. They are all perfectly balanced. Power never trumps wisdom. Love never trumps justice. Do you see? To simply hear us say “I’m sorry daddy,” and then pat us on the bottom and give us an indulgent smile is a gross violation of God’s perfect justice. And it is far removed from any application of wisdom. There is absolutely no justice in forgiving people all willy-nilly. Sending a perfect human man met all the requirements. It is mind-boggling how smart Jehovah God is.”

What is wrong with this answer? Well, everything. But most of all, it comes from a purely human way of thinking. It has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that God ever says in the Old Testament, or that the Apostle Paul writes in the New Testament; and much more importantly, it ignores altogether everything that Jesus says to us in the Gospels. I am pretty well versed in basic Christian theology, and I cannot recall ever reading any place where this responder could have gotten her answer there, either, although it may be some variation of obscure thinking in some odd Christian sub-sect or other. But the very notion that God might artificially limit God’s Own native ability to infinitely, perfectly love and forgive us, and – worse – the idea that God’s doing that might be necessary to “perfect” God’s justice, is never imagined anywhere in any version of Christian Scripture with which I am aware. It never is even considered by Jesus in the Biblical Gospels, and it belies Jesus’s mercy given to the thief hanging beside Him on the cross.

In fact, this woman’s foolish answer is the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of all of Christian theology. And as you read her answer again, you will come to see why that is true. In a reality which is composed of and created by infinitely powerful Consciousness, a reality where there is no place where God is not, you and I are profoundly safe! We live within Consciousness, which means that God is where you and I forever live and move and have our being. We are taking these brief, elective earth-lives now, and while we do that we accept amnesia for what came before these lives; but still, we are living securely within the Mind of God, And for God to create any kind of law which mandates that we are somehow beyond God’s direct forgiveness, mercy, and perfect love would be outside God’s Consciousness, and therefore impossible. Or if God actually did create such a law as this woman describes, which would require God to limit Godself to “four cardinal attributes” rather than just unbounded love, which is the highest Consciousness vibration, then God would be playing some sort of sadistic mind-game with us, which would make God less than what God is. So, again: impossible. No, we can believe what Jesus has told us about God’s infinite, perfect love for us. Within God, there is no negativity at all, beyond the minute negativity that our own puny human minds might ever briefly create.

So, I have come at length to accept the fact that human-created religions are in fact now, and indeed they always have been the direct enemy of our each having a free and open relationship with the genuine God. And I cannot see any way around that fact. My very dear friends, I write these sentences with considerable personal pain, because I love Christianity. I always have loved Christianity, as much as I feel the need on occasion to argue some of the theological details of it. But the hymns, the pageantry, the stained-glass windows? I still love it all! However, religions of every stripe have a long and chequered human existence, having begun defensively in the minds of fearful men in very long-ago prehistory. At first, religions were a way to conjure up imaginary gods that we might placate as people tried to make sense of the scary and incomprehensible void that was all that they could perceive around them. And to this day, the religions that people create still carry the same awful characteristics that for the most part they have had since their beginnings. For example:

  • Religions require that we fear our gods. And the fact that religions teach us to fear the gods that they also teach us to worship is universal! Every religion of every kind teaches us that you and I are venal, sinful, fallen, unworthy, and inadequate in every way to the love of our religion’s human-created god or gods. This has always been true, since long antiquity, and it is the fear of the wrath of our human-made gods that is what pulls even Christians out of bed on Sunday mornings and plants them all faithfully in those pews. Even today, Christians will refer with approval to someone’s being “a good, God-fearing man”.
  • Religions require that we hold to an understanding of our gods that is circumscribed by our religions’ long traditions. We never seek to learn anything new from our gods within our closely circumscribed religions. No, our long religious traditions are far safer if we never learn anything new about them. After all, our religions are proven by the test of time! As Catholics prepare now for a new Pope, who will be the 267th supreme leader of the Catholic church and chosen by the vote of a small group of celibate Cardinals, Catholics expect no changes, no new revelations at all. The first Pope is said to have been Jesus’s disciple, Peter. But a continuous line there seems unlikely, since Peter was martyred by being crucified in Rome, having been hung on a cross upside-down at his own request in about the year 65 C.E.
  • Religions require that we hold strictly to their human-made rules, which are ascribed to their god or gods, or else we will not be rewarded with our religion’s version of an afterlife. This need to obey human-made rules in order to be rewarded with our religion’s heaven feels alarming. Even fairly ancient religions seem to have had some sense of a potential afterlife, but it was always provisional; and unless we were very “good”, then most religions have envisioned negative possible eternities for us, including even perhaps a fiery hell. Which is why it is comforting to know that Jesus pardoned the thief hanging on the cross beside His. When one of the thieves on the crosses beside Jesus’s cross said to the other, who was taunting Jesus, “Do you not even fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed are suffering justly, for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42 And he was saying, “Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom!” 43 And Jesus said to him, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise” (LK 23:40-43). Ah, that is more like it! This man is a thief, and yet he asks Jesus for forgiveness and mercy. And God, as Jesus, even from the cross, freely gives it.

Speaking of Jesus, where does He fit in with all this talk of traditional religions? Well, actually, in point of fact, Jess does not fit in very well at all. Instead, Jesus is deeply and profoundly radical. He came to us from the genuine Godhead not to start yet one more religion; but instead, a strong argument can be made that Jesus came to us to end all religions. Jesus came to introduce to you and me the fact that there is in fact a personally knowable God of all Who would prefer to relate to each of us without any fallible human religions in the way, a Spiritual God Who loves us perfectly, and Who must not be feared! And Jesus did this, mind you, at a time and place when and where for Him  to openly suggest that He meant quite literally to reinvent our whole view of the reality in which we lived could have had Him arrested and killed for that alone. No Christian church, and certainly no Catholic church will tell you that was what Jesus told us that He actually had in mind!

I can recall when I was a teenager, and I was first doing my exercise of reading the Bible from cover to cover, over and over, by reading just a few pages each night. I would finish the Book of Malachi, which is the final book of the Protestant Old Testament, the words of a minor prophet written four hundred years before Jesus was born. And then, amazingly, at once I would be deep in the words of Jesus in the Gospel Book of Matthew. And, Omigod, I would at once be reading the teachings of Someone who in every way is a thoroughly modern Man.

This contrast between the Old Testament and the advent of Jesus, with no bridge and no break in between, always keenly astounded me. Is it possible that Jesus Himself hit His timeline contemporaries on earth in much the same radical way? It wasn’t even precisely what He said, but even the way He said everything was so different! After so many months of reading Old Testament stories and prophets, we then zipped forward in time instantly by two thousand years. I found that wrenching and remarkable, even as a child bent on reading the whole Bible through. It is only very recently, though, that I have come to risk, with Thomas’s prompting, really looking at all of this evidence so frankly.

Jesus was born on earth as our Teacher. That much, the Christian religion understands and accepts. But how might Jesus’s original Way have developed if it had been allowed to continue as Jesus first created it, and as it so very robustly began, without any of the fear-based dogmas that Constantine and any of the later Roman Councils added to it? Let’s consider that idea next week….

When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart!
Then I shall bow, in humble adoration,
And then proclaim, my God, how great Thou art!

Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!
– Stuart Keene Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1949)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Whose Christianity? (#5)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!
E’en though it be a cross that raiseth me,
still all my song shall be,
nearer, my God, to thee;
nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!

Though like the wanderer, the sun gone down,
darkness be over me, my rest a stone;
yet in my dreams I’d be
nearer, my God, to thee;
nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!

There let the way appear, steps unto heaven;
all that thou sendest me, in mercy given;
angels to beckon me
nearer, my God, to thee;
nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!
– Sarah Flower Adams (1805-1848). from “Nearer, My God, to Thee” (1841)

When you have witnessed the murder of Someone you love dearly, and seen Him laid out stone-cold dead in His tomb; and then you go to that tomb before dawn two days later, and you discover to your horror that His corpse has been stolen…   

11 Mary was standing outside the tomb weeping; and so, as she wept, she stooped and looked into the tomb; 12 and she saw two angels in white sitting, one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had been lying. 13 And they said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him.” 14 When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, and did not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” Supposing Him to be the gardener, she said to Him, “Sir, if you have carried Him away, tell me where you have laid Him, and I will take Him away.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to Him in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means, Teacher). 17 Jesus said to her, “Stop clinging to Me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to My brethren and say to them, ‘I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.’” 18 Mary Magdalene came, announcing to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and that He had said these things to her (JN 20:11-18).

Fascinating. There was a time, many years ago, when I very closely read each one of these Biblical Gospel accounts of Jesus’s appearances right after His resurrection, and it was clear that He had very briefly walked around wearing an already rapidly-decaying body that no one could recognize at all. That body was not alive again! Its blood was no longer flowing; it was dead, and it was decaying fast.  And, OMG, Jesus was inside it? All you can think is, “Ick!”  It was also now a fragile body. Notice how Jesus does not want Mary Magdalene to come closer to Him, and He certainly does not want her to touch Him.

That dead body was not usable for anything much any longer, so by that same evening, Jesus already had discarded it. We can tell that He had thrown it away, because by the evening, Jesus had taken on a readily usable body that even was able to go through closed and locked doors with ease. It is not surprising that Jesus’s execution, and then the unexplained disappearance of His body, briefly demoralized His disciples, these men who would nearly all later go on to bravely die for Him their awful martyrs’ deaths. That night they were hiding out from the Jews, but Jesus found them, and He already wore an efficient astral body that nevertheless bore His crucifixion’s marks:

19 So when it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and when the doors were shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” 20 And when He had said this, He showed them both His hands and His side. The disciples then rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 So Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you; as the Father has sent Me, I also send you.” 22 And when He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, their sins have been forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained.”

24 But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, or the twin, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples were saying to him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see in His hands the imprint of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.”

26After eight days, His disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus came, the doors having been locked, and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then He said to Thomas, “Reach here with your finger, and see My hands; and reach here your hand and put it into My side; and do not be unbelieving, but believing.” 28 Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed” (JN 20:19-29).

That Jesus simply switched to using an astral body for the forty days that He remained on earth before He ascended makes sense. Astral bodies are what we wear in the afterlife, when we wear a human body at all. They are solid and mind-created, and they can look and seem exactly as we like, so Jesus’s astral body could carry the crucifixion marks on His hands and in His side that He wanted His disciples to see and to feel. He also could lose the astral body and then pick it up again when He wanted to get through a closed, or even a locked door. What He did with His material body almost right away does not matter; it may be that He simply ditched it in a thicket somewhere, and it rotted in the manner of all flesh.

There is more than sufficient evidence for the Easter events, just within the Biblical Gospels themselves and in contemporary history. I had exhaustively done my own research; and for a long time, even deep skeptic that I am by nature, I thought the overall evidence was good enough. I had known about the Shroud of Turin, which was reportedly Jesus’s own burial shroud, but I doubted that it could be even possible that Jesus’s genuine shroud and sudarium (face-covering) might truly have survived to this day. However, on these matters, I am a skeptic no longer. As was true of all that afterlife evidence, and the evidence confirming the Lord’s words in the Gospels that I have researched so diligently, the modern evidence that these relics are in fact genuine is abundant, and I consider it now to be irrefutable. Here is what has persuaded me:

  • Both the Shroud and the Sudarium actually date to the time of Jesus. The original linen of which the Shroud of Turin (Italy) and the Sudarium of Oviedo (Spain) are made actually can be carbon-dated to the time of Jesus. (An earlier carbon-dating attempt of the Shroud used linen from a later patch, and its resulting Medieval date has now been discredited.) The linen of the genuine shroud is of a weave in common use in the first century, and it still carries pollen from plants that would have been blooming in a first-century Jerusalem springtime.
  • The blood on both relics is male and of the same type. That type is AB, which is so rare that only about two percent of modern people share it.
  • The marks on both relics mirror Jesus’s reported injuries. The distribution of dried blood on both cloths and some twenty other points of similarity make it statistically certain that they both covered the same Man, that He was Jewish, that He died on the eve of a Sabbath Day, and that He had suffered the same wounds that the Gospels report were inflicted on Jesus.
  • The Shroud carries an image of a Man. That image is only smudges on the cloth itself, and the reason for this was not apparent until 1898, when the Shroud was first photographed. More obvious to a casual observer are smoke and burn marks from a fire in 1532, and another in 1997, together with efforts that were made over time to mend and patch the damaged Shroud.
  • The image on the Shroud turns out to be a photographic negative. It was only when the Shroud was first photographed in 1898 that the clear image of a crucified Man appeared on its negative plate. Those smudges had been documented to exist on the Shroud of Turin for almost two millennia before anyone could have known what a photographic negative even was! Moreover, it is a 3-D negative. Mathematical analysis of it presents a perfect three-dimensional image.
  • No one knows how the image on the Shroud was made. It appears as a scorch on just one side of each individual fiber, and it does not penetrate the fibers at all. Close analysis shows that it is not a pigment, nor is it anything else man-made. The best explanation we are given is that it was caused by an immensely powerful “electrical charge in the form of radiation.” And that burst of radiation from the body of the victim happened well after the blood on the fibers had dried.
  • Something to think about… Experts who have examined those scorches and are able to do the calculations now tell us that what would have been required to produce the scorches would have been a tremendous burst of energy from the body roughly equivalent to, or greater than all the electricity now being produced on earth put together, in a single discharge.

Jesus’s dead body was not actually made alive again by that energy discharge. Two days after it had died on the cross, its blood had coagulated, its flesh was decaying, and those who personally knew Jesus did not recognize Him wearing that pale and haggard, rotting body. Jesus Himself considered His dead body to be so fragile that He warned Mary Magdalene not to touch it (see JN 20:16). But Jesus could fully re-inhabit and re-animate the body to the extent that He could move its limbs and jaw and make it seem to walk and talk, so He could use it to demonstrate His own survival. And then by that evening, He apparently cast it away, and He used an astral body from then on until He ascended, some forty days later. That astral body was why He could so easily appear inside the enclosed and fortified rooms where His disciples had hidden themselves (see JN 20:19-20). And having mind-created mimic wounds on His astral body, He invited doubting Thomas and others to probe those wounds and satisfy themselves that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead!

So, there you have the genuine miracle of our eternally risen Wayshower, Jesus. Two thousand years ago, God was born on earth in the Person of Jesus, and He lived among us for thirty-three years. Then for our sake He delivered Himself up to be tortured, crucified, murdered, wrapped in a Shroud which still exists to this day, and He was laid out in a tomb. Two days after that, He re-animated His dead body with an extraordinary burst of energy that was at least equivalent to all the electricity that we now can produced on the earth being generated at once. Jesus then showed Himself to His disciples to prove to them, and now to us and to all the ages still to come, that human life is indeed eternal, and to prove that none of us ever will die.

So, now we can at last attempt to answer the question with which we began this five-posts Easter series. Just whose Christianity is this, anyway? Who truly owns it? The Roman Emperor Constantine would have you believe that it is God’s Own Christian religion, blessed by and handed down directly from God to Constantine himself. The Roman Emperor did, after all, take over Jesus’s Way of Love in a bloody massacre in the year 312 C.E. And thereafter, Constantine and his successor leaders within the religion that he had begun called seven successive church councils, beginning in the year 325 C.E. with the First Council of Nicaea, and ending with the Second Council of Nicaea in the year 787 C.E. They all claimed that their Councils were under God’s guidance and inspiration, so they insisted that those Councils created God’s infallible Christianity. But, look, a movement that began in a massacre of many of Jesus’s followers; that included doctrinal splits, inquisitions, and crusades; and that now includes more than forty-five thousand different versions of Christianity that are still often immersed in petty squabbles in which both sides claim that God is on their own side can hardly claim to be righteous on any level! And anyway, no religion comes from God. Every religion is human-made, by definition.

So, now we are more or less back where we began when we first asked this title question. But, not quite. We now understand more certainly than we ever have understood it before that the one and only straightforward way to end our fear-based turning on the wheel of repeated lifetimes on earth is to return to following Jesus, and following only Jesus. His Way alone is sure! Jesus’s original Way is not a religion at all, but rather it is the steady and certain path that He long ago was born on earth from out of the Godhead to bring to us, and He lovingly taught us to daily follow, his Way of just absolute, prevenient forgiveness and God’s endless and perfect love.   

Then, with my waking thoughts bright with thy praise,
out of my stony griefs Bethel I’ll raise;
so by my woes to be
nearer, my God, to thee;
nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!

Or if, on joyful wing cleaving the sky,
sun, moon, and stars forgot, upward I fly,
still all my song shall be,
nearer, my God, to thee;
nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!
– Sarah Flower Adams (1805-1848). from “Nearer, My God, to Thee” (1841)

 

 

 (Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Whose Christianity? (#4)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I serve a risen Saviour, He’s in the world today.
I know that He is living, whatever men may say.
I see His hand of mercy, I hear His voice of cheer,
And just the time I need Him He’s always near.

 He lives! He lives! Christ Jesus lives today!
He walks with me and talks with me
Along life’s narrow way.
He lives! He lives! Salvation to impart!
You ask me how I know He lives?
He lives within my heart.
– Alfred H. Ackley (1887-1960), from “He Lives” (1900)

 When I was a child sitting with my parents in the pews of my family’s old New England church, our beloved Reverend Turrell often would tell us that Jesus is “fully God and fully Man”. I preferred to go to grown-up church every Sunday from the age of eight because after my experience of light, coloring and singing in the basement held no further charms for me. Instead, what I craved was meaty sermons! And “fully God and fully Man” the way our minister would say it had a fascinating ring to it. I was eager to better understand what that meant, and why, and our Reverend Turrell was a blessing for a childhood-level minister. His every sermon richly quoted long and deep gospel passages, so it felt as if Jesus was talking to me directly; and he never preached hellfire or anything else negative. It was because of Reverend Turrell that my first life-ambition was to become a minister, too, so I also could one day stand up there in a pulpit and say mesmerizing things to people. He even had me reading the Bible from cover to cover, over and over, by the time that I was eleven. I would read a couple of pages each night, and I kept that up until I was in my fifties.

You tend to go deeper, though, as you grow older. That is especially true if you grow up to become such a zealous Christian that you major in early Christian history in college. And as you must realize by now if you have been sharing very much of this life-journey with me, the Roman Emperor Constantine’s version of Christianity won’t stand up to much scrutiny. There is nothing sacrilegious about going deeper, mind you! In fact, Jesus urges us to do just that. Our beloved Wayshower and Best Friend respects our intelligence, and He seems to enjoy our curiosity. Jesus says, 7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. 9 Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? 11 If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him! (MT 7:7-11) The footnotes to this passage even tell us that the forms of the verbs used here are especially strong, so Jesus would have said it to sound more like, “keep asking, keep seeking, and keep knocking”. Jesus urges us to dig away and to keep on learning, my very dear ones! The more eagerly I ever have sought the truth, the very much more I have ever so happily learned. It has always been as if God has been amused by my unwillingness to ever let myself be fully satisfied with anything that I already knew. Until there came at last that unbelievable night in April of 2022 when I was sitting at the feet of Jesus Himself, and hearing from Him at last His own eternal-life story.

It was there that somehow my childhood pastor came together with Jesus in my mind. Reverend Turrell’s old insistence that Jesus must be “fully God and fully Man” made perfect sense to me finally, and Jesus’s own devout wish that my spirit guide please do something so crazy as chasing the Son of God’s astral body around that Heavenly field and catching Him and beating Him up also made its own confounding sort of actual sense. I almost could see a smile on the face of the Godhead Collective, which yes, true enough, is Spirit, just as Jesus long ago insisted to us is true, so it has no actual face. God never wears any kind of a body! All of this came together for me perfectly and combined with my whole lifetime of questioning and challenging Constantine’s bastard religion on the night when Jesus invited me to come and sit with Him on His riverbank so He could tell me how He came to be.

NO, Jesus did not die for our sins! Of course not! And I can see that now so clearly. When you believe that Jesus’s death was a human sin-sacrifice to God, then you throw God’s  perfect love for you as God’s infinitely treasured and best-beloved child right back in God’s metaphorical face. When you believe Constantine’s old fear-based religious idea upon which he built his version of Christianity, that Jesus died for our sins (or needed to), then you are saying that you actually believe in just a petty little excuse for a God who insists that you and I must always forgive, even though God cannot quite manage to forgive us in return without first receiving Jesus’s bloody body as a sacrifice. Jesus Himself tells us that His death and resurrection together demonstrated to us that human life is eternal, which He tells us was the reason why He chose to go to the cross. So then His rising from the dead was the part that mattered! And of course, if Jesus had died as a sin-sacrifice, then His rising from the dead would have been meaningless. It also would have made Him an imperfect sin-sacrifice. After all, every lamb, calf, and pigeon that ever has been killed as a perfect sin-sacrifice to God in the Temple down through all the ages always has stayed dead! Have you never paused to considered that fact?

Jesus informed me on that night in April of 2022 when He told me His life’s story that the Godhead had at first actively rejected His idea that He might allow Himself to be arrested and crucified. God had considered that whole notion to be too humiliating for a perfected Being and a genuine Part of the Godhead! But Jesus told me on that night in 2022 that He had decided that, with or without the Godhead’s permission, He was going to do this. He really felt at the time that He had to do it, because He could not convince the people that He had come to earth to teach that their lives were eternal in any other way. Which makes more meaningful something that Jesus cried out from the cross on that Friday night, the night before the Sabbath, just as the sun would have begun to set:

“At about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?'” (Mt 27:46) This same quotation also appears in the crucifixion story in the Gospel Book of Mark at 15:34. And it suggests that perhaps Jesus was still not quite sure when He dismissed His Archangels and surrendered Himself to be crucified that He had fully convinced God to cooperate with His plan:

  • Jesus had been expecting God to free Him from His body on the cross before sunset, because
  • At sunset on that Sabbath Eve, the soldiers would be coming around to break the legs of those still alive on crosses, so they could no longer push up to breathe and they would then quickly expire and be taken off their crosses before darkness fell and the Sabbath began.

And of course, a resurrected body with broken legs would have been useless when Jesus tried to walk it out of that tomb so He could thereby prove His survival! Personally, I long have assumed that the sponge filled with sour wine that Jesus was offered immediately after He cried out to God contained a poison, and the man who administered it to Jesus was acting at the Godhead’s subliminal direction. Here is what comes immediately after Jesus cries out to God:

47 “And some of those who were standing there, when they heard it, began saying, ‘This man is calling for Elijah.’ 48 Immediately one of them ran, and taking a sponge, he filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed, and gave Him a drink. 49 But the rest of them said, ‘Let us see whether Elijah will come to save Him.’ 50 And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit. 51 And behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth shook and the rocks were split. 52 The tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; 53 and coming out of the tombs after His resurrection they entered the holy city and appeared to many. 54 Now the centurion, and those who were with him keeping guard over Jesus, when they saw the earthquake and the things that were happening, became very frightened and said, Truly this was the Son of God!’” (MT 27:47-54)

And so it was that Jesus died on the cross. And Jesus indeed was, and He remains today as my childhood pastor always used to insist, fully God and fully Man. He was fully Man because up until about the year 6000 BCE, He was a human being like all others, and He was spiritually rising over repeated lifetimes toward love and away from all the ishy emotions, perfecting Himself on earth within God’s Consciousness just as we all are now perfecting ourselves. He then became a perfected Being.

When the boy that Jesus had been in 6000 BCE first achieved Godhead status, He was stunned and alarmed to realize that He had arrived alone at the Godhead level. Neither of His brothers of that lifetime who had died when He had died also had been perfected, so there had been some sort of contest going on here that none of them even had known about and He alone had won it. But it was unfair for there to be a contest going on unless everyone at least got to know the rules! That was the way that Jesus told me He had seen it at the time. So He had refused to join the Godhead Collective, and instead He had spent what my Thomas later reckoned was something like four thousand earth-years making a complete pain in the neck of Himself, petitioning to be allowed to be born again right now from out of the Godhead so He could teach on earth what He now referred to as “the rules” for achieving Godhead status. Let’s make this a fair contest, for Heaven’s sake!

So, very truly, Jesus remains to this day fully God and fully Man. Jesus never has joined the Godhead Collective, even though two thousand years ago His pleas at last were answered, and He was born again from the Godhead as God on earth. All His additional work done in love for humankind has so much further elevated Him spiritually that now He vibrates even above the Godhead level. In the astral plane we recognize one another by our spiritual vibrations, and Jesus’s vibration is at this point one singular, very high note so powerful that  unless He remembers to tone it down by a lot, you cannot get near Him. As Jesus said when He was living on earth, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works” (JN 14:9-10). And with the patient assistance of my Thomas, who is His devoted elder brother from His final earth-lifetime that they lived together so long ago, Jesus also has managed to maintain His human distinction. Thomas has told me that he and a few others who are very close to Jesus have pledged to Him that they will never advance further spiritually to join the Godhead, but they will always remain close to humankind and also in service to Jesus, in order to help Him to maintain forever His intimate human connection. So Jesus can indeed be forever fully God and fully Man, and therefore for each of us He is our own intimate connection to the Godhead. My childhood pastor was precisely right!

So, is Jesus actually our Savior? And what then is He saving us from? Not from hell, certainly, or from anything like it. Afterlife researchers never have found any evidence of a fiery hell, but instead there is evidence that such a place is not really possible. But Jesus is indeed our Savior! Jesus tells us that He came to the world two thousand years ago not to save us from the wrath of a perfectly holy God whose only emotion is the purest and most intense love for each one of us individually. But Jesus did indeed come to save us, and what He came to save us from was ignorance. Two thousand years ago, Jesus was born from the Godhead, fully determined to give us what He thought of as “the rules” for what would be the quickest and easiest way to raise our personal spiritual vibrations sufficiently to make this our last necessary earth-lifetime so we might all become spiritually perfected Beings as soon as possible. And that is precisely what the Gospel teachings of Jesus actually are! Perhaps the Roman Emperor Constantine got everything wrong, but Jesus gets it all precisely right. And next week we will talk about how, despite the careless and dismissive way that Constantine stole and used His name, Jesus made sure that into the far future you and I still might come to know and love Him on an intimate level, even today!

In all the world around me I see His loving care.
And though my heart grows weary, I never will despair.
I know that He is leading, thro’ all the stormy blast.
The day of His appearing will come at last.

 He lives! He lives! Christ Jesus lives today!
He walks with me and talks with me
Along life’s narrow way.
He lives! He lives! Salvation to impart!
You ask me how I know He lives?
He lives within my heart.

 Rejoice, rejoice, O Christian! Lift up your voice and sing.
Eternal hallelujahs to Jesus Christ, the King!
The Hope of all who seek Him, the Help of all who find.
None other is so loving, so good and kind.

 He lives! He lives! Christ Jesus lives today!
He walks with me and talks with me
Along life’s narrow way.
He lives! He lives! Salvation to impart!
You ask me how I know He lives?
He lives within my heart.
– Alfred H. Ackley (1887-1960), from “He Lives” (1900)

 

 

 (Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Whose Christianity? (#3)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan’s tyranny;
From depths of hell Thy people save,
And give them victory o’er the grave.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
– John Mason Neale (1818-1866), Translator from the Latin, from “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” (12th Cen)

When the long-promised Messiah so deeply yearned for in our frame-verse this week came to us at last, He brought to all of humankind the Godhead’s ultimate gifts. The Son of God was born on earth to bring us knowledge of the easiest way to make this our last necessary earth-lifetime of having to learn hard-won spiritual lessons. That was the freedom from “Satan’s tyranny” mentioned in our frame-verse. It is what Buddhists call freedom from “turning on the wheel,” that need to keep returning to earth with little added knowledge gained each time. And Jesus also brought us the explosive truth that our lives truly are eternal! As our frame-verse tells us, He brought us “victory o’er the grave”. Our lives never are going to end, so it will indeed be worthwhile for us to make the effort to learn our spiritual lessons while we are on earth, since we will profit forevermore from our having learned them. And the prize of all this glorious wisdom, these very great eternal gifts, Jesus called “the Way.” Jesus’s Way spread rapidly during the first few centuries following His death and resurrection. It reached many millions of people, more than halfway around the Mediterranean Sea and as far away as Rome, until the Roman Emperor Constantine came along.

Thomas and I experienced together Constantine’s destruction of Jesus’s Way. In fact, becoming caught up in its destruction was actually how we first met. There is no way I would remember any of that now, seventeen additional shared lifetimes and two millennia later, but Thomas used his recalling dramatically back to my mind of the morning long ago when we first met as one way to first break the modern ice between us. It turns out that there are some who see Constantine’s bloody destruction of the Way of Jesus at least somewhat romantically.

One of my favorite fellow-laborers in this field of spreading the teachings and the love of Jesus is Father Richard Rohr. Father Richard is a Franciscan Friar who is the founder and head of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He and his people do admirable work, and he is especially in love with the desert mystics, the very first of whom were those few who survived Constantine’s massacres of all the early followers of Jesus who did not accept Constantine’s singular view of Christianity, which was that Jesus had died for our sins. As you may recall from our last week’s missive, the Roman Emperor Constantine believed that he had received a divine message that told him he would conquer by the sign of Jesus’s cross. So, while the notion that Jesus had died for our sins had been just one minor idea in the multifaceted Way of Jesus, Constantine then set out to take over The Way, and to murder every follower of Jesus who held any other idea about what Jesus ever had taught. And, as Father Richard notes, a few of the disfavored followers of Jesus who still held to any of His other teachings managed to flee into the desert wilderness quickly enough to escape being massacred by Constantine’s legions. The following passage is taken from the good friar’s daily letter of April 6, 2025:

“After the legitimization and, some would say, the co-opting of Christianity by the Roman Empire in the 4th century, many Christians fled to the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Cappadocia (Eastern Turkey). We call these men and women the desert fathers and mothers (or abbas and ammas). The desert Christians emphasized lifestyle practice, an alternative to empires and their economies, psychologically astute methods of prayer, and a very simple spirituality of transformation into Christ. The desert communities grew out of informal gatherings of monastics and functioned much like families. This tradition preceded the emergence of systematic theology and the later Church councils. Since the desert monks often lacked formal education, they told stories, much as Jesus did, to teach about ego, love, virtue, surrender, peace, divine union, and inner freedom.” 

Well, yes, dear Father Richard, my Thomas and I would certainly call that 4th century Roman takeover of Jesus’s Way by Constantine a bloody co-opting of Christianity by the Roman Empire!

Here is what happened to me one morning in the summer of 2015, so it was almost ten years ago now. I was sitting alone at our kitchen table with a cup of tea one early morning, watching through our wall-sized kitchen window as the slanted sunlight rising through the trees from the right took over our grassy back yard. But of course, I was not alone. Thomas, my spirit guide, had first come out to me that previous February, and I was then only barely becoming used to hearing his occasional murmured voice, which back then usually came from behind my left shoulder. Nowadays, Thomas nearly always talks and is dimly visible from in front and to my right.

Unexpectedly my Thomas said, sounding warm and dreamy, almost romantic, “What does this remind you of?”

I still would be startled by his voice whenever he would suddenly speak, right there so close. I said in my mind, “What? Nothing. What should it remind me of?”

“The morning when we died together. That was how we met.”

“Died? What are you talking about? Tell me.”

So he told me. And as he told this story in my mind, and he answered my questions over the course of that summer morning, I gradually began to resurrect some very ancient memories. I was a young boy, ten or twelve years old, and precious to my parents, who had desperately hidden me in our hovel before they went out bravely with the rest of the grown-ups to defend our village against the approaching Roman legion. Our people had nothing to fight with, only farm implements for weapons. Thomas tells me this happened in the south of what is now Syria. I can dimly remember hearing lots of shouting, screaming, the clash of metal, and I had to see what was going on, but as soon as I barely opened the door, a legionnaire ran me through with his sword and I fell.

The next thing I remember is this big, gruff man with a grizzled head of hair and beard lifting me in his arms to give me sips of water. He also was bleeding. All around us were the bodies of the villagers, and my parents were among them. The man, who I think had been the village chieftain, told me that he had played dead and survived, although he was mortally wounded. There were a couple of others that he also was tending, but once they had died, he came back and laid down and held me in his arms until I died. Later that morning, he died as well.

It surprised me that just hearing Thomas describe these events could so well trigger memories from a lifetime that was so long past. Yet, so it was! He even resurrected the vivid sounds, and the smell of death on that ancient morning. Once Thomas also had died, he rose to me where I hung confused above him in the air, and he took me home to the healing gardens in the afterlife. My memory of that experience is vaguer, but Thomas wanted me to remember when I first met Jesus as He lovingly tended the victims of that massacre. All I can recall now is how this nice big hulk of a man that I thought of as a comforting grandfather took me to meet a young man who was tending lots of traumatized people on pallets. He had a zingy energy about Him that I found alarming, and he vaguely glowed with light, which was also alarming. He glanced up, saw the grandfather, and mentally said something like, “Great! You’re back. Lots to do here.” And He was right back to comforting the damaged ones who were writhing on pallets around him. As a newly-transitioned child still in shock who had just lost both his parents, I don’t think I realized who Jesus was.

Thomas tells me that these events occurred barely three hundred years after Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. And of course, this was just the beginning for Jesus of His spiritual healing work, at which He toiled almost without respite until nearly the start of the twentieth century. It has been estimated that over all those intervening centuries, at least ten million lives would be destroyed on earth by the Christian religion in all its Inquisitions, Crusades and wars. That whole history is especially well recounted in Helen Ellerbe’s The Dark Side of Christian History. And for all those many centuries, Jesus faithfully labored in his healing gardens in the afterlife, loving and comforting and healing all those millions of victims traumatized by the Christian religion back into emotional and spiritual health.

What is most remarkable to me is that in all those centuries, Thomas tells me that Jesus never has expressed the slightest bit of negativity or resentment toward the Christian religion, or toward the Roman Emperor Constantine himself. Not even once! And my Thomas would know. As I have come to understand just in recent years, my spirit guide is, surprisingly, a very close personal friend of Jesus’s, even a bestie if you will, from before Jesus became a perfected being; and they still spend a great deal of time together. Thomas tells me that the service that he performs for Jesus is an astonishing, but an essential one. Jesus became an aspect of the Godhead something like six thousand years ago. Then He spent most of the past two thousand years loving millions of people back into emotional and spiritual health. By now, He is vibrating even higher than the Godhead of this universe, which is something almost impossible for us to imagine. When you visit Jesus – and you will, when you transition – He will have to tone His personal energy down by a lot in order for you even to get close to Him.

So Thomas tells me that what Jesus needs and craves now more than anything else is what they both refer to as “balance.” Jesus is, as the saying goes, indeed “fully God and fully Man”; but at this point, He is too much toward the divine. What He needs is a way to maintain a solid remnant of His human nature as well, when He is vibrating at the  Godhead level and everyone sees Him as a purely divine Being. Everyone, that is, except for my Thomas, who was Jesus’s older brother in their last shared earth-lifetime prior to Jesus’s first ascension, and who has been close to Him now for more than six thousand years. I got to see when I was allowed to remember some visits with Thomas that I made to Jesus during the summer of 2022 how Thomas helps Jesus to maintain His human balance. I swear that, so help me, this is true!

Jesus is spending His eternity on a riverbank on lowly level three of the astral because that level is accessible to nearly every newcomer to the afterlife. Jesus wants to greet everyone who has just transitioned and wants to meet Him, so these people are brought to Him in groups every half-hour or so. But meanwhile, sometimes I got to watch Jesus and Thomas just sitting on that riverbank, feeding the fish perhaps, and chatting softly in what Thomas tells me is the language of their last shared lifetime, so it is a language now dead for six thousand years and they must be the only ones who still speak it. Thomas tells me that they enjoy keeping it alive. Then Jesus might start to stand as He jabs an insult at Thomas, generally a word which my spirit guide tells me translates to something like “bloody general”, and was one of his honorifics in that ancient lifetime. Jesus takes off running, Thomas mutters “Brat!” in their language and chases and catches Him, and they tussle like teenagers on the ground. They really fight! Astral bodies are indestructible. They cannot even feel pain. But Thomas is bigger and stronger so he always wins these little battles. And he is, as he tells me Jesus is fond of telling him, still Jesus’s big brother. Thomas thinks Jesus finds a kind of human grounding in the thought of having a brother who “outranks” him and can beat him up.  

But as charming and comforting as I find the brothers’ intense friendship, and despite all the patience and grace with which Jesus has forgiven Constantine’s butchery of Jesus’s long-prophesied earthly mission, the way that the Emperor Constantine hijacked Jesus’s Way long ago still very much troubles me. Jesus came to teach us how to achieve liberation from endless incarnations through forgiveness and love, and He added the glorious bonus lesson that human life is joyously eternal! Then Constantine stole all of that from us, and he distorted Jesus’s entire long-prophesied mission for that Roman general’s own war-based purposes. Emmanuel came at last! But Constantine conquered all the good that He did. And the botch of a religion that Constantine made instead of The Way has by now split into more than forty-five thousand variations. In most Christian churches today, sin-laden plaster Jesuses bleed and die on crosses forevermore, and a symbolic Seder becomes actual flesh and blood, while God’s precious gift of Messianic teachings that were the whole point of Jesus’s having been born on earth are hardly mentioned.  So now we wonder, as we look toward holding yet another vigil at the foot of the cross, and then rolling aside the stone on another Easter morning. Will this year at last be any different…?

O come, Thou Dayspring, from on high,
And cheer us by Thy drawing nigh;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Key of David, come
And open wide our heavenly home;
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Adonai, Lord of might,
Who to Thy tribes, on Sinai’s height,
In ancient times didst give the law
In cloud and majesty and awe.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
– John Mason Neale (1818-1866), Translator from the Latin, from “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” (12th Cen)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Whose Christianity? (#2)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, let me stand.
I’m tired, I’m weak, I’m forlorn!
Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light.
Take my hand, precious Lord. Lead me home.

As my way grows drear, Precious Lord, linger near
When my life is almost gone.
Hear my cry, hear my call! Hold my hand, lest I fall.
Take my hand, precious Lord. Lead me home.
– Thomas A. Dorsey (1899-1993), from “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” (1932).

My college major was Early Christian History, which at the time was almost but not quite on a par in popularity with Art History at my New England college. Few of us there were majoring in anything useful. We Early Christian History majors would playfully say to one another, “My boss is a Jewish carpenter!” Although that was of course never technically true. Jesus worked as a carpenter only during His pre-teaching phase of earthly life, and it was then, during that very youthful part of His life that Jesus was studying the people around Him so He could ever better know how to teach them once His teaching phase began. Jesus was no longer working as a carpenter as He taught anything that the much-later students in my classes would be studying! And later in my life I have become a stickler for holding to all such fussy facts. We study Jesus in His place and time, or we cannot come to know Him at all. And Jesus was throughout His life always firmly Jewish, and it is important that we never forget that fact. It is crucial that we study Jesus in His time and place and not in ours, with His background and with the knowledge that His times would have given Him, in the highly particular world in which He lived. 

Some modern Christians have largely forgotten that Jesus was born and grew up and He remained a Jew, or else they simply would rather not think about that fact. Jesus was actually a rather well-educated and observant Jew. Even the last, formal meal that He shared with His disciples, the one where He asked them to remember Him whenever they again ate unleavened bread together, and they shared ceremonial wine with one another was a traditional Jewish Passover Seder. We forget that Jesus was never a Christian, and nor did He establish the Christian religion. There was no Christian religion in existence anywhere until the year 312 C.E., when the Roman Emperor Constantine had a vision of a cross in the sky, and he heard the spoken Latin words, “In hoc signo vinces,” which meant “In this sign you shall conquer.” It was for that reason that He became a follower of Jesus, since conquest was what Constantine was all about! No, Jesus Himself never was  a Christian, but instead He began what He called The Way, and His Way spread His teachings on love and forgiveness rapidly to many millions of people all around the Mediterranean Sea during those first few hundred years after His death and resurrection.

The plain fact is that the Christian religion actually began as a Roman Emperor’s tool for more effective conquest. Here is another thing that we must not forget! So perhaps it should not surprise us that practicing Christians continue to squabble to this day, and the Christian religion that Constantine began, and that now comes in more than 45,000 different flavors, is even now  prone to further splintering over the tiniest disagreements. Modern Christian clergymen will eagerly create even further divisions over, for example, the role that women should be allowed to play in worship (if any). Some clergymen even will insist that these sorts of worship micro-divisions were happening as far back as Jesus’s day, when of course nothing of the kind is true.

Here is a modern Lutheran pastor who is reading very much too much into a well-known passage of Luke. In Luke 10:38-42, Jesus tells his harried hostess that He won’t prevent her sister from sitting and listening as He teaches, because in doing that the sister has chosen to do what is most important. This passage reads, “38 Now as they were traveling along, He entered a village; and a woman named Martha welcomed Him into her home. 39 She had a sister called Mary, who was seated at the Lord’s feet, listening to His word. 40 But Martha was distracted with all her preparations; and she came up to Him and said, ‘Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to do all the serving alone? Then tell her to help me.’ 41 But the Lord answered and said to her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things; 42 but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.’” The simple meaning of this Gospel passage in the time and place when and where Jesus spoke it remains  clear to us all! But our modern Lutheran pastor friend has turned those simple words into Jesus weighing in on a matter of very-far-future Christian church politics. Good grief. And he even has put Jesus on what the pastor himself considers to be the wrong side of that very-far-future political issue. This pastor has done all of this, mind you, even though when Jesus actually spoke those Gospel words, the Christian church had not as yet even come close to being invented!

Now, as we said last week, the core Christian religious dogma of substitutionary atonement is not spiritual, it is based in nothing that Jesus taught, and it frankly makes no sense at all. To do away with the whole issue, Jesus assures us right in the Gospel of John that God never judges us (see JN 5:22-23), so since God already forgives all our sins, then God needs no sin-sacrifice. And that false dogma of substitutionary atonement is insulting to God and humiliating to Jesus, for heaven’s sake! So, if the dogma simply has to be in no way true, then why did Jesus die on the cross? I have talked here before about the amazing fact that on April 6, 2022, Thomas, my wonderful spirit guide, took me to meet with Jesus in the astral plane. All of us travel out of our material bodies on many nights while our bodies sleep, and since my Thomas is Jesus’s close eternal friend every bit as much as he is my spirit guide for this lifetime, he has duties now to both of us. So Thomas has been dragging me along with him in astral form on most nights of my life whenever he went to visit Jesus. He simply would give me amnesia for all these travels out of my body, so I have had no memory of any of this at all.

But I think that when Jesus so often saw my astral self just sitting there in a clueless lump whenever Thomas would drag me along on his almost-nightly visits, Jesus may have decided that it was only polite for Him to speak with me every once in a while. Especially, you know, after I eventually became a grown-up. And anyway, Jesus was lately coming to want a website, and He and Thomas were talking about that now, and discussing asking my colleague Craig Hogan and me to collaborate in the work of building Jesus a website. So for various reasons, beginning in April of 2022 and for several months, Jesus decided for a time to overrule Thomas’s pretty strong wish that his spirit charge, me, not be allowed to remember my almost nightly visits to the astral plane with him. And for me, that summer of 2022 when I was was working with Jesus was the most extraordinary time of my life.

Right out of the blue and without any warning, on April 6th three years ago, I found myself sitting on an astral riverbank beneath a sky streaked with gorgeous astral colors never seen on earth, next to a man who at first did not look remotely like Jesus. He looked like a kindly older man, like someone’s benevolent uncle perhaps. His hair was short, and he didn’t have a beard. But his personal energy was one high, strong note, so at once I suspected who He probably was, just as I heard Thomas from my other side tell this man something like, “You can look like Yourself now. Seeing You won’t alarm her.” Although I was already feeling somewhat alarmed. But Jesus was already changing then to look as He chooses to look now, as a slight young man with brown eyes, curly hair, and a short, efficient beard. He began to speak to me softly, and He looked into my eyes as we sat there together on His riverbank and fed His neon many-colored fish with grain that just appeared in our hands. And wow, to be abruptly so close to Him, and to feel his personal energy so close as just one high, intense note, was overwhelming.

Jesus generally looks right into your eyes, softly but intensely, as He speaks with you. He makes you feel as if nothing else matters to Him but you, and just that feels amazing! Usually He asks you questions about yourself and your day, and He really wants to hear your answers. But this time, He just wanted to do the talking. He told me with a kind of soft intensity that He knew that I was curious about His crucifixion, and about why He had let Himself be crucified. He said that I was right and I should be curious, since that had been a negative, violent death, and not in keeping with His original life-plan. He had invisible Archangels around Him always when He lived as Jesus, and their task had been to protect Him from just that sort of ghastly, undignified treatment. The plan that He had made for that lifetime, and that God had approved, had been for Him to teach the world as simply as He could do it how to achieve perfect spiritual wisdom, and then when He had achieved those goals, He would quietly leave and seem to the people around Him to simply disappear.  I should add that of course most astral communication is mental, but when Jesus speaks to me it is always verbal. And Jesus speaks English well, but when you converse with Him this way you can tell that English never has been His first language for an earth-lifetime. Sometimes His word-choice is unusual, and He has a mild, unguessable accent that is almost musical. I love listening to Him when He has the floor and keeps talking!

Jesus said that as the time for Him to leave this earth drew closer, He came to see that there was one big fact that He had simply been unable to teach and make His listeners believe it. He told me that helping humankind to understand that our lives truly are eternal was to have been His most important lesson of all. It was crucially important, even above forgiveness and love! He said something like, “If people continue to think that having their bodies die is the end of their lives, then they will see no point while they live on earth in trying to learn how to grow spiritually and raise their vibrations.” So He had come to earth determined to teach all of humankind that there is no death! But no matter what He had said, and no matter how he had said it, no one ever would believe it. I could see and hear His frustration as He was talking about this, so I tried to help Him cut to the chase.

I sort of mumbled, “Because of the bone-boxes?”

Jesus said, “Yes.”

In Jesus’s day, the custom was to lay out newly-dead bodies in caves that had been carved in the rock for just this purpose. Recent discoveries in the area where Jesus’s tomb is said to have been give us a greater insight into this process. Over just a few years’ time, in that climate those bodies would rot away until only the bones remained. So then after a few years the bones of Great-Uncle Bertie, or whoever it was, would be gathered and put into a bone-box, called an ossuary, which would be marked with the decedent’s name, and all the ossuaries were then stored together. Each cave would soon receive someone else who was newly dead, and so the rotting-away process would go on down through the generations. To be the first one whose body rots in a new cave is of course a privilege of sorts, so it was a mark of Joseph of Arimathea‘s great esteem for Jesus when he gave his own freshly-carved burial cave to be the place where Jesus’s body was laid out following His crucifixion. It was assumed by all that of course Jesus’s body would now rot away in there, because little did anyone imagine….

But, back to what Jesus told me about His reason for allowing Himself to be crucified. He did consider it to be an awful way to die, but it was a very public way, and it would prove to the world that He was in fact dead, while still leaving a usable body that Jesus could reanimate. He was determined to find a way to contradict the ossuary evidence and prove that human life truly is eternal after all! He told me that He had experimented with bringing small dead animals back to life, and that had worked, although the animals had never lived for long. But He thought that if He could publicly kill His body while preserving its usability, and then get inside His dead corpse and jolt it alive again, He would be able to keep it alive. And that would prove to all that death is a mere illusion. I didn’t actually die, and so neither will you.

Jesus told me that He had asked the Godhead for permission to make this change to His life plan. He even told Them why it was so important that He do it, but still They refused to permit it. No! They emphatically did not want a member of the Godhead to suffer such public humiliation, such a demeaning and appalling death. For Jesus to order His guardian Archangels to stand down, and to offer Himself up for torture and crucifixion that way would be beyond the pale. I still remember vividly the look of resolve on Jesus’s face when He told me how reluctant They were to let Him do this! He told me His doing it had been so important to the success of His entire teaching mission on earth that He had thought He could persuade Them. But, what if He had never convinced them?  What then? I very shyly dared to asked Him that question. He was standing up, and His face was then once again transforming to what we call “church Jesus” as He prepared to go and greet another group of newly-arrived Christians. When I asked my question, He looked at me and said, “If They had not approved, I would have done it anyway.”

 When the darkness appears, and the night draws near,
And the day is past and gone,
At the river, I stand. Guide my feet, hold my hand.
Take my hand, precious Lord! Lead me home.

 Precious Lord, take my hand! Lead me on, let me stand.
I’m tired, I’m weak, I’m forlorn.
Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light!
Take my hand, precious Lord! Lead me home (lead me home).
Thomas A. Dorsey (1899-1993), from “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” (1932).

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Whose Christianity? (#1)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
The emblem of suff’ring and shame.
And I love that old cross where the dearest and best
For a world of lost sinners was slain.

So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross
‘Til my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross
And exchange it someday for a crown.

Oh, that old rugged cross, so despised by the world,
Has a wondrous attraction for me.
For the dear Lamb of God left His glory above
To bear it to dark Calvary.

So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross
‘Til my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross
And exchange it someday for a crown.
– George Bennard (1873–1958). From “The Old Rugged Cross” (1912)

Of all the things that influence our lives, the single thing about which we have the greatest right to feel most certain is the way that Jesus, our Wayshower and our Best Friend, specifically suggests that we should live our lives. Wouldn’t you agree that is certainly true? Doesn’t each of us have the unrestricted right to be personally sure of how Jesus wants us to live while we are on this earth? I mean, if you cannot be sure of what Jesus wants of you, then how can you really be sure about anything?

But, here is our problem. When I wrote my first book in this field, The Fun of Dying, and that was fifteen years ago now, there were then by most counts more than ten thousand different denominations of Christianity being practiced on earth. True, perhaps most of those versions occupied just  one, or maybe only a few church buildings. But even if there had been as few as perhaps just a hundred major versions of Christianity at that time, or – Lord forgive us! – just a thousand versions, how on earth were we supposed to know which version might possibly be the best one to follow? And, much worse to even contemplate, was it conceivably true that only one of those very many version was the “right” one, the one blessed by God? A few of those ten thousand versions actually were proclaiming back then that they alone held heaven’s keys, and if you followed any other Christian denomination, then you were flat-out going to hell. Worst of all, I am sorry to break this news to you on such a lovely Sunday morning, but when I just asked Google how many Christian denominations there are today, I was horrified!  Modern Christianity is breeding all around us like metaphorical rabbits. Amazingly, there are four times as many denominations of Christianity now than there were just fifteen years ago!

There are more than forty-five thousand Christian denominations now, believe it or not. Even as the number of Christians, in the United States at least, has been slowly declining; although, according to the most recent Pew survey, the religion seems to be leveling off in the low-sixty-percent range of all Americans; still, the differences of opinion among American Christians seem to be proliferating.  People are coming at us from all directions now, and many of them are telling us with lead-pipe certainty that they know just what Jesus wants us to do, yes-sir-ree, and no question about that at all. We can listen to them and ignore all the rest.   

But the problem is that all these spits among denominations so often are based on trivial nothings. One group of Methodists, for example. will allow female clergy, and this other group will not. A third group will allow homosexual clergy, and perhaps there are subgroups for Methodist homosexual female clergy, and another for homosexual male clergy, and so on. Or it might be abortion that has people frothing and further splitting Christian denominations into bits. Or it might be the fact that Oprah has now become a spiritual teacher, but her demands are not strict enough and she refuses to focus on that bloody cross, so now she is alarmingly leading people astray. To tell you the truth, decades ago I looked into many of these splits upon splits as they were happening, but now they only dishearten me. The fact that people who purport to love Jesus have split what Jesus gave us as a single love-based spiritual Way into more than forty-five thousand fear-based religions, many of which insist that the followers of most of the other Christian religions are damned for eternity for not believing quite the right things, is a shame and a horror!

Today’s frame–verse trumpets the central teaching of the original fear-based Christian religion that was designed for the Roman Emperor Constantine at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 C.E., and it remains the core teaching of the Christianity that still is the world’s predominant religion today. Most people associate that religion with Jesus, but as we again approach our celebration of Easter, and we remember that Jesus chose to die on a cross, it is important for us to also recall that the Roman Emperor Constantine’s explanation for Jesus’s crucifixion that came out of his First Council of Nicaea was based upon nothing that Jesus ever taught! We will talk more about all of this next week. But the whole notion that Jesus died on a cross as a sin-sacrifice to God was only one of many ideas that arose in the burgeoning spiritual Way of Jesus as it spread rapidly around the whole eastern half of the Mediterranean Sea during the first couple of centuries after Jesus’s death and resurrection. To prove my point that Jesus never taught that His death on the cross was meant to be a big-deal sin-sacrifice to God, please just note that there are more than six million burials of early followers of Jesus’s Way in the Roman Catacombs, Those burials occurred from the Second through the Fifth Centuries C.E.. And to show you how little the manner of Jesus’s death mattered to His earliest followers, among all the many illustrations on those tombs in the Roman Catacombs, not a single depiction of a cross can be found. Instead, what is commonly seen in the Catacombs is Jesus as a brown-eyed, curly-haired Shepherd with a goat on his shoulders, to show that He came to care for everyone, not just the sheep of His own flock but also all the wayward goats.

We now understand that a big core problem with that central teaching of Constantine’s new Christian religion, which was and today remains that Jesus came to die as a pure sacrifice for all our sins, is that it makes the religion fear- and guilt-based. So the religion worked beautifully for an Emperor who needed an efficient way to control his masses! Constantine seized on and built up that one strain among the many strains of thinking that then existed in the spiritual Way of Jesus, and his armies tried to stamp out every other strain. But we have learned a lot in seventeen hundred years. We now know that:

  • Reality is composed of and created by what we experience as consciousness. Literally nothing else but consciousness exists. And…
  • Consciousness exists on an emotional vibrational scale from fear, guilt, anger, and hatred at the lowest vibrational level up to intense love at the highest level. And we come to earth to learn to raise our personal vibrations on that scale, since at home, in what from here we call heaven, there is so little negativity for us to push against.

The Gospel teachings of Jesus on forgiveness and love are in fact ideally suited to help us learn to rapidly raise our personal vibrations within consciousness. If we will just follow His teachings, we can make the best use of our earth-lifetimes to grow spiritually away from fear and toward ever more perfect love, which is the entire point of our lives on earth! But, please read our frame-verse again. As you can see, Constantine’s awful, fear-based core Christian dogma is literal spiritual poison. And when you combine that seventeen-hundred-year-old teaching with the more recent tendency of modern Christians to squabble and split the religion even further over ever tinier differences in the ways they might want to worship, or in the preferred sexual preferences of their clergymen and other such trivialities. And with even their tendency to want to attach the imagined influence of a theoretical Satan to anyone who doesn’t happen to choose their own particular flavor of worship or clergy sexual preference. Frankly, at this point, you and I throw up our hands. We now have more than forty-five thousand slightly different Christian religions to choose from worldwide, with some of them actively squabbling with one another? And nearly all of them have at their core that awful dogma that says that Jesus died for our sins, so they are unavoidably teaching not love, but mostly fear and shame? Might we actually be better off with no Christian religions at all? With instead just loving and studying God and Jesus, but doing nothing more complicated than that?

Because, please think about just how horribly that awful teaching presents  both God and Jesus to a world that so desperately needs them both. Poor God! What does that teaching say about the wise and loving God Who calls upon all of us to learn to perfectly forgive one another. God in the Gospels in the Person of God’s Son calls upon all of us to lovingly forgive our fellow man. But the Christian religion tells us that God flat refuses to forgive you and me for whatever we might have done wrong, unless God first gets to enjoy watching God’s only begotten Son being horribly tortured and murdered. Dear God, please forgive me, but that is what the dogma of “substitutionary atonement” plainly says! And, what about Jesus? What does that same dogma say about our own beloved Wayshower and Best Friend? Poor Jesus! It tells us that all the precious and intensely worthwhile Gospel teachings that He gave to us when He taught us for three and a half years were not the true reason why He was born on earth. Not at all! No, the dogma of substitutionary atonement tells us that Jesus’s one essential role on earth was to remain sinless for His whole earth-life so He could then take every human sin upon Himself, and His body could be tortured and killed as a pure sacrifice to God.  

The First Nicaean Council’s explanation for Jesus’s death on the cross is insulting to God, and it is humiliating to Jesus. And furthermore, it makes no sense:

  • If substitutionary atonement were true, then Jesus did not need to teach. He just needed to stay sinless from birth, and then at the appointed time he had to take all our sins upon Himself, past and future, and go through the pain of being tortured and killed as a sin-sacrifice to God. Why God would have wanted to watch Jesus go through all that, when God could just have forgiven us all in the same way that God asks us all to forgive one another, is a question that the dogma never bothers to answer.
  • If substitutionary atonement were true, then Jesus didn’t need to rise from the dead. After all, no lamb that was offered in the Temple as a sin-sacrifice ever came alive again! Jesus’s coming alive again does nothing to enhance Jesus’s sacrifice; and indeed, it is a confusing distraction.
  • Since it demeans God and it insults Jesus, that substitutionary atonement teaching also reduces and distorts what is best about the Christian religion that features them both. I will have more to say about this next week, but if you only think about it for a moment, you can see how plainly this is true. God loves you, but not enough to forgive you for even your petty human sins without the blood-sacrifice of Jesus’s death on the cross also added to the scales in your favor? And what good are the teachings of Jesus, if His having lovingly delivered them in service to God was not able to help Him escape His then having to go through all that pain and humiliation?

Worst of all to my mind is the fact that in most Christian churches which play up the notion that Jesus died for our sins, actually teaching the plain Gospel words of Jesus is at the same time sadly minimized. The biggest example of this problem, of course, is Catholicism, the largest Christian sect by membership, where I spent the first twenty-five years of my marriage. A few small bits of the Gospels are read routinely as a part of the Catholic Mass; but seldom are those parts expanded upon in the priest’s homily, or are they otherwise discussed. In some Unity Churches, A Course in Miracles study groups are held; but while Jesus also led the group that channeled that book to us in the Sixties, ACIM is deep and complex and therefore often difficult to understand, and studying it is a serious commitment. By contrast, the Gospel teachings of Jesus can be read all together in one evening. They are simple to understand and easily memorized, and at the same time they are the most powerfully life- and love-affirming lessons ever delivered by anyone.

Next week, we will look more deeply at the conundrum that we all will face as Christianity yet again rolls aside the stone from Jesus’s burial cave on another Easter morning and finds an empty tomb. For two thousand years, we have been content to offer our own shallow, human-level answers to the question of what that empty tomb might mean. What fresh answers might we propose this year…?

In that old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine,
A wondrous beauty I see,
For ’twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died
To pardon and sanctify me.

So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross
‘Til my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross
And exchange it someday for a crown.

To the old rugged cross I will ever be true,
Its shame and reproach gladly bear.
Then He’ll call me someday to my home far away,
Where His glory forever I’ll share.

So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross
‘Til my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross,
And exchange it someday for a crown.
– George Bennard (1873–1958), from “The Old Rugged Cross” (1912)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Sharing Love

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I love you, there’s nothing to hide.
It’s better than burning inside.
I love you, no use to pretend.
There! I’ve said it again.

I’ve said it, what more can I say?
Believe me, there’s no other way.
I love you, I will to the end.
There! I’ve said it again.

I try to drum up a phrase that will sum up
All that I feel for you.
But what good are phrases? The thought that amazes
Is that you love me, and it’s heavenly!
– Redd Evans (1912-1972). From “There, I’ve Said it Again” (1963)

I have been so consumed with working and with doing all the things that I do each week that I never have thought much about distant strangers. I mean, until just recently. My core work for the past forty years has been practicing law for closely-held businesses, and I have continued to enjoy doing that in my semi-retirement; although now, I practice law for just a very few longstanding clients. For my whole life, of course, I have been interested in Jesus and in the afterlife, so I have spent all my life’s spare time immersed in research; and in semi-retirement, I do a lot more of that. I study Jesus, the afterlife, and the mysterious science and spirituality of our greater reality. My library at this point holds thousands of books, with many of them gathered from used-books stores, to the point where they take up several rooms; and my saintly husband is almost at the point of saying, “I love you, but at this point it has to be the books or me.” Well, he almost says that. But he also has quite a few books of his own.

My much less patient supplemental husband, my deeply treasured spirit guide, Thomas, began a dozen years ago to insist that it was time for us to begin to teach some of the spiritual wisdom that I have spent the better part of my lifetime accumulating. So in 2013, he and I began to do that. First, in June of that year, we began a weekly podcast; and then later in that same November we wrote our first blog post. Our blogging was irregular at first, but pretty soon it began to be weekly as well, and typically each weekly offering takes a day and a half to research, write, and polish. Another half-day or more goes toward preparing and recording our podcast, and back then I still was the attorney of record for at least a dozen businesses. I loved doing it all, but I cannot now imagine when I must have found enough time back then to sleep!

The reason why I so much love my life has always been the people. Yes, I practice law, but I never have been inside a courtroom. In fact, one of my clients is involved in litigation at the moment – first time this ever has happened – and we have called in a litigation attorney to handle the case for them (they will win it easily). But my legal clients have always been family businesses, which are the economic beating heart of America, and my work for them has been contracts, transactions, estate planning, and general business advice. For each of the few businesses that I have stayed with for decades, through good times and not so very good times, and through all their planning and working things out, each business’s family members have become quite literally my own much-beloved family. I could not love them more if I shared their names. There are four especially beautiful families that are now preparing to pass their businesses to the third, or in one case even to the fourth generation. And having known each business’s patriarch when my legal practice still was young, I am determined now to work long enough to be able to help to prepare all their beloved next generations’ members, and then to draft their transfer documents!

After twelve years of weekly podcasting, too, the reason why I still love doing it remains all the glorious people involved. Over time, I come to dearly love many of my repeat podcast guests! I love the listeners as well, because I often hear from them, and I even have met a number of them. By now, “Seek Reality with Roberta Grimes” is syndicated, and I will randomly meet people who recognize me because of our podcasting. I also get emails from listeners all over the world. When I often begin many podcasts by addressing those watching and listening as “my dear ones”, I mean that! If you are curious about my podcast, here are some audio links: Apple & Spotify. Even though I have a great face for radio, we began in late June of 2023 to also record these podcasts in video. The video podcasts are available on Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire Stick streaming devices; or you can download the Experts and Authors App on your AppleTV, or else just visit www.Expertsandauthors.tv  online and click SEEK REALTY.  And back here in our studio, there are  just the three of us plus Thomas working each week: my beloved Sam of webtalkradio.net, and yours truly, with our weekly guest. Sam has been my engineer for perhaps a decade, and I truly do not believe that I could do this podcast anymore if he were not always right here with me.

The Seek Reality guest who has been with us the longest is Dr. R. Craig Hogan. Craig and I share ownership of the biggest and most complete source of afterlife information on the internet, which is Seek Reality Online; but that website really is all Craig’s baby! He runs it beautifully, and he does that better than I ever could. Craig was my first-ever Seek Reality guest when we began our podcast twelve years ago, and he has been on with me faithfully once each quarter ever since. In fact, he and I have just recorded our 48th episode together! Although I hear every week from agents representing new potential guests, about eighty percent of our guests now are repeats, most of whom have done Seek Reality episodes with us many times by now. Listeners will let us know that they want to hear from some particular guest again. Or in some cases, I might think that a guest’s story is so important, or so interesting or so enjoyable, that I will let just a few months pass before I will bring that person back again.

Today I am going to share with you one remarkable recent Seek Reality guest. She joined us for the first time a year ago, and I thought her story was so wonderful, and so important, that I brought her back twice more last year, and an additional time early in 2025, so she is already a four-times regular guest. Hers is one of those unbelievably uplifting stories that seems to be impossible, but it is true nonetheless!

After an accident in 2003 left Brandy Gillmore wheelchair-bound and in terrible pain, doctors told her there was nothing more that they could do for her. This was going to be her life. But Brandy refused to accept that, so she searched for a cure, and eventually she figured out how to heal herself. Brandy Gillmore discovered research that changed the course of her life, and she made a complete recovery. But for Brandy, that was just the beginning! After she managed to heal herself in 2010, she didn’t want to just talk about her healing. But she wanted to help other people to see real and objective proof that our minds really do in fact possess the power to heal our bodies!

 So in 2015, Brandy made that goal a reality when for the first time she was able to demonstrate self-healing to physicians in real-time under thermal medical imaging (TMI). Then soon after that, Brandy was invited to deliver a TEDx talk,  which was a pivotal moment in her healing journey. Please notice here that, as has been true with other TEDx talks which demonstrate the truly remarkable powers of the mind, or else demonstrate the failings of science, including Rupert Sheldrake’s famously banned TEDx talk, Brandy’s TEDx talk carries a bogus warning label. This says nothing negative about her work, but it does say something seriously sad about cutting-edge TEDx talks and those who fear them!

More recently, Brandy Gillmore has continued to demonstrate amazing healing results using medical thermal imaging. She demonstrates these results on her own podcast, which is called Heal Yourself. Change Your Life, and in speaking engagements for medical professionals and general audiences. Her excellent book is called Master Your Mind and Energy to Heal Your Body. I think her book is a must-read, especially if you have health issues. The fact is that our minds possess an extraordinary ability to heal our bodies that is far beyond any placebo effect, and Brandy’s book helps readers to understand the missing link to mind-body healing. It provides a simple step-by-step process that helps her readers understand how we can all access this hidden healing potential of our own minds. Brandy’s website is brandygillmore.com.

 There is something else, too, that I enjoy doing weekly with people that I so dearly love. In 2024, at Thomas’s behest, I experimented with teaching a course in how to use the teachings of Jesus to raise your personal spiritual vibration far enough away from fear and close enough to perfect love that you can achieve at least the top of the fourth level of the afterlife by the time that you graduate from this lifetime. That will put you at a high enough point that you can cease to incarnate. By the time that you are vibrating reliably at that level, Thomas tells us that you will be able to continue to grow spiritually just from what you will be able to do from there, primarily serving as a spirit guide or otherwise helping others. We managed to complete two of these twelve-week courses by late in the summer of 2024.

But the problem was that some of the people in each of those two classes wanted to keep on learning and working with me and with one another, and I wanted very much to keep them in my life! I love them. They are part of my own family now. And this is, no kidding, a beautiful worldwide family! Yes of course, about half are Americans from all over the U.S, and a couple of them are Canadian, but then my dear ones in this group encircle the world! We have several members from Australia, and one each from Serbia, South Africa, and Grenada in the Caribbean. We hold our meetings at 5:00 p.m. U.S. eastern time on Wednesdays, which is close to midnight in Serbia and South Africa, and 9;00 the next morning in Australia. And that works for us!

So we will come together again this week, joyously. We always invite Thomas and Jesus to join our gathering, and usually they are already with us. Most often, Thomas will have suggested a topic of discussion for us, and Jesus seldom speaks but His benevolent love will be in what feels like the cozy meeting room around us. And that cozy little Zoom meeting room is worldwide! But you would never know it. You would think we all live in the same small town, and we are meeting in someone’s living room. The love in everyone’s voice for one another is palpable.The delight in simply being together and able to share our thoughts with people who love and understand us personally is indescribable! And it gives you a whole new perspective, doesn’t it? So this is what has lately gotten me to thinking. I think of these shining, so familiar faces that only a year ago were strangers, some of whom are actually a whole world away. The very thought of that is inconceivable now, when I love each of them so much! But I wonder now, as I think of how easily we all have become one family, whether we might find a way, someday, somehow, to make a whole world of former strangers feel so beloved to us as we all now have become?

Forgive me for wanting you so,
But one thing I want you to know.
I’ve loved you since heaven knows when.
There! I’ve said it again.
– Redd Evans (1912-1972), from “There, I’ve Said it Again” (1963)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

Seeking Reality

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Be My love, for no one else can end this yearning,
This need that You and You alone create.
Just fill My heart the way you’ve filled My dreams,
The dreams that You inspire with every sweet desire.

Be My love, and with Your kisses set Me burning.
One kiss is all I need to seal My fate.
And hand-in-hand, we’ll find love’s promised land.
There’ll be no one but You for Me, eternally,
If You will be My love!
– Sammy Cahn (1913-1993), from “Be My Love” (1950)

This is such a wonderful time to be working in this field where you and I find so much joy and excitement! We want to truly know God, and to ever better understand the reality that surrounds us all. We want the bliss of living in ultimate awareness of our reality in each sublime and shining moment! So I have spent my whole adult life studying the Gospel teachings of Jesus, the amazing details of the afterlife, and also popular science magazines, always insisting as I was doing this often thrilling work that there had to be just one reality, and that therefore, since these three separate lines of study are independently real, they must fit together in some fashion and together comprise one great, all-powerful, and infinite truth! They must somehow together create one reality. Of that, I always was sublimely confident.

You could not, of course, ever make sense of reality using only one source of knowledge. For example, you could not study just popular science or the afterlife realities or what Jesus had taught, and expect that you were building a well-rounded body of knowledge that would allow you to make fundamental sense of everything that is real. No, somehow I always realized in my vast, enthusiastic naivete that if I was going to truly seek reality, I was going to have to attempt in the course of my life to come to know more or less a whole lot about everything! So, I persisted in my uncertain certainty, and in my refusal to accept any easy answers to the great whole truth that I always was sure would for certain underlie it all. Until eventually, God sort of sighed at my stubborn persistence, and especially at my endless importuning of the Godhead for the greatest truths that I always knew had to be beneath it all, and available… if God would only, please, You know, lend a little hand here? And eventually, God did indeed give me guidance on my last few steps of the way.

Our human problem is, of course, that we come to earth with not much more than half of our vast, eternal minds available to us, since we are here for rapid spiritual learning, and not to figure out the greatest secrets of reality. But God loves each of us beyond all reason, and God does encourage us to seek these greatest truths! Remember that Jesus says to us in the Gospel Book of Matthew, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (MT 7:7). And what can possibly be a plainer promise than that? The Lord’s word is His sacred bond! But it takes lifelong, persistent and honest work on our part to earn the right to find, with God’s ultimate help, these greatest truths. We must avoid blind alleys, too, and there are two especially big blind alleys that we must carefully avoid!

Those two worst blind alleys that lie in wait and might lure us astray as we seek to find God’s eternal truths about reality are both man-made. And the reason why they are so insidious is that many people consider them to be God-made. So, people trust them as sources of divine knowledge, and they generally think of them as legitimate sources of information about the fundamental reality that we believe we see around us now, when in fact they are nothing of the kind. Many of you, my beloved friends, are going to throw brickbats at me for pointing out these two areas as factual blind alleys; but nevertheless, blind alleys is what they are:

  • Religious Dogmas. Anything that any religion teaches must be considered to be a blind alley where seeking actual, factual information about objective reality is concerned. And this is especially true of Roman Christianity! Every Christian belief that is not based on something that Jesus actually said must be seen to be based in and supported by only human ideas. This is not, of course, true of the Christian Bible, many parts of which are in fact divinely inspired. We know from Jesus, and I have been told by my spirit guide, Thomas, that Jesus and Thomas both were present at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE, when the Christian Bible was assembled; and there they heavily influenced the Bible’s assembly as to the choice and placement of the words spoken by Jesus. So we can indeed largely trust the Biblical Gospels. But the human-created dogmas, such as the notion that Jesus died for our sins? Oh, no indeed.
  • Near-Death Experiences. A Near-Death Experience (NDE) is a spontaneous out-of-body experience which generally happens because the victim’s physical body is temporarily unstable, or that body might even be briefly altogether unable to support life. Our energy bodies generally leave our physical bodies as often as every night during the early, deep stage of sleep; and we might stay in our bedrooms, or else we might travel widely in our energy bodies while they remain attached to our sleeping physical bodies by an extremely stretchy energy umbilicus that is called the “silver cord” (see Ecclesiastes 12:6). During NDEs, our spirit guides will often take us to the love-filled astral plane, and they will create quite vivid, dreamlike experiences for us there; but we never go to where the dead are. In fact, during more extensive NDEs we might approach the place in the astral plane where the dead are, and we are then warned away from it. We are told that if we continue and actually enter the place where the dead reside, our silver cord will then break, and our body will die on earth. Death is always a one-way trip because the silver cord cannot be reattached.

Neither Christian dogmas nor NDEs can be of any use to us as we try to make sense of the objective reality that we perceive to be all around us. Both are useless for the same reason, which is that Roman Christian dogmas and NDEs are equally the product of human minds. So what happens in them tells us nothing about the eternal Mind of God.

Nor, for that matter, can early-twentieth-century materialist science, with its dogmatic insistence that reality must be physical, tell us anything about objective reality, or about the eternal Mind of God. You already know, as we are fond of saying in this space, that 99.9999999% of the supposedly solid reality that you believe you see around you now is, no matter how solid it might seem to our solid-seeming but still immaterial fingers, in fact entirely empty space. And indeed, more and more, the generation of scientists now edging toward retirement age is finding itself forced to give up on solid physicality as a characteristic of reality; although since physics has been so devoted to the dogma of materialism for more than a century, materialism now oddly feels to that generation of scientists like a line that superstitiously cannot be crossed. But still, they mention often kind of stepping over that line or edging around it now. One thing that scientists are lately discovering is just how precisely designed even the most minute details of our home planet actually have to be in order for it to reliably support life. Ah, did we actually hear someone just say that long-forbidden term, “intelligent design”?

I enjoy reading dear Father Richard Rohr’s musings, and he has lately been quoting to his followers some of the mystics of the early middle ages, the greatest of whom were head over heels on fire with their intense love for God. Theirs was often the kind of absolute, complete and naked love that could make a sailor blush! So when I went looking for a suitable frame-verse for what I wanted to say to you today, nothing less than “Be my love” would do. Those mystics knew God as the intimate and highly personal object of a genuine and all-encompassing love more deeply satisfying than any mere sexual love could be. And I can see that now. As I have opened myself more completely to God, I begin to understand how soul-deep satisfying their lifelong love for God truly was. We ourselves live our whole lives inside the Mind of a Godhead whose deep and intense love for us passes all understanding. And when we return God’s love, and we devote our lives in love and service to God and to God’s people, we can live in a bliss far beyond sublime!

Okay, so when I put together my eccentric lifelong immersion studies of the Gospels, and of death and the afterlife, and also of popular science magazines in an effort to understand reality, did I ever actually learn anything for certain? Oh, yes indeed! Perhaps oddly, my assumption that each of my three lifelong areas of study as I sought reality would illuminate the other two areas has turned out to be pretty much right. The conclusion is inescapable to me now that what we experience as human consciousness is in fact primary, just as the great father of quantum mechanics, Max Planck, first discovered that consciousness is primary a full century ago. Consciousness is all that actually exists. Consciousness is the sculptor, and it also is the clay. The popular science magazines slowly are getting there, too, but I wouldn’t know at all where they were heading if it were not for my afterlife studies and some of what Jesus tells us in the Gospels. The more I have put together my lifetime of knowledge gathered from avidly studying my three sources, the more I have been able to build a comfortable certainty of the great reality that Jesus came to teach us about, where God smiles. The great reality that I have spent my life seeking is indeed the literal Mind of God.

And the God described by Jesus in the Gospels is remarkably consistent with the God that we also find in the afterlife evidence. What everyone who has done very much research in this field has discovered is that nothing else but what you and I experience as Consciousness, or the Mind of God, actually exists! The whole of reality is literally a thought in the Mind of God. This conclusion is obvious, inescapable, and slap-your-head simple. And God is not some human-made physical creation with a long beard at all; but rather, as Jesus insists to us, “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (JN 4:24). The afterlife evidence confirms what Jesus tells us in the Gospels, that God never appears as a physical Being. Jesus also tells us that God never judges us, and that neither does He, Jesus, ever judge us. Jesus says, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). And then when we have digested that fact, Jesus adds, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him” (JN 12:47). And again, the afterlife evidence confirms these basic truths about God and about Jesus. There is no joy more certain than is our eternal joy in the perfect love that God has for each of us individually! The reality that I have spent my life seeking turns out to be God’s love song for you, echoing down through all the ages and filling all of time and space, forevermore.

Be My love, for no one else can end this yearning,
This need that You and You alone create.
Just fill My heart the way you’ve filled My dreams,
The dreams that You inspire with every sweet desire.

Be My love, and with Your kisses set Me burning.
One kiss is all I need to seal My fate.
And hand-in-hand, we’ll find love’s promised land.
There’ll be no one but You for Me, eternally,
If You will be My love!
– Sammy Cahn (1913-1993), from “Be My Love” (1950)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Whither Christians Now?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
Christ, the royal Master, Leads against the foe;
Forward into battle, See his banners go!

Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
At the sign of triumph Satan’s host doth flee;
On, then, Christian soldiers, On to victory.

Hell’s foundations quiver At the shout of praise;
Brothers, lift your voices, Loud your anthems raise.
Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
– Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1871)

Last week we considered the entire history of Christianity to date, trying to summarize two thousand complex and too often bloody and venal years in a few quick paragraphs. Of course, my own problems with Christianity began when I was eight years old, and I was awakened at what I think was four in the morning by a brilliant flash of light and then the comforting voice of my spirit guide. Because of that light and that voice, I began so young to disdain kiddie Sunday School, and instead I was glad to attend grownup church. I began to read the Bible repeatedly from cover to cover when I was eleven, and my college major had to be early Christian history. I was eager back then to learn so much more! And my college advisor, Miss Corwin, took me to a much deeper personal understanding and love for Jesus than I ever had found even in gownup church, together with a resentment of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s role that I have never in my life managed to get over.

While it was my childhood experience of light that first transformed me into an eager Christian, it was my college major that much later soured me on the Roman Christianity that has long been the world’s most prominent religion. Now I look at Christians that I respect, and especially the smartest ones, the ones that I know love and honor Jesus, and sometimes I want to say to them, “Oh my very dear one, how can you possibly believe all that Christianity as a religion still insists that you must believe? My darling, where in this is your mind?” But I never actually do say that to anyone.  

The core Roman Christian teaching is that Jesus was born pure and sinless so He could then assume all of humankind’s sins, and He could suffer and die for all of us as our pure sacrifice to God. And you know that makes no sense at all. Just think about it! That whole idea is insulting to God, and it is humiliating to Jesus. Please consider what it says about both of them. God gentlly insists that you and I must learn to forgive whatever happens to us in order for us to grow spiritually. And yet God is not willing to forgive us for anything unless God first gets to watch God’s own Son being tortured and murdered? Does that make sense? And Jesus taught us for three and a half years the greatest wisdom of all the ages, but when it comes right down to it, Jesus’s greatest and most sacred role is not to teach us anything, but rather it is just to be our blood-sacrifice to God for our sins? He is a sacrificial lamb, dumb and mute, and nothing more? When we truly love and respect God, and when we also truly love and respect Jesus, each in their own pure and perfect light, we can see that none of this makes sense. Obviously, it makes no spiritual sense! But even beyond that, it makes no literal, factual, objective sense when we actively apply to it our God-given minds. It is frankly and on every level a fundamentally stupid idea.

It was wonderful Miss Corwin very long ago who first pointed all of this out to me. I can remember that seminal afternoon in her study to this day, her somewhat disorderly books and papers, and how angry at some long-dead Roman Emperor named Constantine she still was, that he had fabricated this nonsensical dogma that made fools of both God and man, and then he had formed his own version of Christianity around his dumb idea. To me, at barely nineteen, she looked to be maybe old enough to herself have known that ancient Roman Emperor personally. And yet, she probably was not even as old then as I am now.

It is said that if you love hot dogs, then you never should watch hot dogs being made. And the same can surely be said of Christianity! I began college as an ardently devout Christian who was planning to become a minister. But by the time I graduated from college, my Christian feelings were deeply nuanced. I still kept my daily Bible-reading habit; and in fact, I kept that up into my early fifties. I still loved Jesus, and even more deeply, just as Miss Corwin very deeply loved Jesus; but then a few years later I met the love of my life. Edward was and remains an ardent Catholic, so that ended my ambitions toward entering the Protestant clergy! And after I had watched Christianity being made at the First Council of Nicaea, I had kind of lost my taste for Constantine’s brand of Christianity, anyway.

My Thomas is the lead author of these weekly offerings for you, and he wants me to point out whenever I mention First Nicaea in any way derisively that it did accomplish two very good things:

  • The First Nicaean Councilors assembled the first Christian Bible. Before First Nicaea, there was not one definitive place where what we now call the Old Testament, the Gospel teachings of Jesus, and the letters of Paul could be found preserved together in good and consistent form. Those Councilors sought out the best versions of all those scriptures, they prayed together, and they claimed to be divinely inspired.
  • In assembling their Bible, The First Nicaean Councilors respected Jesus. As they worked, those Councilors messed far less with the teachings of Jesus in the four canonical Gospels than they actually might have messed with them, collecting and including only the teachings that Jesus Himself was impressing on their minds that He wanted them to use, and putting their few wrong additions just at the backs of the four canonical Gospels, so anything they could not resist adding, such as Jesus’s call to Peter, would be easy for us to spot and remove.

My much-beloved Thomas reminds us that the First Nicaean Councilors could so easily have filled their Bible with Jesus spouting lots of invented nonsense taken from the Roman Emperor Constantine’s ideas! And you and I would be none the wiser.  Nowhere do we find Jesus saying, “I go to the cross now to die for your sins!” or anything like that sort of nonsense. Thomas tells me that he and Jesus were indeed actually present at the First Council of Nicaea, gently influencing the Councilors’ minds at key moments, and keeping pure the Christian Bible that resulted from their efforts. As a result, the Bible that Roman Christianity uses now is one that Jesus’s followers still will be able to use, even after Constantine’s faulty religion eventually fades.

And speaking of the long decline of Roman Christianity, which is something that we have been expecting, it may be a bit longer in coming than we have been imagining would be the case.  A recent Pew poll suggests that, in the United States at least, the decline of Roman Christianity has slowed, and it may now even have effectively been halted. The Pew Research Center calls itself a nonpartisan American think tank based in Washington, D.C. which provides information on social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends shaping the United States and the world. It recently surveyed more than thirty-five thousand American adults across all fifty states, making this one of the most comprehensive religious studies ever conducted. The results of this most recent survey are striking:

  • 62% of American adults still identify as Christians. This includes 40% who are Protestants and 19% who are Catholics.
  • The religiously unaffiliated group has held steady at 28%. This includes those who identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular,” and it is nearly unchanged from multiple previous surveys.
  • 7% of respondents identified with a non-Christian faith. Their list of these other religions includes faiths such as Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism.
  • The percentage of Christians has remained stable over the past five years. Pew points out that this marks the first time in decades that the decline has stalled.

Christianity experienced a steep decline percentage-wise in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. In 1990, roughly 90% of Americans still identified as Christians, which seems to be an astonishing statistic when you learn that by 2007, that percentage had already dropped to 78%. The last major Pew religious survey prior to the one just conducted was in 2014, and it recorded Christians at 65%. Pew calls it “not insignificant” that the steepest declines took place during the eight Obama years.

Some observers note that there seems to be a correlation between the decline of religious feeling and political leftism. For example, as was noted above, the steepest decline in Christian religious feeling in the United States in recent years seems to have happened during Barack Obama’s leftist presidency. And over several years beginning in 2020, more traditionally leftist Canada to America’s north devoted some three hundred and twenty million dollars to finding any evidence at all that nineteenth-century Christian schools for indigenous children there had buried many of those children in unmarked graves, which project inspired quite a lot of anti-Christian Canadian hatred.  When little to no evidence for such a travesty could be found, after a few years the project was abandoned, but not without the waste of so many millions of dollars and the vandalizing or the outright burning down of fifty-five Canadian churches.

It feels comforting to find that the percentage of Americans who identify as Christians seems to be perhaps no longer declining! If this percentage eventually stabilizes at something like fifty percent of Americans who are still willing to hold to Roman Christianity with its deep flaws in dogma in order to keep their relationship with Jesus, and also their relationship with our culture’s old-time religion, well then, perhaps we might gently re-mold Roman Christianity into something more loving and less fear-based. Edward tells me that some old Catholic traditions, like confession, simply don’t seem to happen anymore. However, even gentling the old religion now would still leave some forty percent of formerly Christian Americans without a real spiritual home. And what we still don’t know for sure is what Jesus wants to do now for those who have fallen away from Roman Christianity but still want a relationship with Him.

Pew tells us that ninety percent of Americans were professed Christians thirty-five years ago, and that percentage has declined by one-third now. So it is worth asking what those thirty percent of Americans who already have abandoned the Christian religion are doing today for their spiritual sustenance. Jesus has lately suggested to Thomas and me that for those who have left Roman Christianity, He intends to begin His original Way once again. “The Way” was Jesus’s movement that thrived during the three centuries following His death and resurrection, and it quickly grew to millions of people before Constantine destroyed it. Jesus and Thomas have channeled through me two books that Jesus tells us His new Way will use, and He has asked us to begin a website called teachingsbyjesus.com that will not become fully operational until He tells us how He wants us to complete it. And so, my dear ones, here we are. We have framed our blog post this week with the swashbuckling words of a hymn that I recall so well from my childhood spent attending and loving grownup church. I smile to find that there still is life and a possible way forward for the old-time religion that I once loved, and Thomas and I are talking now about writing for next week a post about what it might take to save it. And meanwhile, in the timeless, glorious reality where Jesus now plans His eternal Way’s next stage, we are watching Jesus, and wondering, and waiting for His next stage to begin.

Like a mighty army Moves the Church of God;
Brothers, we are treading Where the Saints have trod.
We are not divided; All one body we:
One in hope and doctrine, One in charity.

Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
Onward, then, ye people; Join our happy throng.
Blend with ours your voices In the triumph song:

Glory, laud, and honor Unto Christ, the King.
This through countless ages Men and angels sing.
Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
– Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1871)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

A Bit of History

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

To dream the impossible dream. To fight the unbeatable foe.
To bear with unbearable sorrow. To run where the brave dare not go.
To right the un-rightable wrong. To love, pure and chaste from afar.
To try when your arms are too weary to reach the unreachable star.

 This is my quest! To follow that star!
No matter how hopeless. No matter how far.
To fight for the right without question or pause.
To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause!
And I know if I’ll only be true to this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest.
– Mitch Leigh (1928-2014) & Joe Darion (1917-2001), from “Man of La Mancha” (1965)

“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is One God!” (Deut 5; Deut 6:4) This is the most important Law of Moses, and first given to him by God on Mount Sinai thirty-three hundred years ago, after Moses had brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. And then Jesus, some thirteen hundred years later but still two thousand years before this morning, when He was asked what was the greatest Commandment, He boiled the entire Law of Israel, including all Ten Commandments, down to just these two: “‘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).

As we have said often here, Jesus came to teach us how to forgive and to love so we can raise our personal spiritual vibrations sufficiently that we will never again need to incarnate on earth. And His teachings work so beautifully to do precisely that! So, why then did the Lord’s effort to bring the kingdom of God on earth not succeed the first time around? Actually, it was going very well for at least the first four hundred years after Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. Jesus’s earliest followers buried at least six million of their dead in tunnels beneath the city of Rome, the last of which burials date to the early fifth century C.E. And in all the art in the Catacombs tombs, there is not a single cross to be found! Instead, the symbols are all peaceful ones, like the fish, the dove, the vine, and especially the Good Shepherd who carries on His shoulders not a sheep, but a goat. What amazing evidence of the fact that the earliest Christians knew that Jesus had come to uplift all of humankind spiritually, including even the very least worthy among us! This gradual and gentle spreading of His Gospel truths seems to have been just what Jesus intended to have happen. After all, He said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-21).

Well, okay then. But over the past two thousand years, a few untoward things have transpired between God and humankind. For one thing, in about 312 CE, the Roman Emperor Constantine believed that he had seen a cross of light emblazoned with the Latin words “in hoc signo vinces,” which means, “by this sign you shall conquer”. And at once, he went from being a persecutor of the followers of Jesus to becoming the father of his preferred version of the Christian religion.

Of course, Constantine the Great’s Christianity, which still is the world’s dominant religion, is nothing like Jesus’s original gentle spiritual movement. Jesus knew that because every human mind is part of one eternal Mind, it would not take much more than this single population, using Jesus’s teachings to raise their personal vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love, to begin to elevate the spiritual vibrations of everyone then living on earth. The transformation of the minds of His followers would begin the transformations of all human minds! As Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened” (MT 13:33). So we have every reason to think that for those first few centuries, the advent of the kingdom of God on earth was unfolding just as Jesus and as the divine Collectives of the Godhead had intended that it should unfold; and quite rapidly, too. But then the Roman Emperor Constantine cast his eye on the Lord’s beautiful Way, and he had his brutal way with her.

The first thing that Constantine did was to select one version of Christian thought, and set out to destroy every other version. He chose for himself the most fear-based version of all, the one that claimed that Jesus’s crucifixion had been required by God as a sacrifice for our sins. There were more than three dozen “heresies” brutally stamped out or driven into the wilderness by the early Roman church under Constantine before he called the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE that formalized Constantine’s new religion. Those rejected “heresies” had been strains of thought among pre-Roman-Councils followers of Jesus. They had peacefully coexisted as alternative ways to follow Jesus, because the Lord’s original Way had not been a religion at all! It had required only that people follow Jesus’s teachings and learn to ever more perfectly love and forgive; and as Jesus had said, “He who is not against us is for us” (MK 9:40).

The Roman Emperor Constantine’s deeply fear-based notion that Jesus had died for our sins had been just one of many ideas in a widely varied spiritual movement. It had been harmless, until Constantine had used his First Council of Nicaea in 325 to begin to impose one Christian religion with its human-made and fear-based dogmas upon the world. A gentle and gradual movement that was spreading nothing but forgiveness and love would have been useless to an emperor. But a fear-based religion that carried the dogmatic threat of hellfire for anyone who disobeyed him? Now, that was something that he really could use! Six more church councils followed that First Council of Nicaea in 325, all called or presided over by emperors and ending with the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. So a fear-based religion that bore the name of Jesus but otherwise had almost nothing to do with Him was imposed upon the world by force at a cost of what is conservatively estimated to have been twenty-five million mostly awful deaths.

We are surprised to study this history now, and to reflect on the fact that God allowed all of it to happen in quite this way. All of it, from the transformation of Jesus’s peaceful and beautiful Way that seems to have been working so wonderfully for hundreds of years into Constantine’s barbaric and dogmatic religion, and then the inquisitions and the crusades. Thomas whispers to me now that, ah, but Constantine created the Bible that has safely preserved the words of Jesus. And Constantine began those seventeen hundred years that were dominated by fear and negativity for people to push against, into which we can forever after down through the timeless ages choose to incarnate for priceless spiritual learning and growth.

Our earliest evidence that a new effort has begun to bring the kingdom of God on earth dates to the mid-nineteenth century, when we began to receive much easier and more abundant afterlife communications. This effort to thin the veil and better enlighten us might have seemed to the Godhead to be necessary in order to begin the process of at last taking down both Constantine’s fear-based Christianity, and also the equally false notion of atheistic scientism, in preparation for the war-filled and spiritual-stress-filled twentieth century that was soon to dawn. No one knows for sure why we were suddenly being shown so much more of what was really going on behind the curtain!

But among God’s earliest targets in this modern-day effort to bring the kingdom of God on earth were physicists. As we neared the turn of the twentieth century, clockwork materialism remained in place as a dogma in a reality that is in no respect solid, to the point where Nobel Laureate in physics Albert Michelson said in 1894, “It seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice.” Even the great Max Planck, another Nobel Laureate and the eventual father of quantum mechanics, said in 1924, “When I began my physical studies [in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly… he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science… Possibly in one or another nook there would perhaps be a dust particle or a small bubble to be examined and classified, but… theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection which, for example, geometry has had already for centuries.”

To shake up this scientific materialist complacency completely, the Godhead did two things at once. It initiated a new age of much better communication between the living and the not actually dead. And It also channeled in to the minds of Dr. Planck and a few other physicists the wonderfully disruptive theory of quantum mechanics. What strikes me most profoundly is the way God has been acting even in what we know now was a clear divine emergency, with an extraordinary respect for human free will and dignity! Everyone who comes to earth with a commission from the Godhead does so voluntarily, and it is through these willing minions that nearly all God’s work on earth is done. God works in the world with all the love, patience, and respect of a host of perfected Beings who once inhabited bodies themselves. What a sublimely beautiful process!

When the scientific community was forced to react simultaneously to the twin challenges of quantum physics and very good evidence that the dead do in fact survive, it chose to deal with the first challenge and ignore the second. This stonewalling by the scientific gatekeepers of any evidence at all that the universe is not matter-based has gone on now for more than a century. Apparently it is going to end only when God decides it must end. There is a lot that we still don’t understand. But for the first part of the twentieth century, the Godhead seems to have watched Its work unfold while avoiding further interference in the affairs of humankind… That is, until we used nuclear bombs in warfare in August of 1945. This was apparently what God had been working to prevent, and its suddenly happening anyway seems to have been a wake-up call that might have been unique in human history. Insofar as we who study this can tell, four initiatives were then begun at once:

  • The decision was made that we will never again be allowed to use nuclear arms in warfare. If you wonder why it hasn’t happened in the more than three-quarters of a century since Nagasaki, despite the fact that nuclear armaments have proliferated and human crankiness abounds, be assured that we have been told that God is preventing its happening. There are anecdotes about missile tests in which an unexplained missile would turn up out of nowhere and shoot down the missile being tested. But my hunch is that God is working mostly at the level of many human minds.
  • A renewed effort was begun to demonstrate to the world what actually is going on. The floodgates of broader information began to open in the fifties, and then in the seventies they opened much wider! Most of what afterlife experts are telling you now is an accumulation of many bits of information that have been permitted to us by the Godhead. If it had not been God’s perfect will that we figure all these things out now, we would still be as clueless as people have been clueless throughout all of human history.
  • Many more minions began to parachute in. There is no time where the Godhead is, so the first of this new wave of minions were born in the thirties and forties. And we continue to be born today, these people who have promised to assist in the work of raising this planet’s consciousness vibration and bringing the kingdom of God on earth. I may be typical. I am my primary guide’s comrade through seventeen lifetimes, and I had promised him that I would come in and do some specific things that would help him to put a finis to his spiritual work done as Thomas Jefferson. That effort was still in the planning stage when this call came, and we answered it! We made a life-plan for me that included efforts to complete his prior work, and we overlaid it with this plan to help the Godhead that now consumes my life.
  • A decision was made to freshly introduce the Gospel teachings of Jesus to the world. Of course, for this to happen requires that the fear-based Christianity created by Constantine the Great must either die away or be transformed, and we see this ongoing now on both fronts at the level of billions of human minds. Our task is just to nurture the love of Jesus and His Gospel teachings, carefully saving the baby as God discards the bathwater.

The Lord’s Gospel teachings on love and forgiveness and raising our personal vibrations sufficiently to bring the kingdom of God on earth are needed now, more than they ever have been needed before! Those of us who have closely studied the Gospel teachings and are working now in the Lord’s harvest field are delighted to report that it all truly is happening now, and all around us. This Impossible Dream of universal human forgiveness and love as Jesus taught it, such that it really will be possible for God’s kingdom to begin to overspread the earth, is all awakening now.

And beyond that, as we who have spent our lives studying the glorious afterlife evidence can tell you, is the certain fact that all that really exists is consciousness. Or as our dear friend Craig Hogan would put it, all that exists is mind and experiences.  Now we wonder ever more deeply about something even more. As we have studied both the teachings of Jesus and the illusory reality in which we live these lives, we come to ever better understand that what we experience as human consciousness is in fact all that exists. There is no such thing as solid matter. And the afterlife evidence, plus bits of things that Jesus said when He was here, including His much more advanced teachings in A Course in Miracles, all lead us to begin to wonder whether perhaps this all might be a pure illusion? Is it possible that Jesus insisted that we love our neighbor as ourself because He knew that our neighbor is ourself?

It is a surprising, and even an amazing question. To which one day we each will learn the answer!

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

Buy the books:

– Categories –

– Subscribe –

Follow Roberta’s blog for inspiration, book news, and updates!

– Podcast –

Join hundreds of thousands of listeners! Tune in to Roberta’s Podcast. Shows posted each Monday.

Listen

– Get In Touch –

Have a question to ask Roberta? Complete the form below to contact her.

Contact

- Archives -