Author: Roberta Grimes

Trinity?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!
Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.
Holy, Holy, Holy! Merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity!

Holy, Holy, Holy! all the saints adore thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.
Cherubim and seraphim, falling down before thee,
Who was and is and evermore shall be.

Holy, Holy, Holy! though the darkness hide thee,
Though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see,
Only thou art holy; there is none beside thee,
Perfect in pow’r, in love, and purity.
– Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)

Our frame verse was my childhood pastor’s favorite opening hymn. My goodness, even just reading it all these many decades later, even now it makes me feel eight years old again, standing in the fourth pew on the left with my parents, hymnals open and singing in that old white steepled New England church. Reverend Turrell is up there in his pulpit, and here am I, the only child among all the adults in that very well-filled church. I can look around and see that now, but at the time, I think I was oblivious to the fact that I was the only child in that church. I know that I never told my mother why I suddenly wanted to go to upstairs church, and not to Sunday school anymore. But for me, throughout my childhood after April of 1955, every morning was always the first morning after I had that amazing experience of light. I insisted that my family attend church every Sunday thereafter, and I listened avidly to Reverend Turrell’s sermons, always seeking whatever hints he might share about what my experience of light might have been.  

When you never ask a question, it takes you a very long time to get sufficient answers. But after decades of research that began with my college religion major, by the time my mother had her own very similar experience of light when I was in my forties and my father was on his deathbed, I was able with some confidence to tell her what had just happened to her, and to assure her that not only had both Moses and the Apostle Paul had similar experiences that are described in the Bible, but her own daughter had had such an experience myself more than three decades before. That was the first time that I ever told a living soul what had happened to me when I was eight years old. Until then, I had only seen those two experiences of light described in the Bible! But since my mother’s experience of light, I have been talking about my own experience, and I have met a few other people, too, who have had experiences of light. They never talk about theirs, either. These experiences are much less common than are near-death experiences, and they seem to be used as a reliable way to capture our complete attention when there is something that God really wants us to hear!

This is what the Bible tells us happened to Moses: 2 “The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. 3 So Moses said, ‘I must turn aside now and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up.’ 4 When the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ 5 Then He said, ‘Do not come near here; remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’ 6 He said also, ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God” (Exodus 3:2-6). God then goes on from there to have a fairly lengthy chat with Moses about bringing the Israelites up out of  Egypt. Wow, this is pretty heady stuff!

Here is what happened to the fierce oppressor of the early Christians named Saul, and it turned him at once into the great Apostle and eventual Christian martyr, Paul: “Now Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest, 2 and asked for letters from him to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to The Way, both men and women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. 3 As he was traveling, it happened that he was approaching Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him; 4 and he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?’ 5 And he said, ‘Who are You, Lord?’ And He said, ‘I am Jesus whom you are persecuting, 6 but get up and enter the city, and it will be told you what you must do’” (Acts 9:1-6). And that was that! Paul’s conversion to become a devout leading follower of Jesus was immediate and complete.

My mother’s experience of light was more mundane. As she was settling into bed after a long day of tending to my dying father, she was confounded by a brilliant flash of light in her dark bedroom. She heard a voice say from out of it, “I’m giving you a few more days with him so you can get a few things straight.” Mundane, indeed! She was sure that stentorious voice she heard had to be God’s. As, indeed, it likely was. But she told me the next day that she had no idea what still-hanging issues God might be urging her to work out with my father before he died.

My own childhood experience of light was even more mundane than was my mother’s. I woke up in the middle of the night one night when I was eight years old with a new, vastly hollow feeling deep inside, and with the certain terror that there is no God. No God! Then there was a blinding flash of light so brilliant that it lit up my whole bedroom. Oh my God! And out of that light, a young male voice said, “You wouldn’t know what it is to have me unless you knew what it is to be without me. I will never leave you again.” And, sure enough, that emptiness inside me was gone, and I have never been alone again. Even in this moment, my much older body contains not just me, but the Spirit of God as well. That voice, however, was not God’s, but it was Thomas’s, as he very much later admitted to me. He is my faithful spirit guide and my dearest friend.

But when I first heard that voice, I didn’t know that it was Thomas speaking to me. I only knew with a mighty certainty at the age of only eight years old that there truly is a God! God is real. And not only that, but God cares enough about me in particular to reassure me that God will always be right here inside me. And this is a certainty that never has left me, ever, no matter what else has been happening in my life. I never told anyone about my experience of light, not until I first told my mother about it when I was forty-five. But for the rest of my life, that experience has stayed with me, as if it had only just happened last night. It is that experience of light that has driven all my research into death, the afterlife, and the work of Jesus, and all my teaching as well, even to this day.

Our dear Reverend Turrell really loved the Trinity idea that is featured in today’s frame verse. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? God in three persons? But I knew even as a young child that idea didn’t seem to be right, because God is internal to each of us. As Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; 21 nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-22). And wow, I have known that ever since I was eight years old! God is within you, and you can feel God there! Jesus also told us that “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (JN 4:24), which always felt to me to be right. God is within you. God is Spirit.

Eventually, we few who study reality as a research discipline have come to understand that what we experience as human consciousness is in fact all that there is. There really is nothing else. Consciousness is both the sculptor and the clay. The easiest way for you to think of Consciousness is to imagine it as something like the air, uniformly everywhere. But unlike the air, Consciousness is an all-powerful, energy-like potentiality; and like any other energy. it vibrates. And it vibrates in a vast range from fear and hatred at its lowest, slowest, and weakest vibration to intense and perfect love at its highest, fastest, and most powerful vibration.

Are you firmly with us now on how all of this works? If not quite, then please read the previous paragraph again, and read also the blog post that it links, and perhaps also what is linked from that blog post as well. Materialist mainstream science is still so fiercely afraid, on a level that looks to be literally Medieval, of the possibility that it might inadvertently discover the Christian God, that it refuses to do much to investigate Consciousness, or to consider even remarkable evidence in favor of Intelligent Design. And this is true, even when evidence clearly points to just a Designer, and not to the bearded and human-like Christian view of God at all. It fascinates us to watch trained scientists dancing more and more edgily around ever stranger ideas, such as the notion that neuronal networks inside the human brain and galaxy networks on vast scales in the universe look to be somehow oddly similar. OMG, really? As if, perhaps, you know, they might somehow share One Designer, after all?

Meanwhile, we who live and work in a more rational reality have come to understand that, in truth, All is One. What we call “God” is the highest Consciousness vibration, and our minds are of course all part of that same Consciousness, but we only currently are all vibrating considerably lower while we very briefly occupy these material bodies. That is the difference. And it is the only difference. But we all share that single Consciousness, so we are One with one another, and we are One with God. This sense that I always have had that Jesus is right, and God is within me, of course that is all true, since it is easy for those at higher vibrations to move lower. God truly can dwell in each of our hearts, and fundamentally all of us are One Being.

So this notion that God is a “Trinity” is actually a pretty good metaphor for all the ways in which God is ready to freely act within our lives. But always, of course, by our own invitation. God fills all the possible love-based aspects that humankind can imagine; although the Trinity is not separate and never material, and it cannot be seen to in any way limit God:

  • God is the Father, in that God creates us, and God cares for and loves each of us infinitely, as any doting Father would do.
  • God is the Son, since God came to earth in the person of Jesus and dwelt among us as our Teacher, our Wayshower, our Brother, and our eternal Best Friend.
  • God is the Holy Spirit, too, since God is never material, and God gladly dwells forever within each of our hearts as soon as we welcome God in, by our own invitation.

But it is all God! All is God, and there is nothing else but the Consciousness that is God! God is One. And, oh My dear so much beloved God, and my precious brothers and sisters who are all God’s children, How truly perfect is this feeling of knowing it all forever and for certain! Far too often, people are afraid to have such an intimate and fully open relationship with God, because Christianity teaches us that we are sinners. But, pish-tush! God cares nothing for our little mistakes made in simply living and trying to grow spiritually. We all come here to learn spirtually! Making mistakes shows just that we are trying to learn, and that is a good thing. Simply try to follow God-as-Jesus’s teachings, and try to love everyone every day ever more perfectly. Just open the top of your head and invite God inside for a chat and a cup of spiritual tea, or for whatever feels right to you now. God wants each of us to lead this relationship that we are having with God, as we gradually open ourselves to ever deeper intimacy with the One true God. Then, when you are ready, invite God right into your heart forevermore. And God will laugh with delight, and will hug you there with the very greatest joy!

Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!
All thy works shall praise thy name, in earth, and sky, and sea;
Holy, Holy, Holy! Merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.
– Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

His Way Alone (#3)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses,
And the voice I hear falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses.

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

He speaks, and the sound of His voice
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing,
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing.

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
– Charles A. Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1913

I am surprised to be able to announce to you that there are actual Christian theologians who now agree with Thomas and me when we tell you that no one ever had to die for our sins. These scholars now say that the very notion of the need for a human sin-sacrifice always was a nonsensical idea, which of course we know that it always was; although in the linked article, this particular worthy looks to medieval church history for a lot of her evidence that the  concept is plain wrong. Thomas and I, on the other hand, can look farther back, at the words of Jesus, to know for certain both that the God that Jesus introduced to us loves each of us infinitely and eternally, and that God never holds our failings against us. Game, set, and match! And just as importantly, the Jesus of the Gospels for certain did not die for our sins.

The religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine created in the year 312 C.E. was effectively all that remained of Jesus’s Way as early as the end of the Fourth Century. The Lord’s followers who escaped to the wilderness during the Roman campaign of annihilation against all the Jesus-followers who did not hew to Constantine’s ideas became what Christianity now thinks of as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. They were generally monks and nuns who lived simply, while more and more as the years and then the centuries passed, the faith that they were keeping became the same one that Constantine’s 325 C.E. Council of Nicaea and the later First Century Christian Councils were forming and sealing for the ages. Much as we might like now to go back from here to a time before Constantine’s day to selectively pick up again a simpler Christianity, there does not seem to be any such Christianity to be found.

And it also is turning out to be sadly impossible to interact directly with the genuine God using any form of a human religion. The reason why this is true lies in the nature of God as living and personal, internal, spiritual, and love-based; while all religions by their essential nature are uniformly external, static, dogmatic, and fear-based. Religions can make group introductions to God, and those introductions can feel uplifting and ecstatic, with lots of music and chanting and so on; but for their happy feeling to be sustained for long, the religion always must then withdraw and leave you alone with the one-on-one sacred spiritual mystery of God. Please read the first part of this paragraph again! We think of religion and God as going together like love and marriage, a horse and carriage, white on rice, and like every other inseparable pair of words that you can think of. We consider religions, and Christianity in particular, as our very key to begin to know God. But in fact, because all religions teach us to fear the power and the judgment of God, religions serve at best to act just as a transitional emotional lift. Ultimately, unless we leave them as we seek our closer walk, they will become a fear-based barrier between us and the genuine Godhead.  

This is why Jesus was so frankly hostile to the clergy of His day. They were interposing themselves between God and the people, and this was something that Jesus viewed as a terrible spiritual crime! Even worse, they were substituting human-made traditions (Sunday Mass, anyone?) for the deeply one-on-one internal relationship with each of us that is what the genuine and profoundly spiritual God of All actually wants. Jesus said to a passel of religious lawyers, “Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:3-9). As Jesus said to the woman at the well near the start of His ministry, 23“An hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. 24 God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (JN 4:23-34).

We soon learn why Jesus is so irritated by these clergyfolks. Basically, they won’t listen to and learn from Jesus what He teaches, and yet the religion-based, fear-based nonsense that they are teaching is a barrier which divides the loyalties of those who might otherwise simply be following Jesus. So the Lord mutters to the clergy, “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (MT 23:13). Wow, that is quite an indictment!

However, none of this that was repeatedly said by Jesus to the clergy of His day was remembered as warnings by those who created Constantine’s Christian religion, so Christianity as it is practiced today contains all the faults of the religions that were current in Jesus’s time, and then some! As Thomas and I have talked… or, well, as we have frankly argued about how we might find a way to go back and speculate in this space about how Jesus’s Way could have developed if Constantine never had been born, I don’t know what I said to my beloved friend that prompted this, but at one point last fall, Thomas exploded at me in frustration. He said indignantly in my mind, “Stop thinking like a Christian! Just stop it! Jesus was never a Christian!” Well, of course He never was. Jesus was always a Jew! And without Constantine, we would have had no First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 C.E., and no later Christian Councils, would we? We would have had no smallest bit of any version of modern Christianity at all!

Jesus was always a Jew. Absolutely! He was in fact a very well-educated, and a highly observant young Jewish man, and we know this because of the ease with which He read publicly from the Torah on each Sabbath Day. This famous quotation comes at the start of His ministry, right after His baptism and His forty days of being tested in the Wilderness, and then His earliest miraculous healings: 16 “And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and He stood up to read. 17 And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. And He opened the scroll and found the place where it was written,

18 ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
19 To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.’

20 And He closed the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him. 21 And He began to say to them, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’” (LK 4:16-21).

Notice that we are told that Jesus did this every week: it was His custom. He easily read the ancient Hebrew language, and He knew exactly where in Isaiah to find the passage that He wanted to read to them that day. While He was on earth, Jesus was a devout and a very well-educated Jew. I ruminated on this information briefly when Thomas and I first had this seminal conversation, which was sometime back last fall. Then I found an Orthodox Jewish Chabad (the “Ch” is pronounced as a hard ‘K”) in the Boston area, and I put myself on their mailing list, where I have been now for the past six months (they address me as “Robert”, which is fine). And already, my perspective has profoundly changed.  

Reading these weekly messages from a young Orthodox Rabbi and watching his videos, putting myself fully into his Jewish congregation while I also read and commune with the Orthodox Jewish Teacher known as Jesus of the Gospels makes me feel empowered now to relate to my eternal God in a deeper and richer way. These Jews are more closely tied to their Scriptures and to their own spiritual journeys than are most of the Christians that I ever have known, for whom spirituality seems to feel more distant and less joyous; just fundamentally, the Jews in my Chabad seem to be more on a first-name, on a less formal and almost a playful basis in their relationship with God. Oh, pardon me: in their relationship with G-d. There is a deference and respect about saying the name of G-d which Orthodox Jews still observe. I think it might be just that these Jews are fundamentally not afraid to be close to God, as Christians are afraid to be close to God. In fact, I don’t think I had realized until I unofficially joined my Chabad last fall and became a sort-of Jew just how much both Protestantism and Catholicism, and indeed all versions of Christianity are built on a base of fear of an all-powerful God of ultimate judgment, and a sense of permanent abject shame about our being so sinful that poor Jesus had to die on that cross for our sins. Fear and shame lying at the core of what it means for us to be human beings are the very base of Christianity! That is what the crucifix as the symbol of the Christian religion truly means. I don’t think I ever fully realized any of this until now.

I had one more question for Thomas. Since he can read my mind, and communication in the astral plane is all by mind anyway, he didn’t wait for me to ask it. He simply remarked to me this week as we were writing this message, “No, Jesus is not a Christian. He never has become a Christian. But Jesus is God, so He also is no longer a religious Jew. God has no religion.” Oh. Well, that makes sense. Then on Friday morning, as I was enjoying reading my dear Rabbi’s weekly message, Thomas said, “Without Constantine, the early basis of The Way was the Judaism that you have come to like. Take the Old Testament’s love and trust in God. Add everything that Jesus taught. Then what do you have?”

We talked about it then, but mostly I listened. It is Thomas’s opinion, having thought about our exercise, that if the Roman Emperor Constantine never had been born, then the Way of Jesus would have grown and spread mostly on a base of Judaism at first, as it had been spreading in the hands of Jesus’s first followers during the couple of hundred years after His resurrection. But as those teachings reached other cultures, and as a non-Christian version of the Gospels that also included parts of Psalms and sayings of the Prophets was printed and translated into popular languages, it would have taken something like the path of Buddhism, not as a religion at all but rather as a set of wisdom teachings that would have spread outward from Rome in all directions. Thomas doesn’t see The Way as having kept its tie to Judaism, but rather the pure love of God and the sense of God as all-encompassing Spirit that Jesus taught, and the sacred teachings of Jesus would have been central to The Way. So long as it kept the purity of His teachings, Thomas tells me that Jesus would have guided its sure and rapid growth.

But as we sadly know, Constantine unfortunately hijacked The Way with his false Roman dogmas that replaced the teachings of Jesus at the heart of Christianity. And thus are the vicissitudes of history. Thomas tells me now, however, that this development was of little matter. It was a setback in terms of time, but since there is no objective time, that has not bothered Jesus, especially since now the passage of those two thousand years has allowed for Jesus’s name to become known and loved worldwide! Jesus’s name is at this point first or second on every list of famous names, even as the religion that Constantine began seems to be in general decline on earth; at the same time as, surprisingly, young people seem to be giving Catholicism another look. We don’t really know what is going on, since our perspective is far too close. As my beautiful friend Thomas tells us, though, whatever it is, we know that Jesus is behind it!

 I’d stay in the garden with Him,
Though the night around me be falling,
But He bids me go; through the thought of woe
His voice to me is calling.

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
– Charles A. Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1913)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

His Way Alone #2

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Morning has broken like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing,
Praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.

Sweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from heaven.
Like the first dewfall on the first grass.
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness where His feet pass.

Mine is the sunlight!
Mine is the morning!
Born of the one light Eden saw play.
Praise with elation! praise ev’ry morning,
God’s recreation of the new day.

Morning has broken like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing.
Praise for the morning.
Praise for them springing fresh from the world!
Eleanor Farjeon (1881 –1965), from “Morning Has Broken” (1931)

History is written by its winners. And yet, how slim that margin of victory can be! Only consider for a moment how all the winning events of human history have happened, and often by sheerest happenstance, even some of them shaped by chance events of which we never were aware. And among the winners of the Christian religion’s very earliest history were the Councilors at the First Roman Council of Nicaea in the year 325 C.E. Those worthies first codified the transformation of a few select portions of the three-hundred-year-old Way of Jesus into the earliest form of what became the modern Christian religion, by order of the Roman Emperor Constantine. The Councilors cemented into place a few select dogmas as the new religion’s core of required beliefs, foremost among which were the fear- and guilt-based notions that Jesus’s death on the cross had been a sin-sacrifice, and that our afterlife carries with it the threat of eternal hellfire. It is important for us to note, however, that substitutionary atonement, in particular, never was taught, nor was it even imagined by Jesus.

Let’s say that again! The core awful teaching of Roman Christianity, that Jesus died on the cross to save us from God’s judgment for our sins, was never said in the Gospels, never hinted at, and almost certainly never so much as even imagined by Jesus. He told me in April of 2022 when Thomas took me to visit Him in the astral plane that He had chosen to be crucified so He could rise from the dead for us and thereby prove to us that we will live forever. And that explanation for His crucifixion and resurrection frankly makes a lot more sense! If Jesus had been dying just as a sin-sacrifice, then He would not have needed to rise again three days later. In fact, His rising again would actually have damaged His value as a completed sin-sacrifice.

No, Jesus meant His crucifixion as a love-gift to us, but instead Constantine seized on it and gave it that entirely different meaning. Constantine’s barbaric and guilt-ridden interpretation of Jesus’s crucifixion was only one out of many new ideas in the vast cornucopia of fresh notions that had been developed by Jesus’s later followers in the rapidly spreading Way of Jesus after the Lord’s death and resurrection. Even the idea of a fiery hell never came from Jesus Himself! And none of these negative teachings would have survived as anything but fringe nonsense, if Constantine had not chosen each of them as especially powerful and scary, and therefore as concepts that he wanted to include in the brand-new Christian religion that he was developing. So history’s winners in this case chose those ideas to be at the center of their new Christian religion as they first put it together. And that is where those ideas remain. What began as mere random ideas that never came from Jesus are held as holy and sacred Christian truths to this day.

Thomas and I are writing this just as the Vatican is choosing Pope Leo XIV, who is to be the 267th Pope of the Catholic Church. The current news is all about how long this sacred papal tradition is, how it traces right back to Saint Peter himself, and how that first Pope, Peter, was a fisherman who, with his brother, Andrew, long ago was called by Jesus Himself to come follow Him and become “fishers of men.” Like nearly all of Jesus’s Disciples, the Lord’s much-beloved friend Peter was later martyred in Peter’s great old age. When the Romans sought to crucify Peter, the old man demanded that he must be crucified hanging upside-down, since he thought himself unworthy to be crucified the same way that Jesus had been crucified nearly four decades before, hanging right-side-up. And legend has it that when the Romans later tried to grant the old man a reprieve from his long and excruciating upside-down dying, Peter refused it, and he insisted that he be left on his cross until he died. But we cannot help wondering now what Peter, Andrew, Thomas, John, and the other Disciples who once sat at the actual feet of Jesus must think of all the fussy Medieval pomp and ritual of this choosing of Peter’s latest successor? Do they imagine that all this Catholic formality has anything at all to do with their own earthly lives with Jesus, and their original mission of spreading the Lord’s sacred words?     

Because history is written by its winners, we likewise assume that even the sideline details of our written history could have happened in no other way. But of course, that is not true at all. Millions of the followers of the Way of Jesus were murdered by Constantine’s legions as he consolidated his power over his narrow and limited version of his new Christianity. In order to protect what he was building, Constantine felt the need to destroy all other versions of the Way; and those early followers of Jesus that he did not succeed in murdering, he drove off into the deserts and into the wilderness. What Constantine never knew, however, was that two people who were not then in bodies, people that you and I know well, were also in attendance in 325 C.E. as those First Nicaean Councilors were constructing what would become the Christian Bible. Thomas and Jesus were especially obsessed with making certain that the Councilors chose the right versions of the Gospels for Jesus’s purposes. And while Constantine sought to insert his own ideas, our Friends were whispering in receptive ears that any changes the Councilors made must be placed only at the backs of those four chosen Gospels. We smile now to see the results of the Nicaean Councilors’ work, as we pluck their obviously later-added tidbits right back out again. So as the First Nicene Councilors did their Emperor’s bidding, so Jesus and Thomas were busy about their own work. Oh, and once Constantine had created his Christian religion, that religion then was used by others to do some horrible, truly monstrous things to literally millions of people, including but not limited to Inquisitions and Crusades, so Jesus spent most of the next seventeen hundred years working in his afterlife hospital gardens and spiritually and psychologically healing all those millions of victims. Despite all the pain that doing this work must have caused Him, Thomas tells me that never once has he heard his precious Friend complain, or show anger or anything but infinite patience and love through it all.

And it is time now also to point out that where the great service that Jesus came to earth to perform for humankind is concerned, things could have turned out very differently! If the Emperor Constantine never had believed as he looked up at the sky one day that he was seeing a cross, and if he had not then imagined that he was hearing the words, “by this sign you shall conquer,” then might he ever have had even the slightest interest in creating a Christian religion in the first place? Well, no, of course not. So let’s pretend now that Constantine never started his version of Christianity. Let’s imagine that the winner of this greatest of all spiritual historical battles was not some Roman emperor, but instead perhaps instead it was Jesus.

 Jesus tells us now that He came to earth when and as He did with three  purposes in mind. And He was well on His way toward accomplishing those three goals for us by means of His rapidly-spreading Way when in the year 312 C.E. the Roman Emperor Constantine derailed His progress. Here is what Jesus tells us that He came to earth to accomplish:

  • Jesus was born out of the Godhead to teach us that God is Spirit, and that therefore each of us can best relate to God individually, at the level of Spirit, and without any religion in the way.
  • Jesus also was born to teach us how to raise our personal spiritual vibrations away from fear and toward perfect love, so each of us might make this present lifetime our last necessary earth-lifetime; and
  • Jesus was born to teach us that human life is eternal. We never will die, and since that is true, then for us to work hard at raising our personal spiritual vibrations is a worthwhile endeavor from an eternal perspective!

Jesus’s teachings on earth as they are preserved for us in the Biblical Gospels were specifically tailored to accomplish these objectives. And understanding that explains so much! Of course, the words of Jesus are not organized by topic in the Gospels, but when we know what we are looking for, His words on each topic are easy to ferret out. Before we look at them, though, it is crucial that we realize that Jesus, as an aspect of the Godhead Itself, came to earth knowing everything that you and I know, and even more, about two crucial facts:

  • What you and I experience as Consciousness is all that exists. Everything that we think of as real exists within and is an aspect of that Consciousness, of which the Godhead is the highest vibration.
  • Consciousness exists on a range of vibrations, from fear, anger, and hatred at the lowest and slowest to perfect love at the highest and most rapid vibration. It is impossible to really understand what Jesus was saying two thousand years ago unless you realize that He had this perfect understanding of Consciousness always in mind!

With this quick preface, let’s look now at how Jesus spoke to His contemporaries during His three years of active teaching as He tried to achieve His objectives as we have summarized them above.

What surprises us most is the fact that Jesus was so deeply antithetical to religious leaders, and to all religions. OMG, you get the sense that he literally hated both religions and clergymen! Our beloved Wayshower taught us to love endlessly. He lived the very model of love, while all religions are essentially fear-based, just as Constantine built his new Christian religion around just fear-based teachings. Here are some samples of what Jesus said against the clergy of His day:

“Beware of the scribes who like to walk around in long robes, and like respectful greetings in the market places, and chief seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets, who devour widows’ houses, and for appearance’s sake offer long prayers; these will receive greater condemnation” (MK 12:38-40). And, “Woe to you religious lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter (the kingdom of heaven), and you hindered those who were entering” (LK 11:52). “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (MT 23:13). “Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men… You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition” (MK 7:8-9). “Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:3-9).

WOW. Anyone who thinks that Jesus had anything but the rankest disdain for religions and for their clergymen simply has not read the Gospels closely!

Jesus urged the rest of us to establish a private relationship with God. He said, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise, you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. So, when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

 “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.  But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:1-6).

Jesus’s teachings on love and forgiveness are the core of what He brought to us. And even two thousand years later, His words still sing! Just open your heart….

“‘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). “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36).

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:43-48).

Peter asked him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return” (LK 6:37-38).

 It is clear to us now that Jesus never set out to start any religion! No, what He came to teach us to do was to begin a new spiritual Way for people to relate to God and one another that would empower us to grow rapidly toward spiritual perfection.  So, let us imagine now that Jesus’s love-filled Way was never brutalized. Perhaps then Jesus and His Disciples and the millions who were their first followers were instead among history’s greatest Winners! Imagine that instead, if you can. And next week, let’s consider how that might have gone….

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

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)

 

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