When morning gilds the skies My heart awaking cries:
Let Jesus Christ be praised!
Alike at work and prayer, To Jesus I repair:
Let Jesus Christ be praised!
Does sadness fill my mind? A solace here I find,
Let Jesus Christ be praised!
Or fades my earthly bliss? My comfort still is this,
Let Jesus Christ be praised!
To God, the Word, on high, The host of angels cry,
Let Jesus Christ be praised!
Let mortals, too, upraise Their voice in shouts of praise,|
Let Jesus Christ be praised!
– Katholisches Gesangbuch (1774-1855), from “When Morning Gilds the Skies” (trans. 1868)

Jesus’s website went live on Monday morning. When He first asked us to create a website for Him last April, He was quite specific. He wanted a website precisely as His website would have been if He had had a website in the year 30 CE. He wanted it to feature His teachings, and He thought it would be a good idea for it to go live nine months after seekreality.com went live. So that would put it in March of this year. I can claim no credit for teachingsbyjesus.com, but I love it as its doting aunt. All week long I have been wandering around and clicking the links and reading what I channeled with Thomas, and contemplating a few things that I thought were so radical when I first finally understood them that I worried that they could not be right, even given the fact that Jesus had said them. After all, He has been away from the earth for so long! But even radical ideas will wear in over time.

I thought at first that we would never come up with enough material to populate a whole website. Even when we consider all four Biblical Gospels, Jesus’s teachings are simple and basic, and they are not all that extensive. And His instructions were so specific! I mean, a website back then? And if you are asked to do something for Jesus, it isn’t just that it needs to be perfect. It needs to be so flat-out extraordinary that it has to rock the planets in their orbits. I had so much performance anxiety that I was paralyzed and unable to do anything, and meanwhile the whole summer passed while Craig assembled his team and politely waited. And Jesus, for His part, was amused by the prospect of having His own website on earth, which made my anxiety even worse.   I recall that at one point around September, Thomas conceived the idea of Jesus doing a live question-and-answer thing with me on His website. I was already feeling overwhelming pressure. Jesus’s website had not yet been started, designed, nor even envisioned, and March was only six months away. And Thomas wanted to prove to me that his question-and-answer idea could work.

He was at me about asking Jesus a question. “Go ahead! Ask Him! Ask Him anything!”

So I did. I said in my mind, “Jesus, is there a hell?”

I heard clearly in my mind in Jesus’s distinctive voice, “There is no hell. There is only love and light.”

And that was my final straw. I told Thomas emphatically that I would not do a question-and-answer thing with Jesus. Not in a million years. And I somewhat wrecked our relationship for months.

Of course, Jesus understood how freaked-out I was. I have since apologized to Him and offered to do it if He wants to do it, but I doubt that He will want to do it now. However, for Thomas it was a personal betrayal, and the wound may take more time to heal. I cannot imagine that Jesus and I would have been taken seriously, anyway. Roberta Grimes, not even a medium, is suddenly able to channel Jesus? But my strong reaction may have mildly shocked Jesus. He probably has no memory after two thousand years of how people on earth are likely to react in complex interpersonal situations. And, come to think of it, I believe it was right after this experience that Jesus started calling me “Little One.”

Ours is a working relationship, really, like any other working relationship. I would never be in this wonderful position of getting to sort of hang out with and be of personal service to Jesus the Risen Christ if my primary spirit guide were not His very longstanding close friend. I had no right to refuse Jesus anything. I did, however, have the right to tell my spirit guide that I thought his idea was unworkable. And feeling as unbearably stressed as I was feeling back then, with the website not even started and with everything hanging on me, something had to give. I have apologized to Thomas, too, and repeatedly, and again just now. I am pretty sure that He understands. But even though his astral body looks like just some gorgeous young man, he is in fact an extremely venerable Being who should himself long since have ascended; and he would have done so, were it not for his eternal devotion to Jesus. And my Thomas does not suffer fools. In fact, I am working with the two most venerable non-ascended Beings in all the realities. But I try very hard never to think about that.

Not all husbands and wives are actual marital partners. Almost from the day that we met fifteen years ago, Craig Hogan and I have worked together in a perfect dance, with each of us strong where the other is not. In truth, Craig gets me better than my actual husband gets me, and even better than I get me; and so eventually he pried out of me what the contents of teachingsbyjesus.com needed to be. He kick-started Thomas and me into channeling all the contents for the website, and he prodded us into thinking about the design. When I first saw the result, I hated it for a full thirty seconds because I was sure that nothing could be good enough for Jesus; but then of course I began to love it. How could I not love it? If computers had existed in    30 CE, then Jesus would have had precisely this website. Jesus is happy with it too, because Craig also gets Jesus better than I get Him, since he is not in love with Him. But I literally could not do this work without Craig. He is a genius at all the nitty-gritty details.

Giving you a tour of the website isn’t even necessary, because a website would have been simple and straightforward in the year 30 CE.          I should have realized that when I was feeling so paralyzed with performance anxiety. You’ve got Jesus’s adorable astral face at the top, and His teachings, and then with that comes a list of what didn’t come from Jesus in Christianity, which is all of it; and then also some amazing things about Jesus pointed out. And that is the entire website. Traveling back to before the time of Constantine is amazingly freeing! Before Constantine, there are no fear-based ideas around Jesus to mess us up at all. Back before Constantine, there really is only love. And while that will take a little getting used to for people who have been judgmental and moralistic religion-based Christians, it really does feel like a whole new world.  

Let us take for example the new movie just out, called Jesus Revolution. Apparently it is a box office hit and a wonderful movie; but at the same time, the true-story Jesus figure at the center of that movie was a tormented homosexual who later died of AIDS, and the true-story Christians around him would not accept his sexual identity. In fact, I had long wondered whether Jesus Himself might have been a homosexual, and whether that might have been the reason why He never married, and why John was “the disciple that Jesus loved.” And horrifyingly, Jesus was able to read this unspoken question in my mind when I first met Him personally on April 6^th of last year, and it mildly shocked Him. Not, I think, because of the homosexuality angle, but because I was even thinking such a personal question. He came right out and told me that John had been His younger brother in the same ancient lifetime in which my Thomas had been His older brother. I have later learned that it is likely that in His Jesus lifetime Jesus was a slave until He was thirty, which was probably the reason why He didn’t marry, since perhaps by custom slaves didn’t marry; and then once He was emancipated by law at the age of thirty He was right away into His mission for God, so He had no time for marriage. But there clearly are hints in the Gospels, so I am surprised that no scholars have ever publicly suspected that Jesus might have been a homosexual.

Now let’s talk about this sexual-identity issue for a moment, from the pre-Constantine’s-Christianity angle. Would Jesus now judge homosexual behavior to be wrong? Well, from now on what used to be ten Commandments are boiled down to just Jesus’s two Commandments. Jesus said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). So the answer directly from Jesus seems clearly to be that no loving sexual behavior can be wrong. And what is more, Jesus said, “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” (LK 6:37). Oops! So now it looks as if all those judgmental Christians who used to enjoy applying Old Testament rules to homosexual behavior will have to be silent forevermore in this new post-Constantine’s-Christianity world. In Future Church, homosexual love is normal love, because it is only love that matters.

So to answer those who have been wondering how the new Christianity can be so different, here is one answer. Rather than debating the finer points of scripture or doctrine, we will have only to debate the finer points of love. And, well, I suppose that because of venereal diseases and such issues there are arguments to be made that free love is problematic, and that children do best in monogamous families. By all means, let us make those arguments! But the only applicable standard now is the perfect love that Jesus taught. And if there ever are disagreements about something, in the end we simply will agree to disagree. We won’t ever splinter into sects of this vibrant new Christianity. We are now and forever all one loving family, with now and forever one single rule of love by which we judge all things; and those who might win arguments over this or that application of love will sit side by side in church with those who lose those particular arguments. Do you see how this works? God’s love includes everyone, and love is the only rule that matters. We are together helping one another to learn to ever more perfectly apply God’s perfect rule of love.

So now let us venture to look ahead perhaps fifty years or so. It is the year 2073, and Future Church has spread nationwide in the United States, and to hundreds of cities worldwide. It is online and also in what were once empty church buildings, but mostly it lives in individual homes and it meets at whatever times you might like. There is a booklet available at the door of every public Future Church that lists the meetings that are open to the public, by state and by city and country. Of course, by now “Future Church” seems like a stupid name for this spiritual movement, even if the name did originate with Jesus. A proposal is circulating to change the name, but Future Church is still loosely run by the family of one of its founders. And even though the family has always been willing to change the name, to give up control, and to do whatever else the millions of its members might like, there seems by now to be a kind of superstition that to change anything at all might damage this wonderful, peaceful feeling of love and joy that pervades this whole worldwide community. Well, speaking as one of its founders and a voice from the distant past, just let me say that Jesus expects you to come up with a better name! He called it Future Church back in 2023 just so we would have a way to talk about this future Christianity that is free from both fear and silly human divisions. But after fifty years, for heaven’s sake, Jesus wants you to come up with a better name! Why don’t you call it something like “Jesus’s Way” Or “God’s Garden,” or something like that? Just use your imaginations!

And finally, for those who are still shaky about whether or not you really believe in reincarnation, here is an eight-year-old child conducting a symphony orchestra. My husband and I are classical music geeks, and for years we had season tickets to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, until it got too experimental. So I have attended more than my share of concerts. And to see this little child performing like an expert conductor, well, if I had not believed in reincarnation before, I would for certain believe in it now. Every time I watch this kid’s video, he makes me giggle. If you are not into classical music, you may not realize how difficult this is, but it is literally something like playing all those different kinds of instruments at once. And he has memorized all the instrumental parts, so he doesn’t even need sheet music! 

When sleep her rest denies, My silent spirit sighs,
Let Jesus Christ be praised!
When evil thoughts molest, With this I shield my breast,
Let Jesus Christ be praised!
In Heav’n’s eternal bliss The loveliest strain is this,
Let Jesus Christ be praised!
The powers of darkness fear When this sweet chant they hear:
Let Jesus Christ be praised!
Sing, suns and stars of space, Sing, ye that see His face,
Sing, Jesus Christ be praised!
God’s whole creation o’er, For now and evermore
Shall Jesus Christ be praised!
– Katholisches Gesangbuch (1774-1855), from “When Morning Gilds the Skies” (trans. 1868)

Who can I turn to When nobody needs me?
My heart wants to know.
And so I must go Where destiny leads me.
With no star to guide me. And no one beside me.
I’ll go on my way and, after the day, The darkness will hide me.
And maybe tomorrow I’ll find what I’m after.
I’ll throw off my sorrow. Beg, steal, or borrow my share of laughter.
With you I could learn to. With you, on a new day.
But who can I turn to If you turn away?
– Anthony Newley (1931-1999) & Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021) from “Who Can I Turn To” (1964)

The modern western world is full of desperately lonely people. And many of the loneliest are the newly adult, where the family unit seems often to be amazingly reduced to just one person, a situation that when I was their age would have been altogether unthinkable. And sadly, too, this situation seems to be hardest of all on the youngest men, more than sixty percent of whom are likely now to remain single even into their thirties. And since historically it was during our twenties that nearly all of us were paired off and married, this situation does not bode well at all for these single young men’s happiness for the rest of their lives. People lived until very recently in vibrant multi-generational families. We lived in the same area for generations, we went to church, and it was simply assumed that we always would take care of our own. Against that backdrop it has begun to feel now, and oddly to someone who has reached her mid-seventies, as if our society is tattered and unraveling. I spoke last week about growing up in the fifties. My experience of light happened in 1954, and back then my family attended a church that on Sundays was always packed to the rafters. People tend to assume that the future is going to be some better version of today.

And so we are coming to realize that when we compare our present society to the familial security of the nineteen-fifties, we have gained so much in the past fifty years, but there also are things that we have lost. We were so eager to throw off that old fifties stuffiness for our nineteen-sixties experiment in freedom! And oh, how good it all felt at the time. My generation was right at the leading edge, and while I fortunately was able to avoid allowing the sixties youthquake to ruin my life (although I did drink a lot and smoke pot in college), I thought at the time that our experiment in letting-go was overall a positive thing. I recall that in Freshman biology class at my female college, we were taught that there were certain preferred species of trees to plant when we were on three-planting committees. And then, amazingly, in my Junior year the talk was all about “Women’s Lib,” and we were being urged to go to graduate school and all but commanded to choose “men’s careers.” That was literally how fast it happened!

Of course. women should long since have been liberated. I was a member of one of the earliest classes at my law school to graduate women in any numbers. We were fifteen percent of that class, as I recall, and I have loved my men’s career so much that after two failed retirement attempts, I now am sure that I never will retire. On the other hand, my husband hated being a physician, but he enjoys shopping and creative cooking so he retired at fifty-five and this reversing-roles thing has worked out very well for us!

But for all that we have gained, I realize now that some very important things have been lost. As I think back to the idyllic church where I grew up, I think especially of the boys my age, nearly all of whom were married in their twenties. In particular, it is occurring to me now to wonder how important a roll that church community might have played in their lives. Boys are less social by nature, and having that community structure in which to marry would likely have been important to them. Most of them remained for life in or near the same town where we grew up, while here I am, living with all my children and grandchildren fully half a continent away. But the decade of the sixties with its Women’s Liberation and its Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War turned out to be amazingly disruptive to America’s longstanding social norms! We might glibly say that there is no gain without at least a modicum of loss. But the loss of half of our young men of this present generation is a much greater loss than we should be willing to bear.

Still, I cannot regret the decline of Christianity now. Absolutely for the sake of that beautiful Being whose spiritual movement was stolen from Him after it had thrived for three hundred years, and who has spent the past seventeen hundred years loving the hundreds of millions of victims of Roman Christianity into emotional and spiritual health. No, I cannot now regret the fact that the Christianity of my nineteen-fifties childhood is well and truly dying at last.

Thomas still takes me along on some of his frequent visits with Jesus in the astral plane. He tells me that there are other guides who accompany me on most nights when I am out of my body, because he is sufficiently protective to make sure that I am never out of my body alone; but Jesus is my Thomas’s first priority. He assumes that I need no apology for that. And sometimes he simply takes me with him with amnesia for the experience, and I feed the fish or pat the deer or simply hang around while he and Jesus converse by mind. Thomas is helping Jesus to maintain His human balance. I feel like an idiot about tagging along that way, but Thomas gives me no choice in the matter. He feels responsible for me as my spirit guide, and He feels responsible for Jesus, too. On this past Thursday night, though, Jesus had a question for me, and so He called to me, and He also graciously granted to me the right to remember our meeting. This memory gradually came to me during the course of Friday morning, beginning with the memory of Jesus’s voice in my mind.  

“Little One? Little One? Come here and tell me about your day.”

I was briefly confused, and then I realized that I had been sitting maybe ten feet away from them, and somewhat behind them to give them privacy. I stood and went to sit beside Jesus. It felt amazing to be suddenly basking in His glorious, silken energy. My astral body can stand up and sit down easily and gracefully, which is nice. I seem to have adjusted by now to the power of Jesus’s presence; and anyway, He seems to be remembering to tone it down a lot for me. Beyond Him, I could see that Thomas was leaning forward around Jesus to give me his stern “Don’t embarrass me by saying something stupid” look. And Jesus was looking at me the way He looks at people, as if at this moment nothing else in all of reality matters to Him, but I matter very much. He was using spoken words for English practice, so I used words as well; I find His mild, unguessable accent simply adorable. I don’t remember very much about our conversation. I was so dazzled just to be unexpectedly there with Him, and so close to Him, looking into His eyes. Omigod. Jesus was trying to learn more about what it is like to go through a normal day in America in the year 2023. But I was not a very good reporter, because what I mostly do all day long is writing and legal work. Although we have kittens now. I told Him about playing with them. I told Him how our recent ice storm broke the trees. And as happens whenever I have just been with Jesus, more and more intensely throughout the day on Friday I had that glorious sense of Jesus like a lingering, luscious scent, His silken energy and the overwhelming love that He is. All day long on Friday I was lifted and smiling.   

But I think about this now, and I realize how extraordinary it is. Omigod, I know Jesus personally! I mean, to talk with Him! Isn’t this unbelievably wonderful? I don’t have to just believe in Jesus, because I know Jesus as my actual Friend. I know His mannerisms. He strokes and manipulates His sash with his fingers and looks briefly upward and away when He is thinking. He smiles that slight smile very often when He looks at you, as if the two of you are sharing a secret. Jesus gives you the sense when you and He are talking that He has all the time in the world to give to talking with you, and I know how hard that must be for Him to do when almost right away He was transforming into pale church-Jesus again, and going to greet more newly-dead Christians. His eternal life is nothing but love and service.   

And meanwhile, what I have come to think of as Jesus’s Future-Church experimenting still goes on. He is speaking to the hearts of many of the young, and with results that are flat-out astonishing to see; and wherever this is going I cannot imagine, but it is clearly delighting my beautiful Friend, and therefore it is also delighting me. His mind is a great deal more powerful now than it was two thousand years ago, and young people are responding to Him with love and joy. Jesus has not been on earth as a human being for two thousand years. Instead, He has been patiently working to heal the suffering of hundreds of millions of people that Christianity has damaged. And my Thomas, and others who are close to Him have meanwhile been carefully helped Him to keep in human balance. The resulting Being is extraordinary, as I can personally attest, and as we are seeing now as He sparks all these revivals.   

 While at the same time, people who love Roman Christianity are still trying to find some way for it to survive. And the more I have thought about it, the more I think that Jesus’s idea of simply creating a new and genuine Christianity that is free of fear and based on His teachings alone, and housing it in some of those empty churches, might after all make the most sense. It certainly is worth a try. It would be different if Jesus was talking about only tinkering around the edges of Christianity. But, my god, Jesus’s new Christianity is so altogether different from the old Christianity that it would be a complete departure. Teachingsbyjesus.com is apparently so satisfactory to Jesus now that He didn’t even mention it when I saw Him on Thursday night, and I am told that the developers have finished their work and the website will go live in this coming week. So if we call Future Church a whole new Christianity – which of course it surely is going to be – then that will ease the transition for those who want to still call themselves Christians. All I can think is that perhaps this gives us the only chance that we still might have left to create a new beginning for a healthier Christian community. And perhaps we then might rescue some of the lives of this foundering generation of young men from their awful state of terminal loneliness.  

The picture that heads our post this week is of my childhood church. It has wonderful antique stained-glass windows, and its most beautiful window takes up the whole back wall behind the preacher. It shows a brilliant life-size Jesus, resplendently dressed in red and talking with the Samaritan woman at the well. As a child, I would spend each Sunday morning adoring resplendent Jesus in His window with all its bold saturated colors as I listened to Reverend Turrell’s gentle sermons being preached as if they were coming directly from Jesus. There never was talk of judgment or hell, or ever the slightest reason to fear. That whole experience was such a beautiful exemplar for our coming Future Church!

And maybe tomorrow I’ll find what I’m after.
I’ll throw off my sorrow.
Beg, steal, or borrow my share of laughter.
With you I could learn to. With you, what a new day!
But who can I turn to If you turn away?
– Anthony Newley (1931-1999) & Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021) from “Who Can I Turn To” (1964)

We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known;
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing;
Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.

Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining,
Ordaining, maintaining His kingdom divine;
So from the beginning the fight we were winning;
Thou, Lord, were at our side, all glory be Thine!
– Adrianus Valerius (c.1575-1625), from “We Gather Together” (1597)

I can vividly recall singing our frame-verse in church when I was eight years old. This was back when every pew in that building of sacred memory was full, and when I was refusing to go to Sunday School. Instead, what I craved was Reverend Turrell’s sermons. I was always the only child attending grown-up church, and I remember that there were frowns from some of the grown-ups nearby; but my parents permitted it so that was that. I never let us miss a Sunday. I was trying to understand my experience of light.  I realize now how perfunctory, how entirely unserious being in that building on Sunday mornings likely was for some of the grown-ups in attendance; but for little me in my home-smocked dresses, it was the most deadly-serious and important part of my week. We never learned to fear in that church. In retrospect, among the many things that I think that Jesus designed into my life was my childhood pastor. There were three white steepled churches around the common in the little New England town where I grew up. And my parents had been guided to choose the one where I could learn only Jesus’s beautiful teachings through all my childhood years.

Because it is apparent now that this generation is in the process of enjoying the privilege of witnessing the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. And it is also apparent that my own life has been directed toward helping to make this happen. We all want to believe that we are normal, right? And I am mostly normal. But I am coming now to accept the fact that there were some weird events in my childhood that have cast long shadows over my life. It wasn’t only that experience of light. There were other things, too, that I know happened then, and that I am trying to remember more clearly. My beloved Thomas has me on a needs-to-know basis, so he will never answer my questions. Except to acknowledge that of course he has been talking to me for my entire life, and of course all of this has been carefully planned. And it is all now unfolding on schedule.

Jesus seems to be feeling some urgency about separating Himself from the religion as it dies. He has inspired a successful television series about His earthly life, and an expensive (if strange) advertising campaign, and there also is a movie on the way. And now suddenly on February 8^th there began a revival at a Christian college in the American South that is going strong, and it seems to be spreading nationwide. When I asked Thomas if Jesus had inspired that, too, he said, “Do you really need to ask?”

And now Jesus has just in this past week given us what I consider to be a new revelation. I thought we were getting away from Christianity, but it suddenly seems that He wants to make His coming movement into a new form of Christianity that is going to take over all those empty churches? Only, this time it will be for His Christianity? Jesus expects way too much of people in terms of intelligence and sophistication, if He thinks we will be able to tell the difference!

Believe it or not, Jesus calls me “my child.” This adorable Man who looks to be about the age of my own grandsons, whose personal energies are perfectly silken but are powerful enough to nuke the world, actually calls me “my child.” Of course, I have no idea how my astral body and face look to Him. There are no mirrors in the astral plane. But even though by now I am used to seeing Thomas casually treating Jesus as his familiar, and even on occasion play-fighting with Him, I cannot get past the fact that this is the genuine Jesus we are talking about! I cannot raise the least objection to Him. If He tells us this is going to work, then who am I to suggest to Him that He might conceivably be wrong?

Jesus has begun to call His new movement “Future Church.” And that comes as a relief to me, because I have had no idea what to call any possible movement that might flow from teachingsbyjesus.com. Jesus insists that this is not a religion, because all religions are human-made. But God can make a spiritual movement of God’s own to occupy those empty buildings. Later on, God’s people will give it a name. But God’s own Church will have no dogmas beyond the command to love God and love your fellow man, so there will be no divisions among God’s people. There will only be God’s single Church, and it will fill all those empty church buildings. Oh, okay. So no more forty-two-thousand-odd separate denominations? I think I am starting to like this idea! Will it even have a Bible? Will it even have pastors? That will all be up to the people of God. But Jesus, wouldn’t you then get some fake charismatics? Even people claiming to be You, reincarnated? What the three of us ended up with after some discussion on last Monday night was just the four Biblical Gospels as a canon, and maybe teachingsbyjesus.com as the new Jesus Movement’s initial governing organ.

And here you can immediately see a problem. There were three of us involved in this foundational meeting, and the only one of us who is presently occupying a material body is me. And who am I, for heaven’s sake? Why would anyone listen to me? I saw this problem, and I mentioned it to Thomas afterward. He said that Jesus will never see it as a problem until it becomes a problem. At which point, Jesus will simply influence enough minds to make it be no longer a problem. It is good to have a very powerful Friend.

I never was able to envision Jesus’s new website, but Thomas channeled it through me and then Craig Hogan designed it. When Craig insisted that I had to approve it before it goes live early in March, of course then I had to look at it. Which I did wincingly at first, afraid that it could never be good enough for Jesus. How could anything ever be good enough for Jesus? But actually, I love it! I cannot get over how well it works, and how effectively it tells His story. I deserve none of the credit for it, but Craig gives me credit for it anyway. And now I cannot wait for it to go live!

And meanwhile, the serpent writhing in its slow death-throes that is the Roman Emperor Constantine’s Christianity continues to gradually die. What bothers me most about this process is seeing what it is doing to the life’s work of a few wonderful people that I have come to care for very much. And foremost among them is Father Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Father Richard is an eighty-year-old Franciscan priest, and no sweeter man ever breathed. But as a Catholic, he has had to follow the orthodoxy not of Jesus, but of the spiritual descendants of the Roman Emperor Constantine, and so as Father Richard winds down his career, and as he publicly sums up his life’s work, what he is summing up looks to be sadly nonsensical to me. And it grieves me so much to say that!

Here is Father Richard’s missive to the world last week:

“A previous director at our Center asked me, “Richard, you talk about so many things, but what are your underlying major themes that keep recurring in different forms?”

As I remember, I took at least two or three months to try to say, “Okay, that’s foundational, that’s foundational, and so forth.” And I brought them to her.

She read them, and she looked at me and said, “We have the curriculum for a school.”

It became the beginnings of what we now call the Living School, where we’re not trying to teach just theory, but practice. And I really think Christianity in general has been weak on practice. We attend services but note the word “attend.” “Attending” is not really participating with our active, embodied selves.

So what these Seven Themes led to were seven highly participatory conferences that we called CONSPIRE, because conspirare (Latin: con, with + spirare, to breathe) means “to breathe together.” How can we breathe together a kind of wisdom, a kind of what we hope is goodness for the world?

The Seven Themes are, I hope, an honest statement about the underlying foundations of what I teach.

From the CAC website:

1. Scripture as validated by experience, and experience as validated by Tradition, are good scales for one’s spiritual worldview. (METHODOLOGY)
2. If God is Trinity and Jesus is the face of God, then it is a benevolent universe. God is not someone to be afraid of but is the Ground of Being and on our side. (FOUNDATION)
3. For those who see deeply there is only One Reality. By reason of the Incarnation, there is no truthful distinction between sacred and profane. (FRAME)
4. Everything belongs. No one needs to be punished, scapegoated, or excluded. We cannot directly fight or separate ourselves from evil or untruth. Evil becomes apparent when exposed to the Truth. (ECUMENICAL)
5. The “separate self” is the major problem, not the shadow self which only takes deeper forms of disguise. (TRANSFORMATION)
6. The path of descent is the path of transformation. Struggle, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines. (PROCESS).
7. Nonduality is the highest level of consciousness. Divine union, not private perfection, is the goal of all religion. (GOAL)

A friend of Father Richard’s writes that these Seven Themes “are more than simply the themes that have organized Richard Rohr’s life’s work; they are the fundamental issues that any serious Christian must engage in to develop a healthy and holistic spiritual worldview.”

I quote all of the above in love, and in support of Father Richard as he sums up his life’s work as this generation’s foremost American Catholic. I have read it a number of times over the past week, just trying to understand it, as I have also at the same time been reading through and proofing my Thomas’s summation of Jesus’s own life’s work as we have set it forth on teachingsbyjesus.com, which Jesus instructed me last April should go live in March of this year. And the differences between the two are stunning. We find set forth here by Father Richard no mention of love or forgiveness or the spread of the kingdom of God on earth. Instead, it is all about Process! And that is what religions really are, is it not? Beyond the fear-based rules by which they try to control our lives, religions are all just form and procedure and process. That is why Jesus has always been so determined to abolish religions altogether.

And we can see now that of course Jesus is right. If we can fill all those empty churches with people discussing and ever better understanding the Lord’s teachings, and with no complications of fear-based, human-made dogmas and religious nonsense; and if people then are inspired to go forth and share and live those teachings, just as two thousand years ago they were first inspired to share and live the Lord’s teachings in their thousands, and then in their millions; then this time, without the Emperor Constantine’s false Christianity intervening, perhaps we truly can transform the world! And every bit of unnecessary religious process will be out the window.

The late Pope Benedict XVI suggested that, well, the Catholic Church is going to need to become small and begin all over again if it is to survive. Although I cannot now imagine that it is a part of Jesus’s plan for the Catholic Church to survive in any form at all. But still, just about everything that Jesus has done so far as He has planned His return has been amazing to me, so at this point, nothing further that He does is going to surprise me at all. For now, though, let us brainstorm with Him. What might this Future Church of the New Jesus Movement in all those old, abandoned churches possibly look like?

We all do extol Thee, Thou Leader triumphant,
And pray that Thou still our Defender will be;
Let Thy congregation escape tribulation;
Thy Name be ever praised! O Lord, make us free!
– Adrianus Valerius (c.1575-1625), from “We Gather Together” (1597)

This land is mine.
God gave this land to me.
This brave and ancient land to me.
And when the morning sun
Reveals her hills and plains,
Then I see a land
Where children can run free.
So take my hand
And walk this land with me.
And walk this lovely land with me.
– Pat Boone, from “The Exodus Song” (1960)

You would think that building a website for Jesus would be a simple thing, but I struggled with the design for months. When you are asked to do something for Jesus, you want it to be completely amazing! I want people to love Jesus’s words as I love His words, and to see in them all that I see in them. I want everyone to easily find in those words each his or her own perfect pathway to his or her own more wonderful life, and I couldn’t find a way to make that happen. Eventually we came up with what I now think of as a starter version of teachingsbyjesus.com. I imagine that we will be working on this website for years, gradually making it work ever better for each individual user. Because the teachings of Jesus are at the same time both much more complex and a great deal simpler than they seem to be when you first read them.  

Please take, for example, the Lord’s teaching that Thomas and Jesus have been urging me to write about for weeks. They tell me that it is meant to be Jesus’s Ninth Core Teaching. And I tell them that, sure, but I don’t see enough in it even to make a half-decent blog post! “Just follow Jesus’s teachings closely and you can live a better life.” That is your entire blog post right there. So, how is that a Core Teaching?

“Therefore, everyone who hears these words of Mine, and acts on them, will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of Mine, and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and its collapse was great” (MT 7:24-27). And there you have it! That is the whole blog post. Just do what Jesus says. Done deal. But still, they keep insisting. Oy.

What was Jesus really talking about when He talked about rock vs. sand? Well, anyone who knows Jesus would guess that He was talking about love. Build your house on love. Almost every third word out of Jesus’s mouth has something to do with love. But we know by now that for Jesus, love is not what you and I think of as love. No, for Jesus, love is not an emotion. It is an intense and profound and unchangeable way of being.

“Then His mother and His brothers came, and while standing outside they sent word to Him, calling for Him. And a crowd was sitting around Him, and they said to Him, ‘Behold, Your mother and Your brothers are outside looking for You.’ Answering them, He said, ‘Who are My mother and My brothers?’ And looking around at those who were sitting around Him, He said, ‘Here are My mother and My brothers!  For whoever does the will of God, this is My brother, and sister, and mother’” (MK 3:31-35).

A Course in Miracles was channeled to us in the nineteen-sixties by a team that reportedly was headed by Jesus. And in The Course, Jesus calls the kind of love that we have for our family members and close friends “special loves,” and He says that special loves are as spiritually counterproductive as are “special hates.” Believe it or not! No, the kind of love that Jesus teaches is universal. It is big enough to encompass all of humankind, as constant as the ground on which you stand, and important enough that you would give your life for it without a thought. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but I have seen that kind of love at work. That is the love that lives in Jesus.

As our wonderful friend Father Richard Rohr says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness . . . it is not a place you go to, but a place you come from. It is a whole new way of looking at the world, a transformed awareness that literally turns this world into a different place. . . The hallmark of this awareness is that it sees no separation—not between God and humans, not between humans and other humans. . . . When Jesus talks about this Oneness … what he more has in mind is a complete, mutual indwelling.” So Fr. Rohr calls the divine love that Jesus taught “Oneness,” which is a reasonable description of how it feels as it grows in you. The love that Jesus taught is a universal love that makes no distinction among people at all.

Here is what the love that Jesus taught is not:

• Personal. If there is anyone that you are unable to love, then you are being too personal. It is time for a reset.
• Stressful. The process of raising your personal consciousness vibration toward more perfect love is stress-free by nature. And in fact, it requires that you free yourself from all outside stresses as much as you can in order for it to work really well. And if you find yourself gritting your teeth as you try to forgive, then you are doing it wrong; it is time to start over and practice the basics of raising your consciousness vibration more patiently.
• Enjoyable. Falling in love feels wonderful! We thrill! We soar! But none of those intense feelings of personal love is associated with the early stages of achieving the universal love for all of humankind that Jesus teaches. At first, to be frank, the love that Jesus teaches feels more like a flattening of your emotions. It feels like a kind of distancing from actively loving those closest to you. It is only later, from the space of universal peace that raising your consciousness vibration fosters in you, that your heart starts to swell until it encompasses all of humanity.
• Variable. Approaching ever more universal love creates in you a more stable mood-base. It makes it so that you will less and less feel earth-life’s emotional ups and downs, but rather you will feel yourself to be at a little distance from them. And this includes even the great emotional highs and lows, like winning the lottery or the loss of a loved one. As this feeling builds, you come to transcend all earthly concerns, and you begin to feel a kind of deep and constant mild happiness, no matter what might be going on around you.
• Fickle. We tend to think of love as something like a meter that measures how we feel from day to day about the people who are closest to us. We love them more when they are helpful to us, and less when they do things that annoy us. But the universal love that Jesus teaches is the exact opposite of the roller coaster of special loves! As the universal love that Jesus taught builds in you, you will be less and less annoyed or elated by those close to you, no matter what they might be doing.

My dear friends, raising your personal consciousness vibration is a deliberate process. It requires that you literally be love, every hour of every day. Some people do it using an Eastern religious practice, but I have found that by far the easiest method is the teachings of Jesus. By far! They work effortlessly, and within months I was seeing everything so differently. When I first began to cultivate Jesus’s genuine love for all of humankind, it felt as if I was losing some of my love for my close family. But instead, my love for everyone in the world was catching up to the way that I love my family members. And one of the first symptoms of this flattening was the moment, perhaps a dozen years ago now, when my husband picked me up at the airport as I was returning from a business trip. And I was feeling so much compassion for him, to think that he had been alone all week, that I spontaneously told him that if he found a lady friend to share dinners with when I was away, you know, darling, I wouldn’t mind. Poor man – he just looked at me funny. But that is what developing universal love can do.  

My two great youthful heroes were both radical ministers, and they continue to inspire me to this day. As I think of it now, each gives to us an extraordinary example of what it is to have built your spiritual house on a solid rock constructed of the teachings of Jesus. And then, perhaps inevitably, each was martyred in the spiritual house that He had built on that rock:

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer fought the Nazis’ anti-Semitic murder-machine with everything that was in him, but his only real weapons were his pen and the universal love that Jesus taught. He was hanged at the Flossenburg extermination camp at the age of thirty-nine for plotting to assassinate Adolf Hitler, and he died only days before he would have been rescued. I fell in love with Dr. Bonhoeffer’s legacy in college, that persistent but reluctant hero, a budding intellectual and a beautiful writer.
• Martin Luther King, Jr. also was martyred at the age of thirty-nine. Dr. King had such a sure connection to the radical power of Jesus’s love that when racists bombed his home while his wife and infant daughter were inside, he was peacefully able to tell an angry mob bent on revenge that fighting violence with violence gets us nowhere, so they must now peacefully disperse. I fell in love with Dr. King in college, too, when the Civil Rights movement was at its height, that slight young man and his magnificent voice.

You and I follow Jesus in the wake of giants. And now I realize of course that there can be no more ideal examples than these two amazing young men of people whose houses were built on the rock of the universal love that Jesus taught. And they lived at two of the worst moments in history, when Nazi Germany and the racist American South washed away so very many whose spiritual houses had been built upon shifting sand! So, yes, dear Jesus and Thomas, we can make a whole blog post out of your suggestion. And we likely can make a Core Teaching of it, too.

Both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr. had only set out to live decent lives. They were not asking for trouble. As Dr. King said, “Like anyone, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place.” Most of the other people who were alive where and when they each lived their lives had built their spiritual houses on the unsteady sands of no solid principles, so when the Nazis and the haters came, those others had no rock beneath the houses they had built, and as the troubles rolled in for their respective generations, those troubles washed most of those others away. But the few who had built their houses on the immovable rock of the love that Jesus taught stood strong! My heroes did not enjoy being heroes. Watch Dr. King’s face in those old clips. He was never exultant. Never glad to make history. And I don’t know that I ever have seen a picture of Dr. Bonhoeffer wearing more than a half-smile that never reached his eyes. But living where and when each of them lived, there on that solid rock with Jesus, they did what they knew they had to do. They could have done no other.

And it is first now that I feel that I really begin to understand this teaching by Jesus. It is no trivial thing! To build our house upon the solid rock of the love that Jesus taught means loving enough to fight for the right with your whole being, and to love the least of these people with your whole heart and as if nothing else matters. I have just read that Dr. Bonhoeffer’s death was likely not by hanging but under torture. And Dr. King was hounded by the despicable J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, who tried to ruin Dr. King’s reputation even long after his death. But even if they could have known their futures, neither of my heroes would have deviated from his course for a moment.

To love as Jesus loves is to love as Dietrich Bonhoeffer loved, and as Martin Luther King, Jr.  loved. Or else to miss out on the love that matters, which means to never really love at all.   

Though I am just a man,
When you are by my side,
With the help of God
I know I can be strong,
To make this land our home.
If I must fight, I’ll fight
To make this land our own.
Until I die, this land is mine.
– Pat Boone, from “The Exodus Song” (1960)

Postscript: All the photos but the first were taken in Jesus’s earthly homeland.

I paused to watch a darting speck
That flickered in the yellow breeze
And came to taste my daisy bed
And touched with gold my lazy trees
And blessed all I had done.

And though I had to turn my head,
I watched it as it fluttered by.
And though I had to work instead,
I ached to be a butterfly
And frolic in the sun.
– Roberta Grimes, from “Butterfly” (1962, 2012)

Christianity is dying now in much the way that a serpent might die, writhing and churning as it seeks to maintain its hold on teachings that have nothing to do with Jesus. That image of Christianity as a dying serpent came to mind as I read a diatribe against what someone called “the heresy of universalism.” And what is this monstrous heresy, you might ask? What could be the worst heresy of them all? Why, it is the awful notion, so ghastly even to contemplate, that everyone might be going to heaven, even those who never have claimed the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal savior. But I can tell you now with certainty, after having spent more than fifty years studying the genuine afterlife, that universalism is no heresy at all. It is instead an absolute fact. The true God is a far greater God than any petty Christian ever has imagined, so everyone does indeed go to the self-same afterlife together, no matter what they believed in life. But tragically, it is this very sadistic pettiness of Roman Christianity that is the only thing that lies behind the whole concept of the Christian belief in a fiery hell.  Someone recently wrote a tongue-in-cheek post for Patheos, the Christian blogging website, about how relieved an imagined group of mean and petty Christians are to learn that hell is real after all, so some of the people those Christians thought ought to by rights be condemned to burn in hell are indeed roasting in hell right now. But in fact, of course, there is no hell, and the concept of hell has caused so many millions tremendous emotional pain.

Christianity has never recovered from the Covid closures. And traditional Christian practice – at least in the United States – has become a partially online activity, while it seems at the same time to have entered a more rapid stage of its writhing decline. I watch all this happen, and I feel as miserable about it as if I am the cause of it all. I apologize for having left off last week’s post with a set of enigmatic ellipses. But Christianity is dying fast, and I feel as if I am its executioner. I have loved Christianity since I was a child, and ever since my childhood experience of light I had assumed that I was eventually going to become a minister. And now, as I have been working on teachingsbyjesus.com, and feeling deeply called to do it, and even feeling called to do it by Jesus, even though the purpose of the website itself is the further destruction of the Christianity that I love, I had begun to hear faint whispers in my mind from someone saying, “Christian, love me more.” For days I tried to ignore that whisper. This is just what feeling guilty does to you, I thought. I kept telling myself that actually losing your mind is a conscious choice, so I could choose not to do it. “Christian, love me more.” But could feeling so guilty make you lose your mind? Was that a real possibility? That whisper would not stop, so then I Googled the phrase and it came right up. There it was: an old hymn from my childhood. It was the perfect theme for this whole series, so Thomas and I used it as our frame-verse last week.    

And then, as I was working on this post in the middle of last Tuesday night, I drifted into a catnap. And I had a vision of the pink child’s bookcase that was in my bedroom when I had my experience of light; but it was standing out at the curb with the trash, and oddly it was covered in moss. This was a vision and not a dream, since it has stayed with me ever since. When I asked my Thomas what the heck was going on, he told me that Jesus is dredging up these old memories for me. The hymn. The bookcase. He wants me to more intensely recall the Christianity of my childhood days so I can now more properly throw it all away.

What is astonishing is that even now, there are people who confidently believe that the Catholic Church carries a permanent franchise granted to it by Jesus. They say it smugly, as if just saying it with enough certainty might put more people back in those pews. Or Protestants in evangelical churches try to mix organ music with praise bands, in something they are calling the worship wars. Or then there is the megachurch theory, to overwhelm people with the smell of success. Or then, even possibly, what just might work is a return to the solidity of old-fashioned ways. Anything to put people back in those pews! But the plain fact is that the Roman Emperor Constantine’s idea for a religion that he could use as a weapon of mass control is just not working anymore, and it never is going to work again, no matter what we try. 

Seventeen hundred years ago, the Romans under Constantine seized and destroyed a spiritual movement that was then three hundred years old and thriving. Had they simply left that movement alone, it might have gradually overspread the world and made the universal love that Jesus taught the lingua franca of humankind. But emperors bent on conquest have no interest in teaching the world how to love. So the Romans cut down and reshaped the Jesus movement into a religion that they thought they could use as a more effective means of control, and they destroyed all its love-based variations. For how long did the Christianity of Jesus survive? Just to give you some idea, three hundred years ago was the year 1723, and Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743, so more than the lifetime of the United States until now was the lifetime of Jesus’s spiritual movement. And in those three hundred years after Jesus’s ascension, the movement that He and His followers had begun had already grown to millions of people when Constantine co-opted it. The Roman armies massacred whole villages of those first followers of Jesus, and they hung them on crosses or fed them to lions in coliseums in the process of creating their own new religion. Because the thing about organized religions that so often makes them evil is that they cannot tolerate competing ideas. But the Jesus Movement – which is what Jesus’s movement actually seems to have been calling itself in various languages by the time it was destroyed – had tolerated a host of widely varying beliefs. There was that one belief, though, that tickled Constantine’s fancy. He loved the idea that Jesus had been crucified for our sins, and that Jesus then had risen from the dead. It was not the central teaching of the Jesus Movement, but it ended up being the primary fear-based dogma of Constantine’s new Roman Christian religion. That was something the Romans knew they really could use!

So the Romans killed the Jesus Movement, but they did keep the figurehead of Jesus. Then Constantine presided over the First Nicaean Council in the year 325. It was the first in a series of seven Roman Christian Councils, and there they set about creating the Roman version of Christianity that is practiced worldwide today. In the Bible that the Councilors put together, we do have preserved the core of the teachings of Jesus, and a record of the start of the Jesus Movement. But the dogmas of Roman Christianity have nothing to do with what Jesus taught. I have asked a few Christians that I know well enough to actually ask them why Christians don’t, you know, actually read and follow the Gospel teachings of Jesus. Some of them protest that of course they do. Some admit that they don’t, but say perhaps they should. Although none of them think this is much of a problem. But, good grief! When the core of the Roman Christian religion is that Jesus died as a sacrifice to God for our sins, and Jesus tells us right in the Gospel of John that God never judges us for our sins so no sacrifice is needed, then I would say that is a pretty big problem!

Christianity as it stands now is built on a lie. And it is a gigantic lie. Jesus died for our sins, and unless you claim Him as your personal Savior, you are going to hell? Wow, that lie is epic. And you can sell a lie for only so long before people catch on and your lie falls apart. The Christian Bible, too, is an important book, but it is not the inerrant word of God. Sad to say, that is another big lie. So the Christianity that the Roman Emperor Constantine designed as a fear-based weapon to control the masses of his day is being practiced now by more than two billion people, nearly all of whom think that they are following Jesus. But none of these people has much idea of what their beloved Jesus actually taught.

After Jesus has endured seventeen hundred years of this treatment, I find it hard to even imagine the level of His personal frustration. I don’t know how He patiently manages it, but Jesus transforms Himself into church-Jesus repeatedly, something like every hour on the hour if there were hours where He is now, so as not to disappoint all the newly-transitioned people who keep coming to Him to receive His post-death blessing. He helps people on earth, He constantly answers prayers, He is always deep in service. Just a couple of nights ago, Thomas and I met with Jesus briefly, and something in the order of things had broken down so much that I remember that meeting. Which never is supposed to happen, unless there is some reason for me to remember a meeting with Jesus. And He was indeed Jesus. Omigod. I was feeling His overwhelmingly powerful and gorgeously silken personal energy. But He looked like a mix of church-Jesus and Mediterranean Jesus, with olive skin but lighter, longer, and almost-straight hair. He seemed a bit flustered, and He was speaking so rapidly to Thomas that I couldn’t register what He was saying. If Jesus is being so driven to distraction now that He can no longer manage smoothly transitioning back and forth between His astral bodies, then we really are in the midst of a crisis.

My dear friends, I wrote the first half of our frame-verse when I was sixteen years old. I found it among my mother’s papers after her death, and I actually remember writing that first half, sitting at a picnic table in my family’s backyard on a hot summer day. When I found it, I thought that poem needed a second half, so fifty years later I gave it one. And now modern Christianity, too, is ready for its second half. But so much more importantly, Jesus deserves the right to bring to completion what so long ago He so well began. Jesus’s own true Christianity looks nothing like our present Roman Christianity. And His Jesus doesn’t even look like our Jesus! When I first personally met Jesus last April, and I asked Him why He chooses to look as He chooses to look now, He said just that everyone looked that way back then. Well, of course they did. To tell you the truth, I am used to it now, but nine months ago His Mediterranean look was a shock.

And now, my beloveds, it is long past time for each of us to choose! Will we choose Jesus as He wants to look now, with His Bible which contains just His four Gospels and His love-based teachings that can transform the world? Or on the other hand, will we choose to remain with the Roman Emperor Constantine’s fear-based Christianity, and his thicker Bible that the First Nicaean Councilors assembled at Constantine’s command? It must be one or the other. So, whose Christianity will you choose?

Now fifty years have come and gone
Between that butterfly and me.
I’ve done what I set out to do,
But still my fondest memory
Is what I wouldn’t try.

I’ve had enough of cheap success
And superficial days and hours.
Now what I want is gentleness,
The joy of decorating flowers
And trembling in the sky.
– Roberta Grimes, from “Butterfly” (1962, 2012)

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh, Dear Lord,
Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly,
Day by day.
– John-Michael Tebelak (1949-1985) & Stephen Lawrence Schwartz from “Day by Day” (1970)

Preparing the materials for teachingsbyjesus.com is the hardest thing that I ever have done. Taking the Bar Exam over again at almost sixty years old was nothing compared to trying to puzzle out some of the radical new ideas that Jesus came to earth to teach us two thousand years ago! We must stipulate as a fact that Jesus is a consistent and coherent Being. And we further must accept it as a certain fact that despite the problem of those six decades of illiterates playing telephone with His words, and the two-step translations, and the obvious problem that we are dealing with four Biblical Gospels and not one, in the end there will be a single consistent and coherent Gospel message on every detail of His teachings. I have realized only in retrospect how naïve I was to assume that we were going to be able to discover Jesus’s original Gospel message now beneath all the religious distortions, so to find it there feels somewhat astounding. By wild guess, we might have as few as only ten percent of the public words that Jesus spoke still preserved. We cannot even imagine what glorious wonders might have come from His lips and been forgotten, and now they are forever lost. Even with the fact that there is a lot of duplication in the three synoptic Gospels, still those Gospels do vary a bit from one another. And of course, the Gospel of John is another kettle of petunias altogether.

And still with all of that, as you will see when eventually you can visit the website, Jesus’s words taken from the four Biblical Gospels do assemble into a remarkably detailed and consistent spiritual message. And to make that message easier to understand, we have broken it into eight core teachings. There likely are other significant points that can be ferreted out with more effort, but these eight do come together with surprising ease, and they build upon one another and create one set of teachings. Some of the things that Jesus says will astonish you. No more religions? No more rules-based sins? I have been so shaken by some of what I have found that I was allowed to check in with the Boss to confirm what I was learning, and He has confirmed it all. He was only surprised that I might need His confirmations. He thought His words had been perfectly clear, as indeed they are clear. But when I asked Him about one particular area, I found His answer in itself to be ambiguous. I think I must have framed my question wrong. I said, “So, what then is Your commandment, Lord?”

He said, “My child, what is it about love that you do not understand?”

And with that, my memory stops.

One of the problems with reading the Gospels is that those who heard Jesus speak were most likely to remember what they themselves thought was important. And that leaves out all sorts of connector events and surrounding details, the many things that people living in a given situation might take for granted, but that you or I, watching from a distance, might be very eager to know. For example, when I was doing basic afterlife research, one of the last things that I was able to confirm was that human bodies in the afterlife are solid! The newly dead who were communicating from there with their loved ones on earth assumed that their still-living loved ones would of course know that people are solid – Duh!  So very few statements about what people’s astral bodies are like have survived in the afterlife literature.

And my problem in this case was that Jesus had replaced the whole Old Testament with God’s Law of Love quite early in His ministry. He thereby, we assume, had done away with the Ten Commandments as stated rules. And we know that He also had done away quite specifically with all judgment by God, and He even had sort-of done away with rules-based sins. He had replaced it all with something that He called “My Commandment.” So as best I could determine, now the only sin was to do or say or even to think something unloving. I wish I had said that directly to Jesus! Was it possible that “My Commandment” meant simply that?  

Thomas keeps saying to me, “Stop being so literal!” My darling primary guide is much happier now. I gather that seekreality.com and teachingsbyjesus.com are a major part of what he and I have left to do in this lifetime, and with most of both websites well underway, he can relax a bit. He thinks my problem is primarily what he calls “Christian hangover.” People who were reared as Roman Christians can have trouble getting past that old habitual, religion-imposed need for rigid rules and limits. Thomas has referred me to Chapters 15 and 16 of the Biblical Book of John, where Jesus is preaching to His Apostles as He is about to go to the cross. But are those words meant for the rest of us as well? I wish I had thought to ask Jesus that question. I swear, the older I get, and the more steeped and drenched I become in these Gospel words, the less capable I feel of actually doing anything! But I took my Thomas’s suggestion, and I studied John 15-16 in particular. It starts with Jesus flat-out telling His elite team that “My Commandment” is that His Apostles will love one another as He has loved them. But is that also His Commandment to us all?

“This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that a person will lay down his life for his friends” (JN 15:12-13). Jesus also talks about their need to remain connected to Him. “I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser.  Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit (JN 15:1-2).

My husband once had a hobby-vineyard. He made wine as an all-consuming hobby for years, so I am very familiar with that process. My goodness, if you ever want to have any spare time at all, never attempt to grow a twenty-acre hobby-vineyard!

And as Jesus says, if the Apostolic branches are to be fruitful, they must remain well connected to Him. “If you remain in Me, and My words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. Just as the Father has loved Me, I also have loved you; remain in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will remain in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and remain in His love. These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full” (JN 15 7-11). “This I command you, that you love one another” (JN 15:17). You know, I read this, and all I can think of is Jesus watching these men as they then went out into the world and spread His teachings, and one by one they died for His Word. Thinking of that brings tears to my eyes. How proud He must have been of them! How very much He must have loved them! As He said to them, “If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you” (JN 15:18-19).

And now we come to the point of it all. As we move into Chapter 16 of the Gospel of John, Jesus says as much as He ever really does about sin. He even actually utters the word “sin.” “But now I am going to Him who sent Me; and none of you asks Me, ‘Where are You going?’  But because I have said these things to you, grief has filled your heart. But I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I am leaving; for if I do not leave, the Holy Spirit will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you. And He, when He comes, will convict the world regarding sin, and righteousness, and judgment: regarding sin, because they do not believe in Me;  and regarding righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you no longer are going to see Me; and regarding judgment, because the ruler of this world has been judged. I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them at the present time.  But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take from Mine and will disclose it to you. All things that the Father has are Mine; this is why I said that He takes from Mine and will disclose it to you (JN 16:5-15).

There is a bit more in Chapter 16 of John, but it is just comfort-words to the grieving Apostles. And I think we can assume that the word “Mine” refers to His teachings, which throughout the Gospels have been what mattered to Jesus. So, please work with me here! What do we make of this?  What does Jesus mean by “My Commandment”?

Ah! Sweet Jesus has made me laugh out loud. And in the middle of the night! He has just said clearly, “They are Christians. Give them First Corinthians Thirteen.” And so I shall:

“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

“Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1Cor 13).

So I think now we can safely say that Jesus has made His point! It is clear from its placement in the Book of First Corinthians and from its very different language that this most famous of Paul’s letters is a channeled work. And Thomas has confirmed to me that it was channeled through Paul by Jesus. So this tender letter delivered through Paul is Jesus’s beautiful, final Word.

Humankind has grown beyond a need for religions. God in the person of Jesus the Christ has made that fact abundantly clear to us now. We are ready to live daily the teachings of Jesus in the twenty-first century, and in perfect intimate contact with God! Jesus is our Wayshower. He is our Elder Brother and our Dearest Friend. What should have begun two thousand years ago is ready at last to begin today.

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh, Dear Lord,
Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly,
Day by day.
– John-Michael Tebelak (1949-1985) & Stephen Lawrence Schwartz from “Day by Day” (1970)