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 8th 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:
- Scripture as validated by experience, and experience as validated by Tradition, are good scales for one’s spiritual worldview. (METHODOLOGY)
- 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)
- 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)
- 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)
- The “separate self” is the major problem, not the shadow self which only takes deeper forms of disguise. (TRANSFORMATION)
- 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).
- 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)