There was a time in my life
I thought I had to do it all myself
And I didn’t know the grace of God was sufficient
And I didn’t know the love of God was at hand

But now I can say
If you are discouraged
Struggling just to make it through another day
You got to let it go, let it all go
And this is what you have to say

CHORUS:
I release and I let go
I let the Spirit run my life
And my heart is open wide
Yes it’s only up to God

No more struggle, no more strife
With my faith I see the light
I am free in the Spirit
Yes it’s only up to God
– Michael Gott, “I Release and I Let Go” (1990)

It seems apparent now that Jesus is preparing to take a more active earthly role. You might say that He is about to “Return.” But Thomas will never ask Jesus any of my questions about what He might be planning to do, because he tells me that mine are not the sorts of questions that Jesus is ever going to answer for people who are in earthly bodies. So other than noticing the revivals on college campuses, the “He Gets Us” ad campaign and the surprisingly successful movies and TV series, I have no idea what Jesus might be doing or about to do. Thomas does say, though, that Jesus never would do anything that could affect the earth by much, even in a positive way.

People have been looking for Jesus’s Second Coming for centuries. But Thomas believes that Jesus has been sufficiently distant from the earth for so long that  the term “Second Coming” is  meaningless to Him. It comes from the the Biblical Book of Revelation, which of course was written after His death. But apparently what Jesus is focused on doing is just what He began to do two thousand earth-years ago. He wants to begin again to teach those now living on earth how to perfect themselves spiritually, so every dear person on the face of the earth can achieve the Godhead level as soon as possible. Now that the religion will soon be out of the way and no longer coming between us and Jesus, Thomas tells me that Jesus wants to get back to doing the love-based teaching that is dear to His heart.

We are used to associating religions with spirituality, but in fact the two are polar opposites. There is no religion that can give us much, or even give us any spiritual help at all, but instead religions are human-made artifacts from an early stage of humankind’s development. Even the concept of religions is a fear-based hangover. When primitive people had no way to comprehend the reality in which they found themselves, which was cold and dark and full of terrors, people self-protectively invented gods that might be able to protect them. Those gods became more and more real to them as the ages passed, ever bigger and more elaborate. And as their human-created gods grew in people’s minds, those gods demanded from the people they were supposed to be protecting ever-fancier rituals and ever-greater sacrifices. But at least they allowed people to feel that they were gaining some illusory sense of control. And the shamans of those early religions were the earliest human manipulators and rulers: if you were someone who could speak for the gods, then you held a lot of power. And every modern religion can be traced back to those first stone-age religions in an unbroken line. They all worked the same way. They all were based in worshiping gods who created the world, and created us, and who made demands of us in return. So then eventually we got Moloch, who demanded the sacrifice of infants into his fiery belly; and then the YHWH of the Hebrews; and then the Christian God. Fear of what was unknowable, and sacrifices that were demanded in exchange for protection, have been at the core of every god to this day.

There can be no creation without a Creator. Something cannot have come from nothing. And although officially materialist science still insists that our reality must have begun in a Big Bang of something arising from nothing, a few scientists with more sense than the rest did discover in the twentieth century that in fact there is indeed a creative force. Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, found that Consciousness underlies everything. And it is legitimate for us to capitalize that word now, since our friend Max learned that Consciousness is indeed the base creative force. Max Planck thereby discovered the genuine God. In 1931 he said, “I regard Consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from Consciousness. We cannot get behind Consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates Consciousness.” 

And now, thanks to Dr. Planck’s great insight, we have come to know so very much more! You live inside one great illusion, and you have no memory of ever having lived outside of it. No less a leading scientific light than Albert Einstein told us that this universe is indeed one heck of an illusion, but an illusion is indeed what it is. And it is important that you begin to see this illusion frankly, so then at last you will be able to begin to focus some of your attention on the much greater wonders that lie beyond it. My precious friend, you are so much more than you can possibly imagine!

Consciousness is everything that exists. It is the sculptor, and it is the stone. It is both the dancer and the dance. And since the Consciousness that is all that exists is a form of energy, Consciousness vibrates. It is governed by what we experience as emotion – go figure! – and at its lowest and slowest vibratory rate, Consciousness is highly negative, and it is governed by all the ishy emotions, like fear and rage; while at its highest vibratory rate, Consciousness is gorgeous and positive and it is governed by what we experience as perfect love. This is our objective reality that we are talking about here! It is the same objective reality that scientists busily study with their whiteboards full of mathematical equations.

THIS IS OUR REALITY. This is the ultra-super-solid reality that scientists assume has got to be just chock-full of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Or at least, you know, gluons. Or something. Doesn’t that solid reality even exist? Well, not really. Not so much. What scientists used to believe were solid particles are actually just miniscule vortices of energy. If the nucleus of an atom were the White House, where it is and the size that it is, its closest orbiting electron could be as far away as Denver. They would both be just vortices of energy. And there would be nothing whatsoever between them. Please just sit quietly for a moment and let all of this truly sink in. All of it is energy-like Consciousness. And it is all governed by what you and I experience as emotion.

Jesus said, “Whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted to him. Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted to you” (MK 11:22-24). And now you can understand why Jesus was perfectly right.

Jesus also said, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in Truth” (JN 4:24). And understanding, as you do now, that the genuine God is the highest aspect of Consciousness, and further understanding, as you also do now, that the highest aspect of Consciousness is perfect love, again you can see how, even two thousand years ago, again Jesus was perfectly right.

So at this point, and until it abandons its century-old materialist dogma which never made any sense to begin with, science seems to be in as much of a counterproductive blind alley as are all the human-made religions. We have talked before about the fact that materialist science has turned itself into just another beliefs-based religion. Science will continue to provide us with all our various useful electronic toys for daily living, our personal computers and cars and phones that have been vastly improving our lives over the past century and a quarter. But until mainstream science abandons the fundamental scientific dogma of materialism that it put into place more than a century ago to protect its physicists from ever inadvertently finding God, there will be no more fundamental scientific discoveries about reality forthcoming. So for our purposes, we can simply ignore science, just as we are ignoring religions.

No matter how solid it might look, and no matter how coldly clockwork-driven our reality might seem to us to be, all of this reality is, as Albert Einstein told us that it was, simply one gigantic illusion. And you and I find ourselves on our own with Jesus in this entirely beliefs-free and Consciousness-based illusory reality within a greater reality where we are able to see and understand the truth for what it is. We know that science can be of no help to us here, and all the religions are dying after the end of what has been a very long run of something like two hundred thousand years. We have no more need for any of it now, since at last we have found, and we so completely trust and adore the genuine Consciousness-based God. And we have various spiritual teachers who are able to help us to directly raise our personal spiritual vibrations away from the low and fear-based vibratory Consciousness range and toward the higher, love-based range of Consciousness. For many people willing to put forth a bit of effort, it will not be difficult to go most or even all of the way to the Godhead level in a single lifetime.

There are of course the various Eastern spiritual traditions on offer. They involve meditation, chanting, breathwork, and even altered states of Consciousness, and for Westerners they take some time and effort to learn and to perform; but they generally can work very well indeed. However, for most people who were reared in Christianity, turning to Jesus in an effort to grow spiritually really does feel like coming home. And the teachings of Jesus as they are preserved in the Biblical Gospels are the simplest and most effective method for growing spiritually that ever has been devised. Gratitude, forgiveness, and love, in that order. It is just a literal piece of cake. Oh, Jesus puts a fancier spin on those teachings, He makes it feel like wisdom to follow them, and He offers some tricks to make them easier to learn; but basically, that is all they are. And when you put your mind to it, the teachings of Jesus can begin to transform you spiritually in just a few months’ time.

The greatest wonder about the teachings of Jesus to me is that Jesus knew all of this two thousand years ago. It is quite literally as if a modern man had been transported back in time! But of course, Jesus was born from out of the timeless Godhead. And Jesus is more than God’s emissary. He is the genuine God in human form, come to dwell among the people of that ancient day so He could seek to better understand them and then teach them on their level and on their own terms. God among us, born in that ancient day, and the greatest Teacher who has ever lived.

And now Jesus is coming back to us as our Teacher once again.  Not on a white horse and brandishing a sword, but apparently first of all in the hearts of the very young. He will tell us nothing of His plans, but that only adds to the excitement and the joy of it. And so we wait together now in wonder for that ultimate Christmas morning….

If I loved you,
Time and again I would try to say
All I’d want you to know.
If I loved you,
Words wouldn’t come in an easy way.
Round in circles I’d go!
Longin’ to tell you,
But afraid and shy,
I’d let my golden chances pass me by!
Soon you’d leave me,
Off you would go in the mist of day,
Never, never to know how I loved you.
If I loved you.
– Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960) & Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “If I loved you” (1945)

When Thomas and I set out last week to attempt to define the word “love,” we didn’t expect to spark a controversy. But a controversy in the comments was what we got! Or in fact, what we really had was multiple controversies. Someone was irate at the notion that Jesus might have given us love as a commandment. So, what now? Now our choosing to love was not up to us? For someone else, The A Course in Miracles idea of lesser “special loves” seemed hurtful. There was even, I thought, a sense that our attempting to pin down the word “love” with a limiting definition felt like a kind of third rail, as if we were caging an exotic bird that must forever be allowed to fly free. But Thomas and I liked the controversy. We thought it was spicing things up! As always happens, our wonderful commenters worked things out for one another over the ensuing week. And meanwhile, they helped us to realize that this topic itself deserved a deeper dive.

I suppose you could say that love is many things. At its base level, love is an affinity that greases the wheels of daily life, in service and in politics and in everything in general. Love is part and parcel of our everyday lives. We take it as a given that we will be treated with simple courtesy in stores, and in reality that is a form of love. We expect to be given respect by major corporations as they compete for our business. We wrestle with the idea of love in everything and every day, whether or not we ever see it as love, and even whether or not we think about any of it consciously.

I have practiced law for four years shy of fifty as a counselor to owners of family businesses. And I enjoy what I do so much that I hope now never to retire. While this work requires a broad knowledge of the law, even much more than that it needs an understanding of how to help families live and work very closely together all the time, spending every day and night in close proximity through multiple generations. I have lost count of the number of times I have said that I am really “in the love business” more than anything else. And I think that in the business world altogether that is so often the case, and the whole world of work is less about numbers and widgets and barrels, and much more about the way we have learned to treat people on a daily basis. Interpersonal relationships built on mutual warmth and trust are what grease the wheels of commerce in the modern world.

And yet, you probably never have considered any of these kinds of interactions as in the nature of love-based relationships. You go to work and say a pleasant hello to the boss that half the people in the office cannot stand, and you don’t see your need to treat him kindly because you are hoping for a promotion as in the nature of a love-based relationship. Then you stop by your local grocery on the way home to pick up ingredients for your family’s evening meal, and you remember to ask if your favorite cashier’s husband’s back surgery went well, and that doesn’t strike you as a love-based relationship, either. You pick up your child or grandchild at daycare and you ask his carers how his day went, feeling grateful to the two young women who have spent their day dealing with his issues that center around throwing food and too often bullying smaller children. And all of these daily interactions may not have felt to you as if love was any part of them. But yet all of them were in fact love-based interactions. And all the corporate pressures weighing on your boss, the worries plaguing that cashier, and the almost insuperable burden of caring for a dozen preschoolers carried by those two women who must keep children safe so their families can work can be eased tremendously if only you will introduce some genuine love into your side of every one of these relationships! It is in fact our task to learn to see every interaction in our lives as essentially love-based.  

Love in one or another of its forms is integral to everything that people do with other people. Call it something else, if you want to be persnickety about it. Call it affinity, cooperation, friendliness, basic kindness, or some other term. But Jesus would tell you that love is what all of it is.

Our lives on earth are lived close together in order to force love to be a constant issue. We must find ways to accommodate one another’s needs so we can live in such close proximity, so therefore we create formal customs, simple manners, and rules of the road when we are driving. Just ways to handle situations that are bound to keep recurring, in an effort to minimize the number of times that we are likely to get in one another’s way. But love is what underlies it all.

Seeing how love works in family businesses is a simple case in point. In the past fifty years I have served every kind of closely-held business that you can imagine, from a foundry to a printer to a tenting company to building contractors, a delivery-truck factory, and so many more. Decades ago I enjoyed giving informational dinners, until I could no longer cope with the number of clients those dinners generated, and it amazed me to see all the different ways these people had found to make a very nice living. I soon learned that one of the biggest problems for family businesses is all the things that can go wrong when you want to pass your business to the next generation.

 Family businesses are all around you. They are the best way on earth to make a wonderful living! Parents naturally want to bring their children into the business, often beginning in their teens, and children reared in a beautiful home that was paid for by daddy’s or mommy’s nice business quite naturally want to take that business over. But knowing all the ins and outs of making and delivering pizzas at a profit is a far different matter from knowing how best to provide for your own retirement while at the same time you are passing your great chain of pizza restaurants along to your three sons and a daughter without starting a family war. Especially if the best one of the four to become CEO of the chain is your daughter, and she is also the youngest. There is a right way to do this, based in love, and it is something that I can do now in my sleep, but no MBA program teaches it. I have spent my working lifetime figuring it out.  

 So if love and the need to always apply love underlies just about everything we do, why don’t we ever talk about that fact? Ah. That is an excellent question. I think in part that we are afraid to cheapen the word “love.” We want to save it for moonlight and roses, but the L-word escaped its limited romantic use a very long time ago. We use it now for everything from salad dressing to a new pair of socks. And what we are talking about here is loving every one of the people who in any way touch our lives! Each person is uniquely precious as a part, together with us, of the one Consciousness which is all that exists. Surely, for us to learn to muster love for each of these infinitely precious brothers and sisters in Consciousness cannot be such an insuperable task?

In family businesses, we generally make it about Mom. It is a curious fact that husbands and wives can almost never work together happily in a family business that is very much beyond startup size, and it is usually the wife who retires from the business once it really starts to prosper. She either becomes a homemaker, or she begins an entirely different career. But still, when I work with a family business, the mother is part of our annual meetings. She is much involved in preparing the next generation to take the business over; and if there is squabbling in the next generation, it is mother love and not fatherly bluster that wisely straightens everything out. And, yes, sometimes there is no mother. But there always is some individual at the center of the family but outside the business – an oldest sister, a grandfather, or a venerable maiden aunt. The point is that love has to be nearby and available in order to work its magic. I am shameless about invoking the name of that beloved elder at the center of an extended family whenever there is squabbling in a family business. And since people in unstable families always know that this is going to happen, they will sometimes mention the name before I do. And just that name alone will change the atmosphere. Love. There is nothing that it cannot do.

 And of course, in daily family life having rituals is of immeasurable help. For example, my family has held hands and said grace at nightly sit-down dinners since my children were toddlers. I taught my oldest to read at the age of three, and soon she found a grace that she liked, so we made saying her grace a part of our family life that continues to this day. If you have family rituals and traditions, for heaven’s sake, be sure to keep them up! There were times during the first tempestuous twenty or so years of my marriage when I would have paid you quite a bit to simply take my husband off my hands, and I said my family’s traditional grace on many nights through gritted teeth. But still, I always said it. And to this day my husband, old-fashioned stiff that he basically is, still reads The Wall Street Journal in paper form each morning; while I, old-fashioned wife that I still basically am, prefer to go out and fetch his paper for him. So even if he gets up before I do, which is seldom, he will wait and allow me still to do that. Whenever either of us leaves or returns to the house, we never do it without a kiss, and we still hold hands when we are walking anywhere. And what began as a very rocky marriage has lasted now for fifty years. Go figure.  

 It is all these “small-l” forms of love in all its endless varieties in public and in private that grease the myriad wheels of our daily lives. I almost wrote that it is these endless forms of daily love that are what make our living so close together even bearable, and to a considerable extent that is true. Let’s think about this for a moment. Please try, if you can, to imagine a society in which every human interaction is between dead-eyed strangers. Not hostile. Just stiff and cold. If you went through the day at home, at work, in stores, and in that daycare center, and every face was blank, wouldn’t your life soon begin to feel like a screaming hell? Isn’t it the dead faces of those zombies in zombie movies that makes those movies the horror that they are? Even Amazon, giant company that it is, wears a human smile on every package. And when I work with family businesses, over and over again it is clear that it is the love within the families that own those businesses that makes the businesses so strong. It is never the other way around.

This is the great wonder of the simple love that Jesus taught. Jesus knew even two thousand years ago that we are all eternally one in God. And the love that Jesus taught is a core recognition of the grounding and the root of all being, which is our universal human oneness in Consciousness. Jesus said, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (MT 22:39). Because in Consciousness, your neighbor is yourself.

“If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love,
I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have all faith so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
And if I give away all my possessions to charity,
and if I surrender my body so that I may boast,
but do not have love, I gain nothing.

“Love is patient, love is kind, it is not jealous; love does not brag, it is not arrogant.
It does not act disgracefully, it does not seek its own benefit;
it is not provoked, does not keep an account of a wrong suffered,
it does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth.
It keeps every confidence, it believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
– Jesus as channeled through the Apostle Paul, from 1 Corinthians 13

Coming up with a topic for our blog post each week is my Thomas’s task. He proposes our topic on the previous weekend, and then he lets me flounder with it until Friday, at which point he steps in and helps me finish and polish it. Late last Sunday afternoon he still hadn’t said anything, so as I was going through emails I said to him, “It’s time. What have you got for me?” I was opening Patheos.com’s daily email of articles. He said from behind my left shoulder, “Try that.”  

The top article was about the Biblical definition of love. I said, “That? That’s boring. He said, “No. Define the word ‘love’.”  And he was right. We talk about love all the time. But do we really all share one definition for the word “love”? Love as the Bible defines it is pretty much limited to Jesus’s loving us enough to die on a cross to save us from God’s judgment for our sins. Which, as we know now, is a nonsense idea. Jesus tells us right in the Gospel of John that God never judges us (JN 5:22-23). So Jesus didn’t need to die as a sacrifice to God. We have Jesus’s own thoughts about love as a Core Teaching on teachingsbyjesus.com, and we might consult that. But what do you and I mean by the word “love” when we use it in conversation? What really is love, anyway?

I have written about love here repeatedly, and I am embarrassed now to say that I have never satisfactorily defined the word. The Merriam & Webster’s dictionary definition is also unsatisfying, since it boils down to synonyms. “Love is a strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.” “Love is attraction based on sexual desire; affection and tenderness felt by lovers.” “Love is affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests.” So basically, love is a positive feeling, and you and I know it when we feel it? But what really is love, anyway?

Of course, what further complicates our question is the fact that A Course in Miracles would call all the personal loves in the paragraph above just “special loves.” The loves that we have for particular individuals are all special loves, and ACIM derisively tells us that special loves are as counterproductive spiritually as are “special hates.” Well, that’s a real downer!

As a first pass, at least we can say that love is a positive feeling for someone beyond oneself. But there are so many kinds of love! I am reminded of what my Thomas has told us about his brother six thousand years ago, the sweet teenage boy who in his next incarnation was going to be born from the Godhead as Jesus. That boy was so entranced with people that even while a war was going on and his tribesmen were finishing off the losing side, he went searching for people who might be hidden away, hoping to find and save some of them before the soldiers could get to them. And when he found a terrified mother with her children, he rescued them and kept them safe until he could find a man of his own victorious tribe who would take the woman for a second wife and would adopt her children. That was Jesus in the making.

Then when Jesus was born from the Godhead four thousand years later, He had some definitive things to say about love! When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, He didn’t name any of the Biblical Ten Commandments. Instead, He was all about love. He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). Ah, now we are getting somewhere! In shifting the base of the entire existing Hebrew religion to His new Law of Love, Jesus is telling us that love has become fundamental. Nothing is more important. Jesus has moved us from a transactional relationship with God, one in which the breaking of arbitrary rules once called for the payment of penalties in the form of pigeons or unblemished heifers, to one in which God now requires of us that we love with our whole heart, soul, and mind. In a way, this is letting us off easy. We do get to keep all our pigeons and heifers. But on the other hand, to give up your whole heart, soul, and mind to God might turn out to be an even greater burden. It all depends on what love means.

What A Course in Miracles is about fundamentally is forgiveness. An unwillingness to forgive is the ultimate barrier to being able to master perfect love. But forgiveness is much harder than it sounds! You and I are transactional by nature, just as were the ancient Hebrews. We carry around a scale in our minds. For us to be wronged and to forgive that wrong will set our mental scale out of balance, and will make our being able to freely love that much harder. In a way, a lot of what our lives on earth are about is learning to get rid of that mental scale so we can forgive easily and completely, even despite our having been wronged. This is especially true of forgiving God! I will occasionally get emails that are full of woe-is-me complaints about people’s lives, and right beneath the surface it is clear that really the senders are in a rage against God for the problems that they themselves had planned into their own lives as spiritual growth challenges. By far the greatest habit that any of us can learn is complete, automatic forgiveness of wrongs. But doing that goes against human nature, which is why ACIM is called A Course in Miracles. With a big emphasis on that last word! Personally, I have found that once I accepted the fact that I myself had designed into my life all my problems of this lifetime, and then I added the forgiveness-balls routine, automatic forgiveness became a snap.

So my mind goes back to that scrawny boy searching a battlefield for people to save. I don’t know what Jesus remembers of His final earth-lifetime before He ascended to the Godhead level. I never have presumed to ask Him that question. And Thomas recalls very little about it, but on the rare occasions when he has been willing to discuss it, he has dredged up and shared vague bits of memories that I find tantalizing for what they tell us about the titanic spirit that was Jesus in the making. Thomas has told me that some six thousand years ago in the fertile crescent there was some kind of blood-feud between two primitive walled cities, and he himself as the chieftain’s oldest son in one of them led an attack that breached the other side’s defenses. But he stresses to me that it was all primitive, mud walls and hovels, knives and spears. His younger brother should not have been there at all. In his vague memories, the princeling who would much later be born as Jesus was a sickly boy, and under orders never to leave their home city. Still, that boy snuck out to follow the army, and even while they still were fighting, he ventured into the enemy’s breached city that was littered with the dead and dying to try to rescue some woman, some child, some innocent victim from out of the carnage. But, who does something like that?

I try to put myself into that boy’s mind. All I can think is that he could not bear to sit safe at home, while knowing that there was even a chance that maybe there was someone in that city that his brother’s army was attacking that he might possibly save. He would have observed his side’s preparations after witnessing this battling between the two walled cities. First we attack them and then they attack us. Lots of yelling and throwing of stones and spears. But now he was hearing that his brother had a plan to breach the other city’s walls and obliterate it? Oh no! But what about the women and children? He had to get himself over there, so he snuck out and followed the army. The great danger to himself didn’t matter at all beside his thought that there might be someone he could save.

Thomas is looking over my shoulder at this point. He has a vague memory of receiving a report that his brother had been spotted in the ravaged city, so he had to assign soldiers to protect him while there still were enemy soldiers alive. But the boy kept slipping away from them. Brat. And how is this helping us to define love?

Jesus’s teaching that we must love our neighbors as ourselves might perhaps be one key. It is clear that Jesus saw things quite differently from His contemporaries, and surely the boy that He had been in His previouus earthly incarnation also had a unique perspective on things. All of us together are parts of a single consciousness; and amazingly, that means all nearly eight billion of us now. Even in this more sophisticated twenty-first century, that fact can feel difficult to get our minds around. And it is flat incredible that two thousand years ago, clearly Jesus already understood this concept! Love your neighbor as yourself. Because your neighbor is yourself. And even four thousand years before that, a sickly teenage princeling in the fertile crescent at the dawn of civilization seems also to have had some clue that the separations that are apparent between people are illusory. I can think of no other explanation for his behavior.  

But can it really be so simple? Ultimately, love is a recognition that we are all one being? Some forty or fifty years ago there was a major famine in Africa, and a photographer was sent to document it for National Geographic. I recall this story only vaguely now, but I can never get this man and his photograph entirely out of my mind. The story was that he was allowed inside the famine zone to take pictures, but he must not intervene. Which was a rule that likely made sense to the authorities running the relief effort, since with a mass feeding program underway they could not have random do-gooders running around and getting in their way. So this fellow took an award-winning photograph of a toddler crawling alone across a gigantic African plain, while within the frame there were vultures waiting nearby. He did his job and took his photographs and won his award. But he never was able to learn the fate of that one particular child, and he gradually became inconsolable. He quit his photography job. Then he killed himself.

There is nowhere else that we can go but this: love is the recognition that all of us are one being. Love your neighbor as yourself because your neighbor is yourself. Jesus uses the analogy of the good shepherd who leaves his flock and searches until he finds the one he has lost. Humankind is unique among living creatures for the fact that we are all eternal aspects of the one consciousness which is all that exists, and which at its highest is the High God, and therefore we all are encompassed in the singular love that Jesus taught. The special loves and hates don’t matter. And learning to completely forgive is just a necessary step along the way toward achieving this fundamental realization. All those other details are just side-issues.

Love is the recognition that we are all one in God. All almost eight billion of us. And that is the true and eternal love that Jesus taught. It is steadfast, fundamental, and eternal, and whatever else is going on, it underlies and unites us all. It is the love that motivated Martin Luther King, Jr. and so very many others who could not turn away from evil, but in fighting that evil they loved the perpetrators as well as the victims. But how do we form this into a definition for the word? “Love is the irresistible certainty that I am eternally one with every human being on the face of the earth.” Perhaps for now that might do as a definition for the word. It is more complex than Jesus’s “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But for now, perhaps it is enough.

“Love never fails. But if there are gifts of prophecy, they will fail.
If there are tongues, they will cease. If there is knowledge, it will be done away with.
For now we know in part and prophesy in part;
but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away with.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man, I gave up all childish things.
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face;
now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.
But now faith, hope, and love remain, these three;
but the greatest of these is love. “
– Jesus, as channeled through the Apostle Paul, from 1 Corinthians 13

Let there be peace on Earth
And let it begin with me.
Let There Be Peace on Earth,
The Peace that was meant to be.

With God as our Father,
Brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my Brother
In perfect harmony.
– Jill Jackson-Miller (1913-1995) & Sy Miller (1908-1971) from “Let There Be Peace on Earth” (1955)

We all are undivided aspects of one God. We know now that there is a single Consciousness that includes each one of us, and we know that this Consciousness at its highest aspect is the God which manifests all of reality. Of course, this means that reality is fundamentally mental, and not physical. Reality is indeed, as Albert Einstein is said to have once jovially remarked, one heck of an illusion, but it is an illusion all the same. As A Course in Miracles wisely tells us, “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Therein lies the peace of God.”

I can remember what it was like to fret. I can recall what it was like to worry, to struggle, to have a care, but now all of that is in my past. I am all. I am everything. I am one with all that is and was and ever will be. And I marvel to realize that I have spent my entire life exploring what amounts to just about the whole of accessible reality before arriving back here at this simple understanding that has me sitting mentally in the Buddha’s lotus position and murmuring as the Buddha once did, “I am awake.” I look around in soft wonder as it occurs to me to assume that probably everyone must make this same circular journey.

But no, as I consider matters further, I imagine not. I still get so many emails from people who are terrified of death. And I still see amazingly few people who seem to know this deep peace, which fact perplexes me. How can everyone not have this stillness within? But Jesus also has this same deep peace. Oh, yes indeed! You see it in His face, in His eyes, in how He can sit with His hands cupped one within the other and that soft almost-smile on His face, and He can listen to you in perfect stillness as if only you matter to Him. Or He can close His eyes and commune with God in an attitude of absolute bliss, while nearby yet another group of newly-arrived Christians is gathering to await His blessing. At this advanced stage in Jesus’s eternity, nothing ever really troubles Him at all.

The Apostle Paul called this deep tranquil feeling “the peace of God which passes all understanding” (Phil 4:7). And we all can have it, here and now. We don’t have to wait until after we have died and then discovered that, well, what do you know, human life really is eternal. I have been sitting here trying to determine where this peace of God comes from and how it might have begun for me, so how I might help to begin it in you, and it occurs to me that owning eternity probably is its foundation. For so long as you believe that your existence is tied to the survival of that fragile meat-body that grows weaker with each passing moment, you never can know any kind of peace.

When Craig Hogan and I conceived the idea for Seek Reality Online, it was really about easing human pain. Fear of death is the base fear, so when you no longer fear death, you no longer fear anything. And since we knew how much our having conquered the fear of death had improved our own lives, we thought we could similarly improve the lives of many other people around the world. So let’s assume that conquering the fear of death must be the first and most essential step. Once you are certain that your life is eternal, you begin to live in an eternal frame, and the difference that makes in your life is immense. It is impossible even to quantify it, but I do distinctly recall the difference. You go from feeling as if you are living in a box with a beginning and an abrupt and final ending, from there to having a sense that you have unlimited horizons of forever ahead. That constant awareness of death as a black ending that might at any second land on you is a profound horror! It is a terror that makes life miserable until you can conquer it. I believe that I can date the beginning of these wonderful changes in my own life to the moment when I first understood that my life truly never will end.

And it is only then that you can dare to venture beyond the safe humdrum of the narrowest of lives. One of the great joys of my life has been the fact that my husband is a high-functioning Asperger’s person, so two of our three children are Asperger’s people as well. As a result they never have married, and rather than downsizing from a house that is much too large for just two people, years ago we invited them to come and live with us. There are some who might not love this arrangement, but we consider it to be ideal. Two brilliant, quiet people that we adore who have interesting careers and busy lives, and who gladly share their lives with us? How perfect!   I might eventually blog about how our living together works and what I have learned in the process, but my point here is just to talk about our daughter’s kittens. Six months ago, our son’s much-beloved old cat died, so three months ago our daughter decided that it was time to adopt some kittens. And watching these kittens’ surprisingly different approaches to life mimics the two very different ways in which most people live. There is Vicki, who is highly prudent and basically afraid of everything. And on the other hand, there also is Morrie, who is a supremely curious and utterly fearless pain in the neck. And once you lose your fear of death, you too can live like Morrie, happily investigating and figuring things out.

And living like Morrie is so important! When you closely study the Gospels, you come to see Jesus as a modern Man, or even as a Man from our distant future, who entered a time capsule and traveled back in time to teach first-century primitives. He speaks to them simply, while knowing that His words are going to be preserved and will be read in all the ages to come. He knew even then that He was speaking to the ages, and He urged us to keep on asking questions, because in all the ages between two thousand years ago and now, and in all the future ages as well, human understanding would be deepening more and more. So He says to each of us, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8).

Jesus is saying that to you and me now! Before you understand that your life is eternal, you have no choice but to live like little Vicki, protecting your precious meat-body at all costs. You are afraid to do any research at all, because your research might lead you to learn something horrible and unforgettable about reality, and you will have to live with knowing that unforgettable negative thing forevermore. And when you have to live that way, you are going to learn so little! However, once you come to understand that human life really is eternal, then you know that you are indestructible, and a curious and joyous Morrie life is your own. You, too, can be gleefully pulling computers and everything else off overhead tables even if it all might land on your head, and generally raising havoc with the world so you can try to figure out how everything works! (Fortunately we love little Morrie a lot, and we think this is probably just a phase).

The more you come to understand about the greater reality, which is everything that we know exists, the safer you will feel in God’s everlasting arms. Learning that my life is eternal was the beginning for me. But it was only the beginning! The more I learned, like curious little Morrie, the more I was eager to learn even more. And the more I actually needed to learn, since I was finding gaps in what I was learning that my swelling curiosity was desperate to fill. “Ask, and it will be given to you…” What I have been discovering throughout my life is that Jesus is as good as His word. The evidence of what was true was everywhere, and the pieces were fitting together like puzzle-pieces in a vast and complex puzzle that made up all that there is. And that, Craig Hogan was also finding, was true for him as well. Craig and I did not become aware of one another until 2008, and that was rather late in our separate efforts to understand and make sense of reality. Even then, as soon as we began to talk about all the evidence about reality together, we were already at the point of completing one another’s sentences. It is truly far beyond wonderful to meet someone who shares your own eccentric obsession. And then, to find when you begin to discuss it that your very different approaches to the research have led each of you to reach identical conclusions is so very far beyond wonderful!

I soon discovered that there were other people, too, like the Zammits and Sandra Champlain, who had achieved what Craig and I had achieved. All over the world, people here and there had been individually studying the afterlife and the greater reality, and all of us had reached identical conclusions and personally conquered our own fear of death. So when I realized that my lifelong eccentric hobby wasn’t only my own eccentric hobby, with Craig’s encouragement I wrote what became The Fun of Dying. My particular bent seems to be to write simple books for laypeople that are easy to understand. As I have explained the difference between Craig’s books and my own: “Craig uses footnotes.” And of all of these afterlife and greater reality scholars, I am the only one who also is a long-term student of the Gospels, which has turned out, I think, to be my big advantage. That nexus has been of immeasurable value, since Jesus actually talks about some of the same things that dead folks mention from the afterlife. The outer darkness and living water, for example. Wow, talk about cross-validations! The more I learned about our eternal lives, and the more what I learned was validated by what other people were learning, the more comfortable I began to feel in this life. That really is how doing extensive and in-depth afterlife research works.

Sadly, though, discordant fear-based Christianity still was dragging me down. I had given up television by 2010. I could control everything else that was impacting my life, but still I was going to Mass every week to keep my husband company, and that life-size, full-color plaster Jesus that was bleeding for my sins on the cross above the altar was filling me with so much guilt that eventually I had to stop going to church altogether. In retrospect, I realize that ending my church attendance was what made the final difference for me.

That was about the time when I also decided to stop traveling to give talks about the afterlife at conferences and at Unity Churches.  My business clients didn’t want me to retire from my legal career just as we  were  preparing to pass their businesses to their respective next generations of ownership; and my blog posts had to happen each week, my weekly podcasts had to happen; and frankly, of all the things that I loved doing, it was traveling to speak that seemed to produce the most stress for the least reward to both speaker and audiences. So then, little by little, as I settled into my quieter life that was now entirely free from fear, I began to get whispers of what I can only call joy, kind of effervescing in me. You can’t do much about these unexpected bouts of joy. They simply happen when they happen.

My dear friends, after a lifetime of research and learning, at last it all was coming together. The Emperor Constantine’s bogus Christianity was receding in my mind, since I was no longer confronted each week by Jesus’s sorrowful plaster face as He bled out over the altar. I have read the Gospels so many times that Jesus’s words are always in my mind, and I think it was the combination of my certainty that my life is eternal and the gentle words of Jesus always there beneath the surface that caused this permanent elevation of my whole being in a way that I could see only in retrospect. Then, two years ago we suffered a catastrophic financial loss. I wrote about it at the time, and what surprised me most when it happened was how untroubled I was, and how easily I forgave such a heinous crime by someone I had loved and trusted. It was first then that I realized how much I had changed! I look back now in wonderment, and I see what should have been a calamity as barely a bump in my spiritual road. I never think of it now, beyond seeing it as part of my broader relationship with Thomas.  

But I look back now over all my life, and I realize that what can give to you this same ineffable peace of God is just freedom from the fear of death plus a deep familiarity with the teachings of Jesus. That for certain is what has done it for me! When you, too, live in an eternal frame, and when you live with our beloved Friend in your heart, then how can you not also always be joyful? My dear friends, that elusive peace of God which passes all understanding must come from knowing that you are eternal, and from this blissful walk with the Prince of Peace, who sweetly lives with you in perfect love. The fear-based age of the Emperor Constantine is becoming a fading memory. The Age of Jesus has begun.   

Let peace begin with me.
Let this be the moment now.
With ev’ry step I take
Let this be my solemn vow

To take each moment and live
Each moment in peace eternally.
Let there be peace on earth,
And let it begin with me!
– Jill Jackson-Miller (1913-1995) & Sy Miller (1908-1971) from “Let There Be Peace on Earth” (1955)

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)