Author: Roberta Grimes

The Power of Truth (Part II)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

We are the world.
We are the children.
We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let’s start giving.
There’s a choice we’re making.
We’re saving our own lives!
It’s true we’ll make a better day, just you and me.
– Michael Jackson (1958-2009) & Lionel Richie, from “We Are the World” (1985)

The only way for humankind to entirely fix what is wrong with this world is to make it common knowledge now that every human life is eternal. No other attempt to repair a world gone so badly wrong would even make a dent, when compared with the transformative power of that one bit of crucial information! The truth about our eternal nature is far more than just peripheral knowledge. For everyone to know the truth right now would change everything.

 I used to wonder about this. But as I said last week, now I am certain that it is true. And the reason I am so confident is that I have been widely teaching the survival of death for more than a decade now. I have heard from many people who have described the transformative difference overcoming the fear of death has made in their lives, and I have heard from others so traumatized by Calvinism and other fear-based Christian notions that they are rather hoping their death will be extinction and not eternal hellfire! I especially recall one young man who had grown up in a fire-and-brimstone church, and now he lived in an agony of fear that the God he had learned about in church might exist, and might be gunning for him now. I laid out a reading plan for that fearful young man, and I offered to answer his questions as he learned; but he simply went away. I hear from so many people that I lost track of who he was, but fortunately about two years later he emailed me as a response to that earlier emailed reading list. And he was altogether transformed! I had suggested in my email that he keep at it because becoming certain of the truth about death could take as much as two years of study, and he was pleased to report when he emailed me back that it had taken him exactly two years. He had read not just my suggested list, but a good part of my appendix booklist besides. He told me that he knows what is going on now, he looks forward with pleasure to dying someday, and meanwhile he is dating someone and getting down to the business of living. Dear God, if I can help no one else, his email has made my whole life worthwhile!

But in fact, I have watched a great many people come to realize that their lives are eternal. This is a revelation quite different from the almost mechanical process of raising our consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward ever more perfect love by applying the Gospel teachings of Jesus. And yet, the result in people’s lives and outlooks seems to be about the same. People who have learned enough about what actually is going on to become confident that death is an illusion, that God is love, and that their own lives never will end have the following characteristics:

 A Lack of Fear

It was when I lost my own fear of death that I first noticed this lovely phenomenon. Since childhood I had been afraid of the dark, to the point where I now wonder whether my fear might have begun with that sudden flash of light in my darkened bedroom at the age of eight. I recall once in college explaining my fear of the dark to some boy I was dating. I blurted to him, “There might be anything there! Or nothing there!” My fear was primitive, and it was so overwhelming that prior to my marriage I needed a night-light to sleep. Then eventually, at about age forty, I was working at my computer one evening as the room grew dark around me. I paused briefly and looked around, and I was astonished to find that the room was pitch-black but I was not afraid! After seeing this same phenomenon in others, I have come to conclude that fear of death is the mother of all fears. When you no longer fear death, you no longer fear anything.

 Living in an Eternal Frame

 This term covers a cluster of characteristics. People who have internalized the certainty that they never will die begin to think in an eternal timeline. Death is going to end nothing for them! So:

  • They are no longer even vaguely sad. They lose altogether the life-sucks-then-you-die mentality that pervades so much of our culture, and in its place they develop a happiness setpoint that keeps them always cheerful. Life’s little setbacks mean nothing to them, and the big setbacks merit only a sigh. What could go wrong? You are God’s best-beloved child, and you are forever safe in everlasting arms! When it happens to you, this transformation is an exultant feeling that never altogether leaves you.
  • They are no longer grabby about getting their share. This shedding of selfish impulses happens to an astonishing degree! Most of those who truly are certain that they will live eternally actually seem to stop caring altogether about having money or having things.
  • They want to improve their own next stage. Being certain that there will be a next stage really opens up your whole horizon! Rather than wanting to buy more things, you start wanting to “store up treasures in heaven,” just as Jesus said would happen (you can see His words below). And actually, the notion of treasures in heaven turns out to be quite literally true!
  • They want to help others find what they have found. Really knowing what comes next has made such a difference in our own lives that people like Dr. R. Craig Hogan and I are thrilled to be devoting so much of our time to spreading the word about death, even into old age. And some of the people I hear from now who want me to know that they also get it will often say something like, “I’ve been telling people in my church.” Sometimes they will add, “The minister’s not too happy about it.” Hearing that makes me smile, although it shouldn’t!

As you can see, this shift toward living in an eternal frame is functionally close to the same as giving up on selfishness entirely. And in helping us to lose both fear and selfishness, our becoming certain that we never will die seems to be about as effective at raising our consciousness vibrations as is strictly following the Lord’s Gospel teachings.

What did Jesus say about eternal life? Actually, He said a great deal. As you know, Jesus told us that we must apply His teachings to our lives first of all! He said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32). And He did in fact teach eternal living. We can’t be word-for-word certain about these quotations because we know that First Nicaea in 325 and some of the later first-millennium councils are guilty of editing the Lord’s words here and there; but these quotations seem to be largely genuine. He said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps My Word he will never see death” (JN 8:51). And, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (MT 6:19-21). And, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (MT 5:11).

As Jesus was preparing His disciples for His impending crucifixion, He explicitly told them He was going ahead of them to prepare a place for them, in a process that afterlife researchers can confirm is pretty much what our loved ones are going to do for each of us! He said, “Do not let your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also (JN 14:1-3). Then later, on the cross, He gave one of those who was crucified with Him the same promise that very soon He is going to be giving to each of us. He said, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise” (LK 23:43). And of course, proving that death is not fatal was the entire point of His Resurrection! I have lately come to think that a certainty that we live eternally may have been the actual “truth” that Jesus was promising to share with us. And what He assured us it would “set you free” from eternally was the fear of death!

We know that every one of our minds is part of the great eternal Mind that continuously manifests this universe. And because that is true, once as few as ten to fifteen percent of all the people on earth have sufficiently raised their personal consciousness vibrations, the change in them must inevitably begin to raise the consciousness vibrations of us all! But to get there, we have been thinking that we would have to convince maybe a billion people to want to raise their own consciousness vibrations. And it is a sad fact that the notion of “growing spiritually” has little broad appeal. We might point out that this universe exists just to give us a place to grow spiritually, and we might even add that unless we can raise the consciousness vibrations of at least ten percent of the earth’s population we can have little hope of improving all the horrors that now torment this world. But even at that, we get just yawns and a shrug more than seven billion strong!

So let’s decide now to stop talking about spiritual growth altogether. You can sell only what people want to buy, and what they hunger for now is just the certainty that they really never are going to die. So let’s begin now to talk only about how happy you, and you, and you are going to be when at last you conquer your fear of death! Let’s develop a quickie two-year course from which the graduation degree will be a certainty of your own eternal life. Let’s give people a joyful hook where they can hang their lives and every bit of their happiness. Step right up! Spend two years getting your Ph.D. in learning what really is going on, and you will be able to live your most joyous life, both now and forevermore!  Freedom from death is the Gospel promise of Jesus. And at this point, it is our one remaining hope if we seek to save humankind from its present death-spiral into extinction. The Lord said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life”  (JN 5:24). Amen, Lord!

There comes a time
When we heed a certain call,
When the world must come together as one.
There are people dying!
It’s time to lend a hand to life,
The greatest gift of all.
– Michael Jackson (1958-2009) & Lionel Richie, from “We Are the World” (1985)

The bottom two photos are from vecteezy.com, free and with no attribution required.

 

 

The Power of Truth (Part I)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind.
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
– Johnny Nash (1940-2020), from “I Can See Clearly Now” (1972)

The only way for humankind to fix all that is wrong with this world is to make it common knowledge now that every human mind is eternal. No other attempt to repair a world gone so badly wrong would make a dent, when compared with the transformative power of that one bit of crucial information!

The truth about our eternal nature is far more than just peripheral knowledge. And it isn’t something we can safely ignore until our own death stares us in the face. For everyone to know the truth right now would change EVERYTHING. I used to wonder about this. Now I know it to be true.

To understand why, let’s first give some thought to what is basically wrong with humankind that has put us into our present worldwide state of misery and desperation. Opinions may differ, but it is my observation that there are two core human characteristics that feed on one another and together are the cause of everything that ever has been tragic about being a human being, and everything that has gone especially wrong since the start of the twenty-first century:

FEAR

For all of human history, to be alive and human has meant being afraid. The earliest fully human beings, a mere two hundred thousand years ago, suffered predators, hunger, disease, and the gnawing terror of the unknown that caused us to make and worship fearsome gods. And even for those earliest people, awareness of our rapidly approaching death has been our constant companion. Indeed, we may be the only species forced to live with the inescapable certainty that very soon we are going to die. And the advent of civilization reduced some fears, while it added additional fearsome layers. With civilization we acquired human overlords with the power to steal from us, force us to labor, and even take our lives; and the power to require us to carry out warfare on a scale that had hitherto not been imagined. Then eventually, of course, farming towns and fortress castles gave way to modern cities, and our lives as mere cogs in civilization’s wheel went from the plodding pace of horses to the lethal speed of cars and planes. Swords were replaced by ICBMs, and we even invented an “atomic clock” to better count down toward our certain doom. Even today, that doomsday clock stands at just one hundred seconds before midnight.

SELFISHNESS

Every one of us loves and worships the self. At the core of every human being is a deep, egoic craving for recognition, success, fame, money, and an ever-better place near the top of the heap of our fellow human beings. As with fear, that instinct toward selfishness appears to be innate in all of us. It’s a product of the ego, which is a part of the limited package with which we come to earth. The ego is hard to precisely define, but we know that its purpose is to keep us alive until we reach a chosen exit point, and then it dies when the body dies. Meanwhile, it sees every tiny infringement on even trivial status-related aspects of our lives as potential threats to its survival.

These two profoundly negative impulses are basic and innate in everyone! There is no human being who is never afraid, and no one who doesn’t strive and enjoy accumulating ever more of whatever that person most prizes in this earthly life. It is easy to see the ego’s efforts in those who are climbing the corporate ladder, working day and night to accumulate wealth, or pouring themselves into campaigning for office. But what about the beautiful, selfless people whose every impulse is to help others, and who then are given a recognition dinner, a Presidential Medal, or a Nobel Peace Prize? Just watch the ceremonies! That instinct toward self-aggrandizement is still there, even in the best of them. We all want to be important. We all want to be loved.

By way of illustration, we might consider the motivations of some of the worst people who ever have lived, the tyrants who have diminished and destroyed so many other people’s lives. We might quibble over whether humankind’s hunger to dominate others is an artifact of all our terrible fears or is more the result of a needy ego, but when we think of the worst people who ever have lived we see fear and selfishness intermingling to make the acquisition of power over others too often something that those who gain a bit of it will promptly aggrandize until they are monsters. As Sir John Dalberg-Acton so wisely wrote more than a century ago, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Adolf Eichmann was one of the organizers of the Shoah, the Holocaust that claimed six million Jewish lives. He was tried and hanged in Israel in 1962. In the title of her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, the German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt made one of the most profound observations ever made by anyone: she pointed out just how normal, how usual and boring even the greatest evildoers actually are. Eichmann looked like a mid-level clerk. Hitler smiled and patted his dog. The trains to the death-camps looked like usual trains, and perhaps they even ran on time. And if you are living in a Western country that is supposed to be run by its citizens, you are seeing elected officials now openly fighting the freedoms of others with deadly and tenacious efficiency. You see governors decreeing humiliating and business-destroying lockdowns, and police arresting churchgoers and pastors because fear of some illness that is little more than a new version of the seasonal flu has given them that power. Now, as vaccinations begin to erase whatever little threat there was, you see the most power-mad trying to make those temporary restrictions permanent, and you realize with horror how easily the egos of basically decent people, when they are further fortified by fear, can be seduced by even a little power into doing what you and I can see is cruel, self-important, and plainly wrong.

Fear and selfishness are to some limited degree useful. They keep us from stepping in front of moving cars, and they ensure that we will at least take our morning shower and try to work enough to survive. But fear is the opposite of love, so fear can make our spiritual growth impossible; and our selfish ego cares nothing for our spiritual growth, since its motivation is only its own survival. Worst of all, for the little good that they do, our impulses toward selfishness and fear tend to separate us from other people, which is why so many of us later in life live isolated and often mean-spirited lives.

Once again, we are grateful for a final key insight from the indispensable Father Richard Rohr, the head of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. One of his recent newsletters talks about Edith Eva Eger, who was just sixteen when her family was transported to Auschwitz. Her parents went to the gas chambers on the day they arrived, while Edith and her sister survived. Eventually she arrived in the United States, where she was educated and became a psychologist and therapist specializing in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In her recent memoir, The Choice: Embrace the Possible, she reminds us that each moment is a choice. She says, “No matter how frustrating or boring or constraining or painful or oppressive our experience, we can always choose how we respond. And I finally begin to understand that I, too, have a choice… The choice to accept myself as I am: human, imperfect. And the choice to be responsible for my own happiness. To forgive my flaws and reclaim my innocence. To stop asking why I deserved to survive. To function as well as I can, to commit myself to serve others, to do everything in my power to honor my parents, to see to it that they did not die in vain. To do my best, in my limited capacity, so future generations don’t experience what I did. To be useful, to be used up, to survive and to thrive so I can use every moment to make the world a better place. And to finally, finally stop running from the past. To do everything possible to redeem it, and then let it go. I can make the choice that all of us can make. I can’t ever change the past. But there is a life I can save: It is mine. The one I am living right now, this precious moment… And to the vast campus of death that consumed my parents and so very many others, to the classroom of horror that still had something sacred to teach me about how to live—that I was victimized but I’m not a victim, that I was hurt but not broken, that the soul never dies, that meaning and purpose can come from deep in the heart of what hurts us the most—I utter my final words. Goodbye, I say. And, Thank you. Thank you for life, and for the ability to finally accept the life that is.”

The words that follow those second ellipses are among the most profound ever written. In the end, this woman who is now in her nineties was able to surmount, forgive, and even be grateful for the death-camp that took her parents and her innocence because it helped her to learn and grow spiritually. As she puts it, she grew into accepting “the life that is.”

My weekly podcast is eight years old. I was promoting The Fun of Dying in the spring of 2013 when the kindly head of a podcasting company recruited me. We both assumed I was going to be podcasting about the afterlife, but when my new friend told me we needed a title, the Thomas within me blurted, “Seek Reality!” I hadn’t yet met Thomas in person, but I was used by then to having my unknown spirit guide unexpectedly interject his strong opinions. And soon I was glad that such an overbroad title let me entertain and learn from such a stellar range of wonderful weekly guests! It is only now that I realize that seeking and living in reality, as difficult as reality is for us even to find when both mainstream science and mainstream religions are flat-out lying to us, is the only hope left for humankind. And in seeking reality, we eventually find and begin to live in the true reality where death is not even a momentary pause. Like Edith Eger, we all can find “the life that is.” And in finding that life, we can at last do what Jesus came to earth to help us. do, which is to bring the kingdom of God on Earth. Next week we’ll look at the difference it will make when everyone knows the truth about death.

Look all around, there’s nothing but blue skies.
Look straight ahead, there’s nothing but blue skies.
I can see clearly now the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Here is that rainbow I’ve been praying for.
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
– Johnny Nash (1940-2020), from “I Can See Clearly Now” (1972)

All photos are from vecteezy.com, free and with no attribution required.

Devout Atheism

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting.
Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been clear.
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun,
And I say it’s all right!
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “Here Comes the Sun” (1969)

A religion is a system of beliefs based in human ideas about what underlies reality. And by that definition, the most pervasive and destructive religion of all is whatever has become of mainstream science! To be frank, this is a problem so obvious, so destructive, and so central to everything that is going wrong in the modern world that the fact that we seem to be almost the only ones who are noticing it makes me feel like the little boy in the tale of the emperor’s new clothes. Academic scientists parade around in white coats with test tubes in their pockets and continue to assure us that very soon they are going to make progress on our most basic questions, even though it is ever more obvious to anyone who is paying attention that the entire profession of non-medical scientific research mostly stalled out a century ago.

Part of the problem is that the field of scientific inquiry is less hungry than it once was. There were so many world-changing breakthroughs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that even now, a century later, broad societal respect and abundant funds with which to generate more breakthrough discoveries continue to flow into scientific fields that at this point really are not doing much. Nothing radically new and transformative has been produced by mainstream scientific research since Max Planck won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1918 for his work in quantum mechanics, and then Albert Einstein won the same prize in 1921, essentially for being Einstein. By now, the scientific community is reduced to trumpeting “discoveries” as irrelevant as stardust older than our solar system, and “advances” as tangential as better methods of gene-editing.

Another part of the problem with modern science is mission-creep. We have come to see science as so reliably productive of an ever-better way of life that we think it would be useful to apply its processes to just about everything. A recent article in The Atlantic calls for “a new science of progress,” saying that “Progress itself is understudied. By ‘progress,’ we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of ‘Progress Studies.’” Boy, talk about suffering an abject loss of focus on what should be the scientific mission!

But the primary problem with science in the twenty-first century is that, like every other religion, it is intellectually frozen in time. It reminds me of Spiritualism, which is a branch of Christianity based in communicating with the dead that was on the religious cutting edge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spiritualism still exists, but to attend a service and sing traditional Christian hymns with altered lyrics from hundred-year-old hymnals feels like stepping back a century in time.

Science has since the early part of the twentieth century been little more than the dead-end religion of atheism. With forty thousand versions of Christianity now fostering belief in their various versions of the Christian God, it is not surprising that a religion would be trumpeting its belief in what we might call “no-God.” Not surprising at all, but still a tragic diminishment of the once-proud field of scientific inquiry.

Mainstream scientific research is governed by the belief that all of reality is material, and that reality therefore can be fully studied and entirely understood using only methods designed to study what are exclusively material processes. I assume your jaw dropped when you read that sentence! By now, it has been pretty conclusively established that even what we think of as “matter” is not solid in any reasonable sense, and such early-twentieth-century scientific stars as Albert Einstein and Max Planck knew and said that matter is illusory, that matter is energy, and that matter has an underlying non-material matrix that ought to be studied. But to this day, those who control the funding for scientific research continue to enforce the matter-based assumption that consciousness is produced by the brain! To read articles about the search for a source of consciousness in the human brain that still are being published in prestigious scientific journals almost a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century can make you laugh and cry simultaneously. For example, here is an actual pair of sentences from an article published in Nature only three years ago: “What is it about a highly excitable piece of brain matter that gives rise to consciousness? Once we can understand that, we hope to get closer to solving the more fundamental problem.” Actually, there are a host of “more fundamental” problems that will never be solved until mainstream science stops its absurd insistence on the dead-end dogma of materialist atheism. As we will shortly see!

Meanwhile, we just ought to note that there was a chance at the turn of the twentieth century for science to establish and assert a modern commitment to the open-minded pursuit of the truth. I noticed early in my afterlife research this odd refusal  by anyone with scientific credentials to even look at the excellent communications from the dead that were being received early in the twentieth century through physical mediums and documented and published by serious researchers. I investigated further – this was decades ago – and I discovered that the university science departments and the peer-reviewed scientific journals had begun soon after the start of the twentieth century to enforce what they were then calling “the scientific dogma of materialism.” This was not a new idea. In fact, the absurd notion that what is material and what is not material can be separately studied goes back all the way to Plato and Aristotle; but even after more than two thousand years, at the start of the twentieth century that odd dichotomy was still informal. It was only then that the scientific gatekeepers announced and began to rigidly enforce a dogma that was fully as nonsensical as putting scientific consideration of rock-formation off limits, or barring scientific investigation of any phenomenon associated with the color blue. Speculation is that it was the shock of physicists’ discovery that they now had quantum physics to contend with that made them feel forced to concentrate on materialism. Personally, I think it was a worry that they might inadvertently find the Christian God. But in fact, there never was the slightest justification for the scientific community to in any way limit what it was willing to investigate in the reality that it  professed to be thoroughly studying!  

The result of that foolish century-old decision to limit what scientists can professionally believe has led to a mostly wasted scientific century. Think of all the effort that has been stupidly spent on seeking a source of consciousness inside the brain! And consider all the basic research and the endless speculation that has been invested in making sense of ideas that never will make any sense because they are based in nonsense. For example, here are just three of many core areas of research that can never be productive in a thousand years until the mainstream scientific gatekeepers turn modern science into what it always should have been: an open-minded search for the truth.

  • The origin and nature of life. Most research being done in this field is laughable. The plain fact is that for life to begin and be sustained in even the simplest organism would require so many different fortuitous developments that have no other purpose that no materialist scientific theory ever will get us there.
  • The true origin of the universe. The notion of a Big Bang might comfort us with the thought that we have learned something important, but in fact it tells us little. We still don’t know what existed before the Big Bang, nor where whatever that was came from, nor what caused it to explode in the first place.
  • A Theory of Everything. The current standard model of particle physics, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, and Max Planck’s quantum mechanics are all well-studied and demonstrated, and they also are in some ways incompatible with one another. Since of course this makes no sense, the search for what must unite them is underway! And so far, it has turned up goose-eggs.

The sorry religion of atheism, which is what mainstream science has been for a century, is as useless as was the long-ago worship of Moloch. Sacrificing first-born babies won’t make us any more divinely favored. And taking care to make sure that, whatever research we do, we never are going to find a Christian God is an exercise in useless silliness.

Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was a Dominican friar and revered Medieval thinker. In his most prominent work, the Summa Theologica, Aquinas said, “Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause. This leads to a regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God.” Every religion seeks to find that uncaused cause, and then it worships whatever it finds. For the religion of atheism that is modern science, the declared answer is that there is no “uncaused cause,” so everything that exists has happened randomly. And you and I know that notion is completely ridiculous on its face!

Here comes the sun, Here comes the sun,
And I say it’s all right.
Little darling, it’s been a long cold lonely winter.
Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been here.
Here comes the sun!
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “Here Comes the Sun” (1969)

Pigeon collisions photo credit: FotoGrazio <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/94075184@N00/48922186542”>Pigeons collisions</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Seeking God’s Plan (Part V)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing.
Were not the right Man on our side, the Man of God’s own choosing.
Dost ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is He.
The Lord of hosts His name, from age to age the same,
And He must win the battle.
– Martin Luther (1483-1546) from “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” (1529)

When we try to consider human history from the viewpoint of the Godhead Itself, we can begin to see the life of Jesus a bit more as the Godhead might see it. Working this out has been a series of revelations. What seem like throwaway lines in the Gospels have a background and a purpose, and the Lord’s core teachings can be traced back to words of the prophets in ways that make sense to us. From a more Godly perspective, the march of human history over the past 200,000 years looks to be spiritually arrow-straight and highly purposeful! If you have the time, please look back at the past articles in this series, in order. What we are trying to understand as deeply as we can and from the perspective of the Creator is the actual process by which this illusory universe has unfolded for humankind. All the invented past as it now exists is the Godhead’s attempt to educate us spiritually, and we know that because the entire history of this universe is freshly created in each micro-instant. So what is in the past is only and completely what the Godhead wants us to find there Now!

Reading the Gospels from this perspective is a great exercise. It reinforces for us even more deeply Who Jesus is in relation to the Godhead. At times, you almost can see His mind working! And it lets you glimpse a little of the Godhead’s thinking while an aspect of the Godhead, having been born in a human body, interacts with people who can have no idea of the miracle they are witnessing. This exploration by itself could fill a book! But we will here consider just a couple of topics. Let’s briefly watch and listen from our amazing new perspective as the Lord goes about His earthly life:

John the Baptist Was Elijah Reincarnated to Fulfill Isaiah’s Prophesy

 One of the things that we can do now is to look more closely at the role of John the Baptist. For Christians, the point of the Gospel narrative about the Baptist is that baptism itself is spiritually magical. But when we try to take the Godhead’s perspective, we realize that the ritual is beside the point: it could have been a handshake, a certain kind of hat, or almost anything that John was doing which allowed God to single Jesus out, tie Him to prophesy, and announce that He had come from God and was representing God on earth. There had to be such an anointing moment. Without it, the whole ministry of Jesus might not in retrospect have been seen as sufficiently special to have been marked out and remembered in such a way that even after two thousand years He remains among the world’s most beloved people. Note here that the word “repent” has been changed to “reform your mind,” which is closer to the meaning of the Greek word used. And John also talks about the process that was central to the message of Jesus. John the Baptist declares that the focus of his work and the Lord’s is to bring the kingdom of God (or heaven) on earth. Here is what Matthew says about the Baptist:

Now in those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, “Reform your mind, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” For this is the one referred to by Isaiah the prophet when he said, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make ready the way of the Lord. Make His  paths straight!’” (MT 3:1-3). Jesus says of John after His death, “A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and one who is more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written, ‘Behold, I send My messenger ahead of You, Who will prepare Your way before You.’ … For all the prophets and the Law prophesied until John. And if you are willing to accept it, John himself is Elijah who was to come. He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (MT 11:9-15). Especially note that final appeal for us to listen for a hidden meaning! I am coming to think that the truth of reincarnation is something else that Jesus had wanted to introduce to us, despite the obstacle of listening Temple guards nearby. The Council of Nicaea in 325 reportedly removed from the Gospels all the references to reincarnation it was able to identify, but these more subtle hints remain!

One thing that strikes you now is that Jesus didn’t simply begin to teach, but rather He burst upon the scene when John baptized Him in a tableau that seems to have been divinely scripted. As is true of so much that is in the Gospels, Christianity later added a nonsensical religious gloss by calling this the moment when the Holy Spirit entered Him; but we know now that Jesus was born in that body as a Being already perfected and divine. Here is a description of the Lord’s baptism:

Then Jesus arrived from Galilee at the Jordan coming to John, to be baptized by him. But John tried to prevent Him, saying, “I have need to be baptized by You, and do You come to me?” But Jesus answering said to him, “Permit it at this time; for in this way it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he permitted Him. After being baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting on Him, and behold, a voice out of the heavens said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased” (MT 3:13-17). This appears to be the way that God chose to introduce Jesus as being an aspect of the Godhead. Of course, primitive people then took the word “son” literally and created a whole virgin-birth narrative, when what the Godhead seems to be saying is that Jesus is an aspect of God and is acting as God’s emissary.

Later in His ministry Jesus took Peter, James, and John to a mountaintop where they encountered Moses and Elijah. Jesus was there “transfigured,” with His face and clothes shining bright. Then “a bright cloud overshadowed them, and behold, a voice out of the cloud said, “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased; listen to Him!” (MT 17:5). Christianity makes this scene all about the Lord’s bodily transfiguration, but in fact He just briefly showed Himself to His disciples in an astral body to match the astral bodies of Moses and Elijah. What was significant about this scene was the Godhead’s reiteration that the teachings of Jesus are the most important part of His mission. And even with that, those teachings are not being taken seriously by Christianity, even today! Jesus told us that His teachings are the point of His mission when He said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32). And here we see the Godhead making that same point!

Jesus Was Establishing a Narrative About Who He Was

One of the things worth wondering about is whether Jesus always was aware that He was God on earth. I suspect that, like the rest of us, His life-plan was initially internal and not entirely clear to Him, but He was feeling driven toward it even in childhood. When He was twelve, His parents took Him to Jerusalem for the Passover and He stayed behind when they started for home. They returned to the city and spent three days searching for Him, and they found their little boy in the temple in learned discourse with the teachers there. “When they saw Him, they were astonished; and His mother said to Him, “Son, why have You treated us this way? Behold, Your father and I have been anxiously looking for You.” And He said to them, “Why is it that you were looking for Me? Did you not know that I had to be about My Father’s business?” (LK 2:48-49)

It seems clear that by the age of thirty Jesus fully understood His unique identity and His very special mission. Several times as He was carrying out His healing and teaching ministry, He asked His disciples who they thought He was, and who people in general thought He was. For example, Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, He was asking His disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but still others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (MT 16:13-16).

As an aspect of the Godhead, Jesus should have been able to discern what people were saying about Him without His having to ask the question! But what He seems to have been doing here was getting them to think about it, and narrowing their possible choices until they themselves could arrive at His true nature. He even argued with their wrong guesses. For example, Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question: “What do you think about the Christ, whose son is He?” They said to Him, “The son of David.” He said to them, “Then how does David in the Spirit call Him ‘Lord,’ saying, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at My right hand, Until I put Your enemies beneath Your feet”’? If David then calls Him ‘Lord,’ how is He his son?” No one was able to answer Him a word, nor did anyone dare from that day on to ask Him another question (MT 42:41-46).

That Jesus was the promised Christ seems to have been where His followers settled. Then after Jesus was arrested, the elders took Him aside and questioned Him, saying, “If You are the Christ, tell us.” But He said to them, “If I tell you, you will not believe; and if I ask a question, you will not answer. But from now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God.” And they all said, “Are You the Son of God, then?” And He said to them, “Yes, I am” (LK 22:66-70). So, is this where Jesus finally settled? Knowing as we do now that He came to us as an aspect of the Godhead, and knowing how deferential Spirit actually is to our own thoughts and mindset, it seems possible that He found both “Christ” and “Son of God” to be close enough approximations to a truth that, even today, few people who are now in bodies are perhaps quite ready to understand.

Our five-week-long attempting to look through God’s eyes has taught us to understand God about as well as the cat dozing in your lap understands you. She has no way to envision your trips outside your home, your reasons for changing clothing, or what you are doing now on your computer. All she has learned about you is that you are worthy of her trust. You meet her needs. You are infinite kindness and perfect love. And that is quite a bit, as we think about it. Perhaps it is all that really matters.

That word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them, abideth.
The Spirit and the gifts are ours through Him who with us sideth.
Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also.
The body they may kill; God’s truth abideth still.
His kingdom is forever!
– Martin Luther (1483-1546) from “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” (1529)

Seeking God’s Plan (Part IV)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.
Our Helper He, amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.
For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe!
His craft and power are great, and, armed with cruel hate,
On earth is not his equal.
– Martin Luther (1483-1546) from “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” (1529)

The first modern people date to about two hundred thousand years ago. And that is astoundingly recent! The whole of our human existence on earth is just a hundred times the number of years that have passed since Jesus was born. And for nearly all that time we have been spiritual infants and toddlers, born repeatedly and dying soon, probably learning little in each lifetime as we struggled just to survive.  But even with that, it isn’t accurate to say that the Godhead was ignoring our worship of the often-barbaric Gods that we kept creating in our own image. God’s relationship with each individual always has been intimate. Every human being ever born has had a primary spirit guide whose role was to act internally and help that person to grow spiritually; and through those primary guides we always have been directly connected with the Godhead. In any event, the most basic spiritual lessons likely were better learned without God’s even hinting while we still were spiritual babies that eventually we were going to be trying to earn our spiritual Ph.D.s!

And of course, here again we should mention that pesky concept of time. The Godhead appears to be so disconnected from time that we cannot entirely imagine the divine perspective, no matter how we try. For example, we are told that all our earth-lives are happening at once, which means that from every earliest human life lived 200,000 years ago and right on through every far-future final necessary lifetime of every being who incarnates primarily on this planet, everything is happening right now. Clearly, we who are currently limited to just our earth-minds cannot begin to imagine the Godhead’s no-time perspective! So for now, we will make our learning a little easier by taking the matter-based position that time and our earth-lives are as perfectly linear as they seem to us to be.

The Jews of the Christian Old Testament have left us a wonderful history of some of God’s earliest attempts to spiritually awaken humankind. The Godhead likely first revealed Itself in many places on earth at around the same time. Here is how it happened for the Jewish prophet Moses in about 1500 BC: The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. So Moses said, “I must turn aside now and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up.”  When the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then He said, “Do not come near here; remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said also, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God (Exodus 3:2-6). What Moses had that day was an experience of light, which is a powerful tool the Godhead can use to grab our attention. The same thing happened to the Apostle Paul when Jesus recruited him (Acts 9:1-9); and it also happened to me when I was eight. Go figure.

The Old Testament reads like a fear-based history shot through with cruelty and pain. There is in it, though, a consistent strain of prophets who claimed to be speaking for God.  With everything we have learned about how things work, we know that these prophets were recruited before birth, and their life-plans would have included doing this work for the Godhead. But they always had the free-will right to refuse the task at any point! I was assured by Thomas after I had tried to refuse to write Liberating Jesus that if I had not finally yielded, others were in line to take my place. There are roughly sixteen Old Testament prophets, although the count can differ depending on whether a few borderline figures are included. The prophetic period of Jewish history extends from 1450 BC until a century or so before the birth of Jesus, and for our purposes there are six main themes. Here they are, each  with an example of what the prophets claimed that God was saying to us:

  • There is one eternal and all-powerful God. Notions like spiritual growth and a Collective of Perfected Beings were beyond what any Bronze Age primitive could have comprehended, so the Godhead kept it simple. For example, Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: ‘I am the first and I am the last, and there is no God besides Me’ (Isaiah 44:6).
  • It is time for us to know the genuine God. For almost two hundred thousands years we had made and worshipped our own false gods, but it was time at last for us to begin a closer relationship with the genuine Godhead.  “The Lord was very angry with your fathers. Therefore say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, “Return to Me,” declares the Lord of hosts, “that I may return to you,” says the Lord of hosts” (Zechariah 1:2-3).
  • God is angry. Since anger is a low-vibration emotion and the Godhead is at the highest vibration, it is probably impossible for God to actually be angry; but for the prophets to say that God was angry put the situation in terms that people could understand. The prophet Ezekiel said, “They will fling their silver into the streets and their gold will become an abhorrent thing; their silver and their gold will not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the Lord” (Ezekiel 7:19).
  • God is jealous. God wasn’t actually jealous, since after all God has all the power! But here again, jealousy is a human analogy to describe God’s feelings when we worship other gods. “All the earth will be devoured in the fire of His jealousy” (Zephaniah 1:18).
  • God is heartily sick of our ritual worship. Jesus will later use this passage from Isaiah to call for an end to religious rituals, and arguably for an end to religions altogether. “Bring your worthless offerings no longer. Incense is an abomination to Me. New moon and sabbath, the calling of assemblies—I cannot endure iniquity and the solemn assembly. I hate your new moon festivals and your appointed feasts, They have become a burden to Me; I am weary of bearing them” (Isaiah 1:13-14).
  • There will be a New Covenant. Those early Jews were promised a new and more direct relationship with the genuine Godhead. For example, “Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah” (Jeremiah 31:31).

The greatest of the Old Testament prophets also gave us some hint of what life will be like when at last the kingdom of God arrives on earth. Here is my favorite passage in the entire Old Testament:

“And the wolf will dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard will lie down with the young goat,
And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little boy will lead them.
Also the cow and the bear will graze,
Their young will lie down together,
And the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra,
And the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain,
For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
As the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:6-9).

Isaiah also gave us a prediction of the coming miraculous birth of Jesus as God on earth:

“For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; and the government will rest on His shoulders; and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from then on and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will accomplish this” (Isaiah 9:6-7).

And there was one prophet who foretold the next stage of humankind’s relationship with God by giving us an early version of the message of Jesus. What God wants from us is nothing more than just those last few lines:

With what shall I come to the Lord
And bow myself before the God on high?
Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings,
With yearling calves?
Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams,
In ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has told you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice, to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:6-9).

Less than four thousand years ago the Godhead at last began to educate us. After having lived the first 200,000 years of humanity’s existence in superstitious fear of our human-made gods, at last we were past our toddlerhood and ready to enter spiritual kindergarten! And in order to make sure we would have the best start, an aspect of the Godhead descended in person and became our divine Teacher….

 

And though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us.
The Prince of Darkness grim, we tremble not for him!
His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure.
One little word shall fell him.
– Martin Luther (1483-1546) from “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” (1529)

 

Vienna – Fresco of Moses in Altlerchenfelder church Pro Photo
Spring lambs relaxing – Vecteezy Pro Photo
Vienna – Fresco of prophet Micah Pro Photo

Seeking God’s Plan (Part III)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly Day by day.
– Stephen Schwartz, “Day by Day” from “Godspell” (1972)

Last week we discussed our need to better understand the Godhead so we can explore the history of humankind’s relationship with God from something like God’s perspective. It is clear from the response to what we said last week that for us truly to take the Godhead’s point of view, even just as an exercise, is going to be something of a stretch! So I hope that if you still are troubled by some of what we said last week, you will pause and read that post again. And if anything still feels like a sticking-point, please ask your questions in the comments below. If you are confused, then there are others, too, who will have those same questions in mind.

In order for us to come even close to taking the Godhead’s point of view, we first must fully internalize the fact that this universe is a pure illusion. Everything about it is freshly created in each micro-instant of artificial time, including what we think of as “the past.” You and I are eternal beings who chose to come here to have emotionally stressful experiences that will help us to learn and grow spiritually There is a lot more to know about who and what we are, but right now our focus is on coming to understanding God enough that we will be able to imagine something like God’s point of view. And to do that, we’ve got to get out of the way!

We now know that this material universe is neither very large nor very old. Evidence strongly suggests that it was created together with the first modern people, animals, and plants about 200,000 years ago. This universe has never needed to be more than a large enough habitat that the people in it would never find an edge, and it always has been freshly made in each micro-instant of its own artificial time. It may not even have been a planet at first! It might not have had a sun, but it could instead have been lit as the astral plane is lit, by the Godhead’s white spiritual light. But then of course those first people would have started to wonder where the light was coming from, especially as fire was added as a tool for human use and people witnessed their first naturally-occurring fires and learned how to make fire happen. They would have thought there must be a big fire somewhere! So to preserve humanity’s investment in the illusion, a simple solar system would have been born. And every change would have been at once part of an ever-more-complex built-in history, so it would “always” have been there.

Do you see how this apparently worked? We have no way to know how creation happened in what we might euphemistically call real-time, since time is not real and any later enhancements that were needed to keep us believing in the illusion were built into each new instant of this reality as if they had been there forever. But there was no need for the Godhead to begin with figuring out how to generate the Big Bang. And the way that it almost certainly happened would likely have produced an ever-growing Godhead Collective of Perfected Beings, just as the human need grew for ever more creative complexity.

This earth-habitat that was being gradually enriched with an ever-increasing size and an ever more complex past had just one purpose, insofar as we can determine. It was designed to facilitate the spiritual growth and enrichment of Consciousness itself. And of course that raises the question of why, as parts of the same Consciousness as the Godhead, we are not already perfect. Why was there ever this sudden need to do more? Some people, too, have asked me where the Godhead came from and how the Members of the Godhead developed spiritually before there even was a material reality. A lot of these questions can make your head spin! And with access to just our limited earth-minds, we will have to simply accept the fact that there are things that will not make sense to us until after we have died and gone home. But I think that something like the answer to most of these origin questions can be found in what A Course in Miracles suggests happened, which is that the whole need for our spiritual growth in this universe is the result of one stupid mistake. In that scenario, the brief thought of a separation within infinitely creative Mind led to an instant of actual separation, and that created the necessity for that separated part to rescue itself and figure out how to reunite with the Whole. And it may well be that since time is not real, the first Members of the Godhead were developed just as that separated part made the first bit of universe, and then They “always” were there. Do you see how weird the lack of objective time can make things seem to us?

So we know now that humanity – and probably the universe itself – all originated no more than 200,000 earth-years ago. And there would have been no need at first for the Godhead to reveal Itself. Indeed, for that to have happened so early would have interfered with early man’s emotional investment in the illusion! But still, from humankind’s very beginning the Godhead was deeply involved in the life of each individual person on earth. Everyone is born with both a guardian angel for physical protection until a chosen exit point is reached, and a spirit guide for internal guidance in helping us to make the most of our life-plans. For the helpless prey animals that we were then, these invisible helpers were miraculously important! And probably almost immediately the most spiritually sensitive members of the first human tribes were feeling and hearing their guides enough that those folks likely became our first shamans. Their spirit guides were the inspiration for our first gods.

Evidence of religious practice has been found that is many thousands of years old. It seems likely that the first human-made gods date to the advent of the earliest people, when life was tough and most of us never saw the age of thirty. Those earliest folks had no energy to spare for anything that didn’t feel essential to their survival, and yet many thousands of years before it first occurred to anyone to invent an alphabet, domesticate dogs, or even plant a seed, people were inventing gods and putting considerable effort into trying to build cooperative relationships with their gods. And all of this happened long before there is any surviving evidence that the Godhead was actively intervening in human history! Indeed, I will here go out on what feels like a fairly solid limb and say that prior to about five thousand years ago, the Godhead’s involvement in human affairs consisted of just three things:

Maintaining This Ongoing Creation

From what might at first have been nothing more than a grassy plain surrounded by a ring of forest and full of animals that you and I would recognize today, and the earliest people, created as adults, who gave birth to and nurtured the very first children, right down through a split-millisecond ago when the same illusion consists of nearly fourteen billion years of invented history and a hundred billion light-years of space, the Godhead’s patient and loving effort at perfectly preserving this illusion and continuing to build it so we will never find an edge still goes on.

Although a few scientists suspect that it is all an illusion. They just consider that suspicion to be The Truth That Cannot Speak Its Name until they have become so highly respected that they can frankly state it, as did the two greatest physicists of the twentieth century. Just a few decades into that century, Max Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental…. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” He added in 1944, “There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” And Albert Einstein was wonderfully insightful when he said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” And, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

Maintaining the Afterlife and the Greater Reality

Insofar as we can determine, the astral plane which is our eternal home is much bigger and more substantial than is this entire material universe. It still exists within Consciousness, true, and it is variously lit by the Godhead’s white light, but it is populated by people who know the basics of what is actually going on. All the real-seeming places in the astral plane are also mind-created, and the people themselves can choose to create and enjoy their own illusions. Most importantly of all, they know that only Mind exists, that they are part of that Mind, and that they are eternal. Everything else is beside the point.    

Guiding Each Individual on Earth

Every primary spirit guide is someone who has lived on earth fairly recently, has achieved the upper fifth level developmentally and therefore doesn’t need earth-stress to achieve more spiritual growth, and now continues to grow spiritually by guiding someone else. Our primary guides sign up with us before we are born, help us with life-planning, and then assist us in living out our plan and getting the most learning from each lesson. And they do this while they are in direct contact with the most advanced beings, including the Godhead Itself. Through our primary guides, each of us has constant intimate contact with God.

So God has always been involved in the spiritual progress of all humanity, and intimately concerned about the spiritual welfare of each precious human being. But for those first 195,000 or so earth-years of humanity’s existence we were spiritual infants in this playpen of an expanding illusory universe, just trying to learn how to sit and stand and bashing one another with anything handy. And then something amazing happened….

 

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly Day by day.
– Stephen Schwartz, “Day by Day” from “Godspell” (1972)

Seeking God’s Plan (Part II)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

O most merciful Redeemer, friend and brother,
May I know Thee more clearly,
Love Thee more dearly,
Follow Thee more nearly.
– St. Richard of Chichester (1197-1253), From his deathbed prayer (1253)

If we hope to achieve some level of understanding of how the Godhead works in the world, we are going to have to find a way to see things more from God’s perspective. And doing that is going to take a lot more humility than we have yet mustered! So as we begin, we ought to pray for God’s help in better understanding God. St. Richard’s prayer, the end of which is above, was said in Latin by the then-Bishop of Chichester on his deathbed. Praying in gratitude affirmations puts the power of our own minds into our receipt of the gift, so now in beginning with you this effort to come to better know the genuine Godhead, I pray, “Dear God, I thank You that I know Thee more clearly, love Thee more dearly, follow Thee more nearly every day.” Amen. God’s Will be done.

Before we make our attempt to know God outside of all religions, let’s first reassure ourselves that we have the Godhead’s permission. There is so much fear-based superstition surrounding religions that the notion of trying to find and know God independently makes some people afraid. But Jesus urges us to ask questions and to seek the truth. And the plain fact is that God is real! And the God that we are coming to perceive as we study the greater reality is much nicer and more loving than the Christian God, who is frankly the fantastical relic of thousands of years of fear-based human ideas about gods. It has occurred to me that what we are learning now about God might be the genuine Godhead’s direct revelation, else otherwise why would so much new information be suddenly so easy to find?

Our quest to come to know God better is easier now because in recent decades there has been an explosion of new information about what really is going on. Insofar as we can determine, the bounty of evidence that we have come to take for granted began with a concerted attempt by elevated beings not in bodies to make their presence known to us; and that effort seems to have had its beginnings about two hundred years ago. We’ve got to stress the fact that none of this new information was available to the builders of any religion! And in making a fresh effort to understand God that is rooted in these modern facts, we are doing what we should have been doing all along. We are putting God first. One fact that is abundantly obvious to every researcher of the greater reality is that God is even much more involved in each separate moment of our existence than any religious person in human history has heretofore imagined!

We could not possibly know any of what follows if it were not by divine revelation. And here are some things that we now very strongly suspect are true:

  • THE ONLY THING THAT EXISTS IS CONSCIOUSNESS. When the eminent physicist Max Planck discovered that consciousness underlies everything, he in fact began for all of us the process of finding the genuine God.
  • THE GODHEAD IS A COLLECTIVE OF PERFECTED BEINGS. Oh, how I have fought this idea! But it fits with so much else that we have learned about how things work at the highest levels, and Thomas is telling me now to just get over my squeamishness. There is no One Big Guy on a Throne with a Long Beard and Thunderbolts, far away from us and looking down on us. There is instead an infinitely powerful Collective of what is actually Us Perfected. No wonder God knows us and loves us so well!
  • WHAT WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY IS IN THE NATURE OF SHARED THOUGHT. Our own thoughts feel ephemeral and private to us, but the Godhead’s “thoughts” are as solid and public as the hand in front of your face.
  • MATTER, ENERGY, SPACE AND TIME ARE NOT OBJECTIVELY REAL. We can accept this fact about everything but time, since we can think about the universe (for example) as solid and gigantic when we know the thought of it has neither substance nor size. But without time, doesn’t everything just happen at once? Doesn’t even a thought require time for you to think it? As difficult as this is for us to imagine, objective time simply is not real. Welcome to eternity! If something real exists in this moment, then it always has existed and it always will exist. And the only thing that exists right now is Mind. Your own mind is inextricably part of that one Mind, so you are eternal. By definition.
  • OUR REALITY IS NEWLY CREATED IN EACH MICRO-INSTANT OF NON-TIME. Here is another notion that I have been fighting, but no other theory makes so much sense. Reality can best be understood as something like a filmstrip, which is a series of pictures in which tiny changes are made from picture to picture. When those pictures are run in quick series, we experience it as one continuous reality. And the same is true of the reality around us now! Each “picture” in this ongoing reality includes all of what we think of as the past, which means that our past can be freshly revised or augmented in each instant. And apparently our past is being created to be steadily more complex, as human beings become both more curious and better able to figure things out. The Godhead wants to stay ahead of us in order to preserve this illusion! I understand how impossible it seems to us for each instant to be freshly created with tiny changes for each of more than seven billion people, many trillions of animals and insects, and even many more trillions of galaxies, each containing no-number-is-big-enough stars which might carry planets that harbor their own versions of living things. But apparently the Godhead does it easily, although if we understand what is going on we can spot God’s little fudges here and there. I’ll give you a few examples below.

For now, we only know that the evidence is strong that these five statements are some version of true. And wonderfully, they help us explain so much! Here are three quick examples to ponder:

The Godhead Can be Both Powerful and Personal

I have always been a skeptic. I don’t want just comforting answers that make no sense! When I was a child, I would hear people talk glowingly about a “personal God,” and I knew even then that One God on a Throne in Heaven could not possibly be a personal God for each of us individually. If it were not for my experiences of light, I likely would have ended up an atheist. But the genuine Godhead turns out to be a gigantic Collective of thousands of Perfected Beings whose minds are in such perfect harmony that together they make one infinitely powerful Mind. There also are billions of beings who have grown past their need to incarnate and are furthering their ongoing spiritual growth by serving humanity. Each of us has at least one spirit guide, and for all we know each guide works with a preferred aspect of the Godhead. Jesus is an aspect of the Godhead with whom many of our guides are in contact. That seems to be roughly how it actually works. And that makes sense. Even to me!

Reality is Infinitely Scalable

There are many very important questions that materialist scientists never will answer. But the Godhead, in staying always just ahead of us, is able to keep scientists happily busy trying! Here are three such scientifically insoluble and highly scalable puzzles out of very many:

  • How did the universe begin? Our ancestors ten thousand years ago (or even just a hundred years ago) had little interest in figuring out the history of the universe. Then in 1920 someone was inspired to propose what became known as the Big Bang. Of course, going back to something the size of a single atom that explodes to become the universe still doesn’t tell us where that first speck came from or what caused that amazing explosion, but no doubt the Godhead will eventually build in answers to those questions that will “always” have been there.
  • How did life begin? The simplest explanation is that life is a property of consciousness, but scientists aren’t yet ready to accept the idea that consciousness is primary. To indulge them, the Godhead may well soon come up with a life-creating process to be found by scientists that “always” has existed but was just “overlooked.”
  • What is beyond the universe? Neanderthals needed only this solar system. We, however, need a gigantic and ever-expanding universe so we never will find a disturbing edge and have to fret about what might be beyond that. So we have precisely the limitless universe that we need! And there is some evidence that the process of creating ever more galaxies to stay ahead of us still goes on.  

A Lot of Odd Glitches Are Now More Understandable

A reality that is remade freshly in each instant can remain stable while it is being tailored on an ongoing basis to the Godhead’s needs and to our own. For example, here are just three of what are many impossible-seeming facts that represent what amount to God’s short-cuts in creating our past and present earth-reality. When it becomes necessary to fill them in with more details to keep us busy, we can only assume that will happen:

  • Cosmological constants. We are told that there are 26 values that must remain within tiny tolerances or the universe will either implode or blow apart. They must remain “constant,” but in fact some of them keep minutely adjusting!
  • Punctuated equilibrium. There are many “missing links” in the histories of each of the 8.7 million species of plants and animals living on earth. Species will remain stable for thousands or millions of years, and then they will be replaced by new species almost at once and without anything like a sufficiently long transitional period of Darwinian natural selection.
  • About ninety percent of modern species came into existence within the last two hundred thousand years. When God established modern people, God almost simultaneously set the stage for us with all the other modern animals and plants. For this to have happened on its own, so recently and so quickly, is so unlikely that just thinking about it can make your eyes cross.

God is real! And God loves us! There is nothing else that matters beside that single perfect truth. God has always been minutely involved with us, but so respectfully that spotting God’s precise role is difficult. Let’s see now what we can discover about God’s involvement from God’s perspective….

Thanks be to Thee, my Lord Jesus Christ,
For all the benefits Thou hast given me,
For all the pains and insults Thou hast borne for me.
– St. Richard of Chichester (1197-1253), From his deathbed prayer (1253)

 

Texas desert photo credit: G Yancy <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/141788246@N08/51010193191″>Arches Canyon</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

 

Seeking God’s Plan (Part I)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids him rise, Alleluia!
Christ has opened paradise, Alleluia!
Charles Wesley (1707-1788), from “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” (1739)

All the gods that we ever have worshiped have been human–made. This is true even of the Christian God, who is based on the ancient Hebrew Yahweh. We have imagined the modern versions of our gods to be less cruel and a lot less scary, but still their ancient shape remains. And now I am wondering why.  Humanity has long since split the atom, journeyed to the moon, even begun to cure cancer; but still we envision the same static God for whom the first Christian martyrs died. We haven’t even progressed to the much more loving God-just-as-Spirit that Jesus introduced! Despite the tweaks of the Protestant Reformation, we still adhere to basically the same Christianity that ruled by superstitious terror, carried out the barbaric Crusades, and tortured and burned many infidels alive.

But why should it still have to be this way, when at last we know that there actually is a genuine Creator God unlike any god that any religion has imagined? Being reminded last week of the staggering eternal importance of the Easter events that we never could have fully appreciated until after the twenty-first century began has made me think that it might be time for us to reconsider everything. Two thousand years ago the Godhead directly intervened in human history in a way that was designed to be fully obvious to us only two thousand years later. It was a genuine divine revelation! But then, as with every other religion, Christianity was created and soon frozen in time. Its dogmas have changed little in a thousand years.  If God was watching our subsequent progress and later judged that the time was right for another major revelation, then unfortunately God would have been out of luck because the religion based in the incomparable divine events that were the life and teachings of Jesus has been sealed by its people for all time. If the Godhead has something more to say, how will any of us ever hear it? Isn’t it time for us to start to try to better understand what the living God actually wants?

Albert Einstein was a gigantic intellect, but at heart he was a relatable guy. One day in 1925 as he shared a walk with a young student he said to her, “I want to know how God created this world. I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts. The rest are just details.” How perfectly wise he was! And now you and I want to know God’s thoughts about the Godhead’s eternal plan for humankind. We aren’t interested in physics, which turns out to be a mere detail of this limited illusion that seems to be solid but in fact is not. Nothing physical is objectively real, since all that actually exists is Mind; and the laws and details of human physics seem more and more to be just the Godhead’s inventions to keep us amused and distracted. And of course that raises yet another question! There have been increasing hints that the Godhead is a Collective of Perfected Beings that is continuously creating the universe freshly in each instant of artificial time, and is steadily making our past more complex in what seems to be an effort to stay ahead of our attempts to figure things out. But why is that? What on earth is going on?

A quick perusal of our archive here reveals that we have asked variations of these biggest of all human questions many times, but always just in limited ways. It seems that we had to tackle this process in pieces and build toward even knowing how to ask the biggest questions. And beings who are no longer in bodies have lately been telling us that the limited aspects of our vast, eternal minds that we bring into these material bodies are meant just for efficient spiritual learning. They say that we cannot possibly expect to use such puny earth-minds to address the very biggest things!

That may be true. But we are not deterred. Jesus invites us to ask our questions, not suggesting that we limit them by size; and already our trusting Him to give us answers has yielded some amazing insights! He says, “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). So now we ask Him to help us find some answers to the biggest questions of all, while knowing that we won’t fully understand whatever answers we might find. We trust that over time our perceptions will grow. And finally, when at last we get to go home, we are assured that we will know it all! Here is one way that we might frame our primary question:

 How is the Godhead involved in human affairs?

This always has been humanity’s core question, even though we seldom have posed it as a question. Religions have assumed all kinds of things, from gods that deal minutely with every one of our individual wishes and needs to gods that hold us on the edge of disaster and require that we placate them by throwing our firstborn infants into their belly of fire. The Christian version of God is both gods at once, since we confidently pray for things like no rain for some event on Thursday while we also know that because of Adam’s sin we might wind up burning in hell forever. And I cannot recall even once in all my years of being a practicing Christian being told that we should, in complete love and trust, pray only and always for what God wants!

No, that is not quite true. In the greatest prayer ever imagined, the prayer that God in Human Form taught us to pray, we do say “Thy will be done.” But have we ever seen any Christian take those words seriously enough to stop asking God for anything else?

Last week we talked about the life of Jesus. We know now that there was a time when the highest aspect of the Godhead lived a whole life as a human being in an effort to understand us on our own terms. And we are told that Jesus did that so He could then teach us how we could better grow spiritually. Knowing what we know now, it is not an overreach for us to see the life of Jesus on earth as a hinge of human history, since it was the first moment when we could have ceased our endless religious floundering and begun a real relationship with the genuine Godhead.

But, why then? And why just once? And also, here is an astounding question: Why was evidence given to us way back then in all the details of the Shroud of Turin that we would be unable to see as key evidence for an additional two thousand years?

 Since it is reasonable to assume there may be a divine plan, how does that singular gigantic event two thousand years ago fit with whatever came before it, and also fit with whatever divine events may have come after it? It seems to be extremely important that we seek now to know as much as we can! We have talked here about human religious history, but always just from our human perspective. Even when we thought we saw God taking some role, we clueless human beings have applied that role to whatever particular religious tradition we personally most favored. This is why Christians love the new evidence provided by the Shroud of Turin! They don’t yet see it as the reproof to all of Christian history that it might well be.

These musings are not sacrilegious. They are instead the height of loving respect for the only genuine Godhead! As humankind still continues to worship human-made gods in the very same ways that our human-made religions already were prescribing to us many centuries ago, we tell ourselves that we are honoring the genuine God. In fact, we are doing nothing of the kind. Instead, we are smugly telling God that we already know what God wants from us!

That fact is indisputably true. No clergyman can deny it! Many years ago, as I was converting to Catholicism and trying to do my best at it, I asked my priest a great many of the same questions that we have been asking here. And soon his answer was automatic. No matter what I asked him, he would simply say, “That is what we believe. You’re going to have to accept it.” Which is precisely the same thing that all our religions are saying now to the genuine Godhead! Every religious person is always telling God that we already know what God wants. And maybe we do, since after all Christians believe that God ‘inspired” all the councilors at the First Council of Nicaea. And perhaps all the other Christian councils, too. Maybe God has been whispering in human ears every one of the times that anyone on earth has assumed that any event at all has actually been a new divine revelation, from the Buddha’s moment of murmuring “I am awake” some five hundred years before the Lord was born to the amazing discovery of messages on “golden plates” in New York State in 1830. And we could name fifty other such “divine revelations,” just off the top of our heads! Convincing people we have received the Divine Word of God and then starting or revising some religion or other has long been a productive and highly satisfying role in life for a great many people.

But in trying to contain God in all these tens of thousands of human-made religious variations, we have been closing our minds and hearts to the love and guidance of the genuine Godhead. So we ought to begin to ask the question that we should have been asking all along:

How has God been relating to us?

I realize now that I was first prompted by Thomas to begin working toward asking these questions a couple of years ago, when I stopped blogging just when I got around to it and began to do it religiously (sorry!) each week. And just as I didn’t know where that was heading, so I have no idea where this is heading now.

But I do know that it is long past time for us to seek to know the genuine Godhead. Unless we at least attempt to understand what has been going on from God’s perspective, we will remain stuck forever in these human-made religions that will let us pursue a relationship with God only from our own perspective. And what kind of a one-sided love is that?

As Moses is quoted as having put it to the Israelites before they entered their Promised Land 3250 years ago, “The eternal God is a refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deut 33:27). If there ever has been a time in the past three thousand years when all of humankind together desperately needed the comfort and safety of the genuine Godhead’s everlasting arms, it is now….

 

Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!
Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!
Once he died our souls to save, Alleluia!
Where’s thy victory, boasting grave? Alleluia!
Charles Wesley (1707-1788), from “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” (1739)

 

Sunlit sea foam photo credit: giopuo <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/75459497@N00/48758137336″>2019_09_19a</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Christ the Lord Is Risen Today

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!
Earth and heaven in chorus say, Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heavens, and earth reply, Alleluia!
– Charles Wesley (1707-1788), from “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” (1739)

At Easter we celebrate the most important set of events in human history. Insofar as we know, nothing else like it ever has happened, either before or since; and the significance of those events could not have been understood by anyone who witnessed them. Indeed, it is likely that even today we don’t yet know what it all really means! And the fact that a couple of centuries later a new religion created its own dogmas around that extraordinary set of events doesn’t make what happened any less the wondrous possession of ALL of humankind.

Two thousand years ago an element of the highest aspect of the Godhead was born in a human body as God on earth, both to study humanity and to teach us how to achieve the next stage of our spiritual development. To prove to iron-age primitives that death is an illusion, God in human form then allowed Himself to be publicly murdered so His body could lie in a tomb for two days before He re-animated it and rose from the dead. What an amazing story! And now we know that the miraculous events of that extraordinary life were indisputably REAL!

The fact that God chose to be naturally born and to live an entirely human life and death is important. We assume that God knows everything, but in fact my dear spirit guide, Thomas, has told me that once the more spiritually perfected members of the single consciousness that humanity shares cease to incarnate, they pretty quickly lose touch with what it’s like to be a human being. He tells me that Jesus came to us from the highest aspect of the Godhead in part so God could “look through His eyes” and better understand why we were finding it so hard to do what our earth-life is designed to do, which is to help us grow rapidly away from fear and hatred and toward ever more perfect love.

Last Easter we talked about the fact that based upon very extensive modern studies of the Shroud of Turin, the Resurrection of Jesus can be treated as an evidence-based historical event. And in fact, there also is a lot of evidence that Jesus really did live on earth. Astonishingly, there even is evidence that His death in 33 AD was brought about in part by a financial panic (of all things!). And we know now based on evidence that the Gospels are real historical documents, even if they were somewhat altered by later Christian councils. We are fortunate that an army of Christian researchers has been working for more than a century, seeking  every possible confirmation that Jesus is a proven historical figure and the miraculous events of His life were real.

Anglican scholar and bishop N. T. Wright is one of those seeking to prove the reality of Jesus and His miracles. He has written a facts-dense and lengthy book called The Resurrection of the Son of God, where he makes a number of evidence-based claims. He specifically notes that the eyewitness accounts contain details large and small that strongly suggest that these were real events. For example:

* The idea of a murdered corpse dead for days suddenly reanimating on its own is found in no other religious tradition. Such an event is miraculous, true, but it’s also ghoulish and off-putting.

* The Gospel Resurrection accounts feel grounded in plausible facts. For example, the mentions of the discarded shroud and the face-cloth lying separately folded seem like genuine details that an eyewitness would have noticed and mentioned.

* Jesus’s body had been damaged by its death, decay, and subsequent reanimation. And damaged in ways that Iron Age people creating a story from whole cloth are unlikely to have  considered or known how to describe. People who had been in frequent contact with Jesus didn’t even recognize Him at first, which suggests that two days of decay had altered the body’s appearance and perhaps had interfered with His ability to fully re-animate it. Interestingly, Jesus also seems to have considered His risen body to be so fragile that He asked that Mary not touch it. These are such gritty eyewitness details that even you or I would have been unlikely to have thought of them.

The execution of Jesus was an unexpected disaster for His followers. They had come to believe He was the Messiah, the Son of God, perhaps God on earth. They were so demoralized by the Lord’s death that they hurried to huddle behind closed doors, bereft now of all the excitement and hope that Jesus had inspired in them. He had just been executed as a criminal! And now perhaps they also were criminals? For me, the way so many of them were immediately and altogether transformed by His Resurrection may be the most important evidence of all that Jesus did rise from the dead. Once they saw and talked with the risen Lord, His disciples were infused with implacable zeal! They went from cowering in despair to fearlessly proclaiming what they had witnessed to all who would listen to them, and many of them were eventually martyred. These people were the source of all those Easter stories. And nothing can explain their sudden transformation beyond a certainty that they had witnessed an event so miraculous that it was worth all their lives.

There are other scholars, too, whose work provides further powerful evidence that the Resurrection was real. For example, Timothy Keller is a noted theologian. His brand-new book on the Resurrection of Jesus is called Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the meaning of Easter. One of Pastor Keller’s many insights is that when English translations of the Bible talk about “hope,” the word doesn’t do justice to the Greek word used in the New Testament, which is elpida. Keller tells us that a more precise translation would be “profound certainty.” This may seem like a little thing, but the New Testament contains many references to “hope in the Resurrection of the dead” and “hope in God.” If we read these passages as “profound certainty” in God and in the Resurrection, they are very different and much more positive claims!

I have mostly dismissed the Apostle Paul as a naïve first-century fabulist who never even knew Jesus. And clearly, Paul never had access to anything like the Lord’s whole story! But Thomas has made me see that Paul was Jesus’s very useful servant. Paul organized and inspired His earliest followers as they preserved His earthly life and teachings, and some of what Paul wrote was actually channeled by Spirit. Now Timothy Keller has helped me see that some of the stories told in Paul’s letters are actual contemporaneous accounts! He says of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 15, Verses 3-7:

One of the oldest theories is that the legends of Jesus’s resurrection developed only many decades after the actual events had faded from living memory. But the 1 Corinthians text is itself an important piece of evidence against that view. Verses 3–7 are now seen by most New Testament scholars as not an original Pauline composition but rather an early gospel summary used by the earliest church in its evangelism and instruction which Paul is citing. As he says in verse 3, these words were “received,” not created by him, and then “passed on” to others. Scholars also show that the vocabulary in these verses — “according to the Scriptures,” “on the third day,” “the Twelve” are not terms Paul uses elsewhere in his writings. So this was a gospel summary that was already in widespread use by Christians all around the Mediterranean world when Paul wrote. Since this letter to the Corinthians was written only fifteen or twenty years after Jesus’s death, the eminent biblical scholar James Dunn concludes that “we can be entirely confident” that this summary in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7 “was formulated . . . within months of Jesus’s death” (with thanks to Father Richard Rohr).

So there you have it. Two thousand years ago an aspect of the Godhead was born on earth as a human being and lived as one of us for thirty years while He studied the people around Him and came to better understand them. Then for a few years He publicly taught His flock how to overcome this world’s extreme negativity and use it to better grow spiritually. And finally, to prove to primitive people that human beings don’t really die, God in human form allowed Himself to be publicly tortured, murdered, wrapped in a shroud, and laid in a tomb. Two days later He re-animated His dead body with an extraordinary burst of energy, and He showed Himself to His disciples. The entire life of Jesus is a set of divine miracles unique in human history!

But there is no good evidence that Jesus meant to start a new religion. In fact, there is considerable evidence that He came to end our long dependence on our man-made religious beliefs and teach us to relate to God directly and entirely on our own. Jesus is in fact both God on earth and an adamantly non-religious figure. His amazing life is a timeless gift to all of humankind! And now, at long last, it is time for us to listen to the historical Jesus, and to seek to understand and then willingly defer to the Godhead’s wishes about what should come next….   

Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia!
Following our exalted Head, Alleluia!
Made like Him, like Him we rise, Alleluia!
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!
– Charles Wesley (1707-1788), from “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” (1739)

Mourning My Religion

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways….
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) from Sonnets from the Portuguese 43 (1850)

I hear from many disaffected Christians. Some pour out their hearts to me, telling me they have been devout and happy in the religion for their entire lives until whatever age they are right now – usually they are in their fifties or sixties – but of late, they have become disillusioned. There are too many questions that lack good answers, too much that troubles them about Christian beliefs, and they simply no longer feel comfortable about being part of any Christian denomination. Many seem to see the way I have freed myself as their welcome inspiration to make the leap themselves. Some will ask me questions that suggest they are still nervous about suffering some level of divine retribution if they actually leave the religion; but most seem to think I can address their worries. After all, I successful broke away, and look how happy I am now! How close to Jesus! How spiritually fed and joyful and fulfilled I seem to be!   

And I am indeed joyful. But it hasn’t been easy. My leaving traditional Christianity altogether was a move that I resisted for as long as I could, until in the end I really had no choice. And leaving Christianity has brought me so much closer to God in a truth-based reality that at last makes perfect sense! So I have no regrets about leaving Christianity. But I mourn the religion I have lost. I’ve made peace with my grief over the past two decades, much as you would make peace with the death of anyone very close to you. But still, at this time every year just the thought of what I have given up for Jesus feels like a small cloud of sadness in my springtime sky. Despite everything, I still love my religion!

I know from emails that this pining for Christianity after leaving it happens to others, too; and since that is true, it is past time for us to talk about what for many years felt to me like a personal failing. I converted to Catholicism at marriage, and then I came to love it so much that I held onto it long after I should have let it go. I love Jesus with everything in me! And the more I have studied His life and His words, the more convinced I have become that the religion has nothing to do with Jesus. In fact, it is impossible to follow the Lord if you let the religion remain between you.

But Christianity still displays such a comforting face! Despite all that is wrong with that old-time religion, if you ever have been at all devout you will find that the religion you abandon for Jesus is going to have its roots in your deepest heart. The longer you follow the Way of Jesus, the more He will reinforce your choice; but still, and perhaps forevermore, Christmas and Easter can make you ache for your old-time Christian life. And for the joy of singing Christmas carols! For candle-lit Christmas Eve services that always fill your heart with joy! For glorious sunrise services at dawn on every Easter morning, when you discover once again that empty tomb!

And most of all, what I still miss is that old-time Christian certainty. Growing up in a traditional Christian home makes you know when you are too young to fight the lessons that you are a sinner, that hell is real, and that Jesus had to die so God would forgive you and let you into heaven. You grew up knowing the deal you had made, and you knew that God and Jesus would stand behind it; but to keep your get-out-of-hell-free card you would have to keep going to church each week. Eventually I had done enough research to be sure there is no get-out-of-hell-free card, and nor is there ever any need for one; but nevertheless, I kept going to Mass for years after I could have made the break.

I told myself I was keeping my husband company, but I realize now that I still craved that wafer! I had learned enough of the truth that I was sure that in order to get closer to Jesus I was going to have to abandon the fear-based religion that still came between us; but there remained that small, residual fear that I had internalized in childhood. And I still felt the relief of knowing as that wafer melted on my tongue that I had sealed my deal with God for one more week. It was only when our local parish completed work on its beautiful new church that featured a life-sized, full-color plaster Jesus bleeding on a cross above the altar that I was able to stop attending church. I couldn’t bear even to look at Jesus being eternally crucified,  so at last I welcomed into my heart the eternally risen Lord and asked Him to assume control of my life.

If you also find yourself still mourning your religion at susceptible times of the year, here are some measures that might lessen your burden:

  • You still can call yourself a Christian. When I first realized how harmful to the mission of Jesus all those fear-based Christian dogmas are, I began to tell people I was “an originalist Christian” (whatever that means). But in fact, I soon realized that following just the Lord’s teachings makes us even more profoundly followers of Christ than any traditional Christian ever could be! So now I simply call myself a Christian. If someone asks about my denomination, I say that I strictly follow the Lord’s teachings. Whatever that denomination is, that’s what I am.
  • Minimize your traditional celebrations. With our children grown, we don’t put up a Christmas tree or play carols in the house, but we still give Easter baskets to our grandchildren. We share some lovely family holiday dinners, but we keep them generic. No one seems to mind.
  • Find ways to duplicate the warmth of Christian fellowship. To be a Christian is to have a cozy Sunday family and share lots of weekly smiles and hugs! I finally left Catholicism when my oldest grandchildren were preschoolers, and I wanted them to have an early church experience so I joined a nearby Unity Church and enrolled them in its Sunday school. In retrospect, I realize now that having a pleasant and largely dogma-free church home for a time made my transition to spiritual freedom easier.
  • Find ways to duplicate the joy of Christian service to others. The fact that these messages arrive in your inbox on Sunday mornings is no accident! My faithfully writing these posts, producing Seek Reality podcasts, and answering every stranger’s email has given me a ministry. For you, your calling might instead be to volunteer in a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen, or perhaps to serve as a mentor somewhere. Just prayerfully do whatever feels right to you!
  • Continue to enjoy Christian habits that are not fear-based. My own favorite tradition is the fact that I began to give up chocolate for Lent when I was sixteen years old. I still give up chocolate for Lent to this day, and when my Catholic husband teases me about it I tell him that if I eat chocolate at Lent there will be a thunderbolt right through the ceiling. And he doesn’t want to have to pay to fix that. I never have been afraid to eat chocolate, but rather my habit seems to be a kind of joke that the Lord and I can share. If there is some habit that still feels special to you as a holdover from your former Christian practice, then so long as you aren’t doing it from fear, there is little harm in keeping it going.
  • Spend quality time with Jesus. I think it’s this craving I have to know the Lord better, more than any other single thing, that has helped me to keep my priorities right. If you simply give up practicing your religion and you never find anything to take its place, you are likely to be nagged by the emptiness in your life that you yourself have created. Of course you are going to mourn and feel guilty about having abandoned Christianity, and you’ll keep some residual fears besides! But if you invite Jesus into your heart and develop the habit of reading His words, sharing thoughts with Him, and simply building a closer and richer daily walk, you will find that He soon will nicely fill that briefly empty place in your heart.

It has been estimated that half of the Christian churches in the United States that closed for Covid last spring will be closed for good within the year. Our fading pandemic might be accelerating what already was a rapid decline. So it is time now for all of us to make real for Jesus the Christian Way that He taught us long ago. Next week let’s begin to celebrate the joy of at last really knowing and living the Way of our eternally risen Lord.

 

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) from Sonnets from the Portuguese 43 (1850)

Vecteezy – Church in Singapore

 

 

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