Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Where there is offence, let me bring pardon.
Where there is discord, let me bring union.
Where there is error, let me bring truth.
Where there is doubt, let me bring faith.
Where there is despair, let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness, let me bring Your light.
– Attributed to St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226), from “Peace Prayer” (translated 1912)

Once we have resolved to make living and sharing the Lord’s Way our priority, how should we be managing our lives so we can act in accordance with the teachings of Jesus? In a world beset by poverty and rage, plagued by malevolent state actors, and at risk of environmental disasters, terrorism, and many little wars, how does Jesus tell us we can effectively work toward giving this world a brighter future? To what extent should we act politically? How can we best help the poor? What is the Godhead calling us to do?

Better understanding and internalizing the perfect love that Jesus taught turns out to be only a good start. Once we have learned to live God’s Oneness, we still must puzzle out what to do with it!

 And fortunately, Fr. Richsrd Rohr, the Franciscan monk who is our source for the most deeply discerning and actively positive take there could be on Christianity, has answered this question definitively. He says, “In 1998, I spent three days immersed in the life, spirit, and ministries of Mother (now Saint) Teresa’s (1910‒1997) community at the motherhouse in Calcutta….. The sisters didn’t waste time fixing, controlling, or even needing to understand what is wrong with others. Instead, they put all of their time and energy into letting God change them. From that transformed place, they serve and carry the pain of the world….

“I even dared to ask one of the leaders about one of the most common criticisms of Mother Teresa: ‘Why did Mother not speak out against social injustice? Why did she not point out the evil systems and evil people that are chewing up the poor? Why did she not risk some of her moral “capital” to call the world, and even the church, to much-needed reform?’ The answer was calm, immediate, and firsthand. Mother Teresa felt that if she took sides, or played the firebrand, that she could not be what Jesus had told her to be—love to and for all. She said that if she started correcting and pointing out ‘sinners’ she could no longer be an instrument of love and reconciliation for them. Humiliated and defensive people do not change. Like her patron Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), her vocation in the church was to be love. She knew that her primary message had to be her life itself, not words or arguments or accusations. She had found that ‘third something’ that is always beyond the calculating and dualistic mind.”

Please read that last paragraph a few times today. And please keep it handy so you can read it again whenever your need not to take a political side starts to frustrate you. The world can get along just fine with fewer well-intentioned firebrands! You and I and Mother Teresa have no moral capital at all that doesn’t come from the Godhead via the teachings of Jesus. The Lord tells us even more emphatically than Mother ever could how essential it is that we who have accepted His call to follow His Way must be immersed only in the Oneness of God. The degree to which He insists that we not claim primacy, that we not fight, that we submit in all things to God’s will, astonishes us as we encounter it over and over in the Gospels. Please sit with me now at the feet of Jesus as we ask Him directly how we who seek to follow His Way should manage our lives and our work for Him. Please read each of these passages thoughtfully and with reference to your own life. The Lord says:

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

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

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

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

“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return” (LK 6:37-38).

“But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two” (MT 5:39-41).

“Do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?

“And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these! But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (MT 6:25-33).

“Permit the children to come to Me; do not hinder them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all” (MK 10:14-15).

What strikes us most when we read the Lord’s words is how consistently radical His message is! His Way is neither weak nor passive, but rather Jesus personifies a powerful and perfect love for all of humankind, and especially including the most evil people. He calls us to do for our oppressors even more than they require us to do! He insists that our love for God should include a trust that God will provide for our needs. He demonstrates a love for His tormentors so intense that as nails are being pounded into His wrists and feet, His foremost concern is to assure those doing the pounding that He forgives them and that God forgives them (See Luke 23:34).

We have seen this same kind of radically active and trusting, self-effacing love in some of the Lord’s greatest modern followers. Dietrich Bonhoeffer fought the Nazis’ murder-machine with just his pen and the perfect love of God, and he was martyred in a death-camp at the age of thirty-nine. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. also was martyred at thirty-nine. Dr. King had such a sure connection to the radical power of God’s love that when racists bombed his home while his wife and infant daughter were inside, he was able to tell an angry mob bent on revenge that fighting violence with violence gets us nowhere so they must now peacefully disperse. Saint Teresa of Calcutta spent her life tending the poorest victims of economic injustice, and her love empowered her to triumph over what must have been an overwhelming need to intervene in the political system that had done these victims such tremendous harm. You and I follow in the footsteps of giants in service to God’s perfect truth.

Jesus lived in turbulent times. He was born in a subject state of the Roman Empire as a member of a despised religion, in a part of the world that had often been conquered and soon was going to be conquered again. Our own turbulent times are surely no worse than that! And now our path is clear. If we seek to follow the Lord’s Way, we must apply the Oneness of God to every challenge we might ever face. But how would such a plan work in practice? We’ll start to put our minds to that next week….

Where there is sadness, let me bring joy!
O Master, let me not seek as much to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love,
for it is in giving that one receives, it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in pardoning that one is pardoned,
it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.
– Attributed to St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226), from “Peace Prayer” (translated 1912)

Jesus in a cemetery photo credit: jolynne_martinez <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8913547@N06/49714377977″>Jesús</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Mother Teresa photo credit: Ted Abbott <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/21278106@N00/372411667″>Blessed Mother Teresa and child</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Green angel photo credit: [ henning ] <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/43144679@N00/5558619437″>2011-03-20 Verdigris beauty</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Francis by the pool photo credit: BPPrice <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/73082817@N03/22266153733″>Francis by the pool</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Hurrying angel photo credit: jonno259 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/73453930@N00/295443522″>Osborne 37</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Angel on a pedestal photo credit: Jim_Nix <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/34825346@N02/33267765471″>Not that kind of angel</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Joy to the world! The Lord is come.
Let earth receive her King!
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And heaven and nature sing!
And heaven and nature sing!
And heaven, and heaven and nature sing!
– Isaac Watts (1674-1748), from “Joy to the World” (1719)

It pains me to admit that I seem to have been blowing an essential task. My beloved Thomas has shown me that the primary purpose of these posts has been to help you learn the objective truth about a great many things, with one main goal: he wants you to come to know and perfectly love and trust the genuine Godhead. But it is clear from many emails and blog comments that I have long been missing that mark! So today we are going to take a stab at helping you finally understand how you can learn to love as God wants you to love, as Jesus came to teach you to love, and as you will need to learn how to love if you want to make this your last earth-lifetime.

My spirit guide is my lodestar. If he is happy with whatever we write, I consider it to be a success! And as you likely know, for more than a decade Thomas has been using me to demonstrate how the Lord’s Gospel teachings on forgiveness and love are meant to work. Our problem is that Thomas hasn’t been in a body for more than a century. Perfect divine love is where he lives, while we who are in bodies are immersed in a depth of negativity that he can no longer imagine. So it is only now that he is noticing and pointing out to me that some of what we have written has been too vague and mild for an earthly audience. Today we will try again.

After mulling it over, I have come to suspect that the reason why it can be hard for many to learn the perfect love that Jesus taught is that we see emotion as something private that flares and sparks for our own amusement. But the love that Jesus taught is not something that we feel. Rather, it is something that we become. In fact, we begin to internalize God’s divine love fairly early in the process. It then provides a basis for what can be fairly rapid spiritual growth. We need a new word for the love that Jesus taught, and our wonderful friend Father Richard Rohr has suggested one. He says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness . . . it is not a place you go to, but a place you come from. It is a whole new way of looking at the world, a transformed awareness that literally turns this world into a different place. . . The hallmark of this awareness is that it sees no separation—not between God and humans, not between humans and other humans. . . . When Jesus talks about this Oneness . . . . what he more has in mind is a complete, mutual indwelling.” So Fr. Rohr calls the divine love that Jesus taught “Oneness,” which is a reasonable description of how it feels as it grows in you. For today, let’s experiment with using “Oneness” to refer to the divine love that Jesus taught.

Here is what the Oneness that Jesus taught IS NOT:

• Personal. If you feel love for some people but not for others, then you are lacking in Oneness. A Course in Miracles calls the love you have for friends and family – the love that differentiates some people from other people – “special loves.” And the Course says that special loves are as counterproductive spiritually as are special hates. If there is anyone on earth you have trouble loving, you are being too personal. It’s time for a reset.
• Stressful. The process of raising your personal consciousness vibration toward Oneness is stress-free by nature, and in fact it requires that you free yourself from stress as much as you can in order for it to work well. If you find yourself struggling to love someone, or gritting your teeth as you try to forgive, you are doing it wrong. It’s time to start over, and practice the basics a lot more closely.
• Enjoyable. Really falling in love feels wonderful! We thrill! We soar! But none of those intense feelings of love is associated with the early stages of achieving Oneness. At first, to be frank, Oneness feels more like a flattening of your emotions, a kind of distancing from actively loving other people. It is only later, from the space of peace and safety that Oneness fosters in you, that your heart begins to swell until it encompass all of humanity.
• Variable. Approaching Oneness creates in you a much more stable mood-base. It makes it so you will less and less feel earth-life’s emotional ups and downs, but rather you are at a little distance from them; and this includes even the great emotional highs and lows like winning the lottery or the loss of a loved one. As Oneness builds, you transcend earthly concerns and always feel a kind of safe happiness, no matter what might be going on.
• Fickle. We think of love as something like a meter that helps us measure how we feel from day to day about the people who are closest to us. We love them more when they are kind and helpful, and less when they do things that annoy us. But Oneness is the opposite of our roller coaster of special loves! As Oneness builds in you, you will be less and less annoyed or elated by those close to you, no matter what they might do.

Please re-read and internalize these points. It will help you to recognize your progress toward Oneness if you know not only what you should be looking for, but also which feelings are going to be dead-ends. The divine love that Jesus taught is technically “love” because it is the highest consciousness vibration that we can experience while on earth. But emphatically, it does not feel like what we usually think of as love! Oneness is instead much more like what the Apostle Paul described as “the peace of God, which transcends all understanding” (see Phil 4:7).

The love that Jesus taught is already your essential nature. Your mind is inextricably part of the one Mind which at its highest aspect encompasses the Godhead, so your spiritual growth can be a remarkably self-perpetuating process. And because Oneness is your essential nature, the transformation starts to happen naturally once you have accomplished these three things:

• Convinc yourself that you cannot die. The fear of death is the base fear, so once you no longer fear death you no longer fear anything. And without earth-based fears to trip you up, your spiritual rise can begin.
• Learn prevenient forgiveness. Jesus made a point of insisting that we always forgive and never judge, because otherwise the grievances that continue to plague us will interfere with our spiritual growth.
• Vanquish your ego. Your ego can be the hardest to conquer of these three obstacles to your spiritual growth. If you have trouble getting past the “me-me” grabby nonsense that your ego tends to percolate, you might try an A Course in Miracles study group.

Oneness sounds like something hard to achieve, but in fact it is astoundingly easy. After your many excursions into bodies that were followed by periods of afterlife bliss, Oneness already is who you are. Then as you stripped down to your earth-mind again to enter your present body, you put away your active awareness of your glorious eternal nature, and you added a little gremlin ego whose only purpose is to make you self-protective. As you vanquish your ego and strip away what is not-Oneness, your true and already glorious nature begins to be revealed.

It is only once you banish fear, learn to forgive, and also give the boot to your ego that your genuine spiritual growth can begin. Once you have effectively managed all three of the steps listed above, you will already have fought more than half the battle! And you will find that once this process is well along, it seems to maintain itself with little need for further effort beyond your awareness and enjoyment of the process. I think my biggest failing has been that I haven’t helped you understand how growing into Oneness actually feels. In fact, it soon starts to feel delicious! Here are a few of the changes you should be seeing in yourself within months:

• You want less and less. I loved noticing this in myself! Realizing you would be every bit as happy living in just one room feels fantastically freeing.
• You don’t worry. Whether it’s a money crisis or your children’s safety or which politician might blow up the world, you feel safely removed from all earthly concerns.
• No event has the power to upset you. As A Course in Miracles says, “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.”
• You tend to love everyone. I soon realized I was looking at people passing on the street and feeling warmth and kindness toward perfect strangers.

I know a few people who are so far advanced spiritually that to find them still living on earth is surprising. All the people I know who have best achieved Oneness are mild, kindly, self-effacing, and dedicated to whatever work they do for others. They also are steadily and relentlessly cheerful. Even joyous! And they never get angry, but rather if someone confronts them or disturbs their peace, they withdraw. They make you want whatever it is that they have!

Jesus is still saying to us today, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (MT 11:28-30). Learning to love as Jesus taught us to love does require that we surrender and allow our minds to open completely to the love of God. But everything about this process is joyous! And best of all, when you become the love of God, for the first time you will understand just how completely the Godhead loves you. And you will know only joy forevermore.

Joy to the world! The Savior reigns.
Let men their songs employ.
While fields and floods,
Rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy!
Repeat the sounding joy!
Repeat, repeat the sounding joy!
– Isaac Watts (1674-1748), from “Joy to the World” (1719)

Baby Jesus with halo photo credit: giveawayboy <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/49503096783@N01/50250313032″>Jesu</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
       – From “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” (9^th Century Latin Hymn, Translated 1861)

Every human-made god has human flaws, and none of them has been very believable. Primitive people who had no way to understand reality would believe anything! But as we have become more sophisticated, we gradually have begun to find that reality can indeed be puzzled out. It makes sense. And Moloch, wearing cattle-horns and with a fire in his belly to burn up babies, frankly doesn’t make any sense. A Christian God with a long white beard who sits on a judgment-throne is also unbelievable. It is no wonder that traditional religions are losing their last hold on our minds.

Our felt need to find and worship gods is so ancient and so persistent that it is one of the characteristics that define humanity. And as Moloch would tell you, where there’s smoke, there’s fire! So it is no surprise that a genuine Godhead gradually is being revealed to us that makes sense and is consistent with the rest of reality. And wonderfully, God turns out to be both infinite power and perfect love. Our minds had for so long been obsessed with fearing our judgmental human-made gods that the Godhead knew that in the fullness of our eventually beginning to understand reality we would need a divine reset. Those old gods would have to be cleared away, and the Godhead would need to reveal Itself sufficiently for us to come to know and love our true Creator God.

And so it was that two thousand years ago a Member of the highest aspect of the Godhead actually was born as God on earth. We cannot know why at that particular moment in earth-time God chose to enter the human world, nor why the message that God revealed was soon thereafter imprisoned inside a religion that for the next two thousand years insisted that the Son of God had been born just so He could die as a sacrifice. The notion that a loving God could want to watch His Only Son being murdered is yet another awful human-made idea about a fallible human-like god. But at last, in this new century we have built a reasonable understanding of the reality that we think we see around us. We also have discovered and begun to understand the greater reality of which this material universe is a tiny part. And, wonderfully, we have begun to learn enough about the genuine Godhead that continuously manifests this universe that we can at last put every false god aside!

And we have been amazed to learn that Jesus is a whole lot more important than anything Christians have imagined Him to be. Jesus, born two thousand years ago, was actually born as God on earth! It may have happened only once, but in fact it did happen. There was a time when God briefly walked among us.

Perhaps a dozen Old Testament passages have been cited as predictions of the birth of Jesus. To be frank, most are vague and dubious. But one of them is amazingly a genuine prediction of the coming of Jesus and of what He will accomplish, and it was delivered almost a thousand years before the Lord was born. Jesse was the father of King David, who was Jesus’s earthly ancestor. This glorious prediction by the great Isaiah is my favorite passage in the whole Old Testament:

Then a shoot will spring from the stem of Jesse,
And a Branch from his roots will bear fruit.
The Spirit of the Lord will rest on Him,
The spirit of wisdom and understanding,
The spirit of counsel and strength,
The spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord.
 And He will delight in the fear of the Lord,
And He will not judge by what His eyes see,
Nor make decisions by what His ears hear;
 But with righteousness He will judge the poor,
And decide with fairness for the humble of the earth;
And He will strike the earth with the rod of His mouth,
And with the breath of His lips He will slay the wicked.
 Also righteousness will be the belt around His hips,
And faithfulness the belt around His waist.

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 fattened steer will be 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 11:1-9).

So then, in the fullness of earthly time, Isaiah’s prophesy began to be fulfilled:

“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth… And all the people were on their way to register for the census, each to his own city. Now Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, in order to register along with Mary, who was betrothed to him, and was pregnant. While they were there, the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son; and she wrapped Him in cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

“In the same region there were some shepherds staying out in the fields and keeping watch over their flock at night. And an angel of the Lord suddenly stood near them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them; and they were terribly frightened. And so the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people; for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there appeared with the angel a multitude of the heavenly army of angels praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom His favor rests.’ When the angels had departed from them into heaven, the shepherds began saying to one another, “Let’s go straight to Bethlehem, then, and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us’” (LK 2:1-16).

It is likely that little of what Christians believe about Jesus’s birth is true. His lineage to David is through Joseph, who was His likely father. He probably was not born of a virgin in December. The oddly humble details of His birth don’t matter, and nor does the name by which God on earth chose to be called make any difference. The cultural details of the all-too-human religion that was built around Jesus a quarter of a millennium after His birth also needn’t be debated now, because none of that matters at all.

The only thing that matters as we celebrate the birth of Jesus is that two thousand years ago He came to us as God on earth. And He came as our Savior indeed! He tells us in the Gospels that He came to save us from ignorance and fear, and to teach us how to relate to the genuine Godhead so we can raise our personal spiritual vibrations sufficiently to bring the kingdom of God on earth. His mission is nothing less than the spiritual uplifting of all of humankind! The great Isaiah foretold His coming, and he even foretold the Lord’s earthly mission. And now, in the long sweep of human history, in the fullness of God’s time, you and I have the joy of being here to witness the ultimate flowering of Isaiah’s ancient prophesy.

O come, Thou Dayspring, from on high,
And cheer us by Thy drawing nigh;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
       – From “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” (9^th Century Latin Hymn, Translated 1861)

Nativity with goats photo credit: Julián Iglesias <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/141940972@N05/49285849976″>Día de gracia</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Nativity with lights photo credit: giveawayboy <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/49503096783@N01/49272773392″>crèche</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Australian nativity photo credit: denisbin <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82134796@N03/49267850657″>Merry Christmas. A Christmas nativity scene in the Forbes Catholic Church New South Wales.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Blue nativity photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/40646519@N00/49201415416″>Nativity Scene At The Radio City Christmas Spectacular</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

If I loved you, Time and again I would try to say
All I’d want you to know.
If I loved you, Words wouldn’t come in an easy way.
Round in circles I’d go!
– Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), from the musical “Carousel” (1945)

The harder we work to ever better understand the Gospel teachings of Jesus, the more we see that He did in fact come to us as literally God on earth. He knew things about how reality works that we are only now beginning to see, and He understood and could use facets of our minds that our religions are too stuck in the past to imagine. He was comfortable with phenomena that materialist scientists cannot conceive are even possible. He knew it all, and much more, two thousand years ago! And because all of this is true, if we hope to make sense of what Jesus was saying in light of what we are coming to see that He knew, we will need now to delve a little deeper into His use of a word that until recently I had thought we must have done to death. In fact, we have barely understood it at all.

 There is a common belief that the Eskimo-Inuit people have fifty words for snow. My research suggests this is an exaggeration, but it is true that many cultures will have different words for variations of some of their favorite phenomena. And so the ancient Greeks had a number of words for the emotions that English-speakers refer to all together as just “love.” In general, the ancient Greek words for “love” seem to boil down to these eight:

• Agape – Love for everyone.
• Eros – Erotic or romantic love.
• Ludus – Playfully flirtatious love.
• Mania – Possessive love.
• Philautia – Self-love.
• Philia – Intimate friendship.
• Pragma – Longstanding and fully committed love.
• Storge – Unconditional familial love.

The Gospels were first written in Greek several decades after the Lord’s death, and those earliest writers used “agape” for the transformational love that Jesus preached. The first authors of the written Gospels were trying to be faithful to His words, but their vocabulary was so limited. And their understanding was even a great deal more limited! They could have no glimmer of the monumental truth that God had entered a body and had come to earth in order to teach us. Nor did the later architects of Christianity understand more than had those first clueless authors. Nor, indeed, did any of us really begin to understand very much until the turn of this century, when the earliest pioneers in the field of non-material consciousness research followed the insights of the great quantum physicist Max Planck. Then they achieved the gigantic revelation, since confirmed in many different ways, that what we experience as human consciousness is in fact the base creative force, and that force is all that objectively exists.

In the few decades since the amazing discovery of the primacy of consciousness was initially confirmed, we have learned a lot more about the eternal Mind that continuously manifests reality. In brief, we have learned that the base Consciousness is:

• No Aspect of Any Human-Made God. It is much more powerful and a great deal more intimate than any religion has imagined God to be! Above all, the universal Mind has no human flaws. It is never angry, petulant, arbitrary, cruel, judgmental, or anything but gentle and kind.
• Energy-Like. I don’t think we can yet say that Mind is a form of energy, but we do know that in some ways It seems to behave like a form of energy. What is most germane to our discussion here is the fact that it vibrates in a range from very slow to very rapid.
• Governed by What We Experience as Emotion. Far from being just a transitory aspect of our minds, what we experience in a dim way as emotion is a core property of the base creative force.
• Vibrating at a Range Between Powerful Love and Powerless Fear. At its lowest and slowest vibration, Consciousness is governed by fear and all the ancillary negative emotions, and it has no power at all. At its highest vibration, it vibrates at an extremely rapid rate and its creative power is apparently infinite.
• Composed of Every Human Mind. All our minds are part of that one Mind. Not separately, but indivisibly. We are forever individuals, and at the same time we are forever part of One Whole.
• The Force That Continuously Manifests Reality. At its highest vibratory rate, Mind is the Collective of Perfected Beings that we now refer to as the Godhead. It is that infinitely powerful Collective that continuously manifests all that we believe is real.

The Universe Exists To Give Us An Efficient Way to Raise Our Consciousness Vibrations. We come here to experience and push against negativity, and to learn to always choose love and reject fear and every other ishy emotion. We come here to grow spiritually! Indeed, there seems to be no other reason for the material universe to exist. With this background, we can look again at some of what Jesus says about love in the Gospels. He says:

“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (MT 22:37-40). This sounds like agape. Universal love. For a long time, agape seemed to be the sort of love that Jesus was teaching, but agape-love feels easy and mellow. Simply develop warm thoughts for people in general. And Jesus Himself insists that He wants us to embrace an entirely new kind of love! How can we have missed this fact? He says, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (JN 13:34). Loving others with the love of the Godhead Itself as Jesus expresses it to us in the Gospels is in fact a whole new kind of love! How can we have missed seeing what a departure the Lord’s love is from every other kind of love there is in our lives?

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

And He says, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who are abusive to you. Whoever hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other also; and whoever takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic from him either. Give to everyone who asks of you, and whoever takes away what is yours, do not demand it back. … If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. … But love your enemies and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil people. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you” (LK 27-38).

This is very far from just a generalized agape sort of love! This is love the same way the Godhead loves, love at an Olympic level, selfless and infinite. And to achieve this proactive and divine form of love requires that we cleanse and purify our minds of all our old negative habits. It also demands that we learn prevenient forgiveness, so we can effortlessly forgive “up to seventy times seven times” (MT 18:21-23).

The divine love that Jesus came to teach is the only sort of love that actually increases our consciousness vibrations. He knew the primary facts about consciousness that we have laid out above, and He knew a great deal more besides. He also knew something that we are coming to suspect only now, which is that our eternal vibratory rate is naturally so much higher than it is while we are in material bodies that when we remove the fear-based barriers to love’s awareness, we rise naturally toward ever greater love as a bubble of air in water naturally rises to join the air above the surface.

The Lord’s method for raising our personal consciousness vibrations really works! If you will take His teachings seriously, you can achieve an amazing level of personal spiritual elevation within only months; and as you continue the process, you can make that elevation permanent. It has to be the easiest method there is to improve both this life and our eternal lives to come! But when we simply use the word “love” in reference to our efforts to grow spiritually, that bland word has such a fickle set of common meanings that unless we can make a major effort toward striving to love as the Godhead loves, we are not going to grow spiritually by very much in this lifetime. Perhaps we hardly will grow at all.

Now at last we can learn and ever more perfectly live the divine form of love that Jesus taught! And as we grow spiritually, we soon find that all the eight forms of selective and ego-based love for which there are terms in ancient Greek are replaced by one universal and all-encompassing love that is by far and overwhelmingly the greatest and most joyous love there is. And we can so easily do this. Following the call of Jesus to love in the perfect way that God loves each of us is actually natural for us. And it is so richly self-reinforcing!

Now that we better understand what the Godhead wants, and especially the beautiful way the Godhead wants us to love, let’s consider next week how we can carry out our personal spiritual transformation. Okay, Lord! So I finally do get it. And I’m game! Now, what comes next?

Longin’ to tell you, But afraid and shy,
I’d let my golden chances pass me by!
Soon you’d leave me. Off you would go in the mist of day,
Never, never to know how I loved you. If I loved you.
– Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), from the musical “Carousel” (1945)

City love photo credit: Thomas Hawk <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035555243@N01/49870132116″>Love</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Fence love photo credit: SurFeRGiRL30 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/33143245@N02/49706598641″>L.O.V.E.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Love hope peace photo credit: AGrinberg <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/66014106@N00/49944247041″>Love Hope Peace</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Brown love photo credit: David441491 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/97578613@N08/49438903232″>Indianapolis Museum of Art 07-28-2019 72 – Love – Robert Indiana</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Locked love photo credit: abac077 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/9308488@N05/48136567603″>Pour toujours</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Greenery love photo credit: kevin dooley <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/12836528@N00/49045809506″>Love!</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Covert Garden love photo credit: garryknight <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8176740@N05/49546278528″>Love, Figaro</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Lord, our Lord, How majestic is Your name in all the earth…
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have set in place;
What is man that You think of him,
And a son of man that You are concerned about him?
Yet You have made him a little lower than God,
And You crown him with glory and majesty!
– David, Third King of Israel and Judah (1035-970 BC), from Psalm 8:1-5

Ours is the first generation that is able to discern what God actually wants. The Godhead was born on earth in the Person of Jesus, Who then made those divine wishes plain; and for the next two thousand years, God’s commands were preserved in the contrary wrapping of a human-made religion. We have long been eager for a relationship with God, but we are limited to thinking just in human terms; so over the past two thousand years, Christianity has remained as the irrelevant wrapping for the Godhead’s extraordinary gift. That God has chosen this point in history to dissolve that old religious wrapping so the divine Word of God is plain to see is a source of amazement and delight. But all of this is God’s work! We have had no human way to understand that the religion was never more than just a wrapping, and that eventually our glorious morning of awareness of God’s truth would come.

Our knowing at last God’s genuine Will feels like peace and joy after the confusion of endless and arbitrary human-made religious demands. What God actually wants from us seems so easy in comparison to dealing with archaic laws and having to eat the literal body of Christ! And in that very simplicity lies a new problem. It is easy for us to think, Piece of cake, Jesus! We’re there! But in fact, God is now giving us the start of a gigantic mission that is meant to accomplish the spiritual uplift of all of humankind. What God is asking of us is so immense that we cannot even fathom it all! But we can at least begin to consider it in the momentous eternal terms that it merits. For the first time in human history, we can take God seriously. On God’s Own terms.

I cannot presume to give you answers. My hope is just to better frame for you the four commands of God that can be derived from the Gospel teachings of Jesus. What God wants has nothing to do with religions! Religions were a useful introduction to spiritual thinking for primitive people, but once we had God’s Law of Love as Jesus expresses it in the Gospels we had no more need for any religion. The Apostle Paul describes our post-Jesus spiritual situation in his first letter to the Church at Corinth, a letter that we have lately been told was channeled through him directly from God: “When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I also have been fully known. But now faith, hope, and love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1Cor 13:11-13). And so it is!

While knowing that our present understanding still is limited and imperfect, let us nevertheless begin to consider the deeper meaning of God’s four commands. They are in fact not individual and separate, but instead God’s program works well only if all four are strictly followed together. Let’s consider this to be God’s Own amazingly successful process for fostering our rapid spiritual growth! To help you better see how these four commands work, we have here added a few clarifying words in italics to each of them:

* Loving and Forgiving are God’s Only Laws – A Complete Legal Reset

Jesus isn’t just augmenting all those Old Testament moral laws. In fact, He is entirely replacing them. If any of the old laws were to remain, then God’s new Law of Love would forever be seen as nothing more than a suggestion because the Old Testament behavioral laws would supersede it. And that is clearly not what God wants! As Jesus tells us, God’s new Law of Love is this: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). Does that look to you like just a suggestion?

And far from making our lives easier, this new law makes our daily choices harder! True, there are now no behavioral rules. But our motive from now on in whatever we do must be pure love, and only love. The more you consider this requirement, the more you realize it is a much harder standard than a plain behavioral law would be! Only spiritually earnest adults need apply. Moreover, Jesus uses God’s new Law of Love to unwind all the Old Testament’s sin-based morality standards. His acting to discard the deadening weight that the concept of sin has always been for us is essential to His effort to prepare our minds for the magic that following His teachings can perform in accelerating our spiritual growth.

And where forgiving is concerned, Jesus is adamant in saying there is no limit to how often and how completely we must forgive. He says, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned” (LK 6:37). When Peter asks him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus says to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). In other words, every time.

* Strictly Following the Teachings of Jesus Will Transform Our Minds – Process and Goal

Jesus uses the terms “kingdom of God” and “kingdom of heaven” dozens of times. These are not mere terms of art, but rather we can see that they refer to the sixth level of the greater reality, which people can enter when they are vibrating spiritually at a high enough rate that they can at last cease to incarnate on earth. Giving us a place where we can experience negativity and thereby raise our personal spiritual vibrations enough that we can achieve such a high developmental level is apparently the entire reason why this material universe even exists.

So when Jesus talks about bringing the kingdom of God on earth, He is referring to some future day when everyone on earth and in the afterlife is spiritually vibrating at the same high level. He says, “You are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:48). And Jesus tells us that our strictly following His teachings is the key to our achieving our ultimate goal of bringing the kingdom of God on earth. He says, “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 says, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-21). And so it is! Please note, too, that what we have in the Gospels is not meant to be God’s final word. God’s revelations to humankind will continue until each one of us is spiritually perfect! We will better understand this when we consider God’s fourth proposal, below….

* The Teachings of Jesus Must Not be Incorporated Into Any Religion – Spiritual Freedom

The extent to which Jesus disparages religions is legendary! And He insists that we must not incorporate His teachings into any religion, whether old or new. He says, “Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved” (MT 9:17). “Therefore every scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a head of a household, who brings out of his treasure things new and old” (MT 13:52).

* We May Continue to Question and to Learn – Eternal Empowerment

This beautiful invitation is God’s repudiation of all religious dogmas. It makes the Lord’s Way forever new! Here is what God says to us through Jesus: “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). The point made here is that each of us is invited to ask God our own questions, and each of us can count upon receiving our individual divine answers. God assures us that once we have accepted God’s offer, then humankind will be forever empowered! Never again will anyone be able to force a religious belief on someone else. Only think of the suffering that our rejecting God’s offer when it was first given to us through Jesus has inflicted upon the world! The Crusades, the Inquisition, and all the wars against indigenous peoples to impose Christianity at the point of a spear: none of that ever was God’s will! This beautiful invitation coupled with a promise from God is offered anew to each of us in every generation. When I first set out in my latter teens to try to understand my childhood experience of light, I had already read the Bible from cover to cover a couple of times. I had been captivated by God’s amazing promise! So I began to ask my questions. And over the course of my life since then, God has given me all the right evidence at all the right times to abundantly and completely answer every question that ever has occurred to me. Always and forever, God means what God says!

So now we have the parameters of the Lord’s Way that Jesus came to earth to begin. And we know that the purpose of our living by the Way is the ultimate empowerment of our minds so we can make this our last necessary earth-lifetime. It is so simple! But it is far from easy. To help us better understand what a complete departure the Lord’s Way is from every religion that ever has existed on earth, how challenging and how empowering it is, let’s consider over the next three weeks how it might play out in our own lives….

You have him rule over the works of Your hands;
You have put everything under his feet, All sheep and oxen,
And also the animals of the field,
 The birds of the sky, and the fish of the sea,
Whatever passes through the paths of the seas.
 Lord, our Lord, How majestic is Your name in all the earth!
– David, Third King of Israel and Judah (1035-970 BC), Psalm 8:6-9

Indian Madonna photo credit: insane_capture <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/34425257@N07/4672285728″>Eternal Love</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Chinese Madonna photo credit: Rod Waddington <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/64607715@N05/49973249096″>Yi Woman, China</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

African Madonna photo credit: 10b travelling / Carsten ten Brink <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/77334245@N00/45603725804″>Kambari woman with tattoos, scarification and baby</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Festival Madonna photo credit: 10b travelling / Carsten ten Brink <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/77334245@N00/32062870603″>Baby’s first festival?</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

American Madonnas photo credit: donnierayjones <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/11946169@N00/28633771741″>Besties and Babies</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Vietnamese Madonna photo credit: United Nations Photo <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/35483578@N03/6359456941″>Viet Nam and Child Mortality</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Human Madonna photo credit: Ravages <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/44124298927@N01/5692896824″>Aadvika and Bhavani Karthik, wrapped up in each other, Chennai</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>