Who Goes to Heaven?

Posted on January 2, 2021January 3, 2021 by Roberta Grimes

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside quiet waters. He refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths for His name’s sake.
– David, Third King of Israel and Judah (1035-970 BC), Psalm 23:1-3

Ours is the first generation to know that what we call Heaven is a genuine place. And we even know a great deal now about what Heaven is like, where it is, and how it works. We also at last know the truth about Hell. The human idea that we will face punishment after death for things that we did in life is as old as the notion of religion itself, so it is not surprising that nascent Christianity latched onto the threat of Hell as a way to persuade its faithful to submit to the religion’s strictures. The problem is, of course, that when we imagine a Hell and the concept of eternal punishment, we create an awful version of God.

The most terrible take on God and God’s punishment is the reductio ad absurdum of Calvinism. John Calvin (1509-1564) used bits of the Christian Bible to support the idea that since God knows everything, God must know even prior to each person’s creation who will be saved and who will be damned. So God created some to be saved as “the Elect,” and God deliberately created every other human being to burn in Hell. If God’s power and knowledge are infinite, then clearly the whole game must be rigged.

It is easy for anyone who open-mindedly reads the whole Christian Bible to abandon the notion that it is all “God’s Inspired, Inerrant Word.” The Old Testament is full of barbarisms, and the Bible as a whole is rife with internal contradictions: it cannot possibly all be the Inspired Word of a wise and loving, or even of a consistent and rational God. Much of what Jesus says in the Gospels, on the other hand, does feel like genuine divine messages. It feels as old as truth and as modern as tomorrow’s news! Among other wonderful gifts to us, Jesus short-circuits the idea of eternal punishment by telling us that the only eternal judge we ever will face is ourselves. He has to share this truth carefully, since for Jesus to have come right out and contradicted Jewish teachings would have been a capital crime; but over days and with differing Temple guards, He gave us three parts of one solid message. He said:

“For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). Okay, so now Jesus is our judge. God is off the hook. But then on another day He said, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him” (JN 12:47). So neither God nor Jesus judges us? Then who is our judge? He tells us plainly that we judge ourselves. He says, “Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you” (MT 7:1-2).

And the afterlife evidence confirms the Lord’s words! Those that we used to think were dead consistently tell us there is no Hell. All judgment is by ourselves alone. We learn further from the not-really-dead that unless we can forgive ourselves for everything that we did in life, our post-death spiritual vibrations will slow to the point where we can no longer remain at even the lowest Summerland level. If we cannot halt the slide by forgiving ourselves, eventually we will end up in the lowest afterlife level, which is dark, cold, smelly, disgusting, and populated by wailing, demon-like people who all have unfortunately put themselves there. And, what do you know? Jesus warned us about that outer darkness! When a Roman officer trusted in His healing powers even more than did His followers, He said to them, “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (MT 8:10-12). Jesus knew two thousand years ago what the actual outer darkness is like!

People who have sat at deathbeds tell us that many of the dying become increasingly peaceful as death approaches. This calm acceptance and actual anticipation of death and what comes after death seems to be a natural part of the process of finally going home. So it is tragic that it often doesn’t happen this way for the most devout Christians! I have spoken with hospice workers who described how they had tried to comfort dying Christian ladies who had never done a bad thing in their lives, but still those poor souls were terrified by the thought that they hadn’t been quite good enough. They feared they were going to spend eternity in Hell. As Jesus says of all religious ideas,“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thorn bushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit” (MT 7:15-17). Dear God in Heaven, if terrified old ladies are the fruit of Christianity, then Christianity is the worst tree of all!

Many Christian preachers are sure that those who have not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior are condemned to hellfire. They insist that Jesus Himself said so! There is Biblical support for every kind of nonsense if you cite just a sentence or two out of context, and here are what may be the most misunderstood and overused passages in the whole Christian Bible. Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (JN 14:6). And He says, “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life (JN 3:16). On these few sentences many Christian pastors have built their entire fear-based careers! But what is Jesus actually saying here? No mention of crucifixion, sacrificial redemption, substitutionary atonement, or saving us from God’s wrath. And Jesus tells us throughout the Gospels that it is His teachings that really matter! 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). Clearly, those who first transcribed the Lord’s words simply used “I,” “Me,” and “Him” as a shorthand way to refer to His teachings. Doing that would have made sense to people so steeped in the Lord’s words that they equated His words with His mission and His life; but it became a trap for future clergymen, who would use that ancient shorthand to condemn non-believers to a non-existent Christian Hell. And we know that for a fact, because now we know what happens after death! Jesus is right in saying that our following His teachings (or their equivalent in some other tradition) is an essential part of our preparation to live the best eternal life. He is right, too, about the lack of divine judgment. Here is some of what we have learned about the afterlife:

There is one universal afterlife. And adorably, the entrance areas to that single afterlife are tailored to each of the earth’s cultures, so if a Westerner dies accidentally in China or in Saudi Arabia he will arrive in a foreign-looking place. If this happens to you, simply call for help. Those who have done this tell us that an elevated Being appeared at once, apologized for his tardiness, and whisked them to their own culture’s afterlife entry point.
Everyone is welcome in that universal afterlife. Not only do adherents of every religion all go to the same Heaven, but so do atheists. People who are not nice go there, and criminals, and everyone else who vibrates higher than the very deepest fear and rage.
The afterlife is a beautiful version of earth-life perfected. It is gorgeous, colorful, and playful. And solid! We live in a house in endless daytime light, and we spend our eternity traveling, creating, learning, loving, and playing endlessly, until eventually we start to hunger for additional spiritual growth so we begin to plan another earth-lifetime. I have written at length about what the afterlife is like, but there are no words that can convey to you how glorious it is and how much you are loved!
It is possible to go off-course for a time. I used to think this was a minor problem, but we are told now that perhaps a quarter of those who die on earth will go off-track and will need to be rescued. Most will be rescued fairly soon, but tragically they miss a lot of the joy that is attendant on going right from here to there! The biggest reason why people go astray in the process of dying seems to be that they simply have no clue about what is going on, so the best thing you can do for yourself is to make a point of learning about death and the afterlife.
The afterlife is steeped in God’s divine love. We talked last week about the love that Jesus taught. And what most strikes new afterlife arrivals is the fact that God’s love is the air they breathe! God’s love is the light that illuminates the afterlife; God’s love is the living and nurturing water that sparkles everywhere (see JN 4:10). And being so completely immersed in the love of God produces an overwhelming joy!

There is not, and there never could be any punishment by an infinitely loving God. Every fear is human-made! Jesus came to us two thousand years ago to end false religions, end human fears, and teach us how to relate to the Godhead so we can attain at last the perfect love that is our eternal birthright. Jesus told us His teachings are essential to our beginning to understand the only God. And so they are! He was especially down on religions leaders who put their human-made traditions first, even before the divine will of God. He said, “Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:3-9). Still, the human-made traditions of Christianity are favored over the Lord’s divine words, to this day! But now we really know the truth. And as Jesus promised, we are being set free from all the untruths of human-made religions. Now a richly better world for humankind can at last begin! Let’s resolve to make 2021 the seminal year when we will follow Jesus in perfect love. Let us join at last in spreading the Lord’s genuine teachings over all the earth!

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for you are with me;
your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Surely Your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
– David, Third King of Israel and Judah (1035-970 BC), Psalm 23:4-6

Thatched house photo credit: jack cousin <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/52822484@N03/44811634692″>A picturesque thatched cottage.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Heavenly marsh photo credit: Rusty Russ <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/10159247@N04/46299909555″>The Sky As I See It</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Love You Are

Posted on December 26, 2020December 26, 2020 by Roberta Grimes

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>

The Prophesy Is Fulfilled

Posted on December 19, 2020December 20, 2020 by Roberta Grimes

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>

Now, About Sex… (Part III)

Posted on December 12, 2020December 13, 2020 by Roberta Grimes

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation!
O my soul, praise him, for he is your health and salvation!
Come, all who hear; now to his temple draw near,
join me in glad adoration.
– Joachim Neander (1650-1680), from the German “Praise to the Lord” (1680)

The only approach to morality that is consistent with the Godhead’s truth is based in divine love alone. From earliest prehistory, human-made gods have imposed various behavioral laws, but the genuine Godhead gives us no laws beyond God’s perfect Law of Love. Jesus makes that fact plain in the Gospels when 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.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40).

It is impossible to establish a love-based morality while any written moral law exists, since the written law always takes precedence. While any moral laws are in place, love can be nothing more than the optional nicety it has become for us now. And all written moral laws are flawed, since there is no written law to which we cannot soon think of some love-based exceptions! We have never had a morality based on written laws that was right in all situations. So Jesus makes it clear in the Gospels that He is moving us beyond all black-letter laws by replacing the law-based Old Testament with the Godhead’s New Testament Law of Love. When we study the Lord’s Gospel words, and we then endeavor to follow His teachings, we realize that divine love is possible only when we are free of all other constraints.

But what about secular laws? We cannot live in civilization without obeying those! So Jesus tells us how to handle that conflict. When the Pharisees try to trap him into speaking against paying Caesar’s poll-tax, He says, “‘Why are you testing Me, you hypocrites? Show Me the coin used for the poll-tax.’ And they brought Him a denarius. And He said to them, ‘Whose image and inscription is this?’They said to Him, ‘Caesar’s.’ Then He said to them, ‘Then pay to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s’” (MT 22:18-21). Bravo, Jesus! We enjoy this little interplay as more evidence of His cleverness, but He is making an important point. We can – and we must – keep the things of this world, the human-made laws and the grubbing for survival, entirely separate from our sacred effort to ever better practice God’s perfect divine love.

But how do we actually go about developing a purely love-based morality? It is only when we ask the question that we see how very different a love-based morality is from one that is based in black-letter laws. We are used to laws. We find their certainty comforting. Our old way of doing morality – starting with the applicable laws, and then looking for possible love-based exceptions – felt easy and automatic. And a love-based morality will feel easy, too, once we have become more used to it. In fact, I think we are going to find that a love-based morality makes discerning the difference between right and wrong a lot easier! Of course, we might then be seeing that what is right to do in any given situation is not what we would prefer to do. But still, the moral choice will be clear! It is time for us to test-drive an entirely laws-free morality that is based in the love that Jesus taught.

This need to operate entirely from love applies to all our daily decisions. But the simplest way to illustrate the difference that a love-based morality can make in our lives is to consider how we would make entirely love-based sexual decisions. Our decisions about sex are full of ethical thorns, so they are a great place for us to begin to think concretely about a love-based morality. Let’s look now at three basic sex-related decisions, and consider them entirely from the viewpoint of a laws-free morality that is based in love. We’ve got to start somewhere!

Heterosexual Behavior

The decision to be intimate with someone is a complex one. Since there are no longer black-letter laws, it doesn’t matter whether a couple is legally married to one another; but still, we have a lot to consider! Let’s look at the three core love-based questions that we will first have to answer in the affirmative:

Are we willing to rear a resulting child? To kill a fetus for the sake of convenience can never be seen as a love-based choice. So the decision to have sexual intercourse, even with contraceptive use, will always be the simultaneous decision that we are prepared to lovingly co-parent with this partner for the next twenty years; or alternatively, that we are prepared to find the resulting child good adoptive parents. For both birth-parents, that possible child’s welfare is their love-based responsibility from before its conception.
Are we sure that no outside parties will be harmed by our actions? If either party is involved with someone who would see what we mean to do as an act of betrayal, then that other relationship will first need to be comfortably resolved. And if either party is co-parenting a minor child with someone else, then the risk of disrupting that child’s life seems to me in a purely love-based morality to trump every reason that we might have for proceeding to be sexual with this partner!
Are both parties mentally and emotionally able to make love-based decisions about sexual activity? People who are mentally handicapped, too young, emotionally immature, or so deeply indoctrinated into a religion as to be unable to enter this particular sexual relationship without guilt and fear must always be protected by the healthier party from the emotional damage that can result if you proceed.

There may also be other considerations that we will come to see are mandatory for a sexual morality based in love, but these are the three that first come to mind. Few people even consider black-letter laws about intimate behavior anymore, so in thinking this through we are not only getting rid of the laws that nobody follows anyway, but much more importantly we are creating a healthier and entirely love-based morality that can much better take their place.

Homosexual Behavior

Absent pregnancy, the same questions that apply to deciding on heterosexual activity are applicable when the intended participants are of the same gender. Here the thorniest moral issue is not for the participants, but rather it is the fact that so many Christians still feel free to judge and condemn people who are sexually attracted to their own gender. And it is impossible to follow the teachings of Jesus while you are presuming to judge anyone! It doesn’t matter how you personally feel about homosexuality. If you ever judge anyone for anything at all, then you are acting in direct contravention of the plainspoken teachings of Jesus. The Lord says, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged” (LK 6:37). He says, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). Then on a different day, with different Temple guards, He tells us that He doesn’t judge us, either. He says, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him” (JN 12:47). The Lord cannot possibly have made any plainer the fact that neither God nor Jesus ever judges anyone! And those that we used to think were dead confirm this fact as well. The only judgment is by ourselves alone. And when there is no divine judgment, then surely Christians have no right to judge anyone for anything. Yes, in the United States you have a Constitutional right to refuse to bake a cake for a homosexual wedding. But if you are calling yourself a follower of Jesus, just know that it is His frank request that you rise above judgment, smile, and lovingly bake that cake.

Non-Monogamous Sexual Behavior

Sexual relationships among multiple partners seem to be more common now, to the point where psychologists are urging us to accept non-monogamy as a lifestyle choice. A surprising number of people are engaged in polyamory, or in open marriages, or even in stable households that contain more than two cohabiting adults. And without any black-letter moral laws in place, such alternative living arrangements can be perfectly moral. But they still pose some much-increased ethical risks! The decision to enter into any form of non-monogamous sexual relationship is compounded by the much-increased chance of jealousies and general instability that must be lovingly addressed, and by the fact that many more outside people are likely to be affected by it. At the very least, every person involved will need to satisfactorily answer the three questions given above.

As you can see, a purely love-based morality can be simple to apply and seems to make more sense than does one that is based in rigid laws. It surely works a lot better than trying to live by behavioral laws that require us to always be on the lookout for all the possible love-based exceptions!

Next week we’ll pause to celebrate the Reason for the Season. Then we’ll resume this process of learning to ever better practice the purely love-based morality that Jesus taught.

Praise to the Lord! O let all that is in me adore him!
All that has life and breath, come now with praises before him.
Let the Amen sound from his people again;
gladly forever adore him.
– Joachim Neander (1650-1680), from the German “Praise to the Lord” (1680)

Sunset kiss photo credit: scarlett.photo <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/123827861@N05/14216190047″>when the sun sets</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Indian couple photo credit: Shreyans Bhansali <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/94416001@N00/4779332716″>ठहरिये</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

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Wading couple photo credit: Gareth1953 All Right Now <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/40837632@N05/5898568315″>Wonderful West Wittering – June 2011 – Ain’t Love Grand</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Now, About Sex… (Part II)

Posted on December 5, 2020December 6, 2020 by Roberta Grimes

Don’t you think it’s rather funny
That I should be in this position?
I’m the one who’s always been so calm, so cool, no lover’s fool,
Running every show. He scares me so.
– Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice, from “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1971)

The divine love that Jesus taught is the only kind of love that has the power to raise our personal consciousness vibrations. It’s the only kind of love that has any positive spiritual effect at all!

This essential fact is the center and sum of what Jesus tells us in the Gospels, and it is strongly reinforced in A Course in Miracles. When we remove what was added to the Gospels by the Council of Nicaea in 325, we have what we are told by people that we used to think were dead is the core of what Jesus taught us while He lived on earth. And then reportedly Jesus Himself led the group that channeled the Course in the nineteen-sixties. A Course in Miracles is essentially a very advanced version of the basic advice about spiritual growth that Jesus gives us in the Gospels.

The Lord’s Gospel teachings make it plain that it isn’t enough to simply try to be more loving to friends and family. He says, “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 5:46-48). The Lord’s stated goal for us is nothing less than the spiritual perfection of the Godhead! But He tells us that level of perfection is attainable only when we have internalized the universal love that He came to earth to teach. In A Course in Miracles, the team around Jesus makes this point more explicitly. The Course calls our love for only certain individuals “special loves,” and it tells us that “special loves” are as counterproductive spiritually as are “special hates.” Wow.

Jesus also insists that in order to live God’s perfect love, we must never judge another human being. In fact, being judgmental of others is such an ego-based, low-vibration attitude that it makes our spiritual growth impossible. And seeing how fiercely judgmental so many modern Christians are wont to be gives us a pretty good explanation for why Christianity has failed so miserably at elevating human consciousness toward the spiritual level of the kingdom of God.

We now know that what Jesus taught is a deep and transformative kind of love that permanently raises our personal consciousness vibrations. And we now understand that Jesus is right, and none of the things that Christians have been attempting for the better part of two thousand years has really done much to improve anything. It is long past time for humankind to listen to Jesus a lot more closely.

One of the Lord’s goals for us is to build a more universal morality, a better distinction between right and wrong. For all of human history, all versions of morality have been rules-based. And since every rule is human-made, morality has always been a matter of opinion. We might know in our gut that we ought to do something or not do something, but if there is a bright-line moral rule that is different from our instinctive view then it can be very hard to tell right from wrong.

Since this inability to arrive at one universal morality has been such a longstanding daily problem, a number of attempts have been made to come up with a more universally acceptable set of moral standards. For example, the hot spiritual book of the Sixties was Situation Ethics – The New Morality. Traditional Christians hated it! That book’s premise was that love is the ethical standard that trumps every rule; but since it failed to distinguish between divine love and the special loves that Jesus warns us against, all the critics of that book were likely right. At its base, it just threw away the rules without putting any sort of universally acceptable moral standard in their place.

We cannot achieve a love-based morality that will free us altogether from human-made rules unless we can first internalize the divine form of love that Jesus taught.

I think the reason why the Lord’s teachings are so effective when we actually apply them is that the sort of love He came to teach is actually our essential nature. When we get beneath all the special loves and hates and all the ego-based negativity, we already embody that perfect universal love. Clear away the mess, and our personal consciousness vibrations begin to rise naturally! And the easiest way to make that happen is turning out to be nothing more than the close application of the Gospel teachings of Jesus. Simply by concentrating on ever more perfectly living the love that Jesus taught, we can raise our own vibrations enough to make this our last necessary earth-lifetime. And if sufficient people worldwide will work to raise their own consciousness vibrations, we can indeed bring the kingdom of God on earth.

I have been experimenting for more than a decade now, and I have told you something of how different special loves and universal love actually feel. As I got to the magical moment when I realized that prevenient forgiveness works, I also developed the sense that I was loving my family a whole lot less. This bothered me at first, but soon I saw that in fact my love for my family hadn’t changed. Instead, I had simply stopped differentiating them from all the rest of humankind. It was all people that I loved now, all children and everyone I passed on the street! And my new love for humankind felt highly pleasurable, as all forms of love are pleasurable. It was cooler, not possessive at all in the way that special loves often feel possessive, but still it was as rapturous and intense as any love that I have ever experienced. In a sort of muffled, human way, I can envision that this must indeed be the way that the Godhead loves all of humankind.

So now, based upon the teachings of Jesus, we know that what matters to God is not any of the things that we might do. All those Ten–Commandments–style rules were human-made; and the more we have progressed spiritually, the more we have seen exceptions to the rules. Thou Shalt Not Kill (except to protect innocents); Honor Your Father and Your Mother (unless they are harming others); Do Not Steal (except to feed a starving child); and Do Not Bear False Witness (except in 1942 Germany, when you have Jewish refugees in your closet). It has been many generations since we stopped considering the Old Testament rules to be black-and-white governors of our behavior, but rather we now routinely consider those rules to be no more than good suggestions that can be overridden when the facts get complicated.

In the same way, the Old Testament’s sexual laws are human-made and culture-based. So once we have mastered divine love, we will be able to ignore them all. From a spiritual perspective, there is nothing inherently sinful about any kind of sexual behavior! We can morally have sex in every possible way, whether inside marriage or outside of marriage, with or without a partner or three of any combination of genders, and in private or in the middle of a public street.

We know now that God doesn’t put much emphasis on what we do. No, what matters to the Godhead in all our actions, and matters very much indeed, is just two things:

Why we are doing what we are doing. If we have any motive other than perfect divine love, then that secondary motive cannot be ego-based or in any other way negative (fear, revenge, etc.). Anything we do that might affect others must be done from love alone.
The effects our actions might have on others. If we feel confident in saying that love is our only motivation, then we still must make certain that even those who are not directly involved are unlikely to be negatively impacted.

So morality has become a more personal process. There are no longer any rules! But instead, before we take action in any situation, we must weigh on our internal scales of perfect and selfless love both what our reasons are for doing it, and how what we are planning to do might affect the other people around us. Always having to be sure to do the love-based thing might seem to be a complication, but trying to follow the old rules was even worse! Before we ever did anything, we had to mentally check to see whether there were applicable human-made laws. Then we had to look for any love-based exception (like a murderer going after your family, or saving the refugees in your 1942 closet). Then, since we still would be acting in violation of those human-made laws, we would fret about whether there might be some way to do the right thing without violating those laws. We might well carry even our well-thought-out and apparently justified but still non-legal choices on our consciences forevermore!

The key to an entirely rules-free morality that is based in love alone is simply learning and internalizing the perfect divine love that Jesus taught. And then we can altogether and forever entirely banish every rule from our minds!

You may have been wondering what all of this has to do with sex. In fact, the sexual decisions we make are some of the most complex and intensely emotional decisions of all, and inevitably they can affect other people in what are often traumatic ways. Reasoning through some sexual decisions is the best way for us to better understand and begin to implement the Lord’s love-based morality. So next week we will consider how we can best apply divine love’s true measure to some of our thorniest moral decisions of all….

Yet, if he said he loved me,
I’d be lost, I’d be frightened.
I couldn’t cope, just couldn’t cope.
I’d turn my head, I’d back away, I wouldn’t want to know.
He scares me so. I want him so. I love him so.
– Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice, from “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1971)

Abstract balloons photo credit: Raphael Perez Israeli Artist <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/99581103@N06/37889570271″>naive art paintings Painting Modern People Sculpture Design Artworks City England Watercolor</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Abstract fireworks photo credit: Raphael Perez Israeli Artist <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/99581103@N06/37169911243″>naive art Simple Cat Ideas Autumn Angel Town Beautiful Dog Collage Girl Seaside Fashion Love</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

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Blue skaters photo credit: incognito7nyc <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/143502056@N04/50570873377″>Ice Skating Rink at Bryant Park’s Winter Village Midtown Manhattan New York City NY P00702 DSC_3566</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Blue balconies photo credit: incognito7nyc <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/143502056@N04/50341318721″>Alien Spaceship – The Vessel Reflections at Night Hudson Yards Manhattan New York City NY P00650 DSC_2656</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Orange water photo credit: irio.jyske <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/65608474@N03/50332777167″>”The mallard quintet” in formation swimming</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Fall mountain photo credit: RS2Photography <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/99241048@N04/50426525693″>The Reds, Yellows, & Greens of Fall</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Now, About Sex… (Part I)

Posted on November 28, 2020November 29, 2020 by Roberta Grimes

I don’t know how to love him.
What to do, how to move him.
I’ve been changed, yes really changed.
In these past few days, when I’ve seen myself,
I seem like someone else.
– Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice, from “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1971)

Animals reshuffle genetic material in the process of producing each new generation. The usual method of mixing genes involves two genders, one of which has a penis that is inserted into the vagina of the other. To make animals want to reproduce, the act itself is pleasurable; and every material body has a powerful drive to do this odd thing at certain times of its life. But that’s it! Sexual intercourse is a minor aspect of the broad scope of human activities, which fact feels confounding when you realize how much of a fuss we have made about it for all of human history.

The divine love that Jesus taught is so different from most of the emotions that we think of as “love” that it is going to take some effort for us to learn to love in the Lord’s Way. And because the act of sexual intercourse is pleasurable and surrounded by rules and taboos, while at the same time it requires our interacting with other people in complex ways, our sex lives can be an excellent place for us to begin to practice the love that Jesus taught.

Nearly all religions are obsessed with controlling our sexual activity. For example, there are strict notions in every Christian denomination about what is and what is not acceptable sexual behavior; and yet, too often Christians will suffer an overpowering need to violate their own religious laws. They will then be harshly judged and disgraced. Meanwhile, we are allowing our children to be sexualized to an appalling extent! These three problems – our struggles with sexual temptation, all the judgmental Christian congregations, and our grotesque worldwide obsession with sex that is deeply harming our next generation – all spring from our historical obsession with treating the sex act as deliciously forbidden and thereby heightened in importance beyond reason. Unless we can get past our negative obsession with our own sexuality, we never will raise this planet’s consciousness vibrations enough to bring the kingdom of God on earth.

The problem is not the act itself. Sexual intercourse is a bodily function that is fully as morally neutral as eating. But with intercourse, what should be a natural act is complicated by a mess of rules and taboos that damage many people’s lives. And our deeply judgmental views on sex are splintering the forty thousand versions of Christianity even more! To move all modern societies toward a love-based and not a fear-based view of sexuality, we first must understand the ancient mindset that still underlies all our modern taboos. The two rules that follow are from the Christian Old Testament and based in Hebraic law, and they are typical of the mindset of the ancient world:

*Female Sexual Behavior Must be Strictly Controlled. The ancients wanted paternal certainty, so female extramarital sex was forbidden. If a new bride was found to be not a virgin, ^“then they shall bring out the girl to the doorway of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death” (Deut 22: 21).

* Male Sexual Behavior Should be Focused. Many children died, which meant there had to be a lot of extra births. This led to a strong cultural preference that all semen emissions be penis-into-vagina. Masturbation was frowned upon, semen emissions were considered unclean (e.g. Lev 15:16-18), and “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death” (Lev 20:13). Female homosexuality is not mentioned, perhaps because it doesn’t interfere with reproduction.

In the Old Testament, every act of sexual intercourse is a matter of public importance. To change that, Jesus had to do away with all the human-made Old Testament laws and replace them with God’s law of love. He reinforced His abolition of all religious laws, but He did it carefully, since for Him to have been heard by the Temple authorities speaking against an Old Testament law would have been a crime punishable by death. Still, He did what He could. For example:

“Now it happened that Jesus was passing through some grainfields on a Sabbath, and His disciples were picking the heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands, and eating them. But some of the Pharisees said, “Why are you doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” And Jesus, answering them, said, ‘Have you not even read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God, and took and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for anyone to eat except the priests alone, and gave it to his companions?’ And He was saying to them, ‘The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath’” (LK 6:1-5). Whether Jesus spoke those last words or they were just implied, it was clear to those who were close to Him that He intentionally defied all the strict Sabbath rules. For example, healing on the Sabbath was forbidden, but apparently He did it often (see LK 6:6-10; LK 13:15-16; JN 5:9-10). His style seems to have been to avoid confrontations, and instead to teach that the old rules were gone by displaying repeated casual violations of them.

Jesus’s treatment of the woman taken in adultery is a clear repudiation of Old Testament laws. And it is quite brilliantly done! The scribes and Pharisees “brought a woman caught in the act of adultery, and after placing her in the center of the courtyard, they said to Him, ‘Teacher, this woman has been caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?’ Now they were saying this to test Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground. When they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up and said to them, ‘He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. Now when they heard this, they began leaving, one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman where she was, in the center of the courtyard. And straightening up, Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?’ She said, ‘No one, Lord.’ And Jesus said, ‘I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on do not sin any longer’” (JN 8:3-12). Jesus is not reported to have specifically denounced the Old Testament law against male homosexuality, but since that law is based in fear and hatred we can take His repudiation of it as a given. And my dear Thomas wants us to mention here the fact that there is evidence in the Gospels that Jesus Himself, who came from the highest aspect of the Godhead, may have been homosexual. I await a more enlightened day when Christian scholars love the Lord enough to openly discuss what many of them also by now surely must have noticed.

Jesus readily pardons violations of the ancient and outmoded sexual laws, but still He considers marriage to be a profound commitment. When He is asked about divorce, He says that when people marry, “they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no person is to separate.”People said to Him, “Why, then, did Moses command to give her a certificate of divorce and send her away?” He said, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery” (MT 19:6-9).

So Jesus repudiates the sexual laws of the Old Testament, but He affirms the love-based importance of marriage. In doing this, He removes sexual behavior from the realm of public criminality and transforms it into a private matter to be lovingly handled within families. Jesus means to move us from a sexual morality rooted in fear-based tribalism to one that is deeply grounded in sexual privacy and familial love. But for two thousand years we have ignored what would have been a profoundly love-based change, and instead Christianity has kept and has enforced the ancient human-made, fear-based laws. Our only change has been to replace stoning sexual violators to death with just the pain of shame and ostracism. None of this is what the Godhead wants! None of it is based in love, and none of it improves anyone’s behavior. Indeed, it has led to a modern culture worldwide that is built around sexual titillation, with predictable bad effects on our personal lives and on the precious lives of our children.

We can begin to live as God wants us to live only when we have banished every fear-based sexual rule and taboo. And we must stop judging others! Jesus said, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned” (LK 6:37). But since Christians seldom listen to Jesus, all those sexual taboos that He outmoded two thousand years ago remain at the center of Christianity, and the busybody judging of others continues to be a horrifying Christian obsession.

As we better learn to live the Lord’s love-based Way, we will need to rethink so many deep-seated aspects of our lives! And to start that process, we will consider next week how our sexual views and practices will change as we begin to live the love that Jesus taught….

Should I bring him down?
Should I scream and shout?
Should I speak of love,
Let my feelings out?
I never thought I’d come to this!
What’s it all about?
– Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice, from “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1971)

Expulsion of Adam & Eve photo credit: Thomas Hawk <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035555243@N01/49312166413″>The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Adam accuses Eve photo credit: Halloween HJB <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/72185053@N00/50307487488″>FIDUS (Hugo HÖPPENER). Eva, 1931</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

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Living the Love That Jesus Taught

Posted on November 21, 2020November 22, 2020 by Roberta Grimes

What a friend we have in Jesus,
All our sins and griefs to bear.
And what a privilege to carry
Everything to God in prayer.
– Joseph M. Scriven (1819-1886), from “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” (1855)

Without the work of researchers who have studied the afterlife and the greater reality, we still would know almost nothing about what it was that Jesus actually taught. For nearly two millennia, Christians have believed that Jesus was born to be a sacrifice. God was never going to forgive us, so Jesus took it upon Himself to claim all our evil deeds as His own and then die horribly in our stead. So then God would finally forgive us. Oh, a few Gospel bits would be read in church, but generally they were disconnected platitudes about love and forgiveness. And the way the churches long have taught it, loving and forgiving were only feel-good ideas that Jesus shared with us before going to the cross to perform His mission of redeeming us from God’s judgment. It was the Lord’s sacrificial death that was important, even in Protestant churches! In my childhood church, the crucifix was blessedly shorn of the body of Jesus, but still that cross was His central symbol. An instrument of torture and horrific death. A constant guilt-filled reminder of what He had to endure because of our own failings. We even were happy to wear silver crucifixes on silver chains around our necks.

It was only in my early teens, when I began to read the entire Bible, that I realized Jesus had a lot more to say! Soon I was looking forward to the Gospels as I slogged through the Books of Zechariah and Malachi, always feeling at the end of Malachi that I had abruptly landed in the modern day. I would sit at the feet of Jesus, reading favorite passages over and over and reveling in seeing ever deeper meanings. I kept up this nightly Bible-reading habit into my early fifties, at which point I had done enough afterlife research to feel certain that all the Christian teachings were absolutely, stone-cold wrong. So then I had my well-deserved crisis of faith, and I put aside both the Bible and the afterlife evidence for the next two years.

When I finally picked up my Bible again and read just the Gospels, I realized that the teachings of Jesus and the afterlife evidence completely agree. That amazing rainy afternoon was the greatest moment of my life! Jesus knew things two thousand years ago that we could not have corroborated until the twentieth century. And it seems that no one else in history has made and gone public with this discovery. How astonishing is that? The point is that these are not coincidences. They are instead gigantic revelations. For Jesus to have spoken as He did, He has to have known while He lived on earth what afterlife researchers are only now learning.

This really does transform our ability to understand Jesus. For one example, I have found no Christian clergyman who ever has puzzled out what Jesus means when He refers to the kingdom of God (or the kingdom of heaven, which seems to mean the same thing). Jesus uses one term or the other some eighty times through all four Gospels, so arguably unless we know what those terms mean to Him, we cannot understand the Lord’s actual mission. And thanks to insights gleaned when we read the Gospels in conjunction with the afterlife evidence, we are confident now that the Lord’s primary mission was to teach us how to raise our personal consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward the perfect love of the Godhead. When we have reached the spiritual development of what we call the sixth level of the afterlife, the level just below the Source, then we will personally have achieved the kingdom of God. And when we have established that level of spiritual development in a significant portion of living humanity, then we will have accomplished the Lord’s ultimate goal of bringing the kingdom of God on earth.

The modern Christian whose work I most admire is Father Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest and founder of The Center for Action & Contemplation In Albuquerque, New Mexico. Especially if you have a Catholic background, I urge you to sign up for the daily meditations in which Father Rohr and his team do a beautiful job of bringing Christianity into the modern age. This is from their daily meditation for November 18th:

“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. And these are indeed Jesus’s two core teachings, underlying everything he says and does. . . .

“When Jesus talks about this Oneness . . . . what he more has in mind is a complete, mutual indwelling: I am in God, God is in you, you are in God, we are in each other. His most beautiful symbol for this is in the teaching in John 15 where he says, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Abide in me as I in you” [see John 15:4–5]. A few verses later he says, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love” [John 15:9]. . . . There is no separation between humans and God because of this mutual interabiding which expresses the indivisible reality of divine love. . . .

“No separation between human and human is an equally powerful notion—and equally challenging. One of the most familiar of Jesus’s teachings is “Love your neighbor as yourself” [Matthew 22:39] . . . as a continuation of your very own being. It’s a complete seeing that your neighbor is you. There are not two individuals out there . . . there are simply two cells of the one great Life.”

As is usual with what we read from Father Rohr’s team, all of this is true. And here they come so close! But because they cannot know what we have learned in doing afterlife research, it seems just aspirational, doesn’t it? Father Rohr clearly sees the goal! You want to say to him, “Great insights, sir! Now, how do we get there?”

What Father Rohr and his team don’t realize is that Jesus told us how to get there. And He made it so easy! But we can only make use of His teachings as a program for rapid spiritual growth if we can (a) see that His teachings are more than platitudes, and (b) also know enough about how consciousness and the greater reality work to be able to apply the Lord’s teachings productively to our daily lives.

Jesus sums up the ultimate goal of His teachings for all of humankind in His Lord’s Prayer. There He says, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven” (MT 6:10). He flat-out tells us that we are to bring the spiritual development of the highest levels of the afterlife to those who are in bodies on earth. And He insists that this elevation of each human mind happens internally! 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). Thanks to our study of consciousness as it relates to the afterlife evidence, we now know that Jesus is exactly right. And fortunately, since we are all part of one Mind, we can gladly estimate that the elevation of as little as ten percent of the earth’s population to that highest level of spiritual development will be sufficient to begin the advent of the kingdom of God over all the earth!

It is impossible to achieve the Lord’s goal for humankind as it is so well stated by Father Rohr unless we can effect the spiritual transformation on earth that Jesus taught us to pray for. No amount of trying really hard to love your neighbor as yourself (LK 10:27) can produce much spiritual change! But Jesus has the answer for this as well. The key to our learning how to love in the transformational way that God wants us to love is for us to learn prevenient forgiveness. And our afterlife-based understanding of human consciousness shows us why this is true!

We enter these bodies with awareness of only a limited subset of our vast, eternal minds. We temporarily pack away the rest. And importantly, the subset that we use while in bodies is designed for rapid spiritual growth: these earth-minds are lazy, governed by habit, and easily re-programmed. And every wrong that we ever might need to forgive is something that we ourselves have taught our minds is a personal wrong to be fought. We aren’t born knowing that our stuff is our stuff, or that people are attacking us when they cut us off in traffic; but as we grow up, our ego-based self-protectiveness instills into our minds these certainties. We have created our own mistaken habits of thought! And forgiving each perceived “wrong” only after it happens is simply too stressful and too much work. BUT. If we can make our minds’ reactions the whole problem, and we at once perform some boring ritual that distracts our minds whenever they present us with a wrong that would otherwise need to be forgiven, we find that within weeks our lazy minds will re-program themselves and just stop bothering. Then we no longer care if someone steals from us or nearly forces us off the road. And as we get past even the need to forgive, our natural love and affinity for our neighbor starts on its own to bud and blossom. And then it abundantly thrives!

Two decades have passed since I first realized that the Gospel words of Jesus prove He is probably an aspect of the genuine Godhead. I have spent the intervening time in researching, teaching, and trying to ever better understand and use the Gospel teachings in the ways that Jesus wants us to use them. At first, I was my own guinea pig. And with prompting from Thomas, I had amazing results! So then I wrote a book about what I had been learning in order to let others try it out. What I hear from readers suggests that they are having similar results; but the key to making this program work well is probably going to be for groups of seekers to help and encourage one another. And that will come soon. For now, though, let’s talk about how we can better apply to our daily lives the deeply transformative love that God wants all of us to be learning now. And let’s begin next week with what might be our greatest human challenge….

Can we find a friend so faithful
Who will all our sorrows share?
Jesus knows our every weakness;
Take it to the Lord in prayer.
– Joseph M. Scriven (1819-1886), from “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” (1855)

Kissing babies photo credit: pruzhevskaya.photo <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/153178094@N04/33440138791″>IMG_4364</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

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The Love That Jesus Taught

Posted on November 14, 2020November 15, 2020 by Roberta Grimes

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>

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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>

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What Does God Want? (Part V)

Posted on November 7, 2020November 8, 2020 by Roberta Grimes

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>

What Does God Want? (Part IV)

Posted on October 31, 2020November 1, 2020 by Roberta Grimes

God has not promised skies always blue,
Flower-strewn pathways all our lives through;
God has not promised sun without rain,
Joy without sorrow, peace without pain.
– Annie J. Flint (1866-1932), from “What God Has Promised” (before 1902)

Jesus was not the first divine messenger who told us what God actually wants. Nor was He the first to tell us God doesn’t enjoy our religious traditions. There must have been many of these forerunners of Jesus in sharing the Lord’s Gospel truths, but my favorite is Micah of Moresheth, who was one of the “Twelve Minor Prophets” of the Hebrew Bible. Micah lived seven hundred years before Jesus, and he told us even way back then that God doesn’t want our sacrifices. What Micah told us the Godhead wants is amazingly close to what Jesus also has revealed to us; and even so many generations later, his words sing!

“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, Oh 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 6:6-8)

No religion can presume to speak for God. And there is a radical tension between what the Godhead wants and what our various religions demand. Here are the five most important requirements that our religions have imposed on us since deep in our earliest prehistory; and by way of illustration, let’s briefly consider the role these requirements have played in Christianity:

Sacrifices. As Micah says above, all our human-created gods have required that we give them sacrifices before they could forgive us for our human failings. They insisted on money or money equivalents in order to keep the religious fires burning, and some of them have required not just animal and grain sacrifices but even the sacrifice of our children. Christianity is no exception! Many Christian denominations have long demanded that we give the church ten percent of what we earn, and they also require that we claim as our personal act the sacrifice to God of God’s Own Son.
Religious Laws. Every religion has its laws that must be followed, with consequences for our disobedience both here and hereafter. The ancient Hebrew laws were carried forward into Christianity as The Ten Commandments, and also as laws against homosexuality and female extramarital sex, both of which carried the death penalty. The Old Testament even gave us the concept of “sin” as a divinely disfavored status resulting from the breaking of religious laws. Christianity developed from there the notion that we are all “sinners” who must confess and do penance, and who risk burning in hell forever unless we get the religion’s dispensation.
Required Beliefs. All religions insist that we believe a great many specific things. At a minimum, we must affirm that there is a deity with certain characteristics, and that all the religion’s stories are true. We call these required beliefs “dogmas.” For example, all Christians must affirm the Judeo-Christian God and the notion that God requires a sacrifice so extreme that we have no way to provide it, so Jesus came to earth to die as our sacrifice to God for our sins. When I married a Catholic and tried to convert, I had trouble with some of the Catholic dogmas; for example, the notion that I was eating and drinking the actual body and blood of Jesus appalled me! The priest who presided over my conversion told me that I would have to “take it on faith” or I could forget about becoming a Catholic. So for my husband’s sake, I did that. For twenty-five years.
Attendance at Rituals. Most religions hold ceremonies where our attendance is required. The Mayan priests insisted that people assemble to watch them carve the hearts out of living victims, and the Christian Inquisition expected attendance at the burning of heretics if we wanted to avoid being suspected of heresy ourselves. Modern Christians are expected to at least baptize their children and attend a religious service or two each week, but we can be glad that many longstanding Christian rituals like confession, penance, and Stations of the Cross have mostly faded as requirements.
Self-identifying Details. Many religions throughout history have insisted that their adherents observe certain public practices, wear certain symbols, and dress in certain ways in order to mark themselves as followers of their preferred religions. Here, too, Christianity has loosened its requirements. But not long ago Catholics couldn’t eat meat on Fridays or even enter a Protestant church. Women in Catholic churches had to cover their heads, and everyone had to make the Sign of the Cross and kneel or stand repeatedly at Mass. Many young Christians of all denominations found it necessary to wear crosses at their necks.

I have of late been told that I must no longer speak against Christianity. My role is just to propose the Lord’s love-based Way as an alternative for those who have outgrown the religion on their own. Thomas tells me that we must at all costs avoid injecting even more negativity into a situation that is already rank with centuries of fear and pain, so our only role must be to build a bridge for lapsed Christians to a new and better way for them to live in love with the genuine Godhead. As a result, in giving you here just a hint of how well Christianity conforms to all five of the longstanding characteristics of every other human-made religion, I have tried to be neutral. Just the facts! It is not up to me to make a case to you, but rather you alone will eventually decide what feels right in your deepest heart, in the silence that you share with God.

All of this comes from Thomas, of course. After I spent the first fifty years of my life as an earnest and devoted Christian, and then Thomas managed my past two decades of painfully falling through floor after floor of disillusionment, I must now renounce every negative thought. I feel as if I have been cast out and abandoned by the greatest love there is! But I am not to sneak into churches at night and vengefully break all the crockery. I am only to make you aware that the Jesus that you love as much as I love Him is more alive than ever for us now. And He is waiting for us just beyond the church door.

I want to share with you the fact that what we talk about here is apparently part of a larger movement that is bent on rescuing disaffected Christians. I may be wrong, but it looks divinely inspired to me! There are some ardent Christian leaders who have felt led from the religion they once loved and into a closer relationship with God, and some of them are now writing about it. My favorite of these spiritual pioneers is Keith Giles, who is a former minister now often published on the liberal Christian website Patheos.com. I haven’t yet read his books, but from his articles I find Keith to be a brilliant and highly spiritual man who shares a somewhat different message from the one that Thomas is giving to me, but one that still is consistent with the truth. Keith’s message will better appeal to people who are falling away from the religion and yearning for a truer relationship with God, but who do not feel ready to altogether abandon the religion they still love.

So the genuine Godhead in the person of Jesus assures us that God wants simply this:

Loving and Forgiving are God’s Only Laws

Strictly Following the Teachings of Jesus Will Transform Our Minds

The Teachings of Jesus Must Not be Incorporated Into Any Religion

We May Continue to Question and to Learn

Please read again that list of the five requirements imposed on us by our religions. Know that every one of these requirements that date back for thousands of years is now optional for you forevermore! If you have a printer handy, and if doing it feels right, you might even print out this week’s post. Then you can give yourself the gift of crossing out every one of the five demands made by Christianity that are set forth above. Or if just doing that doesn’t feel like enough, you can find a black marker and obliterate them. You can light a match and watch them burn. Or if you aren’t given to that level of drama, you can just sit with knowing that you have God’s invitation, delivered to us by Jesus Himself as a direct emissary from the Godhead, to cross the bridge that leads away from religions and into spiritual freedom. In your own way. In your own time. Thomas wrote during his famous incarnation that “The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.” And my dear Thomas wants us to know now that this sovereign truth applies even more to our spiritual life than it does to our political life! So you can move beyond Christianity in your own way and time. Or not. Your liberty is complete. And eventually you may decide to embrace with joy an ever more perfect relationship with the Godhead as Jesus sets it forth in His Gospels. It may indeed be time for some of us to embark upon following the Lord’s Way! But how will that look? How will it feel? We cannot yet know. Although perhaps we can guess….

But God has promised strength for the day,
Rest for the labor, light for the way,
Grace for the trials, help from above,
Unfailing kindness, undying love.
– Annie J. Flint (1866-1932), from “What God Has Promised” (before 1902)

Yellowstone bridge photo credit: nixter <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/12097621@N00/50082896026″>Golden Gate Canyon Yellowstone</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Covered bridge photo credit: Ian Sane <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/31246066@N04/50456909031″>Rochester Covered Bridge</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Manhattan bridge photo credit: incognito7nyc <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/143502056@N04/50495098527″>Manhattan Bridge & Lower East Side Manhattan View from Brooklyn Bridge Brooklyn New York City NY P00682 DSC_1374</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Twilight bridge photo credit: Thomas Hawk <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035555243@N01/50123858336″>Tells Me Lies I Love to Believe</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

High bridge photo credit: Magda2Genève <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/183888726@N03/49969476347″>Le pont de la Poya (¡con la “ye”, por favor!)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Stone bridge photo credit: Marco Trovò <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/68322598@N07/50175895017″>Bohinj – The bridge over the lake</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Roberta Grimes

Author: Roberta Grimes