Author: Roberta Grimes

Sermon on the Mount (Part I)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree
There will be an answer, let it be
For though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see
There will be an answer, let it be
– Paul McCartney, from “Let It Be” (1970)

The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount is the beautiful center and sum of His transformative teachings. It fills three chapters of the Book of Matthew, but it seems to be only Chapter Five that causes people trouble. Their problem is in part the persistence over centuries of an archaic word-choice, and in part the intrusion of Christian dogmas that came along a few centuries later. The start of Matthew’s Chapter 5 is the Beatitudes, where Jesus seems to be requiring us to adhere to rules for living that would be even stricter than all those Old Testament laws that He is replacing with God’s Law of Love. Worse, He seems to be telling us that unless we have been blessed with certain personal characteristics, for us to achieve much spiritual progress probably won’t be possible. To believe the literal words of the Beatitudes in an English translation is to despair! I think, though, that what Jesus really means to do here is to complete the process of freeing us from religious rules. He is making our rapid spiritual growth even easier to attain. And He does it in the Beatitudes in a beautiful, wise, and powerful way.

The key to understanding the Beatitudes is to know that transformation cannot be accomplished with rules, no matter how well we follow them. At best, rules can only shape our behavior, forming new habits through repetition; but since rules must be enforced through fear, once the fear is gone the habit degrades. No behavioral rule can transform you spiritually, even if you follow it for your whole life. Transformation must first happen within! If it is to be lasting, the behavior mandated by any rule can be nothing more than the fruit of your wondrous internal spiritual transformation.

Let’s first read the Beatitudes without comment, enjoying the flow of the words; and then let’s consider how each of the Lord’s statements here relates to His overall message:

“When Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on the mountain; and after He sat down, His disciples came to Him. He opened His mouth and began to teach them, saying,

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

‘Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.

‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

‘Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

‘Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you’” (MT 5:1-12).

The word “beatitudes” means “supreme blessings.” These exalted characteristics therefore seem to many English speakers to be rare and unmerited gifts. As I began to write this week’s post, I discussed the Beatitudes with a knowledgeable friend who was dismissive of them. She said, “If you are not naturally ‘pure in heart’, Jesus is saying you won’t get to see God.” It does look as if Jesus is ordering us to behave in certain exalted ways that seem so unattainable that we despair of ever measuring up. But Jesus is not insisting here that we meet arbitrary, impossible standards. Instead, He is giving us in the Beatitudes a list of the primary characteristics of those who have completed their earthly spiritual development. He is giving us a track to run on. The Greek word that was long ago first translated as “blessed” could also mean “fortunate,” “rich,” or even just “happy.” So none of the characteristics listed in the Beatitudes should be seen as a mere unmerited “blessing.” They are all earned spiritual wealth that can be attained by anyone. He says elsewhere in His Sermon on the Mount, “You will know them by their fruits” (MT 7:16). And here He actually lists the fruits of genuine spiritual growth. The Beatitudes together describe the wondrous condition of those who have faithfully followed the Lord’s teachings and raised their personal consciousness vibrations to the point where by the end of this earth-lifetime they are ready to enter the kingdom of God.

Jesus has given us the method. Now here He gives us the measuring-stick.

Let’s look at each of these stated characteristics specifically. The words in parentheses are translation alternatives that have been suggested in Biblical footnotes:

When Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on the mountain (or hill); and after He sat down, His disciples came to Him. He opened His mouth and began to teach them, saying,

  • “Blessed (or fortunate, or rich, or happy) are the poor in spirit (or those not spiritually arrogant), for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” It is almost a defining characteristic of those who are spiritually advanced that they are modest and peaceful. For example, rather than arguing, they will withdraw, in part because they find interacting with angry people to be unbearably stressful.
  • “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” What greater comfort for mourners can there be than the certainty that our loved ones never die? And those who are more spiritually advanced find it easier to trust the Godhead enough that with just a bit of evidence they can readily defeat their fear of death.
  • “Blessed are the gentle (or humble, or meek), for they shall inherit the earth.” Being gentle and humble defines everyone who is more spiritually advanced. And when at last we bring the kingdom of God on earth – which is what Jesus says is His goal – then the meek will indeed inherit the earth!
  • “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” This is the Lord’s universal invitation to grow spiritually, which also is expressed somewhat differently later on in His Sermon on the Mount where He says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8).
  • “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” A grounding theme of the Lord’s teachings is Mercy, which He often demonstrates. A key characteristic of those who are more spiritually advanced is their universal compassion for others.
  • “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” The whole process of spiritual growth consists in rooting out everything about ourselves that is not-God, so we can spiritually raise ourselves enough to approach the vibratory level of the Godhead.
  • “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” We have talked about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as exemplars of how dramatic a force for good in the world their radical kind of peacemaking can be in the face of otherwise overwhelming force.
  • “Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Those who are spiritually advanced to the level of the kingdom of God are able to stand fast in the truth, despite even brutal persecution.
  • “Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (MT 5:1-12). How would it feel to be persecuted for defending the Gospel words of Jesus? By what was probably no coincidence, I got a first taste of how it would feel this past Thursday.

On Thursday morning someone pointed me to a Christian forum where my work was under discussion. A newcomer there had naively said, “Hello, My name is Jason, and I am new here. Recently, I was forwarded a video of Roberta Grimes, a business attorney in the US who also studied early Christian history. I don’t know if I should post the link of her YouTube videos here but you can do a search of her name on YouTube and find her videos. My question is, what do you think about her videos? Any thoughts?” He had received a few answers when I read the thread. The one I liked best was, “I watched some of her videos after your initial post. In some ways, she reminds me of Thomas Jefferson and Tolstoy. She wants us to embrace the moral teachings of Jesus, and reject everything else as a perversion of the institution of ‘Christianity’.” Every other response was from the judgmental perspective of traditional Christian dogmas. Not one of them considered the possibility that Jesus might have had a different agenda from the fear-based human ideas of people who lived more recently than He did. Then finally came the response that made me smile. Someone’s whole comment was, “She is a whack job.”

Wow! That last Beatitude may be the hardest to attain, since it requires that someone else take the trouble of insulting you because you stand up for Jesus. And being called a “whack job” for the Lord could be considered persecution, wouldn’t you say?  Perhaps it is time to talk about what some of us might be asked to endure as we risk sharing the Gospel truths. First, though, we will tackle the beautiful and comforting balance of His Sermon on the Mount….

 

And when the night is cloudy there is still a light that shines on me
Shine until tomorrow, let it be
I wake up to the sound of music, Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be
Let it be, let it be, let it be, yeah, let it be
There will be an answer, let it be
– Paul McCartney, from “Let It Be” (1970)

 

Southern manor veranda photo credit: Julie Haines
Garden w/bench photo credit: Onasill ~ Bill Badzo – 70M – Views <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7156765@N05/44614389785″>Toronto Ontario – Canada – Allan Gardens Conservatory – Toronto Tropical Garden –   Sitting Area – Cluster of Flowers</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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Spring garden photo credit: Ken Mattison <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/69421573@N08/48107671517″>Spring Color Splash</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Spring flowers photo credit: Onasill ~ Bill – 73 Million <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7156765@N05/31135525648″>Toronto Ontario ~ Canada ~ Edwards Botanical Gardens ~ Flower Cluster</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Roses and door photo credit: Melinda Young Stuart <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/92033577@N00/26062742663″>A Night in the Country</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

This Changes Everything

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I release and I let go,
I let the Spirit run my life.
And my heart is open wide,
Yes I’m only here for God.
                   – Michael Beckwith & Rickie Byars, from “I Release” (1993)

Anatomically modern humans have existed for barely two hundred thousand years. For nearly all that time, we had no more awareness of why we are here or what is going on than your cat has as it purrs in your lap, so the fact that in just the past two decades our knowledge of how reality works has advanced so much is tremendous news! We now know that our species is a vehicle by means of which the vast, eternal Mind that continuously manifests this universe can grow spiritually by experiencing negativity. And with that insight, we can look back at the long sweep of human history and marvel at what we have accomplished despite the fact that we have always been clueless.

Technologically and culturally, we have advanced by light-years! But we have made almost no spiritual progress. We each have struggled toward learning to choose love over fear and anger, feeling drawn toward love but as oblivious about the reason why as are the bugs that blindly mob your back-porch light. We have advanced in stumbles through many earth-lifetimes until eventually we achieved enough spiritual growth to complete our development in what we call the afterlife. Then, after eons, those who were most successful at elevating their spiritual vibrations grew to become the perfected beings who oversee our spiritual development today.

This has been how the process of spiritual growth has worked for all of human history. Whether our technology under development was the Clovis Point or nuclear fusion; whether culturally we were creating the first alphabet or the U.S. Constitution; and whether our view of God was the Canaanites’ Moloch, the Hebrews’ Yahweh, or the modern Christian God, there was little awareness of our spiritual nature in anything that human beings ever did.

Now all of that is changing. Fast! For the first time in two hundred thousand years, living people are being given insights sufficient to help us achieve whole leaps of amazing understanding. We are being given to know not only what we are and why we are here, but also what and where “here” is; we are being handed depths and insights that the prophets of yore could only glimpse. We are told that we are being helped to achieve this sudden elevation in our awareness because our assistance is needed now to raise the spiritual vibrations of a planet that has sunk so deep into negativity that its very survival is at stake.

The plain fact is that without the divine insights that we are being given now, we would know no more about reality today than we did ten thousand years ago. Oh, our technological advancements are flashy; our cultural developments enrich our lives; and the God we have created in an effort to satisfy the core human need to feel closer to our Source seems to have gentled over the millennia. But the scientific community’s nonsensical beliefs that matter is solid and consciousness is an artifact of our brains have handicapped our scientific progress for millennia. In contravention of scientists’ false beliefs, we have lately learned conclusively that you and I are eternal beings in a fundamentally non–material reality. We think of this as big spiritual news, and hopefully it will be the source of many great personal transformations! But it is a great deal more than that.

In fact, this changes everything.

We have been talking about building The Lord’s Way, and in that area the transformation will be especially profound. But the extent to which every aspect of human life is going to be transformed once our deeper understanding of reality is more broadly known deserves at least a moment’s attention. Consider:

  • Scientific Transformation. Quantum mechanics transformed physics a century ago, and it has fostered an explosion of technological progress. But that was just the start! The only barrier to our using what we have learned to universally uplift the world is the fact that mainstream science is still stuck with its materialist dogma. To this day, every working scientist is required to hold as true some absurd ideas that can now be demonstrated to be false. Scientists are required to believe that matter is fundamental, when in fact it is consciousness that is fundamental and gives rise to matter. Oops! Every scientific conclusion drawn in the past few hundred years is going to need to be re-examined in light of the fact that consciousness is primary. But that will turn out to be a good thing! As the great polymath Nikola Tesla said a century ago, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
  • Cultural Transformation. For everyone living on earth to know as part of our daily reality that all human minds are eternal will mean that most of humanity will begin to live in an eternal frame. I have been teaching these truths for a decade now, so I have seen the transformations that happen in people as they come to know for certain that they are never going to die. They stop seeing their lives as brief and private. Amazingly, wealth and possessions matter less, and better understanding the wonders of our genuine reality starts to matter much more. And becoming whatever they see as better people feels worth doing to those who know they are building the kind of wealth that is going to be theirs forever. In a summer of American rioting that is further depressing the earth’s consciousness vibrations, the improvement in every aspect of our lives that will come when people bent on doing harm realize how much they are harming themselves on an eternal scale is a joy to contemplate!

But the coming transformations will be greatest of all for those who feel called to create the movement that Jesus came to earth to begin. Some have asked why we can’t just take a simplified version of Christianity and add to it an intensive study and practice of the teachings of Jesus. Wouldn’t that be enough?

This sort of gentling of Christianity has been attempted before. Martin Luther tried to improve the religion early in the sixteenth century; and Catholic leaders have held all of twenty-one ecumenical councils, from First Nicaea in 325 through Vatican II in the nineteen-sixties. These were just the biggest attempts at Christian reform! Each of the forty-thousand-odd versions of Christianity extant today was an attempt at improving on the religion, and each now remains forever frozen into the shape those well-meaning reformers gave to it. A decade ago, the number of Christian denominations extant was reported to be just ten thousand or so, and the number of practicing Christians in the world has hardly changed at all in that time. So, no, for us to make yet another attempt to fix Christianity would be just one more partway measure that would even further fracture our already heavily fragmented religion.

The movement Jesus tells us in the Gospels that He came to earth to begin bears no resemblance to Christianity. So on a spiritual level, this really does change everything! Let’s look briefly at some of the primary characteristics of the Lord’s Way:

  • The only commandment is God’s Law of Love. What must most of all distinguish the followers of Jesus from all the rest of the world is that we have one setting and one purpose. All we ever do is love. Whatever the question, love is the answer! We will spend the next few weeks considering just how radical a commandment the Lord’s Law of Love really is!
  • There is no requirement that we take anything “on faith.” The core reason why Christianity is losing followers now is that those reared in the faith stop believing. But the Lord’s Way has no dogmas, no doctrines that must be taken on faith, so everyone on earth can choose The Way without compromise.
  • There will be no conflict with a post-materialist science. We are used to thinking of science and Christianity as incompatible opposites; but once we are free of both Christian and materialist dogmas, science and the Lord’s teaching can not only coexist, but they actually will work together in ever greater service to humankind.
  • There is no concept of “sin.” Jesus mentions sin, but He uses the word to mean falling short of one’s own best aspirations. Never does He talk about sin as a punishable failure to obey God’s laws.
  • We never judge. The biggest complaint I hear about Christians is that they are so cliquish and judgmental. I have experienced it too! If you don’t believe what you are supposed to believe and say what you are supposed to say, you get the side-eye. But Jesus tells us our task is to spread His teachings; it will be up to Him to work on people’s hearts. There can be no crime severe enough to ever cause the Lord’s followers to withdraw their unconditional love, or even to presume to lecture anyone.

This really does change everything! Let’s look next week at just how deeply the followers of The Way are being called to demonstrate the Lord’s love to the world.

No more struggle, no more strife,
With my faith I see the light.
I am free in the Spirit,
Yes I’m only here for God.
– Michael Beckwith & Rickie Byars, from “I Release” (1993)

 

Neanderthal in a suit photo credit: Clemens Vasters <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7489441@N06/23028054391″>Neanderthal Museum</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Finding the Way

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“Everyone who hears these words of Mine
and acts on them may be compared to a wise man
who built his house on the rock.
And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew
and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall,
for it had been founded on the rock.”
– Jesus, from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 7, Verses 24-25

One thing that strikes you when you read the Bible from Genesis through Revelation is that Jesus speaks to us as a modern man. In contrast, the Old Testament feels ancient! Parts of it are beautiful, true, but still it all seems pat and religious, just old ideas and divine edicts that no longer seem to fit us well. So I have been freshly astonished each time I have left the Book of Malachi and begun to read the Gospel of Matthew. We are suddenly in the modern world! Jesus is amazingly timely, speaking in simple and comfortable terms and seeming almost to be answering questions as soon as they occur to us. He speaks from the timeless Godhead. After the Gospel of John come The Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s Epistles, books not so ancient as the Old Testament but still seeming deep in the long-ago. The difference between the rest of the Bible and those four Gospels is the difference between reading dusty manuscripts and watching breaking news on a flat-screen TV.

Jesus speaks to us directly. Today. You have the sense, too, that people who read the Gospels two thousand years from now will find in them the same living Friend Who speaks in their own language. Jesus lives! He is alive in the present in a way in which no other historical or religious figure can be said to be alive. And as we freshly read the Gospels, we find that He told us two thousand years ago precisely what He wants from us now. Last week Thomas pulled from the Lord’s teachings four characteristics of His modern Way:

  • The Way is complete at the Lord’s Resurrection.
  • The Way is not a religion, so it has no prophets and no clergy.
  • The Way has no dogmas and no traditions.
  • The Way uses the Lord’s teachings to help each individual follower achieve real spiritual growth.

This gives us a great beginning, but we need a lot more information! Let’s ask Jesus if He will share with us more about what He has in mind as we begin to implement His Way:

  • His teachings must not be added to or blended with any other set of teachings. They are not to be folded into Judaism, nor even read together with the Psalms and the Prophets! He says, “But no one puts a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and a worse tear results. 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 9:16-17). So not only must our message be just the Lord’s words prior to His Resurrection, but we also must not create a mess of burst skins and spilled wine by attempting to incorporate into the Lord’s Way anything that was said before His birth.
  • His teachings are to be shared not as part of a religion, but as a separate line of wisdom. He wants the clerics of His day to continue to lead their flocks in their ancestral religion, while at the same time they also offer His teachings as a new divine revelation. He says, “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). In the same way, Thomas tells us that the Way must be offered to all, with no thought of wanting anyone ever to leave an existing religion. Christians, Muslims, Jews, and others will find the Lord’s teachings compatible with whatever are their existing beliefs. Thomas tells me it will be very important that we never speak against any religion, but instead our whole task is to spiritually support the adherents of every religion on earth by demonstrating and broadly sharing the Lord’s Way.
  • His teachings require spiritual preparation if they are to bear fruit in listeners’ hearts. He explains the parable of the sower (LK 8:4-8) by demonstrating that unless people are prepared on a spiritual level to hear His teachings, they won’t be able to follow them. He says, “The seed is the word of God. Those beside the road are those who have heard; then a demon comes and takes away the word from their heart, so that they will not believe. … Those on the rocky soil are those who, when they hear, receive the word with joy; but they have no firm root, so they believe for a while but in time of temptation fall away. The seed which fell among the thorns, these are the ones who have heard, and as they go on their way they are choked with worries and riches and pleasures of this life, and bring no fruit to maturity. But the seed in the good soil, these are the ones who have heard the word in an honest and good heart, and hold it fast, and bear fruit in abundance” (LK 8:11-15).
  • His teachings are meant to spread not from any spiritual leader, but naturally in the human community. This is crucially important to Jesus! And it is yet more evidence of the Lord’s aversion to religious leaders. He says, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field; and this is smaller than all other seeds, but when it is full grown, it is larger than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.” He spoke another parable to them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened” (MT 13:31-33). This sort of gradual, organic, seeping growth is not possible for a traditional religion, where each convert must learn new ideas and simply accept them all on faith. It is only genuine divine wisdom that places no restraints upon our minds, but just gives us glorious and timeless ideas that can comfortably grow in our hearts.
  • His teachings work internally on each of us and at the level of Spirit. Jesus all but tells us what we know now to be true, which is that there is one Mind of which every human mind is a part. He says, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life” (JN 6:63). “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).
  • Spiritual humility is essential! The temptation toward smugness and self-importance is ever-present for people inspired to do something big, so the Lord keeps beating our egos down. He says, “Many who are first will be last, and the last, first” (MK 10:31). “The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled; and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted” (MT 23:11-12). “Whoever receives this child in My name receives Me, and whoever receives Me receives Him who sent Me; for the one who is least among all of you, this is the one who is great” (LK 9:48). In my experience, raising your personal vibration serves to lessen the ego’s hold, so it makes you naturally gentler and milder. And that is a very good thing! When Jesus tells us that to enter the kingdom of God we must become like a little child, He is giving us a basic law of spiritual physics. He says, “Permit the children to come to Me; do not hinder them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all” (MK 10:14-15).
  • He intends that those who follow Him will teach not so much by lecturing as by example. And it is a great deal harder to live the Way than it is to simply try to teach it! But to live it for all the world to see is our divinely mandated task. He says, “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven” (MT 5:13-16).
  • There can be nothing about the sharing of The Way that makes these teachings feel difficult. Religions demand a lot from us! But The Way is nothing like a religion. Instead, it is a sweet and love-filled plan for joyfully living life on earth, and it works whether or not you practice any religion. Jesus says, “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).

So now you see how different the Christian religion is from what the Lord has been telling us all along that He has in mind! And you also can see that what He asked of us while He was living on the earth can just as easily be our charge today. Indeed, it may be only in the modern world that His Way can actually transform the world! Two thousand years ago, all He could do was to set His disciples on the open road with a warning to be careful (MT 10:16-20) as they followed His directive to “make disciples of all the nations … teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (MT 28:19-20). Lifting the consciousness vibrations of the world in such a gradual way would likely have taken until “the end of the age,” even if they had at the time truly understood what His charge was to them!

Jesus is with us still today, as alive for us now as He ever has been. He is calling on us to use the power of all our twenty-first-century tools to deliver to humankind His most essential messages. The kingdom of God is at hand! All it needs now is for those of us who have awakened to His eternal truths to make teaching and living The Way our priority….

“Everyone who hears these words of Mine
and does not act on them
will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.
The rain fell, and the floods came,
and the winds blew and slammed against that house;
and it fell—and great was its fall.”
– Jesus, from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 7, Verses 26-27

 

Face of Jesus photo credit: Thomas Hawk <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035555243@N01/16048967919″>Little Ones to Him Belong</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Forgiven puzzle photo credit: Puzzler4879 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/24882165@N07/25716217690″>”Forgiven” Happy Easter to All!</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Sharing the Truth

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Where there is offence, let me bring pardon.
Where there is discord, let me bring union.
Where there is error, let me bring truth.
– attributed to St. Francis of Assisi (c.1182-1226), from “Peace Prayer”

After having my first experience of light at the age of eight, I grew up as a devout Christian. I was going to adult church at ten and reading the Bible daily when I was twelve. My college major was early Christian history. When I married I became an ardent Catholic, but all the while I continued my decades-long hobby of researching what comes after death. And once I was sure the afterlife is real, I put a lot of follow-up effort into seeking any evidence at all that what Christians believe is true. My inevitable crisis of faith landed with a thud when I was in my fifties. Not only had I found no evidence that Jesus actually died for our sins, but I had found abundant and consistent evidence that such a thing is impossible. The genuine Godhead is nothing like the cranky and judgmental Christian God that I had believed in and feared since childhood, and the afterlife turns out to be far more glorious than anything I had ever imagined. Everyone goes to the same afterlife. Everyone is forgiven and perfectly loved!

The moment when I first accepted the fact that the Gospel words of Jesus agree with what the dead have been telling us, but Christianity has nothing to do with Jesus, was a hinge in my life. It took me years to come to terms with it. I was mourning the religion I had so much loved while I sought a way to shield and vindicate Jesus. I went through a period, too, when I was struggling to understand how a perfectly loving God could have allowed Christianity to betray us this way. Had it all been part of some gigantic plan so clever that no human mind could comprehend it? I didn’t have the right to ignore my discovery, but I didn’t have the right to trumpet it either, so in the end I settled for making it just the topic of an Appendix to most of my Fun books. When Thomas told me it was time for us to write Liberating Jesus, I felt flat unworthy to speak for the Lord until Thomas appeared to me through a medium in 2015 and insisted that I do it anyway. In 2017 he inspired me to write The Fun of Loving Jesus – Embracing the Christianity that Jesus Taught, but then he had me put that book aside until some future day when the time will be right. In recent years I have done a great deal of work under his guidance, but with no clear idea of where this work is taking us.

And I have been fretting about the rapid decline of my childhood religion. Since I first realized that my beloved Christianity actually has nothing to do with Jesus, I have gone through all the stages of grief as they are generally listed: shock, denial, guilt, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. For years I worried that Christianity was dying so rapidly that I had to do something big – and fast! – to separate the genuine historical Jesus from that old-time religion in the public mind. We had to save our precious Baby from being thrown out with the bathwater! But whenever I thought about the possibility that saving Jesus might be up to me, I floundered. How do you even begin such a task? Eventually I came to suspect that we might be supposed to emulate the spiritual movement of the Lord’s first followers, the persecuted but joyous movement of a hundred different perspectives that its first-century adherents called “The Way.” But Thomas kept telling me to do nothing big. The time wasn’t right, and neither were my ideas. Instead of giving me a clear direction, he week after week gave me pieces of his thinking to share with you here as he built a base for our eventual deeper understanding.

And now, quite unexpectedly, he tells me it is time to begin our work.

Thomas guides me, but he serves the Godhead. And the individual tasks that millions of us volunteered before birth to undertake with the assistance and direction of our guides are being carried out in close coordination with a heavenly host of the guides of millions of God’s other minions on earth. There is nothing being done in this field now that is not of great importance! But there is no one bit that is more important than any other servant’s part. Thomas reminds me now that when I was going through my writing-bad-poetry phase at twelve, I channeled a poem that was something about sticking to my work, not wondering why I was doing it or what the end would be, but trusting that there was a point to it all and eventually I would know what it was. That poem’s last line was something like, “And when it all is plain and true, you’ll see the little puzzle-piece that was your work and joy.” He tells me that all the previous years of my life have been spent in preparation, and now l am ready to begin to do what I agreed before birth would be my little part of the great work of elevating this planet’s consciousness vibrations.

Thomas tells me that our particular aspect of God’s work is to serve disaffected Christians. I have been hearing from so many! Typically they are in their fifties or older, and most of them have advanced spiritually to the point where they recoil in horror from the most fear-inducing Christian dogmas. And yet, they still love Jesus! They are eager for a closer walk with the Lord. Thomas tells me that he and I volunteered  to spend decades in preparation, and then in the fullness of time to offer spiritual care to the Lord’s strayed sheep (MT 15:24). For Jesus, the good shepherd is a powerful model. He says, “What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open pasture and go after the one which is lost until he finds it?” (LK 15:4). And, “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep. … I know My own and My own know Me, even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father … (And) I have other sheep, which are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will hear My voice; and they will become one flock with one shepherd” (JN 10:11-16).

Thomas tells me that our first task is to attack and destroy the fear of death. Fear of death is the one great fear, to the point where every lesser fear can be seen at its core to be a fear of death; so once we no longer fear death, we no longer fear anything. Jesus said, “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). Long ago I asked, and over fifty years I have been given the truth abundantly. Now Thomas has some exciting ideas about how we can efficiently teach the truth about reality and eternal life online! We’ll be saying more about this soon.

As we are easing people’s fear of death, Thomas intends that we will quietly launch a new Christian denomination. He wants to call it Christianity as a further assurance to disaffected Christians, but as is true of all the forty-thousand-odd other denominations of Christianity, it will have its own name. We will call it “The Way.” As he says, this will be the only Christian denomination that is centered on the Lord and nothing else, so if any mode of thinking should bear the honored name of Christianity, it is this one! And he has given me a few first details:

  • The Way is complete at the Lord’s Resurrection. It knows nothing that has happened since that day. So it offers no ideas beyond the genuine Gospel teachings of Jesus insofar as He leads us to understand them, and no dogmas or articles of faith at all. Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32). In The Way, we take Him at His literal word!
  • The Way is not a religion, so it has no prophets and no clergy. When you read what Jesus said about religions, you cannot help but suspect that one of His purposes in coming to earth was to bring an end to all religions and teach us to relate to God individually. He said, “Beware of the false prophets … You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? … A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. …  So then, you will know them by their fruits” (MT 7:15-20). And He said, “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.  But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:5-6).
  • The Way has no dogmas and no traditions. The Lord despised religious traditions! 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).
  • The Way uses the Lord’s teachings to help each individual follower achieve real spiritual growth. This is a fellowship of people striving to live the Lord’s wisdom ever more completely, helping one another to grow spiritually, and demonstrating love and peace to the world. The fact that all religions are fear-based was the Lord’s greatest complaint against them! He said, “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (MT 23:13). Now at last a group of people who love and trust the Lord completely can demonstrate what is possible when His followers make His teachings the base of their lives.

I had been wondering how we might hold spiritual services without any fear-based religious trappings, but my beautiful friend Sandra Champlain is doing it now. She hosts a weekly Sunday gathering online that “celebrates life and the afterlife,” and it happily grows in attendance each week. Here is the link for Sunday, July 26th, in case you might like to drop in.

How can we live a Christianity that is based entirely in the words of the Lord? Let’s talk about that next week. It is time for all the world to take the Lord Jesus at His literal Word!

O Master, let me not seek so much to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that one receives, it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in pardoning that one is pardoned.
It is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.
             – attributed to St. Francis of Assisi (c.1182-1226), from “Peace Prayer”

 

Woods road with sunlight photo credit: Grotevriendelijkereus <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/127554398@N02/49977986907″>Tilburg – Oude Rielse Baan</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Snowy road photo credit: sniggie <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/16943730@N00/49610690846″>Trail through the woods</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Autumn road photo credit: Kerri Lee Smith <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/77654185@N07/44843117555″>Autumn in Lawrenceville (2 of 2)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Bright woods road photo credit: DrQ_Emilian <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/84945604@N02/43760174210″>If woods told stories</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Leaning tree photo credit: yooperann <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/99923398@N00/14209072298″>Sunlit path</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Road to sunlight photo credit: DrQ_Emilian <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/84945604@N02/39741999604″>Path through the Woods</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Living the Truth

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.
Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be!
With God as our Father, brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my brother in perfect harmony.
– Jill Jackson-Miller (1913-1995) & Sy Miller (1908-1971), from “Let There Be Peace on Earth” (1955)

Fifty years ago I had no idea that in trying to understand my experiences of light I was bucking thousands of years of wisdom that mandated how we must study the world. A strict division between the investigation of what is material and the contemplation of what is not material goes back as far as Plato and Aristotle. And by the dawn of the twentieth century, that division was being so strictly enforced that there was in fact no recognized way to investigate any non-material phenomenon. Scientific inquiry was based upon “the fundamental dogma of materialism,” so science was a closed belief-system which assumed that everything that exists is material. And religions cared little about investigating anything, but instead they treasured their various longstanding and often nonsensical beliefs.

In fact, there has not been for thousands of years any accepted way to conduct any kind of open-minded inquiry. Everything – including mainstream science – has been just another dogma-based belief-system. And this materialist limitation is still being enforced by the scientific community, although it is being seen more and more to have been retarding scientific progress. In particular, it is becoming clear that every effort to understand consciousness and the origins of life will come to nothing until the scientific gatekeepers abandon their materialist obsession.

But where working scientists fear to tread, this clueless fool was glad to rush in. And since I did not for decades imagine that I was doing this research for anyone but myself, I defied all research conventions and considered no potential source of information to be out of bounds. In particular, I used the scientific literature, abundant communications from the dead, and an historical study of the Christian Gospels as equally-weighted sources of evidence. I am skeptical and curious by nature, so I was as rigorous in pursuing my peculiar hobby as any real scientist could have been; and for decades I had no idea that what I was doing was scientific heresy.

My unorthodox method of researching the afterlife was the only one that could have worked. The teachings of Jesus are profoundly reinforced by, and in turn they reinforce, all that the dead have long been telling us; and the principles of quantum mechanics help them both to explain where, when, and how it all happens. Each separate source of information both confirms and further fleshes out the others. The extent of the deep coherence that exists across such very different sources of truth is amazing! Everything I have ever turned up fits smoothly together with everything else to build a single glorious solution to the gigantic puzzle that is all of reality. My very peculiar project has been successful beyond my wildest dreams! Soon after the turn of this century, for the first time in human history I could demonstrate that our lives are eternal, explain where and how that eternity happens, and even make sense of the science behind it.

But for years more I was second-guessing myself. If you knew that you were very likely the only person in history who ever had made some big discovery, you would be second-guessing, too! I was feeling tugged to begin to share what I had learned, so in 2005 I started and briefly maintained a website called jesusisright.com. Obviously that was the wrong approach, but in blogging there for a couple of years and fielding public comments I was toughening myself so we could really go public.

By the time The Fun of Dying was published in September of 2010, I had been made aware that you cannot mix quantum physics with the teachings of Jesus and expect to be taken seriously. So I was then deep into my belligerent phase. I had proven that the religious and scientific emperors are both buck-naked! When you are the only person on earth who has done something so far beyond the pale that everyone knows that it cannot be done, and your error has produced abundant truths beyond anybody’s wildest dreams, you cannot resist the urge to take a victory lap. Since by 2010 most working scientists knew that matter is not actually solid, I saw myself as beating them over the head with the fact that their materialist dogma makes doing much genuine science impossible. After all, even Albert Einstein said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” He also said, “It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing — a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind.” And the great polymath Nikola Tesla said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

For years I have been randomly jabbing at mainstream science’s foolishness, but I have saved my worst attacks for the very much richer target that is mainstream Christianity. It isn’t only one Christian dogma that can now be shown to be in error, but it is all of them! Even the core Christian teaching that Jesus died to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins can be so easily refuted now. Just please read the Bible, Christian folks! Jesus said before the crucifixion, “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 Jesus tells us He doesn’t judge us, either. And please read all those century-old communications from the dead, where they consistently say that everyone goes to the same afterlife. There is no religion in the afterlife, no judgment by anyone but ourselves, and the death of Jesus on the cross has never made an afterlife difference for a single human being. Constantine’s Christianity is wrong! So there!

I have long felt justified in treating Christianity so shabbily. The religion that I still love has always ignored the Lord’s precious teachings while it spreads false ideas that are so fear-based they are contributing to the world’s destruction! But then as I wrote with Thomas last week, he made me step back far enough to glimpse the enormity of what is going on and see that God is in control.  It is not up to us to try to save the world, so with joy we can lay that burden down.

In particular, I am being instructed  to stop speaking against traditional Christianity. The reason this new restriction troubles me is not so much that the religion does not sufficiently respect and follow Jesus. That part is entirely the Lord’s call.  But Christianity as it is presently practiced is so deeply based in fear that all forty-thousand-odd versions of it are feeding the rampant negativity that is demonstrably taking over the world! Thomas now assures me, however, that worrying about negativity is another thing that is not up to us. He tells me that the weakening of Christianity is being carried out with loving care and far above our pay grade, the intention being just to soften the religion and open it to change without killing it altogether. What the Lord intends is just a lessening of emphasis on some of the religion’s most fear-based dogmas, and the founding of one further Christian denomination that is based in His teachings alone. A new but familiar denomination that will be a safe and comforting home for more and more Christians as the century continues, and one which Jesus can use as a base as He works to raise the vibrations of humankind and effect the arrival of God’s kingdom on earth.

I had been assuming that the name of Christianity must be left to the highly splintered religion that now bears it. If you don’t hold to any of Christianity’s dogmas, nor trace your beliefs to the Roman Councils, nor even call your movement a religion, do you have a right to say it is a part of Christianity? I had assumed that what we were supposed to help to start was a modern version of what the Lord’s first followers called The Way. Two years ago Thomas even prompted me to write a book called The Fun of Loving Jesus – Embracing the Christianity That Jesus Taught; and then he had me put it aside unpublished. I assume I may have gotten some of it wrong – and perhaps even bungled the title – but I know that at the appropriate moment my devoted friend will help me correct it and oversee the timing of its publication.

But what would a Christian denomination that actually followed the teachings of Jesus even look like? Without all those old, familiar dogmas – baptism, communion, confirmation, confession, the Lord’s sacrifice to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins, the Holy Mass, and all that music – without the rituals, what remains of Christianity? Is it even a religion at all? I don’t know. And Thomas has made it very clear that we are not supposed to guess! We are talking now about a movement to at last bring the kingdom of God on earth in order to save the world from destruction. If there are any higher stakes than these, I cannot imagine them!

Jesus said to His disciples as He sent them out to begin to bring His truths to the world, “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves. But beware of men, for they will hand you over to the courts and scourge you in their synagogues; and you will even be brought before governors and kings for My sake, as a testimony to them and to the Gentiles. But when they hand you over, do not worry about how or what you are to say; for it will be given you in that hour what you are to say. For it is not you who speak, but it is the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you (MT 10:16-20). I take this passage as the Lord’s promise given to us today that if we will trust in His leadership He always will show us what we are to do. He said, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations … teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (MT 28:19-20). Next week we’ll begin to consider what these promises from the Lord really mean….

Let peace begin with me. Let this be the moment now.
With every step I take, let this be my solemn vow:
To take each moment and live each moment in peace eternally!
Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
– Jill Jackson-Miller (1913-1995) & Sy Miller (1908-1971), from “Let There Be Peace on Earth” (1955)

 

Jefferson Memorial photo credit: Bold Frontiers <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82955120@N05/15861284632″>Bokeh Jefferson Memorial</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Cherry blossoms photo credit: John Brighenti <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/94359914@N06/33656199748″>Blossoms on Capitol Hill</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Jefferson memorial distant photo credit: JoshBerglund19 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/79877212@N00/5214374375″>Cherry Blossoms in DC</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Cherry blossoms with Jefferson Memorial photo credit: Geoff Livingston <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/9397412@N06/49689570728″>Epic Cherry Blossoms</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Cherry tree photo credit: Melinda Young Stuart <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/92033577@N00/49720489818″>All-Over Spring</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Blossoms with SCOTUS photo credit: John Brighenti <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/94359914@N06/33656199678″>SCOTUS Surrounded by Blossoms</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Accepting the Truth

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,
He leadeth me beside the still waters, He restoreth my soul.
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.
– Attributed to King David, from Psalm 23 of the Book of Psalms (1000 BCE)

Learning and adopting a whole new way of thinking and living is a very big task! For the past six months we have been laying the ground for a new Christianity that is not based in the Roman councilors who claimed they were being “inspired by God,” even though in fact they were being inspired by the needs of Constantine the Great. And Emperor Constantine’s corrupted version of Christianity has persisted for two thousand years as what Jesus would likely call the fruit of a poisonous tree (MT 7:17-18). Jesus tells us He came to teach us the truth, and those that we used to think were dead have abundantly confirmed that His words are true. Christianity uses Him as a sacrifice, but otherwise He has been sadly ignored by Constantine’s version of Christianity. And we are being called now to introduce to humankind a fresh and eternally pure Christianity that has nothing in common with Constantine’s version but is based in the Gospel teachings of Jesus. So we began this cycle of posts in January by sharing what Jesus tells us in the Gospels about why He came to earth; and we end it now by talking about how our abandoning that false and fear-based version of Christianity and beginning to share with all the world the love-based and non-religious teachings of Jesus will make it possible for us to begin at last to heal this hurting world.

I apologize for the fact that I didn’t know until this morning that we have been building a cycle of information for the past six months! As I have confessed to you, the genuine authors of all that I write are my primary spirit guide and his team. He gives me the titles and the general ideas for each blog post a week or two beforehand, and then he lets me flounder until the day before each post is made. (This can be frustrating! He tells me he is teaching me to write on my own, but I can tell from his tone that I am a slow learner.) I had written an entire post for this weekend which has turned out to be another miss, so I begin again now with Thomas’s help. He chose the 23rd Psalm for our frame, and he asks that we think of those beloved words as having been the Lord’s first Gospel message, delivered a thousand years before His birth. Thomas then reminds us, as Jesus also did, of the words of David’s Psalm 118:42-43:

“Jesus said to them, ‘Did you never read in the Scriptures,

“The stone which the builders rejected,
This became the chief corner stone;
This came about from the Lord,
And it is marvelous in our eyes”?

Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing the fruit of it’” (MT 21:41-43).

When Thomas pointed this passage out, I had gooseflesh. For two thousand years Christians have assumed that they were the inheritors of God’s work that King David had told us would be based on Jesus as its Cornerstone. But is it possible that David spoke those words, and then Jesus later reminded us of them, because in the long fullness of additional time all religious fears would be outgrown, and we would at last actually read and follow the Lord’s Gospel teachings? Then those teachings, which Constantine’s Christianity has ignored, will in this new day become the true Cornerstone? And does this then mean that we who devotedly follow the teachings of the Lord might be granted the gift of cultivating the vine which will at last bear God’s kingdom as its fruit? Is this passage from David that was quoted by Jesus a thousand years later more important than anyone has imagined?

Long before our current cycle of posts began six months ago, I was being shown and I was sharing with you the fact that Christianity is shockingly altogether unrelated to the Gospel words of Jesus. And this is all notwithstanding the fact that Jesus tells us in the Gospels that His teachings are what matters! 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). But to this day, adherents of the Roman version of Christianity consider what the Lord taught us to be nothing more than good suggestions. And Jesus says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8). But modern Christians are taught that Constantine’s dogma-based version of God long ago gave us all the answers that we ever are going to get.

Jesus rants against the clergymen of His day, saying, “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (MT 23:13). And, “Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men… You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition” (MK 7:8-9). Man-made religious traditions are anathema to the Lord! He says, “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). Back when I was reading the Bible every day and assuming that I would join the clergy, I used to wince when I would come to these passages. Why do modern clergymen not also wince? Do they think the Lord’s disapproval of our placing human traditions over God’s divine Word somehow ended when Constantine came along, even though he ignored what Jesus actually said?

Surely the worst sin of the Roman Christianity that is dying all around us now is the fact that it is cheerfully willing to directly contradict the Gospel words of Jesus! We know that the Gospels were edited as Roman Christianity was being developed, including by the First Council of Nicaea in 325. Those who were building one uniform Christian faith out of many early versions tried to scrub from the Gospels everything that contradicted Constantine’s nascent Christianity, including all talk of reincarnation; and they added to the Gospels passages on church-building, sheep-and-goats, end-times, and God’s judgment that are frankly anachronistic. So it seems to me that we must consider the words of Jesus that were allowed to remain in the Gospels to be especially important, and maybe even doubly-certified to have come from God!

And Jesus tells us right in the Gospels that God does not judge anyone. Jesus 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). And furthermore, those that we used to think were dead have been telling us all along that God never judges anyone, and that the death of Jesus on the cross has never made an afterlife difference for a single human being. But, wait! Doesn’t Jesus judge us, then? No. He says, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). “Aha!” say adherents of Roman Christianity. “So He says He did come to save the world!” Yes. But not from a divine judgment that He assures us never happens. It is abundantly clear from the Gospels that what Jesus came to save the world from was ignorance and man-made religious notions. So there you have it. The core belief fostered by the early version of Christianity that Constantine founded turns out to be a defamation of God that Christians easily could have discovered if they ever had actually read the Lord’s words.  As always, Jesus is precisely right.

This has been a hard personal journey. When the Lord first called me out of Roman Christianity in the late nineties, I was sure I couldn’t be hearing Him right. I kept going to Mass. I tried to ignore Him. When He asked me through Thomas to channel Liberating Jesus, I refused until Thomas broke into my daytime life and told me why I had to do it. But even after having channeled the Lord, and after having studied the Gospels obsessively, I realize now that I still have been fighting this calling to give the rest of my life to the Lord’s own Christianity. He insists to all of us that it is His words that matter! He says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps My word he will never see death” (JN 8:51). And, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (LK 6:46) “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter” (MT 7:21). But still, I was resisting. Who am I to be doing all this? So Thomas has given me this last six months of posts to be shared with you, but he tells me now that he has done them primarily so he could convince me it is finally time for us to begin to fight for the victory of the Lord’s truth on earth.

Thomas is telling me amazing things! I’m having trouble getting my mind around it all. He says, first, that I must stop thinking of Roman Christianity as a mistake, since this entire history was planned by the Godhead. He says that King David was the Lord’s precursor, and his prediction that the teachings of Jesus that the builders of the first Christianity would reject were later going to become the Cornerstone of a genuine Christian movement is being fulfilled now, three thousand years later. He is telling me, too, that he ended this six-month series by talking last week about the Founding Fathers of the United States because they, too, were motivated by the Godhead; and the nation they founded is meant to be the vehicle by which the Lord will operate on earth and assist all of humankind in elevating our consciousness vibrations. On a personal note, Thomas tells me that the first draft of the Declaration of Independence actually was channeled, and enough of what was important in it survived its editing for us to consider it a sacred document.

I am sorry to sound boggled, but this is all news to me! Thomas has shared more about our next week’s offering, and he assures me that I will find it easier to understand and accept. There isn’t space enough to summarize so many posts, so I hope that you will reacquaint yourself with the information in the posts that our beloved friend has asked me to link; and please, if you have time, skim these last six months. I think I can find this next stage easier, if only we can do it together….

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.
Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.
Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
– Attributed to King David, from Psalm 23 of the Book of Psalms (1000 BCE)

 

The Transfiguration photo credit: █ Slices of Light █▀ ▀ ▀ <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/95282411@N00/49935268742″>The Transfiguration</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
King David with harp photo credit: Lawrence OP <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/35409814@N00/5623916902″>King David</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
David in prayer photo credit: Lawrence OP <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/35409814@N00/49465544827″>David in Prayer</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Happy Birthday to Liberty!

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Oh beautiful, for heroes proved in liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life!
America! America! May God thy gold refine,
‘Till all success be nobleness and every gain divine.
– Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929) from “America the Beautiful” (1895)

The purpose of human life is spiritual growth, and achieving it requires that our minds be free. Today we celebrate the fact that 244 years ago a few aristocrats conceived the notion of building their government around  a fundamental need to protect the liberties of all the people being governed. Thanks to their vision, there is at least one place in this sadly un-free world where individual liberty has been tried and proven, and where it now can take its stand.

We cannot imagine how radical the American experiment was in 1787. The Constitution of the United States provides for a government that guarantees expanded rights and liberties; and our Declaration of Independence includes the greatest statement of human equality and worth ever written. This is the only nation on earth whose continuous democratic form of government is more than 200 years old, and its stability is due in considerable part to the fact that it is not a straight democracy. This country is instead a republic, so it protects its weaker citizens from the whims of the majority. As a result of its expanded rights and liberties and its unprecedented governmental stability, the United States of America has been in every year since 1871 the most prosperous nation on earth. We have work to do to correct the mess that America’s race relations have been; but even despite their past limitations, African Americans today are among the freest and richest people on earth.

In researching My Thomas, I came to love the architects of this experiment in liberty. For the first time in history, powerful leaders voluntarily gave up their power and willingly submitted themselves to government by the masses! Here are our first five presidents and a beloved elder statesman as they where thinking through the great American experiment.

* George Washington (1732-1799)

Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!
– Letter to James Warren, March 31, 1779

A people… who are possessed of the spirit of commerce, who see and who will pursue their advantages may achieve almost anything.
– Letter to Benjamin Harrison, October 10, 1784

I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong. – Letter to Francis Van der Kamp, May 28, 1788

May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. – Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, August 18, 1790

It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great Nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a People always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.
  – Farewell Address, September 19, 1796

* John Adams (1735-1826)

Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood. – A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765

Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it. – Thoughts on Government, 1776

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
– Letter to Abigail Adams, 1780

* Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them. – Summary View of the Rights of British America, 1774

My god! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!
– Letter to James Monroe, June 17, 1785

I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere. – Letter to Abigail Adams, February 22, 1787

What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms. – Letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787

The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind. – Letter to William Hunter, March 11, 1790

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it. – Letter to Archibald Stewart, Dec 23, 1791

[A] wise and frugal government… shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.
– First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him?
– First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people. – Letter to John Dickinson, July 23, 1801

The freedom and happiness of man…[are] the sole objects of all legitimate government. – Letter to Thaddeus Kosciusko, 1810

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. – Letter to William Ludlow, September 6, 1824

Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man. – Letter to John Cartwright, 1824

* James Madison (1751-1836)

All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.
– Speech at the Constitutional Convention, July 11, 1787

Democracy is the most vile form of government. … democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.  – The Federalist, No. 10, November 23, 1787

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.
  – The Federalist No. 45, January 26, 1788

(The Constitution preserves) the advantage of being armed, which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation… (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.
– The Federalist, No. 46, January 29, 1788

An ELECTIVE DESPOTISM was not the government we fought for; but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.
 – The Federalist No. 48, February 1, 1788

There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. – Speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 16, 1788

It has been said that all Government is an evil. It would be more proper to say that the necessity of any Government is a misfortune. This necessity however exists; and the problem to be solved is, not what form of Government is perfect, but which of the forms is least imperfect.
– To an unidentified correspondent, 1833

* James Monroe (1758-1831)

Our country may be likened to a new house. We lack many things, but we possess the most precious of all – liberty! – To his daughter, Eliza, and her Head of School in Paris, 1794

If we look to the history of other nations, ancient or modern, we find no example of a growth so rapid, so gigantic, of a people so prosperous and happy. – First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1817

* Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was the godfather of this experiment in liberty. And at the last, his great popularity in France brought that nation to intervene on America’s side just as our Revolution was about to be lost.

Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.
– Letter to French scientist Jean-Baptiste Le Roy on November 13, 1789

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
– Memoirs of the life & writings of Benjamin Franklin, 1818

A republic, madam, if you can keep it.
 – Answering a woman who asked him as he left the Constitutional Convention what sort of government the Founders had framed.

This great experiment in personal liberty is a quarter of a millennium old. We have abused it over the years, but thanks to the wisdom of that generation of giants its structure and protections remain in place. We have only to polish it and tune it up, and its proven economic and spiritual promise can at last become this nation’s gift to all the people of the world.

Oh beautiful, for patriot dream that sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears!
America! America! God shed his grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.
 – Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929) from “America the Beautiful” (1895)

Declaration of Independence photo credit: The U.S. National Archives <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/35740357@N03/3678682267″>Engrossed Declaration of Independence</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/commons/usage/”>(license)</a>
Patriotic child photo credit: acase1968 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/60035031@N06/14582840014″>Ashland’s 4th of July Parade</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Ship’s rigging photo credit: Thomas James Caldwell <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/81643710@N00/19208609540″>Snap</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

“I Have a Dream…”

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.
When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words
of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,
they were signing a promissory note to which every American
was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men –
black men as well as white men –
would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) from “I Have a Dream…” (1963)

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the greatest American of the twentieth century. The more time passes since Dr. King’s death, the higher his stature has come to rise; and watching that happen within the memory of people who recall him as a living crusader feels the way it must have felt when the United States began to revere as its Founding Fathers all those contentious Revolution-era politicians. I was in college when Dr. King was assassinated. I had come to love the man, so waking up to find that he had been killed was the biggest devastation of my young life. But when later that morning I used the word “assassinated” in reference to Dr. King, I was confronted by an outraged Southern classmate. She shouted that he had been just a criminal and not a public figure at all so he didn’t deserve that honored term. I learned on the morning after Dr. King’s death the extent of the evil under which he had lived.

And now the descendants of slavery among us confront another potential evil that may be almost as harmful to them as has been the frank racism I glimpsed that day. While clueless rioters rush to destroy even the revered statues of genuine heroes, they mostly ignore – and they even betray – the very people they claim to most want to help. Well-meaning people in academia, too, tell us now that we all must grovel and atone for the mess that America’s race relations have been, while apparently hardly giving a thought to the fact that all these problems have human causes and therefore they can be healed. For the first time in history, now we know for certain that there is one human race, which means that every apparent difference between people with varying shades of skin is the result of America’s prior mistakes. So in fact, all these renewed efforts to find and punish racism in our culture without attempting to altogether eliminate it can only be based on the false assumption that those with darker skin are in some ways deficient. To try to make Americans atone for racism rather than destroying the remnants of it is the tragic modern equivalent of my college classmate’s racist rage.

The progress toward full equality that Dr. King’s movement began in the Sixties had largely stalled before this century began. There are important reasons why this happened, and emphatically those reasons can be addressed! Indeed, for all of us to work together to make of this nation a truly colorblind society is what most modern descendants of slavery want. It is the least that they deserve, and it surely is what mercy demands! An entirely race-free future will be our ultimate triumph over all the horrors of slavery and racism that have so tragically soiled our past. It will give us at last our shining gateway to the free and equal nation that the wisdom of our Founders envisioned, and that Dr. King’s courage and strength began.

Last week we described six reasons for the racial inequality that still burdens the descendants of slavery in the United States. There may be other causes too, but to effectively address these six alone would make such a difference that it might well take us most of the way to that longed-for free and equal nation. This effort to establish in the United States a new era of racial equality can be advanced by using three initiatives. For various reasons they will need to be led not by governments, but rather by private foundations. And surely there can be no greater charitable goal than this effort to help the United States to fulfill at last its founding promises!

THE FULL EMANCIPATION FOUNDATION

We never can have real racial equality until we have fully emancipated the minds of a whole generation of slavery’s descendants. This should have happened a hundred and fifty years ago, but it is not too late. It can happen now. Every U.S. citizen born between, say, 2020 and 2040 with an ancestor who once was held here in slavery will be eligible to receive an extraordinary education from birth through graduate school. It will be important that we work closely with the parents and offer individual enrichment and empowerment during those crucial first five years of life. And our model for elementary and secondary schools might be the Success Academies which began in 2006 in Harlem and have grown to 45 charter schools with 17,000 students in the New York City area. There have been efforts by some to limit the use of charter schools by the economically disadvantaged, but the methods pioneered by the Success Academies have resulted in such extraordinary educational achievements for children who might otherwise have failed in public schools that for this project nothing less will do. Our goal will be to give to this first emancipated generation the same quality of educational and personal empowerment that they could have had if they had been born into America’s most successful families.

Fully emancipating one generation of slavery’s modern descendants can all by itself entirely re-set race relations in the United States. These children will be our much-loved new beginning, with each of them nurtured and adored by every American of good will. If we do for them what we should have done for their freshly freed ancestors, we can now and for all future time eradicate the ill effects of our having so badly bungled the first century and a half after slavery was abolished, including the Black Codes, Jim Crow, and the War on Poverty’s destruction of the black family. We can in one stroke effectively address five of the six errors that we listed last week!  And importantly, in doing this we will be creating a powerful new image for all black Americans. Today, if you walk down a street and see a group of young black men ahead, your first reaction is likely to be to assume they are a gang of toughs. Perhaps you even might cross the street. But twenty years from now, you will be walking down that same street and see a group of young black men ahead, and you will assume they must be college students. Very soon in the United States the appearance of having African ancestry will become a certain marker for elevated status and greater success.

THE LIVING TOGETHER FOUNDATION

While we are beginning our better long-term future by at last emancipating a full generation of slavery’s youngest descendants, there is a lot that we can do to improve the lives of these children’s family members. This second initiative will ideally be led by those who best understand the communities being served, and Americans who want to be part of the solution are going to find a lot to do! Three-quarters of black children today are born to single mothers, many of whom can benefit from assistance and mentoring; and older children may well need some tutoring and tuition help. With a third of black men now cycling into and out of prison, we can seek and find ways to help people wronged by that system to build some success and satisfaction into their later lives. And in everything we do we must never forget, not even for a moment, that every modern descendant of slavery is precisely who we are ourselves. There will be no limit to what they can do, once we give them the gift of a better beginning.

THE GENUINE JUSTICE FOUNDATION

No matter whatever else we might do, the only way for us to entirely heal America’s racial wounds will be with a complete reform of our horrendous criminal justice system. Next week we will commemorate the 244th birthday of the United States, so we will pause then for a celebration of what could have been and still might be. Then the following week we will devote some time to talking about how we can and why we must reinvent criminal justice in America if we are ever to make racial justice possible.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” We are seeing now how right he was! And the best way to honor this brilliant and selfless man who lived and died for righteousness will be for all of us to come together, every American of every shade, and build at last the better nation that its original Founding Fathers imagined and its twentieth-century Founding Father has given us the vision to at last achieve. It is time for those of us who have inherited the world’s oldest constitutional republic to help it live up to its founding promises so it can at last become a beacon of freedom and hope for all the world.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
…
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation
where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content
of their character. I have a dream… I have a dream that one day
in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification,
one day right in Alabama little black boys and black girls
will he able to join hands with little white boys and white girls
as sisters and brothers.
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) from “I Have a Dream…” (1963)

MLK statue photo credit: Brook-Ward <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/57915000@N02/27921680209″>MLK</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Long Tail of Slavery

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,
Nobody knows but Jesus.
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,
Glory hallelujah!
– From a pre-1865 Negro spiritual, author unknown

Every human being of every shade is a member of a single race. Modern Europeans are in fact east Africans. This scientific certainty has been achieved only very recently, and from the standpoint of history it changes so much! The anatomically modern ancestors of Europeans began to enter Europe in large numbers following the most recent ice age, which ended less than fifteen thousand years ago. And these African immigrants to Europe didn’t fully lose the melanin in their skin until well into the historical period. Scientists have lately begun to sequence the DNA in ancient skeletons. Thanks to them, we now can meet three Europeans who lived in about 8000 BCE, 5000 BCE, and 3700 BCE respectively. All of them had blue eyes and dark skin, and the reason for their blue eyes is amusing. Blue eyes came from a single genetic mutation in about 8000 BCE, and apparently the trait was such a sexually attractive novelty that it rapidly overspread the continent.

The primary genes that allowed most Europeans to lose the melanin in their skin so they could better produce Vitamin D arrived in Europe with Neolithic farmers, and in much of Europe light skin did not predominate until after about 3000 BCE. These dates might change a bit as more information is developed. But the point is that there simply has not been time enough for Europeans to have genetically diverged in any meaningful way from their east African brothers and sisters.

So now we know that every apparent difference between black and white Americans has to be the product of our recent history. Once we understand and address the causes of these artificial differences, there is no reason why we cannot all live in harmony, as one big family.

Slavery is not just an ancient evil. It is estimated that there are more slaves on earth today than there ever have been before. And slavery is not a matter of skin shade, since people with light skin have been enslaved. Slavery has taken many forms, but it always has been common. It has been estimated that when the Declaration of Independence was signed, most of the people living on earth were being held in some form of servitude.

The history of slavery in the United States is riddled with myths and misinformation that need not concern us here. It should be noted, though, that the Founders inherited slavery just as we have inherited the mess that followed slavery. And they hated it. Thomas Jefferson inherited scores of slaves, and he saw this situation as such a shame and a burden that in his youth he was determined to rid himself of it by ending slavery altogether. His first draft of the Declaration of Independence contained what John Adams wryly referred to as “Jefferson’s Philippic against the slave trade.” Slavery was the most contentious issue that America’s Founders had to resolve as they worked to create their union, and they were forced to make what they hoped were short-term compromises with slavery or they could not have united the colonies.

After the Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution were meant to end slavery. But they did no such thing! There was in fact a sensible and loving reason why people of good will worried about emancipation, and it was a problem that especially concerned the Founders. Most slaves were very different from whites in appearance and in behavior, so many people assumed there had to be innate differences between the races that would make it impossible for them ever to live together amicably. If the Founders had known that we are all one race, identical in every way, they would have done things differently! But as it was, even those eager to end slavery were worried that emancipation might precipitate endless race wars. They worried, too, about freeing the slaves into a white community that treated freedmen horribly. As Jefferson said, “we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

After the Civil War, this fear remained that there were real racial differences, so what began in 1865 was a long tail of subjugation of the descendants of slavery that continues to this day. The merciful among us now have the chance to altogether solve our racial problems! Knowing that there is just one race, we can discover and address the causes of all the difficulties that still plague slavery’s modern descendants. I urge others to study this history as well. But here are the causes of our racial mess as I see them:

  • The United States never emancipated its slaves. Making chattel slavery illegal was less than half the task. And in the bitter chaos of Reconstruction, we made no attempt to help the former slaves, but instead we simply abandoned them into a stronger white culture that feared and despised them. Without the protections, education, and personal empowerment that a real emancipation would have provided, the legally freed slaves and most of their descendants have been stuck at the bottom of American society ever since.
  • The Black Codes that began during Reconstruction promptly re-enslaved many black men. The Thirteenth Amendment contained a loophole through which the former slaveholders could drive a truck! Among other things, since there were few jobs available to former slaves, many men were convicted of vagrancy and enslaved on chain gangs with sentences which included fines that they had no way to pay. They were therefore often bound for life.
  • For a century after the Civil War, Jim Crow laws enforced segregation and severely limited opportunities. Blacks in the South were denied the right to vote or be well educated. Any who seemed “uppity” could be imprisoned or even lynched at someone’s whim.
  • The War on Poverty destroyed the black family. While the Civil Rights legislation of the mid-Sixties was bringing a better end to slavery a century after it had been legally abolished, the War on Poverty was launching the dissolution of the black family and thereby beginning today’s third version of slavery’s awful subjugations. From 1870 through 1960, roughly the same percentage of blacks as whites were married; but by 1980, most of those black marriages had broken up. The stalwart and courageous men who had brought their families through Jim Crow were still so stuck in slavery’s mindset that apparently they believed they were being ordered to surrender their loved ones to the care of governments that could better provide for them.
  • Few have understood the power of the first five years of life. For those few years, children’s minds are in download mode as they uncritically learn a lot of core facts, including learning their status in life by very closely observing their parents. This information then becomes hard-wired in us. And since the United States never actually emancipated its slaves, a version of the slavery mindset has been passed down in some American families for generations.
  • Our criminal justice system is an abomination. We talked about this problem briefly last week. Unless we make some radical changes there, nothing else that we do is going to be of much help.

We can address the effects of all these mistakes and cut at last this long tail of slavery. The problems listed above may not be all the ways in which we have hampered slavery’s descendants, but to remove just these most obvious chains would be a way to launch a new beginning! Reparations might seem to be indicated, but we have spent more than half of our national debt in trying to help the descendants of slavery and only made things worse. It is time to begin a dialogue about how we can create one peaceful country where brothers and sisters of every shade can prosper in mutual love and trust. Next week we will begin that dialogue by looking with creative mercy at how we might address each of these longstanding problems.

Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down, Oh, yes, Lord.
Sometimes I’m almost to the ground, Oh, yes, Lord.
Although you see me going ‘long so, Oh, yes, Lord.
I have my trials here below, Oh, yes, Lord.
If you get there before I do, Oh, yes, Lord.
Tell all-a my friends I’m coming too!
Oh, yes, Lord.
           – From a pre-1865 Negro spiritual, author unknown

 

Mount Vernon slave cabin photo credit: jcbwalsh <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/36520408@N02/5915261480″>Mount Vernon Slave Cabin</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Slave cabin – South Carolina photo credit: denisbin <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82134796@N03/13705673934″>Slave cabin at Magnolia slave plantation South Carolina. It used West African slaves with knowledge of rice cultivation in Sierra Leone to cultivate rice on the plantation.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Oak Alley slave cabin photo credit: denisbin <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82134796@N03/8983033124″>Slave cabin Reconstructed at Oak Alley</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Old cabin photo credit: MIKOFOX ⌘ Reject Fear, Go Outdoors, Live Healthy <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/28648755@N07/48556523822″>Hand Hewn Logs & Dovetail Corners!</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Alfred’s cabin photo credit: SeeMidTN.com (aka Brent) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/94502827@N00/40092299983″>Alfred’s cabin – The Hermitage</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Cabin photo credit: MIKOFOX ⌘ Reject Fear, Go Outdoors, Live Healthy <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/28648755@N07/49156210882″>Leaning Back For The Final Rest</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Quality of Mercy

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
       – William Shakespeare (1564-1616) from The Merchant of Venice (1605)

As a teenager I memorized the entire “quality of mercy” speech from The Merchant of Venice. Portia’s plea to a bitter man for mercy is one of the most significant pieces of literature ever written, and I quote about half of it here because it explains the value of mercy better than I ever could. Please read this week’s header and footer together. Then let’s look at how showing mercy is urged upon us in the Gospel teachings of Jesus, and let’s also look at some of the ways in which mercy is central to making easier and more joyous the course of our lives on earth.

Jesus makes mercy one of the bases for His central teachings on love and forgiveness. Indeed, mercy is so much a primary grounding of our ability to grow spiritually that it is not an exaggeration to say that unless we learn to practice mercy, we will find it much harder to grow spiritually. Here are the primary areas of the Lord’s Gospel teachings on mercy:

  • Mercy is a gift to the receiver that redounds to the giver. Portia says, “It is twice blessed. It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” Jesus says, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy” (MT 5:7).
  • Mercy is an important grounding that enables us to live in harmony with others. Portia’s way of putting this is to say of mercy, “It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.” Jesus illustrates His wish that we be merciful with His parable of the Good Samaritan. He ends it by saying, “Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the robbers’ hands?”His listener says, “The one who showed mercy toward him.” Jesus says, “Go and do the same” (LK 10:36-38). Jesus makes a lack of mercy shown by religious leaders reason enough for Him to condemn them. He says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness” (MT 23:23).
  • Mercy is a core characteristic of the Godhead. As Portia says, “It is an attribute to God himself; and earthly power doth then show likest God’s when mercy seasons justice.” And Jesus tells a man from whom He has cast out demons, “Go home to your people and report to them what great things the Lord has done for you, and how He had mercy on you” (MK 5:19).
  • Mercy lies at the heart of justice. Portia says, “’T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes the throned monarch better than his crown.” And Jesus tells a parable about a slave whose master forgives his debt because the slave begs for mercy. The forgiven slave then demands that his fellow slave repay a debt to him. The outraged master says, ‘”You wicked slave, I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not also have had mercy on your fellow slave?” The master punishes the miscreant, and Jesus adds, “My heavenly Father will also do the same to you, if each of you does not forgive his brother from his heart” (MT 18:32-35).

So, what does the word “mercy” mean, anyway? The best definition for our purposes seems to be “compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm.” Until recently, showing mercy to others seemed to me to be a nicety, a classier way to deal with people, an aid to greasing the wheels of life. I thought it had to be used selectively. If you keep letting people do bad things to you without any consequence to them, don’t you risk becoming a doormat? It astonishes me now to realize how long I held the view that our mercy must be limited! I never until recently thought about the fact that mercy is the first cousin to forgiveness. Indeed, it may be reasonable to say that unless you make a habit of being merciful, you cannot ever really learn to forgive.

But it also is essential to bear in mind the fact that even though they come from similar mindsets and are similar in effect, mercy and forgiveness are not the same! Jesus urges us to practice mercy in our daily lives, as is noted in the Gospel quotations above. He wants us to be merciful, but He commands that we forgive.  He tells us that forgiveness is essential to our obeying God’s primary command, which is that we love universally and without reservation.

We cannot state God’s Law of Love often enough! When someone asks Jesus what is the greatest commandment, He doesn’t name any of the Ten Commandments. Instead 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). And the Lord makes it abundantly clear that in order to love our fellow man, we must forgive completely every time and no matter what is done to us. We must not even resist pure evil! Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also” (MT 5:38-40). And when Peter asks Him whether we really have to keep forgiving the same awful things done by the same awful people as many as seven times in a row, Jesus says, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23).

This is radical stuff! And Jesus insists on it. His teachings suggest that unless we learn to forgive to this extreme extent, we cannot learn to love in the transformative way that God’s Law insists we must love.

Forgiveness is a primary command from God, while mercy is meant to soften our hearts. Perhaps it is Spiritual Growth 101. Establishing a habit of mercy seems to prime our minds and make easier our development of such a radical forgiveness practice that learning prevenient forgiveness is easier. Even though it is not commanded of us, we find that mercy, like gratitude and empathy, can assist us in re-setting our minds for more rapid spiritual growth to come.

Mercy is easier to theorize about than it can be to put into use. Unlike practicing prevenient forgiveness, which soon becomes automatic, being merciful requires that before we act in any situation, we must first pause and think in a complex way about the people involved and the likeliest outcomes of whatever we might decide to do. Here are three quick examples:

  • Building mercy into our daily lives. I have a wealthy friend living in a rural area who was often making small emergency loans that some of the borrowers could not repay. This could lead to awkward estrangements from some who were embarrassed about their outstanding loans, so she has instituted a new policy. Now she refuses to lend, but if someone needs money she often makes an outright gift. She then adds, “If you find someone who needs your help, please offer your help.” Try to pay it forward. She keeps no records and she never asks, but now people often tell her about this or that gift of time or talent they have made with her in mind. Now she no longer risks losing friends over what to her are minor sums, and many more people are being helped!
  • Showing mercy in deeply negative situations. Two weeks ago, one of the most beloved bookstores in the United States burned down. Not far away, a landmark business that employed fifty people also burned. Target, CVS, Walgreen’s, and Wal-Mart stores burned, as did most local grocery stores. Reportedly, the proprietors of most of those businesses have no plans to rebuild. If the rioters had given some thought to the people who lived in the neighborhoods they were burning, surely they would have shown some mercy toward the businesses at the core of their community life!
  • Working for general public mercy. The United States holds less than 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prison population. The incarceration rate for American blacks is seven times the rate for whites, even though most of those imprisoned are not a danger to society. One in 87 working-age white men is in prison, vs. one in twelve African-American men. Among 20- to 34-year-old black men who have not completed high school, more are in prison than are employed (37% in prison vs. 26% employed). More than 97% of these prisoners did not have a trial before they were sentenced to prison. Nearly all will lose their civil rights for life. As a result of this situation, many black children grow up fatherless; and thanks to what is called “the school-to-prison pipeline,” a lot of those children will follow their fathers into prison. This complex problem can be solved if enough of us will work together and have mercy on a long-suffering community whose members need our help if they are ever to prosper.

Exercising creative daily mercy in situations large and small is a simple way for us to begin to lighten ourselves spiritually. And for us to show mercy tends to make all of those around us more merciful, too. So not only does showing mercy become a habit that helps us work toward learning prevenient forgiveness, but also in countless ways it lightens the burden of negativity on us all.

Next week let’s look at how we might extend some creative community mercy and start to solve America’s most intractable problem….

‘T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings.
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.
           – William Shakespeare (1564-1616) from The Merchant of Venice (1605)

 

Cut-leaf maple photo credit: Bruce Irschick <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82869520@N00/5119129356″>Cut-leaf Maple (2010)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Red fall garden photo credit: Patrick Vierthaler <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/74399113@N07/45375561192″>Toji-in 等持院</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Red tree with water photo credit: Vicki’s Nature <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7327719@N06/45747300472″>Monet’s bridge @ Gibbs Gardens – 2 days ago</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Red and green photo credit: docoverachiever <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/90692748@N04/31729991558″>Garden Reds</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Tranquility Scene photo credit: Jitabebe <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/43807964@N05/8137816148″>Tranquillity</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Stone angel photo credit: Stanley Zimny (Thank You for 49 Million views) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82256086@N00/44154298250″>Art in Fall</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

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