What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear.
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit. O what needless pain we bear.
All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

 Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere?
We should never be discouraged. Take it to the Lord in prayer.
Can we find a friend so faithful, who will all our sorrows share?
Jesus knows our every weakness. Take it to the Lord in prayer.
– Charles Converse (1832-1918) & Joseph Scriven (1819-1886), from “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” (1865)

The Gospel teachings of Jesus with regard to sin are perfectly clear! And happily, what Jesus said has nothing to do with what Roman Christianity tells us about sin.  Of course, we always can continue to ignore what Jesus plainly said. We can assume that all the Christian churches are right, and Jesus came only to die for the notion that we carry the guilt of Adam’s sin, as well as our own manifold sin-guilt.  And while God insists that you and I must forgive,   of course we cannot expect that God is going to be willing to forgive you and me. Right? So God sent God’s sinless only Son to die in a horrible way to atone to God for your sins and mine. This idea made perfect sense in the Jerusalem of two thousand years ago, when Hebrews were still sacrificing unblemished animals as sin-sacrifices to God in their temples.

But now, of course, we can start to see some pretty big problems with this old Roman Christian teaching. And once we start to see these problems, we really never again can find a way to un-see them:

• Jesus tells us that God never judges us. In the Gospel Book of John, 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). Oh. Okay, so then Jesus is our actual judge? Well, not so fast. Jesus also tells us in that same Gospel of John that, “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). Wow. Okay, so then Jesus assures us that there is no divine judgment at all. Which means that Jesus’s crucifixion must have happened for some reason other than the one that Roman Christianity gives us.
• Or if Jesus’s death did happen as a sacrifice, then Jesus didn’t need to rise from the dead. Jesus made a great point of coming alive again after He was crucified and died, and He showed Himself to people as again alive. If the Roman Christian story about His crucifixion, which was that He died as a sacrifice to God for our sins, had been true, then He only needed to die. His coming alive again adds nothing. Again, this casts doubt on the sacrificial meaning that Roman Christianity gives to Jesus’s crucifixion.

• God requires that you and I love and forgive, so then why does God need to see God’s much-beloved Son sacrificed for Adam’s sin and for our own sins before God can forgive us?? I have never understood this at all! And no minister or priest of whom I have asked this question has been able to explain it to me in a way that has made any kind of sense. Think about it! If you have children, picture your own precious children as a group of adorable toddlers playing on your living room rug. They manage to tip over the coffee table, so all their cups of orange juice make a big mess on the carpet. They are even giggling as they do it. What naughty babies! Now ask yourself which one of your own little children would you most enjoy watching being horribly murdered, just so you can forgive the others for making such a big mess on your living room rug? And if you recoil from that question, then ask yourself how it is possible that you are more loving and more forgiving than God is?

 The plain fact is that you are NOT more loving and more forgiving than God is. And the core dogma of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s version of Christianity, which is the version of Christianity that still in 2024 is practiced by some 2.4 billion people as the world’s most prominent religion, is obviously nonsense! That dogma, which is that Jesus died for our sins, may have made a modicum of sense in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, but clearly it makes no sense at all today. 

What did Jesus Himself say about sin? Well, this is somewhat complicated. First of all, remember these caveats:

• Jesus came to move us past religions, and to teach us to relate to God directly. Doing this was not his primary mission perhaps, but it was important to Him. Every religion is man-made, and all religions are fear-based, so to help us to outgrow our adherence to religions was an important key to Jesus’s teaching us to begin a deeply love-based relationship with God.
• While Jesus was on earth, He was teaching under the watchful eye of clergy who were always testing him. Since He often had to pay at least lip-service to the prevailing religion, He would sometimes trickily twist what He said in some way. We don’t always know what He would have said if He had not labored under this handicap.

• Jesus lived among people who were obsessed with the concept of sin! The Hebrew community into which He was born was ruled by hundreds of religious laws and commandments that governed how they lived, often down to the smallest detail, including even what they ate, what they wore, and how they kept the Sabbath. The fact that transgressing any of these traditions and rituals was considered to be sinful irritated Jesus, when to His mind, God’s law of love was the only real law.

With these caveats in mind, let’s follow Jesus as He goes about His days and catch some of what He says about sin. Jesus seldom expounded directly on any sin just for its own sake.

The Gospel of John, Chapter 8, verses 2-11 is a famous moment when He dealt with sin.

8 ² Early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people were coming to Him; and He sat down and began to teach them. ³ The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, ⁴ they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. ⁵ Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?” ⁶ They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground. ⁷ But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” ⁸ Again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. ⁹ When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. ¹⁰ Straightening up, Jesus said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” ¹¹ She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more.”

The Gospel of Luke, Chapter 7, verses 36-50 shows us both that Jesus did have some religious friends, and that He didn’t hesitate to teach them what is really important!

³⁶ Now one of the Pharisees was requesting Him to dine with him, and He entered the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. ³⁷ And there was a woman in the city who was a sinner, an immoral woman; and when she learned that He was reclining at the table in the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster vial of perfume, ³⁸ and standing behind Him at His feet, weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and kept wiping them with the hair of her head, and kissing His feet and anointing them with the perfume. ³⁹ Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, He would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching Him, that she is a great sinner.”⁴⁰ And Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he replied, “Say it, Teacher.” ⁴¹ “A moneylender had two debtors: one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. ⁴² When they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both. So, which of them will love him more?” ⁴³ Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.” And He said to him, “You have judged correctly.” ⁴⁴ Turning toward the woman, He said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has wet My feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. ⁴⁵ You gave Me no kiss; but she, since the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss My feet. ⁴⁶ You did not anoint My head with oil, but she anointed My feet with perfume. ⁴⁷ For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.” ⁴⁸ Then He said to her, “Your sins have been forgiven.” ⁴⁹ Those who were reclining at the table with Him began to say^]to themselves, “Who is this man who even forgives sins?” ⁵⁰ And He said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

Here in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 9, Verses 1-8, is the sort of thing that happens often in the Biblical Gospels, where Jesus uses His forgiveness of sins as an instrumental part of His healing work.

9 Getting into a boat, Jesus crossed over the sea and came to His own city.² And they brought to Him a paralytic lying on a bed. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralytic, “Take courage, son; your sins are forgiven.” ³ And some of the scribes said to themselves, “This fellow blasphemes.” ⁴ And Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, “Why are you thinking evil in your hearts? ⁵ Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, and walk’? ⁶ But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—then He said to the paralytic, “Get up, pick up your bed and go home.” ⁷ And he got up and went home. ⁸ But when the crowds saw this, they were awestruck, and glorified God, who had given such authority to men.

And in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 12, Verses 1-8, is one of many examples of Jesus and His disciples easily and often breaking the rigid Sabbath rules.

12 At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat. ² But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, “Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.” ³ But He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, ⁴ how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? ⁵ Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? ⁶ But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. ⁷ But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent.⁸ For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”

The four quotations given above are typical of the ways in which Jesus dismissively handles legalistic sins repeatedly, over and over again throughout all four of the Biblical Gospels. Far from seeing the Hebrews’ notion of sin as the strictly punishable disobedience of many rigid rules, the breaking of which can carry as much as a death sentence immediately inflicted, Jesus sees such old-style sins as only easily pardonable stumblings in nearly all cases. Because nearly all kinds of sin are to Him just minimal transgressions against God’s robustly ascendant and all-powerful law of love! Therefore, they all are now readily forgivable in love.

Jesus says of all these sins against human-made laws and rules only, “Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you” (MT 7:1-2). Only learn to forgive, and you will be forgiven!

There are just two sins left which Jesus tells us are unpardonable:  

• “Truly I say to you, all sins shall be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; ²⁹ but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin” (Mark 3:28-29).
• 17 He said to His disciples, “It is inevitable that stumbling blocks come, but woe to him through whom they come! ² It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble” (Luke 17:1-2).

Thomas and I debated whether that verse in Luke really does denote for Jesus an unpardonable sin. So then Thomas asked Jesus directly, and Jesus has confirmed for us that, yes, He did indeed mean to tell us that the only unpardonable human sin is to lead a child astray.

So there you have it. Jesus gives us in His four Biblical Gospels, and not at all hidden but just seldom read, this easily understood primer in the fact that you can throw away all the religious guilt associated with the false notion that Jesus died for your sins. That whole bogus teaching that God needed Jesus’s death on the cross for your sins came from others. It never came from Jesus! No, God is infinitely more loving and more forgiving than that. God loves you perfectly, and God forgives you completely. Jesus chose to die and then to rise from the dead just to prove to you that there is no death. And oh, my beautiful darling one, God’s most cherished of all God’s precious children, for you this indeed is a glorious new day!

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day.

 Oh… Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day.

 Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day.
– Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by Day,” from “Godspell” (1971)

For my whole life I have struggled to find ways to ever better understand what Jesus meant by all the things that He said two thousand years ago, when He taught on earth. Almost as soon as I was able to read such sophisticated language as is in the Bible, I was attempting to read the four Biblical Gospels in a little copy of just the Gospels that some Mormon missionaries had given to each of the children in my Congregational Church’s Sunday School. And even as a young child, almost every time that I attempted to read Jesus’s Gospel words, I seemed to be finding new shades of meanings in what He was saying there. So to deepen my perspective, by the age of eleven I had graduated to reading the whole Bible through, from Genesis right through Revelation, just a couple of pages every night. I wanted to see what added perspective all the rest of the Bible might add to what Jesus was saying to us in just His four Books. And then of course I went on to major in early Christian history in college.

One of the things that I learned in college was that if I hoped to better understand my treasured Jesus’s deeper thoughts, I would have to deal with some additional complications. For one example, Jesus spoke Aramaic while He was on earth, but His teachings were first written down in Greek some sixty or so years after His resurrection. So that was their first language translation. And later on, of course, would come a second translation from Greek into Latin in the early Middle Ages. Then after additional centuries had passed would come yet more translations, into English and into other modern languages. And with each translation, additional fallible human translators had to make many decisions which might do at least some level of violence to what Jesus originally had said in the lyrical and emotional language that was His original Aramaic. The classic example often used to illustrate this problem is the Greek word “Metanoia”. What Jesus almost certainly first said in Aramaic, which then was translated into Greek as “Metanoia”, was “transform your mind.” But the early Medieval Christian monk who first saw that word “Metanoia” in Greek is known to have translated it into the Latin command that we must “repent”. And that is how the insistence that we all must “repent!” ended up as a command from Jesus throughout the first Latin translations of His spoken words. Even though it surely was nothing that Jesus said, nor was it anything that He ever would have said!

But remember that by the Middle Ages, that monk who was Jesus’s first translator from Greek into Latin was a member of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s fear-based Christian religion, which is the Christianity that still prevails in the world today. That monk never knew the genuine Jesus, nor did he have any idea of what the genuine Jesus actually had taught. And the Christian religion of that Medieval monk who first translated the words of Jesus was built not around love, of course, but instead his Christianity was centered on the ancient Hebrew religious idea that Jesus had come to die as a pure sin-sacrifice to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins. Jesus had been a sin-sacrifice without blemish. That whole pure sin-sacrifice idea had been a concept central to the religion of the ancient Hebrews, and it was well known to the Apostle Paul. It was familiar as well to the Councilors at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 who had created Constantine’s Christian religion. The monk who did that first Latin translation therefore readily believed that the Jesus he was sure must have founded the Christianity that he devoutly followed later on would of course have ordered us all to “repent”!

But Jesus was not the founder of what eventually became modern Christianity. What Jesus Himself created was “The Way,” which was the beautiful and simple love-based spiritual way of life that He taught to His disciples. The Way that Jesus gave us then grew rapidly for the first two hundred years after His death and resurrection, all around the Mediterranean Sea until it had amassed millions of followers as far away as Rome. And our great tragedy as we try to ever more deeply understand and draw closer to the true Jesus now is the unavoidable fact that human history always is written by its winners. The Romans decided that they probably could use The Way, as successful as it had been in gaining followers, but not in its original form. So they ruthlessly persecuted and crushed it, and they nearly wiped it out. By the early 300s, there was almost nothing left of Jesus’s original Way but its scriptures, which still had the name of Jesus attached to them when Constantine resurrected The Way in 312. It then was formalized as Roman Christianity at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE. By then, The Way had allowed all sorts of spiritual side-dogmas to develop; and in order for it to be useful to Rome, Constantine’s version of Christianity needed to be transformed from a spiritual movement into a fear-based religion that would make it an efficient means of mass human control. First Nicaea’s new version of Christianity was therefore built around a lesser dogma that had developed within The Way, which was that Jesus’s death on the cross had been a sin-offering required by God to cleanse us of our sins.

Still, the core of Jesus’s teachings when He was on earth had not been focused on sin. And the Councilors who were creating this new religion of Christianity under Constantine’s direction, and were assembling their new religion’s sacred Book, held a sufficient reverence for the teachings of Jesus that fortunately they left nearly all of His teachings just as they had received them, and they put what they added in the course of building their new religion just at the back of each of their chosen four of the many accounts of Jesus’s words that were then in circulation. Thomas tells me that He and some of Jesus’s other followers not then in bodies were influencing the minds of many of the Councilors at First Nicaea, and at the six other first millennium councils. So they were able to shape to a considerable extent what happened at all of those councils, especially with regard to the selection and preservation of those four Biblical Gospels.

The way that the Christian Bible was assembled at First Nicaea with what we now know was spiritual guidance, and then carefully preserved thereafter, ensured that the precious words of Jesus would be largely preserved. Yes, there are some contradictions within the Gospels themselves as to what we are told that Jesus said, but those contradictions come largely from translation issues, from Christian dogma-based contradictions, from some First Nicaean Councilors’ additions, and from the frank fact that as they invented their religion, the Councilors never thought to check to see whether they were going against any of the spoken teachings of Jesus, who was the Prophet that they were claiming as their nominal founder. Here are examples of each of these problems:

• Translation Concerns. Some Biblical translations with the oldest roots still show Jesus calling on us to “Repent,” when what He really said was that we should “Reform our minds.” Modern English translations are generally freer of this kind of distortion resulting from the first translations from Greek into Latin.
• Jesus had to speak circumspectly because He was often speaking directly against the prevailing Hebrew religion, which was then quite powerful. And in fact, Jesus came to free us from all religions. It is important to keep these facts in mind! For example, since the prevailing Hebrew religion when and where Jesus taught was largely focused on sin, and perhaps we might even say that it was obsessed with sin, so Jesus often had to responds to the issue of sin, although in His own teachings, Jesus didn’t focus on sin. Instead, His teachings focus on love and forgiveness. That is a crucial distinction! Jesus is often quite casual about disregarding sins. For example, consider this passage: “At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat. But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, ‘Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.’ But He said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.’” (MT 12:1-8)
• The Councilors Added a Number of Things to the Gospels That They Likely Wished That Jesus Had said. And what they added often directly contradicts what Jesus did say, and what is objectively true! For example, when Jesus asked His disciple, Simon, who Simon thought that Jesus was, the disciple is reported to have said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus then reportedly said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven” (MT 16:16-19). This is obviously one of the First Nicaea Councilors’ additions! Note: “Petros” means “rock” in Greek, but Jesus spoke Aramaic; Jesus never built a “church”; “hades” does not exist, and anyway it would not have “gates”; the kingdom of heaven has no keys; and Jesus could give no human being the power to bind or to loose anything in heaven.
• Some of what the First Nicaean Councilors Left in the Gospels As Having Been Said by Jesus Directly Contradicts the Core Dogma of Their New Christian Religion. This really confused me when I was a child! The most notable of these problems is that the Christian religion as the Romans designed it has Jesus dying as a pure sin-sacrifice. But Jesus tells us right there in the Biblical Gospel of John that neither God nor Jesus ever judges us. 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 “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). Therefore, no sin-sacrifice is needed! And if no sin-sacrifice is needed, then Jesus didn’t need to die as a sin-offering, did He? His death and resurrection were, after all, precisely what He tells us that they were, just His own triumphant demonstration of our eternal life.

Then too, of course, there is the plain fact that Jesus never was speaking in a vacuum. His Gospel words always were at least in part dependent on what was going on around Him, who He was addressing, and what the stage of His ministry was at that moment. This point is especially important! Jesus was always sensitive to His listeners, and He spoke very differently, for example, to clergymen, for whom He had little use, or when He spoke to poor widows, or to earnest young seekers, or to His closest disciples and friends. Modern Christians will often carelessly pluck a few of Jesus’s random words from the Gospels and cite them just in sentence-fragments, as if they were definitive proclamations. And if you do that, you might cause your listeners to misunderstand Jesus’s Mind pretty severely!

As the religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine created seventeen hundred years ago is falling apart around us now, it is fragmenting pretty severely. I recall that when The Fun of Dying was first published in 2010, I was astonished to learn that there were then some ten thousand denominations of Christianity in existence. And now, only fourteen years later, amazingly, there are more than forty-five thousand forms of Christianity extant worldwide, which is simply unbelievable. Yet still, we have our one patient and infinitely loving Jesus waiting for us! Amazingly, there is enough of Him for all of us to share. And Jesus has one clear message preserved for us in one set of four Biblical Gospels, still lovingly protected by Him, by my Thomas, and by the rest of Jesus’s faithful minions not now in earthly bodies. All the struggles of the past two thousand years are nearly altogether over. And Constantine’s Christianity is looking pretty hopeless to most of us at this point. So Jesus does ask one thing of us now. He hopes that we who love Him will try to begin to come together now, and resume The Way of Jesus again, my dear ones, if we possibly can?

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day by day by day…
– Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by Day,” from “Godspell” (1971)

You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord, who abide in His shadow for life,
Say to the Lord, “My refuge, my rock in whom I trust!”

And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings, bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun! And hold you in the palm of His hand.
The snare of the fowler will never capture you. And famine will bring you no fear.
Under His wings your refuge, His faithfulness your shield!

And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings, bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun! And hold you in the palm of His hand.
You need not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day.
Though thousands fall about you, near you it shall not come!
– Michael Joncas, from “On Eagle’s Wings” (1977)

The moment when I found this article about a ten-year-old boy who killed himself because he was being bullied at school felt to me like the worst moment of my long life. I kid you not. I still haven’t managed to make myself read the whole article, so I don’t know what method little Sammy chose to end his life. It was just the picture of that very little boy that did it for me. That small, dorky face. And his age, for heaven’s sake! How does a ten-year-old child even conceive of the concept of suicide? And his parents repeatedly asked his teacher and the school system to protect him, but there was not a single person who did anything for him? So, why didn’t his parents pull him out of that school? Why did no adult protect that child?

It was left just to Jesus to prove to Sammy how very much he was loved, so Jesus came and took him home. That was all I could think as I wept for that little boy. And I look at his picture now, and I see Albert Einstein perhaps, when he was small. He could so easily have looked as dorky as that little boy looks. Or maybe Bill Gates, or another of the modern tech giants. Just think of all the wonderful things little Sammy might have done for this world, as bright and sensitive as he possibly was, as kindly as perhaps he was, or even as simply normal as he was, if he just had been given the chance to live his life. But he never had that chance. And of course, I blamed myself first of all. That I wasn’t there, somehow. I wanted to be there so I could bring him home with me and protect him, so no one ever could hurt him again.

I got over my initial emotional crisis. I don’t so much blame his parents, who must be devastated. But I do deeply blame that school system! And I blame all elementary school systems that allow any bullying at all to happen to children who are too young to defend themselves. I recall that there was bullying when I was in a public school a million years ago, and that was the reason why we sent our own children to parochial schools at first; and when I learned that there was some bullying even there, then we switched them to private schools. But when I was in public school so long ago, a few children in each class were always targeted, so retroactively now, I do blame myself for never having defended those classmates. I even recall one bullied girl by name. Edna had that clumsy name, and her family lived in a little trailer on a field that was littered with salvaged auto-parts. I wish now that I had been strong enough to stand up to the bullies who teased Edna about her shabby life and her thrift-store clothes. And I also recall my long-ago sense of satisfaction when our worst school bully got pregnant and had to drop out of high school. I realize now how wrong of me that was, and I feel retroactively sorry about her as well.

After a couple of days, I was partway over the shock of that dreadful news about Sammy, but still not past the horror of his death by suicide when he was so very young. And then as I was clearing emails on Wednesday morning, I came across an obituary for a mother of a boy who had killed himself because at the age of twelve he had been sexually abused by a Catholic priest. So then she had spent the whole rest of her life fighting the Church over its silence about the extent of sexual abuse by priests that happens within the Catholic Church. And Thomas said to me at once, “How many little boys have killed themselves because they were sexually abused by Catholic priests?” I said, “What?” I never had thought about that. “But surely they were older?” He bitterly said, “Not by much.”

At Thomas’s insistence, over the next few days I  tried to squeeze myself down a slimy rabbit-hole  that until now I have ignored. Omigod, my Thomas is so right! This is a horrific scandal that long has harming the most vulnerable children. A few girls, but mostly boys. And it probably rivals worldwide the American school-bullying scandal in terms of the number of victims who are severely damaged by it, and the intensity of the harm that has been done to them.

In the specific case of sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy:

• The perpetrators are clergy who are completely trusted by the children and by their parents, and those clergy are protected and defended by their church superiors. Until very recently, children and their parents who complained about the sexual abuse of children by their priests would be instructed to keep their complaints to themselves, and they could generally be silenced.
• For decades, going back as far as the nineteen-forties, the children might even be blamed for what had happened to them, and called actually sinful. Children, and even their parents, could generally be controlled by clerical superiors who held over their heads the supernatural powers of heaven and hell, and they could be told that God would punish them for tattling.
• Whenever too many complaints were received about any one particular priest, he would simply be transferred to a different parish, where he would continue to abuse children for many more years. The documented histories of this having happened in the cases of some of the most egregiously offending priests are only lately coming to light, and they are appalling to read.
• The secrecy that surrounded these clerical abuse cases would not have been possible if the priests had been in any other profession. Had they been doctors, say, or teachers, these stories would much more easily have come to light. But the superstitious fears surrounding priests who could call down hellfire on you if you got on their bad side was enough to allow this horrible destruction of the lives of children to go on for seventy well-documented years, and perhaps in some cases for a century or more.

Even now, the Catholic church and its clergy are still being powerfully protected. I have spent three days, off and on, trying to find reliable hard statistics on the numbers of children who have been sexually abused by Catholic priests worldwide, and such numbers are still fragmented and largely anecdotal. What I have found are pages and pages of Google links to articles that were what amounted to very limited admissions at first, kind of “modified limited hangouts” by bishops and by the Vatican over decades of time, as the secular law at last got involved in all the various countries. The Catholic church never once came out in front of any of these investigations, and never once tried to own this situation, insofar as I could see! But instead, and shamefully, the Catholic Church continued to recruit generation after generation of starry-eyed altar boys with no warnings to them, and no warnings to their parents, and it gave all those adolescent boys over to the tender mercies of clergymen who were forced to live outwardly celibate lives. You and I would of course assume that back in the sixties perhaps, as this all started to come to very limited light, the Vatican must have right away come down hard on all its priests and insisted that every bit of abuse must stop. But they were already suffering a priest shortage, so they seem not to have done that, amazingly enough. Instead, they offered just some discreet counseling.

Extrapolating from what has been reported in a few countries, since 1950, more than a million boys and men worldwide have already come forward and reported that during their childhoods, they were sexually molested by a Catholic priest, and these boys and men have been believed. But these were only the ones who were believed! It seems clear from browsing in older articles that very many more were coming forward in the forties through the sixties who were not believed, but instead they were shamed into silence. And seeing that, one assumes that there likely were still more who were abused, but who chose to keep that fact to themselves. We are told, too, that boys made up only about eighty percent of the priests’ total child-victims. I think it is therefore likely that the total number of children worldwide who were sexually abused by priests since 1950 must have been perhaps three million.  

And unlike schoolchildren who are bullied only by other children, even one instance of sexual molestation by a powerful adult like a priest is going to have a fairly severe effect on a young child. In the little time that I had in which to research and write this post, I couldn’t do much research on the effects of priestly sexual abuse on its victims, but the results of the bits of research that I managed to do were horrifying. In one case of a priest who had abused five altar boys when they were twelve years old, four of the five had initially wanted to grow up to become priests themselves, which was why they had become altar boys in the first place. But after having been abused by that priest, all four boys who had wanted to be priests had instead killed themselves as teenagers. I couldn’t find much in the way of studies done on abuse victims as adults, but in general, the effects of childhood sexual abuse seem to be at least to some extent lifelong.

All of this looks like a major indictment of Roman Christianity. And when you consider this rampant sexual abuse of children by priests, and the way the Catholic Church has mishandled its latest scandal by covering it up for as long as possible rather than at once protecting its children, and you add it to Roman Christianity’s many other abominable sins, you must be as horrified as I am horrified.  You can see why so many people are concluding now that the modern Christianity that was founded by the Roman Emperor Constantine and not by Jesus seems to be dying now what looks to be a well-deserved death. My goodness, I don’t think I ever really understood the following passage from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, and its precise application to the modern Roman Christian religion, until I saw how the Catholic hierarchy has been fussily protecting its own Precious, rather than truly serving the Lord Jesus and caring for Jesus’s children in this clergy sexual abuse scandal! Jesus ever so wisely said:

¹⁵ “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. ¹⁶ You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? ¹⁷ So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. ¹⁸ A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. ¹⁹ Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. ²⁰ So then, you will know them by their fruits.

²¹ “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. ²² Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ ²³ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’ (MT 7:15-23)

Jesus never had much use for the clergymen of any religion. Now you and I can pretty clearly see why!

And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings, bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun! And hold you in the palm of His hand.

For to His angels He’s given a command:
To guard you in all of your ways. Upon their hands they will bear you up,
Lest you dash your foot against a stone.

And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings, bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun! And hold you in the palm of His hand.
And hold you, hold you in the palm of His hand.
– Michael Joncas, from “On Eagle’s Wings” (1977)

I will extol You, O Lord, for You have lifted me up,
And have not let my enemies rejoice over me.
² O Lord my God, I cried to You for help, and You healed me.
³ O Lord, You have brought up my soul from Sheol;
You have kept me alive, that I would not go down to the pit.
⁴ Sing praise to the Lord, you His godly ones, And give thanks to His holy name.
⁵ For His anger is but for a moment, His favor is for a lifetime;
Weeping may last for the night, But joy comes in the morning!

⁶ Now as for me, I said in my prosperity, “I will never be moved.”
⁷ O Lord, by Your favor You have made my mountain to stand strong;
You hid Your face, I was dismayed. ⁸ To You, O Lord, I called,
And to the Lord I made supplication:
⁹ “What profit is there in my blood, if I go down to the pit?
Will the dust praise You? Will it declare Your faithfulness?
– David (1040 BCE – 962 BCE), King of Israel and Judah, from Biblical Psalm 30.

If there is one mindset above all others that sets us up for happiness, for peace of mind, and for rapid spiritual growth, it is gratitude. I actually didn’t realize how true this is until our much-beloved Wayshower and Best Friend, Jesus, asked me to create with a lot of His help the course in making this present lifetime your last necessary earth-lifetime that we have been teaching since the start of this year. Our first group of thirty-two students completed this course in April, and twenty of them have gone on to the next level of what we have been calling “Wednesday with Jesus.” Meanwhile, there are seventeen students in “Thursday with Jesus” who are just beginning to benefit from what I learned about teaching spiritual growth that first time around! We have begun a list for a third group, and I have found that I do love doing this teaching, and I especially love the beautiful students that I have been meeting and coming to know. But I think that instead of doing this yet again, we are going to develop an AI teacher who can begin now to teach the whole world Jesus’s Gospel-based spiritual growth principles. And I am amazed to tell you that, my goodness, Jesus seems to really like this AI idea!

The Gospel teachings of Jesus truly are the simplest and the most effective way to grow spiritually. But you cannot just read His words and then try to follow His teachings on forgiveness and love. No, for one thing, as we have said elsewhere, forgiving wrongs after they have already been committed is very difficult, so it is really only prevenient forgiveness that works well for most people. And to make your spiritual growth really effective, there is one more thing that you will need to do first of all.

It never would have occurred to me to even wonder why gratitude is so important. But after just three months of closely following Jesus’s lesson plan, it was clear that His plan had worked for our Wednesday with Jesus students astoundingly well! Omigod, for each of the beautiful ones who had been part of that first intensive course, they all to varying degrees seemed to have grown spiritually to a wonderful extent. They could feel it, too. Some of them remarked to me about it. They were becoming much more “together,” and happier people. And in only three months’ time!

We now can see that cultivating an attitude of gratitude is essential preparation for our efforts to grow spiritually. To understand the likely reason why this would be true, please remember two points:

• Your own mind is a powerful part of one vast, eternal Mind. And at this moment, your mind is helping to create the fear- and negativity-filled reality that you think you see around you.
• Christianity has taught you to be afraid, and to believe that you are evil and fallen. And until you can elevate your mind above all this negativity, above both the general cultural negativity that your mind helps to create, and the negativity produced by Christianity in particular, you really cannot raise your personal consciousness vibration very much at all.

Just imagine, though, how much different things might be for you if you were able to assume more power over your own mind’s vibration!

It turns out that gratitude is the crucial first aspect of the Gospel teachings of Jesus on forgiveness and love. In fact, it sets the stage for all the rest. Unless we begin with gratitude, we very much complicate the difficulties that we face in making spiritual progress in this lifetime! As I have learned from Thomas as he and I talked about this, cultivating an attitude of gratitude is like plowing the field before you fertilize it with forgiveness, so then finally you can plant seeds of love. And Jesus did talk about preparing the soil if we want to grow spiritually. Consider this: “(Jesus) spoke many things to them in parables, saying, ‘Behold, the sower went out to sow; and as he sowed, some seeds fell beside the road, and the birds came and ate them up. Others fell on the rocky places, where they did not have much soil; and immediately they sprang up, because they had no depth of soil. But when the sun had risen, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. Others fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked them out. And others fell on the good soil and yielded a crop, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty. He who has ears, let him hear’” (MT 13:3-9). It may be that Jesus said a great deal more about our need to prepare our personal soil by cultivating it with gratitude before we attempt to grow spiritually. But either what He said was less remarked by His listeners, or else it was removed by the first-millennium councils in favor of the showier virtues of forgiveness and love.

In any event, it is time for us to get rid of all the pebbles in our soil and clear those pesky thorns away! And the best way to prepare our own consciousness soil is with a gratitude practice. Here are some points to keep in mind:

• Gratitude is independent of whatever you see as the current facts of your own life. It is an attitude of mind, and because it is that, you can be grateful no matter what is going on in your life.
• Living in gratitude will help to ensure that you will spot all the good things in your life. Watching studiously for reasons to be grateful so you can record them in your daily gratitude journal tends to crowd out any ambient negative thoughts.
• Gratitude begins the process of raising your spiritual vibration. When your focus shifts toward being grateful, you pay less attention to things that trouble you, and a lot more attention to what is good and useful.
• Gratitude is a way for you to begin to create your own best life. Your mind strongly influences the reality that you think you see around you, so concentrating on reasons for being grateful is a powerful way for you to lighten and lift the reality around you that your mind is helping to create.

You will decide on your own best gratitude practices. But here are four that have been shown by many to work well:

• Keep a gratitude journal. Write down one new thing every day that you are grateful for; then also write down why you are grateful for it. You will probably start with each of your loved ones to make up the first few days; then move on to personal successes, your work, and your hobbies; and then to things like the weather and elements of nature. You will find that sometime in the second month, you will be down to looking for reasons to be grateful for mosquitoes and a distant dog barking in the night. Do this for at least six months if you can, without duplicating anything. Gratitude-journaling this way helps you to go deeper into what gratitude even means.
• Broadly share your attitude of gratitude. Never again agree with any negative thing that is said in your presence! Instead, whenever someone complains, don’t disagree, but instead say at once what you are grateful for. Someone hates the president? Say, “I’m grateful that he hasn’t taken us to war,” or “I’m grateful that our taxes aren’t higher.” Someone complains about a cranky old neighbor? Just say, “I’m grateful that he keeps his lawn mowed.” It has been raining for a month? Say, “I’m so grateful that the reservoirs are filling up.” Not only will your always speaking from an attitude of gratitude reinforce your personal gratitude practice, but it also will help those with whom you share these thoughts to begin to cultivate gratitude in themselves.
• Use gratitude to squash your irritations. Resentments will continue to rise in you until you have perfected your prevenient forgiveness practice, but your work on gratitude will help you to better deal with whatever might be bothering you. Whenever you suffer a cranky thought about anyone or anything, immediately replace it with something that you are grateful for, even if you have to stretch a bit. When your old car is dying, so now you face having to buy another car, just be grateful for the way it has served you so long and so well. When your drunken uncle nearly ruins a family party, just be grateful for how special he made you feel when you were a child. Once you have fully mastered prevenient forgiveness, you will never suffer another resentment in your life; but until then, just use your gratitude habit to help you smother your present irritations.
• Pray for God’s gifts only in gratitude affirmations. When you say, “Dear God, please fix this,” you affirm its brokenness, which just makes whatever is broken even harder to fix! When instead your prayer affirms the gift of healing by saying “thank you God for fixing this”, that better outcome can begin right away with the assistance of the positive power of your own mind. Instead of claiming the lack, always claim the gift. And when you add “Thank you” for whatever gift or cure your affirmation prayer is claiming, you further energize God’s powers by adding to them and to your own healing powers the energy of your own gratitude. In April of 2009 I first prayed, “Thank You for giving me work to do. Thank You for showing me how to do it,” and I thereby gave the rest of my life to God. It was that simple! I still pray that mantra every day, and the endless pleasures that continue to flow from my impulsive gift are beyond my ability to express them.

My suggestion is that you apply all four of these gratitude practices to your life, and that you thereby prepare your mind for the rapid spiritual growth to come as you move forward into forgiveness and love. You might well choose not to continue to keep a gratitude journal beyond perhaps five or six months. But for you to continue the remaining three gratitude practices for the rest of your life will maintain your grounding in ever greater spiritual health. Most people take to gratitude easily, especially since if you are firm about it, you should find your mood lightening within days. In making gratitude central to your life, you are preparing the soil of your heart to yield a bountiful harvest of forgiveness and love. Beginning with gratitude makes your further spiritual growth so much easier!

¹⁰ “Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me; O Lord, be my helper.”
¹¹ You have turned for me my mourning into dancing;
You have loosed my sackcloth and girded me with gladness,
¹² That my soul may sing praise to You and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give thanks to You forever!
– David (1040 BCE – 962 BCE), King of Israel and Judah, from Biblical Psalm 30.