Author: Roberta Grimes

Childhood Transitions

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and staunch he stands;
The little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket molds in his hands.
Time was when the little toy dog was new
And the soldier was passing fair;
And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue
Kissed them and put them there.

“Now, don’t you go till I come,” he said,
“And don’t you make any noise!”
So, toddling off to his trundle-bed,
He dreamed of the pretty toys;
And as he was dreaming, an angel song
Awakened our Little Boy Blue —
Oh! the years are many, the years are long,
But the little toy friends are true!
Eugene Field (1850-1895), from “Little Boy Blue” (1888)

My mother knew many old poems by heart. She especially liked “Little Boy Blue,” and she would recite it cheerily as she went about her day. Somehow, it didn’t tug at her heartstrings the way without fail it still does to mine. Even today, I cannot get through all three verses of it without tears in my eyes. Back in the nineteenth century, before the invention of antibiotics and the wonder of protective vaccines, it was not at all unusual for a family’s two or even three young children to all catch diphtheria or typhoid fever or some other now readily preventable illness, and for all of them to be called by an angel on a single night. Indeed, the wisdom was that you should not become too fond of a young child until after it had hit the age of five.

Even as late as Little Boy Blue’s day, memorial photography was a common thing. Most personal photography in the late eighteen-hundreds still happened formally in a studio, so when children and young people died unexpectedly, they often then would be photographed for the first time and in a lifelike pose. Or a whole family would then be photographed, but with one child looking stiffly propped-up. I have a book of nineteenth-century memorial photographs, and it includes some examples of two or even three small children in the same family who had died together of a single illness. They would generally be laid out to be photographed in plain-crafted oblong boxes leaning against a wall, from youngest to oldest. The youngest might be a nine-month-old in a long white christening dress which spills out of the casket onto the floor. Next might be a little boy perhaps two years old, nattily dressed in knickers and with his hands folded, our Little Boy Blue. And the third, larger box might contain a girl of barely four whose hair has been fussily teased into banana curls. Again, she is posed to greet eternity with her hands folded, as if she were an adult. I look at such pictures with sympathetic horror. There was a long-ago night on which this young family had three children, and they were fighting mightily to keep at least one of them alive! But by the next morning, their children all had succumbed to a terrible childhood illness that is just some preventable nothing today.

My comfort is knowing that for most of a century now, sudden childhood deaths have ceased to be the parental nightmare that they once were. In fact, for a  long time it has been a rare thing for a child that survives its birth to then die in childhood of anything except for cancer or an accident. Yet we who study death and the afterlife still can study deaths that happen out of order for the fact that they nevertheless very often turn out to be deaths that were planned before birth, and they clearly were designed to serve useful purposes in their families’ lives. Not every gift is fun to receive!

This phenomenon of childhood deaths as planned family gifts is a tough one for many people to accept. Nevertheless, we are told now that deaths which happen in childhood are a crucial fact of some lives that were well planned before birth; and when sub-adults die, their early deaths were always planned, without exception. My Thomas feels so strongly about this that he now insists to me that every death by any cause that happens before the early twenties is a planned exit by someone who didn’t need to live that additional lifetime, but who chose to be born one extra time and then die very young for the family’s spiritual benefit. Please recall the fact that we come to earth to learn how to better raise our spiritual vibrations away from fear and toward love so we can better grow spiritually. And then consider some of the many kinds of spiritual growth and depth and overall progress that can be gained by those who love and then lose a child.

Consider, too, these important additional factors:

  • Entering Adulthood. Even as late as the mid-twentieth-century, the near-universal acts of marrying and then bringing infants into the world were closely and irrevocably tied. That combined act of marrying and having a first child was seen as the true and essential marker of attaining adulthood, and it was seen to include tremendous emotional stretching and risk. To marry was to accept and to live that risk, with all its attendant complexities and responsibilities. This is a main reason why sex outside of marriage always has been strictly forbidden. It is hard for those younger than perhaps seventy years old now even to imagine this, but the ancient and long-continuing rigid set of family-related customs, further sanctioned and blessed by the Christian religion, is why those few late-Sixties years wrought such utter havoc on Western culture. In only three or four perfectly disastrous years, we went from a comfortable and consistent family-based culture that was at least two millennia old to one which sanctioned free sex outside marriage and the easy use of recreational drugs, and this new culture actually disfavored and even disdained our ever getting married in the time-honored way. Wow, talk about sowing chaos! Many of those in the first Vietnam-War-damaged, drug-addled, free-love Sixties generation never really got over their sudden loss of all constraints. And Western culture as a whole is still struggling to recover from the aftereffects of that awful youthquake today.
  • Turning to God. The unexpected loss of a child is among the worst tragedies that ever can befall us. Many of those who have suffered the sudden and unexpected death of a baby or a young child will tell you that there is no pain as deep as what they have endured, and in the wake of that death they will often look for spiritual solace wherever they can find it. Often, it is when they are in this bereft situation that many people will seek a deeper relationship with God. Whether they return to church attendance, or they seek a spiritual advisor, or their spiritual awakening comes in a more subtle way, for many people, the loss of a baby or a young child will be the cause of a spiritual awakening for them, and the start of a deeper spiritual awareness. The loss of a child can also damage human relationships, true, and it can break up marriages; but sometimes, the deepening of spiritual awareness can lead to greater and more rapid spiritual growth.
  • Enlightening Miracles. These extra births and early deaths can sometimes be amazingly revealing of what planning must be going on behind the curtain! Twenty years ago, I counseled a couple who were learning after many years of trying to have children that the wife was medically confirmed to be infertile. It was now proven to be medically impossible for her ever to naturally conceive a child, so they decided to try the then-new solution of in vitro fertilization; and, wonder of wonders, she was able to carry and deliver fraternal twin boys. But then, to everyone’s horror, when those dearly loved children were toddlers, one of them managed to get through a fence, and after just a moment he was found floating face-down in a pool. The bereaved couple tried IVF again, and they were blessed with two baby girls. So their beautiful family of one boy and two girls was considered to be complete. But then two years later, this young woman who had been medically proven to be incapable of ever conceiving a child now conceived on her own, and she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. The husband and father was, with me, fascinated by this series of happenings. You and I also can think about the pre-birth planning that must have occurred! And we always have been sure that the naturally-conceived boy is of course his own lost brother, Alex, now safely returned to the family.

Each newborn child is, of course, an eternal being. Having by now met three newborns and watched them grow to middle age, I can testify that this is true without question. I can recall looking into the face of each of my newborn children and being amazed to see not a blank stare back, flat and brand-new today. But instead, each was clearly a different eternal being from the moment of birth, surprised to find itself in a whole new place. Each was registering all the emotions upon greeting this new world and its mother that would be appropriate for the unique human being in my arms that I would later come to know so well. My older daughter was looking around, curious, quite interested in the world but not particularly in me (she has Asperger’s syndrome). My middle child, also a girl, does not have Asperger’s, and she was glancing around, but mostly locking eyes with me, seeming to be glad to see me, and cuddling. My son, another Asperger’s child, at first was regarding everything that he saw in this astonishing new world, including me, with a sensible wariness. And that, my dear friends, pretty well sums up the three bright and beautiful offspring who remain at the center of my life today.

Every child who is born into our lives and then dies  early as a sub-adult is, just as we are, a powerful, eternal being. Each child who transitions early from our lives never leaves us randomly; but instead, each such departure is lovingly and carefully planned before that child’s birth to be a constructive gift for all who will know and love that child. And, knowing this to be true, we can especially honor our children who have gone on ahead of us by not blaming God, and not blaming any human agent for the temporary loss of our child. Instead, it is important that we forgive universally and for everything, and that we forgive ourselves and our child most of all! That we will be joyously together again in the afterlife is a certainty, promised to us by God and by Jesus. And, oh my dear ones, how very great will be that day!

Aye, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand,
Each in the same old place —
Awaiting the touch of a little hand,
And the smile of a little face;
And they wonder, as waiting these long years through
In the dust of that little chair,
What has become of our Little Boy Blue
Since he kissed them and put them there.
Eugene Field (1850-1895), from “Little Boy Blue” (1888)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

No Fear

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The road is long, with many a winding turn
That leads us to who knows where, who knows where.
But I’m strong, strong enough to carry him.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.

 So on we go. His welfare is of my concern.
No burden is he to bear. We’ll get there.
For I know he would not encumber me.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother,

 If I’m laden at all, I’m laden with sadness
That everyone’s heart isn’t filled with the gladness
Of love for one another. It’s a long, long road
From which there is no return.
While we’re on the way to there, why not share?
Bob Russell, Bobby Scott, from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)

The first three-quarters of the twentieth century was a time of constant, irrational fear of wars for most Americans, and for many other people on earth as well. There was the First World War, which ran from mid-1914 through most of 1918. And then the Second World War, which followed it from September of 1939 to September of 1945. And that one ended with two nuclear explosions, which told us that forever more after that, nothing ever was going to be the same again. And the Korean War, which went from mid-1950 to mid-1953. And then finally there was the Vietnam War, which struggled on from November 1 0f 1955 right on through April 30 of 1975, believe it or not. And since the United States had exploded those two nuclear bombs in Japan to definitively end the Second World War, it was readily assumed by just about everyone during much of  what was left of the twentieth century that atomic warfare had well and truly begun. So it really was only just a matter of time before atomic weapons would be used in war again.

 I came along just after the duck-and-cover phase of school management, when everyone was supposed to dive under their desks in the event of another nuclear war. But still, when I was in school, we were taught that nuclear war was inevitable, and we simply had to learn to live with that fact. I can remember coming home from school one day so upset that I told my mother that, really, what was the point of anything, when human life was now so precarious? I will remember forever after what she said to me in response. I must have been no older than first or second grade, because I was looking a long way up at her face as she said to me, “We cannot live in fear.” Just those five words. And with those words, my mother changed my entire outlook! No, we cannot live in fear. My mother was perfectly right!

My mother and I talked a good deal about this, off and on throughout my growing-up. She was a firmly devout Christian, a leader in her Congregational Church, and she was an absolute rock of certain devotion to God. As I grew, and as I simply followed the tranquil certainty of her lead in trusting God, I came to realize that there is a path forward in finding that certainty in God’s patient love. In addition, those of us who were working in the study of afterlife evidence soon came across the fact that elevated Beings had been so horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki that they had vowed right then never to allow another nuclear weapon to be used in warfare. We later learned that apparently this directive actually had come from the Godhead directly. And you will note that, sure enough, despite the fact that nine countries presently have nuclear weapons, including the United States, Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea, some of which are not, shall we say, especially friendly. Still, in the eighty years since the Second World War ended, no nuclear weapon has ever again been used in anger.

I no longer think that we can assume that any of this can be attributed to chance. During the past eighty years, there have been too many very-near-miss situations. Including at least one American missile test which was foiled when an unknown missile came from out of nowhere and shot it down. And then there was the well-documented situation of Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov (7 September 1939 – 19 May 2017), better known as “The man who saved the world.”

Petrov was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces. He was on duty at the Serpukhov-15 bunker on September 26, 1983, when there was suddenly an alarm loudly sounding that indicated that a massive number of American missiles was right now incoming on Russia. Oh my God! Petrov should at once have notified his superiors, and there should have been a massive retaliatory nuclear strike launched against the United States right now, at once, while such a strike still was possible. But from somewhere came the thought that this must be a false alarm. And so, against all rationality and all common sense, Petrov waited. And he waited. And he waited some more, with his heart quite literally in his throat because if he was wrong about this, there would go his country and all that he loved in a bout of rampant nuclear destruction. But Petrov was not wrong. No American missiles ever came.

Again and again in the modern world, People who were working for God have, often unwittingly, done their great work for good, and often with no recognition at all.  Stanislav Petrov does deserve a statue for his heroic act somewhere in the United States, and perhaps in the Capitol itself? It would be lovely if all the courageous stories of unsung people like him could be told to our children. When the stories that we tell our children about people in other countries are not stories of petty hatreds, but when they are instead stories about people like Stanislav Petrov, people who love foreign strangers enough to say, No, I don’t believe they would send missiles at us. I don’t fear them. I love them. I trust them. And I will give them a chance to live.

And that love of good people for strangers is something that we must never take for granted! But what about the malevolence of a blind, uncaring universe? This linked article in the popular science magazine New Scientist is entitled, “The universe could vanish at any moment – why hasn’t it?” and like all such articles in all such magazines, it goes into a learned and complicated dither about just how extremely precarious everything is, and how it all eventually is going to end; but still why, nevertheless, you and I probably are going to be okay just for the moment. Or maybe for longer.  But consider for a moment that since the very recent-seeming year 2000, just shy of a quarter of a century has already passed. Only one more year will do it! We tend to think of a century as such a long time, but it is nothing, really. And I didn’t give that sobering fact much thought until I sat down just now to write this blog post. My, my. What then is a human being’s life, when it is planned to take so little time as one century?

All these musings came about because I have been very ill this week, and certainly in no condition to write. On Thursday, I told Thomas that we still needed a blog post topic for this weekend, like it or not. And as he tends to do when it is already Thursday, he gave me just one word. He gave me Fear as a topic. Oh my goodness, fear is the strongest negative word, and to boot, he said that the idea had come from Jesus. Jesus is quite bothered by the fact that so many people who are going home now are so fearful! And He feels that is more and more because the earth overall is so fearful, and so deeply negative. He thinks that what is needed for us is a more focused personal forgiveness practice which will make our eventual going-home process easier for us, and much more joyous. After all, this past quarter of a century since the twenty-first century began was a quarter of your own life! And how have you used it? What have you learned? What would you like to do with the next quarter of your life?

And above all, my darling ones, Jesus suggests to us now that we truly never need to fear anything. Just remember again that God has decided that there will never be another atomic bomb exploded in a war; and according to God’s decision, so it ever has been, for the past eighty years. Whenever I have thought of something like, “OMG! All our enemies have nuclear bombs!” or, “Scientists say the whole universe could vanish at any moment! We’re doomed!” I always at once think, “Nah.” Because I know that God always has my back. And God has your back, too! God loves each of us more than any of us can possibly imagine .No matter what ever happens, my dear ones, you and I are always safe in Everlasting Arms.

 

If I’m laden at all, I’m laden with sadness
That everyone’ heart isn’t filled with the gladness
Of love for one another. It’s a long, long road
From which there is no return.
While we’re on the way to there, why not share?

 And the load Doesn’t weigh me down at all
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother. He’s my brother!
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother!
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother!
=Bob Russell, Bobby Scott, from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Let It Go

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me,
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me,
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be.
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.

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.
Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be.
There will be an answer, let it be.
– Paul McCartney & John Lennon (1940-1980), from “Let it Be” (1970)

These few days between our celebration of the birth of Jesus and the dawning of the day when we will welcome a new calendar year can be Jesus’s liberating gift to us. Perhaps in previous years we never have seen this transitional week in quite this way, because we haven’t realized what it represents as a part of our larger relationship with God. But in many older and very ancient cultures, the last days of a passing year and also the first days of a new year did have great symbolic significance. For you and me, there is the simple fact that the year ending now carried certain events, whether we thought those events were good or bad, important or trivial, which will forever be tagged in our minds with a date in the year that is now ending. And our beloved Wayshower and Best Friend, Jesus, is asking us to pause here with Him, and to make special note of some of the significant events which happened in our lives in this passing year.

Before our promised Messiah was born as Jesus, there was so little difference in our relationship with God from one year to the next, or even from one millennium to the next, without end. But Jesus tells us that He chose to be born on earth specifically so He could teach us how to learn to better love and forgive and help us to raise our personal vibrations so efficiently that each of us could thereby raise our own personal vibration ever higher and make this lifetime our last necessary earth-lifetime. That was Jesus’s announced mission on earth, and oh, how perfectly he then carried it out! The Lord’s Gospel teachings are ideally suited to give us precisely what Jesus came to earth to give to us, which was the perfect means for vastly more rapid spiritual growth. Jesus did in fact at last powerfully give us the means to end the ancient cycle of eternal deaths and rebirths!  

For example, Jesus said, “‘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). “The Law and the Prophets” was, of course, what the ancient Jews called our modern Christian Old Testament. And Jesus said, “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36). And Jesus further said, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return” (LK 6:37-38).

Jesus’s requirement that now we must not only love, but now we also must forgive was a new command, and it felt vexatious to most of the people around Him. Peter, His disciple, griped to Jesus about it. Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Even up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). Or in other words, no matter how many times your brother sins against you, you must always forgive him. Every time!

Jesus has plainly told us that God never judges us. He said, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). And Jesus has told us that He, Jesus, does not judge us either. He said, “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). And Jesus tells us that what He came to save the world from was ignorance. Repeatedly He says things like, “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). And, “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).

So, all right then. Why does Jesus want us to consider this one brief week out of the whole year to be so special? Why does Jesus hope to begin a new habit with us now of spending these few days between Christmas and the first day of the New Year with Him, every year? What is it that we can productively do together right now?

My dear ones, ours is the first human generation on earth of which a preponderance of the members understands the fact that we are eternal beings. If you are reading these words, then by your very nature you always have been alive and aware, and you always will be alive and aware. Oh, true, in a different age you occupied a different physical body and you were called by a different name, but such details mean nothing to your fundamentally eternal nature. Your eternal home is not in this material universe. But rather, you cycle back here every once in a while because this harshly negative emotional environment is a much more fertile ground for your rapid spiritual growth. Each time you come back here, however, you do unavoidably have negative experiences, and you encounter some negative people. So you will return to your eternal life with a lot to forgive, and especially in yourself.

Which is a good thing! It’s a great thing! As someone whose true home is among the astral stars, one of the first things that you will do when you transition home again will be to have a review of your life here just ended. In your life review, you will experience each event of your life just ended here from the viewpoint of each of the people that you affected. Then you will be asked to forgive everyone in your life just ended who might have harmed you at all. And finally, you will be asked to forgive yourself.

This might seem to you to be easy enough to do now, but trust me on this. It won’t be easy at all. People who have gone through a life review and recall it now tell us that they remembered and they were prepared for most of the bigger events where they knew that they had screwed up in that lifetime. But, wow, there had been so many little places that they had altogether forgotten about, or that they never even had noticed in the first place when they had hurt someone’s feelings, or ruined someone’s day, or missed some great chance to do someone else a real kindness! And when they went through that post-death life review, their whole life looked to them now as if it had been awful, miserable, and littered with failures! So rather than the pretty good life overall that they had expected to find themselves reviewing, they had been staggered to find themselves reviewing a life that they could barely forgive at all. Our spirit guides and others, perhaps even including Jesus, also will be there to help and coach us through our life review.  But self-forgiveness is so hard! And while your big-deal, post-death life review is already happening, it is far too late for you to be just beginning to try to learn to forgive yourself, for heaven’s sake. Because if you cannot learn self-forgiveness quickly enough, your personal vibration will soon start to slow, and then it will slow more rapidly; and then pretty quickly the Outer Darkness awaits you.

So what Jesus suggests to us now is that we use the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day each year from now on to review, and then to fully forgive each of the troubling events of our year  that is now ending. Don’t search your memory so much for the things that you might have done that harmed someone else just yet, but of course include those as well if they occur to you; but try to list everything that has happened to you this year that might have upset you in any way, and that you really ought to forgive right now. List each incident with enough detail to make it unique and memorable, and especially include the names of all the people if you know them; then either write it all down, or perhaps list each event with its details efficiently on your computer or your iPad. And if this will be your first year of doing this, and if some incidents from prior to this year also occur to you, then write down those prior incidents as well. In future years, this process is easiest if you are keeping your forgiveness list all year long.

Precisely HOW you actually forgive is going to be up to you. Jesus is eager to help you if you would like His help, perhaps if you want to pray with Him over some particular item on your list, and especially if someone has severely harmed you. Personally, I have found our frame-verse today to be a good way to lift the weight of a pain as I meditate on forgiving something, since “Let it go. Let it be” is a powerful mantra. Some people know that I teach forgiveness using forgiveness balls and a mantra which goes, “I love you, I bless you, I forgive, and I release,” which also works very well. What you need is a specific way to briefly dwell on each item on your forgiveness list, to allow yourself briefly to feel the pain of it again so you can feel it lift, and then to signal to your mind that the pain is forgiven and let it then fly away. Then cross out each item as you forgive it.

The point of this exercise is to create an efficient forgiveness process. You will find that the more you focus on forgiveness, and even on keeping a list of things to remember to forgive at the end of the year, the fewer things you are going to need to forgive. Our minds are so lazy! Once we train them not to form grudges in the first place, they really do stop bothering. It almost doesn’t matter what the symbolic process is that you use to forgive and release each item on your forgiveness list. So long as you actually do forgive, you will find that this process works ever better each year to clear that year’s slate. And within a few years you will find that it even can start to work for self-forgiveness, too.

Forgiving yourself is a great deal harder than it is to forgive others, even when you have to forgive others for some very big things. But once you have learned to make forgiving other people an automatic reflex, which is just what it will become after you have joined Jesus in a few years of His Christmas-to-New-Year’s-Day forgiveness marathons, you will find that self-forgiveness will become a great deal easier for you as well. And that is what Jesus is really trying to make happen for you now! He tells Thomas that He has been a part of a great many life reviews by now. And he has watched far too many people struggle to forgive themselves for even trivial errors in what had been otherwise some very good earth-lives. He certainly does not want that to be you, too! He wants you to become a forgiveness expert!

As Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, “Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way that you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you” (MT 7:1-2). Oh my goodness, my dear beautiful friends, that is more certainly true than we ever before have imagined!

Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be.
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.
Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be.
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.
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,
And let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be,
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.
And let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be,
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.
– Paul McCartney & John Lennon (1940-1980), from “Let it Be” (1970)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

He Loves Us!

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Joy to the world, the Lord is come.
Let earth receive her king!
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And heaven and nature sing!
And heaven and nature sing!
And heaven and Heaven and nature sing!

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

The first time Thomas took me to visit with Jesus in the astral plane and he allowed me to remember the event was in the spring. it was on the night of April 6, 2022, to be precise. But now I am coming to see that the perfect joy of that night is something that will always be in my mind most vividly at Christmastime, because the Jesus that I met that night was so much more like the gift that we celebrate at Christmas than He was like the gift that we imagine needing to celebrate at Easter. Those two versions of Jesus are two very different gifts! And it gives me no pleasure to point out the fact that two entirely different versions of Jesus even exist in our minds at all, since the one that most modern Christians know isn’t even the genuine Jesus at all, the glorious and perfectly loving Jesus that amazingly I met in person three years ago this coming Spring. And until very recently, I harbored the fear that only the Roman version of Jesus, the version that the Emperor Constantine created with his Christian religion, might be the one that in the end is going to survive in people’s minds. 

Only think of that Roman Christian version of Jesus, and the God that Constantine dreamed up for Him to serve. Now, I could be wrong about this. I would love to be wrong, because even as I write it out it makes no sense to me now, and it never has made any sense at all, even though I was an ardent Christian for the first fifty years of my life. My goodness, I even have a degree in this subject from a prestigious college! But let’s simply reason it through here together. As I understand Christian doctrine, God created everything, and God has infinite powers. God also loves us infinitely. How am I doing so far? Okay, so but as I understand it, the one power that God lacks is the power to forgive us unassisted. No matter how much God loves us, and even though God insists that we all must learn to forgive, still we are so far below our ultra-perfect God that God can never forgive us for even our most basic human failings. Therefore, God had to send His own beloved Son to be horribly tortured and murdered as punishment for our sins in our place. It was only then that God could forgive us. Do I have this right?

My problem with all of this is that it makes no sense to me at all. If God is all-powerful, and if God insists that each of us must learn to forgive, then why can’t God also learn to forgive and just forgive us all outright, for heaven’s sake, without putting Jesus though all that trauma, and without putting us through so much guilt for Jesus’s suffering? For years after I stopped being a Catholic, I used to go to church with my husband, to support him in his faith and to keep him company. We often went to Saturday afternoon Mass, and then afterward we would have a nice dinner-date. But that life-size, full-color plaster Jesus bleeding on the cross over the altar in my husband’s church was so upsetting to me that sadly there at last came a time when I could no longer go to church with him at all.

But, okay, let’s assume for a moment that the Jesus-died-for-our-sins thing did have to happen. God is so far above us spiritually that He needs a pure Vessel to take all the whole world’s sins upon Himself so they can be punished once and for all, and then God can forgive us all. And that ultra-pure, sinless Vessel is Jesus. Okay. Hard for me to accept, but let’s assume that I am a spiritual dunce. So then it was done. Okay, fine. But so why then did Jesus also rise from the dead afterward, and why did He make such a big point of doing that as a display for His disciples? Jesus’s rising from the dead doesn’t seem to have been needed as part of the script that says that He died for our sins. Or does it? Am I still missing something? And nor does Jesus’s having spent more than three years lovingly teaching His disciples and His thousands of followers how to ever more perfectly love and forgive ever seem to have been needed as a part of the script of Jesus’s life before He became God’s pure and sinless sacrificial Lamb. If being that Lamb and taking all our sins upon Himself, and then suffering and dying in our place really was the purpose of Jesus’s life, then why did He teach us anything at all? Wasn’t Jesus needlessly risking a loss of His sinless purity with His side-excursions to argue with the clergy and to teach for three years before His crucial death on the cross at last occurred?

All of this really was the biggest reason why my conversation with Jesus on the night of April 6, 2022, was so extraordinary for me. Truly, I had spent most of my life until that night fighting the Roman Christian dogma that Jesus died for our sins! The entire idea that God had sent His Son to die as a sinless sacrifice to God always had been so repugnant to me. But, could Jesus have known that fact about me, in particular? Could it have mattered to Him that I was so upset by the Roman Christian dogma of substitutionary atonement? I wonder about that only now. I haven’t really thought about this detail until now because the fact that OMG Thomas took me to meet with Jesus Himself has for the past almost three years been my headline fact about that amazing night. But Thomas took me to meet with Jesus for a reason of the Lord’s own. And that reason was that Jesus wanted to share with me His actual purpose for being born on earth from out of the Godhead on that blessed night in Bethlehem two thousand years ago. He wanted me to share His actual purpose with you, and also to share it with all the world.

My dear ones, it is impossible for you to encounter Jesus and not to know right away who He is. No question! In the gigantic astral plane, we recognize one another by our unique energies, and Jesus’s personal energy is one high, pure note so intense that unless He remembers to tone it down for us, it actually is painful for you and me to be near Him. But the joy of being in Jesus’s presence is hard for me to adequately describe for you. Because all that He seems to care about is you! He looks at you with such joy, as if He has been waiting for you to appear for His entire life. He looks deeply into your eyes with the warmest smile, and He asks you about your day, what you have been doing, even what you are thinking. All that He cares about in that moment is you. It’s incredible. He loves you so overwhelmingly! I have given you in a blog post written just two months after that wonderful night Jesus’s story in abbreviated form as He told it to me then, so I won’t repeat much of it here; but I do urge you to read it at the link just above. His own version of His story makes perfect sense!

Jesus came to earth as an infant so He could spend a whole lifetime here studying us, to be sure that He could understand us well enough to teach us very well. And then for three years He taught us how to forgive and love perfectly, so we can each make this our last necessary earth-lifetime, and be done at last with reincarnation. His original life-plan that He had made with His personal Council was that eventually He would simply walk away and be subsumed back into the Godhead. But He had been unable to convince His followers that there is no death, so He chose to dismiss the protection of His invisible Archangels, and by His own choice He allowed Himself to be arrested, crucified, and entombed. He did that so He could two days later reanimate His corpse, and He then could rise from the dead and thereby prove to His followers and prove to us all that in fact there is no death. So Constantine’s whole substitutionary atonement notion is altogether wrong! Jesus’s crucifixion was just a demonstration, and it was all His own idea. He chose to be born on earth as our Teacher, our Elder Brother and Best Friend. And what Jesus came to save us from was spiritual ignorance! It really does all make sense!

 

Thomas and I are sharing with you here for reading, perhaps on Christmas Eve, the beloved tale of the birth two thousand years ago of the genuine Jesus, the eternally-living Christ. Jesus loves us so much that He devoted thousands of earth-years to persuading the Godhead Collective to grant Him His wish to be born on earth as our Spiritual Teacher of God’s greatest Truths so He could save us from our spiritual ignorance. And now Jesus remains with us forevermore. When you transition home, you also will personally meet Him; but for now, we all can together share His nativity story. Down through the ages, these words from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew still sing!

2 Now in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth. 2 This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3 And everyone was on his way to register for the census, each to his own city. 4 Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, 5 in order to register along with Mary, who was engaged to him, and was with child. 6 While they were there, the days were completed for her to give birth. 7 And she gave birth to her firstborn son; and she wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

8 In the same region there were shepherds staying out in the fields and keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 And an angel of the Lord suddenly stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them; and they were terribly frightened. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people; 11 for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. 12 This will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” 13 And suddenly there appeared with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,

14 “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased.”

15 When the angels had gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds began saying to one another, “Let us go straight to Bethlehem then, and see this thing that has happened which the Lord has made known to us.” 16 So they came in a hurry and found their way to Mary and Joseph, and the baby as He lay in the manger. 17 When they had seen this, they made widely known the statement which had been told them about this Child. 18 And all who heard it wondered at the things which were told them by the shepherds. 19 But Mary treasured all these things, pondering them in her heart. 20 The shepherds went back, glorifying and praising God for all that they had heard and seen, just as had been told them.

21 And when eight days had passed, before His circumcision, His name was then called Jesus, the name given by the angel before He was conceived in the womb.

22 And when the days for their purification according to the law of Moses were completed, they brought Him up to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord 23 (as it is written in the Law of the Lord, “Every firstborn male that opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord”), 24 and to offer a sacrifice according to what was said in the Law of the Lord, “A pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.”

25 And there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; and this man was righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel; and the Holy Spirit was upon him. 26 And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. 27 And he came in the Spirit into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to carry out for Him the custom of the Law, 28 then he took Him into his arms, and blessed God, and said,

29 “Now Lord, You are releasing Your bond-servant to depart in peace,
According to Your word;
30 For my eyes have seen Your salvation,
31 Which You have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
32 A Light of revelation to the Gentiles,
And the glory of Your people Israel.”

33 And His father and mother were amazed at the things which were being said about Him. 34 And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary His mother, “Behold, this Child is appointed for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and for a sign to be opposed— 35 and a sword will pierce even your own soul—to the end that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.” (LK 2:1-35)

2 Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, magi from the east arrived in Jerusalem, saying, 2 “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we saw His star in the east and have come to worship Him.” 3 When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. 4 Gathering together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of the magi where the Messiah was to be born. 5 They said to him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for this is what has been written by the prophet:

6 ‘And you, Bethlehem, land of Judah,
Are by no means least among the leaders of Judah;
For out of you shall come forth a Ruler
Who will shepherd My people Israel.’”

7 Then Herod secretly called the magi and determined from them the exact time the star appeared. 8 And he sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the Child; and when you have found Him, report to me, so that I too may come and worship Him.” 9 After hearing the king, they went their way; and the star, which they had seen in the east, went on before them until it came and stood over the place where the Child was. 10 When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. 11 After coming into the house they saw the Child with Mary His mother; and they fell to the ground and worshiped Him. Then, opening their treasures, they presented to Him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12 And having been warned by God in a dream not to return to Herod, the magi left for their own country by another way.

13 Now when they had gone, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up! Take the Child and His mother and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is going to search for the Child to destroy Him.”

14 So Joseph got up and took the Child and His mother while it was still night, and left for Egypt. 15 He remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called My Son.”

16 Then when Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he became very enraged, and sent and slew all the male children who were in Bethlehem and all its vicinity, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the magi. 17 Then what had been spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled:

18 “A voice was heard in Ramah,
Weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children;
And she refused to be comforted,
Because they were no more.”

19 But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, and said, 20 “Get up, take the Child and His mother, and go into the land of Israel; for those who sought the Child’s life are dead.” 21 So Joseph got up, took the Child and His mother, and came into the land of Israel. 22 But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Then after being warned by God in a dream, he left for the regions of Galilee, 23 and came and lived in a city called Nazareth. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophets: “He shall be called a Nazarene.” (MT 2:1-23)

… And so it was very well begun! My dearly beloved friends, may the genuine Jesus, who is pure love and grace, fill your heart now and forevermore. Merry Christmas!

He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness
And wonders of His love!
And wonders of His love!
And wonders, and wonders of His love!
– Isaac Watts (1674-1748), from “Joy to the World” (1719)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Why There? Why Then?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan’s tyranny;
From depths of hell Thy people save,
And give them victory o’er the grave.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Dayspring, from on high,
And cheer us by Thy drawing nigh;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
– John Mason Neale (1818-1866), Translator, from “Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel” (15th Cen CE)

I had almost no time to blog this week because I have just returned from a trip to Massachusetts to see my beloved legal clients, so I still had things to do for them. I turned to Thomas early on Friday morning, and I said, “I got nothin’. So it’s your turn!” He said to me calmly, “Let’s write about what most people are wondering about now, twelve days before Christmas. Why did Jesus come to the world when He did? Why then? Why not a thousand years earlier? Or two thousand years later? And why in Bethlehem of Judea, of all places?” I said right back to Thomas, “Hey, great idea! And will Jesus sit with us so we can interview Him, do you think? Give us some of His own insights?”

I immediately got what I have come to think of as my spirit guide’s Fu Manchu frown. He showed himself to me in a flash as a sixth-level being, nine feet tall and thin, with a fancy robe and frowning behind a long Fu Manchu mustache. So, of course I did next what you would do. I Googled, “Why did Jesus choose to be born where and when He was born?” And I received this pretty good, if superficial, answer:

“According to Christian belief, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, during the reign of King Herod the Great, because this fulfilled Old Testament prophecies that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, and the timing coincided with a period of relative peace under Roman rule known as the Pax Romana, which allowed for the spread of his message across the Roman Empire; however, the exact date of Jesus’s birth is not definitively known, and is estimated to be between 6 and 4 BC based on historical context.”

Well, I think that you and I can do a whole lot better than that! Especially with the work that we lately have been doing with God, learning to better comprehend and trust God, even from our limited perspective; and coming to more completely believe in and comprehend God’s perfect love for each of us. And with Jesus always nearby, reminding us of what He came to earth to teach us. First, of course, it is important for us to note that the Christian Old Testament contains almost nothing in the way of prophesy of who the Messiah was going to be, and what he was expected to do.

Discovering how little the Old Testament tells us about the Messiah surprised me. Rather than any real prophesy of a being to come, there is instead in a couple of those old scrolls just a vague sense of a future prince who will bring about a gathering of the Hebrew tribes back into their ancient home-place. Woe from God will befall those who thwart this obscure Messiah’s work! and when he comes, that vaguely promised Messiah will “declare all things to us” (see Jer 23:1; Dan 9:23-36; JN 4:25). Rather than having been a real future being who was confidently predicted to arrive at some specified future time and place, the Messiah seems to have been more like what a Santa Clause figure is for us. He was a vaguely hoped-for being of largely mythological folklore.

And because this was true, especially in the early part of His ministry, our beloved Jesus was shy about claiming the Messiah’s mantle. Instead, He referred to Himself as “the Son of Man”, so He was something like an everyman’s son. He was quite curious, though, about how those who were following Him, who soon numbered in the thousands, were thinking of Him, and He often asked His disciples what those in His crowds of followers were saying about Him. For example:

27 “Jesus went out, along with His disciples, to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way, He questioned His disciples, saying to them, “Who do people say that I am?” 28 They told Him, saying, “John the Baptist; and others say Elijah; but others, one of the prophets.” 29 And He continued by questioning them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered and said to Him, “You are the Messiah.” 30 And He warned them to tell no one about Him” (MK 8:27-30).

Jesus let this identification of Him as the Messiah, the one who was to come, dawn on His followers only gradually, as His fame grew with His teachings and no other title seemed to fit so well. Or they also began to call Him “the Christ,” a term which appears not at all in the Old Testament, but is abundant in all four of the New Testament Gospels and is used there from the start to identify Jesus. For example, it is said in Matthew, “Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows: when His mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit” (MT 1:18). Indeed, in JN 1:41 we are told that “Messiah” and “Christ” are equivalent terms. And at first, there is some confusion over whether John the Baptist might be the Christ? But no, John is murdered rather early on, and Jesus’s local fame soon surpasses John’s.

We might note here that an effort was made when the Christian Bible was being assembled at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE to remove every reference to reincarnation that was found in the scriptures being considered for inclusion in the Bible. But still, you can see that Jesus’s followers generally believed in reincarnation in the way that they were guessing that Jesus Himself might have been John the Baptist (who had just been murdered), Elijah, or one of the other great prophets returned. And Jesus seems never in the Gospels to protest when people mention reincarnation in His presence. Interesting fact duly noted.

The only people Jesus really disagreed with, and He even actively despised, were clergymen.  For example, when He saw many of the Pharisees and the Sadducees coming to John to be baptized, He said to them, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (MT 3:6-8) It is little wonder that so many of the clergy of Jesus’s day actively despised Him in return!

Because of this constant animosity between Jesus and most of the clergy, He seems often to have been put in situations where He needed  to demonstrate His Own divinity, even toward the end of His life. Read this remarkable, rather long passage from the Gospel of John! Jesus tells us here that, “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep. 12 He who is a hired hand, and not a shepherd, who is not the owner of the sheep, sees the wolf coming, and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. 13 He flees because he is a hired hand and is not concerned about the sheep. 14 I am the good shepherd, and I know My own and My own know Me, 15 even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep. 16 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. 17 For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life so that I may take it again. 18 No one has taken it away from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This commandment I received from My Father.”

19 A division occurred again among the Jews because of these words. 20 Many of them were saying, “He has a demon and is insane. Why do you listen to Him?” 21 Others were saying, “These are not the sayings of one demon-possessed! A demon cannot open the eyes of the blind, can he?”

22 At that time the Feast of the Dedication took place at Jerusalem; 23 it was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple in the portico of Solomon. 24 The Jews then gathered around Him, and were saying to Him, “How long will You keep us in suspense? If You are the Christ, tell us plainly.” 25 Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe; the works that I do in My Father’s name, these testify of Me. 26 But you do not believe because you are not of My sheep. 27 My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; 28 and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. 30 I and the Father are one.”

31 The Jews picked up stones again to stone Him. 32 Jesus answered them, “I showed you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you stoning Me?” 33 The Jews answered Him, “For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy; and because You, being a man, make Yourself out to be God.” 34 Jesus answered them, “Has it not been written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? 35 If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came (and the Scripture cannot be broken), 36 do you say of Him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’? 37 If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me; 38 but if I do them, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me, and I in the Father.” 39 Therefore they were seeking again to seize Him, and He eluded their grasp.

40 And He went away again beyond the Jordan to the place where John was first baptizing, and He was staying there. 41 Many came to Him and were saying, ‘While John performed no sign, yet everything John said about this man was true.’ 42 Many believed in Him there” (JN 10:11-42).

We look back now at Jesus’s birth, at His just over three years of teaching, and His crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. And what an easy thing it all seems to us now to have been for Him to accomplish! But then we actually read the Gospels, and we read about His battles with the clergy and the guards as those conflicts occurred, and we live His life with Him and we see that in truth none of it was actually easy. Not even for God who was made flesh and protected by archangels.

When I incredibly and completely unexpectedly first met Jesus in the astral plane in the summer of 2022, He told me that it had taken Him something like four earth-centuries of pleading before God actually allowed Him to be born again on earth from out of the Godhead. He said the Celestial Councils seemed to think that if they stonewalled Him, eventually He would drop the idea. It never before had been done, that a Perfected Being might be born on earth to teach. The whole idea seemed risky, preposterous, and somehow unserious to them. But He refused to give it up! His only requests had been that He be born near where His last earth-lifetime had been lived, so in the Middle East somewhere; and that He be born at a time when a war during His lifetime as Jesus would be unlikely. I still clearly recall His mental use of that word, “unlikely.”

So, true, Jesus was not asking for much. And as we shall see next week, although there were no wars, a pogrom carried out against infant boys by Herod soon after the birth of Jesus pretty much amounted to the same thing. Oh, and Thomas also confirmed to me that Jesus wanted to be born a Jew, as one of the world’s first true monotheists, so He could teach people who would readily understand that there is One God. But by Jesus’s own account, He seems to have been born when He was born mostly because that was the soonest that He could manage to wear down the Godhead’s resistance to supporting His unique and extraordinary birth from out of the Godhead….

O come, Thou Key of David, come
And open wide our heav’nly home;
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Adonai, Lord of might,
Who to Thy tribes, on Sinai’s height,
In ancient times didst give the law
In cloud and majesty and awe.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
John Mason Neale (1818-1866), Translator, from “Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel” (15th Cen CE)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Trusting God

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Oh Lord, my God, when I, in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made,
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed,

Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,
How great Thou art! How great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,
How great Thou art! How great Thou art!

When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
Then I shall bow in humble adoration
And then proclaim, my God, how great Thou art!
– Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1949)

The problem most people have, I think, is not that they don’t believe in God. As the old saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes. And many of our days contain lesser crises than foxholes that nevertheless still have us thinking quick little prayers, just in case. Every modern culture also is permeated with the thought of God, since there are old churches, cathedrals, or mosques in every city and town, all over the world, even if some of those sacred buildings now see little use. And our speech is littered with the name of God in more than a hundred languages, used someetimes in ways that are absent-mindedly profane. All of that is still true, so it is certainly true that most people still believe that God exists, even if their belief is only vague; and even if nowadays sometimes that holy name is said without much of a deliberate thought.

So, our problem doesn’t seem to be a lack of belief in God, at least in some form. No, but nevertheless I think we all can agree that there is more of a disconnect now between most people and God than there ever has been in living memory. As recently as fifty years ago, in America at least, all those churches in our town and city squares were full on Sundays. It was a simple convention that everyone had some nominal religion, and almost always it was of the Judeo-Christian variety. It is really only in this new century, so I would say in the last twenty-five years or so, that there has been such a major falling-away from our old religions. Many people see this phenomenon as a falling-away from faith in their old religion happening because that old religion no longer makes much sense to them. Thinking about the hundreds of emails that I have received over the past few decades, the one thing that strangers who have written to me have most consistently said was that they could no longer believe in their old religion, but they still believe very much in Jesus.

And with that, if people felt the need to say more, there often was a sharp subtext of fear. This was especially true of those who were getting up their nerve to leave the Catholic Church, or to free themselves from one of the stricter Protestant churches, from the Calvinists perhaps, or from one of the Evangelical sects, which generally decree damnation for those who have fallen away. So the people who emailed me often have wanted to know whether I believed what their former church believed, and if not then why not; and back in the years when I had more time, I might have had quite lively email dialogues with some of those folks. They wanted their strict former churches to be wrong, and me to be right. But with their possible eternal futures lived in flames now riding on the result of our conversations, some of the men, especially, would battle me pretty hard!

And I enjoyed those intellectual squabbles. I am an attorney, after all, and a Biblical scholar with some great quotations from Jesus just waiting in my mind to be shared, so I could readily tell those desperate people, if I was in the right mood, that the fear-based teachings of their prior religion were nothing more than a steaming pile of fear-based excrement. I could happily tell them that if they would stick with Jesus and His teachings, they were going to be just fine.  

What is so horribly fearful about the Roman Emperor Constantine’s form of Christianity that still prevails today? Oh, my dear one, let us count the ways in which modern Christianity is based in fear! As is true of every ancient religion, Constantine’s Christianity had to be based in fear as a standard convention. And there was a doozy of a central fear right there and readily available to the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, just waiting to be used to fill every future Christian’s heart with the misery of fear and guilt and shame: 

  • Jesus Died on the Cross to Redeem You from God’s Judgment for Your Sins. When my Thomas took me to meet with Jesus in the astral plane two years ago so I could talk with Him about His planned website, Jesus told me plainly that He had chosen to die on the cross and then to reanimate His dead body in order to demonstrate the fact that human life is eternal, and not for any other reason. He could not otherwise convince His contemporaries that they would survive their deaths, no matter what He said to them. He told me that it was Constantine who had added the idea that Jesus had died to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins. And of course, if we think about it for even half a minute, we will realize that the Christian dogma makes no sense, because for one thing, God never judges us, as Jesus clearly says in the Gospel of John. Jesus says there, “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).
  • God will Judge You, and God Will Throw Sinners into the Eternal Fire of Hell. Jesus tells us (see JN 5:22-23, just above) that God never judges us, and we also know based on extensive afterlife evidence that our judgment is only by ourselves and it happens as part of the post-death process. We know as well that there is no fiery hell, but instead the lowest afterlife level is what Jesus called “the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (MT 8:12). The outer darkness is where we will end up if our personal vibration falls far enough away from love and toward fear, to the point that we end up there. And it is indeed cold, dark, smelly, and disgusting in the outer darkness! That is the punishment level, no doubt, and we would need to be rescued from it because we cannot escape it on our own. But we are the only ones who ever can put ourselves there, we easily can avoid it, and we certainly do not remain there forever.
  • Human Nature is Sinful and Fallen. The Christianity of Constantine teaches us that our very nature is debased. But Jesus spent three years loving us and tenderly teaching us just how deeply precious to God we are! He taught us to call God our own Father, using the intrafamily term for Father, so He was effectively telling us to call God “Daddy”. Jesus always was building us up, telling us that God loves us very much, and that He, Jesus, loves us. He constantly said things like, “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).
  • Jehovah God is to be Feared. Christians are taught to fear that old-fashioned, religion-based God, even today! We will hear someone approvingly described as “a God-fearing man” or “a God-fearing woman,” as if this were the highest form of praise. But Jesus was appalled to find when He first was growing up on earth just how much the Jews among whom he had been born feared God. He taught us instead to call God “Our Father, Who is in Heaven” (MT 6:9), using the familial form of the word for Father. In every way that He could, He tried to transform our relationship with God to one based entirely on parental love.

You and I cannot possibly love or trust God at all if we fear God, since love and fear are polar opposites. Without love, we only can tremble in terror before the great Jehovah God! But Jesus came to us to altogether transform our understanding of our true relationship with God into the same perfectly loving Parent-Child relationship that God has with Jesus. He said:

“I am the true vine, and My Father is the vine dresser. 2 Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit. 3 You are already pruned clean because of the Word which I have spoken to you. 4 Now, abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. 5 I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. 6 If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned. 7 If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. 9 Just as the Father has loved Me, so I have also loved you; abide in My love. 10 If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and I abide in His love (JN 15:1-10).

When I asked my Thomas how each of us should see God, and should relate to God, he showed me the living room of the earliest home that I can remember. The God from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with His long, white beard is sitting on the sofa in my long-ago living room, and He is grinning at a toddler who is carrying a plastic cup of orange juice. Then, Whoops! The cup tips, and all that baby’s orange juice spills on the carpet. God’s child starts to cry, but God laughs, and He leans and picks up His baby and cuddles it in His arms. God’s precious baby will learn how to carry juice without spilling it, just as you and I will learn how to grow spiritually. And meanwhile, we are being told now to take it as a core tenet of faith that each of us, individually, is in fact that precious baby. Each of us is God’s Own best-beloved child. So we can love and trust God completely! We can call God our own heavenly Daddy. And we can trust God to safely catch us, every time.   

Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,
How great Thou art, how great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!
– Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1949)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

He Challenges Us Today

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Hello darkness, my old friend.
I’ve come to talk with you again.
Because a vision, softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain still remains
Within the sound of silence.

In restless dreams, I walked alone,
Narrow streets of cobblestone,
‘Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night and touched the sound of silence.

And in the naked light, I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking.
People hearing without listening.
People writing songs that voices never shared,
And no one dared disturb the sound of silence.
– Paul Simon, from “The Sound of Silence” (1964)

I was born into a Protestant family not long after the Second World War, so a name that most people living now likely never have heard before this weekend was a familiar and grounding fact of my childhood. Because of my childhood experience of light, I went to grownup church and not Sunday School from April of the year when I turned nine, so I heard him referred to often in sermons. My parents would mention him at home. Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young German Lutheran minister during the Second World War. He was a European version of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in that he was a clergyman who fought governmental injustice that was being inflicted upon the Jews, who were then a famously persecuted European minority. And like Dr. King, Dr. Bonhoeffer was martyred when he was only thirty-nine. If he had been a Catholic priest, he would already long since have been declared a saint. But as it is, it has taken until this Thanksgiving weekend in the United States for Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life to make it to the silver screen.

For each of us, current history happens from our own eccentric perspective. And for me as a child, Dietrich Bonhoeffer became the human face of the Second World War. As I was growing up, I saw him loom as a great hero-minister who had saved many people that Adolf Hitler was trying to kill. So, Dr. Bonhoeffer had nobly tried to kill Hitler, but the Germans had caught him and had killed him instead. Or it had happened more or less that way. His name is musical, which made it memorable, and since I majored in Christian history in college, and Dr. Bonhoeffer was still very much in my mind, I studied some of his writings in college. As someone so young, so naive and idealistic, I found much of what he had written to be strong, and even wrenchingly acerbic. I was too young then to really understand it, and to see it for what it truly was. His were the triumphal writings of a man who was truly living his Christian faith precisely as Dr. King had done, in the awful time in history into which he had been born.

There was one difference between Dr. Bonhoeffer and Dr. King. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was seen by the German to be a well-bred blond Aryan. To the race-obsessed Nazis, he was just what a model human being ought to be, so even as the war raged on, he could and did come and go freely. He even came to the United States, but he could not bear to be outside Germany and safe when there were so many still there who were not safe. So in the end, he had to go back. He even joined the Nazi party for a time and served as a double-agent. Since he was a sweet-faced, upper-class blond minister, at first there was nothing that he could not do, especially since many German clergymen welcomed the rise of Adolf Hitler. To Dr. Bonhoeffer, though, the antisemitism of Nazism was such anathema that he opposed Hitler almost from the start. He soon therefore also opposed the complacent theological ideas that made supporting Hitler even possible for Christians. He insisted that Christians must stand resolutely righteous in a world gone wrong.

I can give you just a flavor of Dr. Bonhoeffer here. A lot of his most brilliant writing was done from prison and smuggled out in letters that he may not have imagined might ever be published. But like Dr. King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a man shaped by his times and by the radical teachings of Jesus into a greatness that transcends time. And now, like Dr. King, Dr. Bonhoeffer is one of the very few who are best fit to teach and to lead us as we seek to ever better serve God in the morally complex world of today. Let’s spend a few moments sitting at his feet as he shares with us the kind of wisdom that can come only from a life deeply grounded in Jesus and lived in radical service to God in the face of unimaginable evil. Remember that these are the thoughts of a very young minister who has been imprisoned by the Nazis for having save many Jews from the death camps. And he is plotting now with those trying to take down Hitler, so he is not sure whether he himself will survive:

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” 

“We live by responding to the word of God… since this word is addressed to our entire life, the response, too, can only be an entire one; it must be given with our entire life as it is realized in all our several actions.­”

“How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge… We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.”

“I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries but at the center, not in weaknesses but in strength; and therefore, not in death and guilt but in life and goodness… God is the beyond in the midst of our life. The church stands, not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village.”

“It was the error of Israel to put the Law in God’s place, to make the law their God and their God a law.”

“God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility… this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.”

“‘Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted’…  By ‘mourning’ Jesus, of course, means doing without what the world calls peace and prosperity: He means refusing to be in tune with the world or to accommodate oneself to its standards. Such men mourn for the world, for its guilt, its fate, and its fortune.”

Christian love draws no distinction between one enemy and another, except that the more bitter our enemy’s hatred, the greater his need of love. Be his enmity political or religious, he has nothing to expect from a follower of Jesus but unqualified love. In such love there is no inner discord between private person and official capacity. In both we are disciples of Christ, or we are not Christians at all… The disciples realized that they too were his enemies, and that he had overcome them by his love. It is this that opens the disciple’s eyes, and enables him to see his enemy as a brother.”

“The extraordinary never merges into the personal. That was the fatal mistake of the false Protestant ethic which diluted Christian love into patriotism, loyalty to friends, and industriousness, which in short, perverted the better righteousness into mere civility.”

“When we judge other people we confront them in a spirit of detachment, observing and reflecting as it were from the outside. But love has neither time nor opportunity for this. If we love, we can never observe the other person with detachment, for he is always and at every moment a living claim to our love and service.”

“Love for the sinner is ominously close to love of the sin. But the love of Christ for the sinner in itself is the condemnation of sin.”

“By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”

“If when we judged others, our real motive was to destroy evil, we should look for evil where it is certain to be found, and that is in our own hearts. But if we are on the look-out for evil in others, our real motive is obviously to justify ourselves.”

“The Church is the Church only when it exists for others… not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live for Christ, to exist for others.”  

“We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts. How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things?”

“It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short, from the perspective of the suffering.”

“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.” 

“The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”   

“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.” Such a great mind he had! And so willing he was to be interrupted and to be used by God. We all hope that we would have the courage to be another Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But, I wonder. It is so much easier, and so much more comfortable, not to be a genuine saint. It was his work saving Jews which at first brought Dr. Bonhoeffer to the attention of the Nazi authorities, but he then became involved in what were multiple plots to assassinate Hitler. Ultimately, he and other plotters were sent to Flossenburg death camp, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer was martyred there on August 9, 1945, literally days before the fall of Germany. Those who witnessed his hanging never forgot the holy peace with which he met his death. Now this Thanksgiving weekend, after twelve years of dedicated effort, people who have been as inspired by the story of his life as I have been are debuting his movie. You can give yourself the chance to be inspired by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, just as we have been!

“Fools” said I, “You do not know!
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words, that I might teach you.
Take my arms, that I might reach you.”
But my words, like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed in the wells of silence.

 And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming.
Then the sign said, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls,
in tenement halls.” And whispered in the sound of silence.
– Paul Simon, from “The Sound of Silence” (1964)

Emotional

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Love is but a song we sing. Fear’s the way we die.
You can make the mountains ring, or make the angels cry.
Though the bird is on the wing, and you may not know why,
Come on, people now, smile on your brother,
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.

Some may come and some may go. He will surely pass.
When the one that left us here returns for us at last.
We are but a moment’s sunlight, fading in the grass.
Come on, people now, smile on your brother,
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.

 If you hear the song I sing, you will understand. Listen…
You hold the key to love and fear, all in your trembling hand.
Just one key unlocks them both. It’s there at your command.
Come on, people now, smile on your brother.
Everybody get together. Try to love one another right now!
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), from “Get Together” (1963)

The single characteristic that most uniquely defines us as human beings is that we are driven by our deeply complex, highly nuanced, and often overwhelming-feeling emotions. Of course, even non-human creatures will recoil from whatever they fear; and we who have pets know that non-human animals will experience an affinity for those who feed them that looks something like love. We humans, though, experience a very much vaster range of more complex and much more intense emotions, like rage and jealousy, yearning and craving, humility and compassion, sorrow and joy, embarrassment and many other various emotions, with our emotions often experienced by us as being supercharged sometimes, or as feeling exponentially better or worse because they are happening in various complex combinations. And we have not yet even mentioned here the three greatest human emotions. Those three core emotions which quite literally define our relationship with the ineffable Divine are, of course, gratitude, forgiveness, and love.

Human beings alone, among all the creatures of this earth, are intensely emotional. We are intrinsically emotional, and altogether driven by our emotions. And that, my dear friends, is all by design! We are born on earth to have experiences that will enable us to learn how to raise our personal spiritual vibrations ever farther away from fear and other negative emotions, and ever closer to ultimate, perfect love. Insofar as any human being ever has been able to determine, learning how to ever better perform that process is the only reason why we even come to earth. And to give us an ideal place where we can raise our spiritual vibrations well is the sole reason why this material universe even exists at all.

It is all so amazingly simple, really! Afterlife researchers were astonished to figure all of this out very soon after the turn of this new century. But the truth seemed at first to be just too simple. The afterlife evidence overwhelmingly suggested it all to be true, and then of course we were open-minded enough to take the father of quantum mechanics, Dr. Max Planck, at his literal word. Dr. Planck told us early in the twentieth century that his work in quantum physics was suggesting that consciousness is the base creative force which underlies all of reality. As he said in 1931, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Dr. Albert Einstein came toward the end of his life to agree with Dr. Planck, saying among other things, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” And the great twentieth-century polymath Nikola Tesla agreed with them both, saying, “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.”

So the world’s greatest minds of all time understood by the middle of the twentieth century what actually is going on! And yet, incredibly, even almost a century later, still materialist scientists are so profoundly clueless about the primary role of what you and I experience as consciousness –  or we might call our experience of it “conscious awareness” –  that even today, materialist scientists cluelessly continue to seek a source of consciousness inside the gray matter that is encased within each human skull. And of course, we know that the folks at the Institute for Noetic Studies, who proudly claim for themselves cutting-edge status, still imagine that consciousness might somehow arise from within the human brain.

Yet still, despite all these various materialist Luddite laggards, by now most of us do know better. And most of us understand by the time that we reach young adulthood that for human beings, our core work of being alive is to learn how to ever better govern our own emotions so we can with ever greater efficiency grow and perfect ourselves spiritually. As our frame-verse for today tells us, you do indeed “hold the key to love and fear, all in your trembling hand.” And yes indeed, “just one key unlocks them both. It’s there at your command.” This is truly the greatest core human lesson of all! Fear is the literal opposite of love. The two emotions are polar opposites, just as darkness is the opposite of light. And until you learn to trust in God’s love completely, to the point where with God’s protection you can vanquish all fears, you flat cannot love at all without reservation.

My beloved guide Thomas and I therefore strongly suggest as a matter of urgency that you at once banish all fear-based entertainments from your life. Scary movies, scary novels, and so on can seem like harmless fun, but they are not harmless! Since they inspire the emotion of fear in us, they make it much harder for us to feel free and unmixed love of any kind, so they work to negate the very purpose for which we each have come to earth in this lifetime. My dear one, if you still fear anything at all, whether it is nuclear war or the darkness of night, then please insulate yourself from scary entertainments. Instead, concentrate on following Jesus’s precepts. He said, “‘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 Jesus also said, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear” (1JN 4:18).

Some of our greatest modern spiritual teachers immersed themselves in using the original and highly spiritual and contemplative Way of Jesus as the only way to right great wrongs. Wow, if ever there were gigantic opportunities with complete justification for feeling and expressing self-righteous rage, for even going to outright war, then my goodness, it would have been if you were a black person in the American South in the early 1960s! But if those who were then fighting for their civil rights had not managed to control their emotions enough to remain peaceful and loving, no matter what might have been their provocations, then their whole cause might have been forever lost.

The recently transitioned Dr. Barbara Holmes of the Center for Action and Contemplation (cac.org) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, talked about using the deeply contemplative aspect of human emotion in these situations. She tells us that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks were classic contemplatives, altogether committed to silent witness, and to what she calls “embodied and performative justice”. Dr. Holmes tells us that the civil rights marches of the 1960s were deeply contemplative. “Sometimes silent, sometimes drenched with song, but always contemplative. This may mean within the context of a desperate quest for justice that while weary feet traversed well-worn streets, hearts leaped into the lap of God. While children were escorted into schools by national guardsmen, the song “Jesus Loves Me” became an anthem of faith in the face of contradictory evidence. You cannot face German Shepherds and fire hoses with your own resources; there must be God and stillness at the very center of your being…. What saves you is the blessed merger of intuitive knowing with rationality, pain, and resolve.”  

Dr. Holmes adds that, “Like a spiritual earthquake, the resolve of the marchers affirmed the faith of foremothers and forefathers. Each step was a reclamation of the hope unborn. Each marcher embodied the communal affirmation of already/not yet sacred spaces…. The sacred act of walking together toward justice was usually preceded by a pre-march meeting that began with a prayer service, where preaching, singing, and exhortation prepared the people to move toward the hope they all held. This hope was carefully explicated by the leadership as a fulfillment of God’s promises. As a consequence, the movement that spilled from the churches to the streets was a ritual enactment of a communal faith journey toward the basileia [realm] of God….” And Dr. King could maintain this contemplative love even when hatred-filled bigots firebombed his house with his wife and infant daughter inside, while he was away from it and preaching! He rushed home, reassured himself that his family was safe and only his porch had been damaged, and then he went outside and confronted the enraged and heavily armed mob that was ready to go to war for him. Dr. King told the mob calmly that they must peacefully disperse. Go home, because nothing will be solved by fighting.

We are living right now in the very much better America that sixty years ago Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called into being with his movement that was conceived in and powered by the pure contemplative love that Jesus taught. I myself live in a formerly Confederate state which is one-third black, one-third white, one-third Hispanic, and full of beautiful, peaceful, shining faces of all shades. We are free now of any form of hatred, and all of us happily live our lives in friendly, integrated neighborhoods. Dr. King gave his life for the hope that his four little children would one day live in just this kind of hatred-free nation. And while back then, when the evil was at its height, this kind of America might not have seemed to be possible so soon, now indeed here we already are! Oh, a few old race-crusaders are still trying to keep the hatred going. Shame on them.The rest of us know, thanks to Dr. King and his generation of spiritual giants, that race truly does not matter at all. We even see interracial dating and marriages now, and we don’t look twice. Love is the most powerful force there is! What Jesus’s teachings have proven through those, like Dr. King, who are the Lord’s greatest disciples, is that there is no force that can stand against the power of love when it is used by those who empower themselves with sufficient love to wield it well. Only listen to Dr. King as he teaches us, and he thereby transforms us all!

“So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow,” He said, “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and 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 one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

“I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

“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 today.

“I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right down in Alabama little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.

“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

“This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

“This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning: My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!”
 – from “I Have a Dream,” delivered 8/28/63 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Human beings are fundamentally emotional beings. And each of us has the power to employ our emotions for good, or for ill. When we do as Dr. King did, and we live lives always driven and empowered by a tremendous love which then can inspire that same great love in others, we truly can transform the world!

Come on, people now, smile on your brother,
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.
I said, come on, people now, smile on your brother,
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now!
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), from “Get Together” (1963)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

What God Wants

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Through the sunshine and rain, Every sorrow and pain,
Jesus still is my comfort and guide.
And His love comforts me, and His grace sets me free,
And some day I shall stand by His side.

I am blessed, I am blessed, I am blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed!
Every day that I live, I am blessed!
When I wake up in the morning, ‘til I lay my head to rest,
I am blessed! I am blessed! I am blessed!
– Jerry Goff (1935-2019), from “I Am Blessed!” (various dates)

Watching the recent American presidential election play out in the United States felt to many of us like watching our two political parties each carrying out its own gigantic psycho-social experiment on American voters in real-time. One political party was certain that it had the American voter so completely figured out that this party knew just what its ideal voter wanted, and it knew that it could satisfy that voter’s full set of wishes with little variation in its promises. The other political party, though, made what was almost the opposite assumption. In such a big and widely varied country, that second party decided that it really had no idea what any one of the maybe twenty or thirty great political factions nationwide might most care about – Hispanic adult women? Young black men? Veterans? Muslims? Jews? Old-Order Amish? And beyond those few, at least a dozen more? So its candidates for President and Vice President and their helpers put on almost daily and for several months a lot of specifically targeted events, nationwide. And some of those targeted testing events were gigantic! The candidates for the two top jobs of that second party even sat with specifically targeted podcasters. And always, always they kept asking questions of the voters. Then they seemed to target various alternative offers that were tailored to what these groups and collections of groups were asking for. We all were heartily sick of this whole election process by the time it was over on November 5th! But I did find watching these two so very different experiments in gathering votes to be pretty amusing. My goodness, one of the Presidential candidates even was down to working as a fry cook for one lunchtime, in his efforts to better appeal to one sliver of his  hoped-for constituents. And he actually suited up and rode in a garbage truck, for heaven’s sake, and I think he even did a stint at handling garbage?

By now, we know how each of these great experiments in seeking the people’s favor turned out. The party that had asked each separate segment of the American voting population what they were most concerned about did in fact run the table. They won not only the Presidency and the Vice Presidency by hefty margins, but also their party took both houses of Congress. And I don’t think that in the end it was the promises made by the politicians that were really most important, so much as it was the generous fact that rather than preaching at the voters, the party that won had instead asked so many of the voters what they themselves were most hopeful about. And especially, what were the voters most unhappy about? All those individual people in all those subsets of the American population really did seem to very much appreciate being asked! Please, Mr. or Mrs. Voter, what might your federal government do to make your life better?

Now, where else in our lives are we also trying to better understand and appeal to and win the approval of Someone whose love and support and whose every day protection we very much want, and we really in point of fact do so desperately need? When my Thomas first brought up that analogy to me, I said, “You’re kidding, right?” And then immediately I added, “No, of course not. You’re not kidding at all.” His analogy is perfect! Let us be frank with one another here. We have spent all of human history being too much like America’s Democrat politicians in our relationship with God. We have always been sure that we knew better, haven’t we? We have created each of our religions, of which modern Christianity is just the latest version, by building them around what have been sometimes pretty monstrous human-created ideas and beliefs about God that fit some human religious leader’s notions. And we then have insisted that God must conform to our human-created religious design about how God ought to look and how God ought to perform, and what God should want us to do for Him, rather than our ever once humbly asking God to please reveal to us who God is, or our ever thinking to politely inquire of God what God might actually want from us.

If this level and degree of presumptuousness on our part shocks you now, just know that you are not alone! Jesus was, and He remains horrified by the way that we have so carelessly ignored the notion of even wondering what God might want from us, and we have instead for so many millennia followed our false and entirely human-made religions. Jesus told us frankly when He first began to go about His public teaching ministry on earth that He had come to earth to abolish all religions altogether! He told us that He had come not to support us in our old religions, but instead, He was here now to teach us how to relate to the genuine God, both individually and directly. And yet to this day, most modern Christian denominations care nothing at all about what Jesus said. Just listen to a little bit of what Jesus said to us then about the clergymen of His day! My goodness, even when I was a child reading the Bible, I used to cringe when I would come upon some of these passages! Jesus said, “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  So then, you will know them by their fruits” (MT 7:15-20).

From the start of His ministry, Jesus was telling the world, just as He told the woman at the well, 23 An hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. 24 God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (JN 4:23-25). But of course, the clergy of His day refused to listen to Him, so it is little wonder that soon Jesus was despising and disdaining them! Jesus said, “Beware of the scribes who like to walk around in long robes, and like respectful greetings in the market places, and chief seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets, who devour widows’ houses, and for appearance’s sake offer long prayers; these will receive greater condemnation” (MK 12:38-40). And Jesus said, “Woe to you, religious lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering” (LK 11:52). “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).

Jesus tells us that in fact He came to do away with all the old religious teachings that were of man, and to replace them with the direct teachings of God. And what are those teachings that come to us from God through Jesus? They cannot possibly be any simpler! You know them by heart by now. When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, He told us that God boils all of the old ten commandments of mankind down to just two. He said, “‘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). So God cannot possibly have made this any easier for us! God, our Father, is Spirit. And God’s only command is that we love God infinitely, and that we love our fellow man. That’s it! Get rid of all those fussy and scary old man-made religious rules. God wants you to follow and love God alone.

When Jesus personally spoke with God, He didn’t do that inside a synagogue, did He? No, and nor did He suggest that we do that, either. Instead, through Jesus God said, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men, to be noticed by them; otherwise, you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

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

Jesus taught us that God is internal. Or as Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:21). So God hears the smallest whispers of your deepest heart. God does not want or need clergy as go-betweens! And as you can imagine, the fact that Jesus taught about God in this free and radical new way did not make Him popular with the clergy of His day. No, but still Jesus continued to teach that God is not the cold, judgmental, and punitive Jehovah that dwells in synagogues and temples and demands sacrifices. He continued relentlessly to talk about God’s love! He taught God’s love, and our love in return, to even an extreme degree. Jesus said things like, “You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.… If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others?” (MT 5:43-48)

Of course, all of this was very disruptive to the old-style religious order. And it could have been even much more than that. It could have begun the new Way of Jesus right then, had not the Roman Emperor Constantine three hundred years later seen fit to use the figure of Jesus, although not His teachings, to build a brand-new, fear-based religion as a useful means for controlling the masses for what Constantine hoped would be many centuries into the future. For Constantine, that idea of his has of course turned out remarkably well. For the rest of us, though, not so much, although we still do have Jesus’s teachings preserved. So as Constantine’s religion now dies, we might yet be able to begin the Way of Jesus, which Constantine derailed so long ago. 

My personal favorite of the Old Testament prophets is Micah of Moresheth. Micah lived seven hundred years before Jesus was born; he was a contemporary of the great Isaiah. What I love about Micah is that it is so clear that he was in intimate and loving contact with the genuine God! And in this best-know passage from the Old Testament Book of Micah, he does the same thing for God that Jesus does at God’s bidding more than seven hundred years later. Micah here rejects religious practices, and instead calls for us to begin a closer and much more loving walk with God. He said:

With what shall I come to the Lord,
And bow myself before the God on high?
Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings,
With yearling calves?
7 Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams,
In ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
8 He has told you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice, to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?
(Micah 6:6-8)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Conscious Awareness

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

To everything turn, turn, turn,
There is a season turn, turn, turn,
And a time to every purpose under Heaven.

A time to be born, a time to die.
A time to plant, a time to reap.
A time to kill, a time to heal.
A time to laugh, a time to weep.

To everything turn, turn, turn,
There is a season turn, turn, turn,
And a time to every purpose under Heaven.

A time to build up, a time to break down.
A time to dance, a time to mourn.
A time to cast away stones,
A time to gather stones together.
– Peter Seeger (1919-2014), from “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (1965)

Last week I witnessed one of the most shocking exhibitions of willful scientific and spiritual ignorance that I ever have seen, or that I could have imagined. My dear ones, it never is our intention here to name and shame those who have no way of knowing better. But we have always respected the Institute of Noetic Sciences (“IONS”), which was founded by the illustrious astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth person ever to walk on the moon, and who had a spiritually transformative experience on his way back from the moon. I have understood that IONS truly does intend to “foster creative and leading-edge approaches to the scientific investigation of human consciousness,” as its own promotional materials proudly proclaim. So, wow, when I learned that IONS was about to award prizes for Breaking the Boundaries of the Brain: Exploring Pioneering Theories of Non-Local Consciousness, I was eager to learn a lot more about that!

The IONS promotional materials for its awards presentation for a set of three prize-winning papers went on to say, “The finalists will share highlights from their award-winning reviews, and expand on leading non-local theories grounded in empirical evidence. The IONS science team will be on hand to discuss the profound implications.” And, “Whether you’re a scientist, practitioner, or simply curious about the mysteries of consciousness, this is a special opportunity to explore revolutionary ideas that could reshape our understanding of human potential and the very nature of reality.” The three prize-winners then presented papers to their online audience that amounted to nothing more than compilations of old guesses about how and where in the brain consciousness might be produced, and how these individual brain-produced consciousnesses might intermingle. Or it was something like that. To tell you the truth, all their trumpeted “leading-edge theories” would decades ago have been seen as nonsense among most modern researchers who have any clue. I lost interest in the whole thing pretty quickly.

The human brain does not produce consciousness. The brain is something in the nature of a transmitter and receiver, but nothing more. There is no evidence that the human brain produces consciousness, and there is so much good evidence by now that consciousness is primary and pre-existing that I was shocked to see such outmoded ideas being considered noteworthy by IONS. The fact that what we experience as consciousness is primary was first discovered by the father of quantum physics, Max Planck, more than a century ago. And it was certainly the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century. In 1931 Max Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Then he said in 1944, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” Albert Einstein eventually came to agree with him. Einstein is quoted as having 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.” All of this is pretty heady stuff! And many people were increasingly confident that before the end of the twentieth century, mainstream science’s brief flirtation with its false religion of atheistic materialism would be at an end. But all of this is still not broadly known even now, when we are already 25% of our way into the 21st century, only because even though matter is 99.9999999% empty space, materialist science as a discipline remains simply unable to cope with the concept of (gulp!) an entirely non-solid reality.    

Consciousness and individual awareness are not the same thing, anyway. This seems to be a part of why the folks at IONS are so hung up on the gray matter inside the human skull. But then, of course, even plants are aware. Oh, yes indeed, the flowers by your garden bench are aware of you as you sit down beside them, and as you then sadly might confide in them that you and your beloved are having a tiff. It is becoming possible for us to imagine now that on some level, even individual cellular life might well be to some extent aware. Indeed, since consciousness is so basic, we might now be coming to see that individual awareness might be one of the features of life itself. And incidentally, I should make it clear that I don’t like doing this naming-and-shaming. In point of fact, doing it horrifies me. But IONS is a prestigious nonprofit organization! And if any such institution holds itself out to the public as being on the cutting edge of consciousness research, but then it refuses to hold itself to a standard of pursuing the objective truth wherever it may lead, then those who are dedicated to pursuing the truth break the public’s trust if we fail to call them out.

Speaking of the truth about consciousness, perhaps the most transformative book that I ever have read in this field is The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. I first read it in 1973, and I didn’t realize until much later the way that book had formed a basis for my ongoing afterlife research. It opened my eyes to a deeper awareness that nothing really is as it seems; it primed me to later on accept the evidence that what we experience as human consciousness really is primary; and it showed me, too, how sadly closed-minded and unable to accept even basic truths about reality mainstream scientists really still are!

That book’s core insight from my perspective was that even plant-fragments are conscious, in the sense that they are aware, and they actually are able to communicate. What a revelation that was! Consider only the work of Cleve Backster, who back in the nineteen-sixties was America’s foremost expert on lie detectors. One morning in 1966, he randomly decided to use his office plant as an experimental subject. He attached to one of its leaves a galvanometer, which is the part of a polygraph machine which registers human emotions. And he found to his surprise and delight that the plant was reacting very much as a person would react who was having transient thoughts. Wow, that was interesting! He soon found, too, that the most extreme reactions in his plant were produced when he decided to burn one of its leaves. But the plant’s reaction was less if he only imagined burning the leaf, without intending to actually do it; surprisingly, the plant could tell the difference. Or it reacted differently if he outright burned a leaf, without thinking about it beforehand. His plant also would react if other living things in the room were credibly threatened with harm. Backster and other researchers later demonstrated that these reactions are present even in living fragments of plants. My goodness, plants even can read the minds of their familiar keepers from a distance of miles away! There is so much more to Backster’s work that mainstream science still ignores. These amazing revelations are now almost sixty years old, and they are all by themselves sufficient reason for you to read one of the most amazing and most unjustly ignored books in human history!

This discovery that even living plant-fragments are not just conscious and able to communicate, but that they actually seem to be aware in the same way that human beings are aware, despite the fact that plants have no brains at all, still fills me with wonder. And of course, it further demonstrates the frank silliness of our clueless friends at IONS, who still continue to look for a source of consciousness inside the human brain, almost as if they are a group of Australian aborigines, perhaps, clustered  around a radio and trying to find inside it all the little instruments making the music that is emanating from it. Many years ago, Cleve Backster’s pioneering work formed a basis for my own growing research-based awareness that what we experience as consciousness has to be primary. There is no other explanation that fits all the evidence. So when in 2011 I read that ultimate quantum-physics-for-dummies book, Quantum Enigma by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, and I found that the greatest of all quantum physicists had many decades before reached the same set of conclusions that I was reaching now, I had a joyously ultimate eureka moment.

All of this came to mind again when I read a wonderful article in Smithsonian Magazine back in 2018, which is unfortunately paywalled. It was called “Do Trees Talk to Each other?”   Well, of course they do! Peter Wohlleben is a German researcher now popularly known as the “Tree Whisperer” whose book, The Hidden Life of Trees,  is now available in English. If you subscribe to the Smithsonian Magazine so you can read the article, or if you buy and read his book, you will forever after see each forest of any size as a thriving community of sentient individuals in constant and heavily involved communication with one another, caring for their young, and even caring for their old and for the stumps of those felled by people. They are caring, too, for other benevolent creatures, and fighting off anything that means to do them harm. You will never look at any plant of any size in the same way again!

What you and I experience as human consciousness is the base creative force. And consciousness is all that objectively exists! Consciousness is how each of us relates to God. Consciousness is the water in which we swim, it is the air beneath our wings, and in point of fact, there really is nothing else. So it should not really surprise us much to find that every living thing is in some way conscious. And in fact, that may be true of even what we now consider to be non-living things. If consciousness is the base creative force, then perhaps even rocks might be somehow conscious? One of the things that we generally do when we first return to our eternal home after each earth-lifetime is sightseeing, on other planets and even in other realities. I recall long ago reading an early-twentieth-century account received through a deep-trance medium from someone who had been enjoying doing his post-earthly-death touring. And he talked about a planet where the life was not carbon-based, but instead it was silica-based. He told his listening loved ones through that medium that the entire planet he just had visited had turned out to be teeming with life! But you didn’t realize that for a while, because all that life moved ve-e-e-ry sl-o-o-o-wly. And you know, come to think of it, the rocks on this planet are moving very slowly, too….

More and more, it is becoming clear that accepting Max Planck’s genius insight that consciousness is primary is going to be essential if scientists are ever to end their now more than century-long materialist muddle. As incredible as it now seems to us, the scientific community has of course known for more than a century that Max Planck and Albert Einstein and many of mainstream science’s other greatest historical heroes were sure that consciousness is primary, and materialist scientists are coming to see at this point how their dogma-hobbled research is stalling out. And yet, they still have been unable to drop materialism as their fundamental dogma. A Nobel Prize awaits the first truly open-minded physicist who is brave enough and smart enough to finally and forever remove his own materialist chains and come up with a viable Consciousness Theory of Everything!

To everything turn, turn, turn,
There is a season turn, turn, turn,
And a time to every purpose under Heaven.

 A time of love, a time of hate.
A time of war, a time of peace.
A time you may embrace,
A time to refrain from embracing.

 To everything turn, turn, turn,
There is a season turn, turn, turn,
And a time to every purpose under Heaven.

 A time to gain, a time to lose.
A time to rain, a time to sow.
A time for love, a time for hate.
A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late!
– Peter Seeger (1919-2014), from “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (1965)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

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