Precious Lord, take my hand,
Lead me on, let me stand,
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn;
Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on to the light:
Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home.
When my way grows drear,
Precious Lord, linger near,
When my life is almost gone,
Hear my cry, hear my call,
Hold my hand lest I fall:
Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home.
– Thomas Andrew Dorsey (1899-1993), from “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” (1938)
When our very dearly beloved Jesus was born from the Godhead two thousand years ago, He was born among ignorant primitives. And that was for Him the entire point! He came here to teach people what our life on earth was meant to be for, because during long previous ages of time, everyone had endlessly turned on the wheel, as Gautama Buddha later would put it, being born into life after life on earth and making almost no spiritual progress each time because we never had any idea why we even were being born at all. Was there ever a point to any of this? Jesus chose to come to people for whom life was only ever an endless drudge. He was determined now to give to each of us the love of God, the purpose of personal growth, and the eventual joy of endless paradise.
For the Being who would become Jesus, achieving His own spiritual perfection by simply living on earth had been an easy task. Jesus loved people as easily and as naturally as He breathed! For Jesus, each individual person always was so inconceivably precious, so lovely, so downright adorable that even as a child in His last pre-Jesus lifetime, He would spend His days tending and doting on everyone. My Thomas had been his older brother in that last lifetime that Jesus lived on earth as a pre-ascended being, and while my dear spirit guide’s memory of it all is vague now because he has lived so many other lifetimes since then, he does remember his own exasperation at his need to always protect his younger brother. That boy never would fight, not even to save himself! To the warrior-general that Thomas had been in that lifetime, having a kid brother like Jesus had been craziness-making! When Thomas and I have talked about this, and he has tried to describe the way Jesus had seemed to see other people, what he has come up with is the idea of a world full of cute but helpless puppies. Imagine seeing the whole world as if every person in it is wonderfully adorable and also desperately needs your care.
Even now, in fact, Jesus seems to see each person who visits Him in just this way. When Thomas was taking me to meet with Jesus in the astral plane during the summer of 2022, the Lord would always appear to be so delighted to see me, with his powerful personal energy always tamped down to just a sizzly buzz. If Jesus doesn’t remember to reduce His personal energy that way, it is so overwhelmingly powerful at this point that it is difficult for us to be near Him; it feels to you and me like a painful battering. But Jesus is aware of that, so He politely keeps it in check for us. At this point, He is vibrating even higher than the Godhead level, but His overwhelming love for people compels Him to spend His eternity on the third level of the astral plane, which for nearly all of us is the entry level to the afterlife. There He mostly sits beside a river that is full of multicolored, iridescent fish, and with a herd of tame deer nearby. And He greets small groups of people who are newly transitioned, who want very much to meet Jesus at last.
They come in small, polite groups of maybe fifteen or twenty, and they line up to be greeted by Him. Since I would spend perhaps a couple of hours with Jesus each time Thomas took me to visit with Him, I became used to watching Jesus briefly transform into what we called church-Jesus, with lighter skin, longer and paler hair and blue eyes. Then He would stand and go and welcome each person in line with a few words, a smile, and a blessing. If a woman who had died in childbirth was carrying her baby, He would take the newborn into His arms and kiss it and bless it, too. There is no sense of time passing there, but to me all of this seemed to happen something like every fifteen minutes or so, around the clock! While meanwhile, Jesus also would be talking in His mind with those who always are praying to Him. Thomas tells me that Jesus can smoothly do all of that while He also is keeping a conversation going with us. But How can He possibly love people this much? How can He be so entirely selfless?
That really is the right word to describe Him. Jesus is selfless. All the rest of us seem to have our little “I’m important!”egos, at least to some extent; but Jesus really does have no ego at all. Instead, all that matters to Him is you. Whenever I arrived to visit Him there under that many-colored sky, He usually would be sitting on His riverbank, communing with His fish. He would look up at me and smile like the sun rising because wow, here she is back again. As I sat down on His riverbank beside Him, He would say, “Little One! My Little One, tell Me about your day! What did you write today?” I always tried to tell Him something specific from my day because He seemed to be so strangely avid to know more about my life, and then He would bring up some details from my last visit and ask about them, and want to know how this or that legal client’s situation had turned out. He then asked me about other of my legal clients, since He knew them by name, as we fed His many-colored fish with grain that just would appear in our hands. But if I tried to ask Him rather shyly about His own day, Jesus? Who has visited You lately? How was that? He always would deflect my questions and ask me again about me. Once I thought to ask Him if any famous people from the earth had died today. He simply looked at me quizzically and asked me another question about my own life, and I realized later that He knows so little about what is happening on the earth from our perspective that He would have no idea about who might be famous among us now.
All the lovely memories that I still hold of having spent personal time with Jesus during that summer give me some sense of what it must have been like to be one of His earthly followers. The Biblical Gospels tell us that He was very charismatic during His lifetime on earth, and wow, I really have felt that same charismatic tug, just sitting and quietly talking with Him! As He began His career as an itinerant preacher, simply teaching and answering questions wherever groups of people would gather, Jesus soon had hundreds, and then thousands of people that followed Him wherever He went. The common people would hang on His every word.
Some scholars who have closely analyzed the words of the Old Testament, and also the way that Jesus taught, now suspect that they know what may have been happening for many of those first followers of Jesus. We know from their writings that human beings even as late as Jesus’s time really didn’t have much in the way of internal lives, and certainly not in the vivid and complex way that we do. Think about it. Their old heroic ballads were stark and plain and were primarily about people simply doing or being commanded by God not to do certain things. Even the psalms were minimalist in their messages. Indeed, even for King David there was action in the outer world that he clearly could describe, but there was relatively little going on in his mind when you compare it with our rich internal lives. This may have been why, before the advent of Jesus, not only did we not know why we were here, but even had we been told that we were here to grow spiritually, we would have given one another puzzled looks and scratched our heads. What was that all about?? The teachings of Jesus, on the other hand, were all about discovering and then richly building our inner lives! Jesus’s teachings were about emotions, and primarily about love and forgiveness.
Consider this remarkable exchange that Jesus had with a lawyer of the Pharisees: 34 But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered themselves together. 35 One of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question. Testing Him, he said, 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the great and foremost commandment. 39 The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:34-40). And wow, Jesus gave them what was an extraordinary answer! “The Law and the Prophets” was what Jesus’s listeners, those ancient Jews, called what we now would call the entire Old Testament. It was the Ten Commandments, the Psalms, and the Proverbs. It was everything. He was telling them that you can now boil the entire Law and the Prophets, all those scrolls put together, down to just two Commandments from God: Love God, and Love Your Fellow Man.
Jesus had just turned all those many old, external, formal Laws into just two Laws which are entirely spiritual, and therefore they are entirely internal! Jesus was talking to old-minded, entirely externally-minded clergymen, so they really had nothing to say to Him in response. Look at what comes right after this key exchange just above: 41 Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus turned it about and asked them a question. He said: 42 “What do you think about the Christ, whose son is He?” They said to Jesus, “The son of David.” 43 Jesus said to them, “So then how does David in the Spirit call Him ‘Lord,’ saying,
44 ‘The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at My right hand,
Until I put Your enemies beneath Your feet”’?
45 If David then calls Him ‘Lord,’ how is He his son?” 46 No one was able to answer Him a word, nor did anyone dare from that day on to ask Jesus another question (MT 22:41-46).
Do you see what has happened here? People who still lack an internal life of the spirit have no way even to conceptualize what Jesus just has asked them. They therefore cannot formulate an answer. You or I could answer Him, though, could we not? We understand that there is an afterlife where David in Spirit now dwells. And we know that David in Spirit is gladly able to assist his Son by putting his Son’s enemies beneath his Son’s feet.
And so it was that Jesus came to us from out of the Godhead to live that lifetime on earth so He could open us all to the greater life of the Spirit, which is internal. It is of the mind, and built on Jesus’s teachings about love and forgiveness. He gave us then the concrete certainty that we are in truth fully spiritual beings. We are not at all the material beings that we can see in a mirror, only dimly. As Jesus said to the Good Thief who was crucified beside Him, so He also says to us, now and forevermore: For so long as you tend to your own life of the Spirit, you will steadily grow in love, and “Truly I say to you, you shall be with Me in Paradise” (LK 23:43).
When the darkness appears
And the night draws near,
And the day is past and gone,
At the river, I stand,
Guide my feet, hold my hand:
Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home
– Thomas Andrew Dorsey (1899-1993), from “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” (1938)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)