Roberta Grimes

His Way?

Posted by Roberta Grimes • October 26, 2024 • 2 Comments
Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus

And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.
My friend, I’ll say it clear. I’ll state My case, of which I’m certain.
I’ve lived a life that’s full! I traveled each and every highway.
And more, much more than this, I did it My Way.

Regrets, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention.
I did what I had to do, and saw it through without exemption.
I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway.
And more, much more than this, I did it My Way.

Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew, when I bit off more than I could chew.
But through it all, when there was doubt, I ate it up and spit it out!
I faced it all, and I stood tall, and did it My Way.
– Paul Anka, Giles Thibaut (1927-2000), Claude Francois (1939-1978), from “My Way” (1968)

My dear ones, msny of us will recognize “My Way” as the signature song of the beloved and now transitioned singer and actor, Frank Sinatra. Ah, but the personal pronouns are capitalized! So, are we saying here that it also might be Jesus’s signature song? Well, yes, perhaps it might as well be sung by Jesus. If we were writing a kind of pop opera about the life of Jesus, we could imagine our Hero, after He has sung a song about His retreat into the wilderness to commune with God at the start of His ministry (MT 4), and then He might tell us musically that God wants us to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind, and call for us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves because in that consists the whole Law and the Prophets (MT 22:36-40); and then after He has confidently sung the Sermon on the Mount (MT 7-9); and then in the end, as He is preparing for His ordeal and death on the cross so He can then rise from the dead, our Hero might well sing for us a song that is very much like our frame verse for today. Don’t you think?

Or in fact, might this even be our own life’s signature song, yours and mine? After all, each of us is the shining hero of our own glorious and well-lived life! Each of us does the best that we can with the cards that we have been dealt, and with the decisions that we each have made, whether those decisions were all carefully considered, or whether a few of them were made in the desperate heat of the unexpected moment. And each of us is going to feel in retrospect that we have done some inadvertent harm to others, and perhaps that we have fallen short of some carefully thought out and well-aimed goals; and of course, we all are going to have regrets. And we will all feel the need nevertheless to stand tall and speak well for ourselves at the end of our lives, in spite of everything. Each of us is going to want to feel as we approach our transition that we have tried to live in the best way we could.

But, have we lived our lives in our own way? And what does our claiming now that we have lived in our own way even mean? What, really, is a well-lived life? Are we even meant to live in our own way, or is there some other, greater, and more objective standard by which we are being called now to live, each one of us, our own best lives? And if we can find and hold to that ultimate standard, can we live our own lives with the fewest regrets? This is not a trick question, although I will admit that it does sound like one.

When I was meeting with Jesus in the summer of 2022 to talk about creating a website for Him, and then one night He told me His genuine story, I was stunned to hear that His was such a human story! Here it is again, And I urge you to read it again, since I wrote it as a blog post only two months after I had first heard it from Jesus. He told me that He wants people to have His true story made available to them now. Because it turns out that just as the Roman Christian religion is not Jesus’s religion at all, so the Roman Christian Jesus is not  remotely who Jesus actually is. But in neither case does the genuine Jesus seem to be fighting the Roman version. He doesn’t seem to care about the fact that the Roman Christianity that has dominated the world for the past seventeen hundred years is peddling an erroneous version of Jesus’s teachings, and also of Jesus Himself. If you prefer Roman Christianity and the Roman Jesus, then Jesus does not seem to mind at all if you prefer the Roman versions of each to the true versions. He just intends that eventually, the truth about who He is and who He always has been will prevail.

It did amaze me at first to hear Jesus say that He once had been a regular human being. And He seemed to be so glad to be saying it now! As if it had been a secret that had felt too heavy to carry and had been too long kept. It is easy for us to think of Jesus as, hey, He is just God anyway, right? So everything is just plain easy for Him? But in fact, when Jesus was born on earth as Jesus, it was the first and probably the final time that anyone ever  has been born from out of the Godhead Level that way. It took Him what was apparently four thousand earth-years after His last earth-lifetime as a regular person to convince the Councils whose approvals were necessary to even allow Him to be born again from out of the Godhead Collective, and He was born knowing only what His goal was, and not really in detail how He was going to accomplish that goal. So, just as you or I might have done, as extremely bright as Jesus is, once He was here again, He had to figure it all out as He went along.

Jesus told me as we sat there on the riverbank two summers ago, feeding His fish, that frankly, people in general with all their selfishness and their petty cruelties had never made much sense to Him, anyway. Thomas tells me that he himself barely remembers the last earth-lifetime that they shared six thousand years ago, but he does recall how abnormal his younger brother who was reborn as Jesus always was, how preternaturally loving, and how unable his brother had been to fight. He simply could not fight at all, not even in His own defense, so as his city’s general, Thomas had been forced to assign soldiers to protect Him. And here Jesus was, four thousand years later, only love and peace to the very marrow of the bones of his new material body, and born out of the Godhead this time, so He was physically protected by invisible archangels. But Jesus still was pretty perplexed by people! So, until He was thirty in His lifetime as Jesus, He was glad to humbly study people from his basically invisible viewpoint as a simple village carpenter, in an effort to comprehend them well enough to know what words might best move them. And He prayed. He deeply communed with God. Jesus was building for Himself His own Way, so He could then share that Way with all of humankind.  

My childhood experience of light was a great gift to me from Thomas for several reasons. Not only did I know from the age of eight that there is something behind the curtain, but also I took it as a comforting working hypothesis that what was behind that curtain was God. And in addition, I began at the age of eleven to read the Bible every night, from cover to cover and over and over. I read it once; then I would read the New Testament again, and then just the Gospels an extra time; and then I would start in again with Genesis. I kept up that routine until I was fifty years old. After that, I have concentrated on just the Gospels, so by now I can almost recite by rote the whole life and the teachings of Jesus. So I know how fallibly human Jesus still was when He was born from out of the Godhead two thousand years ago. Was He loving back then? Oh yes! But He still was human enough to have His moments. He could crankily curse forever an innocent fig tree for being out of season when Jesus happened to be walking by it and wanting a snack (see MK 11:12-14), and He could spew pure venom at the clergymen that He despised, calling them a brood of vipers (see MT 3:7). Two thousand years ago, Jesus was already divine; but also, He was still human, with His own little array of forgivable human flaws. But the Jesus of today that you will encounter in the astral plane when you meet Him after you transition home truly is God, and only God, quite literally. After He has spent another seventeen hundred years healing what were hundreds of millions of victims of Roman Christianity, this Jesus who once long ago was as human as you and I are is now so divinely powerful, and so beautiful! There is nothing fallibly human left in Him at all. I cannot imagine the Jesus of today ever feeling or showing impatience with anyone or anything, or ever cursing any living thing!

And so, Jesus created His Way when He was last on earth, and He gave it to us as a set of teachings that live in the four Canonical Gospels. He had come back to earth with just an idea, which was that He wanted to teach all of humankind how to elevate ourselves to the Godhead level, just as He had done naturally. And by the time He was ready to leave this earth, He had created and shared His own Way, which perfectly fits what He had come to earth to do. He then charged His Disciples to go forth and spread His Way to all nations, just as He was preparing Himself to die on a cross and then rise from the dead in order to teach His one last great earth-lesson, which was that our lives, like His, truly are eternal! So before Jesus went to the cross, He said to his Disciples, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. ¹⁹ Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (MT 28: 18-20).

All right, so what then of you and me? What might perhaps be our own best Way, by which we each can live our own best earth-lives? Well, actually, perhaps Jesus’s Way, based on His teachings on forgiveness and love, might be our own strongest and truest Way as well? That made sense to me, so I said it to Thomas. As is usual for us as we work together, this frame verse was one that Thomas had found in my mind and proposed to me, and I thought that was why he had proposed it: I thought the whole point of this post was going to be that he and Jesus want Jesus’s Way to be the Way for each of us to live our own best lives. How easy and neat that would have been!

But just as I was about to write that, Thomas said, “Not so fast.” And I knew by the way he said it that it was really Jesus who was saying it to him. Often when we write about Jesus, these posts are a three-way collaboration. And apparently, Jesus doesn’t want us just to adopt His Way of living blindly, without thinking about it for ourselves. Thomas has just said, “He isn’t asking you to turn yourselves into more Jesuses, doing it only His Way. That is not why He came!”

Oh. Well, then what? What Jesus is asking of us is that we first learn to understand and live His teachings on forgiveness and love, that we truly make His  teachings our own as we begin to work to raise our own spiritual vibrations. It was to give us those core teachings that He came to earth to live that lifetime as Jesus, after all, and He wants each of us first to internalize those teachings. Oh, but then, my dear ones, Jesus wants us to know how very much He loves each of us for who we each are uniquely! He still wants us to live our own lives on earth as our own very deeply precious selves! And to be the very best examples of ourselves that we can be. I smile to think of that. A more extremely perfect you, and now radiant with forgiveness and love, will be you, truly doing you, in the very best way that you can!

I’ve loved, I’ve laughed and cried, I’ve had My fill, My share of losing.
And now, as tears subside, I find it all so amusing.
To think I did all that, and may I say, not in a shy way.
Oh no, oh no, not Me! I did it My Way.

For what is a Man, what has He got? If not Himself, then He has naught!
To say the things He truly feels, and not the words of one who kneels.
The record shows I took the blows. And did it My Way!
– Paul Anka, Giles Thibaut (1927-2000), Claude Francois (1939-1978), from “My Way” (1968)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)