Posted by Roberta Grimes • June 03, 2023 • 41 Comments
Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
– Robert Frost (1874-1963), from “The Road Not Taken” (1915)
No one who has any deep sense of the way the Roman Emperor Constantine hijacked Christian history at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE can keep from wondering about that other road not taken. We know now how Constantine’s Christianity turned out. And the religion that he established served as the basis for a Western civilization which has been very good for some of us, but it also has been destructive of so many earlier cultures, and recklessly destructive of the earth’s ecosystems. And beyond his religion’s inquisition’s and crusades, we’ve had seventeen hundred years of secular wars! So, what might have happened in the Western world if Constantine had not intervened so early, and if instead the first followers of Jesus had been allowed to continue along that other, gentler, and in hindsight much more promising road that was so early abandoned?
The first point to be made is that the followers of Jesus had already begun to take us down that other road for some little distance before Constantine wrestled them away from it. What was then often called the Way of Jesus had been spreading rapidly around the Mediterranean Sea, and it had gained millions of followers over the first three hundred years after Jesus’s Resurrection before Constantine held his First Council of Nicaea, and he there established his Roman Christian religion. And our second point ought to be the fact that the Way of Jesus which Constantine abolished and replaced by force was actually more radical than most of us realize! We have Jesus’s words in hand in a far different twenty-first century, when those words sound like beautiful common sense. But He first spoke them at a time when what He was saying was radical beyond belief. It is no wonder that Jesus’s message was spread so rapidly after His Resurrection, and it was so popular among the common people. He was turning the old world upside down.
We think of Jesus as a spiritual teacher. But Jesus when He was on earth flat refused to abide by the shame-and-honor-based system that had for countless generations dominated the cultures of that time and place. And it was really His refusal to play by those long-established societal rules that was the thing that most bothered the priests and elders of His day. He wasn’t just a religious nuisance, but He was such a social radical that the authorities were soon conspiring to murder Him (see e.g. Matthew 12:14; Mark 3:6, 11:18; Luke 19:47; and John 11:53). Few of us reading our Gospels now realize that Jesus walked the earth not as just a wise spiritual Teacher. Jesus came to earth nearly two thousand years too soon: He was in fact the quintessential nineteen-sixties radical. And what the Way of Jesus was spreading to the common folk after His Ascension was social chaos and revolution.
In that ancient time and place, shame-and-honor was the basis of the morality that people had long felt compelled to follow, not only for themselves, but even more for their families, their villages, and their tribes. If a situation called for retaliation, then people were expected to retaliate. Indeed, for them not to retaliate would have been immoral, because it would have been dishonorable. Therefore, for Jesus to have walked the hills of Galilee saying, “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) was to subvert the prevailing culture’s whole system of morality itself. Jesus’s listeners were being given a new place to find their identity, not in their civilly-granted positions of honor or shame anymore, but now directly in God. The least of these were being given by Jesus a place in society that was no longer being granted by man and by man’s long-established customs, but now directly by God. It was a new world order that was subversive of both the civil and the religious authorities, and it gave to even the lowliest a new place to stand in God’s presence beside the mightiest, since all were now equal in God’s perfect love. It is difficult for us to imagine just how radical these new ideas taught by Jesus really were in those ancient days!
So the Way of Jesus that was beginning to spread on that other road was not just a new version of Judaism. For Jesus’s Apostles and their acolytes to be teaching these radical new ideas, and for these ideas to be spreading so rapidly was becoming a potential threat to the whole Roman Empire. Among those who heard the Apostles’ emissaries, and in the societies where they were teaching, which had forever been based in honor and shame and were solidly rooted in hierarchical family, village, and tribal ties, Jesus’s amazing new message of universal love and forgiveness and equality in God must have landed like a nuclear bomb. But for the lowly masses, who were most of the people, at last it was liberation day.
A telling phrase used in the Acts of the Apostles shows in microcosm the problem raised by this new sect of Judaism that Jesus had founded. It gives us a better sense of why the Way of Jesus was so deeply upsetting to Constantine in particular, and why it had to be either radically transformed or altogether destroyed. The teachings of Jesus were so deeply upsetting to the old world order that followers of the Way were being dragged before the city councils in Thessalonika and elsewhere, and they were there being referred to as “These men who have upset the world have come here also … and they all act contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus” (Acts 17:6–7). Multiply that reaction by all the towns and cities around the Mediterranean Sea! Jesus could not have gone around touching the untouchables, eating with the underclass, and healing on the Sabbath Day without playing havoc with all the deeply tradition-bound societies in which His disciples later were going to be teaching, even long after His Resurrection.
It was this highly disruptive three-hundred-year Way of Jesus that Constantine sought to reorder with his First Council of Nicaea. And it was thought by those in authority that Constantine’s Council overall was a very good thing, establishing as it did a more mature Christian movement under the control of a more formal and better regulated council of bishops. But as we have long since established, the fear-based dogmas of the Roman Christian church of Constantine had nothing to do with what Jesus Himself had taught, probably because those teachings were just too subversive of the civic order of that time and place. And the resulting religion has by now splintered into more than forty-two thousand variations. After seventeen hundred years, Constantine’s Roman Christianity has brought us to a juncture where most evangelicals are so confused that they can now say that Jesus is not enough for them anymore, while half of modern Americans by survey are not even sure that they still believe in God. Whenever you plant such a crooked tree, eventually it is bound to fall.
But would things really be so much easier for us now if Constantine never had intervened, and if the Way of Jesus simply had continued along that abandoned (but at the time quite exciting) road not taken? Well, for one thing, we now know that almost right away, the Way of Jesus would have run smack into the fiercely expansionist first years of Islam, as it was then proceeding to temporarily conquer southern Europe. And the ferociously warlike Muslim religion and the entirely love-based Way of Jesus would have been completely incompatible. As I have tried to play out those possible encounters, the robust young Islam that had been exhorted to drive on to conquest by its Prophet, the religion that was offering either death or conversion wherever it went against the gentle missionaries of the Way of Jesus, alight with the radiance of faith and love, I can see only disaster for the followers of Jesus. All that they really could have done would have been to get as far out of the way as possible, to try to go into hiding perhaps, to find ways to disappear and wait out the turbulence. Just as it was that the mammals, small and agile and bright, found ways to survive the Age of Dinosaurs.
The first version of Christianity that would have been spreading along the road not taken would not have been much like the Roman Christianity that is dying today. The Way of Jesus of those first three hundred years was a set of spiritual movements anyway and not even a religion at all, and it was remarkably varied, with many strains and beliefs, but all largely based in the remembered teachings of Jesus, and love-based rather than fear-based. There is no way to know for certain where it would have gone and how it might have developed, but over the course of this past week as I have waited for Thomas to join me, as he always does by Friday, I have tried to game it out. Without Constantine’s First Nicaean Council, it would have taken them longer, but the bishops of the first converted cities were moving toward codifying their various beliefs. So Jesus would have been taken off the cross, where Constantine was determined to keep Him forever, and restored to His role of revered Teacher, rather than being treated as just a figurehead and sacrifice, as He still is to this day in Roman Christianity.
And that, my beloveds, seems to me to be the great difference between what we have had and what we might have had if the alternative Way of Jesus had been left free to wend its way along that beautiful road not taken. Without Constantine and his obsession with wielding Christianity as a means of fear-based control, there would have been no need to keep Jesus bleeding on that cross forevermore, shedding upon us the misery of our own imagined guilt and shame and lowering the consciousness vibrations of every Christian on the face of the earth. In the Roman Catacombs, which date to those first three hundred years after Jesus’s Resurrection, there is not a single cross to be seen! There are only depictions of Jesus, often with a baby goat about His shoulders to signify that He had come to bring His teachings and the ultimate good news of our eternal life to the goats as well as to the sheep. Until we first understood consciousness physics early in this new century, we never could have realized just how deadly it has been to our ability to raise our consciousness vibrations for us to keep rubbing our own noses in Jesus’s death for our sins and shortcomings by making the brutal means of His death the symbol of the whole Christian religion. That cross is always right there in our faces! So, dying in that ghastly way was the point of Jesus’s entire life? THAT was Jesus’s whole gift to us? His three and a half years of teaching, and His Resurrection, and His Ascension actually all amounted to nothing? We even wear gold crosses as jewelry on chains around our necks, for heaven’s sake!
But if only we had kept to that road not taken, then in all the Christian churches over all the earth, there now would never be a cross to be seen! Not even a bare crucifix. No crosses anywhere! Only statues of the teaching Jesus, and also sunbursts perhaps, as symbols of the beauty of the risen Christ. And the religion would not teach that Jesus died for our sins, but rather the Way would teach just what Jesus taught, God’s perfect love and universal forgiveness, and it would crown the Lord’s words with the certainty that Jesus came to prove to us that human life truly is eternal. He said, “I came so that they would have life, and have it abundantly” (JN 10:11). And as I think about it now, our Bibles might well be the New Testament alone, just the Gospels and perhaps Paul’s letters. And our churches would be places of teaching and celebration, open to all and free of judgment. Without those outmoded Old Testament rules, all those who follow Jesus would be models of His love and joy, every one of us more or less like Jesus.
All the guilt and judgment and the awful negativity that Roman Christianity has instilled in its followers is what has killed off the Roman Christian religion. I have no doubt about that! And in fact, all that negativity has killed it dead, I am afraid. I can see no hope for Christianity now. For more than a decade I have been getting emails from people who tell me that they cannot bear to attend a Christian church any longer, and nearly always they will say that they love Jesus more than ever, but they find the religion’s teachings to be no longer believable. Or they will say that they love Jesus even more, but they find the people who attend Christian churches to be judgmental, standoffish, cliquey, and unbearable to be around. This broad Barna poll gives you a sense of just how deeply negative the image of modern Christians actually is! And yet Jesus’s image remains wonderfully positive. No one sees Jesus as judging us, and they are right. Jesus is only love. I am somewhat alarmed that judgmental Christians seem to have tarnished God’s image for so many people, but Jesus tells us yet again that God does not judge us. Jesus says, “For not even the Father judges anyone” (JN 5:22). And Jesus invites us now to “Come to Me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light” (MT 11:28-30).
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
– Robert Frost (1874-1963), from “The Road Not Taken” (1915)
I knew you had a new post, Roberta! You felt healthier than
before, so why not get back to the fork in the road….
I have searching all my life; my soul’s been so hungry and
wild for peace,I walked back to the fork and started down
your path, Jesus’s Path: Gratitude, Forgiveness, and Love.
it still amazes me His Way is so simple, yet difficult for me still to forgive and love myself. But I know this is the path
I choose and it will make all the difference. gflerica
Oh my sweet Erica, I just wish it were easier to wash all the harm away! I so much hate knowing all the damage that has been done in Jesus’s name. I know that He can’t bear to know it, but He lives with it. And He forgives it. And now He simply begins again.
Beautiful post today, Roberta! Thank you! You know, the ACIM exercise for today for me is: Truth will correct the errors of my mind; And I will rest in Him Who is my Self.
It popped right up when I was reading and I smiled. Truth will always “out” the illusion, the lie. Isn’t that a saying? Probably because it’s true. Pun intended.
There is a lot of deep contemplation in your presentation today. I had forgotten about the “new” religion of Islam in those times-very interesting to ponder what would have happened to The Way if it had been on the road not taken.
In these times, I reflect back to younger years, and how easily I believed and followed my religion, not really ever questioning. Now, I cannot conceive of swallowing anything it says that tastes like pomp and circumstance rituals, shame, sin and rallying around its mascot of a bleeding man on the cross. Do you remember in the 70’s, the newness the young clergy brought-tried to bring into the Catholic Church? It had the flavor of the 60’s? Baked bread instead of wafers stamped out by nuns? And encouraging us to receive it on our hands instead of sticking out your tongue ((oh! We dare to “touch” Jesus!) ? Offering the wine to parishioners? Including the children in on discussion of the gospel? It was an opening to the people. We had a wonderful priest who carried the microphone and asked questions and opened a dialogue about the gospel! He loved to invite the kids to talk.
Little by little, truth is peeling back the facades.
Written works like yours, ACIM, B Longhurst, J Smallman and so many other brave souls may well become the new scriptures people will seek to find The Way again.
You had long ago mentioned Jesus seemed super determined as His website was being created. Being Truth, AND super determined, I wager the old false facades are no longer peeling but are being ripped and shredded. There are many spiritually hungry souls seeking The Truth. He always keeps His Promises-He’s still with us, getting us through the gate, as He promised. God bless you
Oh my sweet Fran, what a lovely comment! Almost a blog post in itself. Thank you, dear! Yes, now that Jesus has His website we are trying to figure out how to make it interactive, somehow. More readily communicative. His problem is that He has a very complicated life answering prayers and serving billions of people, and meanwhile He also wants to be talking to people too! He can do it, really, just as God can do it, but those who serve Him don’t have a similar range.
Jason’s suggested video is below:
https://youtu.be/om6HcUUa8DI
This is unfortunately going to be one of those controversial posts, but unfortunately the Grand Inquisitor will not be denied. And, perhaps by listening to the Grand Inquisitor we can understand something about the commonality of the Spanish Inquisition, the Islamic aggressions, the specter of Communism, etc., whose commonality is the desire to remake the world, the ends justifying the means.
And Jesus’ reply to the Grand Inquisitor, does it give an answer? Or the beginnings of an answer, anyway. I have not yet finished reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (there are entire sections concerning the Elder Zosima I have not read yet, for instance). It would be nice if he came up with a more robust solution to past, present, and future Grand Inquisitors than “All that they really could have done would have been to get as far out of the way as possible, to try to go into hiding perhaps, to find ways to disappear and wait out the turbulence.”
P.S. So there is no confusion, in this context the word “faggot” means “a bundle of sticks, twigs, or brushwood tied together for use as fuel.”
Oh my dear Jason, religions are evil, and they are creepy to boot!
What did you think of the video?
My dear Jason, my comment is above. I thought it was awful, point-blank, but I am not sophisticated, and all my love and care is with Jesus, and what He has been through over the past seventeen hundred years as He has cared for the victims of Christianity. I love my Lord with everything in me, so what could I think of it?
Hello.
Your above post gave no clue that you knew a video existed. That’s why I persisted with the follow-up question.
Hm, why did I post this video? That is a two part answer, because there are two people in the video.
Let’s start with Jesus. Your reply did not mention Jesus’ response to the Grand Inquisitor, which seemed rather surprising since it seemed to be in line with the nature of Jesus as described here. You have a direct line to the man Himself, was His response different? You had to notice Jesus’ response had an effect on the Grand Inquisitor. In the last few days I have moved to parts of the book that deal with Elder Zosima, and I am noticing an alternative developing to the Grand Inquisitor, the Idealist who loves humanity in the abstract but despises individual people. I was hoping to spark a conversation about how that response could be expanded, to be a robust answer, in order to face future Constantines, future Grand Inquisitors.
This leads me to the second part, the Grand Inquisitor himself. In order to have a genuine response it is not enough to create a straw-man Inquisitor, he has to be an iron-man. He has to challenge people. He has to take the arguments against him, even agree with them, and in essence say “And so what? We were still right in what we did, and here’s why,” I told you a few weeks ago that it was as if Christianity had read your post, and made a reply.
Oh, just to let you know, Alexei had the same reaction you did to the Grand Inquisitor when he heard the story from his older brother Ivan.
My dear, all I saw was the Grand Inquisitor trying to justify the utterly unjustifiable, and being forgiven for the completely unforgivable. But I may have missed something?
Hello again. I think it is time to put in what was missing from this tale: the conversation between Alyosha and Ivan after the tale was completed. I will let Ivan defend his work. After that I will go back to reading the book. It is a great book, one of the best I have ever read. My apologies, this will be long.
Alyosha, who all the while had listened to him silently, though towards the end, in great agitation, he had tried to interrupt his brother’s speech but obviously restrained himself, suddenly spoke as if tearing himself loose.
“But…that’s absurd!” he cried, blushing. “Your poem praises Jesus, it doesn’t revile him…as you meant it to. And who will believe you about freedom? Is that, is that any way to understand it? It’s a far cry from the Orthodox idea…It’s Rome, and not even the whole of Rome, that isn’t true—they’re the worst of Catholicism, the Inquisitors, the Jesuits…! But there could not even possibly be such a fantastic person as your Inquisitor. What sins do they take on themselves? Who are these bearers of the mystery who took some sort of curse upon themselves for men’s happiness? Has anyone ever seen them? We know the Jesuits, bad things are said about them, but are they what you have there? They’re not that, not that at all…They’re simply a Roman army, for a future universal earthly kingdom, with the emperor—the pontiff of Rome—at their head…that’s their ideal, but without any mysteries or lofty sadness…Simply the lust for power, for filthy earthly lucre, enslavement…a sort of future serfdom with them as the landowners…that’s all they have. Maybe they don’t even believe in God. Your suffering Inquisitor is only a fantasy…”
“But wait, wait,” Ivan was laughing, “don’t get so excited. A fantasy, you say? Last it be. Of course it’s a fantasy. But still, let me ask: do you really think that this whole Catholic movement of the last few centuries is really nothing but the lust for power only for the sake of filthy lucre? Did Father Paissy teach you that?”
“No, no, on the contrary, Father Paissy once even said something like what you… but not like that, of course, not at all like that,” Alyosha suddenly recollected himself.
“A precious bit of information, however, despite your ‘not at all like that.’ I ask you specifically: why should your Jesuits and Inquisitors have joined together only for material and filthy lucre? Why can’t there happen to be among them at least one sufferer who is tormented by great sadness and loves mankind? Look, suppose that one among all those who desire only material and filthy lucre, that one of them, at least, is like my old Inquisitor, who himself ate roots in the desert and raved, overcoming his flesh, in order to make himself free and perfect, but who still loved mankind all his life, and suddenly opened his eyes and saw that there is no great moral blessedness in achieving perfection of the will only to become convinced, at the same time, that millions of the rest of God’s creatures have been set up only for mockery, that they will never be strong enough to manage their freedom, that from such pitiful rebels will never come giants to complete the tower, that it was not for such geese that the great idealist had his dream of harmony. Having understood all that, he returned and joined…the intelligent people. Couldn’t this have happened?”
“Whom did he join? What intelligent people?” Alyosha exclaimed, almost passionately. “They are not so very intelligent, nor do they have any great mysteries and secrets…Except maybe for godlessness, that’s their whole secret. Your Inquisitor doesn’t believe in God, that’s his whole secret!”
“What of it! At last you’ve understood. Yes, indeed, that alone is the whole secret, but is it not suffering, if only for such a man as he, who has wasted his whole life on a great deed in the wilderness and still has not been cured of his love for mankind? In his declining years he comes to the clear conviction that only the councils of the great and dread spirit could at least somehow organize the feeble rebels, ‘the unfinished, trial creatures created in mockery,’ in a tolerable way. And so, convinced of that, he sees that one must follow the directives of the intelligent spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction, and to that end accepts lies and deceit, and lead people, consciously now, to death and destruction, deceiving them, moreover, all along the way, so that they somehow do not notice where they are being led, so that at least on the way these pitiful, blind men consider themselves happy. And deceive them, notice, in the name of him in whose ideal the old man believed so passionately all his life! Is that not a misfortune? And if even one such man, at least, finds himself at the head of that whole army ‘lusting for power only for the sake of filthy lucre,’ is one such man, at least, not enough to make a tragedy? Moreover, one such man standing at its head would be enough to bring out finally the real ruling idea of the whole Roman cause, with all its armies and Jesuits—the highest idea of this cause. I tell you outright that I firmly believe that this one man has never been lacking among those standing at the head of the movement. Who knows, perhaps such ‘ones’ have even been found among the Roman pontiffs. Who knows, maybe this accursed old man, who loves mankind so stubbornly in his own way, exists even now, in the form of a great host of such old men, and by no means accidentally, but in concert, as a secret union, organized long ago for the purpose of keeping the mystery, of keeping it from unhappy and feeble mankind with the aim of making them happy. It surely exists, and it should be so. I imagine that even the Masons have something like this mystery as their basis, and that Catholics hate the Masons so much because they see them as competitors, breaking up the unity of the idea, whereas there should be one flock and one shepherd…However, the way I’m defending my thought makes me seem like an author who did not stand up to your criticism. Enough of that.”
I am thinking people do not notice at the top of my post there is a video link. My post doesn’t have a meaning if you don’t see the video to give context.
My dear Jason, I have just edited your post to make the video clearer – because you’re right. People should be able to see it!
i have set it apart so people see it, dear one!
I feel very lucky that I wasn’t indoctrinated into the Catholic church.
My grandmother was an avid Church goer. She was kind and all sorts of awesome. My mother started taking me to church at a young age. It was nice, in a way, because I got to see my grandmother.
I was then sent to bible studies and Catholic school. This is when I started to rebel. I finally got out of Catholic school after about a year and went to public school.
Bible studies was tricky as the nuns were threatening my mom with all sorts of doom if I were to stop going. A lot of that stuff just didn’t make sense to me. How did rules like, birth control is a sin, change over time. Surely God wouldn’t be changing his mind so frequently.
Then came the eternal damnation. God is all-loving, but boy is he wrathful if you screw up. How can you be all-loving and wrathful?
We are sinful from birth but also made in God’s image?
Church felt like a theater show. On cue we would recite memorized prayers in monotonous tones. I perceived no feelings behind the words, though I could be wrong. People did seem happy when they left.
In order to get out of bible studies I ended up pretending I had the worst stomach-ache ever. I must have been an actor in my pass life, because I was then sent to a doctor. The doctor was a devil in disguised as he proceeded to prescribe me an enema.
Great, God has rained enema’s down upon me. Oh, no, what have I done!
Looking back, it was worth it knowing what I know now. I do wonder why I fought the church so much instead of blindly following along like so many others. I’m going to have an interesting life review when I get back home.
Anyway, glad to share more than I needed and hope everyone has a great week!
How can God be all-loving and wrathful? From the mouths of babes. My dear Thomas, you have nailed it, right there! I wondered about that as a child myself, but that religion has such a powerful hold on us that we don’t even recognize it as fear, sad to say, which was why people looked happy when they left church. They had soothed the fear, so they were free for another week. What an absolutely ghastly system!
Roberta,
As awful as it sounds, maybe the 1700 year convoluted path where Jesus’ teachings were added to and corrupted, WERE the Plan to have Earth School continue to be a place where conflict and negative experiences would be available to learn. And maybe that path has merged back to the one path where the observations and teachings of Jesus, on how to speed up spiritual progression, are now available again for us spirits to take advantage of.
This hypothesis could show that the God Collective was always “in control.” The execution of this Plan was obviously very painful for Jesus to watch. So He has always loved us and greeted us as we returned to the Greater Reality all beat up by our latest incarnation.
Thank you, Lord Jesus, that your Way can be revealed to us today and maybe we can reach a degree of perfection and end these difficult incarnations. May we graduate from Earth School and matriculate to the higher teachings of the Greater Reality!
Just some thoughts …
Blessings to you all,
David D.
Dear David,
I’ve recently heard this from others. An image I think of is us choosing to go down the ladder of consciousness and now the time has come since there is a collective awakening that we no longer want this path, to come back up the ladder. I can see wisdom in what you say. A Spirit collective I occasionally listen to has spoken about this concept recently and said gifts we came with will come to our awareness as we wake up.
Oh my dear beloved Fran, I hope that you and David are right about this! Because the world has sunk very far indeed at this point, and Christianity contributed materially to its sinking. It will have quite a long way to rise.
Oh my dear beloved David D, I think it has been too painful for Him to watch. You can see it in His eyes. And none of it has been His fault! But He forgives it all, and He shoulders it all, for us. So now, as you say, perhaps it is our turn at last.
Such a beautiful post … may this world be filled with much love, light, joy and liberation always … 🙏
Dear SML, thank you for your lovely thoughts!
I have always wondered why I love Jesus so much and feel uncomfortable visiting the church! It seems like a paradox… anyway, before, but not now!
My dear friend Erik, you may not realize how many people feel just the way you do! We all love Jesus, but for all sorts of reasons we feel personally uncomfortable in a Christian church. I haven’t been in one in more than a decade, not even for my beloved husband’s sake. Oh yes, my dear, so many people feel exactly as you do!
My dear dear Roberta,
I hear a sad tone in your loving voice; I know your medical fix was simple, but going under and coming out is a strain on our bodies.
I haven’t heard you say how far off we are and thatJesus
shouldered our burden, and forgave us, but in his eyes you saw the pain and exhaustion So he did take on our sins.
I t took me 6 weeks to get back to Erica and I will not be the
same. I fiercely wanted to live. I knew I had to help Jesus in
some way–it’s not clear to me what I can do but love, love
love. I don’t have a specific talent
I know these times are critical.
I love you Roberta, sweet teacher love,erica
Oh my sweet Erica, the medical “procedure,” as they call it now, that I have just undergone was not a strain at all! I have felt fantastic, literally ever since that moment! No, my only strain in all of this really is remembering what Jesus has gone through with Christianity, during its whole seventeen-hundred-year run, as He has taken it upon Himself to heal the literally billions of victims that the religion has caused to suffer in His name. And Jason’s video did bring that sharply back to mind, although truly it is always there. And I love my Lord with my whole heart.
All I can say is that I am so happy to have found the real Jesus through Roberta! I don’t always post but I still try to read all the blogs! I love this blog and its wonderful message!
Oh my dear beautiful Litsa, thank you so much for saying so! I love especially for my sweet Thomas to read your praise, when he so kindly devotes himself to teaching us all. And he is always so patient with us, and especially with me! Far too often I take his presence and his help for granted, and yet he is always so kindly. And always there.
I feel the same way as Litsa.
It was you and Thomas’ work that put me on the path I am now. I can’t say how much progress I am making, but no doubt it is significantly more than I would have without the both of you (and Jesus).
Thanks again!
I too am thankful for this blog, and for everyone’s comments! When I am feeling blue I know that I can come visit this site and inevitably I end up feeling better, uplifted and encouraged.
Much love to everyone here,
JenniferK
Oh my dear JenniferK, how lovely it is of you to say this! I do try to keep things light here, and I know that others do too, but with some of these earthly topics, doing that can sometimes be a bit difficult. Thank you darling for acknowledging that at least we do try!
Dearest Roberta,
I feel the same as Litsa and Thomas Belknap. Thomas-who-was-Thomas-Jefferson and your good self have blown out the cobwebs of staid, fusty conditionings and misinformation about Our Jesus. Hence my path has become much clearer and the closeness to Jesus has become real, without my own mental and emotional blocks getting in the way.
And one point mentioned above has suddenly come to the fore: How can God be both all-loving and wrathful?
The constancy of Love Eternal leaves no room for a jealous, angry, easily offended and punitive God. No. Love unbounded is infinite and will accept no limitations; no confining, ugly barbed fences of wrath, sudden flaring anger or the desire to fire lightning bolts at anyone.
Love and understanding go together. The Divine is not seen in switchy behavior that flips capriciously from saving to smiting.
Roberta you do try to keep things light, as you say. And what is lighter, rising gracefully like a hot air balloon, than knowing that the Divine loves each of us completely and eternally?! ❣️🕊🙏🏼
Oh my poor sweet Thomas! it seems that he never will escape the baggage of that American Founding Father, will he?
But you are so perfectly right, my precious Efrem, it is indeed impossible for God to be both infinitely loving and as wrathful as the religions imagine God to be. No, the genuine God is the highest Consciousness vibration, and at that level the genuine God must indeed be nothing but the purest love!
This is wonderful! I had always thought that the attributes of unconditional love and wrath were incompatible with one another.
When I was a young child, somehow I got my hands on a copy of Jonathan Edward’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. Let me tell you, I lost a lot of sleep on that account!
It’s a sweet relief to learn that God is pure, unconditional love.
Oh my sweet Jennifer K, such a sadist that man was! No, God is only perfect love, and when Jesus tells us that we must forgive seventy times seven times, then can God do any less for us?
Once again you nailed it, Efrem. I have been accused in the past of not liking Jesus when it was actually Christianity I had issues with. Jesus and Christianity have nothing to do with one another. We cannot know while in a physical body what God is, but it is certainly not some wrathful being who is full of anger. Notice that the personality they inflict on him is the same one they identify dictators and emperors with – in other words, human qualities.
And you have nailed it as well, my sweet wonderful Lola! Jesus and Christianity do indeed have nothing to do with one another! And God has no human qualities, and certainly no negative ones. He is, as Jesus told us that He is, our loving Parent, and each of us is God’s best-beloved Child.
Sweet Lola,
I hope you didn’t go through the agony of religious people telling you, that you didn’t have enough love or faith in Jesus!? That is one of the common cruelties that religious people (of the fundamentalist kind) inflict upon their more evolved brothers and sisters.
I have often informed gay and lesbian young people coming from dire, staunch, emphatic churches that they were not the only ones made to suffer. Anyone can fall foul of the one-eyed folk. (This stuff is sadly true of other religions as well.) I feel for you dear Lola. ❣️
No one has the right to judge another’s love for God. If some people do judge they are in the midst of deep illusion, I reckon.
And I feel an urging to propose that, quite possibly, it is the people who feel disquiet about organized religion, who actually have a deeper connection to Our Jesus which can and does approach the profound. 🕊🙏🏼💎
What does Jesus think of our polluted Earth?
He stayed close by, but seems impossible to meet
I love the Gospels
I try not to to blame myself but it’s hard to dump the
mental garbage gfl Erica
My dear Erica, I have just asked Thomas what Jesus thinks of our polluted earth, and he tells me that the earth can cleanse itself. I asked him when you can meet Jesus, and he said that each of you will meet Jesus when you go home. Jesus will make a point of that. And he sends you his hug, dear one!
Roberta,
Thank Thomas for his hug!
I am so glad Earth can cleanse itself
I love Earth more and more: she is innocent
and we hurt her so much.
I have huge backyard; it was mowed yesterday–
beautiful and it smells so good!
I will anticipate Jesus’s hug! gfl erica