Posted by Roberta Grimes • May 30, 2026 • 2 Comments
Book News, Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus, Understanding Reality
Praise the Lord!
Praise God in his sanctuary;
praise him in his mighty firmament!
2 Praise him for his mighty deeds;
praise him according to his surpassing greatness!
3 Praise him with trumpet sound;
praise him with lute and harp!
4 Praise him with tambourine and dance;
praise him with strings and pipe!
5 Praise him with clanging cymbals;
praise him with loud clashing cymbals!
6 Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord!
Psalm 150
The first question that I ever asked our dear friend Reverend Turrell when I was still a young child was whether religions were discovered, or were they invented by people? In retrospect, that was a surprisingly sophisticated question for such a young child to ask! And to this day, I can still remember asking it. As I recall that moment now, when I asked that question, my much-beloved childhood minister didn’t know what to do with such a complicated challenge from such a young child on his busy Sunday morning. Were religions discovered, or were they invented? Huhh? So, instead of trying to answer me quickly, Reverend Turrell just bent down and gave me a hug and hurried about his Sunday business.
That is a complicated question indeed, the more you think about it. Were 
religions discovered, or were they invented? Complicated. I can attempt to answer it now, but only after I have made it part of the subject of my college major, and then done even more research. The world’s oldest known sculpted idol, whose very existence indicates that we were stumbling toward a longing for religious worship, even in very ancient times, is the Shigir Idol, which is a 17-foot-tall wooden totem that was carved approximately 12,000 years ago, during the Mesolithic period. It was discovered in 1890 in a Russian peat bog, and it is presently housed at the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum, in Yekaterinburg, Russia. But many religious artifacts have very much darker histories. And where Judaeo-Christian history is concerned, one of the most evil human-created religions must be the hideous cult of Moloch, of which a few ghastly artifacts still exist.
Moloch, or Molech, was a great and powerful Canaanite god that the Hebrews encountered as they escaped from Egypt into the land of good and plenty that the God of their fathers had promised to them. Aha! And so it was that at last in the history of the Hebrew tribes, who were mere Egyptian slaves at the time, that the genuine Creator God, which we know now was the highest-vibrating Aspect of Consciousness, the God which had thus far made all things, including all of humankind itself; that God at last had chosen God’s special People, to whom God would announce Godself. And in particular, the genuine Godhead had chosen Moses to lead God’s chosen people out of slavery.
So, as I consider it now, perhaps the answer to my childhood question might be considered to be a blended answer. As a part of creating this genuine relationship with humankind that God was planning to eventually inspire all of humankind to reach out to our God and thereby create, God seems to have instilled in God’s human creation a craving to encounter what would be our genuine Creator God, at some future, fortunate day. Doesn’t that seem to be what happened? So, ancient peoples were even very long ago primed to look for God, in fact searching for God in the highest places; longing for God, imagining God as a protector, as the source of guidance and help with hunting, and then later with gathering, and even later with crops, with forming even human relationships, and indeed imagining that God might offer help in all things. That craving for God can be seen repeatedly, going back even to far ancient times, with the Shigur Idol cited earlier as just one example of an ancient, human-created yearning for God.
As those very early peoples, who after all might have counted among them some of the Jews’ pre-Egyptian-phase ancestors, often built their altars to their fondly imagined gods, and built high places as expressions of their people’s yearnings to hope that they might possibly attract a god or two to occupy their altars, there is archaeological evidence that what they imagined for gods often later seem to have scared them enough, so they would fill in their altars, and then they would run away. After all, the human-created god that we know the most about was Moloch, and he was a hideous monster of a disgusting guy who required the sacrifice of people’s firstborn children, to be all thrown alive into the fire that burned in Moloch’s belly. It is said that the God of Moses railed against Moloch, in particular!
I studied a lot of this in college. And to be frank, if you want to become ever more religious as you grow to be an adult, then my strong advice is that you not study religions in college! I am something of a skeptic by nature; and the more I studied ancient Christianity, the less of a Christian I became. I had been reading through the Bible over and over during my teenage years, and I still was reading it, a couple of pages every night, out of habit. But as I moved on into studying the afterlife in my post-college years, I began gradually to drift away from a church-centered life. What bothered me, really more and more, was the rigidity, the formality of even every Protestant church that I tried; and how far every one of them seemed to be from the naïve love and beauty that I had found in Reverend Turrell’s simple, love-based teachings in my childhood church. I decided at last that I could live without religion. And so, contentedly, I moved on.I read my Bible, and I established my own quiet prayer life.
Very soon thereafter, though, I fell in love. And I submit now to anyone who does not believe that God has a sense of humor, that I fell in love with a strictly devout Catholic who was even a recent graduate of Providence College. And you can put that in your irony-pipe, and smoke it! I had never been in genuine love before, and neither had he. To say that the earth moved does not begin to describe the way this love hit us both, right smack in the heart. But Catholicism had my beloved by the throat, and I didn’t realize at the time, nor for many years thereafter, how irrevocably a cradle Catholic through the college level is caught and owned by his religion. It took us four years of struggling with it to try to do anything else; but the certainty of our love left us no other choice. In the end, his religion won. I converted to Catholicism, and we got married.
I couldn’t manage to remain a Catholic forever, but I tried my best for my husband’s sake for more than twenty-five years. And by the time I stopped attending Catholic Mass, I had met my Thomas, reared our children as Catholics (unsuccessfully), written most of my nonfiction books (mostly channeled), and eventually found that I simply could not bear any longer to see that life-sized, full-color Jesus hanging on the cross above my husband’s church’s altar. There are some things that, love or not, simply cannot be borne!
By then, I was following Jesus’s Way, as He had established it at the time of His death on the cross and His resurrection and ascension forty days later. I had channeled, if not yet published the two books that my Thomas had told me that Jesus especially wanted me to write, which encapsulated Jesus’s Way; and when I asked Thomas whether Jesus was pleased with those two books, Thomas told me that Jesus had instructed him to say to me, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” I was stunned, to be frank; you do your best when you are told that you are working for Jesus, but there is no church that follows Jesus alone! Every Christian Church sadly follows the Roman Emperor Constantine, and his series of councils, beginning with The First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE. There was no church now that I could attend, because there is no church that follows Jesus’s original Way. But I offered to teach a class on how to raise your spiritual vibration, and two iterations of that class were well attended. A small group from those two classes has continued to meet with me weekly. for spiritual sustenance. So I am content.
But oh, then in the spring of 2022, the most extraordinary thing happened to me! Thomas took me with him to the astral plane, to meet with Jesus beside his beautiful river full of sparkling, multicolored fish that you feed with grain that just appears in your hand.It was all so real! Jesus was sitting there, feeding his fish, and it all was real, and not like a dream at all. I have spoken about that experience before, and now I feel ready to discuss it further next week.
5 Praise him with clanging cymbals;
praise him with loud clashing cymbals!
6 Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord!
Psalm 150
(Most photos are from Vecteezy.com)
Thank you, Roberta!
I cannot wait to see what you have for us next week. I, too, feel that there is no church that I can follow. I, too, was a Catholic, and after my divorce, I became Episcopalian, which is almost the same. We really do not know what we do, especially when all we want is to please God and Jesus. We may fall short, but we do try.
Meeting Jesus must have been amazing. I am eager to hear more of your impressions. Have a wonderful week!
I’m so glad to hear more. You’ve honestly been a new pillar of my life. I remember vividly when I asked a question to my aged preacher, I think he was 86 at the time, and it was in the middle of our entire congregation of about 200. I think I was 30 years old or so, but still a child in my mind. I asked,”Why did Jesus choose 12? And then they knew there should be 12, and so when they lost one, they added mathias to make 12, but then we have the 13th?” He said,”i’ve never considered that, it’s an excellent question. I’ll have to think on it.” And in that moment, I was proud of that, but now I think what I fool I was. I clearly see the distortion of Paul. But I’m married to a staunch baptist and I try to quote paul’s words to her 🙂 That she she keep silent in the church, and ask her husband at home, like Paul said. But she doesn’t get my joke yet. I try to tell her I don’t think those are Jesus words, and that the Nazarene’s respected and honored women in way that was unknown in that age. All will work out, I know it. 🙂