Posted by Roberta Grimes • July 25, 2020 • 37 Comments
Afterlife Research, Book News, The Teachings of Jesus
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Where there is offence, let me bring pardon.
Where there is discord, let me bring union.
Where there is error, let me bring truth.
– attributed to St. Francis of Assisi (c.1182-1226), from “Peace Prayer”
After having my first experience of light at the age of eight, I grew up as a devout Christian. I was going to adult church at ten and reading the Bible daily when I was twelve. My college major was early Christian history. When I married I became an ardent Catholic, but all the while I continued my decades-long hobby of researching what comes after death. And once I was sure the afterlife is real, I put a lot of follow-up effort into seeking any evidence at all that what Christians believe is true. My inevitable crisis of faith landed with a thud when I was in my fifties. Not only had I found no evidence that Jesus actually died for our sins, but I had found abundant and consistent evidence that such a thing is impossible. The genuine Godhead is nothing like the cranky and judgmental Christian God that I had believed in and feared since childhood, and the afterlife turns out to be far more glorious than anything I had ever imagined. Everyone goes to the same afterlife. Everyone is forgiven and perfectly loved!
The moment when I first accepted the fact that the Gospel words of Jesus agree with what the dead have been telling us, but Christianity has nothing to do with Jesus, was a hinge in my life. It took me years to come to terms with it. I was mourning the religion I had so much loved while I sought a way to shield and vindicate Jesus. I went through a period, too, when I was struggling to understand how a perfectly loving God could have allowed Christianity to betray us this way. Had it all been part of some gigantic plan so clever that no human mind could comprehend it? I didn’t have the right to ignore my discovery, but I didn’t have the right to trumpet it either, so 
in the end I settled for making it just the topic of an Appendix to most of my Fun books. When Thomas told me it was time for us to write Liberating Jesus, I felt flat unworthy to speak for the Lord until Thomas appeared to me through a medium in 2015 and insisted that I do it anyway. In 2017 he inspired me to write The Fun of Loving Jesus – Embracing the Christianity that Jesus Taught, but then he had me put that book aside until some future day when the time will be right. In recent years I have done a great deal of work under his guidance, but with no clear idea of where this work is taking us.
And I have been fretting about the rapid decline of my childhood religion. Since I first realized that my beloved Christianity actually has nothing to do with Jesus, I have gone through all the stages of grief as they are generally listed: shock, denial, guilt, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. For years I worried that Christianity was dying so rapidly that I had to do something big – and fast! – to separate the genuine historical Jesus from that old-time religion in the public mind. We had to save our precious Baby from being thrown out with the bathwater! But whenever I thought about the possibility that saving Jesus might be up to me, I floundered. How do you even begin such a task? Eventually I came to suspect that we might be supposed to emulate the spiritual movement of the Lord’s first followers, the persecuted but joyous movement of a hundred different perspectives that its first-century adherents called “The Way.” But Thomas kept telling me to do nothing big. The time wasn’t right, and neither were my ideas. Instead of giving me a clear direction, he week after week gave me pieces of his thinking to share with you here as he built a base for our eventual deeper understanding.
And now, quite unexpectedly, he tells me it is time to begin our work.
Thomas guides me, but he serves the Godhead. And the individual tasks that millions of 
us volunteered before birth to undertake with the assistance and direction of our guides are being carried out in close coordination with a heavenly host of the guides of millions of God’s other minions on earth. There is nothing being done in this field now that is not of great importance! But there is no one bit that is more important than any other servant’s part. Thomas reminds me now that when I was going through my writing-bad-poetry phase at twelve, I channeled a poem that was something about sticking to my work, not wondering why I was doing it or what the end would be, but trusting that there was a point to it all and eventually I would know what it was. That poem’s last line was something like, “And when it all is plain and true, you’ll see the little puzzle-piece that was your work and joy.” He tells me that all the previous years of my life have been spent in preparation, and now l am ready to begin to do what I agreed before birth would be my little part of the great work of elevating this planet’s consciousness vibrations.
Thomas tells me that our particular aspect of God’s work is to serve disaffected Christians. I have been hearing from so many! Typically they are in their fifties or older, and most of them have advanced spiritually to the point where they recoil in horror from the most fear-inducing Christian dogmas. And yet, they still love Jesus! They are eager for a closer walk with the Lord. Thomas tells me that he and I volunteered to spend decades in preparation, and then in the fullness of time to offer spiritual care to the Lord’s strayed sheep (MT 15:24). For Jesus, the good shepherd is a powerful model. He says, “What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open pasture and go after the one which is lost until he finds it?” (LK 15:4). And, “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep. … I know My own and My own know Me, even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father … (And) 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” (JN 10:11-16).
Thomas tells me that our first task is to attack and destroy the fear of death. Fear of death is the one great fear, to the point where every lesser fear can be seen at its core to be a fear of death; so once we no longer fear death, we no longer fear anything. Jesus said, “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). Long ago I asked, and over fifty years I have been given the truth abundantly. Now Thomas has some exciting ideas about how we can efficiently teach the truth about reality and eternal life online! We’ll be saying more about this soon.
As we are easing people’s fear of death, Thomas intends that we will quietly launch a new Christian denomination. He wants to call it Christianity as a further assurance to disaffected Christians, but as is true of all the forty-thousand-odd other denominations of Christianity, it will have its own name. We will call it “The Way.” As he says, this will be the only Christian denomination that is centered on the Lord and nothing else, so if any mode of thinking should bear the honored name of Christianity, it is this one! And he has given me a few first details:
The Way has no dogmas and no traditions. The Lord despised religious traditions! He said, “Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? … You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:3-9).I had been wondering how we might hold spiritual services without any fear-based religious trappings, but my beautiful friend Sandra Champlain is doing it now. She hosts a weekly Sunday gathering online that “celebrates life and the afterlife,” and it happily grows in attendance each week. Here is the link for Sunday, July 
26th, in case you might like to drop in.
How can we live a Christianity that is based entirely in the words of the Lord? Let’s talk about that next week. It is time for all the world to take the Lord Jesus at His literal Word!
O Master, let me not seek so much to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that one receives, it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in pardoning that one is pardoned.
It is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.
– attributed to St. Francis of Assisi (c.1182-1226), from “Peace Prayer”
Brilliant,….as always!!
Oh dear Jo, thank you so much! We always wonder how a new post will be received, so your jumping in right away with such a lovely comment was a gift!!
Dearest Roberta,
I would like to make the suggestion that in your penultimate paragraph you highlight, perhaps underline, “Sandra Champlain” to let folks know that it is the hyperlink you were referring to. As it stands it is hardly obvious.
“to serve disaffected Christians” really resonated with me, though I was perfectly content until I started to read your books. They made so much sense that I immediately adopted them. They have this internal logic which, I am sad to say, my denomination does not, but would if reincarnation was restored as a doctrine and the meaning of the Resurection became a demonstration of the truth of Christ’s message and not a sacrifice for our sins.
So I am more perplexed than disaffected, especially since there is so much to like about my church. It’s just too bad it’s not all true.
Yours,
Cookie
Dear Cookie, I loved the religion too, and I was deeply perplexed by its stubborn insistence across all the denominations on dogmas that really make no sense! If you can find it in the Gospels, that’s one thing; or even arguably in the whole New Testament. But so much of what Christians insist on is not even explicit anywhere in the Bible! Perhaps just once in every two thousand years we should take the religion back down to base and build it anew, leaving out the old traditions and freshly interpreting the Biblical teachings. After all, God is eternal. Why shouldn’t God have the right to speak to us freshly, as humankind becomes more sophisticated?
I’m sorry to have unsettled your mind, my dear friend, but I’m sure some wonderful new ideas will come from it!
There is much to like in most iterations of the world’s religions. The basic tenet of the majority is compassion for our fellow human beings, and in some cases all beings, including the planet’s intrinsic nature itself. Most of the world’s religions are dedicated to improving not destroying (at least not for its own sake but to rebuild). We need new metaphors. The metaphors we are still using to guide our behavior and to sing about are cultural artifacts so far removed from us that we don’t even understand what we’re saying.
We especially need a new metaphor for God and for the purpose of our relationship to God, each other and the experience we perceive as incarnation. These can be best understood through metaphor, since language fails us. But we need metaphors that resonate in a 21st century, not a 1st century, culture.
The marvel of Jesus’ teaching is that we don’t need to be learned scholars. We don’t even need to talk about what we’re doing. We can just do it: love everybody, no matter who; forgive everything, no matter what. Behave based on these and everything changes.
Dear Mike, you’re right in saying that the aspirations of most of the major religions seem noble – love and compassion – but the problem is that these are just aspirations. People cannot be changed at the level of their hearts by simply being ordered to change! Disaffected Christians often tell me how judgmental they find Christians to be, how cliquish, how wedded to tradition over action and form over substance. I have seen it too, I’m afraid, and knowing how sharply Jesus speaks against all these tendencies, I am amazed that modern clergy never emphasize what the Lord actually wants!
Building The Way to be both stable and useful is going to be a more complex task than it might seem to be at first. I’ll be eager to see what all of you think next week!
Awesome Roberta, I’m here – I’m with you …peace be with you.
Dear Toni, thank you so much for this! Peace be with you as well, my dear. I’m excited about what can happen now!!
SHARING THE TRUTH
If God isn’t the author of all the divisions, factions, or confusions in the world, what and who is? Political party’s are at each others throats; I’m not sure which news portray things accurately; there are so many religions in the world how could only one be right? To make matters worse many renowned atheist and their followers seems to be on a mission to devalue and humiliate unabashedly anything sacred or religious. Then we have this whole covid-19 thing that seems to be effecting everything. I could go on and on…for some may be triggered by an apocalyptic images of Armageddon. Yet, I think it may be just a pattern, but get excited to think that something bigger than all the world is coming…
Tony, Two sorry traits that come with free will:
1: Ego, self aggrandizement at the expense of all else. ME ME ME
2. For battered egos as Eric Hoffer so well explained in his analysis of the True Believer, grasping at grand causes (whether Left or Right, or anything else) serves to submerge the wounded ego, and replaces it with aspirations of greatness.
And religions, however benevolent create schisms manifest as wee the insiders who know Truth, and outsiders who re ignorant and contemptuous.
Religions also invariably invent entrapments of dogma, and often promote fright of possibly offending a temperamental, scary God who may impose eternity in Hell for any breaches.
It is good simply to believe in God, and honor the explicit teachings of Christ stated by the Gospels, even if they are not perfectly accurate because of imperfect translations, and changes in culture and conventions we misinterpret (such as the meaning for “Turn the Other cheek, ” which was not about taking a beating but being passively defiant.
A good new Christian religion does not require a church and buildings, or tax write offs. For example, I keep reading that Moslems in Iran are individually benefiting from visits by Mary and Jesus, and quietly converting.
Dear Jack, thank you for such a wise and thoughtful set of observations. Yes, religions as they are presently practiced do contribute substantially to making things so much worse! I’m not sure I agree with your interpretation of the Lord’s “turn the other cheek” teaching, but your take is a reasonable one. In fact, it might be worthwhile for us to explore in a future post just what He probably meant? But I do love the thought that the Lord and His Mother are working to bring the truth to more Iranians – thank you for sharing that!
Wait now, didn’t you say that we all go to the same afterlife? We are all forgiven and loved? Then why should the Iranians even care about Jesus? Or the “truth” as they are being taught? It’s disturbing and confusing that Jesus said to the Pharisees that they were preventing people from getting into the kingdom of Heaven…if we all go to the same afterlife. ???? Is Heaven according to Jesus different from the afterlife? I don’t know what to believe anymore. Somebody in the Bible gave a warning about false prophets in the end times that would mislead people. Perhaps I’m being misled.
Tim, if you are asking questions I am happy to answer them briefly. But if you are eager to learn the truth, there is no substitute for your doing a lot of research on your own! As you can imagine, I have neither the space here nor the time to give you the level of detail that will bring you to certainty. As I see your questions:
1) There is one afterlife, and there is no religion there to speak of (a few people might sing a hymn or two for nostalgia’s sake). The afterlife is gigantic, and it is highly stratified as to each individual’s level of spiritual development, so although it is all in the same place, people’s individual experiences there are VASTLY different!
2) The kingdom of God – or the kingdom of heaven – is the highest level of the afterlife, just below the Godhead. Those who are there are at a very high spiritual vibration, and the Lord’s complaint against the Pharisees was that they were not helping people to grow spiritually and attain that level because the clergy themselves were so fear- and negativity-based.
3) The book of Revelation is one of a number of revenge-porn tales that were created in a time of tremendous persecution. It was added to the Bible by the Council of Nicaea in 325, and the Council even edited the Gospels to add bits about Armageddon even though it directly contradicts what Jesus taught. In fact, we are told by those that we used to think were dead that there will be no end-times. Instead, the Lord’s work will be carried to completion and the kingdom of God will dawn on earth.
I have written about these topics here, and if you put key words into the search bar at the upper right on this page, you should find a lot of information which can help to build your understanding. If you would like PDFs of some of my books, please request them by sending me an email through the green Contact block.
I wish I could do more for you now, but time won’t allow it. Nevertheless, I hope this helps.
Dear Tony, all the things you are concerned about are direct manifestations of the fact that the consciousness vibration of this planet has sunk so deep into negativity. Who is the author of all these problems? Effectively, all of us are. And how can we repair it all? By raising our own consciousness vibrations, and teaching and helping others to raise their own: since all our minds are part of a single consciousness, it will take just a small percentage of all the people in the world working to raise their vibrations – perhaps as few as ten percent – to effect this transformation. Of course. ten percent of seven and a half billion people still will be quite a few people….!
Something I recently picked up about the purposes of each of us being here is that although we each are learning something unique to our own growth, the work belongs to God. Our guides, who are mentioned in the main post and whom we have discussed in other entries, also have their stake in our success.
Here is an important point from an interview Michael Tymn did with Matthew McKay, who lost his son Jordan and reconnected through automatic writing:
Matthew says this about a communication he received:
“I knew, for example, that the purpose of life was learning. But I had no idea that the wisdom each individual soul acquires contributes to the wisdom/ knowledge of collective consciousness (the divine/god). I had no idea that each lesson in our lives allows – ultimately – collective consciousness (god) to make the next, more perfect universe.”
So we’re in good hands, I would say.
Dear Mike, the message you share from young Jordan shows us once again our vast interconnectedness with all beings, including the Godhead! And Thomas has emphatically told me that the better I do my work, the more he will grow spiritually. This was one of his arguments when he was trying to persuade me to channel Liberating Jesus, the implication being that if I wouldn’t do it for Jesus alone, perhaps I would do it for Jesus and Thomas together. A guilt-thing? I found his saying that surprising at the time, but he has worked with me so intensively since he first said it five years ago that he has abundantly earned every bit of merit that might come to him. Surely, all our guides have!
Yes! I cannot recall the details of the conversation now, but I know my beloved guide recruited me with clear personal interest in the outcome of “the mission (which I am still working to discern).”
Perfection in timing and in delivery.
We are “The Way”.
In these turbulent times, this was exactly the message I needed.
With Much Love and Gratitue.
Susi
Thank you, dear Susi! I appreciate your kind words, but know that they go to Thomas much more than to me. All of this is his work! But since he isn’t in a body now, he lets me claim most of the credit 😉 He tells me we all are going to really enjoy these projects he is outlining for us now, so I hope you will join in and be part of the fun!!
As always Roberta your right on in what you describe. I’m going to ad a couple of different ways my life has traveled.
As a young, perhaps 3 I knew the world was not what it looked to be; I was brought up, until the age of 5yo, on a remote farm in Vermont where Dad & Mom lived on 500 acres at the foot of a large mountain. Remote. Dad took me in the woods, taught me to line bees to find the swarm and spent time roaming by my self in the woods with my trusted cat..
Fast forward: Mother took me to church when I was 5yo and went 2 or 3 times. I told her then that I never wanted to go back inside and she followed my wishes. I don’t to this day, i’m 77 understand that decision; however, it was the correct one because I was never held back by dogma & lies.
Fear & Death: I have been shown, through experience FEAR is nothing more than EGO maintaining superiority over self. Learn to develop self confidence. Death and Pain is fear of the unknown; from my experience Death does not hurt; it is simply closing one’s eyes and sleeping. For the most part we pass out of this life when we have finished in this life what we came in to do.
My Experiences: 1. Lived in Alaska for 12 years and spent a large portion of my time in Wilderness areas of the State; hundreds of miles from civilization and have been really close and personal to Grizzles many times. 2. I’ll relate to experiences with them. I was sleeping in the sun, high in the mountains after hunting, awoke to see a Mother Griz & 2 cubs the size of Black bears 10 or 12 feet in front of me. The mother was standing on her hind legs and perfectly calm. I slowly got up took the gun & kept at my side and started talking quietly to her while I backed up slowly. She never showed 1 sign of agitation. As I slowly backed up she dropped to all 4 feet and ambled down the valley.
The second encounter was different. I was charged by a Mother Grizzly who had 2 cubs; She started perhaps 50+ feet away. With my rifle aimed at her shoulder; I drew a line in front of her and said to my self, If you pass this line mother & have to shoot & we’ll both die. Believe it or not she STOPPED right at that LINE. Woofed a couple of times, turned and left rapidly with the two cubs.
This Experience is on finishing our journey: About 300+ miles from Civilization out of Dillingham AK on a month long white water rafting excursion. I was washed out of my raft by 15′ waves, ended going over 30+ foot falls and being sucked to the bottom of the river by undertow. I knew I was being dragged across the face of the falls, I could see the surface way, way up with sunlight streaming down through the water. I remember trying to breathe twice, only water, third time somehow I knew it was all over, and I just saw black. Some how I floated to the surface, ended up floating right side up, being rescued by fishing guides who had flown in to fish the falls. Think how unlikely this rescue alone turns out to be…
My suggestion is this based on my life experience: The experiences each and everyone one of us “humans” are having is unique to us and we planned this life prior to this adventure. Pay close attention to the emotions coming from the heart; these are telling you the direction. Meditate daily.. Each individual has the knowledge of the Universe inside; YOU have a direct connection to “Source”; Clergy likely understand less than you, because it’s all learned dogma; Think only POSITIVE Thoughts; You draw to you what you think; You can only effect the NOW, for there is no past nor a future, there is only NOW. Many/most will not understand; we are in a dream; this is a illusion for learning/seems real; this is how we experience and learn. I call it the ” game of Life”..Enjoy
Skip, Well said in all particulars. You just might have advanced to the level in which no further rebirth will be warranted, although you might choose to come back, as does the Dalai Lama.
Dear Jack, perfectly and very generously said. Skip has been living his life to the full, and seeking to learn all that he can from each experience. Would that we all would take the business of life as such a beautiful gift, and really make it our own!
Dear Skip, thank you so much for sharing so much! You have written what amounts to a whole guest blog post here, and a wonderful one. I hope everyone will read it!!
I am so inspired by your work! Thank you for sharing .
Dear Marsha, thank you! Again, it is really my guide, Thomas, who is inspiring you, as he daily inspires me; but he is happy to let me share in his credit 😉
Your writing is a most beautiful gift. Your words and wisdom and heart have resonated from the first day I found you. Thank you.
Dear Natalie, I am so glad that Thomas and I can be of help to you! Please of course let us know if you ever have questions or suggestions. We have become one great family of seekers!
The truth of what you say really shines out. At 10 I decided the vicar had it completely wrong, God was about Love in my experience, not the Wrathful God he seemed to know.
I saw a picture of a cross but it was turned Way sign pointing us in the right direction. The carol Once in St.Davids City, said Jesus was our childhood pattern.
I realised it was just a pattern but I had to use it to make my life.
I studied theology, as a young Mother I tried the Church again. Then I was shown a Gold plate studded with sapphires normally locked away. I could only see hungry people. I then found Quakerism.
I had an spiritual experience at ten by a beloved grandparent who died when I was four. It is as fresh today as then.
Islam honours Mary and Jesus in the Koran, sometimes it seems God keeps sending messengers but we ignore the core message. In the Mystical Heart we are indeed One. I see the differents faiths as if different languages trying to express a truth of God.
Perhaps there are more followers of Christ, as Richard Rohr says the Universal Christ outside the establishment than within. Thank you Roberta
Dear Maureen, so much that you say resonates with me. I also am a fan of Father Rohr’s! He is trying to find the truth within Catholic Christianity, and succeeding in many small bits of ways: I admire his journey, and I find the fruits of it to be helpful.
You say you see the different faiths as if they are different languages trying to express the one true God. That is so beautifully and so truthfully said! We are preparing now to write next weekend’s post, and Thomas is giving me insights earlier than I usually get them. That sentence of yours is something that he has already told me he wants us to emphasize, and your saying it is the second independent confirmation of that truth that he has sent to me.
Aren’t we having FUN?!!
Dearest Roberta,
I’ve been wanting to clarify something for a time now my dear. I’ve had a strange week; trapped inside largely, working at Covid safe distance, and under the heavy relentless onslaught of a large coastal rainstorm in the very pit of winter. So I’m a bit stir-crazy and I’ll risk an unusual comment here.
I’ve sometimes wondered if some of our blog family thinks of me as a ‘yes man’ should they think of me at all… I seem to be in ongoing agreement with you, dear Roberta, and tend to find myself augmenting this unique blog. However, the truth is that normally I challenge ideas, both directly and by logical argument, finding reason to do so on many occasions. In short I’m no ‘yes man.’ I’m normally quite argumentative rather than augmentative.
Yet your blog seems to strike chords of resonance and align with what I feel is true and right. I first came to it with an almost familiar feeling. A recognition, I think. So again this week, I have got to say that adhering to the words of Jesus (that jump straight out of the NT as if He is speaking to us directly) is the path I wish to follow. It just makes sense to actually do what he teaches – without all the palaver of religion or clutter of extraneous religiosity!
And whether I sound like a ‘yes man’ or not, I love the idea of a fellowship of equals. No hierarchy, no priesthood and no cliques; rather an inclusive, relaxed community like an extended family where people care deeply about each other, is something I’ve long wished for.
The bath water must be flushed and the precious Baby needs to be wrapped in fresh towels of love, placed carefully in a simple cot and treasured by all His family who sit around Him. And it seems I’m alive at this time to see it.
🙏🏼❣️👶
Oh my dear Efrem, you bring so very much to each of these posts! This is what has astonished me most, I think: the fact that so many of us seem to be finding these chords of resonance now (what a lovely turn of phrase!). I find it in lots of emails, too, this sense of people I have never met or heard from before who feel as if they have been moving and striving for their whole lives toward something that they now can glimpse, and they are excited. I am excited with them and for them, because I am coming to know – as they do not, as yet – that there is a vast army of individuals coming together now, all of them ready to sing with a single voice!
Our greatest risk in beginning what Thomas tells me we are being asked to begin now is that no matter how pure our intentions might be, just as pure have been the intentions of many others, going back to Saint Paul, Martin Luther, and the Filmores who gave birth to the Unity Movement: all of them were devoted to the teachings of Jesus and were trying to serve the Truth. And yet in every case – these three, and so many others! – their successors soon made the founders’ insights the point, rather than the Lord. Whatever they had started became a movement about Paul, or Martin Luther, or the Filmores, and their “take” on Jesus. This whole great effort will rapidly become just one more closed belief-system and useless to the Lord unless we can somehow ensure that He will remain the whole center!
Dear Efrem, my sudden horror now is that I ever might be remembered at all. That hadn’t occurred to me as a worry, but I’m sure the Filmores didn’t ever want Unity to be built around them, either! Paul was trying to build something beautiful for Jesus: that is obvious in everything he ever said. But what he got was an entire religion built around his own first-century take on the Lord’s teachings, one in which he is treated as very important, with his words as important as the Lord’s words. His work soon all but obliterated Jesus, Who was supposed to have been the whole point of it! How he must hate to see that! Whatever we do in answering the Lord’s call, whatever we build must be about the eternally living Lord, with all the rest of us glad to fall away once it is well begun so each new generation can freshly meet in whatever we have built that eternal Jesus standing alone, magnificent in His single perfection, and speaking His Own words afresh to each new generation, forevermore. We must be glad to be only the forgotten builders of the vehicle in which the Lord can ride!
Dear Roberta. To keep it brief, I want to second what Efrem says above regarding feeling those “chords of resonance,” and also to say that I’m very happy that it will still be called The Way. I know it is just a name, but it feels like such a direct link to those first witnesses and inheritors of the teachings of Jesus, like a passing of a torch across 2000 years. What a long hard slog it has been. Hopefully this time things will work out better for “The Way.” 🙂
Dear Scott, and I second (third?) your seconding of what Efrem says above! His phrase, “chords of resonance,” is wonderful, and it perfectly describes the way this feels to us all. As you say, this feels like picking up the torch that Jesus passed to posterity at the moment of His Resurrection and giving Him for the first time a vehicle that He can trust to be forevermore His living witness in each new generation. As I said to Efrem, we never can forget that everyone who ever has tried to “fix” Christianity, going back to Paul, has wanted to do it for Jesus and tried to make Him the point; but since each new innovator was a person of his time, they only succeeded in tweaking the existing religion, rather than altogether restoring the Lord’s Words. But we can see the risks more clearly now, and we won’t make the mistake of taking as holy the word of anyone who spoke after the Lord’s Resurrection. All we can do is to try our best!
Roberta. I have been mulling these same questions over the last few weeks about trying to “fix” Christianity. Like Monday morning quarterbacks we can easily look back and see a lot that we don’t want to repeat. It becomes not this, not this, not this, not this …. but what is left that we WOULD do? If the evisceration is too comprehensive, there’s nothing left for people to grab onto, to come together and actually do together. Have a little chat session? I can’t quite wrap my head around it, but that’s for the folks at the higher pay grade. I look forward to seeing what Thomas and his colleagues on the other side may suggest in the coming weeks.
Dear Scott, this really is the essential core question. How do we go back to Jesus now, remove seventeen hundred years of Christian accretions and Roman notions, all the passing religious fads of nearly two thousand years, and get back to the world as it was at the Lord’s Resurrection? And even if we could do that, would we have anything left? Would it be what Jesus wants us to do?
As you will see next week, we really can’t do that. But what we can do is to start afresh two thousand years ago and at the Lord’s direction. What He set out to do in a primitive world with little in the way of communication options might have been almost impossible to do without a lot of divine intervention. But it is easily possible now! Stay tuned….
About a month ago with all the uncertainty and unrest going on in the world and especially our country, I remembered the prayer of Saint Francis and how much it meant to me growing up Catholic. So I started to say it every day. Then, a couple weeks ago I flew home from Colorado to Virginia to be with my mom to help her deal with house stuff after my dad’s passing in April. My mom had already packed up some clothes to donate and when I went to load them into the car I noticed there was a shirt that was lying outside the bags. I picked it up and before I put it into the bag I looked at it. It was a shirt that no longer fit my mom and it had the prayer of Saint Francis written on it. I truly feel like this was an affirmation from God (and my dad) to keep up the good work!
Oh dear Maura, what a lovely story! Thank you for sharing it! Your dad for certain is smiling now, since he managed to give you such a beautiful gift. Perhaps you might even have that shirt framed, to preserve it and so every time you look at it you will again feel that wonderful spiritual connection?