Tragedy/Comedy

The "news" is rarely literal or actual. I have come to see it mostly as a play presented to us to keep us busy and often upset. I see it as a control and power thing. I see it as it was predicted in "1984" and "Brave New World."

Examples:

• Someone comes out of a meeting and says inflammatory things about what was said. Other people who were in the same meeting say they did not hear that. The press accuses those who say they did not hear the ugliness as being liars. The press goes into a frenzy over a possible comment but does not even notice the inflammatory speech of people on "their side."
• The President's doctor gives a detailed account of his physical and mental exam and answers questions for an hour. The press refuses to believe it and begins asking ridiculous questions and making up problems that don't exist - Are you keeping back some information? How can he be healthy and eat cheeseburgers? Are you sure he is mentally fit? Does he have addiction problems? Does he wear dentures? etc etc etc.
• We keep changing enemies - as in "stop think." We are to accept yesterday's enemies as friends and yesterday's friends as enemies. We are to try to improve relations with country X, but working on that makes one a traitor.
• We keep changing the most disastrous things - in the 60's global cooling, in the 90's global warming, in the new millennium climate change. Each time some subset of scientists are brought forth to "prove" the new disastrous situation. So when planetary experts say the climate shifts on earth fairly regularly with 120 years of cooling and 200+ of warming, they are not heard, as fact is not what counts. We people of earth must be kept off balance in order to control us and in order to keep those in power in power.

Well, I could go on for pages, but I just wanted to set the situation I want to discuss.

The majority of people seem to be quite naive and fairly easy to manipulate.

So while so many of us are kept busy being upset about what is "happening" or "not happening," or what is said to be "happening" or not "happening," we are not busy with our spiritual life. So instead of meditation, contemplation, spiritual study and conversation, there is a wave of drug addiction, alcoholism, violence, etc. -- or the opposite of spiritual awakening, People are often trapped in an illusion.

I ponder how we can get a wave of spiritual awakening going and extricate us from the imaginary comedy/tragedy presented to us not as a political play but as fact. The restless people trapped in the cycle of "news" really in the depth of their being want something more meaningful and real.

I think people actually yearn to know God. Therein lies my challenge, and hopefully yours, how can we move more people to not only know about God but to actually Know God? To Know God changes everything. How can we reignite the age-old understanding that all and everyone are sacred?  

Many ideas flow in mind. Let us pray together.

Oh, wondrous God, I know that I live all of my life in Your Presence, for You are always with me. I seek Your Guidance so that I may more fully Know You, and I ask for inspiration to find ways to bring a spiritual awakening to the people of earth. I listen....

Love - Hate

Jesus rests his case for the ultimate significance of life on the love ethic. Love is the intelligent, kindly but stern expresssion of kinship of one individual for another having as its purpose the maintenance and furtherance of life at its highest level... If we accept the basic proposition that life is one, arising out of a common center - God, all expressions of love are acts of God. Hate, then, becomes a form of annihilation of self and others, in short - suicide.  ---- Howard Thurman

This quote is so apropos to today at so many levels. We see violent extremists wanting to annihilate all they call "other," not realizing that they are actually committing spiritual suicide. We see political hatred at an all-time high. It is fascinating and terrifying watching people jump off such a cliff and going farther and farther from spiritual awakening and understanding.

Monday I had an experience of a friend who waxes loving and suddenly hateful. Periodically, she gets set off by some seemingly simple and neutral thing. I watch the dynamic in her microcosm and see the dynamic of the macrocosm. I know that the shift to love and to stay at love is an internal thing that must be made inside the heart and soul. I wonder, however, if there is a tipping point that could start the tumbling out of hate that could be applied from the outside - just to get the process of awakening to Jesus' radical love ethic started. And, I wonder if there is such a point that could apply to the macrocosm - to groups that hate. Let's consider this.

Perhaps most importantly, you and I can consciously practise Jesus' love ethic and become radical lovers of life.

Flu

Ever since the day after Christmas, we have been very ill with the flu. Hope to be posting again in a few days.

Health is an incredible blessing.

Early Gnostics

I've been reading some of the early Gnostic Gospels. One I'd never read before is "The Greatest Human Evil Is Forgetfulness of God." Quite a title isn't it?

Here is a quote from it:

Elevate yourself by mental power. Maybe not all of you can do that, but some of you can!

For the degeneration that flows from forgetfulness is drowning the earth, infecting soul and body, veiling the soul like a cloak and stopping you from abiding in the heart. 

So don't be swept away by this mad flood!

Find the way into your heart! Look for a good teacher to show you the path to the gates of remembrance, where there's a light, radiant and bright, free from darkness. 

This was written in a time of Roman excess, yet what I read seems almost as if it were written for this very time where you and I live. Spirituality is not the prime goal of most people. It seems that a version of hedonism is the main goal - do what you want- eat, drink, drug yourself, ignore meditation and prayer, ignore your heart, destroy those you define as "other."

To stop the drowning of our earth with darkness, we simply must turn to spirituality, to an open heart, to compassion, to focus on kindness. It can only begin one person at a time. You and I can turn away from the darkness and to the Light, even more than we have before, and shine that Light so others are drawn out of the darkness to It.

Powerful?

I've been thinking about how powerful we are in potential and how we often meter that power down, often because of wounding.

For me, another name for my wounder is "teacher." I have had many, many, many wounds in my life, beginning with birth. It took me awhile to forgive and then finally move to gratitude for what I had learned from each and every teacher - and perhaps what they learned from me. I came to believe that wounding cracks the shell of ego, and ego has to go in order to truly awaken and grow spiritually.

What people often do is to ignore the teaching and go straight into self-pity or maybe some kind of revenge. In that process, we are victim, and we name ourselves things such as no good, unlovable, worthless, less than, etc. All of these shut down potential in us, not in the wounder. We wander around life being less than we can be, maybe in some perverse ploy to show how badly we are hurt and how wrong and bad our wounder is. But they then "win" and we are the loser for we bury our potential in a pile of sorrow, tears, recrimination, fear, etc.

It seems to me we begin to unlock our potential by changing about how we speak to ourselves about the events in our lives - for example, rename enemy to teacher, or challenge to rise above, or opportunity to exercise our compassion, or...

Then, I suggest we do some focused forgiveness practices such as in my book, The Key - Forgiveness and Beyond. I also think journalling daily is incredibly helpful. We need to examine ourselves in order to set ourselves free. This is really essential in order to release our potential. We need to cease our addiction to our own pain and judgments and open to the freedom of infinite possibilities that are already within us.

I'm going to write more later about the vast potential in each of us. Let us begin our journey to express more by practising the suggestions in this writing.

Infinite One, I know my life is lived out in Your Presence. Lead me to forgive and release and open in ways needed for me to step into more of the possibilities that You have placed in me. Guide my thoughts, words and deeds to be more and more in harmony with You. I seek to be the fully free person You created and call me to be. Open my heart. Open my eyes. Open my mind. Open all of me to Your Great Good.

Mechthild of Magdeburg

Mechthild is one of the historical women that I have studied and has made a difference in my spiritual journey. She lived 1207 to 1282, not the typical historical time for enlightened, educated women to flourish, but she did anyway.

In preparing for a brief spiritual experience for our Methodist Women's meeting, I decided to introduce Mechthild. I have already introduced Hildegard. I have printed out 20 quotes from Mechthild and will roll them up and tie with ribbon. Women will pick one which I will request be a spiritual practice for 2018. Two of the quotes I'm going to share are:

Prayer is naught else but a yearning of soul...it draws down the great God into the little heart; it drives the hungry soul up to the plenitude of God; it brings together these two lovers, God and the soul, in a wondrous place where they speak much of love.

The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things. 

I find listening to those who "knew" leads to encouraging my "knowing" and often opens me to new byways of awakening, just the thing my soul needs at any given moment in my journey.

Mechtild's statement about prayer leads me to understand a bit more about the dynamics of prayer going on within me as I pray. Her description is lovely and powerful at the same time. My little heart opens to be filled with the infinity of God and has been ever so hungry for God. The union is love. From that union, I am led to understand that God is everywhere, in everyone. I breathe in God and am at peace.

2nd Century Thoughts on Satan

The 2nd century Greek philosopher, Celsus, was vehemently opposed to Christianity. So I wondered what bothered him so much.

According to Elaine Pagels this is one of his arguments:

What makes the Christians' message dangerous, Celsus writes, is not that they believe in one God, but that they deviate from monotheism by their "blasphemous" belief in the devil. For all the "impious errors" the Christians commit, Celsus says, they show their greatest ignorance in "making up a being opposed to God, and calling him 'devil' or, in the Hebrew language, 'Satan.' All such ideas, Celsus declares, are nothing but human inventions, sacrilegious even to repeat: "it is blasphemy... to say that the greatest God... has an adversary who constrains his capacity to do good." Celsus is outraged that the Christians, who claim to worship one God, "impiously divide the kingdom of God creating rebellion in it, as if there were opposing factions within the divine, including one that is hostile to God!

Celsus accuses Christians of "inventing a rebellion" (meaning sedition) in heaven to justify rebellion here on earth.

He has other objections too, but today I thought I'd put this one up to consider.

As it turns out, quite a few people thought (and still think) about this division and the ludicrous notion that God has an antagonistic also divine being fighting him, perhaps an equal. If God created all, and God is all good, then how can this be accurate? It does not make sense. In the creation stories, God saw that all was "good."

I invite us to think about this. It has been a very long time since I believed in satan. I arrived at that conclusion on my own. And, I find Celsus' argument very interesting.