The Light in the Woods

5/30/08 Spiritual Presentations         Last night I watched TV and when surfing along I stopped a while at the Catholic channel. There was some sort of ritual going on involving a holy book that a priest was reciting from in Latin. The way they treated this book, it was more than reverence – it looked like each time it changed hands in the course of the service, someone would hold their hands under it in case the book was dropped. It looked so pagan to me, even though I know that was no one’s intent at all. Then they escorted this book over to two obviously higher-ups, bishops maybe? They were sitting there enthroned in their fine vestments and tall hats. The rest of the priests drew near to them, genuflecting, holding out this ornate book. It looked like human-veneration to me, although I know that wasn’t the intent either.

I used to attend Catholic services all the time and enjoyed this kind of ritual. What I felt last night was a mixture of abhorrence and the realization that for me, the book and human adoration was terribly wrong. These people were worshiping God, and here I was, utterly repulsed by the way they were doing it. Surely it must be me that’s deceived; not them. And yet it persisted in my spirit, a peace in knowing I was OK in spite of my doubts; that what God wants for me is different from what I was seeing, but I didn’t need to worry about what anyone else was doing. There was a definite cognizance of God showing me by contrasts that it was His will to put me on a different path. Where I should have been afraid for my non-conformity, I was comforted interiorly. Nothing about this could have come from my own feelings – I am being led and I have no fear that my guide may be evil, because I wish nothing bad on the participants in the ritual I saw. What they were doing was good for them and their service to God. But it is not good for me and so I distance myself without being conscious of it. This has to be the work of God in me.

5/29/08 Insights from Prayer           I know better than to pray to be pain-free; I understand that if God gives me pain it’s for reasons of His own, designed for my own good. Just because I don’t see the good doesn’t make my pain unfair; no decision of God’s is unfair. But I do pray for the relationship with God that makes physical pain of little regard. When I walk in holiness I walk in a world where all my thoughts are on God; there are none left over for registering pain. This is the state I pray for – to love God so much that nothing else matters but that I’m doing His will. If it’s His will for me to endure pain, then my joy is to do that as perfectly as possible. I don’t always succeed, and that is when the pain closes in. But this very thing is the impetus for me to go to God once again to ask for focus on His love. As a child, when something went wrong I was taught to “offer it up to God”. I believed in a balance-scale life of reward and punishment then. Now, the phrase has a whole new meaning. So much of our lives is an invitation to experience God, and often it’s through something we perceive as negative in us. How short-lived is our anxiety when we see it as an invitation to communicate with God. The more we do this the more automatic it becomes, and the less we have to think of ourselves and our imperfect world.

5/28/08 Spiritual Presentations                   Yesterday a bird hit a window and I held it in my hands, thinking to comfort it while it died. Afterwards I buried it, thinking that once in the ground it would be safely where it should be. Today I was watching other birds and it came to me that I don’t know anything about what’s good for birds. Maybe when I held this one in my hand I was stressing it out unduly at a time when it was already having enough trouble. And maybe burying it was an injustice because in death it was meant to feed other animals. I would say on both counts these things were more probable than not. I didn’t think to put myself in the bird’s place when I was deciding what to do for it – I was using the human viewpoint, which is the point of view I’m most familiar with and which, of course, seems right. But is the human perspective infallibly relevant when dealing with other creatures? Do we do more harm than good when we force our “help” onto nature? Are we ourselves not a planned part of the natural world, better subjected to a higher power just as all created things are? Small things such as this incident tend to remind me that God is in control and therefore all is well, even if in the human perspective it doesn’t seem that way. I for one am grateful for that because only God is capable for the job of co-ordinating creation.

5/26/08 Insights from Prayer          Even a badly-done prayer is a prayer. Do you want to participate in God’s love? Then you are a prayer in and of itself. For what do we have to give God but the one thing He will not control Himself — our free will? God is as pleased by our holy desire as if we could become perfect just by willing it. Even our limitations are God-given; how dare we claim power over them as necessities for good devotion? Lay your spirit before God, that is what you have to do. Watch in awe as He empties it of the corruptible things of the world and fills it with His everlasting light. You will become perfect in God’s time, so leave it all in His hands. Delight now in your fresh, God-filled spirit, and look forward to living within its perfection in that other world. Rejoice to do what God desires for you, and put everything other than that out of your thoughts. With your will in union with God’s, you don’t need to fear or to question the rightness of your path even if others do.

5/26/08 Inspirations         All scripture has had to be interpreted since the very beginning of scripture. It has begun as word of mouth and only eventually been written down – don’t you think those who started to put these truths down into words succumbed to the very human temptation to personally interpret them to make them as clear as possible? And we know very well from personal experience how distorted something becomes after having been passed along by many people who are trying to faithfully repeat what they heard. And yet we take a phrase out of the Bible and call it the word of God and damn to hell anyone who dares question it. So you have churchfuls of people dancing around with snakes and babbling nonsensical sounds – their fervor for a visible and audible rendition of their adoration of God is so human, it’s embarrassingly outrageous.

I’m not saying what we claim as the word of God should not be interpreted. What I’m saying is that it should not be limited, and that anytime we introduce a human element as the prerogative of God, we ought to be careful that it is kept to the individual who received that insight and not broadcast as a requirement of the general populace. Inspirations between God and man are just that – personal and individual. One only has to look around at the incalculable combinations of human attributes possible to realize that a relationship between God and a single person doesn’t translate well into global mandate.

And yet that’s just what we are subject to when we let others interpret our relationship with God for us, package it up neatly to be served to everyone that can be found, and may the religion who has the most, the loudest, the most intrusive, or the best brainwashing be declared the “winner”. Is this how God wants us to adore Him? No, He wants us to go to our cell, close the door, and pray to Him in silence. We know this because we know all human groupings are dictated by human goals, whereas a right-relationship with God is dictated by God’s will and our abandonment to it; containing knowledge that can come from God only and personally absorbed without human intervention.

Once you leave behind the snake-kissing, ancestor-worshiping, Bible-thumping, and suicide-bombing, you can listen and hear the only entity that has your own good in mind; you find the real interpretation of God is in what He personally tells you. The first step in this is to close your ears to the clamoring of those who have been telling you it’s not possible to have a relationship with the Creator. It’s possible if that is His will; all you have to do is accept His will over and above yours or anybody else’s. Allow only God into your spirit, and your spirit will be free from deceit.

5/21/08 Reflections                We were noticing this morning how the female birds around here are drab-colored so they don’t stand out when on their nests, while the males are bright-colored to show off their quality, impressing the females with their good genes to pass along. I thought that if birds had human attributes they’d be strutting around in their fine plumage, striving to make themselves even finer-looking than God made them. We seem to do a lot of “improving on God” in today’s society – being awed by our accomplishments and forgetful of the Giver of Life. We have made the humble drabness, so necessary in God’s mind for our task, into something to be abhorred and changed. In our competition to override God’s provision, we’ve become negative towards each other and careless in the things that really matter. No wonder there’s a tendency to want to hide from the world by those who understand God’s creation clearly. We are so obviously headed for a fall with our self-congratulation and manipulation of God’s gifts. Improvement is a good thing – unlike the birds we are not meant to be content with mere survival. But the goodness we strive for needs to be the abundance God envisions for us, not the pandering to self-interest above all else that is the hallmark of our society.

5/18/08 Inspirations                Lord, it’s been a long time since I worried about whether the words I write derive from my own intellect instead of through Your instruction. By Your grace I now know that there is no distinction between my reasoning and Your insights – they are one and the same thing because of my union with You. How could I have missed this? Was I just not ready then for the realization? Did I first have to lose my fear of being special; my distress at being better than someone else? Whatever it was, I will practice humility because I know I have this gift only through Your blessing. There are many ways I can say “Thank You” — please help me find the best ways.

5/18/08 Insights from Study                Trinity Sunday – does no one else have the same comfort in their understanding of the Trinity? To me, it’s all God, who just “is”. If not for having to cater to us on Earth – because of our ignorance and our pride derived from the ignorance of our ignorance – God could just be God. But in having to deal with us God has to use our categories or else we won’t understand.

Yet for me, having already been given the grace to understand, I am greatly bothered by both the distinction and the need for distinction.

Especially in Jewish history on into the time of Jesus, society was strictly patriarchal and the father/son relationship was very well-understood. This was helpful in explaining Jesus’ mission, because by calling God His Father, He was assured that the people would understand that close relationship, which is an allegory for our own relationship with God. But to me the Father/son designation, at least the way human beings use it to describe the life of Jesus, makes too much of the differentiation between God and Jesus, muddying the total “Godness” of the Trinity.

This tendency to humanize everything is why the Bible for me is inspirational; not authoritative. It is why we can expect to take away different interpretations of its contents and still maintain right from wrong in our hearts. Because God made our perceptions various in type and in degree, it’s up to His inspirational grace to interpret it for us when we welcome Him.

I understand the doctrine of Jesus being all-God and all-man at the same time, but it bothers me that we put too much emphasis on His humanity in order to make the point that we too can have a relationship with God our Father. That’s all well and good but in a trinitarian tradition it drags in a certain humanization of God as well. It confuses the issue of what God does and doesn’t do into an issue of what God can and can’t do.

I see Jesus and the Holy Spirit as manifestations of God – not entities as such, but extensions of Him given to His people so that we can be touched by God without being overwhelmed by his inherent majesty.

The problem is, there are Bible purists that claim that because of the terminology the Bible authors used, God is committed to damning to Hell anyone who doesn’t worship Jesus. They are adamant that Jesus is God, but deny salvation to anyone who worships God without acknowledging Jesus. That can’t be right. We know instinctively that God doesn’t damn good and moral atheists, let alone good and moral God-worshipers who don’t know Jesus. And because we know this, we also know the Bible is either flawed or misinterpreted; open to superior interpretation by grace. That’s why it’s extremely harmful to God’s cause for fundamentalists to beat us over the head with their Bibles. The more they do this, the more disservice they do, because everyone knows better through their own experiences. The worst is those who claim the Bible is the only word of God – who gave them the authority to determine that? To me, they are the blasphemers, because God has seen to it that millions upon millions of us have heard from Him personally in our worship.

I don’t say this in order to debate – there’s no debate. I put this down here to comfort the quiet majority who feels outnumbered by the screeching few.

5/16/08 Insights from Study             Here’s an entry I wrote on January 22, 2007 and never posted because it was written for the prison ministry classes I was working on. It seems to me that at the time I was sorting out how inconceivable Hell was, and how Purgatory fits better with what I know by insight. I just read it over and realize that it sounds right and I should have published it as a blog entry.

“The things we do here on Earth are not material to gaining salvation, but are evidence of our having received and accepted salvation as what is important enough to occupy us fully. In this we have a choice within God’s master plan. But in the end the plan will be fulfilled – all humans from all times will be purified from sin completely so they may enter the eternal kingdom of God’s full presence. We can choose to approach this perfection in this life by abandoning our will to God; living and giving according to His desires so that, when the death of our bodies releases us from the sinful confines of Earth, we may easily and immediately pass into eternal life with God.

But when we experience physical death our choice, our free will, is gone forever, and if we haven’t already purified ourselves on Earth, God purifies us in Purgatory in the measure needed according to our Earthly sins, to gain the requisite perfection demanded in order to warrant His full presence. For no sin, and no soul who still bears sin, will enter. God gives us a chance here on Earth to accept His ways as our own, and though we can’t reach perfection before death, the very fact that our desires can match God’s brings us closer to purification, and our actions reflect that. It’s the glow of the taste of God’s presence in our spirits that goes the furthest towards teaching others to want to experience what we are experiencing – this is one way to bring others onto the path to perfection and thereby do good on Earth.

Never be ashamed of this glow; always recognize the jealousy of those who haven’t made the right choice. They’ll try to bring you down to their level and, failing that, will ridicule your righteousness. The best defense is to maintain that righteousness with humility and selflessness, and keep the healing lines of communication with God open.”

5/14/08 Insights from Study                  Devotional Mysticism, done right and globally, would be an efficient force for unity. As an individual practice, it focuses on individual spirituality. Far from being divisive because its form would be unique to each individual, it would be unifying because it demonstrates that God is saying the same thing to each and every one of us if we stop grouping ourselves long enough to recognize His desires. Allowing ourselves to be distracted and split apart by the human need to belong to a category, couldn’t we better admit that God loves us as individuals and longs to have a personal relationship with us? If we could all open our spirits to God He would gladly fill them with the all-encompassing love He feels for us. When love of God reflects outward from us, religious affiliation is spotlighted as the silly insignificance it really is.