The Light in the Woods

3/8/10 Insights from Study              I love the Bible parables that remind us that when we have everything there is to have, we don’t need to strive or begrudge. And we do have everything we need, plus much more, when we embrace the loving presence of God in our lives. All it takes to believe in our blessings is to be willing to recognize that it’s only faulty perception blinding us to what we have been provided.

We are stubborn though; it’s hard to believe that what our senses tell us is true is true only in a dream; not in Reality itself. The world seems so concrete to us – it must be real. But the real world is beyond Earth, beyond senses, beyond human intelligence and perception. No wonder it’s hard to believe.

But it’s to our great advantage to believe, because with belief comes intuitive perception whereby we appreciate God’s desire for us to have the best of everything. Only then can we be content; to aspire to spiritual peace. Most of us wait until we die, and so waste our time here on things that don’t matter in Reality. Mystics die to the world on purpose, recognizing the love of God we all receive; recognizing it in such a way as to experience a little bit of heaven here and now without the wait.

In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the father tried to explain to the good brother that all the family has belongs to the good brother anyway; the bad brother can’t take away anything of value and so is not to be hated out of jealousy.

In the parable of the Vineyard Workers, the owner tried to explain that wages are wages; having once agreed to what will be accepted as payment, there is no need for any worker to begrudge what another one gets.

So often we think of life as a race — all this does is make sure we push others out of our way. So often we expect fairness out of all of life’s workings – God does not countenance fairness in His dealings with us because we cannot understand and cannot therefore judge His plan. Life is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Life isn’t a popularity contest or a system of rewards we can count on. Life doesn’t run smoothly on greed — not the greed of the “haves” and not the greed of the “have-nots” for what the “haves” have. A smooth life consists in something much greater than what we traditionally hold dear. When we strive for what will really satisfy us, we find that we look to accept the love of God that reaches out to us constantly. In this endeavor, nothing aspired to on the lower plane can approach, and the favors of the Holy Spirit we wouldn’t think of trading away.

If we take our individuality seriously and place our emphasis on a personal relationship with God, we are more apt to accept His work done in His way. There are so many little things that will not bother us in the least when we dedicate all we have to God’s plan for us. And we have a better relationship with others when we are not always trying to outdistance them on the path to fully appreciating God’s love.

12/24/09 Inspirations              When I was a child I believed in hell. You went there when you died unbaptized or in mortal sin; there was no hope – there you stayed for eternity. If you were baptized but in lesser-than-mortal sin when you died, you went to purgatory. This was a place of suffering where you paid for your sins, but also a place of hope because when you were purified you went to heaven. Your friends and family and even total strangers could help you get out of there and into heaven by praying a certain way, and if during life you did this and that you could build up indulgences that would be redeemed against your time in purgatory – a sort of time off for good behavior. Limbo was a kind of purgatory where unbaptized babies who knew nothing of sin were stored. Heaven was for the baptized who hadn’t committed any sins since the last time they ate a wafer blessed by a priest.

Later on, when I began to analyze my beliefs, little of this seemed plausible so in my feeling of having been duped, I went as far as I could the other way. I stopped believing in most everything. I still believed in God, but I had no relationship with Him because He was tyrannical and distant and the less I had to do with Him the safer I was. I didn’t have much trouble being good – for the most part I was a natural goody two-shoes who wanted to be left alone. I treated my neighbor as I wanted to be treated myself — I left him alone.

Then a little over five years ago God took me in hand; He showed me wondrous things and told me about Himself. I found out He was a loving God who was familiar with every aspect of me, because He lived in me and all around me. I found out how to recognize Him in His works. I learned that heaven is all there is and we’ve all been there all along – our perception has been so clouded we don’t experience things as the really are. There isn’t one thing I can do to gain or lose heaven – it is what it is and will not change. It is very, very good because it is what God made, and God wants only good for us.

Life on Earth is an exile – not from heaven but from our proper experience of heaven. For God’s good reasons we can only experience unreality here. It’s a dream, sometimes better described as a nightmare of our own making. We are causing our own thoughts to be fogged up. Somehow through our own free will we made our own delusion, and only direct knowledge and grace from God can be trusted. I haven’t been shown how this exile happened, except that it must have originated from God’s goodness. Life on Earth is in God’s master plan and not to be feared because God’s master plan only leads to reality, and God’s reality is wonderful.

So God’s spirit infused in me not only told me things outright, but showed me how to interpret other things with a view geared towards His will and the reality He made for us to live in. For instance – do my inspired thoughts make the Bible a pack of lies? No, God inspired others long ago just as He inspires us today. There is much to be gleaned of the inspirations found in the Bible, but it has to be ferreted out by means of my own personal inspiration from God in order to find in it what is meant to be found. We can look at our own times to see how truth gets battered beyond recognition – the government, the media, the education and justice systems are always rewriting history to fit their own agendas and spinning statistics to fit their own theories. The Bible is a holy resource that has been handled by human beings to conform to human needs, just as all inspirational literature is. It is not purely God’s original word – for that one has to look to one’s own spirit, where God’s truth is written. And why wouldn’t it be this way? God loves us and wants to deal with us directly.

It was in the midst of scripture-abuse that God came down as Jesus. He set the record straight on what we were doing that was not conformable to God’s wishes. He demonstrated the joy of having a right-relationship with God by abandoning our will in favor of matching His. Jesus taught us how to live in prayer; to be prayer itself in our very words and deeds. He showed that the harshness of humanity seems very real to us the way we see it, but we will be resurrected from this bad dream and return our perception to the reality of heaven. He made an example for us by His very life – affirming that God’s spirit is here with us; that His inspiration is the only truth we have, and that only God’s knowledge and grace can be relied upon. If we need to know more, we can always come to God to ask.

Jesus proved that though we tend to focus on the wrong thing in this foreign environment, the right thing is always available to everyone and is as close as our own spirits, which God fills with Himself out of love for us. God wants us to break through the heavy curtain that separates us from Him and that keeps us from realizing the pure joy of our existence. His light does come through, encouraging us to take advantage of the kind of relationship Jesus identified for us, but we need to put forth the effort by letting God prepare our spirits.

We can know a bit of our joy which is hidden, and bask right here and now in the kind of glory that is ours in full after our own resurrection into reality. We were made for this and all God asks is to be asked to reveal it. Even with a right-relationship with God and direct communication with His word, we are still only works in progress and far from an all-encompassing insight into truth while we are in this world. But if we are sincere, obedient, and humble we can be Christ-like. When you think of the meaning of Christmas, you understand how it must satisfy God greatly when we are willing to be Christlike despite the nature of the world around us.

12/9/09 Insights from Study         I think my favorite image in the Bible comes from Psalm 137. Picture the miserable Jews, exiled in Babylon and longing in melancholy for home. Around them are the natives of Babylon, their conquerors, sneering and telling the Jews to sing songs of their homeland.

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remember Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

How graphically this sorrow and longing for home under extreme adversity reminds us of our dissatisfaction with the way we seem to be here in this life, longing for the life we once had. Our world is Babylon, our exile this life on Earth. We can no longer sing in joy of remembrance, because we long too sadly for Zion – Reality, the perfection of life with God. We have the advantage, though — we have been promised our sure return. And maybe, if we take down those harps of prayer again and sing well enough, the sneering may stop and our captors will see the light of our joy and want it for their own.

6/21/09 Insights from Prayer           How do I worship God? I worship Him when I praise Him; that is all He needs to channel His grace to me. How do I praise Him?

I praise Him when I count to ten before speaking out in anger. I praise Him when I defend someone who is the victim of gossip. He must smile when I put a dollar in a beggar’s cup, look longingly at His rainbow, swim in the ocean and think of His mightiness, buy a gift, lie in bed sick and pray for recovery, read a book to a child, plant grass seed. All these things are praise to God if I am willing to live in His presence by doing His will.

There’s something in the Bible that makes me cringe every time I read of it. In Revelation there are these 24 elders, and when something momentous happens the 24 elders immediately fall down before the throne and worship. Right or wrong, whatever it is in the makeup of western society, when we see people fall down in worship, we instantly think “brainwashed, cultists with no independent thoughts.” But because it’s in the Bible, our churches need to ritualize worship some way similar without making the general populace feel uncomfortable.

No wonder secularism is taking over the West. No matter how we spin it, worship of God is linked in our minds with human degradation. Maybe we’ve watched too many Hollywood renditions of third-world ritualism – worship by ritual begins to seem faintly backward. We don’t like to think of ourselves as inferior beings with sinful natures. To heighten our sense of atonement, churches emphasize our sinful nature, but they stop short of making us fall prostrate before a throne. We won’t do it – it seems phony. Before too long it may all seem phony – bowing our heads, folding our hands in prayer, being on our knees after the age of eight, carrying around a Bible, discussing our religious thoughts, uttering God’s name outside of profanity, attending church, going to confession.

I’m not making a judgment call — if you are comfortable doing these things you have found your path. I’m merely stating that spiritual persons that don’tfeel comfortable doing these things are no less spiritual for that. They in fact have an advantage because the privateness of their worship underscores the individual nature of a right-relationship with God; one that does not need to be showcased and therefore is open to genuineness. Behind the closed door of your spirit you are free to be as humble and obedient as you feel.

I wouldn’t argue with the objection that a true believer ought to be willing to go outside of their comfort zone if required. I’m just skeptical of how often God requires this and to what extent does it go on before it becomes ego-driven. I do not and never will, unless told to directly by God, believe that evangelizing others into Christianity is a requirement for entry into heaven, yet I would do it whenever inspired to by God’s Holy Spirit.

The point of it all is that once I am blessed to enter into a right-relationship with God, I am able to discern His will and would have His help in carrying it out.  I don’t need anything else, and God does not need anything else from me. Living the presence of God, I will do what He asks, and nothing He asks will feel degrading or uncomfortable no matter how it seems to others.  In His wisdom God may test me, change my mind, or lead me in ways I don’t understand or would rather not go. At least my praise will be genuine, my worship appropriate, and my works God-directed; all because instead of following a church I am following God’s design for me as an individual. To those who say: How can you be sure? I answer: If God is capable of leading me astray when I humbly ask for His guidance, then all believers are hopelessly deceived and we should all settle for secularism.

All faith is based on divine inspiration, and the moment this seems to stop is the moment we realize our worship and praise has not been sincere enough for God’s grace to attend to us. We need to go back to the basics – the point where it’s just God and me enjoying each other’s presence and straightening things out between us. This presence is what makes me praise God, and my praise is the worship He seeks.

4/14/09 Insights from Study             Mysticism does not fly in the face of scripture in the way some would have you believe. Anytime scripture mentions the work of the Holy Spirit in man, it’s talking about mysticism. The Holy Spirit is the power of God working through His creatures and His creations. The Holy Spirit indwelling in man is promised over and over, and how this would show up in God’s plan was predicted many times and evidenced throughout the Bible. The actual words used by the Holy Spirit to individuals visited by Him can not always be found in the Bible, but the Bible is clear in it’s teaching — that the Holy Spirit would be clear in His teaching.

Where fundamentalism and Christian Mysticism part company is that fundamentalism rests solely on the very words of the Bible with no new input acknowledged, while Mysticism allows inspirational work of the Holy Spirit in the individual as a valid way that God speaks His mind to us.

It doesn’t help that the true meaning of Mysticism has been clouded by people using the term incorrectly when speaking of the paranormal and secular self-help, and also by people, especially those in the media, who use the term “mysticism” when they mean “mysterious”.

Fundamentalists also do not like the doctrine that there are many paths to God. To them, the law is clear and all that’s needed is obedience. But “many paths” spoken of in Mysticism doesn’t mean we’re free pick and choose what we want to obey so much as that God has a role for us in His plan and He doesn’t work with us all in the same way.

Mysticism, which is a process, often gets blamed for beliefs that diverge from Biblical interpretations. But when you are on fire for the Holy Spirit it would be just as unBiblical to ignore His offerings as to deny God’s purpose in Him.  I think if the devotional aspect of mysticism were better understood there would be less objection to it. We just give our whole selves to God and are at peace because we hold Him in our hearts as we go about our daily tasks. We pray, but we contemplate as well. We read scripture, but we read as well the testimony of those who have received God’s enlightenment throughout history. We tend to be individualistic, but as long as we’re following virtue and love, we feel sure our guidance is holy.

In short, the devotion of mysticism is honest of itself. Like anything else, those who profess it are not perfect. But this can be said of any spiritual doctrine, dogma, or process.  We shouldn’t fault the faith for the sins of the faithful. And we shouldn’t miss out on the beautiful gifts of the Holy Spirit from fear of deception. Protection from deception is one of those gifts.

4/12/09 Inspirations                         It’s not for the reasons you may think . . .

I’ve read my Bible as a historical treatise; I enjoyed that, but it didn’t seem relevant. I’ve read it as the holy word of a God we can’t come close to understanding, and was frustrated by the mystery of it all. I’ve read my Bible literally and felt that anyone who could swallow that stuff was mighty gullible. Then I quit reading my Bible myself and listened to Bible commentators, whose interpretations made a lot of sense overall, but never touched me personally.

But after I set my Bible aside and wasn’t looking there anymore, I was hit hard by the gift of spirituality. Knowledge and grace came flooding into my spirit. Conviction and elation filled my days. Intuitions and miracles paraded before me. I found out that God was not at all like what the Bible writers said, but all about what they inferred. In other words, what God is saying to me between the lines of my Bible is the same thing He’s saying to me in contemplative prayer, where I know Him as well as He wishes to be known by me.

Now I can pick up my Bible at any place, and because God has touched me personally and I have welcomed His gifts, I find seeds of reflection scattered everywhere, and the realization comes easily and clearly. Like birchbark in the presence of a match, words of my Bible are a catalyst for what I already have been taught by God. Put together, the effect is explosive, sure, and predictable.

1/16/09 Reflections                    We are often warned of the dire consequences of mistaking our own thoughts for those of God. Much more spiritually devastating is to dismiss, as our own, the thoughts infused by God for His purposes.

In trying to not be deceived, we are in danger of missing what God is telling us. Our very thoughts would logically be the medium God would use to impart knowledge, for we turn our thought into words in order to express feeling. It’s for this reason that besides placing ourselves in a position to recognize God’s desires, we would also profit from listening to what others say of God, then analyzing that in the light of what’s already in our spirits.

We give deference to what seems right, but we can still value all thoughts as either affirmation or denial of our inner intuition. This isn’t allowing ourselves to be talked out of what we know of right and wrong; it’s protection against false teaching that may have already taken place, and a way of clarifying the myriad nooks and crannies of discernment that is only gradually being formed within us.

Our spiritual knowledge is never complete; there is progression which doesn’t end in this life. You may argue that further instruction isn’t necessary; that the Bible contains all we need to know. But we’ve all experienced dramatic clarification of Bible passages – sometimes as inspiration during our own reading, and sometimes through the words of others. We nurture the seeds of inspiration, see what comes up, and pick out the weeds. If it doesn’t appear right to us, we know it and reject it. This is what we all encourage, as personal understanding is a progression. We know this is how spiritual education takes place.

To mystics, these seeds of enlightenment are everywhere, not just in the Bible. We can catch the flavor of Godliness in just about everything we experience, because we see God’s design in all His creations. We may not understand it, but we see that the master plan exists, and we trust that it exists for our good. The point is that we don’t turn our back on God’s help just because we are prideful and we don’t see that this guidance is really coming from God.

1/13/09 Insights from Study                        A Bible student is someone who reads about the love of God and His absolute power to make that love known on Earth. A Bible slave is someone who can witness the voice of God in his very spirit, but must run to the Bible to find a verse that would verify what was said. Some people are using the Bible to limit what they might experience of God. They admit that the only way the Bible could validly come about is through the inspiration of God, but when personally faced with that inspiration, they assume it’s delusional. They have declared that God’s window of opportunity to directly communicate with His people is closed, for fear that He might say something extra-biblical. Who professes humility of humanity and still respects this decision?

If we do not allow God to inspire us through every avenue He wishes to use, our faith is a dead thing. What is faith if not the trust that if we humbly and sincerely abandon our will in favor of God’s, He will not deceive us? What more do we have to give, if not our human convictions of what God is or isn’t; of what God does or doesn’t do? Let God fill your spirit – in His way, at His time, by His method. If you don’t trust Him to do that with your good in mind, on what do you base your faith?

12/29/08 Insights from Study          Religious fundamentalists deride mysticism because it says that divine knowledge and grace can be instilled in other authority than just the Bible. Atheists scorn mysticism because anticipating divine infusion into the human spirit is the greatest leap of pure faith possible. The enemy opposites of fundamentalism and atheism can find common ground in the ridicule of mystics in that, with their heads in the clouds, mystics have nothing to offer the real world.

Mystics, who know that the real world doesn’t exist in our temporal realm at all, quietly go about doing what they do — not trying to please or convince their detractors from either side so much as to hope that the peace and joy evident in themselves draws others to want what they have. It is that very intuition of the will of divine reality, so different from what passes for reality here, that elevates mystics above the fray. Nothing we can do will convince the immovable. Fundamentalist exclusivity is just as much a denial of God’s will as atheist pig-headedness is a denial of God’s existence.

The irony is that the open-minded tendency of mysticism is the very thing that allows its faithful to “catch” the favor of divine reality when others are busy belittling the mystic’s experience of God. The double irony is that through their welcoming of communication with God, mystics are far more likely to trigger definitive proof of God than either biblical faith or science. So far only mystics, by definition, are privy to the direct experience of God that would offer inarguable proof to the scoffers on both sides of the God controversy. Yet to mystics there is no controversy and no need to offer a defense.

Mystics know they will not be the ones to enlighten others as they have been enlightened. That is a function of God’s master plan; we will know exactly what God wants us to know, and no more, for our own good. From Moses to St. Paul to Mohammed to Dawkins, no book in the hands of a seeker will enlighten him to the truth without a personal, specific, inspirational visit from the Creator. It is this miracle that introduces a person to reality, and this truth comes from God, not any human being no matter how deeply inspired or object-oriented.

Only God can prove God – He does it all the time in subtle, loving, beautiful ways. If you can see His effects, you’re too far advanced in your relationship with God to need any proof of Him. As for unbelievers, even religious unbelievers, God will provide proof when and how He wishes. Nobody receiving this gift will any longer ridicule the gifted – the great proof will be mystical; all who receive it will be mystics.

12/6/08 Insights from Study                     Since creation God has dealt with the world in various ways – sometimes sternly with the “tough love” of the Old Testament, sometimes with great hope and sympathetic direction, as when He came to us through Jesus, and sometimes with the great loving mercy we often feel today as we more and more realize our dependence on Him.

He doesn’t leave us or turn His back on us. No matter how He chooses to deal with us, we are aware that He is present and working in our lives. We love Him in response to His love for us. And our love in turn brings us closer to Him, repeating the cycle of give and take until perfection is reached.

In Christianity we believe we inherit this right through the sacrifice of Jesus, and when Jesus had to leave us He sent the Holy Spirit to guide us to perfection. We don’t expect any other manifestation of God in our lives – to use the Holy Spirit to our full potential is only logical and gratifying.

Christian Mysticism is all about welcoming, recognizing, receiving, and accepting the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. This work is a gift from God, but what’s really important to remember is that the ability of humanity to deserve the Holy Spirit is a gift from God too. It’s the direct result of Jesus having taken on the sinfulness of humanity, dulling it with His own humility and obedience, vaporizing it with His death, and showing us by His resurrection what, as a result, is now possible for us. So if you distance yourself from God because you don’t feel you deserve His love, you are not being virtuous – you are being ungrateful.

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus shows us how much God love us, and makes possible our entry into eternal life with Him.

Now, the full mechanism by which God reconciles His perfect justice with His unfailing mercy is not shared fully with us. Since it’s not shared fully with us, it’s one of those things we do not need to know or pursue. Remember, for each glimpse of the mind of God we are able to assimilate for our use, there is an awesome balance of infinite mightiness that’s none of our business. I tend to think that most of what is the Creator’s mind-force will never be known to us even in the afterlife, because in eternity with God the need to know and the satisfaction of learning will not follow us there. When you have perfect joy you don’t seek more – one can’t accumulate more than all.

Having been gifted with the presence of God, we realize more clearly that He is a personal God; a loving God. The wrath of God displayed in the Old Testament is no longer necessary after the passion of the Christ. The Old Testament sacrifices are no longer necessary because Jesus was the scapegoat for all our sins. The Old Testament law made way for the new covenant. No longer are sins of the father visited upon the son, or the sins of a nation the downfall of the individual. This is an expansion of the law – now, because God’s mercy benefits the individual, it’s the individual who must desire virtue and act consistently with it.

To impart this virtue on us, God again manifests Himself to us just as Jesus promised He would. For Christians, the Holy Spirit is God’s spirit working with our own spirits. It’s a shame to gloss over this phrase just because as theology it appears to sound like it’s beyond our understanding. We should roll these words around in our minds every day – in them is said all of what’s really necessary to realize about our relationship with God, whether we welcome that relationship or are running away from it.

The most precious thing you own, your spirit, is being visited with loving care at every moment by the almighty Creator of the universe. If that doesn’t appear at the top of your list of most valuable assets, I feel so sorry for you.  You are not experiencing the joy that God wants for you; the peace which is achieved merely by the asking.