The Light in the Woods

2/27/10 Spiritual Presentations           I love You my God, for making it clear that You are here, You know me well, and You love me enough to let me know something about it. I must have prayed sincerely and properly for the release of my pain, because it happened immediately and decisively. Much more than my healing, I value how You have given me Your word, letting me know that it’s right to believe, to ask, and to offer.

I worship You and I honor those mystics who have come before me. They have told of their experiences as well as they could, and You have guided me to study their lesson. All this love is not lost on me. Thank You for Your love – I want, more than anyone but You can know, to have the chance to pour out my love to You in return. I promise to take every opportunity to do this, and still, as always, I ask for Your help in every aspect of my life to be whatever pleases You.

You created me as Your child. Everything You do is for my good, even pain. I don’t need to know nor am I likely to find out what purpose you have for my pain. Sometimes I feel like it’s there so that I can know great relief when the pain passes. Sometimes pain reminds me of all the things in my life that can be painful but aren’t, because of Your mercy. Sometimes my pain makes me compassionate towards the pain others are going through. Even when the agony goes on despite my prayers, I at least have a higher comfort – that of knowing I am accepting of Your plan without complaint; proof that I hold You in higher esteem than I hold myself.

1/31/10 Reflections          I’ve been thinking a lot about the children’s ward lately — about how it tested my faith in God’s mercy plan, and how it returned me to my faith tenfold over the years through the deep peace of supernatural insight.

While visiting my brother, who was bedridden with multiple sclerosis and in a nursing home, it was necessary for my other brother and I to go to the office on some business. The home was doing some renovations, which made us have to detour through the children’s ward to get to the office. As we were admitted we were told walk straight through, not to interact, and to make as little as noise as possible so as to not disturb the children.

What I saw in the children’s ward is almost beyond description. There were small misshapen bodies in all sorts of contortions; blank expressions on faces that didn’t look like humanity so much as things closeted away until no longer needing care. Their beds or wheelchairs lined both sides of the hallway — as we walked the gauntlet of unspeakable aberrations, in the midst of what the coldest-hearted human would call insufferable, there wasn’t any noise; just the silence of tolerated existence.

When we finally got through the opposite doorway, I told my brother this was a real test of my faith, which depends on the love of God for all His creation. It did one thing, though – it caused me to keep coming back to reflect on what little I know of God’s reasoning, and how I can only believe that what He does He does for our good. Then slowly the lesson of the children’s ward was taught to me within my spirit, and has given me a deeper, more peaceful intuition of the working of God’s love than I think I could have ever had without the experience.

I see now that we cannot care for each other properly. No matter how dire the circumstances and how tirelessly we work for our fellow human beings, we cannot give them what they truly need. Only God can do that. The most dedicated nurse on the children’s ward can only comfort the bodies of the children, and help them remain emotionally neutral.

Their bodies may be decimated, but who knows what they’re seeing inside? Only God can offer that comfort, and somehow I’ve come away with complete assurance that He does. Behind those distorted shells, could the children be experiencing the golden glowing joy of God’s perfect love as do those who have already passed on into His kingdom? If real meaning only exists in another world where God is the only god and our spirits gather Him fully and ecstatically, could those that are physically dependent and mentally unencumbered with worldly priorities be blessed with heavenly bliss here on Earth and unable to tell of it?

In fact, I’ve come into the knowledge that those children are experiencing the beauty of God the way God meant humans to experience Him — how we all would if our minds and bodies were disabled and given over solely to God’s care. In this condition of having nothing else, we enjoy the one thing we do have, unconditionally and without fail — the love of God.

Mystics are able to see the logic of their detachment from the world and negations of self-interest. To them the loss of selfhood is not debilitation so much as essential to experiencing something much better and closer to God’s desires. And those who study the Bible know well the scriptural plea for decreasing so they may increase, giving up all they have and following, taking no scrip for the journey, becoming like little children, the last being first, choosing the good part, letting them deny themselves, taking up the cross, losing their life for God’s sake, having their treasure in heaven, being poor in spirit, crying in the wilderness, the stone the builders rejected, casting in all they had, taking the lowest seat at the feast, seeking the kingdom of God, and entering at the narrow gate.

God should like us to be what we were at creation, before free-will and the sin and suffering that comes from it. For truth, that’s the state He has planned for us to return to in glory. Now, in the world, the independence we asked for has become a thing of strife. The only way to alleviate it is to allow ourselves to become totally dependent on God again so we may look upon His kingdom with joy and hope.

In the children’s ward this has been done for them and they live in the perfect presence of God without effort. Only those who give too much credence to the world and how we perceive it will miss completely what I missed momentarily – that the only thing that matters is the love of God, and whatever state we are in that we can perceive this love the most is the best state to be in. In the measure that we can’t assimilate this, we suffer from our lack of perception. That, then, is true and needless suffering.

I’m not suggesting that those who take care of the residents of the children’s ward don’t provide a heroic service – the need for care of these children’s bodies and emotions is enormous, and I hope for the caregivers’ sake that part of their compensation is the feeling of being blessed to be near these special temples of God’s love. But I am confident that God makes up for suffering by opening up the spirit to supernatural consolation. And this, being the better part, is what God encourages for all of us by our offering of our very selves to Him — a disabling of the ego so as to make His love our spiritual sustenance.

Mystic vision is not apparitions caught by our human senses. Mystic vision is the ability to see things as God sees them; a gift given because we want it badly and allow it freely. Through mystic vision we are able to “know properly” — not the things of this world but the reality of this world as seen from a higher plane. This is a comfort not only to the residents of the children’s ward, but to anyone who can learn exactly what it is they are experiencing. What we can know of God comes down to one necessary specific – that when we seek God we see Him, because that’s what we were made for. And when we see Him we know at once that no matter who we are, or how we look, or what we have or don’t have, without His love we would be nothing and with His love we are everything.

 1/23/10 Insights from Prayer                      I just thought – there isn’t one person in the whole world who doesn’t have a problem, large or small, at the moment, and who couldn’t use a prayer, like it or not, from me. There are billions of us, going about with our own thoughts and fears and sins and doubts. I wish that each time I’m taken to prayer I could have one person to concentrate on – what a prayer that would be!

I was just praying for a specific friend with a specific problem at this very moment of need. Thanks to instant messaging my prayer is in the present – what a miracle that is! A message has traveled to me by satellite that a prayer is needed, and so I pray while I wait to find out if this friend is OK.

Our God is great Who cares about each of us and watches over every one of us as if there were no one else in the world for Him to love. And He is wise to let me know the scope of humanity and human need which He attends to without fail. I’m blessed to feel welcomed into partnership with Him in this.

1/19/10 Inspirations             The more I experience God the more I would need to know in order to do Him justice. I can’t explain the unexplainable, yet this is exactly what a believer is expected to do. This is a world where all you have to do is show skepticism and you appear to have wisdom. But those who have wisdom of Reality — that is, a world more attuned to the Creator than to what He has created – tend to remain silent and waiting.

The first thing you learn when you become truly enlightened is that there is a God and He is in control. You may object to feeling like a pawn in a chess game, but if you do you’re reacting with your ego whereas God is dealing with your spirit. To be spiritual is to be fully free; to accept God’s control so that you may exercise your free will from within the condition that truly responds to human free will — God’s desire to show love and be loved.

This cosmic consciousness is the key to true joy and deep peace. To a humanist happiness for all is a noble cause; to a mystic it is an inheritance from God. It takes acknowledgment of divine control to attain real peace; it will not come about through human desire for it to be so. But our free will can be used to accept recognition of God as Creator and to guide our actions toward working from within God’s master plan.

This master plan cannot be known except generally – the specifics are left to the mind of God, which we cannot probe deeply enough for now. But this is how creation works best; with enough mystery to encourage our participation in God’s plan, and enough knowledge to accept the wisdom of its Creator without question.

As each individual is blessed with mystic perception the fire spreads even more quickly. One day all will grow to abandon ego and embrace spirit – at this point the world can end at last, and we may all awaken into true life of perfect joy in the full presence of God.

1/7/09 Insights from Study         More than one of today’s devotionals touches upon an attribute of mine that puzzles me. I often need God’s assurance on something that has been in the back of my mind for as long as I can remember. I hate to say it out loud because it sounds like a delusion of grandeur, even though no feeling of pride actually comes with it at all. But I have felt since I was a child that I have a special mission for God and I have been waiting rather obliviously for His “go-ahead”.

I don’t usually dwell on this, trying to figure out intellectually what I know can only come to me inspirationally, but it is ever there in quiet expectation. Whatever it is I am to do, I must not be ready for it as yet. I feel like I’m actively being prepared but there’s no clue as to the progress in what I’m being prepared for. It’s as if God hides my purpose so I don’t waste my effort in bumbling attempts to gear myself toward the work.

This call for patience isn’t a cause of anxiety – in fact this unknowing brings me a certain calm because I know the answer will come surely and supernaturally. All responsibility lies in the hands of the Creator, who not only treats me with love but is also very good at setting right things into place. But I’m sixty years old – sometimes I can’t help but wonder if I could have somehow missed the ship. Yet if that were so, why would I have this feeling of preparation?

Anyway, today’s theme seems to be that I will not be going anywhere on my mission; that I will be sought out right where I am. That makes sense in two ways. First is that as the years go by my odd distaste for leaving home for any reason gets stronger and more apparent. Second, I live in a place steeped in spirituality, where the presence of God can call to a person mystically, forcefully, and somewhat continuously. Today I read reminders that this narrow path I take is that way for a reason. Maybe as I record what comes to me in God’s presence I am already affecting His plans in ways I don’t even recognize. I may die tomorrow and find my mission is already done. Stay home and love God – easy for me and what I’d choose to do anyway. God hasn’t matched my job to my temperament; He’s given me the mission and matched me with the temperament I need to accomplish it.

1/5/10 Insights from Study            Yes, God created evil, but to Him it isn’t evil. We have come to see it so, but to God all of His creation is goodness. We are not God, and we see things through human perspective; not divine. We wouldn’t think of calling medicine evil because of its bitter taste, but when it comes to God we expect Him to arbitrate justice without pointing out sin. We expect God to extend His mercy without our having to concede we were wrong. We want His peace without admitting we brought about the conflict. We blame God for what we see as evil, but want Him to overlook consequences of sin, which is something of our own making. How is it we can choose to turn our backs on God, then turn around and blame Him for not preventing us from making a mess of things?

Earthquakes are not evil — they are a natural part of Earth’s regeneration process. When one swallows a car with your loved ones in it, an earthquake appears quite evil to you. But the earthquake did not sin against you, and God is not evil for not having prevented the deaths. If a hungry bear attacks your child, it isn’t because it is evil, nor is God remiss in creating the bear’s need to feed.

Only human beings can perceive God’s created things as evil, because only human beings can create sin out of good and accrue the consequences of their actions. It isn’t that evil is doled out to us as punishment in proportion to our sins so much as it’s that we are simply seeing life as a condition of imperfection. We “know” things as evil because we are used to ordering matters to our own specifications, and often they don’t co-operate.

We insist on exercising our free will and God allows that even when we harm ourselves by it. Unless we are mystics, we would not be willing to give up our free wills, even when we know we often use them with harmful results. Unless we are spiritually enlightened, we are unaware of all the cases where God has in fact intervened to save us. We are just as unaware of this as we are unaware of His reasons for permitting us to witness evil. Opportunity, correction, guidance, education, conversion, grace – all good things can appear to us as evil when directed by God’s hand, because we do not understand divine intellect. We cannot assimilate the intensity of God’s love for us and the steps He takes because of this love.

This is why mystics are always encouraging a person’s abandonment of will. It’s saying this: “I’m not divine and can only haltingly absorb divine reasoning. But if I make a point of accepting God’s will as good, no matter whether it seems to me to be loving or evil, I will certainly be at peace knowing my way won’t be wrong. If I unite my desires to God’s, even if I don’t understand them, I’m confident that I’m doing God’s will and showing Him love. And if I do this sincerely, humbly, and obediently, I will be shown by insight what I need to know, and be given the means to do what I need to do. When I am in sync with God all decisions are God’s, even the ones He has subjected to my free will.”

In this desire for union with God we’ll not only have assurance of following the path our Creator means for us to follow, but also we will have a more proper perception of the worldly, temporary nature of suffering and evil.

12/27/09 Insights from Study           It’s pretty amazing, when you give it the thought it deserves, that God in His power would choose to use it to bring Himself as low as He did in taking on man’s nature and walking the Earth with us. What can we learn from this except that God never wants to remain aloof from us but to insert Himself as much into our lives as we will let Him? If only we could have this much humility and love for mankind, everything else would become clear to us.

God is our King, and should be respected as such, but how much better we know Him and love Him because He chose instead to come to us as a helpless baby.  Do you turn your back on the unconditional love that made this act of selflessness possible? What can you do to match it in your own abilities? Just thinking about it seriously is a giant step in God’s direction. Will you meet Him all the way by becoming as humble and helpless as a baby yourself?

And if the important thing in our lives is that God is with us, what does it matter what else we believe? For being with us God enlightens us – some one way and some another – but only to get us through this world and on to reality, where belief is not needed because perfection reigns over all. I look forward to being with God as He is in His kingdom, without the need of His concealing His glory in order to cater to the baser needs of human beings.

12/25/09 Insights from Prayer              Christmas proves what every mystic knows from experience – God has many ways of appearing to us. It’s not always about majesty and power – our connections with God’s word are usually no more spectacular than another baby being born. But what mightiness there is in small things when we can recognize them as the presence of God. I feel sorry for anyone who can’t grasp the workings of God for their own experience. That God walks among us even here and now should inspire awe in us all. Life is a house of cards in the wind – it’s only God holding us up that makes us possible. We really are seeing God, but we see Him in an unfamiliar way – with the eyes of the spirit. Lately I feel as though we have drifted so far off the trail again that it’s time for God to come to us in a way we can see with our bodily vision. Would we greet Him with relief and joy, or crucify Him once more?

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.

12/19/09 Inspirations               When it comes to the things of God, how much can we human beings really know? What portion of what our ancestors said is really true? Given what we know of the history of mankind, and through our own experiences of human nature, what are we to believe?

As in everything pertaining to the mystical life, the first thing necessary for reflection is to put God first, ahead of worldly considerations and human input, because through this door lies only what God desires for us to hear. That means mystics, because they come from many beliefs, must as always pare down dogma and build up intuition. As we honor the Creator, we honor His methods, which are shaped to the individual and are varied beyond our comprehension. Our trust is in God’s word to us and through others with God’s inspiration in our spirits.

Remembering that Devotional Mysticism is an attitude of worship and not a religion itself, we must also remember that it is a practice open to all faiths, all denominations, and all individuals – excluding no one, as does God. Many mystics are Christians, and many non-Christian mystics believe in Jesus. Because of the varied interpretations God gives us, a discussion of Jesus and mysticism, to be relevant to all mystics, starts out simplified in the masses and will be built upon by the individual from within his own belief system.

A mystic interpretation may be that in Jesus God was saying “I will meet you where you live. I will come to you; to be among you and within you. In doing this, I will show you the things that I admire so you can follow my wishes through your free will. I will show you that if all in this life is not pleasant, you can look with joy to your own resurrection. From My manifestation on your level – separated as you are from Me by deception – you will find I’m a loving God, a merciful God; dedicated to you even when you turn your back on Me. I teach you compassion for others; I show you your own weaknesses so you too can be merciful to My other children. I bring you the promise that I will keep coming to you asking for your love — being pleased anytime you show it and merciful anytime you don’t. In other words, I have the capacity to communicate with you, and I do it in many different ways – ways that conform to what you can relate to. You call these manifestations of Myself by the names that mean something to you – Son of God, nature, Jesus, miracle, inspiration, Holy Spirit, co-incidence – because if my glory is beyond you I can have no real meaning for you. I am first your Creator, and I care for you in many ways while you’re away from me. Nothing pleases me more than that you would wait patiently for me with total confidence, see what I am to you, dedicate yourself to my will, and most of all love me with all you have.”

The important thing is that God can speak to us as Jesus and we will hear a powerful message. Christmas is a perfect time to reflect on this message in awesome wonder that God can and does put all His love into mankind despite what mankind can do.