The Light in the Woods

2/22/10 Insights from Prayer              The trouble with biblical religiosity is that it never encourages us to take what Christ afforded us and use it to get beyond Christ and into God. Fundamentalist Christians, while rightly seeing Jesus as our means of a right-relationship with God, think it demeaning to Jesus that we then aspire to go beyond Him and on into the exact realm for which He interceded.

Yes, we are too immature to start with a unitive relationship with God, and need Christ to win that ability for us. But Jesus is a manifestation of God, and having freed us from our limitations God wants to draw our focus when we’re ready so that we may communicate directly with Him. A direct relationship with God is the whole point of salvation and sanctification – to hear some churches say it, seeking such a relationship is the work of the devil; not of the Christ.  The suspicion is that if we all cashed in on our mystic relationship with God won for us by Jesus, there would be little need for the power of the churches.

Mystics run into trouble with fundamentalists because mystics embrace the goal of Christ’s work instead of worshiping the work itself. Christ’s humanity is not the purpose of His existence, just as it isn’t the purpose of ours. The exercise of our divinity, our worthiness to desire union with God, is the end game. Jesus wants us to aspire to that. To a parent at the moment of letting the child go, if the child keeps running back it’s an indication that the work is not done and the child is not ready. Likewise, to the mystics it’s not blasphemy to thank Jesus and accept the relationship with God that Christ won for us – it only means advancing our focus from Christ the man to God who loved us so much He manifested Himself as Christ. The blasphemy is when we are admonished for not worshiping Christ the man.

We worship Jesus along with God each time we communicate with Him, for this is the purpose of Christ. Fundamentalists de-emphasize God’s call to contemplation and personal communication, drawing the focus back to the Bible and the church’s interpretation of it. Mystics use the Bible as a step to the real purpose of Christ. We may still be too weak to take full advantage of Christ’s work, but to deny those who are ready for it direct access to God implies that Jesus somehow failed, and the job of the church is to cover that failure with dogma.

2/21/10 Reflections              God is not just another experiment for scientists, for He will never be known completely on Earth. This is not a failing; this is His plan. His plan keeps us seeking, keeps us praising, keeps us grateful for the small hints of heaven that we see all around us when we cultivate awareness of them. If God were not a mystery we wouldn’t be in awe of Him as we are.

Now and then I play at pretending there is no God in my life, just to see how it feels. After all, I put in many years of not thinking of God at all, and I made out OK. But I always come back to the welcoming of my relationship with God, because of what it adds to my existence. I don’t need to understand God completely. What I need is to accept that there is something very much worth seeking, and that even if I don’t fully appreciate God because of my human limitations, the desire for that relationship keeps what I can know ever before me.

God is constantly bringing me towards acceptance of what it is I need. He puts before me what He wants to give; sometimes I reach out for it hungrily and sometimes I’m not hungry enough to reach out at all. In one way I’m better off than in the other, but God doesn’t force me. In the same way, He works with what he withholds from me – fear, despair, disease, calamity, guilt, my own sin. Whether I’m thankful, oblivious, or aware yet without gratitude, I’m not forced to acknowledge the source of my protection or my provision.

Yet if I do choose awareness of God I learn easily in proportion to how much of the process I give over to God. Once I begin, I see results. Once I see results, I want more of the same. The more I ask for the more I get – my asking shows that I’m humble enough to use God’s graces effectively. Even though my role is small, it’s an integral part of God’s master plan and therefore significant. Yet I don’t have to perform it flawlessly; I shouldn’t even aspire to that. I merely need to keep desiring the right attitude for my way to be made sure.

That’s why it’s so important for us not to exclude others’ paths or disdain others’ works. We don’t know what assignments God has deemed appropriate for others. We cannot do His desire while judging His gifts.

2/14/10 Insights from Prayer         I’m convinced that if more of us understood the beauty of a divine relationship the world could start to heal. I can’t imagine being scared of a one-on-one relationship with the Creator, but apparently many of us are. We tend to be more comfortable in groups – groups of like race, religion, gender, causes, economic class, location, interests. All these things are fine to consider, but they make us dependent, and dependent on the wrong things.

Sometimes our groupings hold us back from the one thing that can easily bring us joy – a relationship with our Creator. We often look to a group to help us gain this very thing, and often go away disappointed. A union with God is not a group activity. It is much too special to be anything but an individual commitment. That’s because each of us is specially-made and, in the eyes of God, uniquely loved.

If you really think this over, it’s quite an awesome arrangement. We each have the power of God at our disposal, just for the asking. We are worthy of the asking, for not only are we God’s children, but God is extremely involved in our welfare. He likes for us to put our dependence on Him, because He knows He’s all for our good.

This is intentionally simplified; there are many other considerations. But the point here is that we would be so much happier if we let God do for us what He would like to do. It’s so simple if we start thinking interiorly – that is, with our willing reception of supernatural grace. We often don’t realize how much we desire God; how lost we feel and how homesick we are. Only when we give our selves over to Him do we then realize what we’ve been given and how much better things are when these graces are fully appreciated.

Let’s not substitute something less for the best we already have. Let’s turn to the divine instead of our human groupings to realize our potential joy. God is available to you every second you live. Your relationship with Him is up to you – something you will know how to seek out because your desire for it is always within you. Stand alone and turn inside yourself to experience the ecstasy of God.

2/5/10 Reflections                    The knowledge we need of God is in us. Our hearts beat and our lungs exchange air without our intellectual input, and our minds apprehend God in the same way.

Lately, science is pin-pointing where in the brain that function resides, just as it has found the core location of other brain functions. This is good in that it admits the universal awareness of God we experience. But prideful man will probably interfere with this as in other things, and no doubt some megalomaniac will eventually mandate that the “God center” of an infant’s brain be deactivated at birth as a matter of course. Which all goes to show that while Creator-awareness is a normal function of a human being, Creator-knowledge must come to us in other ways; ways which science and megalomaniacs can’t touch.

God did not have to create the universe at all. His reality abides without it – always has and always will. The fact that He did create the universe implies a plan; a plan that takes place no matter how much humans interfere. Man’s need to experience God will not be impaired. What’s important is that we allow our full and certain joy of God-awareness however we can and in whatever ways God devises for our happiness. It’s hard-wired in us – what God desires is for our good, and what is good for us is what God plans from the beginning. Denying it gains us nothing, and denying it in others is impossible if the other person values a relationship with God. Need for God cannot be taken away, because it is supplied by God.

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.

12/8/09 Insights from Study                The mystic process goes from detachment to discernment to abandonment to perfect perception – all being towards a unitive relationship with our Creator. The mind of God is vast; we can be of one mind with Him and still have room left for individuality. It’s often through our individual assignments that God has caused His wishes to be done.

We can’t know everything there is to know of the sin and imperfection that holds us back, but God does, and that’s why we turn all we have over to Him. Body, mind, soul and spirit – God purifies the whole of us though it isn’t necessary for us to know how. When our intellect, emotion, and will are served by God instead of used for lesser things, we have let go of human-control and aligned ourselves with God’s immanence, which is always there.

This is how it is in the reality we’ve forgotten through having to live this life. That’s why we have so much spiritual doubt here – our perception is flawed; we sense this and feel melancholy for the true-perception that is our life with God. Having become disassociated with God we can expect here on Earth only hints at the remembrance of our perfection, and those joys are available only through God’s love and mercy towards us. But with God’s grace we can offer up to Him the very things that are the result of man’s disassociation with God. We are moved to do this through divine insight and we use our own free will to gather God’s grace close.

Our estrangement from perfection shouldn’t be a cause for despair, because we know that we lead truly joyous lives with God in the dimension of reality. Though we can’t understand what that’s like now, when we open up our mystical senses – those attuned to how we really are – we can experience some of that joy even in this imperfect life. This is what mystics do, because in this direction lies the freedom for perfect worship of God the Creator. We always respond to goodness with joy and welcome. Pure worship is simple — we honor God when we desire to return to the state in which He created us.

12/4/09 Reflections           Quietism believes that we merely exist. Everything we truly need is gdiven to us. We have no responsibility other than to God. World affairs must be ignored, and the risk of contamination thereby avoided. Self-annihilation brings perfection, which is enough in its own right. It’s just one person and God – everything else might as well be non-existent.

It’s a radical mysticism, even though “radical” seems contradictory to everything Quietist. In every principle above, there is merit and truth. But as a whole theology, Quietism doesn’t add up. It’s too much like the way we would like life to be – a utopia without the provision that if God wants us to be active for others we could comply. And if we can’t comply to God’s desires, we are certainly no mystics.

I would love to feel justified in a life of total contemplation and isolation; to have absolutely no other responsibility. I would be content to know that in complete passivity I am pleasing God; I could easily enjoy living in blissful abandon. The trouble is, as much as the world can turn without me, I must make myself available and ready to be active when and how God wants me to. That is an inseparable part of abandoning my will to God – the acceptance that His will might be to use my action for a greater good.

So while I agree with the Quietist premise and would like to live a Quietist life, I could never get past the intuition that though God doesn’t need my co-operation, He wants it. It’s in this way we honor Him, for it isn’t enough to abandon ourselves to Him if we will not abandon our abandonment should He ask us for that as well.

One of the first insights of mysticism is that God wants to be asked for His favors. Without this attribute of God’s, intercessory prayer and works on behalf of others would make no sense, as we’re aware that God is capable of anything He desires without our input. We couldn’t even honor God if He didn’t feel the need to be loved by us. So Quietism doesn’t sit well because it takes mysticism further than it should go. In the same way as God wants us to ask for favors He would have given us anyway, He asks us to love Him and honor Him in our care for others, even though He has no needs and is capable of caring for His children Himself. Mysticism is an unequivocal “Yes” to God’s desires; Quietism limits what those desires can entail to what can be done passively. That sounds like “No” to me.

12/4/09 Insights from Prayer        We are all in exile but we can stand anything when we keep our emotions centered on home. If we try to fit in with imperfection we will never be at ease, because we were made for better than that. When we put it all on the Creator we are consoled, for we know two things: He will act on our behalf perfectly, and He is honored when we give up our disordered priorities in favor of His perfect ones.

The world frightens us because it is filled with human-powered sin. It’s this sin, not the will of God, that causes us our agony. Whether it is we who are doing the sinning or not, we all suffer together because we must experience imperfection together. Sins committed, sins of omission, emotions unbridled, annoyances personified, addiction, prejudice, wanting what we don’t have, putting forth too much reverence for what we do have, making too much of ourselves – any sin we commit or weakness we give into is a sign that our spirits are in disorder. And no wonder – we were not made for this world at all.

This world is what our lives look like when we look at them wrong. God created us for perfection and so that is what we are. But God allowed us to reject Him, and we pay for it by being blind to the reality of our perfection. We are in exile; this doesn’t feel right to us at all. We’re missing something and most of us don’t understand that it is the perfect relationship with God that we’re craving. That’s why our spirits feel as if they’re never contented.

We can’t bring our spirits back to perfection here, because “here” itself is imperfection. This world is only the medium of misperception which is the result of our disassociation from God. It isn’t real, and that should be a comfort to us, to know that one day we will again have perfect vision of reality. Until then there is only hope.

What makes the world of exile bearable is God’s mercy, and His power of consolation available to us when we ask for it. Each experience of worldly beauty gives us a glimpse of promise – God’s word that He is present and wishes to remind us of the joy that reigns where we are headed. When we see this beauty, we ought to immediately connect to the Creator who brought it about. The more we think of God, the more hints He gives into our immortal existence, and the more hopeful we are. God answers the confusion and suffering we experience in this world with better perception of the beauty and perfection that is our real life. The more we honor God the easier we see through our exile and into our reality, and the less anxiety we will have with our earthly, temporary trials when we recognize the joy that is to come.

12/3/09 Insights from Study           God became visible to us as Jesus. When we look upon Jesus we see God in a way we can understand. This is done because God wants us to share in His nature so that we may honor Him and take our rightful place in His kingdom with Him.

Human beings wanted God’s intellect; to partake of the tree of knowledge. Jesus confirms how what is goodness is always known to us. God puts that in our hearts and through Jesus and His Holy Spirit God shows us how to live what is right. We are privileged to glimpse God’s infinite knowledge – some believe Jesus won this right for us; some believe that Jesus demonstrates this right. Whatever our belief, Jesus reminds us that God is knowable to us in the degree to which we can handle this knowledge.

We human beings also wanted autonomy; to feel the power of self-determination. God gave us free will and Jesus shows us how to give it over to God. Jesus is our affirmation that the Creator cares and, because He cares, He participates — in the universe and within each individual. We are worthy of our relationship with God – some believe Jesus won us this right; some believe that Jesus demonstrates this right. Whatever our belief, Jesus reminds us that God is personally and continuously involved in our lives, and we recognize this in the degree to which we welcome it.

We wanted the knowledge and grace that belonged to God. We didn’t exactly get what we wanted, because we wanted things that weren’t wholesome for us. So God gave us something better than what we wanted, and of course God does know what that is. God is still with us; it’s God’s Holy Spirit which gifts us with knowledge and grace as He sees fit.

11/24/09 Reflections           Once we accept God, we realize we have been forgiven. End of subject — there’s no need to rehash the past. We do not need to make up for what we’ve done – we could never do that as God has already done it perfectly. We don’t have the ability to pay for our past sins, so we neither have the obligation to try.

In the same way, we have no right to expect others to even up their accounts with God. We deal with others as God does – full forgiveness without requiring any payback. What could anyone do to reverse the effects of their sin against God? No more than you can do to square yourself with God. Life is better when we accept God’s forgiveness and extend the utmost degree of forgiveness to each other.

Now we know it’s futile to promise to make up for our sins or to require others to make up for theirs; so what can we do? Only accept that God has done this for us, and do our best to not get into the same occasion of sin again. Nothing forces us to do this, and if we do return to sin, we’ll be forgiven as before. So what’s the motivation for goodness?

It’s that no matter how prideful and “tough as nails” we want to appear, it feels good to feel good. Righteousness feels right. There is a peacefulness in justice and serenity in living right. We don’t even have to be sure of where such contentment comes from, although it makes sense that God would supply the favor when it seems right to Him. What matters is that a good deed begets the desire of the recipient to pass along the sentiment. And forgiveness of one person spurs on his desire to forgive someone in his life. It doesn’t always come to fruition, but the desire is there where it wasn’t before.

The motivation for goodness is the good feeling that comes from doing what has been put in our hearts as “right”, and the tendency of God to acknowledge the desire for goodness on the same scale as if the good deed had actually been done. This is because all we can really do that God does not take upon Himself is to give up our human tendencies in favor of letting our free wills conform in harmony with the will of God. Having done that, we only wait for God to act upon our desire. The result will be goodness.

We tend to miss this phenomenon because it seems too simple to be the meaning of life. But it stands to reason that, as helpless as we feel, life is far less about our contribution and more about God’s. Take away responsibility for everything but what God has given us to do, and life really is quite simple.

From there, we can contribute to society to the extent that we can, always keeping in mind that the die has already been cast, the roles have already been awarded, and the outcome is sure. We feel better when we exercise goodness and make life on Earth as serene as possible for the most of us as is possible. But it’s also important to remember our limitations; leaving the impossibilities up to God.