The Light in the Woods

1/9/10 Insights from Study                Ironically, it’s probable that all religion would be acceptable to all believers if there was no such thing as the holy scriptures.  Imagine religion if it resembled spirituality, where all we need for instruction is direct communications from God. Scriptures plant seeds of belief in us – preordaining us toward the Source – the God who wants to be made known through them. But in each case, the source and the authors have different styles and different goals. Scriptures may be inspired by the Creator, but they are written by man, and worse, manipulated by those with certain agendas.

That’s why we can all profess to worship the one God but don’t recognize the God of other religions, and feel uncomfortable because of it. We see good people worshiping a God Who historically demands the conversion of those who read a different scripture and we wonder. If God is the same God for everyone – and many of us instinctively feel there is one God and one Creator – could it be scripture that is poisoning us against each other?

You can answer this with a resounding “Yes!” and yet still hold your own scriptures close to your heart, just as someone else can halfway around the world. How is this possible? Because there are people who use scripture to seek God’s inspiration behind the words, and those who use the words to hit others over the head.  That’s why there are Christians who are beacons of hope in the dark, and those who are glaring lightbulbs over an interrogation chair. That’s why there are Muslims confident that theirs is a religion of peace, and those who want to reign destruction on everyone who isn’t like them. That’s why there are Jews who are so beaten down by the need to follow strict ritual that they have no time for love of God’s children, who should be benefiting from God’s laws.

But how would we know God if not for scripture? The same way God can be known in cultures which have no written word. God has written on our hearts everything we need to know. When we seek truth by looking into our own conscience, we find God ready and willing to dispense His knowledge and grace. Knowledge and grace directly from God – it’s never deceptive, never wrong, never misleading or prone to misinterpretation. It’s what we as humans do to His word after it’s given that sets us up for spiritual failure and fight.

When asked for sincerely, God’s insight is given – given abundantly and with great joyfulness. When insight is written down, it should not need interpretation – it means something to the person who got the guidance in the first place, and it means whatever God wants another to get out of it when it’s read. No human intervention is needed, or else God’s inspirations become dogma that needs to be defended.

We don’t have to be slaves to scripture.  Scripture is not meant to be a handbook for hate, or for intolerance. When it is used that way there is blasphemy against God’s intentions. But use scripture to guide you in asking for God’s personal communication to you through it, and you are praying the prayer that God loves. You can pray this way through any writing that touches you spiritually. You can find through the experience of others what God wants to teach you personally. This is a logical use of inspiration the way God intends. Always remember your personal place in God’s affections and His desire for you to experience Him. And when you pass along these inspirations, try to do it with love, tolerance, and compassion; not the heat of self-righteousness. God might not have the same message for others through this channel as He does for You. We are better off to leave it to Him to do the teaching.

We should be sharing beliefs; not demanding them. If there is only one Creator, one truth, one master plan, one reality, one eternity – there is an infinite number of ways God’s lessons can be taught. Don’t ever limit God to your capabilities. Put your capabilities before God for His instruction and shut up long enough to hear them. Then live this insight humbly and obediently, and God will surely not steer you wrong.

11/7/09 Reflections             Jesus was God manifesting Himself in the world in order to reach out to us in a familiar way so we can benefit by a divinely-apportioned measure of understanding. The Holy Spirit does this as well; it is God making Himself available to human experience in order that we may benefit from divine capabilities.

Why can’t we just leave it at that and absorb the grace in which this gift is given? No, people have to butt in and make up things so the explanation of God is sure to be done “the church way”, leaving any unchurched spirit open to judgment and condemnation.

I find the celebration of Jesus’ humanity especially disturbing the way it is done by churches. It’s as if we can never learn what the coming of Jesus was meant to tell us – that the God/man relationship is a thing perfected in heaven but we are welcome to it even if we can only experience it imperfectly in this life; that it’s not meant to be fully understood by us in order that we keep striving for it.

Instead we see Jesus treated as the Son of God with duties separate from God, as if he was not God. We humans have to give Him human attributes and human names in order for Him to be palatable to us. The Catholic faith is one kind of offender, in that it takes the essence of Jesus and then constructs all sorts of scenarios around Him so that He makes sense to us. The unknown circumstances of His humanity must be filled in and cataloged in such a way as they fit both scripture and human experience. What we end up with is not the awe and wonder of God reaching out to mankind, but a fully logical, and fully made up, explanation of God’s plans.

The same goes for those churches who think they need only to churn out Bible slaves in order to please God. Instead of filling in where scriptural information is lacking like the Catholic church does, these people take each sentence of scripture as the final, exact word, no matter how the sentence got there or how it fits in with the rest of the concept around it. The fact that there is so much infighting among them should be a clue that this method of understanding God isn’t the answer either. One would think, listening to them, that Jesus’ role was to perform a task for man so that people who don’t follow him can be condemned by God.

It all comes from trying to fit God’s plan into human understanding without consulting God. When you base your relationship with God on scripture only, you will probably be too intimidated to listen to God another way, and may never experience what God wants to say to you as an individual. Our churches frighten us with scripture in order that we do not become tempted to accept what God says to us personally. They fear losing control of us when God communicates with us directly. They tell us we open ourselves up to the devil when we pray for God’s guidance. They assure us that if it isn’t in scripture – and this is true in many religions – then it doesn’t exist, because God is incapable of having anything else to say. Really?

Many of us have tried to remain in our churches and still go to God for spiritual guidance. Many churches profess to encourage this, but we have found that when push comes to shove, we are not considered sophisticated enough to receive what God wants to give us. And so many of us have given up the pretense of church religion and gone the way our hearts have told us to go. 

I’m convinced that the Creator sees this as a step in the right direction and works with us in a special way in order to encourage this kind of spirituality worldwide. I believe this is His plan and it gives me a satisfying feeling of hope to know that it’s OK to step out of the feedlots our religions have fenced in for us. Nothing else is needed from man, because all is provided by God anyway. When God works in an individual, it doesn’t take many individuals to become a powerful, self-replicating force for good reaching across any and all human-made boundaries..

10/9/09 Reflections        The purpose of study is not to find out what others believe so we can design our own beliefs after theirs. We study in order to become exposed to various subjects so we know what to ask of God, for ultimately God decides which seeds must take root and grow in our spirits.

No matter how inspired by God, the authors of spiritual reading have human weaknesses and human agendas. For this reason, modern mystics will study spiritual writings all across the boundaries of religion, picking up subjects here and there, and consult God in trust that He will enlighten the individual with truth. This is opposite from the fundamentalist, scripture-based religions which deny that God can impart any new knowledge; that if a person insists they have received God’s inspiration, the proof of that will be that it’s already found in scripture.

The problem with this is that scriptures assigned as the bases of various belief systems often don’t agree with one another. For the mystic, the Creator – being of one mind and that being the only necessary consideration – is the ultimate source of knowledge, who places His wisdom directly into the spirit of the individual – every and any individual. We earn discernment by placing ourselves before God in humility and obedience, firm in the faith that the Creator would not deceive us as another human being would. We can then, with trust in God, retrieve the wisdom that resides within us by willing God to release it to us – this being the highest, most-productive level of gaining spiritual knowledge that’s possible.

Spiritual reading from many sources blesses us with the “seeds” of interest that will bring us close to our Teacher. Contemplation with the Ultimate Inspiration will spur us on to discern well and act on what we learn. If we could not rely on God in all His ways, all hope would be lost for our enlightenment in wisdom and grace.

8/9/09 Inspirations       Mysticism is anything you directly experience of God. It is what God chooses to infuse into your spirit; it’s independent of anything God has inspired into other spirits.  We already know we don’t all experience everything the same way – we can easily see this when we consider our individuality and our individual differences.

Consider any creation other than man. One squirrel is most likely indistinguishable from another member of its species. A plant has a certain way of growing and that is how it tends to grow. Granite is granite; gold is gold. But each person you meet is different than any other in appearance, aspirations, habit, emotional effect, opinion, and a variety of other factors. In fact, the very range of factors that can be variable in humans go a long way towards showcasing our individuality.

We are special because unlike other of God’s creations we have a divine nature; we are God’s heirs and made in His likeness. From within this special attribute God works with each of us in a way He desires for us; we react in our own way.

Your mystic spirituality is anything you know of God when you take away whatever you know only through another’s experience of God. If you were to set aside scripture and all other inspired accounts, you would still have spirituality; God’s relationship with you would remain. Mysticism is the best part of spirituality as a whole, because it’s the part that you witness yourself. Through it you become attuned to God and receive His grace into your spirit. Nothing you learn of someone else’s relationship with God matches your needs like God’s own choice for you as His child.

When we learn to trust God’s choices we are free to work with them as God meant us to, which takes away the anxiety with which so much religion burdens us. We learn what’s right for us from God, instead of trying to build our relationship with God on something experienced by someone else.

7/25/09 Reflections        God manifests Himself in all things great and small – from Jesus to a ladybug – to tell us of His presence and to assure us that the outcome of life will be good. Scripture doesn’t do this. Scripture tells us the human way of seeing things – that we are bad and will go to hell unless we shape up.

How can scripture be both inspired by God and fallible at the same time? Because God uses scripture to inform us of both the human way of seeing things and things the way God sees them. It contrasts the two views in order to spotlight the divine reality, something we would not consider during our daily lives unless prompted.  God’s presence within His creations is another kind of prompting.

The world that comes to us through our natural senses of taste, smell, touch, sight, and sound is very real to us because the effects of these forces is experienced by all and can be measured. By consensus, then, Earthly life is “real”. But human consensus is meaningless because the creator of the universe is powerful and has the first and last word regardless of human forces. It is His reality that is real, and since humans don’t have the intellectual or emotional capacity to absorb God’s reality, reality can only be taken on faith.

The frailty of human faith is the reason why God manifests Himself in every thing He has created. He is here with us if only we want to receive Him, and if we want to receive Him He helps us do that. Now it’s the supernatural senses instead of the natural senses that come into play.  They are the gifts that help us recognize divine reality. They are given; not developed. By our desire to receive them we ask God for them, and as we ask so we are given.  These supernatural senses don’t have to be measured in order to be real – they come from the master and so are perfect.

You will know how your supernatural senses work when they are working in you, because by then you will be sharing in God’s knowledge and grace, and your ability to absorb reality will be expanded. In mystic theology it’s said that you will be approaching union with God, whereby you begin to see things with a divine perspective and to recognize God’s manifestation in His created things. You will know God’s promise of perfection is real, and this knowledge prepares you to approach the human world with peace and compassion.

Your light beckoning others into a unitive relationship with God is the purpose of God’s actions on Earth – to gather all together in harmony as we seek to awaken into reality at last.

4/5/09 Insights from Prayer         In theology, the religious tend to live out of a love of God and fear of everlasting damnation, while the spiritual tend to live out of a love of God and gratitude for the promise of everlasting life with Him. Religious believe scripture holds all we need to know; spirituals believe it’s possible to know beyond that by listening for inspiration from God Himself. For example, “Ask and you shall receive” appears in scripture, but a spiritual person knows what that really means because they have asked and received. Scripture contains seeds for understanding; God provides the understanding itself.

You can be both religious and spiritual, but in this day and age faith has become controversial and so we are ever more likely to take a stand within ourselves. The world has begun to experience religious bigotry on a grand scale, and we each may realize that some of that bigotry is ours. So well we might run away from it, straight into the arms of God, Who will gladly teach us what He wants us to know. Mystics get it – if you go to God for care and comfort, God is not too mighty to communicate with you personally.

Many religions give this lip-service, but think of it as blasphemy. They preach God’s mercy, but don’t affectively accept it. They pronounce God’s glory, but keep as far away from Him as possible out of feelings of unworthiness. Church service and calls to prayer are lovely rituals, but you are not spiritual until you can call God by name while you’re signing autographs, lounging on the couch, or rolling in the gutter in a drunken stupor. You have religion, but you live spirituality. You keep your humanity shame-facedly hidden with religion; with spirituality you celebrate your divinity by living with God every second. You know what scripture means when it says “Pray without ceasing” because you stepped away from the book and had a conversation with the author. It’s not about your agenda; it’s about God’s. Yes, we’re sinners and yes, we’re unworthy in our own right, but fortunately our right-relationship with God isn’t up to our abilities but to God’s gift-giving.

I don’t disparage another’s path as long as it’s the will of God, for each of us must be different in order to fulfill God’s plan. But I find I have to defend my spirituality against those not so open-minded, and explain why it’s the better way for me and possibly for them too if they would open up their minds to it.

As Jesus walks this week toward His sacrificial death, let’s remember what killed Him – slavish adherence to a set of rules God never requisitioned. This too is part of God’s plan.  Easter Week is time for all Christians to rededicate their dedication. So Christians can encourage all of the world’s people to rejoice in the gift of God’s personal relationship to each of us and all of us – our spirituality.

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.

9/26/08 Reflections            The reason I don’t think the Bible is the infallible word of God is because man had a hand in its making. It’s that simple. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe the writers were inspired by God, or that the Bible doesn’t speak to me of truths that inspire me in turn — I do and it does. It’s that every single person who wrote it, translates it, annotates it, studies it, preaches it, publishes it, and reads it has their own personal agenda about it. And the only agenda I trust or care about is God’s.

To illustrate what I mean: There was a popular song that quoted a beautiful Bible passage teaching that to everything there is a season. Birth and death, planting and sowing, killing and healing, breaking down and building up, weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing, casting stones and gathering them together, embracing and refraining from embracing, getting and losing, keeping and casting away, rending and sewing, keeping silence and speaking. But it was the 1960s and there was an unpopular war going on; the group had an anti-war agenda. So as a result there’s a generation that likely still thinks Ecclesiastes 3:8 goes “A time to love, a time to hate; a time for peace, I swear it’s not too late!”

Change the Bible to fit your agenda – it happens all the time. That’s human nature, and the best way to bypass human nature is to go directly to God for guidance. I trust that God will guide me in any spiritual reading I do, so I am able to love the Bible and learn from it. But I’m not a slave to the words themselves. Words can be corrupted; even God’s words. To some this makes me a “relativist” — picking out which parts of God’s word I want to obey and which I don’t. But that assumes not only that the Bible is God’s word, but also that I can’t receive His word any other way.

This is the point where fundamentalist do all God-lovers a big disservice – for if you’re right and everyone else is deceived, that gives you the moral right to insist that God wants everyone to do just as you do. Well, maybe He doesn’t. Maybe other paths fit into His plan. I would say certainly other paths fit into His plan. We look around and see saintly people who love God and avoid sin; condemned to hell in the minds of fundamentalists of any religion. No wonder people look critically at religion in general.

Especially in this era of religious terrorism, religion itself is under scrutiny. This too is part of God’s plan. Let’s not spoil it by turning to exclusivity – truly the God who created all, loves all. Let Him be the guide and judge of each one. Keep your religion if it’s what you think is right with God, but use it to lead each other to the spirituality that will help them depend on God’s word; not man’s.

After the song is over and the time and the season for everything under heaven is acknowledged, move along to verse 11 which teaches that all of this is God’s responsibility. I think deep down we all know this intuitively.

8/10/08 Inspirations          I think I’ve finally understood why I’m so uncomfortable with exclusively scriptural religions of any sort – they’re all about what God gives to us, when the whole point of creation lies in what we give to God. If God, who needs nothing, created us, it was because something incomplete in the universe needed completing. I think my prayers and good acts please God because they work to complete His plan. But over and above this, I think my abandonment of my spirit to His will is what pleases Him most, because when every spirit does this, this world can be finally replaced by the kingdom of heaven God always meant for us to enjoy.

Scripture, revelation and gifts of the Holy Spirit aren’t ends, but means. Religion tends to stop when what God has given us is studied and realized, but spirituality goes beyond, into the realm of giving back to God with our own spirits. We would not be created, and created with free will, if God hadn’t deemed it necessary for us to contribute to His plan. Religion treats us as sinners, fit only to be preached to and obey; spirituality recognizes the divinity within us as God’s presence, making us ready and worthy to work for God. Religion not only limits how we are allowed by others to receive God, but as to our natural desire to return God’s love, relegates it to obedience and duty instead of joy and spontaneous perception of divine reality.

It seems to me that the result is that religion is of men, while spirituality is of God. In our journey, we need both guidances, but we seem to be forced to make a choice between one or the other as long as we can’t understand that though God is perfect, His plan is incomplete without us. So often religion becomes a stumbling-block to the work of God within us, that our best choice is to concentrate on our spirituality. Then, at least, we have a way to reach out to God by reaching out to each other indiscriminately. This is the adoration God meant to elicit from us – love of God through love of neighbor. Differences in belief as to any other way to worship God do not help at all.

7/11/08 Reflections             Years ago my mother was visited by some radical Christian evangelicals. She had strong convictions of her own, but was vulnerable because she felt uncomfortable saying “no” to anyone. But as for me, I don’t know what came over me, except I felt like Jesus clearing the temple of moneychangers. I was far from holy myself, but even then I had no patience for it when good people skewed the word of God and insisted that their interpretation was the only valid one. It really didn’t matter what they believed – they were out to tell us anything we believed beyond that was wrong.

I was gracious enough to ask my mother if she wanted these people in her house, but when she indicated that she didn’t but it didn’t seem right to slam the door on them, I told them they had ten minutes to do their thing, and at the end of that time I was coming back to make sure they were gone. Of course they didn’t respect that, but I made it so.   As they left they said something to the effect that I was not open to the truth, and at that point in my life I probably wasn’t, but even then I recognized that I wasn’t shutting out God; just them.

Now I have a vivid spirituality; looking back on the incident I don’t think I would handle it much differently, other than today I would have explained to them why I objected to what they were doing. If you limit God’s word to the Bible, you miss out on His most effective means of communication. If you limit God’s commandments to the way they appear in scripture, you miss the importance of His immanence. If you limit God’s “people” to those who are baptized Christians with a literal belief in the Bible, you are proposing the exact opposite of what the Bible hints at – God’s focused presence and interaction in every spirit. The important things of God do not come out of a book – Jesus said that over and over again and then proved it through His death. It’s your experience of God that makes you a whole person; your relationship with God that steers your course. First Jesus taught this through His own example, and then He made it alive by sacrificing God’s insistence on His covenant rights in favor of unwarranted mercy. We could not become God’s people by following scriptural dictates if all we were doing was letting scriptural interpreters tell us what we must do. Our relationship with God must come from inside our very being, willfully and humbly. This, like all things, is a gift from God – resulting in a recognition of God in our lives and our desire to do His will through love of Him, and not fear of the consequences of not doing His will.

It was the evangelical’s limitation of God’s presence in each individual – the denial of His personal communication through our spirits – that I was objecting to those many years ago, even if I didn’t know it then. It’s the same for me today with all good-intentioned people who fear back and forth communication with God; who call any word of God other than the Bible a dangerous deception. I don’t want anything to limit what God has gifted me. If I am humble and willing to place myself in front of God for His guidance and I am deceived, then the deception itself has been ordered by God for His use. The Bible is certainly useful, but it is only God Himself that is infallible. So it is God I will come to for guidance, for providing what I need when I need it, for protection from bad theology, and for the relationship I crave, as all mankind has, does, and will crave.