The Light in the Woods

12/13/09 Reflections                 The job of the world is a simple one. It doesn’t matter what your vision of God is – as long as you appeal to goodness, you love your Creator. It’s not difficult to do, and from where we are we might be amazed to know how well the world already does this. The world isn’t as bad off as it seems – much is said about its negative aspects, but then little is reported about our spiritual state. You think global spirituality will never happen, but the world has already come a long way toward it. The great religions, and most of the obscure ones, are all based on goodness. From the time human beings were created, we have looked up to the Creator in awe and wonder, looking for goodness from Him and within ourselves.

You don’t even have to believe in the Creator in order to worship Him. Even atheists show honor to God each time they do something good for others. Goodness doesn’t have to spring from religion; goodness reflects on God no matter what we believe, because God is goodness Himself. The job is simple because it comes naturally to us. We are our own reward system. Of course there are objects pulling us the other way, but while they may provide happiness, they don’t provide safety and contentment. And there are always the spoilers, who seem to thrive on evil, yet who can say how they are inside?

But global goodness doesn’t take global government – that would be sure to polarize people because government is about power, and only one power can reign supreme, leaving lesser powers resentful. It takes individuals working on a local scale with what they know and the means to advertise it.

It’s absolutely amazing how our lives intertwine and intersect, though we be total strangers. Now with the availability of instant communication worldwide via the internet it’s infinitely more possible to have an effect on someone without even knowing it. Interestingly, the probability of this being a polarizing factor is just as likely as it being something that brings us together. But the point is – it’s getting harder and harder to deny that, living under the same sun, we may have a lot more in common than the ten o’clock news might imply. We are not as diverse as we think because in God’s eyes we are all the same — everything!

Our differences can’t cancel out our overriding essence – we are all spiritual beings lost in a world of matter. Any differences we have are superficial, because only the spirit matters in the great scheme of things. Our one job is to care for our spirits and encourage, whether actively or passively, others to care for theirs. If left alone we do this naturally, because all spirits are the same and we know others’ exactly as well as we know ours. The difference is only in the degree of the grace we allow to pervade our spirits. It’s the goodness of God that wishes to live in us, and the joy we receive from His presence (our spirits are lifted) makes us tend to want to cooperate in this plan.

But we are spirits in a material world, and there is happiness to be had. Material happiness is not evil, but what it does is prevent the spirit from being filled with God through the neglect that comes from our preoccupation with worldly things. The body is the tool that moves us through the world. The mind is the lever that makes the body go. The soul is the emotion that directs the mind toward which levers to pull. All this for not only survival, but for happiness.

None of this though is the essence of what we really are – that is the spirit. The spirit is the container for however much of God we are willing to invite. In the end it is what of us survives for eternity. If it is full of God we have joy; if it isn’t, we have longing for God. The filling of the spirit with God takes place now and continues until perfection is reached. Allow God in, and seeing as God seeks all spirits, encourage others to allow God in. Make God more important to you and the effects of this will spill over to the lives of others as well.

11/28/09 Reflections          What’s missing in the world isn’t love, for each and every one of us is loved so immeasurably that we cannot even absorb the concept. But that’s what’s missing – our ability to recognize the immensity of God’s love for us, and our ability to expand the scope of our intellect enough to desire to experience God more than we have.

Today is a special day for me – the anniversary of the moment when God took hold of my mind, my imagination, and my ego and showed me how little I’ve been settling for. He chose me and I accepted. He chooses many, and many accept. If they’re like me, they enjoy a flurry of supernatural favors, causing them to experience extreme joy and contentment. Then just when they grow to expect joy, they’re handed complete letdown.

We are fortunate that there have been those who have gone before us and left accounts, as accurately as they might be in explaining the unexplainable, of how it feels. And I’ve been particularly fortunate in that I’ve had the means to teach myself the theology behind God’s personal involvement in my life. Because of this, I have an understanding of why we must suffer after having a taste of deep spiritual knowledge and grace. And I know that the suffering of perceived estrangement from God is followed by, not the initial ecstasy, but something more stable and more sustainable. It’s the continual awareness of the awesome presence of God and the certitude that this is but a small taste of a banquet yet to come.

11/22/09 Insights from Study              The way the world destroyed Jesus is the way it tries to destroy those who avail themselves of Jesus’ blessings. There are those who think of this life as all there is and because of that they live only for worldly desires. These people despise the thought of the real life to come, because they assume preparing for it would mean giving up their Earthly ways.

When they encounter someone who ascribes to a higher plane of spirituality there is resentment and a need to test this focus. There are many forms of persecution, and the more secular the society, the more extreme the justification for the persecution.

Buy my spirituality cannot be realized by anyone other than me and God. It cannot be measured in worldly increments and cannot be tested against worldly standards. You can kill me to prove that God will not save me, but God might not have worldly purposes in mind when He saves. The realm of reality to which I go is not a place where you can follow me, and so you’ll never know the results of your test.

It was not the death of Jesus that enlightens us to God’s design so much as His resurrection. If you do not see beyond this world, you cannot reasonably test someone who does; you will not recognize the promise of the resurrection unless you yourself experience it. Your persecution of the spiritually-minded will be counter-productive because it only validates the righteousness of those you persecute.

11/15/09 Inspirations           Spirituality attends to the “rightness” of the way we are when we are wrapped up in God. Religion tells us we please God by following the rules of “rightness”.

This example of the difference came to me: A spiritual woman was so immersed in the things of God that she was seldom moved to look at herself in a mirror and didn’t feel that putting on makeup was important to her. So without giving it much thought, she didn’t wear makeup.

A religious woman was taught all her life that wearing makeup is a sign of wantonness and self-adoration, so she didn’t wear makeup because she believed to do so was to sin against God.

Both women were of a mind to do the right thing, but this “goodness” in the spiritual woman was an effect of abandonment of self to God while this same “goodness” in the religious woman was reached by adherence to law.

If you are waiting for me to tell you the spiritual woman’s way was more pure than the religious woman’s way, you need to hear about the third woman in my example. This woman belonged to a religion that didn’t put forward any tenet at all on the wearing of makeup, but the only time she wore makeup was at church. Why? Her thought was that all week long she sweated and toiled for the sake of keeping body and soul together. On Sunday she was going to church to worship her Creator and wanted to make herself look and feel special for the occasion.

And I don’t know for sure, but it seems logical that there are places in the world where a person doesn’t feel they’ve honored God properly if the ritual didn’t include full body makeup.

We really confuse ourselves when we allow ourselves to judge “goodness”, especially when we move beyond self-examination and into the realm of judging others. That’s precisely why I do believe in the purity of motive that comes with spirituality, even if religious and plain old secular “goodness” is fine as well. It’s because in spirituality we immerse ourselves in God first and exude goodness because we’ve taken on His attributes. We are good because God is good; not because God has given us rules to follow and we’ve followed them.

The less self-interest there is – when our own goodness surprises us – the more evident that we treat goodness as a gift from God instead of as a reason to be rewarded for our own work.

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..

9/30/09 Insights from Study             The more we think on God’s works, the more apparent it becomes that God does not act in the way human beings think to be logical. When we accept that this is so, we understand that what we don’t know about God’s ways would fill a much thicker book than the one about what we do know of God. God is mystical to us even though there are hints and clues, and the more these hints and clues become available, the deeper we seek. It’s between each of us and God what we are able to learn of Him, and this process has never ended.

It’s like digging a hole in rocky ground – each rock you discover reveals another beneath it that, when you remove and examine it, exposes yet another rock. You will never get to the bottom of the hole, but the more you dig, the more you come to understand this. You become gratefully content that there is much you can’t do, and get on with the business of enjoying what you can.

We say we get to know God, but we really mean we reserve for God the honor of the wisdom He has chosen to give us. It doesn’t bother us at all that there’s so much we can’t measure, considering what we have been given to know. Our unknowing only brings God more glory in our eyes, and affords us a great opportunity to trust God in the faith of His goodness. He knows exactly what to reveal and what is not good for us to know; we are blessed to be treated individually and perfectly.

9/16/09 Insights from Study          Why don’t we seek virtues as relentlessly as we seek worldly possessions? Because we don’t understand that the goal of life is love of God; not love of ourselves.

How different the world would be if patience was diamonds and compassion was gold; if we could amass love like money and spend it freely by giving it away. If we went to work each day to make a right-relationship with God instead of a wage. If we could go around dripping with inner peace instead of pearls. If a nation’s main export was prayer instead of cars, and each night we’d all go home and get drunk on the grace of God. If schools taught holiness, if humility was cool, if witness of God’s favors made up the number-one rated TV show. If awards were given out for small but steady acts of kindness instead of foul-mouthed bitterness. If obedience to our Creator was our constitution and everyone followed it in delight. If we could walk our streets in perfect safety because everyone was pushing love of God and there’s always plenty of that to go around.

Utopia has nothing to do with economics or politics or entertainment; it’s about spirit – the state of our relationship with our Creator. Many don’t even know there’s such a relationship possible because they haven’t asked or don’t feel worthy or they have been taught there’s no such thing. What riches we’ve passed by, what favors we’ve refused, what joy we’ve missed, what gifts we’ve left unopened because we’re too busy pleasing ourselves to recognize real goodness when it’s offered.

The kingdom of God is the real Utopia; we will claim it in heaven when our trials here are done. But if spiritual virtues are good enough for everlasting heaven, shouldn’t they be honored as well in this short-lived world? We all have spirituality and it can be cultivated. The seeds are there in every spirit. But it’s God who does the growing, and God loves to be asked to begin. That is when spiritual virtues arrive, and they are supremely precious.

8/20/09 Reflections              We’re so arrogant to think that just because we can’t understand a thing, that thing cannot be. Those who don’t know, or refuse to acknowledge, God’s master plan, cannot see beyond Earthly death, so they assume there’s nothing. Always we look at things with the imperfect eye of humanity, but because that’s all we know, we think there’s nothing else to know.

God is waiting for us with a life of perfect peace and joy. He isn’t offended when we don’t come to Him to claim it and then blame Him for the painful consequences of our inactions. He keeps it offered and he hopes for our acceptance, because that’s what’s good for us and what’s good for us is what God wants for us.

But we are afraid of faith the more science takes over our interests. We turn to science and away from spirituality when we need to satisfy ourselves that humans are in control. In the matter of death, we know we are not in control, but we place our hope in science to one day discover the fountain of youth. We would like science to discover a way for us to live forever. We hope for human control because we don’t understand divine manifestation.

Even if human control over death were possible, I would definitely want to opt out. Why would I want eternity on Earth when eternity in heaven is already offered?

7/31/09 Reflections                  Science is wonderful; we owe so much to those who postulate, then research and prove along those lines. Through science we’ve consistently achieved a higher standard of living for everyone, and with new computer technologies the pace of discovery has quickened.

What we need to guard against is junk science – postulating and then manipulating technology to agree with the supposition the scientist wants to prove. As wonderful as the new technologies are for the scientific method, they also provide a false model when in the hands of someone with a personal agenda to forward. Science is no different than any other discipline; it must be true to itself in order to be valid, and we trust the scientist only so far as his methods are ethical.

The same standard applies to spirituality, no less because it’s an inexact process dependent on individual effect. The fact that it’s an individual acquisition makes it imperative that it be proven to the satisfaction of that individual. Only our inner virtues and spiritual peace prove what we suspect of the Creator. But spirituality can be pursued sloppily – we may think we’re communicating with God and purifying our spirits through virtue, but upon further introspection we find we may be fooling ourselves. That doesn’t mean that spiritual pursuit is folly; it means that when God’s presence is received properly we expect to accept God’s instruction through a faith that is studied and reasonable.

Science and spirituality are both research disciplines – it’s the way of measurement and study that is different, and the fact that in spirituality the search and the learning doesn’t end. For all the good that science does us, it can only be applied to the temporal universe. If that’s all you believe in, then science can suffice. But of all the things science can achieve, it cannot answer the end question — “Why?” When all the measurements are taken and theories proven, the very purpose of the existence of the subjects of scientific exploration, the universe and its inhabitants, cannot be discovered by scientific method. It cannot be discovered by spiritual pursuit either, but it can be glimpsed. This flicker of knowledge can develop faith, and faith itself generates more grace and more divine knowledge.

This knowledge of the Creator and His will can be just as true and clear to the individual as the answer to a math problem. But if this grace hasn’t happened to you, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened to someone else. It’s viable and useful to someone, and secular sneering born of the “Prove it!” school of reality can’t take that away.

Science and spirituality are not looking for the same thing – naturally the results will be foreign to each other. They are not speaking the same language or starting with the same hypothesis. They are not studying the same curriculum or aiming for the same goals. But both are extremely important. To demean one and revere the other is to rob oneself of the full range of the pursuit of knowledge.

7/26/09 Insights from Prayer       We do so much that God has never required of us, and we avoid what little He does ask.

Think about the people you know – does anyone live for the love of God? Sure, they may busy themselves with holy works, but I often wonder if we should analyze what we can do for others and re-assess the importance of what we can do for our own spirituality. One thing is better-handled by God; the other is one of the few things God sets aside for our participation.

We need to get this right, because from it wondrous miracles of opportunity grow. We are taught to think of others before ourselves, and we have an innate knowledge that self-regard can lead us away from God. But wrong too is neglect of our own spirituality, because that is the engine that powers our good works.

We must be right with God before we can bring others to this state. It’s God’s spirit that does the work, but God allows us to participate by maintaining the proper attitude. In this way we work in conjunction with the Creator, building up divine perceptions and keeping our spirits pure and receptive. We need to stop for a while to refresh this relationship if we want to best hold our experiences up as a good example. In this instance self-regard is a benefit instead of a weakness.