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.

1/5/10 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.

12/21/09 Reflections              I seldom watch TV but yesterday evening I wanted to watch while I had my dinner. I flipped through the channels, trying to avoid politics, and came upon a “Caught on Camera” episode that disturbed me deep down inside – even more than politics would have.

A Polish man immigrating to Canada arrived at Vancouver airport. Speaking no English or French, thoroughly confused, and eventually frustrated, he spent nine hours in the airport trying to get on the right track. His mother, who came to meet him, was told he wasn’t on any flights and she had gone home to wait for word. Finally, frustrated and disturbed, the Polish man started acting aggressively. The airport authorities tasered him and tackled him to the floor; somehow in the scuffle the man died, and his mother had to be told. It was horrible to watch.

This is the kind of thing that tests my faith. I understand about suffering, but I’m too human to not be saddened by something that to me didn’t need to happen. In my prayers last night I confronted God: “Now look – nobody was wrong and nobody was 100% right. But it was Your will and everything had to come together just so for this to happen. He was looking forward to a new life here, and ended up dead and disgraced in public. What gives?” And God answered me plain as day: “Why do you assume this man’s continued life on Earth is preferable to his life of glory with Me? He is home now – no longer fearful, disturbed, confused, or frustrated. And yes, it is My will. So what do you plan to learn from it?”

I don’t consider myself a slouch when it comes to learning from God; this is, after all, my life’s focus. But I guess I’ll never understand some lessons perfectly, because I post this in heartache for this poor man’s memory, even though the incident itself and God’s insight about it proves to me that he is in a better place than I am.

12/20/09 Spiritual Presentations             

Last night I shut off the light and settled down under the covers to pray. It was zero degrees, making the ice boom like cannons – a nice sound, like thunder without the fear of lightning. The stars were many and beautiful; as always they remind me of the immensity of the universe, and that always makes me wonder about God’s works.

I was thinking about the fall of man, away from perfection and exiled here, where the ugliness of life stands side by side with the beauty of nature. The only way God, who doesn’t create evil, would allow us to exist this far away from Him is if the agony of this life is somehow a good thing. To me, this life is an illusion anyway; maybe the evil inherent in it is even more than an illusion. Maybe the illusion that is our suffering here exists to bring us greater joy. Did you ever look back on a bad time in your life with that curious relief that comes from realizing that life is better because the bad time is over? Did you ever have pain that was almost worth it because of the relief it brought you when it went away? Maybe that is the reason for our worldly existence – to make the transition back to reality even more wonderful than if we had never left. Maybe God gets something from this on our behalf. Whatever insight I was poised to get, I never got any further than this in this reflection.

I was about two minutes into my thoughts when I heard a soft, swishing sound come out of nowhere. I sat up in bed and listened but there was nothing but the sound I couldn’t identify. So I got out of bed and went over to where the sound seemed to be coming. That’s when I realized that during my meditation, for no reason at all, my old radio had started to play even though it was turned off.

It hadn’t been tuned to a valid station – what I heard during my meditation was white noise coming from a dead radio. Happening when it did was like God acknowledging that I was finally understanding something that He wanted me to understand. I fiddled with the power switch to see if there was a short in it, but the switch was working perfectly. Once I started messing with the dials, the radio no longer played when the switch was off, but that’s without a doubt the way it was when I heard it. It’s been over nineteen hours and the radio hasn’t repeated it’s unasked-for performance, and the switch is still working properly.  I can’t duplicate the miracle.

I still need more inspiration on the initial thought that set off the radio. I will put myself in front of God and I’ll reflect on this with patience, and eventually I will have more insight on it if that’s God’s will. But for now the important thing is to stress that God does give us signs to encourage us to come to Him for enlightenment. Some signs are less subtle than others, but we should be amazed at everything anyway. Our first thought when given a sign should be to go before God and thank Him for His wisdom instilled in us, and to pray that we will use this wisdom wisely.

“Dear Lord, I am so small, but it’s OK, because I belong to a great God who can do anything to show His love for me.”

All mysticism does is bring you before God – God will inspire you as to what to believe, and it will be right because it’s God’s work. While we do not ask for signs, it’s a valuable gift to be able to receive them.

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.

10/8/09 Inspirations             It’s come to me to understand that life on Earth is life away from God – living hell; the imperfect state that exists outside of heaven, which is in contrast the perfect state of being with God in His full glory. This Earthly state of being is all we can now perceive, and so we naturally tend to perceive it faultily. When we are able at death to let loose of this illusion, we will have in heaven the perfect perception of reality. Only then will we witness for ourselves that God is indeed perfect goodness; His will is always and only for goodness.

There is no suffering in the Creator’s desires, and therefore none in reality. But we certainly see it here in our disillusionment, and it certainly feels real. What then is God’s place in our Earthly nightmare? His place is to allow us to exercise our free will, yet guide us toward His desires — that is, the rightness and goodness that is the reality we can’t now fully experience on our own.

Though God guides, He never insists that we decide against our own free will. What He will do, and what He does very well, is gift us with the grace to want our free will to match up with His as much as possible.

For each of us who decides for God, there is no lack of those who decide against Him, using free will in ways that don’t glorify the Creator. This is not the same thing as God creating suffering – suffering is illusion created by our demand for autonomy and exercise of free will.  Our demand for a right to sin makes it necessary for us to live in a sin-filled world; there’s no sense in blaming God for the consequences of our seeking to be free from Him.

We choose between evil and good. If we choose good it’s because we are attracted to God’s desire to reclaim us. If we choose evil it’s because we reject God’s desires. We are in control of our free will, but in no way can we change reality through what we do; all we can do is affect this illusion apart from reality – this imperfect state of being we live in. But once we exercise free will, God can use our decision to affect His push toward goodness. This doesn’t mean God uses some of us as instruments of good and some as instruments of evil. It means we decide which role to play and consequently God uses that to fit His own purposes.

As one example: Every time the need to control power makes a war break out, it causes people to flee for safety. Every time there’s a gathering of refugees, there’s an opportunity for others to help bring God to the forefront of their lives.  The warmonger and the helper are what they are not through God’s wishes but through their own free wills. What God does is use the circumstances of their decisions in ways known only to Him and those with whom He wants to share this knowledge.

9/20/09 Insights from Prayer          Lord, all I ask is that I do Your will in whatever form that takes. It doesn’t matter if that involves my pain – I can take any pain You give me because I know it’s for my good. But I’m human, and being human has sadness, and human sadness persists no matter how accepting I am.

So You know of the times when I can’t persevere; when I can’t live up to my sincerest desire to follow You without question. I know You’ll remain pleased with my desire to do Your will with gladness even if I fall short of perfection. It is the desire that pleases You. How well You know my limitations; that they don’t take a thing away from how You appreciate my abandonment of self.

What could I fear, if all is in the hands of my Creator? It’s when I fall short of perfect abandonment of my will in favor of Yours, dear God, that I’m in danger. That’s when I count on myself instead of on the Almighty. I never fear the loss of self-regard, because it means I have Your perfect help. What I fear is when I forget my fate is in Your hands and I take on something I can’t handle myself.

So help me make my desire more perfect; to accept with a smile the trials You must use toward this end. I want to be humble enough to invite You in without question and to say with all sincerity that whatever You present to me is good. I want to live so that no matter how I in my humanity perceive it, Your plan for me goes on good and glorious. Then I have no worry since, whatever comes, I’m fine with it.

8/17/09 Spiritual Presentations             

Thank You, Lord, for answering my prayer and totally taking away from me that agonizing pain. Some would say that my tooth would have eventually stopped hurting even without Your intervention. But You and I know that nothing had happened, except Your loving grace and my prayer to You, that could have severed that exposed nerve from reaching the pain receptors in my brain.

Isn’t that a lot like the mystic idea of perception of reality? Reality is not always what we perceive, like pain, because we do not perceive perfectly, and reality, being reality, is perfection. You, Lord, and Your will for our good, is what reality is, and You have prepared for us a place with no pain and no heartache; free from fear or worry.

You give us glimpses of this perfection to inspire hope in us. We cannot fully experience Your perfection while we go through our trial of Earthly life, but this faulty perception can clear up in small ways if we ask for this in sincere, honoring, prayer to You. And each time perception is cleared up for us through prayer, we release a little more of our doubt and fill the void it leaves with hope.

Prayer leads to hope – this is why mystics communicate with God. Yes, we can receive what we ask for but, more importantly, we receive validation for our hope in eternal life and the part God plays in this Earthly one.

7/20/09 Reflections         There are two types of people who ask “Why does God cause the world so much suffering?” — the ones who use the question to prove there’s no God or that God isn’t good, and the ones who really want to know.

Have you ever looked around you and wondered what the world would look like if it were truly God-forsaken? I think of the description of beautiful Venus – a maelstrom of noxious gases. God did not choose Venus for us. He made Earth – He made it just what we needed, and He tailored us to need just what Earth had. And He continues to do so, for His reasons do not change and His powers of creation are greater than our powers to consume.

God did not make life on Earth perfect – He made it what we need. Perfection is the heaven He made for us, which we reject and cannot yet claim. Imperfection is the Earth we earn. And as imperfect as it is, the fact that we get along on it as well as we do is evidence of the Creator and His great love.

Why does He allow pain and suffering? Maybe it’s to teach you what life would be like if God were not lovingly looking out for you. Instead of asking this question, maybe we ought to reflect on the tornado that did not carry us away, the car that did not hit ours head-on, the rain that fell on crops that grew to feed us, the inspiration that produced the vaccine that saved us, the awesome water-cycle that provides us life itself, the babies that are not born malformed, the asteroid that did not collide with Earth.

The list of God’s goodness goes on forever. Every single particle of creation resides in the mind of God, and having created everything, He is in a good position to know what’s best for His purposes. What business is it of ours why God allows suffering? Our job is to accept His decisions with faith. We did not create the universe and we do not order it; is it too much for us to accept the judgment of the one who was able to do so?

We need to review our actions and weaknesses, and then reflect on the love and mercy we have been shown despite what we deserve. Then it might be good to shut off the TV and tune out the bubbleheads that get what they want from us (be it votes, ratings, fame, or money) by persuading us that all is in great crisis. No, all is going according to the plan God made to gather us back into His arms. Think about the God who never created a thing He did not love, who watches over us and disciplines us when we put ourselves in danger, who teaches us through experience what we need to know in order to get back to Him, and who reserves a place for each of us, known to Him personally in His aching heart, in the perfection of life in full union with Him for eternity.

God knows what He’s doing; it’s just that He doesn’t deem it good for us to fully understand how it’s done. This we should praise and not question.