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.

11/25/09 Insights from Prayer           What greater honor could I show to my Creator than to give Him my full attention? He made me perfectly, He watches over me in my trials, and He lives with me on a higher plane, which I will again understand fully when time is over for me. He gives me His full attention and His full capacity for love, and that is a great deal of attention and love indeed. My contribution is to love and honor Him with the most of what I have to give.

This gets harder and harder as my society turns its back on God, and the culture I live under no longer resembles anything I care for. But I am full of faith and willing for God to be my government no matter who it offends. I love the allegory of the Hound of Heaven because it reminds me that no one can unbelieve the truth out of reality; no one can change truth by their opinion, or make reality disappear by willing it so.

We have an innate drive to connect with our Creator. The more others deny Him, the more we seek Him. The more we allow Him in, the better we are at it. The more others try to suppress our devotion, the greater our need to seek God.  And the more our detractors succeed in their persecution, all the more consumed we are in carrying on our worship of God from within our spirit – that secret place where only God and His child can go.

There we are not judged, but simply loved. There we finally find what we need, and our persecutors become God’s means for our joy and contentment. Therefore, love your enemy – he brings you closer to God as part of God’s design. And if he is your enemy because of your spirituality, he is an even greater blessing. Much as some hate the thought of it, there is no way anyone can stop me from praying for them, as the beauty of prayer lies in its unobtrusiveness. You can’t see me praying for you, but I wonder – can you feel the Hound of Heaven closing in behind you?

11/9/09 Inspirations           God has everything. But there is one thing to have that is meaningless if not received from someone else. God would like to be loved. That is why He created us in His image – with free wills so that we can voluntarily love Him. For what good is love if it is mandated instead of freely given? Even if you’re God, love has to be received to be meaningful.

Here on Earth, the distortion of reality is the result of free wills used for other purposes than to honor God. But that makes the love potential all that much more significant, because our love for God can come through above human weakness and human suffering, without which there would be nothing for love to overcome.

When we come out of this coma of life on Earth and enter the reality of heaven, we will love and honor God without question, as divine beings. But here and now, love for God does not come so easily; here our humanity takes hold of us and demands all we’ve got. How specially it must please God then, when we freely volunteer to love Him despite the strikes against it! This is love in the extreme; valuable because it comes from self-willed creations who can and, indeed, are of a nature to withhold it.

To mystics then, this is the greatest privilege and the focus of life itself – to honor God by loving Him. Despite all it might take to get to that point, the commission is simple — all we do is honor our Creator by loving Him. Rites and groupings and dogmas and scriptures are redundant, because we know how to love God without all these things. To love God is, after all, what we were created for.

In this we embark on a journey that will not fail, for the moment we decide for God, all His power and knowledge is at our disposal in the measure that we allow ourselves to ask for it and to put it to use. And one spark of love sent to God is returned in a totality we can’t even grasp, but know in our hearts is how reality will feel when we reach it at last.

10/17/09 Insights from Study             Asking God for something is the simplest and purest form of worship there is. The more you do it, the more convinced you will be that this is what is most pleasing to God. Forget about the human hesitation that asking is self-centered. To ask something of God is a selfless act because you are being humble in your petition; admitting that you need God to provide. From this base a mountain of trust can arise.

Don’t think that in choosing what to pray for you are dictating to God which road He should take. These things never enter into the mind of God. It’s enough for Him that you have a need and you recognize that it is He who must fill it.

Goodness will come from prayers of petition, even if it’s nothing other than the warm feeling of doing your best in what God has asked of you. Prayer is never useless. The more you pray the more you understand of the One to Whom you are praying. It’s your need, and God’s willingness to provide for you, that brings you closest to union with the Divine. But don’t be surprised if human-minded miracles do occur anyway.

7/6/09 Insights from Study            We are all equal in the mind of God because all God cares about is that we give Him glory and praise; this can be done by anyone and everyone, anywhere and everywhere with no other requirement. And where you are lacking in this, God helps you along no matter what you do or have, so that His desire will be met and His kingdom inhabited by all His creatures. Therefore you will enter eternity as equal to all others no matter what has taken place in your life on Earth.

Why be good then? Why worry about morality and justice and charity and the sharing of God’s attributes? Because these things bring satisfaction and peace to you in the here and now in ways that God gives you, in His wisdom. Any glory we give to God comes back to us – that is the point of what He does; He Who would need nothing from us otherwise.

The glory we give to God comes back to us as individuals and also as members of the human race, who all benefit from the praise others of our kind have sent God’s way. All human goodness comes about through the auspices of God the Creator, Who allows us to co-create with Him by offering others that same goodness by our dedication to God. God sees us collectively as all humanity – that’s why we are punished together on Earth and promised together eternal heaven. Our instructions come to us as individuals; our compliance benefits humanity as one entity.

If this cycle of glory was all there was in the world, it would be sufficient. All else is added complication which more often than not tends to interfere with the basic duty of man – to love God by setting all else aside. It’s why we are equal in our quest – there is nothing involved but our willingness. No one has an advantage over another; nor is anyone disadvantaged in honoring God’s request.

As we move about the Earth let’s keep in mind that God has promised Himself to us with a small but sincere effort on our part. That’s why we need give only little heed to what we eat or wear, since God provides what we need and what He doesn’t provide we don’t need. But we also ought to remember that the small thing God asks of us can wind up being denied to Him if in our human pride we busy ourselves with tasks we think He ought to require of us. We believe God asks too little of us and we come up with ways to improve on His demands. It’s a common stumbling block, destined to upset the cycle of glory. We get back on the right track by going back to cultivating our relationship with God first and foremost; if there is more we can do He will tell us, and it will be for our benefit. As for God, His request of us is not diminished by its simplicity.

6/26/09 Insights from Study                So often we worship Jesus as man instead of God. Son of God? In the kingdom of reality there are no fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, spouses, cousins, aunts or uncles. All are of one mind and that is the mind of God. Jesus is God – plain and simple. God comes to us in any form He chooses; as a hummingbird like the one this morning looking through my screen, or as Jesus 2000 years ago. It is God, coming to interact with us out of love, out of His care for us, out of His desire to usher us peacefully into His kingdom, purified by death to this world. The father/son thing – it’s an analogy anyone who has a relationship with God does not really understand because the fact that Jesus is God is so ingrained in them. It’s a prop for people still so obsessed with life in this world that they must gauge everything by human standards.

Religion is ruined for me because of its labels – once we label something we claim to know it to the point where we can judge it. Who cares about human constructs, human likes and dislikes, human judgments and condemnations, human laws and legislatures, human wants and needs, human sins and weaknesses and failings and misunderstandings? God cares for none of this so much as for even the most sinful of us. He could eliminate any of this or any of us all in the wink of an eye. God cares for each of us alone as a beloved creation – beyond that we are not labeled, because beyond that there is nothing of importance.

If only we treated God as faithfully – to know what He’s saying to us as much as we can and loyally assuming the rest as something God does to our benefit. Then labels wouldn’t be needed to prop up our love for God because God’s love will come through loud and clear. It’s not a formula devised by humans to prove you are saved — it’s a connection desired by God and put into force in you by His wishes. It’s this relationship you must claim in order to experience the fullest joy you can obtain, and when you make it all there is in your life, you are as complete as you can be.

6/21/09 Insights from Prayer           How do I worship God? I worship Him when I praise Him; that is all He needs to channel His grace to me. How do I praise Him?

I praise Him when I count to ten before speaking out in anger. I praise Him when I defend someone who is the victim of gossip. He must smile when I put a dollar in a beggar’s cup, look longingly at His rainbow, swim in the ocean and think of His mightiness, buy a gift, lie in bed sick and pray for recovery, read a book to a child, plant grass seed. All these things are praise to God if I am willing to live in His presence by doing His will.

There’s something in the Bible that makes me cringe every time I read of it. In Revelation there are these 24 elders, and when something momentous happens the 24 elders immediately fall down before the throne and worship. Right or wrong, whatever it is in the makeup of western society, when we see people fall down in worship, we instantly think “brainwashed, cultists with no independent thoughts.” But because it’s in the Bible, our churches need to ritualize worship some way similar without making the general populace feel uncomfortable.

No wonder secularism is taking over the West. No matter how we spin it, worship of God is linked in our minds with human degradation. Maybe we’ve watched too many Hollywood renditions of third-world ritualism – worship by ritual begins to seem faintly backward. We don’t like to think of ourselves as inferior beings with sinful natures. To heighten our sense of atonement, churches emphasize our sinful nature, but they stop short of making us fall prostrate before a throne. We won’t do it – it seems phony. Before too long it may all seem phony – bowing our heads, folding our hands in prayer, being on our knees after the age of eight, carrying around a Bible, discussing our religious thoughts, uttering God’s name outside of profanity, attending church, going to confession.

I’m not making a judgment call — if you are comfortable doing these things you have found your path. I’m merely stating that spiritual persons that don’tfeel comfortable doing these things are no less spiritual for that. They in fact have an advantage because the privateness of their worship underscores the individual nature of a right-relationship with God; one that does not need to be showcased and therefore is open to genuineness. Behind the closed door of your spirit you are free to be as humble and obedient as you feel.

I wouldn’t argue with the objection that a true believer ought to be willing to go outside of their comfort zone if required. I’m just skeptical of how often God requires this and to what extent does it go on before it becomes ego-driven. I do not and never will, unless told to directly by God, believe that evangelizing others into Christianity is a requirement for entry into heaven, yet I would do it whenever inspired to by God’s Holy Spirit.

The point of it all is that once I am blessed to enter into a right-relationship with God, I am able to discern His will and would have His help in carrying it out.  I don’t need anything else, and God does not need anything else from me. Living the presence of God, I will do what He asks, and nothing He asks will feel degrading or uncomfortable no matter how it seems to others.  In His wisdom God may test me, change my mind, or lead me in ways I don’t understand or would rather not go. At least my praise will be genuine, my worship appropriate, and my works God-directed; all because instead of following a church I am following God’s design for me as an individual. To those who say: How can you be sure? I answer: If God is capable of leading me astray when I humbly ask for His guidance, then all believers are hopelessly deceived and we should all settle for secularism.

All faith is based on divine inspiration, and the moment this seems to stop is the moment we realize our worship and praise has not been sincere enough for God’s grace to attend to us. We need to go back to the basics – the point where it’s just God and me enjoying each other’s presence and straightening things out between us. This presence is what makes me praise God, and my praise is the worship He seeks.