CC48: The Crucifixion and Resurrection

Today is Second Advent, so this seems like a good time to talk about miracles.

You'd think that, with all my talk about science and brain chemistry, I'd be the sort of person who would reject the reality of miracles. Because practical people who believe in science are sort of obligated to reject the reality of miracles. Aren't they?

"When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, 'Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?' When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, 'Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been healed; he is not here. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.' So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid" (Mark 16: 1-8). Sunset, October 2014: I captured this dazzling ray effect close to my home when my angels unexpectedly told me to pick up my camera, get in my car, and go! Photo credit JAT 2014.

Most United Church of Canada members seem to think so. They're squeamish about the idea that the soul exists as a scientific reality. Same thing with miracles. Officially, they won't talk about miracles. Off the record, some United Church members will confide they believe in unexplainable, God-given events. But when they talk about miracles, they speak awkwardly and self-consciously -- the same way people react when they're invited to sit at a formal dinner table where there are three different forks on the left and three different knives on the right, plus a whole bunch of spoons, and they don't know which utensils they're supposed to use first. So they spend most of their time trying to watch the other guests to see which fork they should use when. They're so busy paying attention to their feelings of embarrassment and discomfort that they can't enjoy themselves. The whole situation is stressful rather than enjoyable.

I'd like to be able to say that United Church members have gone on the defensive about miracles because of repeated attacks from atheistic scientists such as Richard Dawkins. But it's not that simple. United Church members are on the defensive because they've been repeatedly bullied by "progressive" Christian theologians (e.g. Rudolf Bultmann) who have loudly proclaimed that the miracles performed by Jesus in the Gospels couldn't possibly have happened.

In the view of Bultmann and others, no sensible Christian should believe in these miracles because to believe in miracles is to reject science. These theologians recommend that Christians read the miracle stories . . . symbolically. 

Symbolically. My favourite word (grrrr).

These same theologians call into question the reality of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. They insist we should understand the Resurrection metaphorically rather than literally. In their view, the Resurrection couldn't possibly have happened for real. Naturally, this makes it easier to believe that Jesus himself wasn't real, either, but instead was an invented religious symbol.

I think they've got it all backwards. They've started with the assumption that miracles aren't scientifically possible (an assumption that's not scientifically valid), and on the basis of this assumption they've concluded that the miracle stories (especially those in the Gospel of Mark) must have been invented by gullible, superstitious, scientifically uneducated 1st century authors who didn't know any better. Or maybe by authors who were just following a popular ancient trend of inserting invented miracle stories into their biographical narratives. (The fact that many of today's Christian televangelists are still inventing new miracle stories to dupe the public should remind us not to make blanket statements about the motives of all ancient writers.)

Queen's University history professor Dr. Jacalyn Duffin, who is both a practising hematologist and a professor in the history of medicine (a modern day physician scholar, as it were), has recently published a book* about the history of canonization and attested healing miracles in the Roman Catholic Church. She sums up medical miracles in this way: "The doctor is surprised."

The doctor is surprised. The doctor is surprised that, on the basis of current scientific understandings of the disease process, the patient somehow manages to fully recover despite all scientific predictions of imminent death.

I would suggest that when the doctor is surprised, it can mean one of two things: (1) the doctor was wrong from the beginning about the diagnosis or (2) the doctor isn't as smart as she thinks she is about the disease process, quantum biology, healing, and God.

Usually it's the latter.

The Resurrection as described in the Gospel of Mark is very sparse on details. (I agree with biblical scholars who suggest that the book originally ended at Mark 16:8, not at Mark 16:20). All we really know for sure is that Jesus was crucified, was declared dead, was taken down from the cross, hastily placed in a tomb, and somehow managed to disappear from said tomb. Mark's account leaves a lot of scientific wiggle room for a doctor to be surprised.

It's a powerful symbol, the cross that Jesus hung upon. (It's okay for symbols such as crosses or a stars to be symbols; it's just not okay for historical facts to be treated as symbols instead of as facts.) The story of the cross has something important to say to us, even today, because it's still a story where the doctors are surprised and we, the regular people of faith, are filled with awe.

For me, the miracle in this story is not that a man died and was raised from the dead. (I don't think that's scientifically possible.) For me, the miracle is that the man didn't die in the first place.

How did Jesus son of Joseph escape death on the cross? That is the miracle in question.

It's a much bigger question than Paul's Christ myth asks. Paul's Christ myth asks you to believe with blind faith that a human man fully died but was fully returned to life after three days because he was divine -- the chosen son of God. He furthers asks you to believe with blind faith that if you fully accept Paul's teachings about Judgment Day, then you, too, will be resurrected on that day. Sin is the enemy and death is its consequence. The great question for Paul is, "How can I escape death?"
 
The Jesus reality (as told by Mark) asks a different question. The Jesus reality urges you to ask new questions about God. The Jesus reality tells a powerful story about the relationship between God and God's children, and asks you to not rely on blind faith, but to use your common sense, your senses, and your heart.

The Jesus reality is a powerful story about the kinds of things that are possible in God's Creation when human beings walk side by side and hand in hand with Mother Father God.

It's a story about courage. And trust. And humbleness. It's a story about God's free will and our own. It's a story about miraculous (though still scientific) healing. And it's a story about grief.

One of the things we can be certain of when we read Mark is that Jesus is not trying to escape death. Jesus has no fear of dying. He tells his disciples he's going to die, but then he gets on with his life of service as a teacher and healer. He ignores all the Jewish purity laws around disease and death. He puts himself in harm's way by going to Jerusalem. His Last Supper is not a last supper but a first supper, where he rejects the Passover ritual of eating unleavened bread by choosing instead to drink water and to eat risen bread. He breaks all the laws designed to protect the pious from death. His message is not about escaping death. His message is about embracing courage and trust and gratitude and devotion in our relationships with each other and with God.
 
The Jesus reality is Mark's way of saying that death is part of human life, and no one -- not even a gifted physician scholar filled with learning and love -- can fight this reality. Jesus had to die because he was a creature of Earth, and all creatures of Earth will one day die. It's meant to be this way. It's part of the fabric of Creation. It's painful and emotionally overwhelming for us to lose someone we love, but it's the way it has to be. Our lives here are only temporary. When it's time for us to go Home to our eternal reality, God the Mother and God the Father (both of whom are brilliant scientists and brilliant healers), come and gently lift us out of our mortal body and tenderly carry us Home. There we're reunited with our loved ones, and our hearts break open to pour out all the tears and sorrows of our lonely human lives so we can be healed and restored in God's loving arms.

Yet, despite all this, we're left with a mystery. Despite the reality of Jesus' total trust in God, despite the reality of Jesus' courage in the face of death, we're left with the puzzling fact that God the Mother and God the Father in their wisdom decided that a man named Jesus of Nazareth would not die on the cross that day, but would, in fact, escape that terrible death, and live to tell the tale -- for a short while, anyway, before he, too, surrendered his human life, as all of us one day must.

What was God saying?

Thanks be to God the Mother and God the Father this Advent Sunday.

* Duffin, Jacalyn. Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

CC46: Understanding God's Relationship With Us

My New Testament professor once said in class, "Give me 15 minutes and I can find a proof text in the Bible for anything you want to justify."

You'll have noticed by now that I treat the Bible with a great deal of caution. For me and for many others, the Bible is a lot like a pit bull with a hair-trigger temper. One minute it's wagging its tail at you, spouting happy thoughts. The next, it's trying to rip your throat out.

I'm not one of those mystics who thinks the Bible is a lap dog that will always treat you kindly -- an immortal, timeless lap dog whose eyes are always filled with serenity and bliss if you know the secret of looking at it the right way. Spiritual talk of secrets -- secret knowledge (gnosis) and secret interpretations (symbolic readings of the Bible) -- makes me very nervous. I'll tell you why. It's because spiritual leaders who say they can teach you how to unlock the secret biblical interpretations are making some powerful claims about God. They're claiming that God isn't a very loving God or a very nice God at all.

Take the example of the book called Song of Solomon (also known as Song of Songs). Here is a lyric poem about human love (eros). It's filled with erotic imagery and metaphors that nobody can miss. Scholars think the poem (or collection of poems) was probably written in the 4th or 3rd century BCE. Despite the extremely obvious fact that the Song of Solomon is part of an ancient tradition of erotic love poetry written for a pre-Viagra age, the Song of Solomon started to be interpreted symbolically by religious teachers sometime around the start of the Common Era.

For about 2,000 years, then, theologians have been teaching the faithful to read Song of Solomon symbolically -- as an account of the love between God and Israel. Pious and devout people are expected not to notice or respond to the explicit sexual content. And fourteen year old boys are not to read it late at night by candlelight.

If this is a sacred text about the relationship between God and God's people, I'll eat my hat.

I'm very unhappy that this symbolic interpretation can only be arrived at through some pretty twisted mental gymnastics. I'm also wondering why it's only through a special secret scholarly key that regular people can see the "light of truth" hidden in this poem. As many mystics would have you believe, the majority of people -- regular people who aren't privy to the secret key -- won't be able to see and understand the wonderful "truth" buried in this erotic text. Regular people are too dull to see the "truth." Their corrupt, inferior human senses make them too stupid to understand what's actually written here.

And, of course, that's the way God wants it to be! (according to Gnostic teachers). God, in God's infinite wisdom, decided that most human beings are just too darned stupid and weak and untrustworthy to be entrusted with divine truth. So God hid it. God hid the light of truth in the deepest, darkest swamps, where regular people can't find it, and then God chose a few select warriors to go out and find the light and guard it. Because God is too weak and stupid to protect it. God, Creator of all Creation, is too weak and stupid to parent trustworthy children. God is too weak and stupid to share divine truth with all children equally. God is too weak and stupid to tell the honest truth honestly. God is too weak and stupid to communicate clearly to all people without the help, aid, or benefit of that trusty band of "specially chosen warriors of light."

Maybe it's because God is too busy thinking lascivious thoughts about the luscious gazelles and wild does in the Song of Solomon.

I hope the last sentence creeped you out. I know it creeped me out. But don't yell at me. I'm not the one going around claiming that Song of Solomon has an elevated message about the sacred love God feels for a few chosen children.

We have a term we use today for parents who engage in sexual conduct with their own children: we call them child abusers, and if we catch them, and succeed in convicting them in a court of law, we put them in jail. As we should.

The God I know is nothing like this. Nothing like this at all. The God I know and talk to every day as part of my mystical practice are my divine parents. God the Mother and God the Father are wonderful people. They're kind and thoughtful and generous and funny. They're extraordinarily patient. They always explain things in a way I can understand with my very human brain. If I don't understand something, they don't call me weak or stupid, but instead they always try a new tack to help me "put it together." They love me as their child, but I know I'm not loved more than anyone else. They love all their children with as much ferocity as they love me. It's the ferocious love that all loving parents know towards their children. It's lifelong devotion, commitment, sacred trust. It's safety. It's eternity.

There are precious few passages in the Bible that convey this sense of God's relationship with us as angels-in-human-form. The passages that do exist are almost buried under the holy mountain of piety, righteousness, law, fear, and obedience.

I say "almost."

Beautiful things grown in marshes. These blue flags from the iris family grow in many wet spots in Ontario. Photo credit JAT 2014.

 

The really cool thing is that the truthful passages "somehow" survived all the cuts, revisions, and ruthless doctrinal choices made by narcissistic theologians in the past. "Somehow" the Letter of James made it into the Christian canon, although many influential theologians (including Martin Luther) were openly hostile towards this letter. "Somehow" the Gospel of Mark was preserved, despite the best efforts of the authors of Luke and Matthew to eradicate its message by "improving" on it. "Somehow" the non-elitist Psalm 116 got tucked in there among the more famous Royal and Zionist Psalms.

I just love the way these truthful messages are "hidden in plain sight" where anyone with an open heart and a lick of common sense can find them.

Even better, these passages say what they say in an open, honest way. No special training is required. No promises are made to you about the hidden truth that will one day be revealed to you if only you submit to blind faith.

Divine truth needs no embellishment. It's beautiful just the way it is. Today. Not centuries from now, but today.

Which is pretty much what you'd expect from a wonderful, loving God.

CC32: Forgiveness: The Divine String of Pearls

Today I'm being lazy and posting something I first typed in 2007. When I say "typed," I mean "typed." I wasn't the author of this piece. The author was the person whose name appears at the end of the lesson. He did a particularly fine job of describing forgiveness, and I can't improve on what he wrote, so I'm giving his words a second airing.

* * *

Lesson 6

So what is forgiveness? I will explain what I learned two thousand years ago, with the help of my angels and my loving Mother and Father, but I'll put it in modern terms to make it more relevant.

Forgiveness is not a state of grace that mysteriously descends on you. The Gospels report (not to their credit) that the Holy Dove descended on my head while I was being baptized. These passages have led many a faithful person astray because "descent of the Holy Dove" wrongly suggests that God singles out "special people," and confers on them special gifts through grace.

String of Pearls (c) JAT 2013

Am I saying there is no grace? Of course not. I'm saying that everything in God's good creation is grace, and to single out one event for one person is to highlight 1% of God's ongoing grace, and ignore the other 99%.

You are here, living a life as a human being on Planet Earth, so that you might understand, in your eternal life as one of God's angelic children, the transformative power of forgiveness. You are not here because you're unworthy of God's love. You are here because God trusts you as an angel, and God knows that when you die as a human being, you will take what you have experienced here and transform it into forgiveness and wisdom.

However, you do not have to wait until you die and return Home to Heaven. You have the tools available to you here and now to begin this transformative process.

Your primary tool is your will power. Forgiveness, as a divine experience, is 100% pure will power. There is no mystery. There is no magic. There is no ritual, no potion, no esoteric way to go about this except to learn to use your divine free will in the same way your divine Mother and Father use their divine free will to forgive the harmful choices you make. Though the method of forgiving involves no mystery, the result is filled with unending mystery. When you accomplish divine forgiveness, God's true beauty shines even more brightly for you, if such a thing is even possible (though it is . . .). In other words, I find it much easier to put into words how you can get to the place of forgiveness than to put into words what it will feel like when you get there. That is the sacred part of the journey for each person.

Forgiveness is what you end up with when you use your soul's Courage, Trust, Gratitude, and Devotion to make a permanent choice to wrap up a harmful choice in a permanent layer of love. The harm (caused either by you or someone else) is like the grit inside an oyster's shell. The grit hurts. But the oyster painstakingly covers the grit in smooth, nacreous layers that take your breath away with their beauty. The grit inside the pearl does not go away. But it is permanently transformed into a thing of beauty. The task of forgiving is like the efforts of the oyster. The task of forgiving is not to erase or deny the pain. The task of forgiving is to use your will power to turn the pain into a divine string of pearls.

I used the word "permanent" three times in the above paragraph. This is because I wish to highlight the difference between "forgiving" and "shrugging something off." What makes forgiveness divine is its immutability. Once God makes the choice to forgive a particular harmful choice you have made, God will never go back on the decision to forgive you. Their forgiveness for that action is permanent. They will not say to you, "We take it back -- you're no longer forgiven." They will not manipulate your trust by pulling the rug out from under you. They make the choice, and they stick by the choice.

Human forgiveness is meant to be exactly the same. The forgiveness in your own heart must be an unflinching, unshakeable choice that nobody can talk you out of under any circumstances. If somebody can talk you out of it, it's not real forgiveness. Another way to describe this is to think of it as integrity. Forgiveness is an oath you make, an oath you make to your own soul. Forgiveness is an oath you make to yourself that you will put a layer of love around the harmful choice, and you will never, ever remove the layer. You would not be a person of deep integrity if you broke this sacred oath. So you choose each day to keep your oath, and you choose each day to maintain the layer of love.

Each harmful choice that is forgiven is its own pearl on your divine string of pearls. You do not have just one big pearl that keeps getting bigger and bigger. You have separate pearls for separate acts of forgiveness. Each time you experience pain that must be forgiven, you build a new pearl using your divine free will and your own innate Courage, Trust, Gratitude, and Devotion.

This is the manner in which your loving Mother and Father forgive you.

I invite you, as my beloved sisters and brothers in Christ, to step through the portal of wonder that will open for you when you choose to forgive.

Love Jesus
December 16, 2007

CC31: How God Listens To Your Soul and Not To Your Idiocy

I remember the day when I finally accepted the fact that God could hear all the nasty thoughts I was thinking. I wanted to throw up.

Up until then, I'd been trying hard to convince myself that "what happens in my head, stays in my head." I was sure that my nasty, judgmental thoughts about other people were my own little secret. Sure, I felt guilty about those unkind thoughts. But as long as I didn't express them out loud, nobody would know about them but me.

But then I decided I wanted to learn to be a mystic. It was a conscious decision. Nobody forced me to become a mystic. Nor did I have any big epiphanies or any life-altering visions or any sudden calls from God (i.e. conversion experiences). I simply thought it would be cool.

I confess now, with the full benefit of 20/20 hindsight, that ten years ago, when I made the decision to learn to be a mystic, my motivation reeked of status addiction. This was not the best of motivations, as I've pointed out in earlier posts. I wanted to be "special," and it seemed to me that "the mystical path" would be a good way for me to become "better" than others. I confess now that this was my motivation at the time, but ten years ago, I wouldn't have been willing to admit this to myself. I desperately wanted to believe that I was becoming a mystic "for the benefit of others." I wanted to believe that I was only a humble servant of God -- a humble vessel of God's will. Really, though, what I wanted at the time was the status that comes with being a mystic.

"Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, saying, 'I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, "I am driven away from your sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple?" The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O Lord my God, as my life was ebbing away'" (Jonah 2: 1-7a). Photo credit JAT 2018.

I wasn't entirely devoted to my own selfishness, however. There was a part of me that genuinely yearned for a deep sense of connection with God. There was a part of me that was very . . . lonely. Very sad. There was a part of me that felt small and quiet and vulnerable, that wanted to reach out to God, but didn't know how. This part, of course, was my soul. But I didn't know that at the time. I was too busy filling up my head with New Age idiocy to recognize the voice of my own soul.

Good news, though. God was much smarter than I was, and God didn't pay any attention to my ridiculously vain and selfish New Age/devout Christian prayers. God listened only to my soul. My soul was saying, "I want to remember how to love," and that's the only choice I made that God was willing to help me with. I must have offered up 20 selfish prayer requests for every time I asked God to help me learn how to love. God ignored the many selfish demands I made (thank heaven we have a God with common sense!), then God put my nose to grindstone on the one prayer I'd asked that was worth asking.

I had no idea that this one sincere prayer would be such hard work for me, my family, and God. I had no idea that I was literally asking God to help me rewire my entire biological brain.*

You would assume, naturally, that the process of rewiring a person's entire biological brain would take a great deal of time. (It did). And a great deal of experienced help. (It did). And a great many changes in daily lifestyle. (It did). And a great many conscious changes in attitude. (It did). And many moments of painful insight. Plus setbacks. And moments of quiet healing. And tears along with great joy.

It did.

How I Felt At First. Although most of the time my brain felt rigid and full of selfish weeds, God saw the spring flowers waiting to bloom. My sincere wish to remember how to love was the trillium God saw and nurtured. Photo credit JAT 2014.

That's what it felt like, and many spiritual seekers have described similar feelings. But inside my biological body, at a neurophysiological level, changes were taking place. My neurons and glial cells were changing, adapting, making new connections, breaking old connections. My immune system was changing along with my entire nervous system. I was getting a gradual "nervous system makeover." This happened because my body was rewiring itself to accommodate my new regimen -- my new regimen of remembering how to love.

If I've learned anything about the spiritual journey, it's this: no human being anywhere on Planet Earth at any time in Earth's history has ever been exempt from this biological reality. You are a package deal. You are a soul intertwined with your biological body, and you can't find spiritual enlightenment if you're punishing or mistreating your physical body (for example, through ascetic practices). It's a scientific reality that nobody can escape, though most mystics want to pretend they're exempt from these rules.

Eventually I realized that I was -- am -- a package deal, and that as part of this package deal, my thoughts and feelings are not hidden from God. My thoughts and feelings are an open book. I can try to fight this reality, or I can work with this reality. It's my choice. If I try to fight it, I hurt myself, and I end up hurting the people I love. If I decide to work within this paradigm, and trust that God forgives me even when I make a mistake, then I'm using my free will in the most loving way possible. I'm using my free will to trust in God's love and forgiveness. I'm using my free will to be in full connection and relationship with God. I'm using my free will to be open to their observations and suggestions for constructive change.

Of course, this paradigm pretty much implies that change is part of the healing process.

So . . . this runs smack into the painful truth that religious leaders who reject change in favour of the status quo (status addiction) are not part of the healing process.

I'm very grateful to God the Mother and God the Father, plus the soul who once lived as Jesus son of Joseph, for being so patient and so firm and so consistent with me. They got me on track -- the track I'd chosen of remembering how to love -- and they never gave up on me. They stuck right with me, and they put up with a lot of abuse from me, until I got it through my thick head that my soul was -- is -- okay.

As for those nasty thoughts I used to have . . . I don't have them anymore. Eventually I learned that those nasty thoughts were the "voice" (as it were) of status addiction. I was looking for a way to raise myself up inside my own head by putting other people down. (Yeah, it really is that simple!) When I confronted my own status addiction issues, and stopped denying the harm I was creating for myself and others, I no longer needed the "high" of thinking nasty thoughts.

So I stopped.

It's a great cure for that feeling of wanting to throw up because you're carrying so much guilt, remorse, and embarrassment about your own nastiness.


* Only recently have neuroscientists come to understood how malleable and changeable the human brain is. This new field of research is known as "neuroplasticity."

CC30: Forgiveness: The Free Lunch You've Been Looking For

Ask most Christian ministers what forgiveness is, and you won't get much of an answer. 

This infuriates me. Christian ministers have been given an incredible opportunity to help people of faith understand what forgiveness is and how to bring forgiveness into their daily lives. In fact, it's one of the few things the church can offer that isn't being offered elsewhere through service clubs, secular charities, and weekend workshops taught by various coaches and New Age gurus. 

I have a book called Helping People Forgive by David W. Augsburger (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996). According to the back cover, Dr. Augsburger is a Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling at Fuller Theological Seminary. I'm sure Dr. Augsburger is a sincere, well-meaning man. But he doesn't know the first thing about the mystical reality of forgiveness. 

Early in his book, Dr. Augsburger says, "A major paradigmatic shift occurred two thousand years ago in the philosophical breakthrough that allowed persons to disavow their past and alter their future through 'forgiveness'" (page 9). 

I disagree. Forgiveness is not about disavowing the past, nor about reversing a moral judgment (Augsburger, page 11). Nor is it (as one of my classmates said, though he ought to know better, considering his interest in restorative justice) a state of "just not thinking about the harm at all."

Forgiveness is an act of great moral courage that requires the person who's doing the forgiving to dredge up from within their own soul all the divine love they're capable of. 

Forgiveness is not for the faint of heart. 

While it's quite within the capacity of all human beings to forgive themselves and to forgive each other (as Jesus taught), it's not something a person can learn overnight. For many people, it will take years to learn how to forgive. Part of the reason for this is that when you open up your heart wide enough that you can hear your own soul, you have to deal with a lot of intense emotions, including painful emotions. Many people don't want to deal with such emotions. 

If you've never learned to master intense, positive, mature emotions such as gratitude, trust, devotion, and courage, you're going to find it difficult to master the emotion of forgiveness. 

Not impossible, but difficult. 

This shouldn't stop you from trying. Each day, your beloved Mother and Father God forgive you for everything you do that's motivated by status addiction, or greed, or rudeness, or cruelty (to name some of the less-than-loving motivations you might choose in a typical day). They forgive you whether or not you ask for forgiveness. They forgive you for everything -- and I mean everything. 

Divine love and forgiveness are like this hoard of 1st century CE Roman coins found in an ancient pottery amphora in Egypt. The original owner buried the coins for safekeeping, but he and his heirs eventually lost track of it. Such treasure hoards, when found today, usually fall under national laws that require the finder to first offer the hoard to a public museum at a fair price. This allows the treasure to be shared equally by all those who visit the museum. In other words, like a museum treasure trove, forgiveness belongs to everyone. Photo credit JAT 2017

HOWEVER, the fact that they forgive you does NOT mean they consider such behaviours acceptable. They forgive you when you're abusive towards others, but they also have an opinion about your decision to be abusive towards others. 

God the Mother and God the Father have free will, just as you have free will. They're within their rights to have an opinion about your harmful actions. They're also within their rights to promptly respond to you, to share their thoughts and feelings with you about the choices you're making. This means, of course, that God is not transcendent and God is not unemotional with regard to your choices (although orthodox Western Christianity would have you believe that God would never cry about the choices you're making.) 

God forgives you whether you ask or not, and by the same token, God is always watching and listening whether you ask or not. God is always watching and listening to you, because this is how God knows when it's time to intervene to help you (whether you ask for help or not). 

God will intervene whether or not you recite the right prayer to God, whether or not you think you're worthy of God's love, or whether or not you think you're worthy of God's forgiveness. 

You don't get a say in these things, because it's not up to you to decide what God should be thinking, feeling, or doing. That's up to God. 

You can't make God stop loving you. You just can't, no matter how hard you try. 

You are one of God's children. They love you. They forgive you. There is no force anywhere in Creation that can block their divine love. The flip side of the coin is this: there's no ritual, no prayer, no temple, no church, no sacrament that can give you more divine love than you already have. God loves everyone -- from the North Pole to the South Pole and all points in between -- in the fullest, most wondrous way imaginable. God's love cannot be purchased. Ever. 

Anyone who tells you that you can only receive God's love by accepting baptism in Christ is lying to you. Give God some credit for being able to love you completely without attaching a bunch of religious strings. 

Trust in God's love and forgiveness as Jesus trusted in God's love and forgiveness. There's only one free lunch in all Creation, and this happens to be it. 

As a mystic, I've worked extensively on the question of forgiveness -- what it is, how to do it, how to let it transform your life. I'll continue to write on this topic in future. 

Thanks for listening. And thanks be to God!

CC27: Jesus: The Anti-Status Teacher

There is currently no major world religion that bases its doctrines and spiritual practices on the teachings of the man who once lived as Jesus.

There are several world religions that owe a significant doctrinal debt to ancient Egyptian mystery cults. There are several world religions that would not be recognizable in their current form without the legacy of ancient apocalyptic groups. There are several world religions that have incorporated the teachings of ancient Wisdom literature into their texts. But there are no major world religions that approach the deep questions of spirituality and relationship with God in the way that Jesus approached these concerns.

This isn't new. At the time Jesus was teaching and healing, many different religions and philosophies were competing with each other to attract devoted followers. Many of these "pagan" religions were quite successful, far more successful than the modest house churches that sprang up in response to Jesus' message. So successful were these "pagan" religions, in fact, that in the end they won out over the teachings of Jesus.

Most Christians believe it's the other way around, that Christianity's "truth" won out over paganism's "heresy." But orthodox Western Christianity isn't based on the teachings of Jesus. It's based on the teachings of Paul and his vigilant successors -- men such as the author of Matthew and the author of Luke-Acts (whose writings were decreed canonical), and men such as Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Cyprian of Carthage (whose early Christian writings helped shape orthodox thought). These men took the ancient teachings of the mystery cults, the apocalyptic groups, and the Wisdom sages, and repackaged them -- rebranded them -- into a "new and improved" religion called Christianity.

So while early orthodox Christianity had everything to do with Christ -- an ancient saviour figure who was central to Egyptian, Persian, and Greek mystery cults -- early orthodox Christianity had nothing to do with the teachings of the physician-scholar named Jesus son of Joseph. In fact, the doctrines promoted by Paul and the men of the "apostolic succession" are the antithesis of Jesus' teachings about God.

Paul wanted desperately to preserve the ancient teachings of the mystery cults, the apocalyptic groups, and the Wisdom sages because these three approaches to religion, though very different from each other on the surface, all share one fundamental feature: they encourage people to become addicted to status.

Paul offered people a new religion that gave them "bonus points" in their drive for status. Paul promised people more status, extra status, new and improved status, special status, irrevocable status. It's a status-addict's dream! 

Jesus, meanwhile -- as evidenced in the Gospel of Mark, the reconstructed Q source, and parts of the Letter of James -- desperately wanted to get rid of the ancient teachings of the mystery cults, the apocalyptic groups, and the Wisdom sages. Why? Because he understood that widespread addiction to status was the single greatest impediment to people's understanding of God.   

"If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gang or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body to be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends (1 Corinthians 13: 1-8a)." Shown here is Hawthorn Cottage in Kingston, ON. It was built of sturdy limestone in 1866 to house a family of villagers; eventually, it became part of the Pittsburgh branch of the Kingston Frontenac Public Library. It may not be the grandest of buildings, but its simple elegance has long served its families and its community with enduring comfort. Photo credit JAT 2020.

You've probably heard the biblical saying that it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God (Mark 10:25). This is usually interpreted as a condemnation of money and wealth, the idea being that if you give away all your money and wealth, you'll be closer to the kingdom of God.

This is too simplistic. "Rich" people can give away all their money and wealth, and still not feel God's presence because all they've done is exchange one form of status addiction (wealth acquisition) for another form (asceticism, a.k.a. purity acquisition). Money per se isn't the problem. Money can be used for hospitals, schools, meal programs, and so on. It's not money that's the root of all evil -- it's status addiction.

The only way for people to feel God's ongoing presence in their lives is for them to acknowledge their addiction to status and to make a commitment to heal this addiction.

It goes without saying that status addiction is rampant in our society. It's not an easy thing to heal (about as easy as that camel going through that narrow gate). But it can be done. To be free of status addiction is to be kind and loving towards others in the guileless manner of a young child.

For this reason, Jesus compares those who want to enter the kingdom of God to little children (Mark 10:13-16). Young children haven't yet been taught to hate others on the basis of class, race, or gender. They haven't yet been taught that they're "better" than others, that they're more loved by God than others, that God will save them and their families but not others. They haven't yet absorbed the cultural norms of competition, superiority, perfectionism, or purity (all forms of status addiction). Young children are still free. They still have free will. They still have the ability to love. They still have the ability to forgive. They still have the courage to look at other people and see them as people, not as slaves, property, or lesser beings.

A young child knows nothing of Law or Covenant (both of which are hopelessly interwoven with status). Nor does a child care about "whole burnt offerings and sacrifices" (Mark 12:33). What a young child cares about is love -- love that's infused with respect, and dignity, and egalitarianism, and empathy, and mature relationship, and simple kindness. Love that doesn't boast (since boasting is food for status addiction). Love that doesn't presume to prophesy (since prophesying is food for status addiction). Love that doesn't claim to be centred in the Mind (since pure logic is food for status addiction). Love that doesn't punish the body through ascetic practices (since asceticism is food for status addiction). Love that never seeks revenge (since revenge is to status addiction what crack cocaine is to substance abuse). Love that can't be taken away or withheld as a form of punishment. Love that isn't co-dependent. Love that isn't synonymous with "obedience." What a young child wants is love that forgives. Love that's . . . well . . . divine. 

What children need, and what they in turn give to others, is divine love -- the kind of love our God (God the Mother and God the Father) feel for all their children. The kind of love that Jesus wrote about in a text that Paul subsequently "borrowed" for his letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 13:1-8a).* The kind of love the orthodox Western Church doesn't teach you about.

This is a love based on the power of the soul, the power of free will, the power of forgiveness, and the power of redemption. It has nothing to do with sin, separation, sacraments, and salvation. It's a love that can be difficult for human beings to understand. It's a love that can be difficult for adults to master (the whole "camel squeezing through the narrow gate" thing). But once it's yours, nobody -- not even an angry Church cleric or an angry Temple priest -- can take it away from you, because it's a sacred trust that exists between you and God.

It's a sacred trust that fills you with wonder, and devotion, and gratitude, and humbleness. It's a sacred trust worth dying for, as the man named Jesus once knew. It's a sacred trust that opens the door to the kingdom of God while you're living here as a somewhat confused but unquenchably hopeful human being on Planet Earth.

The keys to the kingdom are not found in the person of Jesus. The keys to the kingdom are found in the teachings that Jesus introduced to anyone who wanted to listen to his annoying and exasperating attacks on the status quo.

If you're a Christian, and you want to start to work on the problems of status addiction in your own life, you're going to have to let go of the doctrine that Jesus is your Saviour. This doctrine is food for your status addiction. There is no Saviour. You don't need to be saved, because God don't make no junk. There's nothing wrong with your soul. Your soul is just fine, thank you very much.

It's okay to think of Jesus as a teacher and mentor in the same way you think of Mahatma Gandhi or the Dalai Lama or Martin Luther King, Jr., as inspiring teachers and mentors. But please don't put Jesus on a pedestal. That's the last thing he'd want anybody to do. 

Jesus wasn't trying to teach his followers about himself. That would have been the height -- the very pinnacle -- of status addiction. He was trying to teach his followers about God the Mother and God the Father. He was trying to take out the "middle men" -- the prophets, priests, and philosophers -- whose grandiose, narcissistic musings about the One God had made it all but impossible for anyone to have a loving, trusting, forgiving relationship with the God who is Two.

If the church of the third millennium wants to follow the teachings of Jesus, it must let go of its apocalyptic, mystery-ridden, wisdom-elevated "Saviour," and shift its focus to God. Now there's a radical idea.

* It's fashionable these days for theologians and biblical scholars to express their profound regret that Jesus wrote nothing down because he was an illiterate Galilean carpenter who spoke only Aramaic. This is nonsense. No lasting Indo-European movement has ever got off the ground without an articulate, knowledgeable leader and a written record of the movement's main tenets. To those scholars who insist that Jesus couldn't write down his own original and penetrating observations about God, healing, and psychodynamics, I want to say, "Get a life , , , and a history book!"

CC10: The "Mind" of God

I'm really sick of hearing about "the Mind of God." 

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying that God the Mother and God the Father are brainless. I'm saying there's a lot more to our Divine Parents than 100% pure mind power. Well, sure, you say, of course God is more than just mind power -- God has a loving heart, too! And you would be right . . . except the church wouldn't agree with you officially. Off the record you'd probably get some senior church officials to agree with you that God has both mind and compassion. And lots of regular Christians instinctively understand this. But none of the mainline churches, either Protestant or Roman Catholic, have yet been willing to reexamine their official belief systems about God's "substance." As far as the church is concerned, God is a transcendent and trinitarian being who values "reason and righteousness" above everything else. God is "oneness" with three different forms of expression. This "oneness" is serene and detached and highly logical -- just the way Plato described God four centuries before Jesus!

This portrait of God is very convenient, because it gives people an excuse to ignore the reality that God has feelings. According to the church, however, God doesn't have emotions. Therefore nothing you think, say, or do can make God cry. You can make God angry, says the church, but that's different. God's anger is simply his (its?) logical reaction to your disobedience. There is a divine book of laws, you see, and even God is required to follow those laws. It's all very logical.

Hah! 

Not only do I personally disagree with this assessment of God (because my work as a mystic has shown me a very different understanding of God), but I also think that Jesus himself was teaching his followers that God is more than pure, transcendent "Mind." I think Jesus knew about the Platonic teaching of God as "One Mind," and I think Jesus was trying to overturn this idea. I think Jesus was talking in a truly radical way about God as a "he and a she" who together watch over all Creation: Abba and Ruah.*

"Happy are those who find Wisdom, and those who get understanding, for her income is better than silver, and her revenue better than gold. She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her. Long life is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called happy. The Lord by Wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; by his knowledge the deeps broke open, and the clouds drop down the dew. My child, do not let these escape from your sight: keep sound wisdom and prudence, and they will be life for your soul and adornment for your neck. Then you will walk on your way securely and your foot will not stumble" (Proverbs 3: 13-23). Photo credit JAT 2025.

Biblical scholars who study "the historical Jesus" have often tried to figure out what Jesus actually said and did that could have provoked such a strong reaction among both followers and adversaries. Some of these scholars see Jesus as an unextraordinary wisdom sage whose "golden rule" teachings weren't much different from the teachings of his contemporaries.

Hah!

While it's certainly true that "golden rule" teachings had been around for centuries before Jesus taught and healed in first century Palestine, it's not true that Jesus' own understanding of God was a rehash of ideas found in all major Ancient Near East religions. Jesus had a rare understanding of God shared only by the Jewish teacher we know as Job. It might be called "Modified Monotheism" -- but it certainly wasn't the monotheistic understanding of Judaism's post-Exilic Yahweh, nor was it the monistic understanding of Plato's Divine Truth. Jesus' understanding of God was inflammatory in its first century context. That's because Jesus thought of God as two people -- a Mother and a Father -- whose chief attributes were not transcendence, power, and Mind (as in both Hellenistic philosophy and in Second Temple Judaism), but instead were immanence, trust, and Heart.

True, there had been a minority religious voice in Judaism that saw God as immanent. But in the Zion Covenant that appears in the writings of early Judaism (e.g. certain Psalms), this immanence meant something particular: it meant that God physically lived in a specific location on Mount Zion. Since God had chosen to live in the temple built on Mount Zion, great status was conferred upon the people of the Zion Covenant.

This idea of God living on a particular mountaintop was not unique to early Judaism. Other Ancient Near East religions taught the same thing, except that the holy mountain where God lived was, of course, a geographical site within their own political borders. Yet in the Gospel of Mark (Mark 9:2-9), Jesus rejects the idea of living on the holy mountain in the company of Judaism's revered prophets Moses and Elijah, both of whom had followed a spiritual path of ascent. For far too long, Christian commentators have overlooked the significance of this passage in Mark. They focus on the fact that Jesus suddenly appears in dazzling white clothes, but they forget the fact that Jesus wants no part of the holy mountain. He immediately returns to the community below, a community of real people in need of real healing. There he wades into the crowd and unflinchingly heals the epileptic boy without any care or concern for religious laws. In this way, he emulates the compassionate devotion that loving parents share with a sick child.

For Jesus, who spent little time in Jerusalem (Jerusalem, not coincidentally, was the site of Mount Zion), the traditional claims of a male god who lived exclusively in a man-made temple were nonsense. For Jesus, the distinct male and female attributes of God were visible everywhere. So, too, God's emotional attributes were visible everywhere you looked. How could people look at the wonder of all Creation and believe that God had no feelings? 

"Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, 'Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah.' He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, 'This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!' Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus. As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen" (Mark 9: 2-9a). People come to shores of Lake Minnewanka in the Alberta Rockies to feel the beauty of earth, water, air, and love painted by the hearts of our beloved Divine Parents. Photo credit JAT 2015.

For those biblical scholars who wonder why Jesus provoked such a strong response in people, they need look no further than his teachings on the nature of God. Even today, people are infuriated when you tell them that God is not a distant, unemotional, trinitarian "he," but instead (and quite obviously) a "he and a she" who together infuse their love, courage, trust, devotion, and gratitude in everything they create. (Take the Son out of the Trinity, and what do you have? Abba and Ruah, except that in Jesus' time the Aramaic noun Ruah was always feminine!) 

That's why I can safely say that "God don't make no junk." Our God is way too amazing to allow something so stupid as the "law" of Original Sin. 

To our beloved Mother and Father I want to say to you today and always . . . you both rock!

* Abba is a masculine-gender Aramaic word for "father" or "papa." Ruah is a feminine-gender Aramaic word for "breath, "spirit," or "wind." Because words in the English language don't have gender, English-speaking people often forget that gendered languages give subtle shades of meaning through the choice of nouns. As in Romance languages such as French, Italian, or Spanish, the gender of the noun (that is, its status as male, female, or neuter) determines the conjugation of other parts of speech in a sentence.