Healing Tones

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Solar Eclipse on a cloudy night

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“For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away.” (Psalm 32:3)

AS CATHOLICS the world over don sackcloth and exercise mortification of the flesh by fasting and various other means during Lent, I recall a passage from the Gospels where Jesus was challenged by the Pharisees to explain why they and the disciples of John fasted but his disciples did not. His answer was to the effect that the time for fasting is not when the bridegroom is present. In other words, his presence in their midst called for rejoicing and celebration. The entire passage is worth revisiting here.

And Jesus saith unto them, Can the children of the bridechamber fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast in those days. (Mark 2:19)

They challenged him further when his disciples plucked corn on the sabbath day, which was not lawful. Again Jesus’s answer suggested that a new consciousness and observance was replacing Moses’s law of old and their literal interpretation of the letter of the law overshadowing the spirit:

Or have ye not read in the law, how that on the sabbath days the priests in the temple profane the sabbath, and are blameless? But I say unto you, That in this place is one greater than the temple. But if ye had known what this meaneth, I WILL HAVE MERCY, AND NOT SACRIFICE, ye would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath day. (Matt. 12:5-8)

There is another saying that comes to mind about the Lord being in His temple: “But the Lord is in His holy temple: Let all the earth keep silence before Him” (Habakkuk 2:20). Well, the Lord is in His Holy Temple, and my heart cannot be silent, . . . nor my voice . . . lest my bones waste away and my presence on earth be of little value. I resonate with Jesus’s words recorded in the Gospel of Thomas, Logion 84:

“Jesus said: When you give rise to that which is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not give rise to it, what you do not have will destroy you.”

Here’s what I’ve been holding back from saying for years: Christianity does not uphold the teachings of Jesus the Christ, and Catholicism leads the pack of too many religions down the road of not-so-good intentions, barring the faithful from entering the Kingdom of Heaven here and now, where Jesus declared his Kingdom is located: “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, within you and all around you. Repent, turn around and see that you are already in it!” We are in the Kingdom of Heaven here and now. We do not have to die in order to enter it, because we are already in it while we live!

I’m reminded of the incident where Jesus berated the Pharisees for the same hypocrisy and abuse of power:

But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of the heavens before men. For you neither enter, nor even do you allow those who are entering to go in.

This “good news” of the Kingdom is not what the churches are preaching to their believers, bless their faithful misguided souls. They preach that they are sinners and must be redeemed by the blood of their crucified Redeemer. That they are dust and unto dust shall they return, totally contradictory to what Jesus taught, and what the Bible teaches: “Know ye not that ye are gods . . . made in the image and likeness of God . . . sons and daughters of the Father.” Human beings are not dust. Our very bodies are the temple of the Living God, as St. Paul declared.

Not many preachers, if any, preach the Gospel of the Kingdom. If they do it’s about the Kingdom of Heaven they insist is hereafter, not here now. This all became the dogma and doctrine of Christianity no less than 325 years after Jesus had completed his mission on earth — which was to reveal and glorify His Heavenly Father on earth — not to “die for our sins” and shed his blood on a cross to redeem men’s souls from the devil. That was totally unnecessary to the purpose of His incarnation, and to the redemption and restoration of mankind. The Truth has been eclipsed by religion all these years and centuries.

In His own words:

“Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son may glorify thee: As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. And this is eternal life, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.

I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.

This was before his ordeal on the cross. It is significant that He spoke of Jesus Christ as someone separate from Himself, The significance lies is what was happening with Him at this time of completion: He was ascending in His consciousness as the Lord of Love, the Son the Father, who had incarnated in and through the body of Jesus the Christ, the Anointed One. But that’s not who He was nor is. In just a few more moments, He says something else significant, which indicates that he had left this world.

And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee. For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me.

I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hath given me; for they are thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them.

And now I am no longer in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep thou through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one as we are. While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name: those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition . . . . And now come I to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves.

I have given them thy word, and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world; but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. . . . Sanctify them through thy truth; thy word is truth.

As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth. Neither pray I for these alone, but for them which also shall believe on me through their word;

That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee that they also may be one is us; that the world may believe that thou hath sent me.

And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one. I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.

Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me; for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee; but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me. And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them. (John 17) [All emphases added]

These words for me are heart rending: the Lord of Love praying to his Heavenly Father for me and for all who believe he came directly from the Father and incarnated in Jesus Christ, the Anointed One. Do you hear what he is saying in this prayer to his Father — which reads much like a debriefing of his entire life and mission with His Father who had commissioned him and sent him to Earth? Nowhere does he even mention his impending crucifixion, because it was not part of the Divine Plan of Salvation. He knew there was a devil in the mix of the twelve disciples, but I believe that he was giving Judas a chance to change his course and abandon his self active Zealotry.

These words embody the Lord’s entire purpose for incarnating. Anything added later — by the Council of Nicaea, by Peter and Paul and by all the other evangelists, except John, — are redactions of the truth and blatant lies intended to create yet another religion by which power and control could be exercised over the souls of the faithful by fear of hellfire and reward of eternal life after death. The Beloved disciple John was exiled to the Greek island of Patmos where he recorded for posterity the Revelation of those things which were to come about in the next cycle of the Plan of Salvation and Restoration of Man to his original and ordained state of oneness with his Creator. The cycle which the Lord of Love through Jesus initiated with the twelve apostles was aborted by the apostles themselves, who abandoned Him at the very end. Only John remained true to Him and stood at the foot of the cross with a few women. (I will speak to the significance of this in a later post).

During all my seven years in Catholic seminary studying for the Roman Catholic priesthood, this prayerful passage in the Gospel of John was never considered in the light of the Master’s true and completed mission and purpose. It had been eclipsed by religious dogma. His ignominious crucifixion was made and still is the celebrated center of the Christian dogma. I’ve only come to be aware of this redaction a few decades ago and it shook me to the very depth of my soul.

How could the world have been so deceived and misled by a self-serving and self-appointed priesthood?! Yes, the priesthood, a false priesthood. It was a conclave of over five-hundred bishops of the Church (over a thousand were invited) who conspired with the Emperor of Rome, Constantine, at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. to redact portions of the Bible, throwing out those gospels that didn’t serve their purposes, and establishing Christianity as the universal, or Catholic, religion of the Roman Empire. Those bishops who did not align themselves with this declaration and ruse, were expelled from the Council and condemned to death, along with thousands of Gnostics, Cathars, “witches” and other declared “heretics” who didn’t ascribe to the narrative imposed by the Council: the Nicaean Creed.

The truth is you don’t need a church or a religion to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Simply give expression to the Spirit and character of the King, which is Love and Truth, in your living and you become aware of your presence in the Kingdom. To know it simply give it consistent expression. It’s that simple, as Truth always is.

A LIFE OF VICTORY

The visitation of the Lord of Love incarnate in Christ Jesus was a life of victory, which He celebrated with His Heavenly Father in that beautiful prayer. His victory is what I celebrate, in my heart and in my remembrance of Him, during these days leading up to Holy Week and culminating in Easter Sunday. I invite all of my Christian brothers and sisters to celebrate this with me. Let the joy that was His be fulfilled in ourselves this day . . . when the Christ Spirit of Love is so expressively present and felt in the hearts of millions the world over. The Bridegroom has arrived! Let all of the earth rejoice and be glad! I will continue with this series in my next post. Until then . . .

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

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