IN THIS POST I share with you one of the most touching and profound words of Uranda I’ve ever read anywhere. Words that bring me to tears of joy and of unspeakable love that rises up from the depth of my soul for this One that I am, and we all are, privileged to call Master, Son of God, LORD of Lords and King of kings — and, as George Frederick Handel called Him in his Oratorio Masterpiece, Messiah, “Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.”
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My thoughts turn to some of the words of the Master tonight: “Yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me. These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” And we are, also, to overcome the world.
I was thinking that, in the conclusion of the activities of a blessed day such as this, we might well again give thought to the Master’s Prayer at the time of the conclusion of His Ministry. The conclusion of His Ministry was peculiarly the point where our Ministry begins. The time that has elapsed since has no meaning in that. He had been outlining the Principles of the One Vine and of the means by which we might let the Works of the Father manifest.
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you. Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full… For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God. I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.”
He had also outlined the Principles with respect to the work of the Comforter or Spirit of Truth. He had pointed the Way to Life. It remained for those who should follow after to prove that Life, to experience it according to His Word. And then, in the conclusion of that Ministry, He gave a prayer—a prayer that is our beginning point.
“Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee”. He was, of course, the manifestation of the Son of God, but He was returning to the Father and He had outlined the Plan by means of which the Son, the only begotten Son of God, should continue on earth. The interval of time that has elapsed before that Plan began to be of effect should be, in our consideration, forgotten, as it were, that it may be meaningless. The trials and the tribulations, the concepts, the efforts and the failures of that interval must not be allowed to have meaning in relationship to our function. From the standpoint of Reality, those things do not have meaning. The connecting thread, the unifying Current, is not less strong because of the passage of that time. Our attitude and our feeling and our function should be as if we had heard these words for the first time a few days ago, as if only a month ago He had stood with us upon the face of the earth, as if it were but yesterday that the vibrant sound of His Voice fell on our ears, as if we, in this flesh, had seen Him come forth Victoriously from the tomb, as if we had, in person, shared His final words of admonition and instruction, as if we had known that hour when He ascended to return no more until what He had begun should have been finished in the hearts and lives of men.
The human mind is so inclined to feel the distance of the intervening years, so that there is a loss in a consciousness of personal contact. The Son is the One Christ Body on earth, then and now. The meaning of the Word as He spoke it with respect to His own manifestation is not to be construed as the only meaning, for He spoke also of that Body that is—“Father, the hour is come”. His was the hour of departing; ours is the hour of beginning, of moving forward in fulfilment. The Father glorified the Son then. He is just as capable of glorifying the Son now. “The hour is come. Glorify thy Son”. Why? “That thy Son also may glorify thee”. The beginning and the end, or the end and the beginning, are the same.
He was here on earth. It seems but yesterday we heard Him speak. It seems but the passage of a moment since His prayer first ascended as sweet incense unto God. Time—these things transcend all time. It was but yesterday He gave the Promise. Today we let that Promise be fulfilled. We remember how our hearts were stirred at the sound of His Voice, and the passage of an hour or a day cannot quiet that stirring or end that surge of consciousness of the Power of God. It is now, in this hour, that the Spirit of His Word finds fulfilment in our hearts. It is now, in this hour, that we let His Promise be fulfilled. The excitements and the questionings, the fears and the doubts, have been stilled. We have ceased trying to make it be so, for in the vibrant Power of His Love we are not separate or apart and we know that the Father Himself loveth us because we have loved Him, because we do love Him Who has walked the earth before us, Who has revealed the Way, the Truth and the Life.
“The hour is come” for us to let the Father glorify His Son, that the Son may glorify the Father. We trembled, and were sad, that the hour had come when He should leave us, but we did not let such things prevent fulfilment of His Word lest what He did should be in vain. The hour of His going was the hour of our beginning, and it is so still, for though He went He has not departed, for His Spirit lingers in our hearts and His Word is as powerful as when it first fell from His lips, Words burned in letters of Fire upon our hearts, memorable occasions that could never pass from mind. Yesterday His hour came—today is our hour of fulfilment in beginning.
“Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also 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 life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”
“And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God”, and the Christ, the only begotten Son—then Jesus—now the One Christ Body Whom Thou hast sent. “I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do”. How truly is that our point of beginning. How seldom on this earth has the word reverberated in truth—“I have finished the work”. We have seen in the world the feeble attempts at doing some bit of work—human beings, like children, building castles in the sand to admire in one moment and to destroy in the next, and then to delude themselves into feeling that they had accomplished something. And how they brag about the mansions they builded in the sand; but we consider other mansions, Mansions in the Father’s House.
“I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do”—and in season the Son shall again speak these words, but before those words may be truly spoken once more, there must truly be the beginning, the opening up, that comes through the surging Power of His Spirit as we hear again, in memory, His Word, “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.” That was but yesterday, surely. It is but a dream that some did not keep His Word. There must now be fulfilment which gives meaning to His faith when He spoke that Word, that when these words sound in memory, and stir within our hearts, they shall not be as a mockery, a symbol of the faith of the Son of God that found no answering heart on earth, but a symbol of the faith of the Son of God that finds fulfilment here and now in His Son on earth.
“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 hast given me; for they are thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them.” Yes, the intervening time when these words remained unfulfilled is surely but a dream. Twas only yesterday He spoke, and today His Word finds fulfilment. Today we prove His faith was not in vain.
“And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep 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; that the scripture might be fulfilled. And now come I to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves.” What was His joy? It was the joy of Oneness with the Father. It was the joy of Being the Son on earth. That is the joy that must be fulfilled in us, the joy of Oneness with the Father, the joy of Being the Son.
“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. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth. As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world.” That is His Word. His Word is true, and we let it be so in us in this hour, and forevermore, for as the Father sent Him into the world, even so has He sent us 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 also which 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 in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them”—“And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them”. It is glory to be the Son on earth. “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”—not where I shall be, where I am.He, the Son of God, stood on earth in the hour of fulfilment. He had finished the work. That was where He was in the hour of fulfilment. And He said, “Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am”—and so it is His Will that we should stand in that Oneness of the Son in the hour of fulfilment. “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.”
Beloved LORD, we thank Thee that it is so, and we thank Thee for the Holy Privilege of sharing Thy Fulfilment on earth. In the Christ. Aum-en.
“I am come that they may have life and have it more abundantly. . . that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.” — Gospel of John
VICTORY OVER DEATH
While attending a memorial servicefor a departed friend recently, I sat down in one of the pews waiting for the service to begin. When I looked up toward the closed casket, my eyes were met by a large crucifix on the wall behind it with the graven image of the crucified Jesus. I felt a sudden pall of sadness; not for our departed friend and his family, but for our Lord and King whose crucifixion is still being celebrated by Christians two-thousand-plus years after his victory over death and his glorious resurrection.
I long for the day when Christians take down the crucifixes in their churches and elsewhere — ideally, do away with “Good Friday” altogether and only celebrate Jesus’s victory over death and His Resurrection from the tomb. It’s not that He didn’t make the best use of what was imposed upon Him by the world. He did ask His Heavenly Father to take that cup from Him in the Garden of Gethsemane, yet He yielded to His Father’s Will. He knew well what was ahead and yet embraced it fully and used it for a higher purpose: a victory over death and the opening of a portal to eternal life for all of mankind.
His victory is what I celebrate during Holy Week . . . and I invite all of my Christian readers and friends to celebrate with me. Let the joy that was His be fulfilled in our hearts and souls this day.
THE CRUCIFIX AS A CROSSOVER SYMBOL
The crucifix can be seen as a crossover symbol, with its vertical and horizontal aspects joining and crossing at the point of the Golden Mean, the Divine Proportion (1.618) — the vertical representing Heaven and the horizontal representing Earth. The Spirit of God descends from Heaven and touches the Earth. Angels descend from the Realms of Light and incarnate in earthen forms in order to extend that Spirit below the horizontal into the world; to serve the Creator on Earth and bring Heaven here. By extending your arms, like the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro demonstrates, you assume the posture of a cross, signifying that your body temple provides a crossover point between the invisible and visible realms — between Heaven and Earth.
This is the true meaning and significance of the Cross of Jesus. He came to Earth not to die but to demonstrate for us how to live in union with His Father and bring the experience of Heaven on Earth into our lives. Sadly, the world rejected Him and redacted His teachings to align with the traditional religious concepts held sacred in the human mind . . . then crucified His body on the cross at Golgotha, the “place of the skull.”
We are a death-oriented people. We worship death as a necessary evil; a way of escape from pain and hardship, as well as the way to enter Heaven. Truth is, HERE on earth is where the ultimate experience of life take place. Angels in the realms of Light long to have the experience of living on this beautiful planet where Mother God, the Queen of Heaven, creates a Paradise of Edenic beauty and bounty on Earth — Her Queendom. Where delicious fruits and crisp vegetation can be tasted and lifted up in flesh temples as loving tithes to Her Lord and King.
THE “PLACE OF THE SKULL”
It is said that Martin Luther threw an inkwell at the devil upon awakening one night, and that he was plagued by many demons. My mentor used to cite this incident and then would suggest that he must have smashed the inkwell against his own skull, making and bringing home the point that our demons are in our own heads and projected out there; that the crucifixion of the Christ Spirit is taking place in the skull of human beings where the self-active mind of man shuts out the Kingdom of God from being experienced, by the priesthood and by the faithful. Christians pray unceasingly “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” but they do not allow it to be done. They have their own wills to exercise and fulfill in their lives, individually and collectively.
Am I being too harsh or irreverent? I don’t think so. After all I include myself among those who once recited the Lord’s Prayer daily in seminary while studying to become a Catholic priest. I, too, believed that Jesus died for my sins and that we had to die in order to go to Heaven. How well I recall the many times I knelt at the foot of a large crucifix in the seminary chapel gazing up into the eyes of the image on the cross depicting the brutal crucifixion of Jesus and feeling a deep sadness while trying to get in touch with the anguish and pain He must have felt, abandoned by His world He came to save, with hands and feet nailed to a wooden cross. As I recall those formative days of that fourteen-year-old young man’s life — responding to a calling, a “vocation,” to serve the Lord as His priest — words come to mind the Master spoke to the weeping women of Jerusalem as he carried His cross up the “Via Dolorosa” in the “Holy City” of Jerusalem on the way to Golgotha:
“Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and thewombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck.“
There’s so much prophecy encoded in that response to the weeping women. Those days have come for millions in war-torn countries such as Ukraine, and where earthquakes and torrential floods have displaced millions from their homes and devastated villages leaving mothers nothing to bring their children home to and raise a family; husbands and fathers gone off to fight their country’s battles and defend their homelands from enemy invaders; too many never to return home, dead or alive.
I feel in my gut that those days have arrived for the entire world and they will be apocalyptic for the human race and for all life on Earth — unless we turn away from our self-centered destructive ways and return to our LORD and KING of Heaven and Earth. This is His world, after all, as are we His body.
A passage from the Book of Malachi (3:7) in the Old Testament wants to be brought forward here:
“Ever since the time of your ancestors you have turned away from my decrees and have notkept them. Return to me, and I will return to you,” says the Lord Almighty.”
OUR CATACLYSMIC PAST
There have been six documented mass extinctions, the last one being at the end of the last ice age 12,800 years ago with the Younger Dryas meteor impact that melted the ice cap and caused an apocalyptic deluge that washed away entire advanced civilizations in North America and in parts of Europe and Asia, raising sea levels and sinking the great civilization on the island of Atlantis. Evidence of this massive rush of waters over land can be seen here in the scablands of Washington State and the region around the Great Lakes and the lakes themselves. We may well be headed for a seventh mass extinction.
I highly recommend Graham Hancock’s “Ancient Apocalypse” now streaming on Netflix. It’s a well documented series on our cataclysmic past, a topic well worth visiting at this time — as it seems humanity needs a sobering splash of cold water in the face in order to wake up to reality.
It could well happen again as conditions in the heavens are similar in the Winter Solstice of today as they were in the Summer Solstice 12,800 years ago when Earth wandered into the thick debris tail of the Taurid comet and got showered by a raining mass of meteors. The Zodiacal science of Mazzaroth is an exact science, and our absence from the crossover point of dominion over the whole earth has allowed our planet to be knocked off of its appointed orbit and start wobbling on its axis. Like the Children of Israel, we are wandering in the wilderness of the cosmos into dangerous areas where cataclysms have happened in times past. The Taurid comet observes a 26,000-year cycle, according to Graham Handcock’s documentary. That’s approximately the length of two precession cycles of the earth’s axis around the 12 Zodiac constellations, each cycle being 12,700 – 12,800 years.
I don’t mean to be a prophet of doom and gloom here. But, based on our cataclysmic past, we earthlings would do well to take heed — or as my parents would say “You better straighten up and fly right!”
I will close with those uplifting words from Psalm 24 immortalized in Handle’s Messiah:
“Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory. Selah.”
“Don’t be afraid to face the facts, and never lose your ability to ask the questions: Why? and How?” Immanuel Velikovsky
CONSCIOUSNESS IS NO MYSTERY. Like a seedbed wherein ideas are planted, nurtured by unwavering belief, and given birth in their seasons, consciousness is the matrix for creation. It is very fertile soil, so fertile that one has to be very careful about the nature of the seeds one plants.
This fertile soil can be cultivated and seeded from below as well as from above and within. Our physical bodies and the natural world are the fruits of seeds planted by Life from above. The world that man has constructed and imposed upon the surface of this planet, with its skyscrapers, concrete roadways and parking lots, industrial and commercial complexes, along with its burgeoning landfills, are all the product of seeds planted by human beings from below . . . none of it compatible with the fine living, breathing fabric of our beautiful Home among the stars.
Not all is a burden to the Earth, as many of our ideas and dreams, visions and asperations are creative and harmonious with the natural climate of Gaia. There is a saying among the spiritually awake when an idea presents itself for manifestation, “Put it in the heaven.” A more common expression is “Put it on the back burner.” If it is resonant with Life, it may be useful to the creation of a living world. What we now have is a dying world created by dying human beings.
Weeds find their way into this sacred soil as well, deposited there by birds-of-sorts in their fertilizing poop. There’s a biblical passage that cautions “Beware the snare of the fowler,” the web-like net of the human mind that snares fleeting ideas. The soil of consciousness can become cluttered with weed-yielding seeds, so we have a responsibility to “Tend and keep the Garden.”
The content of human consciousness is generally a clutter of “false ambition’s restless schemes” . . . busy thoughts and self-serving ideas and concepts—many of them like concrete: thoroughly mixed up and permanently set . . . and ardently defended when challenged. Just consider the “narrative” put forth by the official guardians of the nation’s health with regard to the current global health crisis. Try and put forward an alternative narrative on social media, even amongst friends and family, and you’ll find yourself quickly censored and cancelled. Mark Twain had something to say about this: “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled.”
THE “OFFICIAL NARRATIVE”
Human consciousness, in its state of uncertainty and insecurity, greatly values official and popular narratives, and will ardently defends them against any and all challenges to the contrary. It’s an addiction affording a sense of comfort, though false, in knowing what’s going on in the world, especially in a life-threatening crisis. Most are fear mongering motivators.
There are a number of crises constantly going on in our world of many problems. One such crisis is in the Christian world of religious beliefs and doctrines. I ran into this one several months ago during a fairly pleasant conversation with a nephew who is heavily invested in the Pentecostal narrative that “All men are sinners”—until I suggested he consider the passage in Genesis that says he is made in the image and likeness of God and is therefore Divine. He vehemently objected to even the suggestion of a different narrative about the nature of man. “Oh No! I am a sinner! The Bibles says all men are sinners.” I recall a biblical passage that declares “All men are liars.” (Psalm 116:11). It was Paul who declared all men to be sinners, but Paul didn’t know the Master, nor did he ever hear Him speak of His Gospel of the Kingdom of Love.
Then, there’s this “pandemic” which has polarized the population of the world in two different camps believing in two opposing narratives. Friends and families have been torn apart by this controversy. The attitude is taken, on both sides, “Don’t mess with my belief if you don’t want to start a heated argument. I need to believe in this for my own sanity and security.” Apparently, this is not a good time nor topic for inquiry and critical thinking.
People have been censored and imprisoned, even scrubbed out, for putting forth a narrative that radically differs from the “official” narrative . . . and not only in modern times. We have the historical precedent of the crucifixion of Jesus. He was denied not once but three times by a disciple, abandoned by all but two or three, and crucified by those to whom he had come to offer salvation and a Way into the Kingdom of Heaven without having to die—all for proclaiming his divinity and the divinity of all men, male and female, made in God’s image and likeness. He brought forward a narrative that was radically different from the long-standing Hebrew doctrines, and it was rejected by staunch believers in an ancient narrative that a Messiah would come and set things to right here on earth. “My kingdom is not of this world” he told Pilate . . . yet another narrative that no one in his day could quite comprehend much less adopt. The narrative of a temporal kingdom with a Messiah as king was deeply invested in by the religious authorities of the day, as well as the Zealots among the people, who cried out for his crucifixion.
OUR YOUTH IN THE “CLIMATE CRISIS”
Then there’s the “climate crisis” everyone’s polarized in . . . well, almost everyone, most actively our youth since it’s their future that’s at stake. Here’s a report by Somini Sengupta, Global Correspondent on climate issues for the New York Times from a recent survey of 10,000 young people on the issue of climate change.
HOW THE YOUNG GENERATIONS VIEW THE WORLD
Four Takeaways on the youth climate movement: They’ve grown up in a pandemic. They’ve come of age in an era of strongman leaders. The climate crisis looms over their very lives. Generation Z, the cohort born after 1996, has inherited a set of compounding uncertainties. It explains, in some measure, the vibe of the youth climate movement. Powered by rage and distrust, it is decentralized and it is increasingly focused on the inequitable effects of global warming.
The global youth movement known as Friday for the Future has called on its members to organize protests around the world this Friday, March 25 (yesterday). Its rallying cry is “climate reparations and justice.”
Here’s what I find most revealing about this generation of climate activists: They distrust government.
In a survey of 10,000 people between ages 16 and 25 in 10 countries, three-fourths said they think “the future is frightening.” The survey was funded by an advocacy group, Avaaz, led by researchers at the University of Bath in England and published in The Lancet in December. It asked respondents to answer “yes” or “no” or “prefer not to say” to a series of questions.
More than 64 percent said their governments were not “doing enough to prevent a climate catastrophe”; more than 61 percent said they did not have trust in their government; and more than 58 percent said their governments were “betraying” them. In the U.S., they are mostly female and white.
This state of protest in the consciousness of our youth, seeded and nurtured by fear of extinction of our species, and anger toward the government for not doing more to avert an existential crisis, ignores the fact that the government has little real control over the climate of the planet. The climate of the earth and all the planets is largely controlled and determined by what’s happening with the Sun at the center of our solar system. Earth is part of a unit and moves with what is moving within it—which for the past several years has been a gradual heating-up, bringing about climate changes on all the planets, severe storms and turbulences just like those here on Earth.
Our planet is not in jeopardy of extinction. We are. Not by climate change alone but by our own hand. We’re poisoning our water, our air and our earth with our waste and industrial pollution. The fourth Creative Force, fire, cannot be polluted, and is at work cleansing and purifying the earth and its inhabitants.
THE OFFIIAL CHRISTIAN NARRATIVE
Returning to the ill-conceived cancellation of Jesus by the radical fundamentalists of his day—a cancellation that was echoed and repeated at the ecumenical Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, a council of Christian bishops convened by Roman Emperor Constantine, in which Jesus’s message of the Kingdom of love was literally redacted and the official narrative of Christianity for the entire world established and published in the Nicaean Creed, a narrative recited at Sunday Services in the Christian world year ’round. The narrative Jesus brought and offered to the world hasn’t been successfully cancelled but continues to be offered by the Lord of lords and King of kings. His Kingdom is the Kingdom of Heaven from which his Father, who is Love, seeds the sacred soil of Consciousness from which Mother God brings forth the fruits of the Tree of Life in the Garden of the Natural World and so-called “wild kingdoms,” even with a few faithful stewards on hand to tend and keep it.
The youth of today protest to the government for its lack of doing more about the “climate crisis.” The truth is, WE are the government. As youth choirs sing out these days, “We are the world. We are the people.” It’s our job to set things to right here on Earth. We are the designated keepers of Eden.
IT’S A WONDERFUL WORLD SEEDED BY LIFE
When was the last time you looked around and marveled at the beauty of Mother Nature’s wonderful world? The wondrous works of the Creator, seeded from above by Father Sun, as the Native American Indians saw the world and honored the Earth and the Great Spirit whose world it is? As I stated earlier, we must take great care for what seeds we sow in the garden of human consciousness. Seeds of fear for what the climate prophets predict lies ahead for mankind and the planet invite that which we most fear to come upon us. The narratives we uphold and hold sacred in consciousness have the potential of doing more than simply defining what is thought to be going down in our world. They have the seminal potential of determining what will transpire down the road, if not sooner.
“IT’S WHAT IT IS”
When I think deeper about it, why do we need a narrative at all? About anything? Why, indeed? A narrative is not needed to define what’s going on in the world. It’s plain to see. As the current popular quip puts it, “It’s what it is.” The world is what it is . . . and how we’ve made it. There’s a saying in the Bible “Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” The New World—the biblical “New Jerusalem”—comes down from God out of Heaven . . . “adorned as a bride for her husband” . . . all ready to be received and established on Earth. That’s why we’re here. The only reason why we were put here: to know the ordinances of Heaven and to set their dominion in the Earth. Let us lift up our hearts unto Heaven and welcome the New Earth . . . even as we totter on an existential precipice “between the devil and the deep blue sea,” as the ancient saying goes.
I leave you with these timeless words in the form of a poem composed by a remarkable spiritual teacher, Lord Martin Exeter. May they quicken the angelic spirit of love for the truth of life in you, my cherished reader and follower.
Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea. —Dylan Thomas
I GREET YOU ON THIS CHRISTMAS MORNING in the Spirit of the Christ, whose birth we celebrate today. Let peace reign in your heart today and throughout the New Year.
Cynthia Bourgeault takes this chapter of her book, THE WISDOM JESUS, home to an unveiling of love. Recapping the previous two paragraphs for continuity of thought, here is the final installment of this series on the incarnation of Jesus.
♦ ◊ ♦
LET ME BE VERY CLEAR HERE. I am not saying that suffering exists in order for God to reveal himself. I am only saying that where suffering exists and is consciously accepted, there divine love shines forth brightly. Unfortunately, linear cause-and-effect has progressively less meaning as we approach the deep mysteries (which originate beyond time and thus have no real use for it). But the principle can be tested. Pay attention to the quality of human character that emerges from constriction accepted with conscious forgiveness as compared to what emerges from rage and violence and draw your own conclusions.
At any rate, I have often suspected that the most profound product of this world is tears. I don’t mean that to be morbid. Rather, I mean that tears express that vulnerability in which we can endure having our heart broken and go right on loving. In the tears flows a sweetness not of our own making, which has been known in our tradition as the Divine Mercy. Our jagged and hard-edged earth plane is the realm in which this mercy is the most deeply, excruciatingly, and beautifully released. That’s our business down here. That’s what we’re here for. ♦ (Emphasis added)
Unveiling Love
IF MY HUNCH IS CORRECT, you can see how it significantly rearranges the playing field. Our earthly existence, then, is not about good behavior in preparation for a final judgment. It’s not a finishing school in which we “learn what we need to learn,” nor a sweatshop in which we work off our karmic debt. Right here and now we are in the process of speaking into being the revelation of God’s most hidden and intimate name. That’s a difficult assignment, particularly when “success” and “failure” mostly wind up being the complete opposites of what we would normally expect in life. But the most productive orientation for our time here is not to focus on how quickly we can get back to our spiritual homeland, but to give ourselves fully to the divine intimacy being ventured right here and now. We might reassure ourselves that in some conscious (or deeply trans-conscious) way, we have chosen to bear our part in what mystical tradition calls “the suffering of God”: the costliness that is always involved in the full manifestation of divine love. We’re doing it here and now, through the marrow of our own human lives, consciously lived. And these space-time conditions, as fragile and as frustrating as they are, are precisely the conditions which allow it to happen. As the poet Dylan Thomas expresses it in the beautiful lines with which this chapter began, “Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea.” It is the reality of the chains that creates the beauty of the song.
Mediator as Bridge
From a God’s-eye view of creation, the real operational challenge is not sin and evil; it is posed by the vastly unequal energetic frequencies between the realms. How can the sun touch a snowflake? How can the divine radiance meet and interpenetrate created life without incinerating it? This is the ultimate metaphysical koan—to which Christianity proposes as its solution the mystery of the incarnation.
This realization, in turn, opens up a whole new line of insight into John’s statement, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” The Son, in this wider metaphysical context, is no longer the one who bails us out or who rescues us from our fallen state but the one who becomes our bridge between the realms. Recognizing the enormous difficulty of our mission, Jesus comes to accompany us on it, advocating for our human finitude in a way that respects its integrity but doesn’t allow us to get trapped in it. As in the traditional theological understanding (but with a very different flavor), he becomes our mediator. Standing at the confluence of two vastly different orders of being, he offers his own life as the sanctuary between them.
“Become All Flame”
As we have seen already, these great metaphysical paradoxes lend themselves more easily to poetry and metaphor than to the theological scalpel. One of the classic images Christian mystics have used to portray this cosmic mediation is actually very ancient, from the Old Testament. In the book of Exodus (3:1-6) the story is told of how Moses, while tending his father-in-law’s flock of sheep in the Midianite wilderness, suddenly comes upon a bush fully engulfed in flame and yet miraculously intact. The miracle is quickly revealed as an angel of God speaking through the flame. But for the Christian desert hermits later inhabiting that same wilderness, the burning bush became a symbol of Jesus himself: all flame, yet perfectly intact within his finite container. And there were those among that desert fellowship who yearned for that same incandescent ground. In one of the most famous of the desert parables:
Abba Lot went to Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace, and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.
Would it be possible for us, too, to “become all flame”? Could our own lives become such a perfect fusion of infinite love and finite form that light would pour from our being as an actual physical radiance? I have indeed seen this light in more than a few realized masters toward the end of their earthly journeys; it is the fully revealed mystery of human life lived as a conscious sacrament. How we get there is the secret Jesus will unfold for us through the course of his own consciously sacramental life. But our first step in joining him on this journey is to recognize that his incarnation is not about fall, guilt, or blame, but about goodness, solidarity, and our own intimate participation in the mystery of love at the heart of all creation. ♥
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Life is sacred wherever it is expressed in Nature. A life lived with love is truly a sacrament. I love Cynthia’s passionate presentation of the incarnation and life of Jesus. Speaking of passion, I was listening to Bishop Michael Curry on NBC’s Today Show this Christmas Eve morning give his Christmas message, which is all about giving the gift of YOU to all those you meet in your daily activities by greeting them with a smile and a kind word or two to make a connection with them for sharing love. He exemplifies this in his own robust ways. We each have a gift to give of our Self, which is a gift from Heaven from whence we came into this world. The gifts of Spirit are always coming down from God out of Heaven. We need only be still enough and prepared in our hearts to receive and deliver them. My friend in South Korea, Jae Hyoung Lee, shared this timely message on his Facebook page today:
How careful are you that the atmosphere in you, that your state inside yourself, is of such a nature that the delicate things of God will not be destroyed? Such things will be destroyed by self-indulgence in such things as resentment, fear, hate, jealousy. All such attitudes produce a coarse atmosphere within a person, where the delicate plant cannot grow, where the delicate plant in fact will be destroyed. The way the world now is the atmosphere is so coarse that the things of God cannot exist here. They must first be placed in a womb, and the womb is provided by human beings, who were created for this purpose. We are the human beings through whom this development needs to take place, and we are responsible for maintaining security. —-Martin Cecil
There a beautiful hymn we used to sing in choir that speaks of the womb of the Earth for beauty to be born and our crowning role as emissaries of beauty and light. I’ll leave it with you to hold in your heart during this Christmas Season and throughout the coming year.
Our God did make the earth a place of beauty, love and light, Where skies and seas and all of life reveal Him with delight. For God did make the earth a womb where beauty might be born.
The flowers drink the rain and sun above the good brown earth, And do not seem to have to try to fill their life with worth. For God did make the earth a womb where beauty might be born.
And man He made with crowning care to share His majesty, To let His gifts of life appear, His glory ever be. For God did make the earth a womb where beauty might be born.
May your Christmas be a joyful celebration of the gift you are and the gifts of friends and family. Feel free to share my Christmas message with friends and loved ones. See you next year!
Merry Christmas . . . and Happy Hanukkah to our Jewish friends and neighbors!
“The crucifixion wasn’t really the hard thing for Jesus; the hard thing was incarnation.”
THE PASSAGE ABOVE, attributed to the mystic Bernadette Roberts, sets the tone for this second in a series of three posts on the theme of the incarnation of Jesus, the son of God. I continue from where my previous post left off sharing from Cynthia Bourgeault’s beautiful and provocative book, THE WISDOM JESUS, Transforming Heart and Mind—A New Perspective on Christ and His Message. We came into Being in Heaven before coming into Human form on Earth, and our journeys here were anything but pleasant. We fell into this illusive world “from a lighter gravitational field to a heavier one.” With this post I celebrate the Winter Solstice and the beginning of yet another solar cycle initiated by the increase of Light. Enjoy.
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“Many Dwelling Places”
We Christians still inhabit a rather small universe, metaphysically speaking. We know that we live here on earth, and some of us may believe that above it is a place called heaven, counterbalanced by a place down below called hell. At very best it’s a three-tiered universe. But the ancient wisdom traditions (now strongly reinforced, incidentally, by findings emerging from modern physics and cosmology) universally suggest that we need to throw this three-story world out; it is far too cramped to contain the vastness of divine consciousness. There are many realms, wisdom teaches: not just earth, heaven, and hell, but countless densities or dimensions of existence, all of which exist to manifest or mirror an aspect of the divine fullness. Jesus himself states this very clearly to the disciples in his farewell discourses in the Gospel of John, when he says, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places” (John 14:2). He does not mean physical places but rather states of consciousness or dimensions of divine energy (as we saw in chapter 3 with Jim Marion’s recognition that the “Kingdom of Heaven” was Jesus’s way of referring to nondual consciousness). The tradition of sophia perennis (perennial wisdom) pictures this vastness as a “great chain of being” or “ray of creation.” which begins in a pure, high-intensity, invisible, subtle consciousness and “descends,” thickening as it does so, into this world we inhabit: the realm of sharp edges and tables and chairs and human beings crashing and banging against each other in a finite and terribly solid world.
The contemporary Christian hermeticist Valentin Tomberg envisions this ray as a vast energetic cascade, beginning in divine consciousness itself and ending up in our familiar empirical universe. In Meditations on the Tarot he writes:
“Modern science has come to understand that matter is only condensed energy. Sooner or later science will also discover that what it calls energy is only condensed psychic force, which discovery will lead in the end to the establishment of the fact that all psychic force is the condensation, purely and simply, of consciousness; i.e., spirit.”
Like a mountain whose base is solidly on the earth but whose summit is hidden in the clouds, this insight leads us step by step up the ray of creation. Modern physics certainly would have no difficulty with the assertion that matter is only condensed energy; this is officially the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But what about this next realm, “psychic force”? Here the paths divide. This second form of energy is well known to spiritual seekers, but largely invisible to hardcore science; it is the energy flowing through prayer, attention, intention, and will: those more subtle exchanges which science has so far declined to measure but which we know have the power to create demonstrable effects in the physical realm.”
Beyond psychic force, yet another energetic realm awaits us, claims Tomberg, for psychic force is itself only the “condensation” (that is, the densification or coarser expression) of a substance incomparably more intense and subtle: pure spirit, pristine consciousness itself, unmediated by any form of expression. This primordial quality is known by many names in the tradition-“I AM” in Judeo-Christian tradition, wujud (“reality”) in mystical Islam, rigpa (“pristine awareness”) in Tibetan Buddhism. The names vary, but the understanding remains the same. Virtually unanimously, the ancient wisdom roadmaps picture the cosmos as a vast light stream, radiating out from the ineffable Godhead through the realm of primordial intention (known in Christianity as the logos), into archetypal form and energies, and finally into human, earthly becoming. Our life here in this physical cosmos is merely the endpoint of a long journey of what you might call “divine redshift”— that is, the condensation or cooling down of the intense energy of pure spirit in order to make physical manifestation possible.
Down Here on the Edge
So here we find ourselves on this plane of existence, at or near the bottom of the great chain of being. What are we to make of our position? What are we doing “down” here in a world that seems so dense and sluggish, so coarse and fragile and finite? Even in our dreams we move faster than the speed of light, and our mystics and visionaries are perpetually reminding us that in our heart of hearts we remember and yearn for a state of greater spaciousness and fluidity.
It’s curious, when you come to think about it, how virtually all the world’s spiritual traditions see this earthly realm as somehow deficient. Depending on the tradition, our world is either an illusion or a mistake, but in either case we “fall” into it, from a lighter gravitational field to a heavier one. We have seen how the Judeo-Christian tradition upholds this understanding in its primordial myth of the fall of Adam and Eve. Other traditions (primarily the Eastern ones) see this world as a mirage, an illusion to be dispelled. Still other traditions, such as mystical Islam, carry a profound sense of exile and a “nostalgia for the infinite.” Here is not home.
Is there another way of looking at this? I believe there is, and I think that it is actually at the heart of what is intended by that beautiful mantra, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” But it is so spiritually counterintuitive that it remains almost entirely unspoken — at least I myself have never heard it spoken or written about in any of the traditions. To the extent that what I am seeing here is correct, Christian wisdom steps out into unknown territory, leaving even sophia perennis behind.
Here is my take: Yes, this is a very heavy, frustrating, difficult density that we come into by taking birth in the human realm. Because of the binary, finite nature of both the physical world itself and the egoic operating system we use to navigate it, it seems as though we’re always bumping into sharp edges. Life presents us with a series of seemingly irrevocable choices: to do one thing means that we have to give up something else; to marry one person means we can’t marry another; and to join a monastery means we can’t marry at all. Our confused agendas clash both inwardly and outwardly, and we cause each other pain. Our bodies age; we diminish physically; loved ones fall out of our lives. And the force of gravity is tenacious, nailing our feet to the ground and usually our souls as well. I remember my granddaughter, now five, who from the very moment she arrived on this planet experienced an intense frustration bordering on fury at her inability to move. “What the hell?” she seemed to be saying as she flailed her little arms and legs and tried even at four months old to wriggle herself across the room. I have never seen a child who felt the constriction of this planet as much as she did.
Yes, we come into constriction, but is that the same as punishment! I believe not. I believe rather that this constriction is a sacrament and we have been offered a divine invitation to participate in it.
Remember our discussion of sacrament at the beginning of this chapter! A sacrament reveals a mystery in a particularly intense way while at the same time offering the means for its actualization. And in this sphere of human life, the sacrament is finitude and the mystery is “I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known….”
Notice that there is a subtle double meaning at work in this phrase. At one level “I loved to be known” is a synonym for “I longed to be known” (and the phrase is often translated that way). But you can read the words in another way: “I loved in order to be known”– and when you do, they reveal a deeper spiritual truth. In order to become known to another, we must take the risk of loving that person, and this includes the real possibility of rejection and the even more painful prospect of heart break if the beloved is lost to us. It is difficult to risk love in a world so fragile and contingent. And yet, the greater the gamble of self-disclosure, the more powerful the intimacy and the more profound the quality of devotion revealed.
Could it be like this for God as well?
Could it be that this earthly realm, not in spite of but because of its very density and jagged edges, offers precisely the conditions for the expression of certain aspects of divine love that could become real in no other way? This world does indeed show forth what love is like in a particularly intense and costly way. But when we look at this process more deeply, we can see that those sharp edges we experience as constriction at the same time call forth some of the most exquisite dimensions of love, which require the condition of finitude in order to make sense — qualities such as steadfastness, tenderness, commitment, forbearance, fidelity, and forgiveness. These mature and subtle flavors of love have no real context in a realm where there are no edges and boundaries, where all just flows. But when you run up against the hard edge and have to stand true to love anyway, what emerges is a most precious taste of pure divine love. God has spoken his most intimate name.
Let me be very clear here. I am not saying that suffering exists in order for God to reveal himself. I am only saying that where suffering exists and is consciously accepted, there divine love shines forth brightly. Unfortunately, linear cause-and-effect has progressively less meaning as we approach the deep mysteries (which originate beyond time and thus have no real use for it). But the principle can be tested. Pay attention to the quality of human character that emerges from constriction accepted with conscious forgiveness as compared to what emerges from rage and violence and draw your own conclusions.
At any rate, I have often suspected that the most profound product of this world is tears. I don’t mean that to be morbid. Rather, I mean that tears express that vulnerability in which we can endure having our heart broken and go right on loving. In the tears flows a sweetness not of our own making, which has been known in our tradition as the Divine Mercy. Our jagged and hard-edged earth plane is the realm in which this mercy is the most deeply, excruciatingly, and beautifully released. That’s our business down here. That’s what we’re here for. ♦ (Emphasis added)
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I love Cynthia’s passion and I’m finding her insights enlightening relative to the evolution and transformation taking place in Christian thinking and in the collective consciousness as a whole, probably because I still have a place of compassionate caring in my heart for my Catholic roots. Not that I’m setting out on a mission to save the Catholic Church. It’s the betrayed and misled that I care about, and who I have in mind and heart sharing Cynthia’s writings. Please feel free to wisely share these blog posts with friends and family. We will find out where the author is taking this consideration in the final series installment, which I will post on Christmas day. Until then, Happy Solstice.
“I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, and so I created the worlds both visible and invisible.” — Islamic Tradition
CHRISTMAS IS A YEARLY CELEBRATION of the incarnation of God’s only son, the Lord of Love and Prince of Peace, on Earth. I would like to share with you an insightful view and perspective of the incarnation of Jesus as a fully humanized being, taken from Cynthia Bourgeault’s beautifully written and profoundly insightful book THE WISDOM JESUS. Its author is an Episcopal priest who has written several books exploring Jesus’ life as a mystical teaching and sacrament.
Having emerged from a Catholic upbringing myself, and having spent seven years in Catholic Seminary, I do enjoy sharing this author’s vision of what Christianity could be simply by adopting a more metaphysical view and understanding of it core truth and of the One whose birth we celebrate this week. Cynthia takes us from where we’ve been in our religious path of worshiping God, to where we are now at the threshold of opportunity for a radical shift in our attitude and consciousness, and forward to how we could easily move into a more spirit and love based path to knowing God. I will share selections from her book in two or more blog posts. I hope you will enjoy her as much as I do.
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THE INCARMATION
IN THE FIRST PART of this book we explored Jesus’s teachings as a comprehensive spiritual path. In this second part we will be shifting our focus to consider Jesus’s life itself as a teaching. By “a teaching” I mean a model, of course; all authentic teachers walk the talk. But more than just a model, I want to consider his life as a sacrament — that is, as a spiritual force in its own right. The traditional definition of a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” But what to my mind this definition does not make sufficiently clear is that a sacrament does not merely symbolize a spiritual reality; it lives that reality into existence.
Jesus’s life, considered from this standpoint, is a sacrament: a mystery that draws us deeply into itself and, when rightly approached, conveys an actual spiritual energy empowering us to follow the path that his teachings have laid out. This sacramental life of Jesus rests on four cornerstones which are both historical events and cosmic realities: his incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension. Together they compose the foundation of the Christian mystical and devotional life, and to open oneself fully to the meaning of these great mysteries is to be able to read the inner roadmap of the Christian path. In the next four chapters we will be exploring each of these mysteries in turn. My hope is to move beyond the usual theological and critical-historical explanations in order to follow the living mystical thread that will allow us to appropriate each one of these mysteries as food for the journey.
Since the ground we will be traversing is also the sometimes prickly shared territory of Christian liturgy and sacramental theology, let me remind you once again of my own background here, so that you will know where I am speaking from. While I wear the collar of an Episcopal priest, most of my lived liturgical life has been within the wider stream of Benedictine monasticism, primarily Western and Roman Catholic (although the Episcopal liturgy is in most respects identical), and it is from this perspective (as well as my earlier training as a medievalist) that I will primarily be speaking when I describe the ritual celebrations that unfold these great mysteries. I am less familiar with the Orthodox traditions (except through my exposure to the Christian inner tradition), but at ease within the Celtic and Oriental Orthodox spiritual streams, whose extraordinary insights I will draw on at appropriate moments. As Meister Eckhart once observed, “There is no being except in a mode of being,” and the Western Catholic mode of being is the stream in which I have primarily come to know what I know. With that disclaimer in place, let us see what we can discover about the first great mystery, the incarnation.
“For God So Loved the World . . . .”
I remember being struck many years ago by an insight from the contemporary mystic Bernadette Roberts that crucifixion wasn’t really the hard thing for Jesus; the hard thing was incarnation.” Crucifixion and what followed from it — his death and resurrection — were simply the pathway along which infinite consciousness could return to its natural state. What was really hard for infinite consciousness was to come into the finite world in the first place. With nothing to gain from the human adventure — nothing to prove, nothing to achieve, and a dangerously unboundaried heart that left him defenseless against the hard edges of this world — Jesus came anyway: that, claims Bernadette Roberts, was the real crucifixion! As we saw earlier, Paul grasped that same point in his beautiful hymn in Philippians 2:9-16. The first self-emptying that Jesus goes through is the self-emptying that lands him in bodily form on this planet, a human being. There is definitely something spiritually counterintuitive about this business of incarnation, and to really get what’s at stake in this mystery is for me the acid test as to whether you understand what Christianity is all about.
Unfortunately, this understanding is hard to come by: not only outside of Christianity, but inside it as well. Make no mistake, Christianity is intensely a religion of incarnation. Millions of people caught up in mass hysteria during the Christmas season can’t all be wrong! But even the sentimental excesses of the season only go to reinforce the point. There is a deeper truth at work here that stirs us in spite of ourselves. Who among us has not awakened in the wee hours of Christmas morning to catch the live broadcast of the Ceremony of Lessons and Carols from Westminster Abbey and thrilled to the sonorous reading of those immortal words from the prologue to the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelled among us”? There is a deep soul-truth here that both contains and redeems our frantic efforts to penetrate its meaning at a more superficial level.
If you were to imagine the great world religions like the colors of a rainbow, each one witnessing in a particular way to some essential aspect of the divine fullness, Christianity would unquestionably hold down the corner of incarnation — by which I mean the vision of God in full solidarity with the created world, fully at home within the conditions of finitude, so that form itself poses no impediment to divinity. There is another beautiful phrase in John’s gospel proclaiming: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son” (John 3:16). At its mystical best, Christianity reverberates with the warmth of this assurance: with the conviction that creation is good, that God is for us, and that what ultimately gets worked out in the sacred mystery of Jesus’s passage through the human realm is a profound testament to love.
Who Screwed Up?
Unfortunately, Christianity as a religion has never had a sufficient metaphysical understanding of its own core truth. The message gets obscured by its primary interpretive vehicle: the theology of fall and redemption. Virtually all Christian teaching begins from the supposition that Jesus’s incarnation is brought about by the fall of Adam and happens in response to it. “As in Adam all died, so in Christ shall all be made alive” is the classic Pauline formulation of this idea (I Corinthians 15:20). The primordial parents Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and plunged the world into chaos; Jesus came to rescue it. Thus, incarnation is framed from the start within the context of God’s response to a mistake that should never have happened in the first place. This assumption, in turn, deeply colors our understanding of the phrase, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” It sounds like: “God didn’t give up on us; God bailed us out.”
In a more mystical nuancing of this same basic idea, we encounter the theology of “0 felix culpa”~”O happy fault”~ to quote the first line of a traditional Gregorian Advent hymn which expresses this theology particularly clearly. Rather than blaming Adam and Eve, this line of argument claims, we ought to be grateful for them because their mistake set in motion the chain of events through which Christ would fully reveal himself to this world. Without that initial fall there would have been no need for the redemption. In the most subtle versions of this teaching (as in Karl Barth’s Christ and Adam) linear cause and effect are reversed, and we see Adam and Eve falling into this space/time continuum out of God’s “prior” decision (that is, already made in eternity) to reveal himself in human form. Rather than being the cause of the fall, Adam and Eve become the instruments of the ultimate divine self-communication. This is a much more affirmative teaching, which brings the theology of fall and redemption to its most mature expression.
But I would like to push the metaphysical envelope still further and see if we can approach the mystery of the incarnation through a conceptual framework that does not rely on fall and redemption at all but unfolds along an entirely different line of understanding. Instead of a cosmic course-correction, this other approach envisions the steady and increasingly intimate revelation of divine love along a trajectory that was there from the beginning. The best expression of this idea is actually contained in a beautiful saying from Islamic tradition (although its roots go down into perennial wisdom ground): “I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, and so I created the worlds both visible and invisible.” Both the saying itself and the understanding that illumines it derive from a profound mystical intuition that our created universe is a vast mirror, or ornament (and the Greek word “cosmos” literally means “an ornament”), through which divine potentiality — beautiful, fathomless, endlessly creative — projects itself into form in order to realize fully the depths of divine love. And remember that “realize” has two meanings: “to recognize” and “to make real.” The act of loving brings hidden potential to full expression, and the more intimate and costly the self-giving, the more precious the quality of love revealed. This subtle and beautiful understanding of creation will also, as we shall see, have something very important to show us about our true work as human beings.
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We are each one an incarnation of Divine Being. Our personal incarnations were stressful and limiting, descending from the peaceful Realms of Light and landing in the dark wet terrain of busy embryonic cellular activity; from flying freely in the air of spirit to crawling on our bellies until our toddling forms learn to walk and run. How we yearn for the freedom we knew before incarnating. I remember very vivid dreams of flying above the ground at breakneck speed in my youthful years. Who hasn’t had such dreams? And I can relate to the thrill a jet pilot must enjoy flying through the air at supersonic speed. One has to be fit and well trained to fly a jet. Likewise our human capacities need compassionate care and vital nourishment in order to be fully fit and available in accommodating the incarnate divine beings we are.
Yet here we are, fully awake and learning how to navigate a multidimensional universe of energy-shaped-and-driven hard and complex materiality only God comprehends. Being incarnate gods ourselves, we have been gifted the privilege of sharing in Divine Consciousness and comprehending reality that is incomprehensible to the human intellect—for the darkness cannot comprehend the Light in the same way that Light comprehends the darkness. We incarnate to bring Light into the dark corners of Creation to bring forth a heavenly world here on Earth where we are. This gives us great cause for celebrating, at Christmas time and throughout the year.
I celebrate you, dear reader, this Christmas, along with my own Divine incarnation—and my gift to you and myself is unconditional love and acceptance. May the joy of Love fill you full to overflowing during this Holiday Season. Until my next post — which will be published this coming Wednesday,
Be love. Be loved.
Anthony (tpal70@gmail.com)
Credits: Artistic drawing by Rose Meeker, author of MAGIC AT OUR HAND – Releasing Our Lives into Order and Beauty
“It was not love stored up but love utterly poured out that opened the gates to the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Generosity of spirit is innate with everyone. We are born to be givers. This pandemic, along with hurricanes and wildfires, is bringing out the spirit of giving in us all, heralding in a new day and shaping a new world. When I see it acted out in movies and news stories, I tear up with joy and longing for the return of generosity to our world. A passage from my poet friend Don Hynes expresses what I feel today:
The old earth claws for purchase
but the turning is profound,
reaching from the furthest stars
to the roots of trees,
a new heaven poised beyond
the horizon, beginning even now
to shape the world anew.
This passage from Cynthia Bourgeault’s THE WISDOM JESUS touched a place in my heart of deep sadness for the state of the world mingled with profound love for this Man she honors and celebrates so exquisitely personal. How little we know of his colorful character from the Four Gospels. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene give us a taste of his more candid expressions, some rather blunt and thought provoking: “Whoever is near me is near the fire. Whoever is far from me (the fire) is far from the Kingdom.” He was no gentle lamb, nor a “sweet Jesus.” His generosity of spirit still shines through his words and deeds recorded in the New Testament, all of which were written down four to five decades after his departure, all from oral traditions. Yet they inspire and compel us to be better and do better than we have been and done heretofore—even to be ablaze with love as he was. Cynthia introduces this passage with poetry by Rumi:
Yet in the midst of suffering, Love proceeds like a millstone, hard-surfaced and straight forward. Having died to self-interest, she risks everything and asks for nothing. Love gambles away every gift God bestows.
The Jesus Trajectory
The words above were written by the great Sufi mystic Jalalludin Rumi. But better than almost anything in Christian scripture, they closely describe the trajectory that Jesus himself followed in life. He certainly called us to dying to self, but his idea of dying to self was not through inner renunciation or guarding the purity of his being but through radically squandering everything he had and was. John the Baptist’s disciples were horrified because he banqueted, drank, and danced. The Pharisees were horrified because he healed on the Sabbath and kept company with women and disreputables, people known to be impure. Boundaries meant nothing to him; he walked right through them.
What seemed disconcerting to nearly everybody was the messy, freewheeling largeness of his spirit. Abundance and a generosity bordering on extravagant seemed to be the signatures of both his teaching and his personal style. We have already noted this in two of his parables, where the thing that sticks in people’s craws is in each case the display of a generosity beyond comprehension that it can only be perceived as unfair. But as we look further, that extravagance is everywhere. When he feeds the multitudes at the Sea of Galilee, there is not merely enough to go around; the leftovers fill twelve baskets. When a woman anoints him with expensive ointment and the disciples grumble about the waste, he affirms, “Truly, I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her” (Matthew 26:I3). He seems not to count the cost; in fact, he specifically forbids counting the cost. “Do not store up treasures on earth,” he teaches; “do not strive or be afraid—for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke I2:32). All will come of its own accord in good time and with abundant fullness, so long as one does not attempt to hoard or cling.
It is a path he himself walked to the very end. In the garden of Gethsemane, with his betrayers and accusers massing at the gates, he struggled and anguished but remained true to his course. Do not hoard, do not cling—not even to life itself. Let it go, let it be-“Not my will but yours be done, 0 Lord. Into your hands I commend my spirit.”
Thus he came and thus he went, giving himself fully into life and death, losing himself, squandering himself, “gambling away every gift God bestows.” It was not love stored up but love utterly poured out that opened the gates to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Over and over, Jesus lays this path before us. There is nothing to be renounced or resisted. Everything can be embraced, but the catch is to cling to nothing. You let it go. You go through life like a knife goes through a done cake, picking up nothing, clinging to nothing, sticking to nothing. And grounded in that fundamental chastity of your being, you can then throw yourself out, pour yourself out, being able to give it all back, even giving back life itself. That’s the kenotic path in a nutshell. Very, very simple. It only costs everything.
Now, I wouldn’t say that Jesus was the first or the only teacher in the world ever to have opted for this more reckless and extravagant path, the kenotic way to full union. But it does seem that this was the first time such a teaching had ever been seen in the Near Eastern world, and along with its newness also came confusion. It was a concept so far ahead of its time that even Jesus’s closest disciples couldn’t quite stay with it. They’d catch it and they’d lose it. Paul catches it exactly in his beautiful kenotic hymn, then loses it in the long lists of rules and moral proscriptions that dominate his epistles. And as the church took shape as an institution, it could not exceed the wingspan of its first apostolic teachers; what they themselves did not fully understand, they could not hope to accurately transmit. Thus, as we will see in the next chapter, right from the start the radical simplicity of Jesus’s kenotic path tends to get roped back into the older and more familiar ascetic models, with a subtle but distinct dissonance that we will be keeping our eyes on.
“It only costs everything.” Cynthia’s words in this passage take me back half a century to the awakening phase of my spiritual transformation. I was in my late twenties, just starting up my chiropractic practice in Denham Springs, Louisiana, eager to give my gift to the world and hungry for patients to serve. The going rate for an office visit back then was $15, up from $5 a decade earlier. Even with such a low fee, however, I felt restricted and handcuffed by the tradition of a “fee for services.” What price can one place on health? On life itself? Health is priceless and life is a gift freely given by God to all human beings. It didn’t feel honest for me to place a price tag on my services, so I dropped my fees altogether and placed my services on a “giving basis.” This launched me into the most rewarding and enjoyable fourteen years of my entire career. (This was before the widely available use of credit cards and insurance coverage of Chiropractic care.)
This way of serving wasn’t original with me but was already being successfully modeled by Dr. William H. Bahan and his brother, Dr. Walter Bahan, up in Derry, NH, who were seeing upwards of a hundred patients a day. I began attending his seminars and discovering that there were a number of chiropractors practicing on a giving basis. Six years into this new way of serving—called “GPC” for God Patient Chiropractor—I wrote an article for ONTOLOGICAL THOUGHT, a journal of The Ontological Society, while attending an Art of Living Class conducted by the Universal Institute of Applied Ontology (the art of being). The article is entitled “How Do You Live, Doctor?” I’ll share it in my next post. Until then,
Every hero’s journey has a dark night of the soul, when all seems lost with no path forward in life. A sinking feeling of hopelessness fills one’s heart. The specter of ending one’s life may even loom large in one’s thoughts. Of course, that is an option. There’s light at the end of that tunnel. Suicide among war veterans, even youth, is on the increase.
Today is “Good Friday” in the Christian world when the crucifixion and death of the man Jesus is once again mourned in a most peculiarly celebratory way. One cannot even imagine what his dark night of the soul was like. His prayer to his heavenly Father gives but a hint: “Father, let this cup pass from me. Yet, not my will, but thy will be done.” The Gospels — though highly redacted by the political factors at work under the hand of the Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicea — tell how he sweated drops of blood during his passion. Assuming this is an unredacted account, I don’t believe anyone in the depth of their darkest night of soul can relate to such a depth of dread and fear. In that sense, I don’t see where there is any “good” to celebrate on this day, except perhaps in the fact that he didn’t end his own earthly journey by taking his life. He rather faced his nemesis, his greatest fears: failure of his mission by rejection, and death by crucifixion . . . and won the battle to go on and claim the Elixir of Immortality. He rose above death to find eternal life, setting a precedent for all of mankind to draw strength and courage from while in the depth of despair and hopelessness. If we’re honest about it, suicide is a royal cop-out from facing life’s challenges . . . and we all have them.
There’s a lesson to be learned from the proverbial bar of soap, which, when squeezed, will go up or down depending on which direction you point it. When your circumstance caves in and the pressure of life seems to be pushing you down, if you look down, you’ll go down. Look up and you’ll go up. This is what the man Jesus did. He never stopped looking up to his Heavenly Father — which, according to his own words, was not up but within. Look to your Father who is within you and go up into life, which is eternal. Find courage and strength in these words: “You are loved more than you can ever imagine.”
DEPRESSION OF LIFE
I had an interesting dream last night. I was giving a talk in a seminar about finding one’s path to a creative expression of life. The metaphor I used was that of a wall, of all things — but not a wall to keep undesirables out; rather a wall preventing one’s spirit from coming forth into expression of love and creativity. This, at a vibrational level, I believe is a root cause of mental and emotional depression, and there’s no drug for the dissolution of this wall. A vibrational, spiritual wall can only be dissolved vibrationally and spiritually. Love is the vibration and Life is the Spirit that, when expressed with joy and thankfulness, alone can dissolve the wall inside depressing one’s life energy.
There is a collective wall in the heart of the body of Humanity with many windows and doors created by individuals who are coming forth through it by expressing love and joy in their living. Because there are so many these days who are walking on through the illusory barriers in their lives and finding new life by dying to the old, this collective wall is crumbling and falling down, bringing the old world of deception we have known for eons down with it.
FIRE IN THE BELFRY TOWER
I feel certain that the fire that destroyed the ceiling, roof and the cross-bearing spire of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris this past week is a poignant symbol of this crumbling wall . . . a wall which exists only in the upper cranium of human beings as a mental concept and belief that heaven is “up there” somewhere, and one gets there by suffering through life’s “vale of tears” and dying a “good Christian death”– whatever that is. Such nonsense and deception has prevailed on earth for too many centuries, even after the proclaimed “Messiah” spent his entire public ministry preaching that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us and all around us. He was crucified for proclaiming his divinity, and not by the Jews, as Christians believe and hold in prejudice against them, but by the people, the mob gathered in that public square on that fateful day who cried out “Crucify him! Crucify him!” To this day that cry is maintained by human beings who continue to crucify the expression of their own divine and authentic Self and adhere to the teachings of the Council of Nicea over those of the Master himself. We continue to crucify our own expression of Divinity at Golgotha, the place of the skull. It’s ironic that the Cathedral fire started in the attic.
With all that is coming to the surface and being exposed in the Catholic Church today, I believe the Church is headed into its dark night of the soul. A billion dollars were raised in just a few days to rebuild Notre Dame Cathedral in France, a nation whose people are out in the streets in protest against economic inequality and social injustice. Yet none of that can rebuild the social and economic collapse in France, nor stave off the dark night of the soul of Christianity.
There’s a vibrational connection between the riots in the streets of Paris, as well as the scandalous pedofile activities in the Catholic Church, and the conflagration at Notre Dame Cathedral, the geophysical centerpiece of the city and the Mother of the French nation. Conditions in America and elsewhere are ripe for such a conflagration. Only radical change in our beliefs and behavior toward one another can alter the course we have set for ourselves and our world. We will have our dark night of our nation’s soul. It will take that to wake us up and face our nemesis: ourselves.
(Preface: As much as I’ve tried to shorten this post, no part of it could be omitted without a loss to its impact and meaning, as well as the spirit of the authors of the excerpts. I think you will agree after reading it.)
GNOSIS is the experience and knowledge of spiritual truths. In essence and in practice during the Early Christian era, it was the experience of knowing God within. The experience of Spirit. Of Divinity.
According to the Gnostic Gospels, which included the gospels of Thomas and Philip, Jesus had given “secret knowledge” to some of his apostles of the way to ascend the “Tree of Life” and come to know Spirit as one’s Self. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, in which she describes her personal ascension up to the “crown” of this tree that Jesus said had its roots in her body, does not belong to the collection of thirteen Gnostic Gospels that were discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. The Gospel of Mary was discovered earlier in 1896, also in upper Egypt. It stands alone as a testament to the true experience of Gnosis.
The Son of Humanity
I will conclude this series with a passage from The Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Jean-Yves Leloup, followed by the author’s commentary. It begins with a question posed by the apostle Peter about the nature of matter:
[ . . . ]What is matter? Will it last forever?
The Teacher answered: “All that is born, all that is created, all the elements of nature are interwoven and united with each other. All that is composed shall be decomposed; everything returns to its roots; matter returns to the origins of matter. Those who have ears, let them hear.”
Peter said to him: “Since you have become the interpreter of the elements and the events of the world, tell us: What is the sin of the world?”
The Teacher answered:“There is no sin. It is you who make sin exist, when you act according to the habits of your corrupted nature; this is where sin lies. This is why the Good has come into your midst. It acts together with the elements of your nature so as to reunite it with its roots.”
Then he continued: “This is why you become sick, and why you die: it is the result of your actions; what you do takes you further away. Those who have ears, let them hear.
I will let the author give his commentary on this passage first, because he offers such profound insight into the dishonest human condition and into the path the “Son of Humanity”set before us for our return to our “roots” in Source.
Lack calls for fullness. Thirst calls for the Source. The Good has come into our midst because the nature of matter involves lack. Humans as we know them are beings who feel a lack of Being. The process of corruption begins with their own identification with this lack. They then confuse themselves with the matter of which their bodies are composed, which ultimately leads to an experience of their own vanity and emptiness. Thus they may finally become open to that which can fill them.
The Original Sin of Adam was a fall from identity with Spirit to identity with form that left us with a feeling of profound lack which gave rise to a deep desire and longing for redemption, ironically creating a void for a Savior to fill. “Blessed fault of Adam, that gave us such a Redeemer,” the traditional chant for the Easter Vigil says. “What is it that transforms matter, adama, a lump of clay, into Adam, the true human being capable of this essence of desire,” the author asks. What can we do now to make room in our hearts for Spirit to come and fill the emptiness there?
Meister Eckhart, a Christian whose metaphysics was very close to the Gospel of Mary, said it more simply: “If you do nothing, truly nothing, God cannot help but come into you.” Unfortunately, in those who are full of themselves, there is no place for the Other. This is why he added, “If you leave, God can enter.”
This means that we must leave the illusion of taking ourselves to be something, some thing, an object that exists in time. We must return to our true being as Subject, living in wonder at its manifestation in those transient objects that it calls its world, its body, its emotions, its personality.
When we leave behind the illusion of belief in a permanent thing, the Good can then come into our midst. In the heart of this finally accepted impermanence shines the presence of this unborn, unmade, uncreated “Nothing that can be found in the All of which It is the cause.” This is the clear light unimpeded by the opacity of all the things with which we are identified. In the midst of the heavy, the light is revealed.
According to the Gospel of Mary, the Teacher came in order to help free us from the ignorance that is identification (corruption). For he is the very countenance, the incarnation, and the practice of this Good.
The Good is the manifestation of the famous triad of the ancient philosophers: goodness, truth, and beauty. The Good in this sense does not have evil as its opposite, for it means the unity of these three, the One that embraces the multiplicity of all qualities through which it is expressed.
What does goodness become when separated from light, consciousness, and truth? A softness that is the gateway to hypocrisy and compromise.
What does truth become when separated from goodness, love, and beauty? A hardness that is the gateway to fanaticism and persecution.
What does beauty become when separated from truth and goodness? Art for art’s sake, an aestheticism that is the gateway to a brilliance that clarifies nothing.
Beyond the realm of opposites, the Good is the One, the doorway to Being. This Being can only manifest in a heart, body, and mind that have been emptied of all illusion, meaning all inflation and presumption; for it cannot fit into the straitjacket that they offer.
“This is why the Good has come into your midst. It acts together with the elements of your nature so as to reunite it with its roots. “
The radiance of Presence has come to us, and “we have seen its glory,” or its kavod, as the Hebrews called it — the glory of the Son, “full of grace and truth,” which is also that of the Father, or Source.” [The author’s footnote: “The Metaphor of Mother could just as well be used for the Source.”]
By planting the seeds of his knowledge (the sperma Theou, in Greek) in the elements of our nature, the Teacher restores us to our own true heritage and ushers us back to endless resonance with our uncreated Source, the “Father whom none has ever seen, and none can know,” but who is revealed to us through the monogenetic Son, the Good that unites the ancient philosopher’s triad. This invites us to live a life of glory, a life of love and consciousness, just as he did.
This reunion with our roots is not a mere event in time, but an ever-renewed relation with the Source engendering us in every instant. It is our ignorance that creates our distance from it, and this distance involves all sorts of sickness and suffering. By an ever-new act of knowledge that is both metanoia (in Greek, passing beyond the known, beyond the mind and memories of which we are composed) and teshuva (Hebrew for the act of return, a turning about of our consciousness from our externalized, objectified being toward our inner Being), [the literal meaning of the word “repent”] we act from the deepest heart of our lack, from the intimate space of our desire of desires. This is the space where we receive the inspiration of the Teacher and his teaching.
Then he continued:
“This is why you become sick, and why you die: it is the result of your actions; what you do takes you further away. Those who have ears, let them hear.”
Having spoken of matter and its impermanence, and of attachment and identification with this impermanence, the Teacher now shows the consequences of ignorance and attachment.
Sickness, suffering, and death are the consequences of our acts. There is no one to blame for this, and it is vain to complain and expostulate about the evil nature of matter, the world, and humanity. There is no room here for hatred of the world, for it has been clearly stated that there is no sin, no evil. Evil and sin arise from the blamer in ourselves.
(The “blamer” in Hebrew is the shatan, which means “obstacle.” In Greek the word is diabolos, which means “divider.” I find this most interesting and revealing of what is actually happening in ourselves as we point a finger of blame away from ourselves.
Attunement with Source
In a word, the Teacher came to offer attunement to the Body of Humanity through the open hearts and resonant substance of his disciples in order to reunite the flesh Body of Humanity with its roots in Source by drawing forth the Spirit of Love, the Father, from within them. His own incarnation as the “Son of Humanity” set a precedent for the whole of Mankind.
But he didn’t do it alone. Mary Magdalene, who brought the Divine Feminine into their shared mission of redemption, was his companion. Together they restored the sacred union between Man and Woman and their union with the Father. They shared the ultimate Attunement with Love.
The revelation of Love, the Father within, through Humanity was his expressed purpose for incarnating. He was on fire with this purpose, as was his companion. It is our purpose as well. This excerpt from a talk given by Lord Martin Exeter, who was my spiritual mentor for twenty years, speaks passionately to this purpose:
Until God’s Love comes into the individual and sets the individual on fire, the physical substance of his body, the substance of his whole outer being, remains subject to the destructive burning of the fire. It is only as he is actually set on fire, while he is living here on earth, that there may be a purification and transmutation into a state of being in attunement with the core of Being – which is God’s Love – so that the form is not destroyed. We can recognize these basic principles. Only as there is lust, so that the individual lets himself be set on fire by God’s Love, can he be consumed by God’s Love instead of destroyed by God’s Love. Being consumed by God’s Love there is no loss, because every level of Being is supposed to be the means by which there may be a manifest revelation of God’s Love, and this level where we are was so designed by God not to be destroyed by God’s Love but, being consumed by God’s Love, to reveal it….
…The body of Truth is lust, that all-consuming hunger and thirst, that depth of feeling, that longing, that which springs from the intensity of aloneness, an opening of the heart to God without reservation, without holding back anything, in a surge, a constant surge of passionate lust. And until we do open ourselves so, we cannot know the reality of God’s Love as it is; we can only know it as a painful fire, whereas in fact God’s Love, received into the true body, is the resurrection and the life of the body.
I think this well encapsulates who Mary Magdalene was and the pivotal role she played with her Beloved Lord that made Jesus’ mission on earth at all possible. She gave him her all, an open heart through which he could enter and plant the seed of Love in the Body of Humanity. She was the true founder of Christianity — “The Woman at the Heart of Christianity,” as Cynthia Bourgeault identifies her in the subtitle of her profound book, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene.
There is much more that I could share from the pages of these three books. However, I feel complete in this series. If you feel inspired, and in the least bit inclined, to obtain copies of these thought-provoking books, I certainly encourage you to do so. Until my next post,
Eighteen years of Jesus’ life are not accounted for in the four Canonical Gospels. The last we hear of his early childhood is the alleged story about him debating with the chief priests and elders in the Temple of Jerusalem at the age of twelve. Where he went after that is a question that has given rise to much scholarly speculation.
Religious historian Michael Baigent has a very intriguing chapter on the missing years of Jesus’ life in his book The Jesus Papers – Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History. Digging deeply and tenaciously into whatever ancient texts and oral traditions he could find—the most resourceful being those of the Dead Sea Scrolls, written by the Jewish Zadokites and Zealots in Egypt, where they were found around 1947-56, and the Nag Hammadi texts discovered south of Cairo in Egypt in 1945—Baigent places Jesus in Egypt where he receives his messianic training in the Egyptian Mystery Schools.
It is in Egypt, Baigent suggests, where Jesus received training in the ancient rituals of Egyptian mysticism that opened heaven’s gate for passage into the Underworld—the “land of the dead,” which was thought more to be the “land of the living”—and re-entry into the physical plane. Bagent suggests that Jesus was initiated into these mysteries whereby, with the assistance of fellow initiates who attended to the physical body during the soul’s out-of-body journey, one could die to this world, visit the realm of the gods and obtain wisdom, then be resurrected from the “dead.” Not entirely without historical support for his scenario, Baigent’s speculation is quite conceivable and compelling, especially knowing what we know today about “near death experiences” (NDE’s). Was Jesus’ crucifixion, death and resurrection akin somehow to an NDE? Let’s have a look and decide for ourselves whether or not Baigent’s scenario is in the least bit credible, perhaps even likely.
(This is a dense and complex consideration with many political and religious threads weaving through the fabric of the story. I will attempt to condense it into two or three installments. Encompassing the larger part of Jesus’ thirty-three years of life as recorded by the four Gospel writers, it is perhaps the most crucial and important period, as it was his formative years of preparation for the three-and-a-half years of his public ministry, which ended in his personal victory over death—which was the sole interest of the Gospel writers, though not the sole reason and purpose for Jesus’ life and mission, as we will see.)
Where did Jesus live as a young man?
According to three of the four Canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), Jesus was living in the town of Nazareth in Galilee in his youth. Luke says that Jesus grew up there and that he went with his family every year to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. It was on one of those occasions that he was found debating with the learned scholars in the Temple. “Unfortunately,” Baigent writes, “there is no evidence whatsoever that Nazareth even existed in Jesus’ day.”Then, as is his style when he comes upon an inconsistency such as this, Baigent’s critical thinking and suspicions kick in. I love the manner in which he goes about questioning everything handed down as history. Here’s a taste of his reasoning and compelling writing:
The first mention of it appears no earlier than the third century A.D. Could this mention of an exchange at the Temple have been placed here as some kind of cover story for a period in Jesus’ life that was otherwise unaccounted for?
As far as the Gospels were concerned, Jesus appears to have vanished during his youth and early adulthood. But it was during those years that he learned the ideas, the beliefs, and the knowledge that he later taught. So where exactly was he? And why have his whereabouts been kept hidden? Had he been “talent-scouted” by priests or rabbis and whisked away for almost two decades of secret training? Surely the disciples must have known where Jesus had been. But what could have possibly been at stake, what problem could have arisen, through sharing this information? In fact, we cannot avoid asking, what were the writers of the Gospels intent on concealing?
Scholars over the years have speculated about this gap in the account of Jesus’ life. Some believe that Jesus traveled with his family to the East,
“far beyond the jurisdiction of the Romans, to Parthia, Persia, or beyond, to Afghanistan, or India. Even today there are many who believe that the shrine of Yus Asaph in Kashmir is that of Jesus himself who, after surviving the crucifixion, returned home to the East to live and ultimately die. There are also suggestions that he studied as a child under Buddhists—this would explain, it is said, the parallels that can be found between the teachings of Jesus and those of the Buddha. And we have the very early Christian community, centered in Malabar on the west coast of India, which claims to have been founded by the apostle Thomas. Surely where Thomas went then so too could Jesus have gone?
Is it possible that the Great Spirit who incarnated in Jesus is the same Divine Being who was also incarnate in the Buddha some six-hundred years earlier in Nepal, India? Well, that’s getting a little ahead of the current story. There was no reason for Jesus to have fled Roman jurisdiction as he was not involved in the Zealot’s revolutionary activities against the Romans. Baigent reasons:
Any move he made out of Judea or Galilee must have been by choice rather than by coercion. But where could he have ventured, and why?
There is a single clue in the Bible, one in the Old Testament that is echoed in the New. As we have seen, it was important for Jesus to follow, to act out quite specifically, the predictions made by the Old Testament prophets in describing the coming of the messiah. We have already seen the very literal expression of these predictions during Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem when he finally went public with his messianic claims. We can therefore be confident in expecting that every messianic prediction in the Old Testament would be pressed into use in this manner.
In a real sense these predictions by the Prophets limited Jesus. They provided a set of boundaries within which his messianic mission needed to express itself. A particularly interesting prediction was given by the prophet Hosea (II:I): “When Israel was a child I loved him, and I called my son out of Egypt” (emphasis mine). Matthew (2:I5) picks up on this in one of the earliest prophetic predictions he mentions: in a garbled historical account, he records that the Holy Family fled into Egypt when Jesus was still a baby, explaining, “This was to fulfill what the Lord has spoken through the prophet: ‘I called my son out of Egypt.'”
I’ve learned that anywhere in the New Testament when these words “This was to fulfill . . .” are used to preface a Biblical event, one can be sure that what follows is a rationalization by the author(s)inserted into the text in order to connect the event with words of prophecy from the Old Testament. It’s like doing research in order to find something that backs up or proves one’s preconceived conclusion or beliefs.
Why Egypt?
AT THIS POINT, we cannot help but ask, why Egypt? This is a minor detail in Matthew’s Gospel and is treated as such in the Roman Church. But for the Egyptian Coptic Church, which separated from Rome in 451 following the Council of Chalcedon, it is a matter of considerable importance indeed. For almost a thousand years it has maintained a legend about the journey the Holy Family made into Egypt, all the sites they visited or resided at, and all the miracles that accompanied the presence of Jesus. This legend is called “The Vision of Theophilus.” Theophilus was patriarch of Alexandria and leader of the Egyptian church from A.D. 385 to 4I2, but the Vision seems not to have been written down until the eleventh or twelfth century
Given the highly devotional nature of the story and the very obvious use made of it to justify Jesus’ uniqueness and divinity, we can locate its theology far beyond the beliefs of the Jewish community in Egypt—the community that would have been giving refuge to Jesus’ family. What’s more, these same factors place the origins of the theology in an era following the dogmatic decisions of the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. It seems fairly evident that the Vision—at the very least—is a product of Christian thought in the fourth century A.D. or later, and certainly not of Judaism or Judeo-Christianity. It therefore cannot be an accurate account of any such journey, although it may very well contain some elements of a real journey. Thus, we need to ask, whom does the story serve? Who would have benefited from its telling?
No one would have benefited more than the author of the Gospel of Matthew himself, as it added credibility to his Gospel. For less obvious reasons, the Coptic Church in Egypt would have benefited by the story of the Holy Family’s travels to the East. “The Coptic Church has been at odds with Rome for over six-hundred years, and its faith was at least tolerated by the Muslim rulers.” There appear to be political and economic factors influencing Mathew’s scenario.
If the Gospel of Matthew is given greater credence, then it stands to reason that various Egyptian holy places within the story would also be validated, thereby opening up a whole new pilgrim route that would include Egypt. With pilgrims, of course, came trade and gold.
Despite its deficiencies, the tale gives every appearance of picking up on local oral tradition or legend. And local legend is dismissed at one’s own peril, for local memories are long. There has certainly been a very ancient and widespread Jewish presence in Egypt—extensive enough to justify the story’s telling well into Islamic times.
There was a legitimate and functioning—although controversial—Jewish Temple in Egypt during the lifetime of Jesus. It was founded by the Zadokite high priest, Onias III, who built it upon the ruins of an old Bubastis temple in the Egyptian delta on the same design as the Temple of Jerusalem.
Onias III, a Zadokite priest, was forced to flee Israel to Egypt when Jerusalem was attacked by the Syrian ruler, Antiochus Epiphane in 170 B.C., and the Temple in Jerusalem was taken over by non-Zadokite priests allied with Epiphane. The Onias Temple with its Zadokite priest became the only legitimate Jewish Temple in the region. That is until his son, Onias IV, a military commander in the Egyptian army and a non-Zadokite priest, succeeded his father as high priest. This made the Onias Temple in Egypt illegitimate, a diminishing of status by Josephus that was used as his rationale for excluding it from serious academic consideration, by Josephus himself as well as by Philo of Alexandria—both of whom had friends in high places in Israel to placate; friends in the upper class wealthy Jewish sector as well as in the ruling class. Both groups wanted to put distance between them and the Zadokites and the Zealots associated with the Onias Temple in Egypt as well as the Temple in Jerusalem.
The Onias Temple was on the road that Jesus and his parents would have traveled from Judea to the city of Heliopolis in Egypt in order to avoid the strongly-influenced Jewish communities in Alexandria and Naucratis to the west. They would then have traveled south along this road that passed by Onias’ temple, where they would most likely have stopped and settled. Baigent reasons:
And it is highly unlikely that Jesus and his family, raised in a Zealot environment, one that hoped and prayed for a reinstatement of a Zadokite priesthood in the Temple of Jerusalem, would have just passed by this Egyptian Jewish temple. All of these observations lead naturally to the thought that the Temple of Onias served as the initial training site of Jesus. It was here perhaps that he received his introduction into the politically active world of the Zealots.
In a sense, we can see the temple as an overseas branch of Galilee where Greek-speaking Zealots could learn their trade. It would have also been a good place for Jesus’ family to bring him so that he could learn what it would mean to be the Messiah of Israel, for all the texts and commentaries on the role of the messiah would have been available there. So we do now have a good reason for the Holy Family to have traveled to Egypt, and a reason for Matthew’s brief comment, disguised as a flight from the dangers posed by Herodian infanticide. In fact, it would seem not to have been a flight at all but rather a positive action undertaken in order to allow Jesus to grow, to study, and to teach away from the troubles in Judaea and Galilee.
Despite his training in the Zealot cause, Jesus, as we have seen, at some point secretly took another path – one revealed only after he had been anointed as messiah [by Mary of Bethany, who was also Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ wife and companion], when it was far too late for anybody to challenge him. That path was a more mystical path. Yet where in the Jewish world of Egypt could he have learned such a path? For the answer to this question, we need to look at one of the mystical groups of the time, one described by Philo of Alexandria.
In my next post I will consider the Therapeutae healers in Egypt with whom Jesus may have studied and developed his own gift of healing. I will also consider a most enlightening chapter of Baigent’s book that tells about the mysticism of Egypt and the rituals of initiation into the Mystery School and what was called “incubation,” a most interesting and exciting consideration that may shed light on what really happened on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. So, stay tuned.
Anthony Palombo
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CONSCIOUSNESS IS NO MYSTERY. Like a seedbed wherein ideas are planted, nurtured by unwavering belief, and given birth in their seasons, consciousness is the matrix for creation. It is very fertile soil, so fertile that one has to be very careful about the nature of the seeds one plants. 
I GREET YOU ON THIS CHRISTMAS MORNING in the Spirit of the Christ, whose birth we celebrate today. Let peace reign in your heart today and throughout the New Year. 
Every hero’s journey has a dark night of the soul, when all seems lost with no path forward in life. A sinking feeling of hopelessness fills one’s heart. The specter of ending one’s life may even loom large in one’s thoughts. Of course, that is an option. There’s light at the end of that tunnel. Suicide among war veterans, even youth, is on the increase. 
Healing Tones 