Realspiritik

Fatherman, you know the spaghetti and meatball test you mentioned for Italian restaurant authenticity? Souls who incarnate here as human beings come because they want to check out the famous 3D spaghetti and meatballs that aren't served in the "quantum buffet" at Home. When in Rome, do as the Romans do!

Thanks. I'm glad we can talk and share.

Building on what you and Soma have already said, David, there's diversity in our approaches to God (which is good) and diversity in our experiences (which is good) and many languages to use in connecting with God (which is good), yet the thing we most often need to help us better understand our own experience is mentorship. We need mentors, not to tell us what to do or how to do it, but to act as the safe haven where we can be honest with ourselves about our own questions and answers. It seems hard for us, as human beings, to be honest with ourselves. But conversation in a safe context can trigger the insights we've been struggling to accept (giving us that precious "aha -- now I get it" feeling). Because the church has often been lacking in mentors, I think we sometimes turn to creative avenues such as film, fiction, poetry, sacred texts, mythology, pop psychology, and music to serve as a substitute for the personal relationship offered by a mentor. I'm not saying that film, fiction, and other creative avenues don't help. In fact, I know they do help us on the spiritual journey. But sometimes the imaginings of "God consciousness" are so . . . perfect . . . that they muddy the waters and create false, unrealistic expectations about what's actually possible for us as human beings. For us as human beings, there are no limits to our ability to love fully and wholly, to forgive fully and wholly, to trust fully and wholly. But there are definitely limits to our ability to feel love and trust in the same way we feel it while in a mystical or contemplative state. Our brains aren't designed to allow us to live constantly in the quantum realm. Yes, many of us long to do it, because we sense it's our natural soul state, but it's not why we're here. We're here on Planet Earth because, as souls, we have questions -- big, big questions -- about the 3D universe of matter-with-mass, which is something we don't normally experience as persons-of-soul. I have a wonderful connection with God the Mother and God the Father, a connection that's safe and trusting and whole, a connection I can open up at any time. But I can tell you for sure that my brain cannot maintain this state 24 hours per day. Nor is my brain supposed to be able to maintain this high energy state on an continuous basis. I touch base with God many times during the day, but most of the time, I have to use all my brain power to do a good job of loving and forgiving and trusting in ordinary 3D ways with family and work and letter-writing and housecleaning and cooking and going to the bank and being a normal human being. It doesn't feel exactly the same as being in a quantum state, but it's a good way to feel. And it's okay with God, because God knows I'm trying as hard as I can to balance many competing needs to the best of my ability. I know you already know this, but I'm affirming that your need to juggle and shift priorities -- and your inability to do "everything" at once -- is perfectly normal and natural as far as God is concerned. Even Jesus came down from the Mount of Transfiguration and said "Okay, that was fun -- now back to being human and doing the best I can to help others." Blessings, Jen Edited for typos and clarity.

Fatherman and Soma, thanks for a good conversation.

Yes. Very true.

God the Mother and God the Father in their infinite wisdom have given shape and form and voice and gift to a vast number of different children in their Creation. Some children are large, some are small, some soar high, some burrow deep, some sing loudly from the peaks, and others whisper quietly in cool, dark places. I don't think God minds very much that some of their children are quite chatty. Indeed, I think God would be very sad if the children born chatty were silenced. At the same time, I think God does everything possible to bring comforting silence to those who need it most. The Fourth Gospel reminds us that Logos has always been a part of Christianity. Understanding how to hear, understand, and act on Logos with loving kindness instead of boasting, demeaning, separating, and hating is the challenge to us as children of God and as Christians.

Yes. Thank you.

Interesting that you say that, Fatherman. One of the reasons I've head difficulty making headway in communication with neuroscientists is that the phenomenology of my mystical experience is not what they're expecting. They're expecting me to describe a state of loss of personal identity, diminished sense of time and space, and transcendent union with the Divine. This set of phenomenological experiences occurs with apophatic mysticism. But I'm not an apophatic. I'm a cataphatic mystic. (And I"m still waiting for neuroscientists to notice there's a difference!) When I open up my communication channels to make the quantum jump, I rely heavily on my vocal chords as part of the process. It's subvocalization, so you wouldn't hear me talking out loud. But I definitely can't communicate as effectively without using my vocal chords. (This relates to use of the basal ganglia, as you know, and also, I now think, the somatosensory pathway.) Sometimes they say something so funny I start laughing. If there's anyone else in the room, this can be quite awkward, so I do most of my communication work when I'm by myself. Singing is one of the most powerful ways to connect with the soul, which is one of the reasons I think church can be an important part of our lives as souls-in-human-form and as Christians.

Beautiful post, David. You already know that faith and love are what matter most. So don't give yourself a hard time because you're a philosopher at heart. You are who you are, and there's nothing wrong with that as far as God is concerned. Jesus was a mystic/scholar/physician (a dyed-in-the-wool philosophy geek) and to this day he STILL can't let go of all his questions and conundrums and ideas. Ideas are never incompatible with faith and love. As Harry said above, it's what you do with the ideas that matters. God bless, Jen

Couldn't agree more. It's amazing (and also kind of scary) how many examples you can find of status addiction in everyday life. On my way home from church just now, I stopped at the drugstore to pick up a few things. A middle-aged woman decided she wasn't happy with the wait time at the cash, so she started yelling at the cashier. Another customer stepped in to the defend the cashier. Rather than back down and apologize, the first woman upped the ante, saying incredibly rude things to the Good Samaritan because she couldn't admit she'd been wrong in the first place. Status addiction does that to a person. A status addict can't admit he/she has made a mistake because it's viewed by the brain as a loss of status points. It's like taking away a bottle of scotch from an alcoholic. Not pretty. The status addict will do anything to recover the lost status points -- anything at all. So in the case of the rude customer at the drugstore, she tried to reclaim her lost status points by demeaning the Good Samaritan. (Status points are all about hierarchies and pecking orders, so anything an addict can do to try to raise herself above others serves the purpose as far as the brain's reward centres are concerned.) Not pretty at all. But it happens all the time. When I was growing up, children on the playground used to say, "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me." Whoever coined that phrase didn't know anything about status addiction. Nasty words fired at others as part of the status addiction cycle hurt like stink!

I sense from the general drift of this conversation that the terms "intelligence" and "high IQ" are being equated with high levels of pure cognitive function: abilities such as organizational skills, application of logic, ability to set aside emotional considerations, methodical and rigorous approaches to tasks, and Platonic ideals such as Mind. I'd just like to point out that, although our culture has, since the time of the Scholastic thinkers and later the Enlightenment thinkers, deeply infused these beliefs about the superiority of the Mind into our pedagogical system, what they've actually infused into our system is a preference for System 2 thought processing at the expense of the brain's much older System 1 thought processing systems. I know a lot of psychologists don't accept Dual Process Theory, but there's a growing body of scientific research for it. A really readable article about Dual Process Theory and its links to the religious impulse is this one from the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141219-will-religion-ever-disappear. Another factor complicating the discussion about "intelligence" vis-a-vis the religious impulse is status addiction. Status addiction so deeply pervades our culture that it's become nigh on invisible to our ever-so-clever-and-ever-so-well-educated Minds. Status addiction strikes anyone who's not paying attention to the way this insidious addiction shapes the reward centres of the brain and remoulds the brain to place preference for status points ahead of all other considerations. This is no different than other forms of addiction (eg. addiction to alcohol or addiction to pornography) but the costs of it in our society are extremely high. Unfortunately, status addiction regularly creeps into all major world religious systems and can become "carved in stone" in the form of the "dud bits" that PaulS refers to. The choice is always there for us to not accept the "dud bits" based on status addiction and to instead choose the parts that guide us towards redemption (aka the Bible's version of the Twelve Step Program). God bless, Jen

Hi Mike. Again, more great questions. I appreciate the way you're thinking and challenging. You're absolutely right about the fundamentalist's belief that he is right and everybody else is wrong. I agree the fundamentalist believes he's using his intuition. From a neuroscience point of view, though, he's not using his intuition or his conscience (both of which depend heavily on the "default network" of the brain). He's instead misusing the default network and relying heavily on a limbic system network called the temporo-amygdala-orbitofrontal network. He may even, if he's not careful, slip into the state of empathy-free choices that we call psychopathy. (You check out these networks at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/depts/fans/sackler-group/Publications/20131/Arevisedlimbicsystemmodelformemory,emotionandbehaviour.pdf.) Since the neuroscience is important, but not very useful in a discussion with others about spiritual direction, I've pasted in a piece I posted 3 years ago. It's long, so I hope Joseph will indulge me. (Sorry, Joseph .) I own the copyright, but I'm not the author. This piece arose from my ongoing work as a mystic and it's called "Walking on Water." I hope it will help trigger some more questions and insights for you. Thanks for asking, thanks for listening. God bless, Jen __________________________________________________________ Walking on Water Jen has reminded me I haven’t written a solo post here, so I’m going to do that today. I’m going to talk about what it feels like to walk on water. I don’t mean that I or any human being has ever been able to literally walk on water. When my great-nephew wrote about “walking on water” in the Gospel of Mark, he didn’t mean it literally. He meant it metaphorically. He was trying to describe what it feels like when a person has entered into the Kingdom state of fullness of heart. He chose the image of water carefully. In Second Temple Judaism, water was a powerful and frequent symbol in Jewish texts. Often it meant blessings from God. In an arid region, rainfall is a blessing, and most of ancient Judea was arid. But there was a parallel understanding of water, too, as the primal force of chaos, the place where uncontrollable monsters lived. Where female monsters lived. The Book of Genesis starts out with the assumption that water has to be pushed back by God and held in place before the Garden of Eden can be planted. The sea is seen as a dangerous place. An unpredictable place. A deep place which is formless and dark, with no knowledge in it. God fixes this problem by first bringing light (knowledge of order and symmetry) onto the scene. He calls the light Day and the darkness Night, but he hasn’t created the Sun or the Moon yet, so the light he brings to Planet Earth isn’t sunlight. It’s the light of knowledge. The men who wrote the Book of Genesis emphasize again and again that you should want to have order in your life. Order is good. Chaos is bad. There’s knowledge, and God saw that it was good. There’s careful separation of all major “elements” into their proper places, and God saw that it was good. There’s careful naming of all creations, large and small, and God saw that it was good. The earth itself (adam in Hebrew) is separated into two aspects — male and female — and given the breath of life. The resulting creations, man and woman, who are made in the image of God, are God’s representatives on Earth and through them God can impose the law of hierarchy upon all other kingdoms in creation (kingdoms in a biological sense, that is). And God saw that it was good. By the seventh “day,” God has put a big, fat leash on all that watery chaos stuff and firmly imposed the Law of Cause and Effect upon Planet Earth, and it’s so darned good that God calls for a day of rest to honour his accomplishments. And what is Elohim’s greatest accomplishment? The greatest accomplishment of Elohim (“the gods” in Hebrew) is to whip that dark, watery, feminine principle into shape and force it to obey the male principles of order, knowledge, law, and hierarchy. When Elohim creates humankind — adam — he creates adam entirely out of strong, orderly, procreative, male earth. No water in sight. Elohim adds the breath of life (by inference from Gen. 1:30) to his new creations, but he’s very careful not to include any of that chaotic water stuff in his perfect new creations. Water’s okay when it’s in its proper place, but let it loose, and there’s no describing the destruction that will occur. Oh wait! There is a description! Let me see now . . . of yes, that would be the Great Flood story. The Great Flood story reminds you (just in case you need reminding) what happens when bits and pieces of the Divine Order fall out of their proper places and start to misbehave (Gen. 6:1-7) and why God’s creation of order and hierarchy is a good thing! A good thing you really, really want! Still, even the bad behaviour of the Nephilim was nothing compared to the fall of the Feminine Principle. When the Feminine Principle fell out of her proper place in the heavens and coalesced into the dark, formless, watery depths that existed before God came to rescue her with his light of knowledge an’ all . . . well, that was a real mess. A mess that still needs fixing. Occasionally, if things get really bad on Earth, God unleashes her and lets the monsters out, which is exactly why you need to put a Molten Sea in front of your big temple (1 Kings 7:23-26). You need to remind your people that God has given you power over the forces of chaos by proxy. This power by proxy comes in the form of ritual bathing in water that has been tamed. Fresh water — including rainfall — is water that has been properly tamed by God. Restored to its true state of purity. Immersion in purified water allows you to share in God’s purification process. (It also happens to make you cleaner, and therefore healthier and happier, but this is a separate question.) Mark, a trained scholar, had all these traditions about water in mind when he chose to show me “walking on water” in the middle of his Parable of the Idol Bread (Mark 6:47-51). He’s turned the traditional meaning of water on its head. It’s a new relationship with water. Nobody commands the waters of Lake Tiberias to part so Jesus can walk across on dry land. Nobody immerses themselves in the waters in baptism. Nobody puts the waters in big jars or little jars or cauldrons or ritual baths. The lake is the lake, the way it’s always been the lake. And Jesus is Jesus, the way he’s always been Jesus. And the lake and Jesus seem to be getting along! No fighting with the lake, no thrashing with monsters in the lake, no prayer rituals to calm the lake. Jesus starts walking towards his companions (who are struggling with questions of understanding and true faith) and the lake suddenly calms down as if maybe the waters (the Feminine Principle) and Jesus are working together and aren’t in conflict with each other. As if maybe the waters are comfortable supporting Jesus because he has already “taken heart and stopped being afraid.” As if maybe the waters are not and never have been the problem. The problem is written down in black and white as plain as you can get in Chapter 7 of Mark. The problem is not what you touch on the outside of your body. The problem is not the water itself or what you do with the water. The problem is what you choose to do on the inside of your body. The problem is what you choose to do with your own free will. The journey to know your own free will, as I said last time in conversation with Jen, is very much a journey that resembles the stages of grief. All people must wrestle with what it means to have free will. They must question it, be confused by it, be angry at it, reject it, and finally come to terms with it. As the character Job once did. As I did as Jesus son of Joseph two millennia ago. There’s a reason for this, a reason that has nothing to do with sin or salvation or sacraments or separation from God. The reason for this painful journey is that God trusts you. Human beings often wonder why they’re here and why it has to hurt so much. Many reasons have been offered over the centuries by different religious leaders. In the tradition of Occam’s razor, I offer this: you are here to learn how God the Mother and God the Father discovered together how to walk on water. You’re here so you can experience firsthand what it means to use your free will in every permutation possible in the service of Divine Love. Put that way, it sounds simple, doesn’t it? But it’s not. You know that and I know that. It’s damned hard to work your way through the stages of knowing what free will means. Not what you, as a human being, think it means, but what God the Mother and God the Father think it means. To live from a place of pure free will is, as you may imagine, the very opposite of living in a world of pure cause and effect. But once, long ago, long before the event called the Big Bang took place, the universe was not as we know it today, and the laws of cause and effect held much more sway than they do today. This is hard — beyond hard — for most angels to understand, so some of us decide to incarnate here to see what this kind of existence must have felt like. Our Divine Parents let us do this because they trust us. When souls decide to incarnate here as human beings, they know it’s going to be hard, but when they get here they find out it’s even harder than they could have imagined. They do it anyway, though, because they’re experiencing something important, something that’s part of their history, their past. They want to understand their relationships with everyone at a much deeper level, and this crazy journey called “life as a human being” helps them do it. Not every soul chooses to do this. But the ones who do, do so voluntarily. These are the souls who are primarily kinesthetic learners at a deep soul level. They learn best by experiencing something firsthand, by walking a mile in somebody else’s shoes so they really “get” what it feels like. If you’re reading this, it means you wanted to come to Planet Earth for a while so you can walk in your Divine Parents’ shoes and see for yourself what it felt like for them to work together to overturn the rule of “cause and effect” and replace it with something infinitely more powerful and mysterious: Divine Love (a.k.a. quantum physics). The human brain (unlike other mammalian brains) has an annoying habit of trying to shed its own emotions and slip into the unloving habits of cause and effect. (As your cats and dogs like to remind you.) So the human brain is ideally suited to this particular journey of discovery. It has both a great potential for learning and a great potential for unlearning. So to state your brain gives you the option to explore every possible nook and cranny of free will would be an understatement. I know you can think of a thousand examples of people who didn’t use their free will in loving and trusting ways. But what about the people who have come to terms with their own free will? Who are they and what do their lives look like? More important, are these people “special,” or can anyone on Planet Earth find this experience of redemption? We’ve often used the term “redemption” [on the website] in contradistinction to religious salvation, and I’d like to talk about this a bit more. Any human being — regardless of gender, sexual orientation, age, culture, time, place, or religion — who has worked through the grief stages of free will is a person who has experienced redemption in the way that I experienced it. Redemption is the emotional insight that fills up a person’s entire heart and mind with the knowledge that it’s okay to never fear the Truth. There’s Truth in the universe and there’s Divine Love. They’re not the same thing. Truth exists in the absence of consciousness. Divine Love is the choice of consciousness to never hide from the Truth, to always be transparent to the Truth, to fully embrace whatever is true about another being without losing the truth of oneself. What does this mean? It means that Divine Love always respects the right of another person to be another person and not a mere extension of one vast cloud of self. A human being who understands that free will holds the key to Divine Love, forgiveness, passionate creativity, and committed relationships (devotion) is a human being who has found redemption. Such a person can be found anywhere. And, indeed, such individuals are found in all cultures. They are the people who simply won’t back down from the idea that all beings are worthy of respect, fair treatment, compassion, kindness, and encouragement. They are the people who believe in social justice and due process, in democracies rather than republics or empires, in transparency in government and accountability for intentional harms. They are the people who treat women with as much respect as men, who treat the planet with as much respect as they treat other human beings. They are the people who treat their children as souls in need of education, guidance, mentorship, and respect instead of as property to be bartered for status or personal gratification. They are the people who don’t whine and complain and blame God for all the travails they’ve chosen themselves. Most of all, they’re the people who have the courage to see their neighbours as worthy human beings, not as objects of hatred, contempt, and violence. When you really “get it” — when you understand that your ability to choose your path does not make you separate from the rest of Creation but is in the fact the very glue that holds God’s family together as a loving, trusting group — the world no longer feels to you like a place where good is fighting evil or light is fighting dark or order is fighting chaos. It doesn’t feel like a fight any longer, but neither does it feel like mere acceptance of the way things are (which is often just resignation in disguise). It’s not obedience. It’s not piety. It’s not subjugation. It’s not anomie. It’s not cynicism. It’s not apathy. It’s not depression. It’s not escapism. It’s just . . . honesty. The heart’s honesty. The heart’s willingness to see things as they really are and, despite that, to dig deeper, ever deeper — or maybe higher, ever higher — into empathy for another person’s Truth. There is no adequate word for this emotion in English. “Trust” would come closest. When you have this sense of trust, it feels as if you’re holding God’s hand and God is guiding you through the storms and worries of daily life. It feels as if you’re walking on water. Blessings to all, Love Jesus September 19, 2012 Edited for spacing problems.

Mike, welcome to TCPC. You've jumped in with some really interesting and important observations. The conversation between you and Dr. Crossan reminded me again that although it takes only a few short minutes to ask the questions and get started on the answers, it usually takes a whole lifetime (and many books) to fill in the gaps. I've recently been rereading the book Dr. Crossan co-wrote with Jonathan Reed called "In Search of Paul." Although, in the end, Dr. Crossan and I wouldn't agree on Paul's motives, I deeply admire Dr. Crossan's scholarship and his willingness to use all the tools available to us (not just religious texts, but also research evidence from archaeology, history, anthropology, and the like) to help us better understand not only the answers we're seeking but the questions we're asking! I live in Canada, a country that's more like Denmark in some ways than it's like the U.S. There's a cultural emphasis on distributive justice (not that we always get it right, or even come close to getting it right) but I wouldn't say it's secular. Canadians, for the most part, are very private about their religious beliefs and practices. So although a person might be deeply committed to a journey of faith and healing, he or she probably won't talk about it in the workplace and won't bring it into major political campaigns (such as the federal election campaign we're in the midst of right now). The most vocal religious people I've personally met are atheists. I do very much feel that militant atheism is an expression of religiosity (with the meaning of religiosity deriving from the root word "religiose," which has nothing to do with belief in God and everything to do with extreme reliance on ideology, whether it's political, cultural, scientific, or sports-related ideology). Of course, I'm referring here to militant atheists, not people who just aren't sure what they believe about God (agnostics) or people who are leaning towards the "I'm not sure there's a personal God but maybe there's a universal Source from whom we originate" belief system. Myself, I'm a pure theist, but you'd pretty much expect me to be as a cataphatic mystic who talks every day with God the Mother, God the Father, and the persons-of-soul I have strong connections to, including the soul who once lived as Jesus son of Joseph. Mike, you ask,"If Christianity is not the only path to God, how do we know which paths are valid and which are not?" This is an outstanding question, and I'll take a brief stab at starting to answer it. I would say start with Dr. Crossan's insightful statement -- "the validity of all religions should be assessed on how they track with evolution because the arc of evolution, though long, bends towards justice (that is why empires have always eventually fallen)" -- and to his comments about distributive justice add this: "the validity of all religions should ALSO be assessed on how they track with the full and holistic functioning of the brain-soul nexus." A religious belief system that preaches distributive justice while at the same time undermining the ability of individuals to hear, understand, and act on the inner wisdom of their own soul will not ultimately lead to the goal of Peace that Drs. Crossan and Reed point to in "The Search for Paul." To get to the point in your life of feeling Peace -- which I'm going to define here as the state that Gospel writer Mark tried to depict in his Parable of the Idol Bread (Mark 6:1 - 9:8) -- you need more than just distributive justice; you need to feel whole deep within yourself in your relationship with God. But to feel whole deep inside, you need to nurture the circuits of your brain that deal in non-cognitive experiences and states such as empathy, trust, forgiveness, humbleness, wonder, and love. You can talk about justice till you're blue in the face (as many religious prophets have done, including Paul) but if you fail to give full accord to the scientific realities of the brain God gave you, and if you choose to engage in ideological practices that ultimately damage the circuits of the brain that deal in non-cognitive traits, you'll eventually hurt your own ability to hear, understand, and act on the inner wisdom of your own soul. If, on the other hand, you start with the idea that you have a brain-soul nexus that can be healed and developed and strengthened, then eventually you can start to rely on your own intuition when weighing the merits of any philosophical system, whether religious, political, cultural, or scientific. Intuition helps you sort the wheat from the chaff, helps you figure out which teachings you think are valid and which teachings are probably not. I know this is a big topic and I've only mentioned a few ideas that might be relevant to your question. I hope I've been able to help somewhat. God bless, Jen Edited for typos and clarity

Joseph, I enjoyed reading your post about how you understand the differences between spirituality and cult. I know your framework works well for you. Thank you for sharing it. As you know, I have a somewhat different framework, and I'm not especially fond of the teachings of Eckhart Tolle (mostly because, although he seems very sincere in his quest, he has chosen to avoid questions about science and neuroscience in relation to the spiritual journey, so his teachings remind me too much of Ancient Near East Wisdom literature, which I'm no fan of for the same reason: too much Materialist cause and effect proclamation and pseudo-science, not enough non-Materialist quantum questioning). I completely agree with you that teaching others about love, acceptance, forgiveness, kindness, and trusting God are central to the path of healing and peace. Thank you for always emphasizing this. Blessings, Jen

If, for you, the fundamental quality of being a good Christian is being loving (a definition I think many would agree with) then the question of intelligence is a bit of a red herring. I've met many people with "high IQ" who are well educated and well versed in scientific knowledge, but who are lacking in empathy and in emotional percipience. I've also met people with "high IQ" who are well educated and well versed in science, but who are deeply compassionate and genuinely interested in the needs of others. Same pattern for everyone else, too, when I think about it. In my experience, there's no causal link between IQ (cognitive skills) and loving kindness (non-cognitive heart skills). I do think, though, that daily practice of heart skills (e.g. empathy, forgiveness, love, trust) with commitment and faith can improve the overall functioning of the whole biological brain (including memory and cognition), no matter what level of education a person has been exposed to. Best, Jen

Hi Rhino, Have you considered the possibility of house church? You and your wife could set aside a formal time on Sunday mornings to read scripture or uplifting poetry, sing along to some hymns or favourite uplifting songs, pray together, and open your hearts to God. When my son was growing up, we often did this with him on Sunday mornings. It was a very safe, cozy, happy family time -- very different from the High Anglican church we officially belonged to at the time. When Jesus was teaching and healing, there were no churches. It seems he sometimes went to synagogue, but other times he met with people of faith in fields and on roads and in private homes. So I think he left it pretty wide open for us. I don't think it's hypocritical to go to a church you're not 100% committed to. I doubt that many people are ever 100% committed to a particular church. We go because we feel a need to share our faith with other people who are also struggling with uncertainty. If we had all had to meet the 100% test, not only would there be almost nobody in the pews, there'd be almost nobody in the ministry. To be honest, I'm always a bit suspicious when individuals claim to have no doubts. If Jesus hadn't had doubts about the religious laws he grew up with, we wouldn't be having this discussion today. I think your questions and your thinking faith are very positive. Thanks for sharing with us.

Hello, Rhino, It's good to hear your thoughts. I think your honesty about your feelings is an important part of the healing journey. Your need to experience a spiritual community without judgment or fear shows how much healing you've already accomplished. All you can really do is add to that bit by bit, step by step, each day. It's extraordinary how much all the little bits add up when one has the courage to go slowly and carefully. You've already shown you have that courage. I think many people can relate to your wife's questions about death and whether she'll see her loved ones again. It's interesting to note that sometimes the Christian Church, in its formal positions on the nature of humankind and on last things, can be more of a hindrance than a help in showing Christians how to deal with the pain of these questions. (I'm speaking here of formal church doctrines adopted over the centuries within Western Christian orthodoxies, not of grassroots support and concern along the way.) I tackled the history of doctrines of the soul for a recent graduate degree, and believe me . . . it's a big, knotty, thorny, ugly mess that doesn't do much to help people get through the grief they struggle with. In recent years, some books written by credible authors have appeared on the question of life after death. One book, written by a Christian physician named Mary Neal, describes her near death experience. Your wife may find her website -- http://drmaryneal.com/about-to-heaven-and-back.html-- helpful because of the large number of experiences posted by readers on the "Share Your Miracles" page. There are certainly some unscrupulous people out there who are eager to take advantage of the many who long to know what happens when we die. So it's good to be cautious when looking for answers. But there are also a lot of people who've had experiences they can't explain by using simple classical physics. So go slowly, take it step by step, and always hang onto your logic and common sense when exploring questions about death and the afterlife. It's okay with God if you have a "thinking faith" rather than a "blind faith." It's what Jesus taught. Take care, Jen

The parable of the prodigal son is one of a series of parables Jesus wrote to teach others about forgiveness. The main point of divergence between Jesus' theology and the theology of other religious groups in first century Palestine was Jesus' understanding of the mystical power of forgiveness. Jesus' understanding of forgiveness is the key that unlocks the meaning of the Kingdom teachings, including the parables. Jesus' teachings on matters other than forgiveness don't sound a whole lot different than the teachings of other groups. Jesus, like the Pharisees -- and, indeed, like most religious groups of the time -- believed in the importance of ethics, moral choices, and obedience to a code of moral conduct because, well, it's the right thing to do. So Jesus certainly didn't invent the idea of moral codes. But he did build on the radical teachings of the Jewish author we call Job to present a minority understanding of how to be in relationship with God. The minority understanding of Jesus (and Job before him) presented a model for relationship with God that was built on forgiveness (not mercy, not atonement, and not contract law); on agape/love (not obedience, not fear, and not contract law); on a "thinking" faith (not blind faith, not prophecy, and not revelation); on humbleness (not religious humility, not religious salvation, and not on status addiction);on radical inclusiveness (not clan chosenness, not honour-shame cultural norms, and not sectarian segregation); on courage (not fate, not predestination, and not abdication); and finally on the totally crazy idea that God is not a lone male figure (YHWH) but two distinct and separate figures, one male and one female (YHWH and his Asherah?), who together are the One God and make all decisions together based on mutual forgiveness, agape, thinking faith, humbleness, radical inclusiveness, and courage. As above, so below. The parable of the prodigal son reflects Jesus' theology, Jesus' understanding of how we can be in full relationship with God during our lives as human beings. Jesus' parables always ran counter to the Wisdom literature of his time -- what Michael Coogan once called "anti-Wisdom Wisdom" in his commentary on Job. It was Wisdom literature (currents of which ran through most major world religions of the time) which taught that obedience to divinely revealed laws and cultural norms would guarantee "happiness" and eventual acceptance into the heavens (in whatever form "the heavens" were envisioned in a particular religion). Those who willfully disobeyed God's laws (again, in whatever form they were envisioned) would surely be punished -- and rightly so. Wisdom literature (which was already ancient by the time Jesus lived) insisted that Materialist laws of cause-and-effect governed all Creation (including God's own choices) so stability, order, safety, and happiness could be built into a society by observing Creation's laws in scientific ways and then applying reason, justice, and piety to the whole affair. Of course, the world doesn't really work this way, and Jesus knew it. He saw a completely different paradigm in operation in the world around him, a paradigm that blended both Materialist and non-Materialist laws of science in complex and intertwined ways. His parables reflect the anti-Wisdom Wisdom paradigm he observed. He didn't invent what he saw. He simply allowed himself to see what was already there. He allowed himself to hear what God was already saying. And then he tried to share with others the process of emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and physical change that would allow them to willingly and voluntarily enter "the kingdom of the heavens" as Jesus himself had done -- as any of us can do, according to Jesus (though it's a lot of hard work!). The Kingdom parables are confusing, messy, non-linear, multi-layered, and filled with anti-Wisdom Wisdom because life is confusing, messy, non-linear, multi-layered, and filled with all sorts of irrational (but totally wonderful) emotions like love and gratitude and devotion and forgiveness and the courage to change. Paul didn't agree with any of this, but that's another story.

Whew. That makes more sense!

Perhaps it's just me, but I didn't read Rhino's words as a fear of his spouse's vindictiveness. Maybe you didn't mean it that way, either, but it's one way to read the sentence. Ah, the joys and perils of the written word!

With regard to the question about whether there's room for fear in love . . . through my experiences, I've learned that one emotion which often accompanies love -- which is made possible by the presence of love -- is grief. There are times when the heart, greatly filled with love, is moved to grief. Tears flow and the heart expands to make room for new memories, insights, and emotional intertwinings which bring us closer, at least in our hearts, to those we love. But grief can be overwhelming at times. It can also be inconvenient. Who wants to start crying in the middle of a business meeting when something reminds us of a deep and painful loss? So we can start to become afraid that we'll feel grief. It's not really the grief itself we're afraid of, but the inconvenience and embarrassment and emotional vulnerability we're afraid of. I wouldn't say there's any room within love itself for fear. But when we dare to love, a whole host of other emotions can spring up around that love and complicate the picture. Does that make any sense?

Hi Rhino. Thanks for your post. Don't worry about your what you wrote -- it makes perfect sense. I don't know if we can help you here, but you took a risk in reaching out, and I hope you'll at least feel safe here. I don't have any fast, easy answers for you because the situation you describe is complex (as you know). I very much hope you're able to connect with a health care professional you trust. I know this can be difficult if you need to talk about questions of faith but your health care provider isn't interested. I know it can also be difficult if you need to talk about mental health care issues with a pastor but the pastor isn't interested. What I'm trying to say is . . . I hope you're getting the one-on-one care you're probably needing right now. I don't know what your context is, so it's difficult for me to say anything too specific about your faith concerns. If your background is evangelical, fundamentalist, or conservative, and you're trying to move away from that, you'll find a lot of sympathetic ears here. Maybe that's not your context, though. Maybe it's something else that's eating away at you. Do you think you'd find it helpful to talk to a counsellor about why you feel so guilty about your wife's experience of faith? I know you love her and want what's best for her. But maybe it's enough for you both to quietly support each other as you both heal your relationship with God. Maybe it's okay with God if you and your wife have some different needs and therefore some different ways of doing things on the journey of healing. I think it would be okay for you to go to church by yourself if you feel drawn to this experience. I don't think God will be upset if you go by yourself. Some of your fellow parishioners may be upset and judgmental, but, you know, that's their problem. Healing any relationship is a complex process that takes time, and healing our relationship with God is no different. So be kind to yourself. Let God show you how to heal yourself. God knows what your wife is thinking and feeling, and God will care for her as God cares for you. Your paths won't be identical, but that's okay. Part of loving another person is to find the courage to honour those differences. Hold each other's hands, but allow your steps on the path to be your own. God loves you both very much. Jen

I think there's no doubt about the suffering we create -- the hell we create -- in our own minds when we hang onto the idea that we're not worthy of God's love and forgiveness.

Thanks for your thoughtful insights, Soma. If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying the devil is something we've more or less constructed ourselves and if we approached our lives in a more loving way, we'd realize the devil is a "virtual construct," not a reality, and only has "power" in our minds when we feed the ancient archetypes of hatred and anger. If this is how you understand the devil, I'm with you 100%. Anakin Skywalker is truly wonderful example of how we can turn ourselves into the devil by insisting that fear, anger, hatred, vengeance, and obedience to the laws of status addiction are more important than Divine Love. Like Anakin, we all have the choice to seek redemption -- to choose differently and reclaim our true nature as loving children of God. As Jesus once did.

Yesterday, in the `weird but probably true`department, I found this link on the website of a major Canadian daily: http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/real-life-version-of-star-trek-impulse-engines-that-could-get-us-to-moon-in-4-hours-actually-works-scientists-say The story was originally filed by Sarah Knapton of the Telegraph. It`s about a British inventor who was ridiculed by mainstream scientists because his novel propulsion system appears to defy the law of conservation of momentum. NASA has been studying the drive and thinks it might actually work. Science fiction often becomes science fact. But first people have to step out on a limb and take a risk. Christianity has had a role to play in scientific risk-taking, not just as an ``opposing obstacle`` against which to push, but also as a positive force in the lives of some individuals who pushed against the limits of known science because of their faith, not in spite of it. I`ve been noticing lately that some Christians have bought into the idea that they have to choose between science and faith. They choose faith, but they do so with embarrassment and guilt, as if they themselves (and their choice to live with faith) are somehow personally responsible for past errors in science. This is the same pattern of thinking that has led some Christians to stop believing in miracles. Miracles aren`t non-scientific. Miracles are simply quantum physics combined with ordinary everyday Materialist physics. This isn`t to say that miracles aren`t miraculous, though. To the Heart, science is so breathtakingly beautiful that tears of joy always follow in the tracks of all those whizzing neutrinos. God bless.