Category Archives: Jesus’ Journey is our Journey
The Timing of Miracles in Lives Differs
It’s a lovely sunny day in Memphis. I’m as usual playing on face book before getting serious about unpacking my mess of decades of writing in hopes of gathering some together to describe my spiritual journey. The point being, that I am convinced that the timing of it differs from person to person. But if open to mystery, to miracles past our understanding, even if finally only in old age, we can recognize that amazing connection of God to our daily lives. It can be in the timing of really small things or recognizing God’s hand in the large and even scary aspects of our lives. I know that I was a weak person and needed immense doses of grace early on to keep on keeping on. But, there are times in all our lives when our natural strengths are not enough. And if we are naturally strong people we may not recognize our limits as gifts. Because they open us to grace in ways beyond our understanding. To the strong it may seem like failure to need that grace, but it’s the gift of Jesus’ life as a human being. His journey is our journey complete with miracles beyond human understanding, because we too have the Spirit of God within us and surrounding us. God is as alive and well in our times and our lives as God was in Jesus’ life, suffering, death and resurrection. The timing of our need for and openness to God’s interventions is different from one person to another. But ultimately we are all called to experience our limits and need for God’s active participation in our daily lives. Admitting our natural limits is harder for the strong than the weak. But it is part of the spiritual journey. The Spirit is within us and outside us. We are a tiny, but needed part of God’s plan for humanity. But recognizing our personal limits and need for an awareness of our connection to God is part of God’s plan for humanity.
A Universal Christ
Christianity is the most radical of all world religions
Franciscan sister and scientist Ilia Delio focuses on the theology of the incarnation and the universal nature of the Christ mystery:
The Christian message is that God has become flesh [sarx in Greek or “matter”]—not a part of God or one aspect of God but the whole infinite, eternal God Creator has become matter. The claim—God has become flesh—is so radical that it is virtually unthinkable and illogical. Christianity is the most radical of all world religions because it takes matter seriously as the home of divinity. [1]
So does everyone have to become Christian to know the Christ? Absolutely not. Christ is more than Jesus. Christ is the communion of divine personal love expressed in every created form of reality—every star, leaf, bird, fish, tree, rabbit, and human person. Everything is christified because everything expresses divine love incarnate. However, Jesus Christ is the “thisness” of God, so what Jesus is by nature everything else is by grace (divine love). We are not God, but every single person is born out of the love of God, expresses this love in [their] unique personal form, and has the capacity to be united with God…. Because Jesus is the Christ, every human is already reconciled with every other human in the mystery of the divine, so that Christ is more than Jesus alone. Christ is the whole of reality bound in a union of love.
We are transformed by experiencing the presence of Christ in all things.
Eileen: (And all people.)
I believe this. But find expressing it difficult without it becoming so complex that only theologians can “get” it. In the fifty-eight years since I experienced the incredible unconditional Love of God fleshed out in Jesus, my view of Jesus and Christianity has been expanded, rather than changed, until I realized that we have mostly missed the point of Jesus. Our importance is as a part of the whole…..we are part of God with God’s Spirit within us, but we limit the Spirit because of fear. Fear is literally the root of all evil. It’s the root of Musk’s need for power and my need for pleasure as escapes from the reality of our human vulnerability. We are fragile physical beings in a huge universe beyond even our understanding, never-the-less, our control. Unconsciously, we are all aware that the possibility of heartbreaking disaster lurks in the next minute. We do all we can to make this life pain free……our idea of heaven. We miss the point of Jesus. We want Him to be a “get out of this life’s possibility of being hell free” card. And we consider Him our key to the spiritual country club of escape from it. And we miss the point of both His life journey and His death as the prototype for ours. He grew spiritually. He became aware of the need to balance achievement with simple kindness through his mom. He was literally pushed into the increased danger of becoming known for doing miracles by His mom’s caring about a family’s social embarrassment. He was challenged over and over to love the least of these (lepers, tax collectors, fallen women, Roman Soldiers, people unwilling to help themselves, cowardly best friends, and the leaders of His own religion who had Him tortured and killed) and even God when He felt God had abandoned Him.
This life is not meant to be heaven. It is school. It is the journey from Self as number one, to being willing to lay down our lives for not only those who are different from us, but those that would kill us. That takes Growth through Grace with a capital G! Ultimately it takes a willingness to die to what we value most in our lives and ourselves.
This may not sound like the “good news,” but it’s a letting go that ultimately frees us from the fear that controls and corrupts us, so that we can ultimately Love all others unconditionally.
Accepting Jesus as Savior Takes a Minute. Accepting Jesus as Lord Takes a Lifetime.
I want to explain something about having a relationship with Jesus and about saying the prayer accepting Jesus as Savior and Lord.
For me, as an agnostic, it was a new beginning. Jesus became both a partner with His life as a guide, and a presence as a source of God’s Love that is the grace to grow more loving all along life’s spiritual journey.
I began to recognize the pattern Jesus had of opening up to more and more people as those Loved by God…..until it included not just good Jews, but the Jews that used the power of the enemy government to get rich, the slut at the well, the guy at the pool who wouldn’t help himself, Soldiers of the hated enemy government, his closest friends who abandoned Him, and even the Jews that thought they had a monopoly on God and were instrumental in his torture and death. And as He died, Jesus chose to trust God even when He felt abandoned by Him.
Jesus fleshed out both the Love of God for ALL of us and the WAY for us to become Loving. That Love is the grace for us to grow more loving every inch of the way until we die.
I don’t know what God is… I don’t know what heaven is. Sometimes I’ve felt like this life was hell. But I do know we are all different and have different limits. I’m not sure we all die loving like Jesus, because we are not dealt the same hand. We only have to play the hand we were dealt the best we can with the grace of that Love. I cannot judge ANYONE, even myself. At 88, I’ve realized that I wasn’t dealt as great a hand as I thought I was. But I’m still here, so I’ve got more growing to do. Sometimes when I see really GOOD people suffer horribly, it mirrors Jesus to me. Maybe they love enough to bear what the weaker people they love couldn’t. I don’t know. NO one knows! If we think we know the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, we are claiming to be equal to God. Being human is living and, even by the measure of perfection, dying unfinished.
We want so badly to feel safe, and we think either worldly power/riches or religion will guarantee it. This life is not about safety or perfection. It’s a journey from our own NEEDING to LOVING. Some of us are born better at it than others. It’s a personal journey, so some of us need more grace than others. Some of us, like me, even need miracles among the heartbreaks. It’s a JOURNEY of learning to LOVE like Jesus did to the best of the grace we are given. Though the journey varies from person to person, groups of us start out more like each other than others. The challenge isn’t getting to heaven, it’s becoming the loving person God created us uniquely to be. And often our failures are in what we DON’T do, because of limiting our love to only people like ourselves. And that includes both conservatives and liberals in any society.
I KNOW I am LOVED, but that doesn’t mean I’m perfect or will ever be perfect. And the same goes for every single child of God. I know that by the pattern of the life and death and Love fleshed out in Jesus.
The Broken Body of Christ
OUCH!
The Power of the Cross
Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and purpose.
Christ sends us to proclaim the gospel simply, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.
Jesus died and rose for all, but many want a savior who is about power for this world, this life.
The power of the cross is the resurrection, which shows us that this life is not all there is.
The power of the cross is that it is the ultimate expression of unconditional love for us imperfect, unfinished people.
The power of the cross can free us to die to our self-centeredness, our self-righteousness, our false sense of superiority, our judgmental spirit, our delusion of infallibility. These are the mindsets that twist our belief that we belong to the people of God into the blinding sin of pride. The power of the love of God expressed in dying on the cross can free us from our blind spots of pride, so we can become peacemakers.
The Broken Body by Eileen
Reflecting on the Body
You, the hand, I, the foot
Christ, the head, perhaps the heart
Someone else, the hidden part,
I let the scriptures
Flood my mind with images.
Then suddenly one image
Is so harshly real,
I gasp aloud.
I see a person staggering
And stumbling toward me,
Arms flailing, head jerking
Back and forth in spasms,
Body parts all pulling
Different ways.
This then – reality
Christ’s earthly body now.
Forgive us! Eileen
OUCH!
My Journey from Agnostic to Christian
As a Catholic from childhood, I had four children in the first five years of marriage. Unfortunately, I had to have them by Caesarean Section. Then the doctor told me I would die if I had another C section in the next few years. When I asked the priest what to do since birth control was considered a mortal sin, he said,
“Many children have good stepmothers.”
I decided that men who had never married or had children shouldn’t be making that kind of decision for women. Since I unknowingly had made the Catholic Church my God, when I left the Catholic Church, I threw Jesus and God out with it.
I was not a typical woman who loved to cook and bake, sew and make flower arrangements. In fact, I felt totally inadequate as a wife and mother. We were affluent then and I had help and we both enjoyed giving parties. So, for several years we led a party life, and I began drinking even before the parties and on weekday afternoons when we didn’t have parties.
I got scared that I was losing control of my drinking and found a therapy group for alcoholics. After several months of reading and going to therapy, I broke down weeping one night, admitting that I felt totally inadequate as a wife and mother and didn’t think I was capable of loving anyone, even my husband and children. The group did not judge me, but rather seemed to hurt with me. Somehow it was a beginning of healing.
The next day as I was vacuuming, I had a sense of someone standing behind me with their hand gently on my shoulder. My first thought was that it was Jesus, but then decided since I didn’t believe in Jesus it couldn’t be. So, I just put the feeling into my “need more information file.”
Unexpectedly my father died.at fifty-two years of age. I closed down my feelings, so I could deal with it intellectually and cope with life. I took a course at Vanderbilt Divinity school on the Christian View of Death and another on other World Religions. Neither made much impression on me, so I began to visit various Christian denominations and reading the bible. The book of Acts was an eye opener and made me a bit wistful that Christians might still have life changing experiences. About that time some affluent friends of ours gave up their lifestyle and his Vice Presidency in his family’s company to be missionaries in a non-denominational ministry, Campus Crusade for Christ. I hoped they had kept some investments for the future for their three children, but I was intrigued by their willingness to change their life so drastically.
Sometime later they came back to town asking our group of friends to give a Christian coffee where several women would talk about how Jesus had changed their lives. I laughingly invited women to come, saying I didn’t know our current gatherings weren’t Christian, but come and enjoy the great food we were going to have.
Several women gave talks about the changes in their lives and relationships when they said a prayer asking Jesus to be their Savior and Lord. Then they invited us to say the prayer with them. I was impressed with the changes they described, but since I didn’t believe in God or Jesus, I didn’t say the prayer. As the other women who prayed the prayer were being embraced, I started washing dishes.
One of the women came in and asked if I had said the prayer. I said I didn’t believe in God or Jesus, so I had not. She didn’t hesitate, suggesting I say the prayer this way, “Jesus, IF you are who you claimed to be, I want you to be my Savior and Lord.” That seemed like a win/win, so I said the prayer and went back to washing dishes wondering if this would make any difference.
Suddenly, I was simply over come with the feeling of being totally loved with no small print. The joy was so great, I was afraid I’d burst from it. And that began my fifty-seven-year spiritual journey that has had awesome times of joy and very difficult times when I sometimes felt that loving presence even when in great pain.
It has not been easy. And there were times when temptation was so strong that God literally intervened in amazing ways to keep me from screwing up my own and others’ lives.
I have learned that saying the prayer isn’t a magic incantation. For some of us it makes an immediate difference, but it doesn’t make us perfect. And for some it doesn’t make a difference for years. Asking Jesus to be our savior is one thing. Letting Him be Lord is a whole other ball game and for me it’s taking a lifetime. Different personalities experience the Spiritual Journey in very different ways. Some of us are relationship people. Others are worker bees and doers. Some are thinkers and questioners. God did not make His children with a cookie-cutter.
Following Jesus means literally following in His footprints in His journey through the Gospels. And that takes grace in our emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual lives that changes us in many different ways over the years.
We are loved unconditionally, but we are on a journey of change from being needy to being loving. And that is not easy and takes commitment, courage, and grace.
Is Our Suffering Redemptive for Others?
To me the root of sin is fear. We dull fear with pleasure and we try to fight it with power. And human power is an illusion…..as Adam and Eve found out. A tiny, microscopic germ can wipe us out. The question of why the good suffer is confusing. Perhaps accepting suffering and trusting the grace of God to get us through it is somehow redemptive not just for us, but possibly for those that don’t get it together with God until the last minute or even until they see God. This may be wishful thinking on my part because of being the matriarch of five generations, some of whom don’t seem to be getting it together with or without God in a world that is increasingly scary. Perhaps our suffering somehow helps those we love unconditionally. Perhaps like Jesus, we can say, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” If we who are imperfect can hurt for them and forgive, surely a God who is Love does.
The “Guts” of my Faith
Trying to kind of sum up my faith and understanding of the spiritual in life.
Is there something/someone worth calling God? Yes! Why do I believe this? Because I’ve experienced unexplainable timing miracles over and over in my life and because when I separated Jesus from any religion, it became clear that Jesus fleshed out these things: 1. UNCONDITIONAL LOVE; 2. that we ALL are loved: and we are ALL created and called to love one another(even our enemy) just as WE are loved. 3. God’s essence (Spirit) is in everything and everyone if we are open to it. We are an essential part of the whole, but we individually are not equal to the whole. 4. Life, both as individuals and as humanity, is a school for the spiritual journey of evolution in loving, and we are learning to love still on the day we die. 5. We are not all dealt the same hand, so it is impossible to judge how well anyone is playing their hand. Only God knows that. 6. No person or group has all the truth and nothing but the truth. 7. We are part of God and God is part of us, but we are not the whole. 8.The Scriptures are letters from God written by people in earlier and more primitive cultures, but we hear God through the Scriptures with the understanding of the culture we are living in. with its differences AND its limits. 9.Truth and fact are not the same. Some Scriptures teach truth through metaphorical stories. The details are not facts, but the truth they are illustrating is real. 10. Jesus FLESHED out not only the Love of God for all humanity, but also the stages of growing into Loving as God Loves. His WAY is our WAY. He is the witness that we unfinished human beings can grow from the selfishness of an infant’s needs to the freedom to Love others more than ourselves, even those who seem to be our enemies, but who play a crucial part in our growing free to Love. 11. We not only can love our enemy, but choose to trust God when we feel abandoned just as Jesus ultimately did on his cross. 12.This life is not all there is. 13. Jesus as a person in History is not the only way to learning to love as God loves. But Jesus has definitely been my personal way, so I that is what I have to share.
At 87 I am still on my personal journey so may understand more tomorrow, but will not know it all in this life, just my God given personal potential through the grace of being loved. I pray for people, even those connected to cars broken down on the highway this way: “God, be with that person and their loved ones. Give them the grace they need physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to become the person you created them to be. I ask this in Jesus’ name, who fleshed our Your love for us. Amen.”
Jesus Chose Love Over Power
Jesus chose love over power. And paid the price. Jesus fleshed out the Love of God. That was his WAY and the WAY we are called to also.
The early world of dog eat dog, of the fallen get left behind, of only the physically strong survive began to evolve into partnerships, into family, into tribe, into country, now into world, and soon into universe. It grows past hunter/gatherer to social networks of different skills working for the whole. Eventually we will all need each other across our differences, in fact because of our differences.
In our current world we often see greed as the root of all evil, but greed is just a way to power and power is still seen as safety.
Jesus was not about safety. Jesus lay down his life. He chose to be vulnerable even knowing the consequences. Because he knew that death was not the end. And survival is not the goal. Love is.
Jesus being fully human and fully divine is a paradox and our minds don’t deal with paradoxes well.
The problem for us is identifying with both. Divine implies bigger than life. And the human Jesus showed us what that means in the resurrection. Being human doesn’t mean bad or evil. It means “unfinished.” We come into the world dependent and needy and greedy. With the grace of knowing there is more than survival and pleasure we can become able to love, to value ourselves and others equally because life is not about personal survival but about humanity becoming Love which is Divine.
Humanity has the seed of the Divine within …….the Spirit of God , of Love. Like the fig tree we can yield the fruit of that Spirit. But it’s a spiritual journey from need to Love and that takes the grace of being Loved. And that’s where Jesus comes in. The journey of life is a hard one with hard choices and without the grace of knowing Love up close and personal it’s impossible. But we are different from one another from birth, so the journey won’t be exactly the same for us. But it is always a journey from need to Love.
For me that has been graced by knowing that imperfect and unfinished as I am, I am Loved by the creator of all , the whole, the great I AM and Jesus fleshed both that Love and the WAY , (the choices) to become Loving out for me.
I don’t personally think a creator, a father, a mother, would only have one way of loving and giving grace to love, so billions of their children would never know that Love. But for me it has been Jesus. I could not have come this far without that grace of being known and Loved. I don’t think we come into the world equal in ability, opportunity, freedom, cultures, so we are not cookie cutter children of God. Each of us comes with different strengths and weaknesses; physical, mental, emotional, situational, cultural, etc. which is what makes judging impossible.
The seed of the Spirit is in us. What awakens it and strengthens it will differ, like with Cornelius and his family. No one has a monopoly on God or grace. We can share our source of Grace, such as Jesus, but unless we Love like Jesus, it will not find soft fertile ground.
Scripture contradicts itself, such as the difference in the Gospel accounts of Jesus carrying or needing help carrying His Cross. The Gospel of John says Jesus did not need help carrying His cross. When I first hit a time when I felt I simply could not go on, I opened to the story of Simon of Cyrene helping Jesus carry his cross and realized some times we all need help and got an immediate phone call offering the help I needed. Years later when feeling overwhelmed again by circumstances, I opened to the Gospel of John that said Jesus carried his own cross and heard that as God telling me that now His grace was sufficient. And it was.
The Spirit speaks to us through the Scriptures in different ways at different times in our journeys. Do not make a God of one part of Scripture. Our personal journey’s from need to Love are different from each other’s and even at different times in our own lives. Jesus’s life is the WORD of God fleshed out for us and different people at different times need to hear different things. Do not set a Scripture in Stone and make a God of it.
Ultimately, each day has challenges to grow in Love in our own personal journey. But not necessarily in the same way as our parents, our pastor, or our best friend, but always in one of the ways and choices that Jesus made sometimes through tears, heartbreak, frustration, and even anger…..but ending with Love. “Father, forgiven them. They know not what they do.”
The Mystery of Prayer
Sunday’s sermon was on prayer and I find that my experiences bring me to a slightly different, but possibly important slant on it. My friend, Montez, pointed out that we have a two way relationship with God that is the basis of everything else. A relationship with God is the heart of the matter. And that relationship is expressed, fleshed out in our relationships with others. Prayer is an important aspect of caring about others.
We can’t really understand God, so our relationship with God is always going to be something of a puzzle. (If we understood God, we would be equal to God and the story of Adam and Eve points out the very human, but treacherous path that takes us on. ) Let’s face it, whether we live in a small cave in a world hard to explore on foot or in a world of trips to the moon and other planets, we are still teeny tiny vulnerable limited beings in a immense and scary universe. Our very understandable human desire for power, whether it comes from the illusion of power through knowledge, riches, weapons of destruction, or even our sense of a relationship with the creator of it all, it is to some extent an illusion. Our relationship with God is a dialogue that’s about growing in our ability to love unconditionally. It’s NOT about power.
My experience has been that a simple openness to something far greater than anything we are or know can be life changing. Unfortunately we are naturally limited in our understanding, so once we become aware of the size and power of whatever it is, the temptation is to use it for our own agendas. So it can be a temptation to turn prayer into an illusion of power.
Over and over Jesus turned to prayer for refueling, for understanding, for empowerment to both teach and heal and feed others. Prayer was his WAY of keeping his relationship with God open for understanding, strength, and the gifts of the Spirit, but MOSTLY it kept him aware of his dependence on God. In the end, he was powerless, totally dependent on his faith in the Love of God.
My experiences of both the power and the lessons of prayer have varied in extremes.
Once at a Catholic Charismatic Conference I witnessed the shorter leg of a young woman friend respond immediately to prayer with instant growth. She had to take her built up shoe off and go barefoot that weekend! Ten years later she was still able to wear flip flops and tennis shoes.
Yet, I watched my mother die by inches with Alzheimer’s for fourteen years.
A forty-year-old woman friend, who had not been raised in any religion, was in intensive care on a respirator in the hospital. She had a diagnosis of incurable idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and was told she would never again be able to breathe off a respirator. She wanted to be unplugged, but a woman stopped to talk to her in the ICU one night and told her to simply give herself to the God of Jesus and trust his Love.. She did this. Three days later she was permanently off the respirator. She became a beautiful witness to the Love of God that was fleshed out in Jesus for all. But she continued to have all sorts of other health crises, even losing a leg. After about ten years she was polishing the candle holders and praying in her Episcopal church and was finally freed to forgive her father, who had been so awful that she had actually been happy that he died in a fire. Shortly after this she had a heart attack and was freed from her earthly struggles.
God is simply beyond anyone’s understanding. So, prayer is also.
I have had many prayers answered so quickly that it was beyond doubting a connection. But also, plenty that seem to fall on deaf ears. This isn’t heaven. And though when we are suffering it seems like eternity, it isn’t even a blip in eternity. My youngest son was seriously ill from a heart defect his first four years, running temperatures that were beyond the thermometer. Every time he had to have a shot; it took three adults to hold him down. I’m sure that few minutes seemed like an eternity to him, because it did to me. At four years of age, he finally was healed without any medical repair. Through the whole four years I had many Christians of many denominations praying with me for him. (Note: Obviously as a child he was not being punished for anything).
My guess is that healings are so we will know that when God or medicine does NOT heal us, that it’s a part of our journey to a new level of faith and capacity for loving God and all others unconditionally.
Many Europeans seem to have given up on God. Most of the small churches have been turned into cafes or theaters. The crowds in Cathedrals are tourists. We in America have not had widespread bombing blitzes, fire-bombs, or nuclear destruction of our homes and cities. When in Holland my brother asked the tour leader if people in Holland thought we were now facing the end times. She said, “We thought it was the end times when we were eating our tulip bulbs to survive.”
Here in the USA, we don’t really realize how spoiled we are. We think it’s the end of the world when groceries cost too much, Hurricanes increase, and Covid makes us reclusive.
If it’s the end of our world, it’s because we killed it, not because Jesus is coming. Though I am seeing what seems to be some seeds of a renewal of faith in our country, as a History major, I’m pretty sure this isn’t the rapture.
Contrary to what Americans still seem to expect, this life is not heaven. As I’ve said before it seems to me to be a school for growing from need to the capacity for unconditional love……like the life journey of Jesus. And obviously we haven’t gotten there yet.
But I could be wrong, since I’m only 87 and God isn’t finished with me yet.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 