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grounded in a mystical, interfaith-Christianity inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg
We’re All One in God, Especially in Our Diversity
The oneness of humanity is a theme hinted at or exclaimed by many traditions and ancient scriptures, and I think leaning into this awareness can serve as a healing salve for our minds and our world. However, why do so many traditions use different terms or explanations for how we are one, or ignore this often-scriptural concept entirely? What’s the fundamental similarity and is it similar enough to be called the same thing? And finally, is there something fundamental at the core of our beings that unites us even in, especially in, our diversity?
The Radical Social Justice of God(dess)
The image of the bloody, fiery God from Revelation 19 can be a bit shocking at first. Why is the social justice and love wielding Christ so horrific in this vision, and why does it say, “He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself?” We find that although the Lord focuses on compassionate awareness and care, he doesn’t shy away from emphasizing the bloody and hurtful injustices in the world. And although the Biblical scriptures highlight that this is the glorified Jesus, it also doesn’t shy away from emphasizing that the Lord radically transcends any one tradition, name, gender, or creed – but can yield her spiritual-political sword in each of our hearts, no matter our spirituality.
Find Blessings in Intrinsic Awareness
Blessings in life abound, but it can be difficult to perceive them when we’re too caught up in self-awareness instead of selfless awareness. Selfless awareness is less “humbling one’s self” than it is realizing that our identifications with our perceived intelligence, our bodies, and our circumstances are a lie we’ve been telling ourselves. Instead, as some Buddhists, Hindus, and Christians believe, we should identify more with the eternally peaceful awareness that shines light into our minds as it observes our thoughts, pervades all sentient life, and underlies the energy within all matter. As we find that we are not our rambling minds, selfish ideas, and worries, we can start to truly see the blessing of every moment and settle into the blessedness of Goddess-given awareness.
Carry Your Cross to Find Resurrection
The cross is an interesting branding symbol for most of Christianity – as it’s the instrument of the murder of God, according to the Christian scriptures. But whatever our faith and despite our feelings about the cross, the image of it can serve as a heavy metaphor for the weight that we each carry, with compassionate strength and patience enabled by God(dess). Christ himself asked us to continue to carry our crosses and follow him, pointing toward the spiritual health that can be found as we accept our histories and move steadily forward with our eyes on that warmth and the light of consciousness at the root of our souls, inviting us to loving care and the peaceful dawn of a new day.
Find the Heavenliness Within
We’re told that any journeying to God(dess) or God’s journeying toward us is just a metaphor since there’s no true distance between us and that Holy One that transcends any religion. But I think both are helpful parables as they describe how we often feel and other truths of the process toward wholeness and peace. Indeed, it seems to us that we have to work at finding peace within, even though it’s already there at the root of our consciousness. And it also feels like we must often wait for God to act, for that descending holy city to get mysteriously closer before a new stage of compassionate awareness and flow reaches us (or perhaps we’re not sure what will come!). However, we’re told that sometimes the most effective way of journeying to God is to journey within into a state of sabbath or rest (whatever we may be doing). This means resting in the peaceful, spacious consciousness that we use to observe our mind’s chatter and all the things that we perceive through it, letting go of identifying with our lusts, attachments, perceptions of our bodies, or random thoughts. Interestingly, our favorite mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, believed that the Palm Sunday image of the Lord riding on a donkey represented our natural mind subordinating itself to our spiritual awareness, similarly to this.
The Woman Clothed in the Sun: Find New Life in Divine Warmth & Light
Sometimes it feels like we’ve been left out to dry. We feel exposed and let down, vulnerable, depressed, and undersupported. And unfortunately, often we are undersupported and underappreciated – on an earthly level. But funny enough, as we lean into the compassionate warmth and the enlightening truth of God in our lives, we can find that we feel spiritually protected, cared for, and more and more mentally sound, even amidst great trials. Further, as we lean into care, oneness in God, and compassion, we’ll find that we ourselves are able to better support and appreciate those around us – while empowering that in others.
How to Shine Like the Sun
The ancient Tao Te Ching states, “The Master keeps her mind always at one with the Tao, that is what gives her her radiance.” We see an important example of one who becomes one with the Tao, the uncreated life force that gives rise to everything, in Christ – who not only says as much throughout the gospel, “I and the Father are one,” but who also literally shines like the sun when his inner self is revealed. Further, we as living beings are also invited through many traditions to become a shining one at one with the Tao, one with the Master, the Buddha, with the Christ who is one with the Father. But we might ask, “The Tao is dark and unfathomable, how can it make her radiant? Because she lets it.”
Release Your Imprisonment
We can all feel trapped at times, whether due to a pandemic, a work environment, a relationship, or an internal oppression or depression; most of us know something about feelings of imprisonment. Our society is slowly coming around to inviting more tools to help us through these situations and moments. And yet there’s an exceedingly long way to go and many improvements we can make to better enable and empower people – from promoting more effective psychological and spiritual tools to just becoming more aware of the unrightfully oppressive natures of our economic, social, and justice systems. In a way, we can see an embodiment of our collective oppression in the “least of these:” the disregard and unrehabilitative attitudes we hold for the truly imprisoned, which are often the poor and the disempowered.
Romantic Awareness
I think we can often find the essence of Divinity, no matter our belief tradition, in our romantic and loving relationships – although sometimes we can allow our yearning for love or sexual connection to bring us out of the moment and away from healthy connection. Indeed, many ancient spiritual teachings (including many Tantras) encourage us to engage with life itself, our every moment, with present, loving engagement, for our own spiritual health and the health of our families. Coming into the moment and letting go of distracted thinking, yearning, and worries, allows us to be present to our loved ones and ourselves in new and surprising ways, as it also helps us to heal our hearts and minds in loving connection with the spiritual light and warmth of God, known by many names.
Don’t Worry, Enter the Moment
The idea that we should “stop and smell the roses” is an ancient and popularly expressed one, and yet, it can be incredibly difficult to take it to heart! Many of our religions and spiritualities tell us this in a variety of commanding and detailed ways – expressing how we should rely on God(dess) and our own God-given present awareness to navigate our days and not get ahead of ourselves. But how can we lean into this state of mind when there’s so much to plan and do, and is it actually worth striving to follow such a radical approach to life? Well, to start to answer this we must ask ourselves, “do I enjoy being anxious and yearning for the future, or would I rather find peace and a sense of wholeness today?”
How “40” Represents Temptation and Illuminates the Bible
There’s an interconnectedness in scripture that is often lost to us when we read it purely literally, a tendency of both Hebrew and Christian bibles to use recurring images and symbols to point to deeper spiritual truth. This multilayered structure is often made plain by the gospels themselves, but in our desire to use scripture for our own purposes and avoid personal reflection we never seek these threads nor see where they lead. One example of these spiritual symbols is the number 40 (which I mention regularly), often used to describe a state of temptation in scripture, just as Christ is said to have spent 40 days in the wilderness overcoming three key temptations from the Devil.
Why Does Divinity Insist That It Takes a Process?
The process of spiritual transformation takes time and patience, as they say, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” But often our spiritual teachers tell us that the infinite Divinity that we each express in our own finite way has always existed, and so why does our reception of it seem to take so long? Why does becoming our “best self” tend to be riddled with setbacks, process, and seeming disappointments on both individual and societal scales? Well, we’re also told that the Divine One is a God of process – and that this allows for our freewill and deep engagement of compassion, social justice, and wisdom from a place of individualized love and acceptance. Indeed, we read that even “Jeh-with-us,” Jesus, underwent his own process of growth in the Christian gospels, which helped him “fulfill all righteousness,” and we discover similar stories in many of the world’s scriptures revealing how God works and helps us to work as well.
Reclaiming Christianity & Our Ancient Traditions
There’s a deep, living tradition within our scriptures themselves. One that speaks to love and a transformation of heart and action, even if the text itself is sometimes weighed down by its characters’ bad habits and hurtful decisions. This is similar to the slow awakening of today’s modern acceptance of cultural and identity diversity, which corresponds to a reawakening of the heart of many of our major traditions in the minds of young and old alike. This spirit of Christ doesn’t accept the moneychangers in the temple, or the dominating Pharisees in society, and points out that “Christian” and “religious” count for more than we’ve cast onto them. Like Christ, these should point to love for everyone, deepening our understanding of reality, and opening our hearts to the diverse wellspring of God within and around us under many guises.
The Transcendent Joy of the Holidays
Christmas and the holidays are an interesting time of year because no matter how seemingly nonreligious we become in Western society, we still love celebrating it and getting festive! I think this is because no matter our beliefs, there’s something compelling about the joy of the season, about the joy that comes when families connect, when we dress and celebrate festively, when we collectively listen to songs and messages about communal love, joy, and hope, and when we take some time away from the hubbub of life, focus on giving to the oppressed and our loved ones, and rest a bit in (relative) peace. We like to forget, but this is the type of joyous living that God encourages us to find throughout our traditions and specifically in the Christian Bible, and so perhaps there’s a lesson for us in the holidays that we can carry forward through the rest of the year.
Why Are There No More “Major” Miracles? Love
I find it interesting that despite the miracles found throughout holy texts, most of us don’t seem to see many miracles today (besides those “normal” ones of life itself!). If we look seriously at the spiritual insights that our scriptures try to present metaphorically (the reason why they’re often carried as communal parables), and particularly, at what kind of miracles these texts are trying to encourage, I think we might discover why there’s such a disparity! In short, I think it is the rootedness of miracles in love that helps explain what we might see as a lack of modern “major” miracles, similar to what the 18th-century interfaith-Christian mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, proposed.
Be Still Within as Justice Advents Through You
There’s an empowering, interreligious message at the centre of our Moses tale today, and also one that is repeatedly uplifted by Jesus Christ in the gospels: “be still,” “accept peace,” “quiet your mind and know God.” Any practicing Buddhist or Christian Monk will tell you that this is at the heart of how Divine Awareness deeply advents into our minds, and yet, when we read scripture, we often miss this deep, central vein. Further, the concept of being still and tapping into our deeper, silent awareness, can often be misconstrued as being inactive (perhaps due to the seeming remoteness of monks!) where the opposite is the case; this inner stillness allows us to respond to the world with clarity, uplifting within and around us the Divine activities of compassion and social justice that are at the root of all life.
Shed the Beast and Uncover Our Humanity
God’s message of social justice, hope, and life sometimes gets watered down in our various understandings of the world’s scriptures, which is ironic since even the most esoteric sections of holy text point to the Divine’s mission of uplifting and empowering the entire world in spiritual health. One example, Daniel chapter 7 of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, describes Daniel’s visions of beasts rising up and subjugating the earth in war and strife, but they’re eventually cast into a fiery river in front of the “Most High” who is the “Ancient of Days,” which then leads to “one like a son of humanity” to enter God’s presence and to rule over and empower all nations, releasing them from oppression. This story can be read on many levels, from the personal to Christ’s process of glorification during his earthly life, and as we break down its meaning I think we’ll all hope to not only embody its message ourselves but also as a diverse, interreligious society.
How to Walk Through the Lion’s Den
In Canada this week we celebrate Remembrance Day on the 11th, when we remember our fallen soldiers as well as the deep risk our armed forces face every day. And I think that no matter our country, religion, or creed, we would do ourselves a service to remember that no matter our differences, there are many of us willing to sacrifice our lives for what we believe is the greater good. That’s partly why it’s so important for us as a global community to continue to empower sound and healthy decision-making, as well as a peaceful, altruistic approach to the world and our neighbors. It’s also why we have much to be thankful for when it comes to our martyrs and those that truly wish the best for us and are loyal to their higher ideas, even unto death – just like Christ and like Daniel in today’s reading. And ultimately, we’re told by tradition after tradition, this life isn’t the end – indeed, whether it’s the afterlife or reincarnation, we all will continue our journey toward eternity and so should strive for that higher idea of humanity today for the benefit of our eternal future.
Renounce Your Pride, Regain Your Crown
In the ancient Hebrew book of Daniel, we see a continuation of the universal spiritual teachings that this book uplifts – with King Nebuchadnezzar falling from his kingship due to his pride and arrogance. In all of our beauty and personal gifts it’s easy to fall into similar vanities, but our feelings of pride only serve to undermine these empowerments from Divinity – the seed of consciousness called by many names, and they lead to our own fall. But although being cast down may seem like a setback for the king (it does speak to his need for change) we’re shown that even this failure can be viewed from the light of God as a necessary lesson for the healing of Nebuchadnezzar’s soul. May we each look at our own setbacks similarly: accepting the invitation to renounce our pride, regaining our crowns.
The Core of Our Humanity Overcomes the Fires of Life
Throughout time there have been many persecuted due to their loyalty to their cultural heritage and personal convictions, and unfortunately, religion has often been the instrument used to do this. Instead of inviting openness and cultural diversity, like Babylon in today’s story we often set up a graven image in the place of a loving God and then persecute others for being different – resigning them to the fire of our judgment if not the fire of outright persecution when we can get away with it. Strangely enough, we personally often consign our own innocent and spiritual side to just such a fire, and yet even so, even with such hate in our world, I believe today’s scripture (Daniel 3) shines light on the resiliency and fortitude of the spirit of Divinity within and within all other beings in their diversity.