Sunday, July 31, 2011

Ramadan at sunset



In my part of town there are a number of Muslim families, many from Somalia, Jordan, Egypt, Iran, essentially a good sampling of the Middle East and Northern Africa.  There are also a number of Arabic grocery stores and restaurants, all of which add to the multi-national flavor of my southeast Portland community.


Ramadan begins tonight at sunset.  While for these loving, beautiful, interesting, vibrant people, Ramadan is a huge part of their lives, it continues to create a sense of exclusivity, a set apart from the larger community, that I find a bit challenging both spiritually and morally.


It's been a few years since I sat in Fr. Fulhaber's moral theology class, but if there was one single bottom line in his class it was something called exercising your "fundamental option," that orientation of your own center-most being.  Did your soul, freely and of its own volition, point in the direction of what is good and godly, loving and healing or was it headed down the path of submission to a darker, controlling, autonomy-usurping "other"  - whether it's a religion, a spouse, an employer or a dictator. And, tandem to that position is, do you even know if you are free to make a moral choice?  When a couple marry, the implication is that both are adult and mature enough to make a willful decision about their partnership.  The question belies the truth that most of us are steeped in spiritual blindness, dimmed by the cloud of unknowing, the proverbial human condition of living with our spiritual eyes closed. 


We are all in varying stages of awakening, but I daresay there are few of us who are fully aware and therefore fully conscious enough to make a perfect decision.  At least we admit this, and continue to seek enlightenment and awareness.  We stumble and we fall, but we keep getting up.  It's the continued effort to get up that I think our Creator values, above our blind submission to the rules of a religion that has told us we would be eternally punished if we didnt' follow its dictates, dogma or commandments.  


We are all like blind men stumbling around in the dark.  Some may have a penny candle, but that's about the best we have.  It is the honesty and courage to listen to your heart, rather than blind obedience to the rules, that opens that sometimes illusive door into consciousness and the divine encounter.  


Yet, the question is not that we should be judged by our past - personal or religious - but rather by how much we have evolved, grown, healed, integrated the true spirit of love into our less than lovely human natures and grow, expand into a more perfect reflection of the divine here on Earth.  


As one who believes in a God of all mercy, absolute unconditional love, a God who nudges us along toward greater awareness, unity among all people, especially those who are opposite or different from us, and asks us to open our eyes to our and God's ultimate truth.


I honestly feel that religions are meant to be like cars, designed to take us somewhere, closer to God. Are we to worship the car, or use the car to get to God.  Once we're there, assuming we actually can get there through the car-religion, do we need the car anymore?  Does Islam, like old Christianity, ask us to worship God (Allah) or does it ask us to worship the religion.  The ultimate message to Christians in the Book of Revelation, near the end, is NOT to worship the religion, but to seek God, who can only be encountered within the deep, pure channels of the human heart.


Peace to all people, of all religions, all who seek God.  May you find the truth you are seeking. 

Saturday, July 30, 2011

You are loved


(This is a reposting of a blog that I ran a year ago.  I felt like re-running it with some changes.)


There's a scripture that I love and I want to paraphrase it so you can receive the full bouquet of love that's in it for YOU.  It begins like this, "For God so loved the world that he sent his son" (our brother) ... to tell us how much God loves us and that under no conditions whatsoever would that love ever be dimmed, darkened or diminished.

In our world, all economies are based on marketing commodities and everything has a value measured against its worth on that common exchange market. That ideology applies to everything in life until everything is viewed as an object to be bought/sold.  This idea has also seeped into our false sense of personal worth.  We have come to even see ourselves as objects, images -  not people with eternal souls.  


To be very blunt, we have all prostituted ourselves to be accepted, valued and successful in this sadly overly materialistic world.  Even while the economy is dropping before our eyes, people are still going to the gym, hair salons, diet centers; even while children in Somalia* are dying from lack of water, people are still thinking about their personal images.  That travesty, in my opinion, is because people don't know God's love for them.  They've traded that awareness - if they ever had it in the first place - for the world's love, which is always passing away.


Unconsciously or perhaps consciously we have come to think that for someone to love you, you must be either wealthy, powerful, beautiful, "built," cool, classy, and awesome in some capacity in some category.  Ideally, you'd have a job, or at least a good reason why you don't have a job, a talent, a skill, a fun-loving personality.  If you're boring, well, you're a loser, right?  Oh, so wrong!!!!

There are those among us who have been gifted with the sensitivity to "hear" or "see" those divine messengers whom we have called angels or ascended masters. Those beautiful heavenly beings are always saying pretty much the same thing to us, and that is that we need to not be afraid and realize that we are loved, immeasurably beyond our ability to understand or even receive that love.  In fact, their messages to us is for us to open up our hearts and minds and receive that love.  I wonder if the problem for us, on a deep level, is that we don't really believe that we are that lovable.  In fact, on some level, the world has taught us that we are "sinners" bad, wrong somehow fatally flawed. How sad that the church taught that for 2,000 years and really turned Jesus' message upside down. 


We don't believe we are lovable due to the programming we received throughout our lives, that negative feedback we received from parents, teachers, peers, employers, everyone else who lives within the world collective mindset of judgment, punishment and criticism, always trying to fit into the world's definition of normal or successful.  

When we do finally get the message, as many have lately, that we are loved, we may understand this intellectually; but, allow this knowledge to sink all the way down through the layers of false information to the deepest recesses of our souls, is quite another thing. We have been enslaved by the status quo for our entire history on Earth and as much as we'd like to step out of that leg hold trap, we can't.  We keep slipping back under its control.

I want to say a couple things about all that. The first is, because those sensitive souls have been able to receive the messages from the divine that we are loved, that message is applicable to YOU personally as well as to everyone else.  If you have ever read that you are loved, if anyone has ever told you that, even if you're reading it for the very first time here, it is no accident that you happened to come across those words, that concept.  It was intentional.  God so badly wants you to know this, that S/He will do almost anything to get the idea to you.  

You might casually pick up a newspaper to read about the debt ceiling debate in Washington, DC, and your eye might catch an advertisement next to the article, you might read it and a thought to check out its website which leads you later to go to Google and you mistype the web address and it takes you to an odd New Age blog and there you happen to see a pretty picture of a sunset and over the picture are the words, "God loves you with more passion, more intensity, more completeness than you could ever possibly imagine."  

Don't you know that those words are there, scrawled across that picture just for YOU.  Nothing is an accident.  It doesn't matter how you learned the message, who told it to you, where you read it.  What matters is that you hear it, read it, learn it, study it, and allow it to totally change all that inner spiritual programming and wiring you have that has led you to believe that you are only a commodity, based on your productivity, beauty, power, wealth, education, even physical or intellectual awesomeness. You ARE already awesome just because you were born - not based on anything YOU did, but because you are a powerful, spiritual being designed to co-create with our Great Creator.  You need to realize this, you must realize this.  Time is too short to postpone accepting this new awareness even for one more minute. 

This is the message Jesus came to tell you.  It's really that simple.  The second message, inherent in the first one, is that God loves YOU and everyone of us totally, completely, fully and exactly the same.  S/He does not love Mother Theresa more than Hitler.  WOW!  right?  Can you get your head around that one?  

The difference is that Mother Theresa knew that God loved her and wanted with all her heart, soul and life to share God's power and love with everyone, especially those who were unable to feel lovable due to poverty, disease and limited programming by the world in which they grew up.  

Hitler was just the opposite.  He did not know that God loves us unconditionally just as we are. In his absolute total blindness did not love - himself or anyone - and that dark void within him, where the awareness of God's love could commune with his human soul, grew in darkness into a huge empty hole.  

We are so powerful and that power is fueled by our consciousness, which can freely choose to either create or destroy.  When you realize, accept deeply and completely into your consciousness that God loves you and that you are lovable just the way you are, something inside you opens. Perhaps it's that narrow gate. I'm not sure what you'd call it, but something inside you lets go of your need to protect yourself. You release the controls, you have been holding onto with such fierce determination out of fear and allow that door within to swing loosely on its inner hinges. Then, to your sheer joy and amazement, the power of God's love slips in, flooding your being with joy, peace, creativity, ingenuity, and the power to love - yourself and others.  

Once you have done this, once you are filled with God's power, that power has a life of its own.  It wants to build connections, synapses or little bridges across which God's love can flow from you to another and to another, sort of like holding hands spiritually with you and others, until, if you can imagine, we are all of us, the whole humanity, the whole planet, holding hands and allowing God's love, God's power of creation, to flow across, in and through all of us.

*  http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/sponsor-a-child/africa/somalia


Top picture designed by the author















Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Courage for an uncertain future



Pilgrim, how you journey on the road you chose 
to find out why the winds die and where the stories go. 
All days come from one day that much you must know, 
you cannot change what's over but only where you go.  
Each heart is a pilgrim, each one wants to know the reason 
why the winds die and where the stories go. 
Pilgrim, in your journey you may travel far, 
for pilgrim it's a long way to find out who you are ... 
- Enya

My grandfather lived near Gates Circle in Buffalo when I was a child.  He was so many things but most especially he seemed, even to me then, to exude a deep presence of wisdom and peace but most of all courage.  

Widowed long before I was born, he was my caretaker, teacher, friend and often playmate.  My world spun around him.  He was tall, lean and walked everywhere, often holding my hand, whistling, smiling, tipping his hat at strangers. He never owned a car and most likely never had a driver's license. He carried me "up into the air," when I was very small and later slowed his gait to match my stride and then laughed as I ran to keep up with him on our long stretches.  I was born on his birthday and have always known in some incomprehensible way that we were a special pair of some odd making.  He began teaching me theology when I was five. Once when I had asked him why Episcopalians weren't Catholic, he laughed and said, "My dear, of course we're Catholic.  We're English Catholic not Roman Catholic, but Catholic nonetheless."  He died when I was only 16, but a piece of his spirit has remained with me ever since.

If there is one word that defined this gentle man, it is courage.  He had a great patient heart, full of wisdom, patience, humility and courage.  It was his defining character.  


As Canadians, he and his young wife had begun a beautiful life together in Toronto in the 1920s.  He was an accountant at a bank there and she taught music at the Toronto Conservatory.  Their lives were filled with music and friends, three little boys and a home brimming with the expectation of a bright and beautiful future.  He had come from a farm near Watford, in rural western Ontario, settled by his Irish father, and she from Stratford-on-Avon, a very proper English town also in rural Ontario, not far from his. He was very Irish with odd words for things and a bit of a brogue and she very English.  Both were bright, educated, vibrant and proud.  But, what fate would throw at them in the ensuing years would teach them a courage that newlyweds and young parents often don't think to put first on their plate of life. 

Just as their young marriage was beginning to bloom with the birth of their third son, the depression hit Canada, closing my grandfather's bank there.  He looked south to the United States, where he was offered a job as an accountant at a bank in Buffalo. He gathered up his wife and children,  the few things they chose to bring, boarded a train and immigrated to the United States.  They rented an apartment on the west side of Buffalo and he went to work.  They had a daughter and again looked toward their future with continued hope and joy and even excitement at their new life in the United States, despite having left their families in Ontario.  Things were going to work out.  Life was kind and generous and loving and promising.  They kept the faith at St. John's Church, which later merged with Grace Church, and today is St. John's-Grace Church. Everything looked wonderful on the horizon of their young lives. 

As my mother was just beginning to walk, the Great Depression brought everyone to their knees. My grandfather's bank closed.  He joined the more than 30 percent of the country that was out of work.  My grandmother continued to teach piano lessons and they did manage to survive.  But, survive is about all they did for many years until after World War II.  Throughout challenging years, they moved a bit, but the extraordinary gift I share with you in this epic blog was my grandfather's strength of courage, evident in his sense of humor that remained in tact, his peaceful presence, his gracious generosity and his ability to seek God in his faith and daily prayers. He was a role model to his children, one of whom became an Episcopal priest and yet flew in the air force during the war.

As my grandfather faced the changing tides of his family's fate with a gentle inner strength, my grandmother's strong English pride began to be tested, allowing a deepened spirituality to grow and hold her steady. Yet she often broke down  in tears, my mother said.  She died of a heart attack after years of worrying, praying and grieving her son, who had been missing in action in Germany during the war, but finally returned stunning the entire family when he appeared on their doorstep four years later.  Not long after his return, her heart gave up. My grandfather's great heart was broken by her passing.  He never spoke of her and we were never allowed to ask about her.  And, yet, her picture remained on the bookcase. Mysteriously beautiful, long dark wavy hair, bright eyes, alabaster skin with a soft smile, peaceful, self possessed, it exuded that confidence a young woman with a bright hope-filled life ahead, bursting with promise, often has. 

I can remember thinking how courageous he must have had to be during the years of the depression and the war years. He was strong in a quiet way, with the humility great wisdom and courage gives a person. He never boasted and in those moments with me as a child, often sang to me, enjoyed jigging and whittling and telling me wild stories, laughing. He told me about his childhood in rural Ontario when he had to wear snowshoes to cross over the winter fields to neighbors or walk into school or church.  He helped his mother spin wool as well as tend the few sheep and horses they had.  Once, only once, he told me about his love for my grandmother, how they met, how they 'dated,' not a term he used.  In the softness of his voice, I heard a deep sadness and a great passion for the woman in the picture on the bookcase.  

He gave me a sense of a very different life than that which I lived growing up in the 1960s.  They lived off the land, faced everything with a great inner strength and courage.  They carried memories told them from generations before them, during which their own families had somehow survived cholera epidemics, and miscarriages and  long cold Canadian winters.  Yet, those challenges, like those that have always challenged the wit and candor of mankind (and womankind) brought out the best in the best of us and the worst in the worst of us.  There were stories, about both kinds of us, that illustrated his source of courage.

Lately, I've seen many changes in our lives.  I lived in the postwar era, times when people still talked about their trials during the depression.  I was part of that population swell as our country got back on its feet, up out of the ash of the Great Depression and the Second World War. I have lived during our country's engagement in several horrific wars, and then a long lasting quasi-economic decline in Buffalo which never saw the economic boom the rest of the country enjoyed during the 80s and 90s.  I've seen terrible inner city poverty, racism, as well as the courageous and dignified response by a faith-based community action organization there that has made wonderfully important changes.

But, more recently, there is something more threatening than anything we've ever seen seeping into our lives.  I have experienced a deepening awareness that the foundation of our lives, the economic brick and mortar that has under-girded our country, even our world, feels as though it's slipping, eroding away, taking with it our once fine culture while allowing an undefinable decadence to drag us down.

Yet, at the same time, I hear in my heart, "the light has come into the world and the darkness has not overcome it." My grandmother had left a bookmark on that passage from the beginning of the Gospel of John  which was her favorite scripture, my mother said.

Recently, as I was enormously challenged by something, I whispered into the air, "Papo, what would you do?"  and distinctly as if he called back from another room in the house, "Have courage."  Suddenly tears welled up, my chest heaved a huge sob.  "Oh my God, yes!  Of course you would say that. 'Have courage!'  Yes!"  I felt so grateful for that gift that came in that dire moment that transcended time, space, dimension and everything we know about everything. 

A few days later, still feelng the weight of everything on my heart and yet his words now vaguely filed away in some other compartment of my mind, I met a priest shopping with his wife.  I stopped, looked at his collar and realized he had to be an Episcopal priest - rather than Lutheran because their collars are distinctly different.  My heart stirred, the Spirit stirred, I felt something moving in my heart.  He was on his cell phone.  His wife was looking at light fixtures.  I wondered how to ask her.  I smiled at her and simply asked her, "Are you Episcopalian?"  She brightened up, smiled a broad beautiful smile, nodded and said, "yes."  I wanted to hug her.  I was elated.  I'd not run into an Episcopal priest anywhere in Portland, the self professed land of the 'unchurched.'

She told me they were charismatic Episcopalians, the branch of the church that had broken away from the Episcopal church when it had changed its ways from the old ways, to be politically polite.  We talked awhile.  He told me where the church was and then said, "On the road you'll see a sign with a lion on it and it's called 'Aslan, where the lion is king."

My jaw dropped and my heart lept.  The lion-hearted one, the one of courage.  Who else speaks to us through our loved ones, their memories, their timeless gifts that stretch through decades, droughts and economic depressions? I knew I needed courage and then I knew where that courage would be nurtured and strengthened.

I also knew that I wanted to share this story with you because in the next week the U.S. government will either extend or not extend our nation's debt ceiling.  I don't know what that will mean for us.  I don't know if anyone knows what that will mean.  Will it cause a global economic disaster or will it be like a ripple through our already stretched budgets?  I don't know.  But, I do know that whatever that inevitability holds for us it will either bring out the best or the worst in us.  I know, for me, I will put on the whole armor of God and face whatever comes with as much courage as I can find, with as much Spirit as God holds out to me and with as much love, humor, candor, integrity and hope I can..  

And, as the Episcopal priest said to me at the end of our conversation, "the peace of the lord be with you....." I offer that blessing "also with you ........"  May you also remember the courage of your ancestors, those great souls who also faced an uncertain future with the best in them.  And, may you also find the peace that passes all understanding in the tide winds of that ancient courage.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Summer light show


Lightning Storm on Mount Hood



Wisdom breaks through the dim unconscious, piercing the hold of that ancient conspiracy of domination and silence. Wisdom awakens the mind to the soul's value and dignity and breathes into the human a voice, a voice that lights the darkness, thundering through the sleepy valley until the whole town is awakened to her power and presence. Wisdom draws off the covers of silence, lifts evil's veil,  rendering it's enchantment powerless.  Wisdom opens the voice of the silent one, and the entire valley resounds with heaven's song at last. 


In the three years I've lived in Oregon, never once has there been a thunder storm here.  I've often missed the thundering summer nights in Buffalo, when the heat index was blistering high and then the cool night air off Lake Erie would burst the heat bubble causing rain, thunder and lightning to light up the night.  I remember as a child, my sisters and I would wake up in excitement at the thunder and lightning and run to our bedroom window, exploding in light and sound and cascading in torrential rain.  


But, in Oregon's Willamette Valley where Portland is, there is rarely ever a thunderstorm.  Bounded by two mountain ranges - the Cascades to the east and the Pacific Ranges to the west, the valley is usually insulated from thunder storms.  But, this morning, in the very early hours a thunder and lightning storm that would intimidate Buffalo's summer light shows roared and rumbled through the area.  It sounded like bombs exploding and for awhile, until the second round rumbled in, I wondered if there were bombs being dropped nearby.


As I watched out the big windows of my treehouse deck, I reflected on the storm, the rare flash lightning and thundering overhead and thought of a deeper storm, and the gift of awareness nature has brought. 


 http://www.katu.com/younews/126106393.html

Friday, July 22, 2011

The Gospel of Mary: a closer look at love




"... the child of true humanity exists within you. 
Follow it! Those who search for it will find it."  
- from the Gospel of Mary

Since today is the feast day of Mary Magdalene, it seems appropriate to honor her by sharing a bit from her gospel.  The New Testament has four Gospels, all written by men none of whom were first hand witnesses to the Jesus story.  Mary's is probably the most noteworthy because it is written by the one person who Jesus left in charge of his message and its propagation.  


The Orthodox churches have always revered her by naming her the Apostle to the Apostles, but when the Roman church split from the (then) only church, which is now the Orthodox, it cut itself off from the church's long and rich knowledge of the earliest traditions, traditions which contained information that would remain lost to the western world for another 1000 years.  An intelligent and respectful understanding of who Mary was to the early church was left in the dust of the Roman church's departure.  Later, the Roman church slandered her legacy, calling her a prostitute, and even now minimizes the richness of her mystical message.  


To hear her thoughts and words these two millenia later is stunning.  Her love and passion for Christ's radical wisdom message of love and its ability to change and heal people completely and the world as well, when given a chance, leaps off the few remaining fragments of her gospel.  Her message is His message.  It is a message of love - a powerful, creative, dynamic, empowering, healing and world-changing love.  It rises so far beyond the sentimental stuff our world fluffs off as love.  It is a dynamic divine encounter with the creator that is nothing less than the ultimate mystical experience.  


To the newcomer to Gnostic wisdom literature, her writing may sound a bit esoteric, but with patience and careful reading you may hear the depth of Christ's wisdom she is sharing with the world. He offers the world a whole new lens on life, rather than a new religion.  He calls for love as the glue to bring us together - bridging differences, no matter what they are - and coming together heart to heart with each other.  In that shared heart beat we can almost hear the great heart beat of our creator.  


Love is about inclusiveness, forgiveness, patience with the other and even the self discipline and self control to choose to love above being right.  Love emanates out of a strong center, that inner place in which we "live and move and have our being."  It is from that center where our "true humanity," or in more current Jungian terms, "our true self" or our own sacred heart, resides.  If our consciousness draws from that center unimpeded by others' control, we will live out of a place of love, where also God's love resides.  It is at our center where we connect with our creator since that center is intimately connected to our creator's own heart. 


We authentically love another when we honor our own selves and dignify our own self hood first.  It is truly a kind of tandem motion.  We accept and love our own value and dignity and out of that self honoring, we open the faucet to love others.  There is no other love, really.  Any other kind of love is questionable. Authentic love is rarely ever selfish.  Since it radiates from a strong center which needs nothing other than the companionship of God, it gives generously, loves unconditionally and frees all who encounter and embrace it. It is enormously free, creative and powerful and yet as gentle as a newborn baby. It doesn't clamor for attention because it just simply doesn't need it from outside itself.  This is true humility and true humanity.


Also, that love which radiates out of our own center moves in two directions.  One direction is outward into the world into which we radiate the love, light and power from our own center.  The other direction is deeper, through the interior "narrow gate" into realms and realms of increasing mystical union with the divine. Mary's gospel discusses that interior mystical union, borne out of an already existing strong inner "true humanity," where one has already found and is honoring his own self-hood.  The adultery she (or He) mentions is that state of having no self, not honored one's self and has abdicated his own "true humanity" to the controls of another person, system, government, religion, etc.  The adultery she mentions here was a term often used in Gnostic language.  It doesn't specifically mean the unfaithfulness to one's spouse as we understand it to mean today. Its warns against an interior mystical disassociation from one's own true self which would inhibit the flow of authentic love and power, which is the goal of Christ's message.


Each of us is an earthen vessel into which God has poured His Spirit, like the wine in the wedding at Cana.  We are more precious than we realize and far, far more powerful, loved and important, as well.

The Gospel of Mary

Pages 1-6 are missing.

     "… Will m[a]tter then be utterly [destr]oyed or not?"
     The Savior replied, "Every nature, every modeled form, every creature, exists in and with each other. They will dissolve again into their own proper root. For the nature of matter is dissolved into what belongs to its nature. Anyone with two ears able to hear should listen!"
     
Then Peter said to him, "You have been explaining every topic to us; tell us one other thing. What is the sin of the world?"
     The Savior replied, "There is no such thing as sin; rather you yourselves are what produces sin when you act in accordance with the nature of adultery, which is called 'sin.' For this reason, the Good came among you, pursuing (the good) which belongs to every nature. It will set it within its root."
     Then he continued. He said, "This is why you get si[c]k and die: because [you love] what de[c]ei[ve]s [you]. [Anyone who] thinks should consider (these matters)!
     "[Ma]tter gav[e bi]rth to a passion which has no Image because it derives from what is contrary to nature. A disturbing confusion then occurred in the whole body. That is why I told you, 'Become content at heart, while also remaining discontent and disobedient; indeed become contented and agreeable (only) in the presence of that other Image of nature.' Anyone with two ears capable of hearing should listen!"
     When the Blessed One had said these things, he greeted them all. "Peace be with you!" he said. "Acquire my peace within yourselves!
     "Be on your guard so that no one deceives you by saying, 'Look over here!' or 'Look over there!' For the child of true Humanity exists within you. Follow it! Those who search for it will find it.
     "Go then, preac[h] the good news about the Realm. [Do] not lay down any rule beyond what I determined for you, nor promulgate law like the lawgiver, or else you might be dominated by it."
After he had said these things, he departed from them.
     But they were distressed and wept greatly. "How are we going to go out to the rest of the world to announce the good news about the Realm of the child of true Humanity?" they said. "If they did not spare him, how will they spare us?"
     Then Mary stood up. She greeted them all, addressing her brothers and sisters, "Do not weep and be distressed nor let your hearts be irresolute. For his grace will be with you all and will shelter you. Rather we should praise his greatness, for he has prepared us and made us true Human beings."
      When Mary had said these things, she turned their heart [to]ward the Good, and they began to deba[t]e about the wor[d]s of [the Savior].
     Peter said to Mary, "Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than all other women. Tell us the words of the Savior that you remember, the things which you know that we don't because we haven't heard them."
     Mary responded, "I will teach you about what is hidden from you." And she began to speak these words to them.
     She said, "I saw the Lord in a vision and I said to him, 'Lord, I saw you today in a vision.'
He answered me, 'How wonderful you are for not wavering at seeing me! For where the mind is, there is the treasure.'
     I said to him, 'So now, Lord, does a person who sees a vision see it the soul with the spirit?'
     The Savior answered, 'A person does not see with the soul or with the spirit. 'Rather the mind, which exists between these two, sees the vision an[d] that is w[hat … ]'
(Pages 11-14 are missing.)
     " '… it.'
     "And Desire said, 'I did not see you go down, yet now I see you go up. So why do you lie since you belong to me?'
     "The soul answered, 'I saw you. You did not see me nor did you know me. You (mis)took the garment (I wore) for my (true) self. And you did not recognize me.'
     "After it had said these things, it left rejoicing greatly.
     "Again, it came to the third Power, which is called 'Ignorance.' [It] examined the soul closely, saying, 'Where are you going? You are bound by wickedness. Indeed you are bound! Do not judge!'
     "And the soul said, 'Why do you judge me, since I have not passed judgement? I have been bound, but I have not bound (anything). They did not recognize me, but I have recognized that the universe is to be dissolved, both the things of earth and those of heaven.'
     "When the soul had brought the third Power to naught, it went upward and saw the fourth Power. It had seven forms. The first form is darkness; the second is desire; the third is ignorance; the fourth is zeal for death; the fifth is the realm of the flesh; the sixth is the foolish wisdom of the flesh; the seventh is the wisdom of the wrathful person. These are the seven Powers of Wrath.
     "They interrogated the soul, 'Where are you coming from, human-killer, and where are you going, space-conqueror?'
     "The soul replied, saying, 'What binds me has been slain, and what surrounds me has been destroyed, and my desire has been brought to an end, and ignorance has died. In a [wor]ld, I was set loose from a world [an]d in a type, from a type which is above, and (from) the chain of forgetfulness which exists in time. From this hour on, for the time of the due season of the aeon, I will receive rest i[n] silence.' "
     After Mary had said these things, she was silent, since it was up to this point that the Savior had spoken to her.
     Andrew responded, addressing the brothers and sisters, "Say what you will about the things she has said, but I do not believe that the S[a]vior said these things, f[or] indeed these teachings are strange ideas."
     Peter responded, bringing up similar concerns. He questioned them about the Savior: "Did he, then, speak with a woman in private without our knowing about it? Are we to turn around and listen to her? Did he choose her over us?"
     Then [M]ary wept and said to Peter, "My brother Peter, what are you imagining? Do you think that I have thought up these things by myself in my heart or that I am telling lies about the Savior?"
Levi answered, speaking to Peter, "Peter, you have always been a wrathful person. Now I see you contending against the woman like the Adversaries. For if the Savior made her worthy, who are you then for your part to reject her? Assuredly the Savior's knowledge of her is completely reliable. That is why he loved her more than us.
     "Rather we should be ashamed. We should clothe ourselves with the perfect Human, acquire it for ourselves as he commanded us, and announce the good news, not laying down any other rule or law that differs from what the Savior said."
     After [he had said these] things, they started going out [to] teach and to preach.