Sacred gratitude

You sanctify whatever you are grateful for.

- Anthony DeMello

Gratitude is joy overflowing the heart. It is an experience of an open heart and a blessing even to feel the exuberance of gratitude and a heart full of such joy. As this year closes, I'd like to end it in the spirit of gratitude, for all that has been and all that is to come.  Life is still a beautiful, awesome experience. In the final hours of 2013, I'd like to share with the Tiger Lily community a beautiful homily preached  by Thaddeus, a dear and gifted friend, last Sunday to his St. Joseph University Parish in Buffalo, NY.  

Holy Family

by Thaddeus Pijacki, deacon

There is something you know about me, something very personal; and there is something I know about every one of you that is central to your life.  This is something we know about everyone we meet anywhere in the world, on the street, at work, even in church.

That is that all of us want to be happy!  In this we are all together, especially at this time of year when we say Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy New Year.

How we imagine our happiness differs from one another, but what we have in common is that we want to be happy.

On this feast of the Holy Family, we are reminded that a key to happiness lies not in things but rather in our relationships and one of the most common experiences resides in the family. Whether married or not, those closest to us form the intimate bonds that lead to happiness.

What is the key that opens the door of happiness in our lives?  The key is gratefulness.  Our second reading from Colossians tells us, "Let the peace of Christ control your hearts, the peace into which you were also called in one body.  And be thankful! Whatever you do, in words or in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him."

The great spiritual teacher, Anthony DeMello, summarized this saying:  "You sanctify whatever you are grateful for."

What is the connection between happiness and gratefulness?  Many people would say that is easy: When you are happy, you are grateful.  But think again.  Does it really always work that way?
A few days ago many people were showered with an abundance of gifts.  Did that automatically make them happy?  And there were others who live with misfortune or poverty but with only a few gifts from an Angel Tree or warm meal from a soup kitchen, radiated happiness on their faces.  Why?

Because they are grateful!  It's gratefulness that makes us happy.  What does experience tell us about how this works? Something is given to us that is valuable to us.  And, it is given by the giver precisely to make us happy.  These two things have to come together.  It has to be something valuable and it's a real gift. Now valuable does not mean expensive, but it does mean important to the heart.

A gift is something you haven't bought, you haven't earned it, you are not trading for it, you haven't worked for it - it's just given to you. When something valuable is freely given, gratefulness spontaneously arises in the heart, happiness spontaneously arises in the heart.

So we can see how that happens on special occasions like holidays and birthdays, but the real challenge is how do we live with gratefulness and happiness every day?

The master key to happiness lies within our minds and awareness of the present moment.  The old saying goes that being aware of the blessings of the moment here and now is a gift, which is why we call it The Present.  Each moment is an opportunity to be grateful.

Does that mean that we can be grateful for everything?  Certainly not!  we cannot be grateful for violence, for war, for abuse, for exploitation.  But at times like that, when something difficult is given to us, it's a challenge to rise to that opportunity.  And we can rise by learning something that is difficult or painful for us like: patience, trust or forgiveness.

That is certainly the message in today's Gospel as the Holy Family flees to Egypt in the Messiah Relocation Program.  but they are promised that they will return home.  it reminds us that we always get another opportunity.  That's the wonderful richness of life.

So how can we find a method for living gratefully, not just once in a while, but moment to moment, that will bring us happiness? It’s actually a very simple method. It was told to us as children when we learned to cross the street.

Stop. Look. Go.

We often rush through life and miss opportunities for happiness because we don’t stop. We need to slow down, to stop, to be quiet. We need to build stop signs into our lives.

When I was in Mexico doing missionary work with my students, we didn’t have drinkable water from the faucets. When I returned home, I was so grateful for drinkable water from the faucet that it made me happy. For quite a while I stopped every time I turned on the faucet and was grateful for this living water. Gratitude becomes less of an emotion or feeling and more like a spiritual discipline.

Nowadays, I stop every time the telephone rings, which is quite often, to be grateful for either the friendship of the person who is calling or for the opportunity to help out the caller in their need. Telemarketers not included!!!

So leave it up to your own imagination. Find whatever works best for you because we all need stop signs in our busy lives.

And when you stop, you look. You open all of your senses to the richness of life that surrounds us. And when you do that, you open your heart for opportunities to help others, to make others happy.

Nothing makes us more happy than when all of us are happy.

These opportunities invite us to do something to bring about happiness. That is the third step: Stop, look and then go, really do something. That is the seed that can revolutionize our world. Remember: “You sanctify whatever you are grateful for.”

I love Christmas music, I start listening in early November. I have one of those clocks that plays a different Christmas Carol every hour. One of my favorites is, “Joy to the World.” A grateful world is a world of joyful people. We all have the opportunity by the simple Stop, Look, Go, to transform the world, to make it a happier place.

Gratitude is like a fine wine, it doesn’t happen overnight. It needs to be cultivated and nurtured over years and years.

This is what God wants for us, simply to stop, look and go, to bring Joy to the World: to all of our Sisters and Brothers in our Human family and to have a Happy New Year, not just on January 1st but on all 365 days of 2014.

Authentic power in holy wisdom

Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves:
be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.

        Matthew 10:16

Much of our gospel scripture is drawn from something much older.  Just for starters, we know that Jesus was a strong and faithful Jew who called the temple leadership to regain the original teachings of the faith.  He was adamant they had corrupted the faith and challenged them to clean up their act. 

We also know that Judaism emerged from its captivity in Egypt considerably changed from its half a millennium there. Clearly it wasn't just wasted time. There is some scholarship that points to the possibility that Moses 

(1391- 1272 BC) would have been strongly influenced by the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten's (1380-1334 BC) courageous, passionate and adamant one God theology. 

In fact, there's a theory posed by Muslim scholar Ahmed Osman that suggests that Akenaten and Moses were one and the same person. Their historical time periods were concurrent and Akhenaten's strong stand politically and theologically swept Egypt like a storm, alienating him and his family to a remote region of the capital, and even leaving his sudden disappearance from his royal position a mystery that remains unsolved.

When Jesus refers to the wisdom of the serpent, he's not just using graphic language.  He's really saying something specific.  He is pointing to ancient Egyptian thought, which we hear also in the stories of Moses (Exodus 7: 8-11) being told by God to throw his staff on the ground which then turns into a snake.  And then there's the famous line in Genesis in which the woman is tempted by the serpent to eat from the tree of good and evil which sends Adam and she packing into our fallen sorry state ever since.  The serpent.  Ah, the serpent.  The divine feminine has always been associated with the serpent, and it's not just for women. The divine feminine is the power of that serpent which is clearly meant for both women and men.  And, that's just the top of the teapot.

OK, so what about the dove? The dove was the wise little mythic bird that returned to Noah's ark with the branch from a tree that indicated that the waters from the great flood had receded enough for them to return to the land. Later, the dove is the bird that brings Jesus at his baptism in the Jordan the message from God that Jesus is his son with whom he is pleased. (Matthew 3:16) Later, in Christian theology the dove is a symbol of the Holy Spirit, who is also understood as Sophia wisdom. 

It's interesting that it's usually associated with water, soaring over it, bringing God's message - or logos - to whomever is connected or in communion with God.  It's especially interesting that from a disaster of a flood that washed the planet like a global baptism, to the individual anointing of the one sent by God to teach us authentic power and wisdom, the precious pure dove is always there.

The serpent in ancient Egypt, as in Yoga which may be the oldest existing religion or spiritual practice known to us today, existing predeluvian into ancient civilizations that are long gone, stretching back before ice ages into prehistory, has a specific meaning.

The serpent is that kundalini highway that runs from the Earth's energy up the human spine, spinning through the six chakras, up through the seventh into the higher dimensions where it connects with the interdenominational realms of pure Spirit, or God.

It seems, the power of God flows up and down through us on this kundalini pathway, which is the power centers of the human being and was understood as a serpent.  Notice on Akhenaten's headpiece, the snake?  It is also showing that the head of the serpent is at the third eye or the seventh chakra of the human energy system. 

As I write this I am reminded of the statement in Genesis where God says, "let us make them in our image."  So, this is not some strange science fiction fantasy idea that we are made this way.  We are made this way, but this is lost wisdom to most of the western world.

So, to look at what Jesus says again with this all in mind.  I hear him saying, to center, balance and fuel our energy through the awakening of all the energy sectors of the human kundalini and to be filled with the power and wisdom of the Holy Spirit.  He is calling for a full integration of human and spirit and thereby we become fully whole human beings, strong, powerful beyond anything we commonly know today.

When he says he brought a sword, it is this sword - the sword of knowledge and spirit, a power that would save us from the false powers and principalities of our world.  It also connects us powerfully with God and our eternal spirits.  It is what brings us into full aliveness, awakens us from our dull existences here.

Could any army on Earth do this?  Could any military might have the power against someone fully empowered like this?  Moses seems to indicate not.  He led his nation, possibly under the wise direction of Akenaten's teachings combined with those of his Abrahamic tradition that seems was never lost during those years, and had the power and guidance to lead an entire nation out of the then incredible world power of Egypt.

Gnostic Christianity has reclaimed that ancient of ancient traditions and understands that Jesus was calling us into full empowerment by blending the feminine and masculine principles in us individually on a deeply psychological level ( as Karl Jung also suggests by his theories) and into a coupled union of a divine dyad. This integration of power and wisdom in male and female terms, two radically opposite polarities, would be experienced in the sacred union of the male and female in relationship as well as individually in each one's own separate psyches.  As much as this sacred union would be the full integration of the male and female as Jung's anima / animus in the individual psyche without necessarily being united with one of the other sex, it seems that both would be best. 

This is profound and deep stuff and not typically understood or shared among those who embrace a militant worldview, an entirely externalized religion.  The call from prehistory seems to have always been a call into the depths of our being, for a greater understanding of who we really are and in that deep inner chamber, that inner Holy of Holies, only there can we worship the everliving God, creator of all and divine presence in all.

Starlight in a stable

Gently, she laid her newborn baby in a manger of sweet hay, warm and safely protected from the noise from the nearby streets of the arriving tribes from throughout the region clamoring in response to a census call.

The trip had been hard and long, dirty and tiring, and yet in these quiet moments with her beautiful, precious child of God beside her and her kind and strong husband napping nearby, she whispered to God a private prayer of gratitude for the safe delivery of her baby and for the honor of being chosen to bring into this world his gift to humankind.  She knew she didn't know what the future held for their young family, even what the next day would be like. 

She was tired, and her newborn fragile.  Would they even make it back to Nazareth safely?  The times were rife with unrest, the Romans were bearing down on her people, and all they had was their faith in God who they knew would never forsake them, never abandon them and would always be there even if it didn't fit their design or comfort.  She knew this and yet she also sensed something heavy was lingering out in this dark, starlit night.

She glanced up at that incredible star that streaked into the opening of their shelter.  She felt peace. She felt hope and most of all she felt God's love. She reached into the manger where her tiny baby was tucked in with the fresh clean baby wrapping she'd carefully brought from Nazareth for him and when she felt sure he was sleeping contentedly, she slipped closer to her husband to keep them both warm.

As she drifted off to sleep, it seemed a glow of warmth held them all.  They would be safe for now on this beautiful, hopeful and glorious night.

Restoring the Tree of Life

The knowledge of the awesome love of God, gifted to us at Christmas, was for all people in all seasons and all places. It has no religious, national, cultural or geographical boundaries. It is every living being's heritage as much as it is part of life itself, embedded in the original design. 

Its home is in the heart, rather than the data-centered brain, and radiates from the heart to another heart, which can receive it, or has ears for it, as in early Christian language, a heart that has "ears to hear." Its power seems directly related to the depth of the heart of the sender and the receiver. That depth and capacity of the heart is created, or plumbed, by life's suffering and grief. The greater that heart's suffering, loneliness and loss, the greater that heart has been trimmed and readied for the infilling and presence of love's pure and passionate power. 

In its suffering, it needed, longed for God's cherishing. That too is part of the journey's design. Once the heart is healed by the awareness and acceptance of God's perfect love, that heart becomes a perfect chalice for God's Holy Spirit.

When the pharisees complained about a woman washing Jesus' feet with her tears in gratitude for his forgiving her many sins, he asked them if a man who owed a small debt had been forgiven his debt, would be happy?  They nodded.  He then asked, how much happier would a man be who was forgiven an even larger debt?  They got the point. The more one has suffered, the larger their heart has been made by that suffering, and consequently the more that heart can love.  

Jesus was born with all the love of the universe and, through the wise and loving nurturing by his family, entered into life an unharmed pure soul, without wounds or issues. His innocent light was protected by his wise and pure mother and strong and faithful father.

He was welcomed among those who were bitterly oppressed and marginalized by a cruel tyrannical system, not unlike many systems still actively out of control in our world, today.  As he looked into their eyes and felt their pain, he grieved for them. He knew the knowledge of God's love would heal them and their suffering would not be in vain. Due to their broken hearts and lives, they had deepened their hearts. They were able to love more than the rich who had never suffered. They had ears to hear him and embraced his message eagerly and crowded around him.

They had subsisted at the mercy of a cruel Roman power system and as its victims needed to be relased from its control. In order to be freed mentally and spiritually they needed to understand authentic power. Jesus began his ministry by declaring that he came to "preach good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight to the blind, and to release the oppressed." In short, he came to liberate them (and us) from limitations that enslaved and blinded them to the truth of who they are and release them from spiritual captivity. His primary concern was liberation of their inner light that was hidden and suppressed out of fear. And, when we hide our light long enough, we detach from it and lose touch with its ability to guide us and become weak and lost.

Only the awareness of who we are, that we have an awesome power within us, would liberate our minds from the grip of any external power system or status quo. True freedom is contained in the awareness that we are loved and don't need to please or submit to those oppressive systems and powers that control us.

Since women around the world are controlled by patriarchal systems, oppressed, abused, silenced, the liberation of the feminine globally is essential to create an authentic balance on the planet of male and female energies. Womankind has suffered for many thousands of years as the patriarchal voice continued to control the planet until today the world is terribly lopsided.

To restore the planet to its intended state is to harmonize the male and female.  To do that on a psychological and spiritual level is to bring back the goddess, who is beautifully present in Mary Magdalene. Womankind need a strong, positive and powerful feminine role model. She is the perfect candidate.  Jesus saw the oppression of women in his time and in his radical message of love, lifted up women especially.  As the most marginalized, he saw their plight and called for their burdens to be lifted.

If Jesus came to show us how to love our enemy, would this man of sheer perfect love not show us how to love on an intimate level? Why would he leave that aspect our lives out of his love teachings? Once we stop damning human love and intimacy, we will release it from the dark forces that oppress and prey on the feminine with the same miserable consumptive gluttony as it feeds on everything else that's beautiful in our world.  If we reclaimed it, protected our dignity with a ferocity and restored the dignity of the divine feminine to its rightful place alongside its male counterpart to create a divine dyad as were Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, and Jesus and Mary - wouldn't our world change overnight?

These times are really not so different from the first century when a clear understanding of true power was desperately needed. When we lost the meaning of Jesus, we lost our understanding of who we really are. He sought to restore the dignity, light and power to women and especially one woman who had been misunderstood.

If all women could imagine being loved as much, they might begin to love themselves enough to realize and act as if they deserved to be treated well by men, rather than tolerate cruel, dehumanizing treatment. Where is their courage?  Today it's in hiding because they do not know they deserve better.  A better life is absolutely unimaginable to them because, I believe, they've been taught since infancy of their second class status in a man's world.  In a sense, they've been brainwashed. Too many around the world, and especially in third world nations including the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and even in America, where women still jeopardize their health and wellbeing to be appealing to men - none know how to love themselves.  

Jesus' love of Mary helps them understand love through their example.  By restoring Mary as queen beside her husband, women would feel worthy and better able to accept God's love, something Jesus would have wanted.

With our global embrace of his queen, we embrace the divine feminine and restore 3.5 billion women to their rightful place as equals and partners to men. When we balance the male and female unique spiritualities, we come closer to restoring Eden.

As we accept Jesus' love for Mary Magdalene we restore the goddess and her divine feminine power. The divine feminine is a spirit of pure unconditional love, healing, compassion and mercy. For millenia, she has cried out to God to hear her suffering. Through that long suffering, her heart has become profoundly deep and wise. 

She is the world's chalice for God's love. The world needs her sweet, yet powerful, wisdom. She is profoundly intuitive, just, innately more focused on the interiority rather than the external territorality the male principle is driven to protect.  We need both, equally, and we need them to be balanced immediately. We are the tree of life, drawing on the seed which is that sacred union of male and female, that authentic yin/yang, which is at the core of life.  A world out of balance is insane and self destructive. Restoration of the divine feminine is the antedote. 

Mary Magdalene is our authentic queen and when we accept her again, restore her royal place, the world will begin to heal.  People have always been inspired by the power of myth or story to be moved into the next stage of their collective development.  Today, we need to amend an old and flawed story to put us back on the path we were always meant to be on, more than 8,000 years ago or even longer.  It's long overdue.

Cosmic light dance

As the long dark night slowly slipped behind the dawning new age, awakening our spiritual landscape with its transformative light, our collective consciousness began drifting away from religion, receding from its empty rituals, as something authentically alive and powerfully creative emerged. 

This great awakening is evolving us rapidly. It is vibrant with a new hope for humanity and the entire planet with its abundant outpouring of spiritual enlightenment, imparted by those who have left the mainstream's ungodly pursuit of money, power and control to embrace the great Other, the ultimate and only real divine presence, who, like Shakespeare's rose, "would by any other name smell as sweet."

Those many bright souls who are birthing this great awakening have been blessed with the wisdom and courage to transcend the ordinary, to simply walk away from the status quo and never look back. While we are all collectively evolving spiritually in our own ways, they are well ahead of the herd. I admire them and am grateful for their tireless and wonderfully inspiring work.  

As much as I would love to join their new vision of sacred journey, I find myself still firmly rooted in the original faith, the first light of Christianity - which isn't Christianity as we know it today - in pursuit of something even brighter - a bigger fish, I guess. In my heart I have always felt the answer to our common human condition and all the terrors of this global dark night of the soul in which our world is tragically immersed, is still in that beautiful man of Nazareth. 

We are all on a journey individually and collectively and everyone has their own story. Even where we are right now, this very minute, on our spiritual journeys is not where we'll be in a week or a year from now. The Spirit is alive and moving, evolving everything as it continues to create, always calling us into a cosmic dance, and a greater awakening.

To experience this evolution consciously, is to be lifted up and out of this heavy dimension. It is to see with the mind another reality, another dimension, even if we don't see it with our eyes. Something in us acquiesces to its ultimate existence. It is simply life which is a kind of creation machine, yet of absolute, ultimate being, intelligence, and total consciousness. It may be hard to understand. It's like trying to contain the whole ocean in a tea cup. We can't grasp the whole ocean of Spirit, or our creator, but we can understand what it is in a small dose, which is us.

It seems now - in historical hindsight - the Church's hierarchy, right from the moment it became an established orthodoxy, only had part of the truth. I honestly think they didn't know it because the rest of the story was buried in the scriptures in code and they only had what had been passed down to them. Each generation led us further and further away from the whole story. Without the whole story, the church limped along, vaguely grasping the real message and too often stumbling off the road into some dark stuff. It seems it needed to control the masses due to an unacknowledged, perhaps even unconscious, sense that it was incomplete. It's as if you were to attempt to prepare a chef's finest recipe, but left out a key ingredient. The end result would be a failure. So, when the church's message didn't taste right to me I felt compelled to move on in search of the rest of the story. 

I returned to the sacred scriptures, poured over them and read everything I could until I stumbled across several interesting ideas. I realized as we evolve, mature and ascend spiritually in our current process of awakening, the old stories seem to make sense in another way, a new way, even while all the old interpretations are still there. It seems they are alive in a new way and speak brilliantly to every level of spiritual development we're on.

If someone is new to the faith, they can be read literally. Later, when you're able to see more, you'll find a deeper meaning, a mythic truth. Then, there's sheer mystery and awe as you discover patterns and codes and hidden hints of something else. When you discover that, you've found the entrance into the kingdom, the door, the narrow gate. It is truly a case of when the student is ready, the teacher appears.  The teacher is there all the time, it is we who can't see him. As our eyes adjust to the light, we can slowly make him out.

I read and reread the scriptures and other resources to understand the hints which I was finding with the help of several awesome scholars and authors.* They suggested there was something originally known that the gospel writers wanted to hide but not hide completely. They obviously wanted to preserve and protect it. So they hid it.  It seems the early Christians were good at hiding important writings, with the hope one day they would be found. 

The gospel writers' task then, while under Roman persecution, was to tell the story on a simple level to preserve it but with clues and deeper messages for those "with ears to hear." By hiding the sacred message through codes, gematria and hints, they'd hoped the Romans wouldn't catch on but that we would. 

In the centuries that followed persecution, when the gospels were translated from the Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic into Latin, the gematria simply didn't translate, and was lost to us from then on. Evidently, the later church fathers in the third century didn't know about the hidden messages either so the other half of the story remained lost throughout history. Later scholars knew there was some kind of code in the gospels, but only recently were they able to crack it by decoding the gematria with a sophisticated computer system. 

It's been like a treasure hunt, finding clues and piecing stories, myths and legends together and matching them with the hints and the gematria to bring into focus something entirely different from the church's version.  

Typically the historical significance sometimes doesn't matter, rather it's the essence and meaning of those myths that matters. But, in the case of Mary and Jesus the historical truth about their relationship had to be discovered, and assembled to complete the picture, so we could receive and allow it to change us. 

I found what I'd been looking for at an intersection of ancient Jewish theology, decoded gospels, gnostic legends of Mary in southern France, mystical spirituality, and sacred geometry - all of which came together to bring into focus one single realization. 

The picture that is emerging is profoud, beautiful, passionate and powerful.Their love is a perfect reflection of God's reign which is the perfect integration of the masculine and the feminine. The male and female cosmic energies melded together with a powerful divine love forms a unit of God's kingdom, a new Jerusalem. They are the key to understanding the ultimate wedding of God with your own soul and the integration of your own opposing differentiated aspects to bring wholeness.

The new picure offers a glimpse into another world, a kind of new Garden of Eden and a new Adam and a new Eve. They were like gods living among us and were also in another dimension, loving, living, dancing as the Spirit moved within them, sharing, ecstatically enraptured in just being, radiating sheer love, breatless and spinning.  It was about them and it was about us. Their love conveyed our worth, taught us and called us to love as they loved, healed our world-weary souls, set our hearts free of the many burdens that block our ability to love, that reduce our sense of value, diminish our spirits, and keep us locked in this shallow world and feeling separated from God's divine love.

They were a light dance with shekinah wisdom and divine love moving between them, drawing them higher into even more elevated levels of consciousness.They became one with the heartbeat of the universe and they invited us to the dance. He said, "we played the flute for you but you would not dance."

Some have said the "Song of Songs" describes their relationship.  It certainly seems so. It is such a close replica of their story. It is so obvious, why didn't we see it before?  Now, that we see it, what does it mean to the human condition?  How do we unpack it in a relevant meaning. That's for another blog posting, but it seems clear the problem in our world is that we are unable to realize our value and our potential. We are enslaved to our world's limiting belief system, ages of woe and worry, all cold bedfellows. We do not know how to rise up in the glory of God's love. We don't know how to love on an ascended level.  

Sure, we think we know how to love and we fall in love and we get married, but so much of our love language and love culture isbasically an emotional hormonal reaction, almost to the scent of another human more than a soul connection.  For someone who has experienced real love on a soul connection, he or she knows that love is beyond sex and leads the lovers into another dimension, other worlds. That kind of love can and will last a lifetime. 

There is something more profound about their love that can change the world once we accept it and feel it. The call is now, as it always was, a call to enter into a sacred cosmic love affair with the divine Other, and love as they love. 

They can lead you into the same experience and on into the reign of God. However, they must be allowed to take you up to their level, not we reduce them down to ours. They came to redeem us, but we killed him and exiled her by reducing His queen to a whore. With that condemnation, we kept these lovers apart. We need to reunite them and allow them to rise up together, hand in hand, and return to their ecstatic joyful cosmic light dance. Then, we also will be set free to join in the same love dance with the great divine beloved.  

* Thanks to Margaret Starbird for her profound insights that are resonating with mine.  

Leader of the flock

Suddenly it's Christmas when the world celebrates the awesome birth of a king and the promise of a future queen, a most holy alliance.

This king born in the humblest of circumstances would show the world what real power was.  His power came strictly from God through his pure innocence and surrender to ultimate power. This power was also a soul love which, through his teaching and example, would lead us into the truth of who we are potentially and reunion with God.  

With the birth of a genuine king, rather than the arrogant, selfish, narcissistic kings and leaders of this world who usurp their false power from the masses and claim authority and power over them, our hope and potential fulfillment was also born.  

For millenia, rulers of this mad man's world have been models of authority. Too often cruel tyrannical dictators have exploited us and our Earth and just about everything on it. 

For millenia, women were property, used as servants and sexual playmates. Real mutuality between men and women has been elusive and in many cases, reduced and devolved to co-existence without passion, without light and life. 

Afterall, it's still a man's world and where there's no love, there's only control and abusive power.  In a world that only knew abusive power, falseness on every way, there was little love for a man to show a woman, who too often trembled fearfully in her husband's coarse words and action, rather than speak up, stand up for her own dignity. In this man's world that taught fear over love, any woman's courage came at too high a price.

But, it wasn't ever meant to be like that.  In the birth of Jesus the world was given both a future King, and the promise of a future Queen as well. According to legend, as his heavenly partner, she would stay with us until his return, remain to lead us in his footsteps on the true path to God.

Long ago, before there was patriarchy there was the goddess, who empowered all others in her presence, who in humility and grace, expressed the highest qualities of the divine in human behavior.  In goddess communities, archaeologists have never found evidence of any spearheads, or ancient weapons of war.  It is clear in a goddess community, there was considerably less competition among the people than in a male-dominated community, such as we've experienced for the past many thousands of years, in  fact for so long, that we have no collective memory of anything else.

With the coming of Jesus, Messiah, we were introduced again to what a true partnership of feminine / masculine power would look like.  Even in Jesus' teachings alone there is the blended male/female, power and wisdom, merged in a benevolent, life-giving wine for the soul, poured into our thirsty hearts, our own souls as chalice.  

Many of today's scholars, after extensive study of the scriptures - orthodox and Gnostic - are certain Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.  As a Jew, part of keeping the law was marriage. Marriage was terribly important, far more so than today, and Jesus only increased its importance by forbidding divorce.  Marriage was a mirror of God and humanity's covenant and it was to be taken as seriously as humanity's relationship with God.

According to the Gnostics, the birth of Jesus' bride would have held almost equal importance to his own birth.  He was returning to us our lost goddess, whose benevolence carried with it God's grace and Holy Spirit. As his beloved who would remain here after his resurrection and ascension, she would continue as leader of his flock, as Magdal-eder, which means "watchtower of the flock" Hebrew. (See Micah 4:8-11 and Margaret Starbird)

Based on this smallest shred of evidence, it seems clear Jesus fully intended Mary would continue in his place to watch over his flock. Maybe it was even part of his initial mission and plan. Once the good Shepherd was gone, she would remain as his shepherdess, rather than Peter.  

If so, what would that mean to the world if we had received her as Queen? Through the centuries, inspired people have often realized this and expressed it - in art, poetry and more recently in theology. And as many have received her as holy queen, their interpretations of her have become increasingly more respectful. Today we see her as Queen, whereas centuries ago the dark patriarchy of the church saw her as prostitute, perhaps, because it had once prostituted its own soul to the dark powers of Roman patriarchy, which killed the innocents, the children, and the sons and daughters of God.

As Queen, what was her guidance to His people?  How did she lead and what was her message?  Simply, it is that you are loved with an everlasting love, you have within you a pearl of great price, more precious than diamonds and gold, and that pearl is the light, an anointing from God's holy helm, which would continually lead you into your own regal nature.  In your own passion, emotional expression and poetic power, you will find and reflect a little bit of God's divine realm.  You can trust your inner spirit because that inner spirit is God's own Holy Spirit.  Beyond your fear, beyond your sense of inadequacy, is a field - a beautiful, florid landscape - which is heaven.  

In that sacred inner place, you will find your own true partner, your own soul. There, you will see the Queen who will escort you to the gate where her own beloved will take your hand and lead you into all truth, which is life eternal, and a joyous bliss beyond anything this dark place could ever offer you.  

Maybe the only question left for you to answer is how brave are you, how free are you from the world's false kings who have duped, conned and controlled you all your life, to take her hand and allow her to midwife the birth of your own soul and lead you to Christ at the gate of heaven, all within your own precious heart and mind?

His Christmas birth brings you to her and she will return you to him.

P.S.
According to the Gnostics, Mary was born near Bethlehem also, yet not in a stable or cave, rather in a comfortable home, only a few weeks after his birth.  

Wisdom teaching

"Set me as a seal on your heart, a seal on your arm, 

for love is as strong as death."  Song of Songs 8:6-7

Awakening to the Magdalene's teachings, what they are and why they're important, has been a jouney for me. For years I'd had a sense of something lacking from the Church's teachings. As a child, I asked my religion teacher what was the "Holy Ghost."  He didn't know and stammered something like, "it's the third part of the Trinity." So, that was useless. I wanted to really get this and that didn't make sense.

The teaching of the Gnostics informs that question.

Today, if a child asked me that question, I would respond with inviting the child to bring some of his friends into the music room where I would play some powerful praise music and show some videos of how passionate praise can lead to a powerful infilling of the Holy Spirit.  That's ground zero.  I would explain, as Jesus does in the Gospel of John, that God is Spirit and we worship God in Spirit. Yet, even that, I would tell him, is only the beginning.  That power releases something inside you - a kind of power which will guide you, make you free and confident, teach you and make you smart, strong, courageous and full of joy.

It will set you free from anyone's control.  You will control yourself and release your own power which comes from God's Holy Spirit. And, when you are self empowered by the Holy Spirit, you will not need to attempt to control (oppress, use, abuse) others or fall victim to any kind of addiction. You will experience life, real life, and that life is your real self which is eternal. 

So, what if you experienced a taste of that gorgeous power, that love beyond description and with it the knowledge that you would live forever - and not just an intellectual knowledge, but a felt experiential relational knowing, would you let anyone take that away from you?  They can't really, but they tried.  You can kill the body, but not the soul.

Understanding this rationally is only like opening the book to a great story.  It's not the full experience, but it's a kind of map of the new country. It's the experience itself that teaches.  Some things can be read and studied and some have to be experienced because you learn on a different level than simply intellectual.  That too is part of the difference between Orthodox and Gnostic Christianity. I believe we need some kind of an integration of the two, which sadly took 2,000 years for us to achieve. Only now are we finding both in the newly emerging Church, yet still not so much in the Roman Catholic, which still bars women from the sacrament of ordination. In the Catholic Chutch, for women there are only six sacraments, for men, all seven!

For me it would be years and several churches later before I would finally understand who the Holy Spirit was, and she's no ghost, for sure. Rather, she's a beautiful, fragrant power of joy, absolutely pure unconditional love, hope and healing, wisdom that can knit a room full of strangers into an intimate web of friends.  Her spirit is sheer awesomeness. That spirit radiates from within and yet for some it is visible externally.  Whenever Moses came out of the tent to meet with the people, he radiated a light so bright that it hurt their eyes, so he began wearing a veil over his face. That brightness is called "Shekinah," which is what the halos around the saints are really.

The terrible difference between the Gnostic and Orthodox, a difference worth dying for, is the Church then withheld Mary's teaching (which was Jesus' original teaching) that people could access that power of God, that Holy Spirit, personally and that it was already existent within them as part of their initial creation, their own inner programming.

It is their birthright, as it is every one's birthright, and with its access, individuals became free, sovereign, incredibly powerful, radiant, brilliant creatively. The potential for human spiritual development, growth, evolution and awesome ascension has always been available to us. 

Only a fearful, weak, spiritually impoverished, vacant, dark patriarchal institution would attempt to block the people from receiving this gift, this birthright. It forced them into submission to their priestly authority witholding from them the realization that they were always meant to be priests of their own lives. The Catholic priesthood wanted to withhold that from the people and thereby control the masses. They were like the pharisees Jesus condemned in the gospel, whom he calls "white washed tombs" because they were focused externally to the exclusion of the inner reality, where the real knowledge (gnosis), the real power, which is light and life eternal, is. They set themselves as guardians of the well of knowledge, yet didn't drink and didn't allow anyone else to drink from it either. 

Jesus says, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness." Matthew 23:27 (NKJV)

Then, as if he were speaking to the church in the Middle Ages and Inquisition, he says to the spiritually dead Jewish power brokers of his time, "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in." Matthew 23:13 KJV

There are hints and pointers to His real message in the Gospels and yet the focus of the incomplete canon (since it doesn't include Gnostic scripture) seems to return to how we can "control" God through good works or good behavior, obedience to authority, submission to an externally set law, rules; giving to the poor or "doing" without "being."  If just doing was the whole picture, why would they have to present God as judgmental, fearful and punitive, casting people into a fiery pit for eternity? Talk about control through fear! We understand today that control through fear is basically a personality disorder, a kind of psychopathology.  Would the creator of the universe be such a being?  Or, is that more likely a picture of ourselves at that time? 

They held onto their one-sided version of the message with a firm grip over the people.  And, if anyone dared to challenge their stance, he or she was tortured, burned to death. What kind of courage would someone need to have, what kind of faith, knowledge, absolute certainty of their rightness, to stand up to that kind of beast?  The answer whispers from the graves of the many hundreds of thousands of her persecuted spiritual army, Gnostics, Sethians, Cathars, Templars and numerous others.

This was just one of the points the reformers addressed when they called for faith over works. While they were rightly and instinctively resisting the Church's control, at the time they didn't have the whole story and weren't able to go all the way. That full awareness would take a few more centuries and the discovery of the Nag Hammadi and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Gnostics understood the Holy Spirit in feminine terms, as did the early Jews, who called her the Hokhmah. She is the feminine side of God and is God as much as the power to will and to act is the masculine side of God and is God.

These two reciprocal attitudes - that of being (faith, contemplative prayer) and that of doing (social justice, giving to the poor, systemic change for the better, education/teaching) offer a glimpse into the duality of God, the real masculine and feminine postures of life. Both are necessary for a more complete understanding of God and ourselves. Without both, working together, held in balance by each half, the heinous results are what we've seen happen in the opppressive power of control, in our history and today in the Middle East. The darkside of power set the world ablaze.  The gentle washing of the Holy Spirit would have kept that power in check.  What happened (and is happening) without it, is all over our history books and still in today's news.

The "doing" aspect was always meant to be a reflective response to the "being" aspect. Inspiration leads to wise action. In a sense, our actions need to be informed and guided by our wisdom from God's Holy Spirit. So, it's spirit first then action, or feminine first then male.  And, it's not a heirarchal paradigm, rather it's a reciprocal, relational model. A dance of light.

This duality was seen in Judaism since Moses and is reflected in the ancient symbol of the Star of David - the two tetrahedrons posed over each other in reciprocal position - one is female, the other male.

So, was it something to die for?  Is it still?  The Cathars and Templars were the first freedom fighters of what would begin a wave to the future reformers. Yet they would only bring some of the picture into perspective.  Today the need for a full understanding and experience of God remains as vital and imperative as ever.  Our collective apathy isn't helping to accomplish that which may be our biggest failure today as a global family.
______________________

Above: "Mary Magdalene" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 –1882)

Friday-the-Thirteenth

Icy roads, despite rain and warmer temps, created Portland's infamous black ice this morning.  At first we thought the roads would be deadly, but generally the drive was great and traffic sped along easily, bringing many of us to work earlier than usual.

On this morning's news, the weather reporter said, "It's Friday the 13th, so be careful out there."  

I sighed, thinking, "she knows not of what she speaks."  

The real meaning of this dreadful date may be lost on the ordinary early morning driver on his way to work. The number 13 has since antiquity been the number for the goddess, a number representing the divine feminine who for the earliest Christian Gnostics was represented by the Blessed Mother and Mary Magdalene, to whom (they believe) Jesus entrusted his "church" rather than Peter.  For many Gnostics, the date is one of profound mourning, a powerful and bloody reminder of the cost for those who stood up for another version of the Jesus story, one that could have existed alongside the Roman Catholic version, but was not tolerated and consequently exterminated by the Church.  

More than 7,000 Cathars were dragged out of St. Mary Magdalene church in the Languedoc, France, by Roman Catholic church officials, under the direction of Pope Innocent III, and were butchered to death on July 22, 1208. Then on Sunday, March 13, 1244, 250 Cathar monks were burned at the stake. Once the Cathars were wiped out of France, the Knights Templar took up their legacy, until a century later, on Friday, Oct. 13, 1307 the Knights Templar were gathered, tortured and killed. They had fought to defend Jerusalem against Islam, according to Crusade history. But, they, like the Cathars, had also stood for Mary Magdalene's secret, yet holy, order. 

In Kathleen McGowan's The Expected One, the terrible deaths borne by the Cathars is described so vividly, a reader's perspective on real courage and martyrdom and church history is changed forever.

There are many theories, but the primary one is the Gnostics who were personified in both the Cathars and the Knights Templar believed piously and ardently in the mystical and secret teachings of Jesus as carried to the world through Mary Magdalene and were willing to defend her to the death. They had carried her story, and her truth, soberly and stealthily throughout the centuries, and when they were deemed heretics and bitterly targeted by the Roman Catholic Church, as evidenced by history, they died bravely for her.