December 22, 2009
Like Jacob wrestled an angel, I have wrestled Christianity for decades. And, like Jacob, I will not let it go, except Christianity bless me.
My most memorable introduction to the underpinnings of Christianity was during my fourteenth year. My mother had died a few years before, my two older brothers had left home for college, and it was my father and me in the house . . . and he had a heart attack. I felt very alone and scared, so I turned to the Bible.
Through pure bad luck I opened to one of the Old Testament texts about how God was about to pour a bad-ass heaping of punishment out on the Hebrews for having fallen away from the law. It scared the dickens out of me, but it all made sense and I believed it. I was being punished by God, and my father's heart attack was just the next installment. I hadn't even had sex yet, but I knew I was already doomed. After a few close encounters with various fundamentalist born-again Christians, I got tired of worrying about eternal damnation all the time, so I threw the Christianity bathwater out the window, baby Jesus and all.
But I returned, slowly. In fits and starts, I have become reconciled with the religion of my birth. A Course in Miracles helped a lot.
Articles:
Christianity and a Course in Miracles
Are you a Christian?
A Christian dialog - part one
Saint Peter, the blockhead
Selling Jesus to the Romans
I have notice that when anyone wishes to compare the teachings of A Course in Miracles to the teachings of Christianity, that person invariably starts talking about the Roman Catholic Church as the basis for comparison. There are many other forms of Chirsitanity that are more useful to examine, such as The Society of Friends. Sometimes that deep seated cynicism about Christianity from decades ago comes out in me. The pool at Bethesda.
But, as I recently observed elsewhere, if you can't see the Christ in Jesus, who can you see it in?
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The psychic gridRecently I have been inspired to take another look at the structural underpinnings of apparently reality in the world. It's not as easy as it sounds, and it doesn't necessarily involve standard psychic powers, real or imagined. Chopra described it as the field of infinite possibilities, and it is related to the discussion of The Holographic Universe from last week. See also: Mind power or miracle.
Now it is extended to a thirty year old book by Beatrice Bruteau titled The Psychic Grid.
An excerpt:
"Happily for us, experience never leaves us long untouched by doubt, unexposed to some alternative to our present perception of the world. We may think ourselves secure on our island which we have organized in terms of our own images of reality and our own emotional attitudes. And then there will come a great storm, and suddenly a totally new type of world is confronting and confusing us.
" Our first reaction is almost always rejection. We meet the alien thought with hostility and struggle with it in fear. Even when intelligence suggest that the alien has certain points of merit, our emotional being registers distress . . . We live in different worlds. It is the difference that causes the upset. It undermines the kind of homeostasis which we feel is necessary to preserve our tranquility and our sense of reality. . . . The strong feeling, the sense of being 'shocked' and 'stunned,' comes out because every worldview conflict threatens our sense of selfhood."Carmen has described her 1996 close encounter with the grid on Peaceful Path.
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I have added several new links to A Course in Miracles resources, which may be of interest to anyone looking for good quality on-line Course discussion and sharing.
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Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
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