A Sign for You

Signs, signals, symbols lie around us everywhere—if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear. The eyes and ears of the heart—the inner self—was what Jesus was talking about. And God has placed peculiar signs for each of us, readily available. All we need do is listen and look with our spiritual ears and eyes.

Probably we will not experience an angel visitant with celestial chorus accompaniment. But the directions to our sign are all around us, trying to get our attention, trying to make us see how much we want great joy, trying to make us understand that God wants us to have just that.

We, as the shepherds in the story, will find our own Babe, lying in the stable of our heart, waiting for us to wrap it in very special swaddling cloths that only we can provide.

Note:  More on the idea of our Inner Babe can be found in “Cradling the Babe,” under Meditations on this web site.

23 December 2014

God Within Us

The ability of God to plant himself within the flesh of humankind was an attribute of God from the beginning, so in a very real sense we were with God from the beginning. The soul that resides in each of us is none other than the essence of God which is and was and shall be, having no beginning and no end.

The God-in-us that was alive from the beginning, and has been alive in us since our birth, needs a second birth—a birth into our conscious awareness. This spiritual birth, much like our physical parturition, involves risk and suffering. Just as the fetus must make the journey through the narrow birth canal, leaving the warm womb and risking asphyxiation in the passage, so our spiritual birth involves the decision to leave the present protective power of consciousness, trusting something within and beyond us to get us through the confines of this second birth canal.

God is not satisfied until his essence is part of our conscious awareness. Only then can He reveal himself to us in ways that give us the fullness of life He has for us. Only then can He infuse us with his kind of creative energy, so that our work and play become intertwined, transforming us into beings whose greatest joy is simply being.

27 December 2009

Preparing

 

Several phrases from early in The Messiah continue to resonate: ”prepare ye the way of the Lord;” “make straight. . .a highway for our God;” “….and He will purify.”

When guests are expected, we make elaborate preparations and attempt to straighten every corner. Unfortunately, however, we are not spiritually able to straighten the crooked paths in our lives in preparation for a personal visit from God. This inability is inherent in God’s plan. If we could straighten our crookedness, we would declare ourselves all right and see no need to seek special action of the Lord.

Only a straight and flawless path is proper preparation for the coming of God. And only He is able to make straight what needs to be straightened and purify what must be made pure before His arrival.

From The Messiah again: “He shall purify the sons of Levi. . . . that they may give an offering in righteousness.” God’s purification of us, as all “sons” of the divine priesthood, enables us to offer ourselves, the totality of our personality, newly sanctified, as a righteous offering to the Lord, the most perfect offering we can give—and all He ever wants.