petitioninggod.com Blog

I believe, as Scott Peck did, that most illnesses & other physical conditions are psychosomatic & deeply spiritual. To truly get well, the person must undergo a spiritual (or psychic) transformation, in which he or she accepts, on the deepest level possible, forgiveness & salvation & the love of the God of Love. Understanding “salvation” as healing, as salve for our wounds, applies here.

The healing/salvation doesn’t have to mean the person is completely cured of all illness or deformity. In our mission as Jesus’s followers, many times all we can do is demonstrate God’s love & acceptance by loving & accepting & helping the afflicted ourselves; if they feel loved & accepted even momentarily, they will in that small way have had a taste of salvation.

So it’s up to us as Christians to never tire, never cease carrying out our mission of active & radical love & healing.

I don’t usually correspond directly with fundamentalists, mainly because I don’t know many of them, but I do have this friend, a pastor in the “holiness movement,” who recently observed that that movement, whose purpose is to help people increase in “holiness” by perfecting their natures, seems to be missing something, because, as he put it, “the rubber doesn’t meet the road” as far as making a real difference in the lives of the students in the “holiness colleges” despite the fact that they surround themselves all day long with all the right holiness materials & practices. I couldn’t resist this opportunity to explain what I had always thought about such insulation of oneself from life, plus the guy had asked, after all. Here’s basically what I told him:

>>>”Although I had never heard of the modern holiness movement, I understand that it’s an attempt to put Wesley’s teachings about salvation & sanctification into practice, an attempt that I don’t agree with in the first place. I think the whole premise of the holiness movement is flawed in its self-absorbed concern about how holy or how sinful one is. Obsessing about the state of one’s soul seems to me an incredibly arrogant and faithless path to take, and a non-christ-like one at that. It seems clear to me that Jesus was all about LOVE, not sin! He was constantly helping the poor & marginalized, & bringing them the good news that God loves them. Our commission as his followers is to accept the good news and set about spreading it to the world not by going around telling people how sinful they are but by loving them radically with no partiality, as Jesus did. If they then want to become followers themselves, our job is to help them in any way we can, but never to judge that they or others aren’t really saved, much less to worry that we ourselves aren’t holy enough! Our assignment as Christians is to feed the hungry & heal the sick, not to waste our time & energy worrying about holiness.

“In my own work on my book, I’m interested in helping people work on their private relationships to God, as well as their personal transformation into their better selves, but not in the sense of making sure they’re forgiven by God. It seems clear to me that Jesus’s message was that we ARE forgiven and our task is to forgive others, not to worry about whether we’re really forgiven or really saved. We are, and so is everyone else who chooses to accept that fact of God’s love, so the next thing to do is set out spreading that LOVE to others, not going around telling them they’re not really saved or that their beliefs are erroneous. Not only is that approach off-putting & hurtful to those who hear it, but also Christians who get caught up in it are wasting valuable resources as well as sabotaging their own joy! In my view, “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” means it’s time for us, empowered by JC’s message of love, to spread the kingdom by spreading love & healing the way he did! Alleviating poverty & hunger & disease are huge tasks that should keep us occupied full-time!

“In my work, I feel called to help people develop their inner spiritual lives & prayer relationships to God for the purpose of furthering their spiritual growth & the transformation of their flaws, which in turn enables them to serve others, which leads them to deep joy. While this process could be described as “perfecting our natures,” it cannot occur in a vacuum. Moreover, I have no interest whatsoever in telling anyone that they aren’t holy enough or that they’re not saved. Surely this is what Jesus meant when he said we were not to judge. And surely salvation is available to all who accept it, whenever they do decide to accept it. They’re more likely to if they see Christians being joyful & loving, which is what _I_ call holy, rather than morose, fearful, & judgmental of others or themselves.

“I think the disconnect you mention in the holiness colleges, where you say the rubber doesn’t hit the ground as far as making a difference in the students’ lives, stems from the simple fact that trying to be “holy” all the time is a way of escaping from life rather than confronting it. I think the mistake of the colleges as well as the whole holiness movement is that this focus on how “holy” & “sinless” one is itself a self-absorbed, fruitless activity that keeps the person from serving the needs of the world, loving others constantly as Jesus taught & modeled. Loving God is fine but it is not complete without loving our neighbors, radically & actively & continually.

“SO, there you have my opinion of the holiness movement, probably more than you bargained for. . . . I think you are wise to recognize the disconnect in the movement, & would be glad to try to offer input that could help them perhaps retool their approach, but as I’ve stated above, I think it is fundamentally flawed. I pray that they (& you) will see the light and learn the joy of using their energy to help heal the world!

Christ’s peace,

Sara”

In my 20s and 30s I was less happy with my life than most of my peers were with theirs. But in my middle age, I look around me & find myself infinitely happier than nearly all others, so I must be onto something, & here it is:

To be deeply happy we have to accept (& continually re-accept) that life on earth is not meant to make us happy! This doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy earthly happiness when it’s available, but we have to stop expecting it to be available. This is the only rational response to the observation that all earthly happiness is fleeting, and life is difficult, for everyone, everywhere.

To stop expecting earthly happiness to be available is to stop expecting our life circumstances (including people, money & career matters, activities & possessions, & all other life circumstances) to be to our liking. Once we do this, the logical next step is to seek happiness within, by communing with God & our conscience, which is God within each of us.

When we do this we usually find that God, through our conscience, is telling us what we “ought” to do—about any problem that may be bothering us, or simply about life in general. If we then in fact do what this Inner Ought tells us to do, we will have taken a step toward deep happiness. It may not be apparent right away, but have faith, because it will be apparent soon.

The Bible passages about not clinging to your life but giving it up for eternal life, & about storing up for yourself treasures in heaven instead of on earth, apply here. And I write about how I did it in my book, as described elsewhere on this website. (That’s because what I found I really had to do to get my prayers answered was precisely this following of the Inner Ought.) Don’t try to intellectualize it too much, just get in there and start working on your own spiritual growth & relationship to God. Trust me, you will be happier this way.

As always, I am glad to help if you want to email me. It’s the least I can do!

Blessings on you as you seek your God.

Sara

To be born again is to orient your life around the God of Love instead of around your own desires & wishes, which is the way we’re all naturally oriented the first time we’re born. In practical terms, this means simply that we choose our actions & attitudes according to the needs of others rather than our own needs.

God doesn’t need much himself, just our love. But others, if you’ll only glance around you, need many things all the time. That’s why he gave us the simple commandment to put others first. And it’s why this love, this charity & compassion, is a basic precept of all major religions.

Sadly, many Christians seem to get the emphasis wrong & think they need to worry about their own sins & whether they’re forgiven. But it seems clear to me that Jesus was all about love & very little about sin, which he said we didn’t need to worry about, because as long as we forgive others, we too will be forgiven by God. So all we have to do is accept our acceptance, and then get a move on spreading the kingdom by serving others.

When we do this, we find joy!

I have a movie rec for all us spiritual seekers: AUGUST RUSH, currently in the New Releases section of my Blockbuster, as well as many other sources, I’m sure.

The one quote I went to the trouble to write down was a line spoken by Robin Williams’s character:

“Do you know what music is? It’s God’s little reminder that there’s something else besides us in this universe.”

Blessings!

Sara

Think TEMPORARINESS. That is, this life is very temporary, even fleeting, a drop in the bucket of eternity.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this blog that one way to follow Jesus and to find happiness is to view everything in terms of eternity, but I haven’t discussed exactly how to do that. But it’s as simple as remembering that everything on earth is temporary. So we can’t expect wonderful moments to last, but on the other hand, pain & suffering don’t last either, and if we’ve felt the kingdom of heaven (and I think we all have, even if only momentarily at special times), then we know it’s all a prelude to eternal joy.

Indeed, it makes no sense whatsoever that we humans are capable of feeling that ineffable joy if we’re not going to experience it in a more lasting form in the future. It also makes no sense whatsoever that our brains are many times more powerful than we ever use in this brief life, if there’s not a whole lot more to come in the next life!

Blessings on all of you!

By the grace of God I myself usually do this naturally, but the least I can do is to share it in here so that others can try it if they want to—

Many who know me think I’m somehow immune to the pain of life (boredom, meaninglessness, hopelessness, loneliness), but I assure you I’m not! It’s the way I react to it that makes the difference.

Most people—influenced by our culture, no doubt—seem to view the pain as something to be avoided by means of entertainment or activities that they often don’t even particularly enjoy but that merely serve as what one friend of mine calls “boredom preventers,” or by surrounding themselves with expensive possessions, dwellings, & vehicles, with which they hope to buffer themselves against the emptiness.

I and all other deeply joyful people, in contrast, embrace the pain as something to be worked through in the heart, mind, & soul, after which we will feel deeply joyful until the next psychic challenge comes along, and upon working through that pain will be even more joyful than before, thus constantly growing in joy. By embracing the pain instead of trying to insulate ourselves against it, we transcend it and become even happier than we were before the pain struck.

When Jesus said it’s harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven, I think part of what he meant was that rich people have more means to do all those artificial things in order to avoid facing the pain and emptiness, the working through of which is the only way to experience true joy, which is surely a chief component of the kingdom! In this sense they’re poorer than those whose circumstances make the pain of life (& the need for God) unavoidable.

Wow, I had to be careful there in the title to make sure I distanced myself from that group who has made such a bad name for themselves that I’m sure many of my readers would read no further: “born-again Christians.”

In their misguided, narrow view, what Jesus’s line “You must be born again” means is something like this: “You must undergo some type of dramatic conversion experience (like getting saved at a Baptist rally) and then dedicate your life to living in strict (and very visible) adherence to supposed principles of sexual and other morality, whichever tenets happen to be emphasized by whichever conservative church you choose to join.”

But what “You must be born again” REALLY means is exactly the same thing I’ve been talking about recently in this blog: if you want to experience the joy of the kingdom of heaven (which is the only way to be genuinely happy on earth), you must continually die to your natural life, to your human nature that puts yourself and your own wants, desires, & conveniences first, and instead continually realign your mind (i.e. be born again) with the God of Love, which leads you to routinely inconvenience yourself in order to serve others.

As an incisive Episcopal priest said in his sermon yesterday, you must be be born again and again and again, as you repeatedly die to the life you’ve built up out of your own selfish hopes & fears, and then continually be born again into the new life in Christ, where you drop all that self-absorbed baggage completely and become a radically new person—an unselfish, loving-others, deeply joyful person.

I don’t know about you, but I’m immensely thankful that we have this option of avoiding the restlessness and emptiness of life by allowing ourselves to be “born again” into the new life centered around the God of Love!

Repent means to change your mind, and what this famously misunderstood verse means is NOT “perform self-torturing acts to punish yourself and purge your sins because the time is near when you’re going to burn in hell if you don’t.” Rather, it means to turn from your self-absorption and unhappiness to the abundant joy that comes from focusing your life on God & loving others instead of remaining in the more natural human position of being turned inward on yourself. The “kingdom of heaven” that is “at hand” (i.e., here, now) is this abundant living that is available now to all of us if we will only make the decision to align our lives and minds with God instead of continuing to focus on ourselves, which only leads to emptiness.

SO, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” means turn from your sadness & emptiness and embrace the joy that God wants to give you!

As open-minded theologians have noted, the Greek word for “salvation” used most frequently in the New Testament means to save from suffering, rather than to save from sins. The point is that Jesus came primarily to bring us healing rather than forgiveness.

This distinction applies even to the passages preferred by hellfire preachers when they want to scare their audiences, such as Philippians 2:12, which says we are to “work out our salvation with fear & trembling.” What this passage actually means is that we must work out our healing in fear & trembling—the goal is not to save ourselves from burning in hell but rather to secure our own well-being, our own greatest joy. Whatever we do in order to “work out our salvation” makes us feel the best we possibly can feel. The “fear & trembling” part is a way of getting across just how much better we can feel by doing this than we feel if we don’t do it!

Of course for most people this well-being is primarily mental rather than physical, but it’s all connected, and moreover, isn’t mental well-being what we all desire anyway? We want to be happy, right? Well, this being right with God and working out whatever it is he wants us to do is, quite simply, the only way to be happy!

If you doubt that claim, just look out there—people who have every level of success & riches imaginable, including people who can seemingly have their pick of romantic partners, are still not happy! The fact of the matter is that the only way to fill up the emptiness that everyone feels in this life is to center our lives around God (the God of Love).