Well, maybe not so frequently. But here they are.
Why did Jesus focus his proclaiming on the Father?
What if a woman has trouble with the Father concept of God?
How do you respond to Christian legalism?
How can you be happy about being poor in spirit, mourning, etc., as the beatitudes teach?
How do you cultivate the practice of the presence of God?
Why did Jesus focus his proclaiming on the Father? Here are some of the reasons.
· Jesus loved his Father so much.
· The Father is so experienceable in the precious indwelling gift of divine love.
· God is one in religious experience, anyway.
· The child’s first ideas of God come from the human father.
· We have a message for peoples of all religions and for all who sit in darkness.
· The Father is the alpha and omega of our worship and destiny.
· The Father idea is the highest human concept of God.
· Jesus’ mission was to reveal the will of the Father.
· It’s such a great achievement, when fascinated with the wonders of a new epochal revelation, obediently to sustain one’s main focus of spiritual rejoicing on the Father and in the brotherhood of man.
· The Father is the best beginning for religious awareness.
What if a woman has trouble with the Father concept of God?
The father concept is not necessary to enjoying a relationship with the personality of the First Source and Center. I believe that everyone craves the love of the Universal Father, especially if their relationship with their human father was bad. Nevertheless, the emotional obstacles to relating to God with that name can be so great that it is not wise to push against them. Men's mistreatment of women has been a long and dark chapter in human history, and Jesus' gospel will not enjoy widespread reception until fathers better reflect the love of the Universal Father. Even during the heyday of the gospel of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, in the speeches presented to the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions, there was more than one Christian woman who notably declined to refer to God as father. Therefore, it is essential that we convey (implicitly and sometimes explicitly) our spiritual liberty in naming! "The name that we use matters little." Very much of the meaning of the father concept in the contexts of Jesus' teaching has to do with the assurance that we can have an experiential relationship with this friend who dwells within our mind!
How do you respond to Christian legalism? Obviously, various circumstances in each situation will move you to a particular course of response. Here are some of the alternatives that mark out the range of possibilities. What do you think?.
1. Minimize your interaction with the person. Be friendly to your brother or sister. Emphasize one or two truths you have in common, but don't expect to do much for one who is so closed.
2. Try your best to lead that person to a more open view. Get to know them, encouraging them to share religious experience, and uniting in your love of God and what he has done in your life. Gradually show them how Micah, for example, simplified the law in his famous "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with your God?" (See the chapter on Judaism in my book, The Golden Rule, Oxford University Press 1996 for the tradition of using the law of neighbor love and the golden rule as equivalent summaries of Jewish law pertaining to our treatment of our fellow human beings.) Show them how Jesus in the same Sermon on the Mount repeatedly says "But I say to you" in order to contrast his teaching with that of tradition and how Jesus in various ways challenges legalism. Point to a deeper concept of law. You might help them get a fresh appreciation of scripture--see my web article, "Becoming a Beacon" (go to the religions section of the site and then to "For Christians."
3. If you are personally attacked for proclaiming spiritual liberty, vigorously defend the religion of Jesus and the interpretation of the Master's life against being co-opted by the very legalism from which Jesus lived and died to liberate his followers. The Epochal Sermon launched a militant response to religious legalism that we may need at times to maintain today if such a threat is serious and in the region of our responsibility to respond.
How can you be happy about being poor in spirit, mourning, etc., as the beatitudes teach?
One
way to look at is is to take each of the beatitudes as a meditation, akin to the
progressive attitudes "feast upon uncertainty, fatten upon
disappointment" etc. The customary human response to an unwelcome
situation is to turn away. Jesus is giving assurance of the divine
presence, of the fulfillment of what is desired, of rewards for righteous
living. It takes time and reflection and prayer and the ministry of the
spirit to bring the blessing through.
The first beatitude is all in
the present tense, and I personally see it as the gateway to the others.
The one who feels poor in spirit is humble, teachable, not a hot shot on a roll;
this is the spirit of entering the kingdom as a child. It may well take
sustained openness for the happiness to dawn, but the assurance does come, and
that transforms the entire situation.
Having met God, and being now a
member in the family of faith, one is prepared to embrace the future-oriented
assurances of the other beatitudes. I hunger and thirst for righteousness.
Have faith, says the Master. You will be satisfied. Righteousness
is, finally, a gift of the spirit. In the power of the Holy Spirit I will
one day move into that level of spirit-filled living that will erase the shadows
of the not yet. Living in faith makes the not yet MUCH easier to bear that
I actually become happy and content to go through the experience of having the
realizations and making the decisions and carrying them out and making them real
through the labors of this earth life. A noble character is not going to
be bestowed upon me in one fell swoop, but it is on the way, and knowing that, I
rejoice.
As Eija Seppanen-Bolotinski said,
mourning facilitates healing, whereas depression does not. The beatitudes
can be taken as factual observations about the attitudes that the spirit can
effectively work with. Eija saw meekness as facilitating the expression of
the Thought Adjuster, one's eternal self; and she saw inheriting the earth as
the blessed life that we harvest when we do so.
I'll skip to the last beatitude.
The assurance about persecution enables us to be strong and self-forgetting in
situations that call for courage and potentially for self-sacrifice, even the
laying down of one's life. Once we receive this assurance, we can go ahead
without anxiety about self.
Thus the point is not rejoicing
in what is humanly unwelcome, but happiness coming from the reception of the
assurance of how the divine mercy responds to our needs.
Thanks for the honest question.
It will probably elicit other fine responses.
We are preparing ourselves to
reach out to others in distress, in some cases, with words of comfort akin to
the beatitudes. As we deepen our realization of our own needs and of the
Father's loving response to our needs, we will find fresh ways to encourage
those we meet.
How do you cultivate the practice of the presence of God?
My personal approach to that goal is to find, nearly every day, enough communion time to make sure that I reach the genuine experience of true worship (pp. 65-66). Prayer for upcoming situations also has a great effect on my spontaneous responses. I also work with the new philosophy of living in truth, beauty, and goodness. It is a philosophy that integrates material, intellectual, and spiritual levels. Jesus could live as if he were "seeing him who is invisible" by the concentration and patience with which he took up each task before him. His interpretation of the task, and of the import of time, was implicitly guided by the meanings and values of such a philosophy of living.