Does anyone know Jesus anymore?

This is a topic rife with contradiction.  You read about Jesus saying "Love your enemy" and telling us not to judge.  Yet the most public and outspoken Christians seem to say the opposite and are ready to quote scripture to make their point of judgement and hate.  It can be very confusing.

I don't remember my earliest religious education.  The earliest I can remember is one day I went out to play with my sister, who was 8 years my senior, and the kids made fun of me for wearing sandals.  I said, "Jesus wore sandals."  Their reply was "Oh now he thinks he's Jesus."  I was around 4 at the time.  I've always been rather strange, I can't help it.  I heard years later that the reason I came forth gay was to teach unconditional love.  Basically, people would not be able to change me so they would have to either avoid being in my presence, or find some way to love me in spite of my sexual identity in order for them to be comfortable around me.  That really resonated with me, because I've been made fun of for one reason or another all my life.

I do remember going to a Baptist Sunday School.  They reiterated a lot of things about Jesus I'd already heard but then they added more I hadn't heard.  Who god hates, and who is going to hell.  Child that I was at 8 years old I said, wait a minute, Jesus said to not judge and to love people.  I was told not to ask so many questions.  After a while my mother decided I didn't need to go to Sunday School any more.

Later, because of a boy who'd been my best friend when I was 3 or so (Todd Dooley) I started going to a Methodist church.  My Mom was brought up in the Methodist church and the Dooley's were our friends so we took steps to join the church.  I really liked it.  I liked the minister also.  I could listen to him for hours.  Unfortunately soon after we joined he retired, and the Dooley's, a military family, moved away.  I can't tell you what happened after that, maybe it was the lack of distraction because Todd was no longer there, but I would sit in church and not fall asleep but I would enter a sort of trance state, where I heard everything that was being said, but it was more like I was absorbing it rather than actually listening to it.  That's hard to deal with in the Methodist church because you stand to sing like 8 times every service.  So a few years later we stopped going.

I'd always felt that something was missing from religion though.  I felt it was something magical.  Truth be told now I know the true spiritual experience is a mystical one.  It transforms.  I spent the next 10 years or so, from 12 on, being a mystical practitioner.  I've seen things most people only wish to see and somethings no one would.  Of course, that's the same year I started to realize one of the reason why I felt so different is that I was gay.  So, since the church said I was evil, wrong, or confused, depending on who you talked to or which bible verse they quoted I, of course, turned my back on Jesus, the church, and Christianity, first from embarrassment then in defiance.

Some might consider that a bad thing but I would remind you of the prodigal son.  The sons that stayed and were loyal to their father weren't as loved as the one that left, fell and returned.  There is just something about the person that has sinned (originally the term came from archery and meant missed the mark), that the person who hasn't just doesn't have.  Marianne Williamson talks about Nixon before and several years after Watergate.  She tells how she couldn't listen to him before but years after when he started returning to the public eye, he'd been humbled.  If you think about it to go through such a international embarrassment and then return to public service, a person would have had to drop to their knees just to survive it.  All the false bravado would have to have been stripped away, and reliance placed on something in yourself but not of yourself.

I had a similar situation happen to me.  If you've never looked in the mirror and seen no one there, you have no idea what it's like.  So anyway I made my own return.  Not that I've returned to Christianity, but I've stopped turning my back on God and Jesus.  I just had to redefine what those words meant to me.  I had to reread the bible and to put it into context.  I basically stopped throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  I know the value of reading such text simply so they are no longer intimidating.  (I today love people who quote Leviticus to me, and Roman's because it's obvious to me they haven't actually read it or they have read it but don't have the intelligence or the desire to think for themselves.)

Buddha came before Jesus, and he described the law of Karma.  It was essentially the Law of Cause and Effect.  We misunderstand it today thinking that we do bad in this life and we come back and suffer for it in another.  Not what he meant.  What he meant was about thought.  See God is all about things in his universe becoming what they really are, and he has given us free will and the power to create just as he creates, and we can do so with him or with out him.  Buddha told us, you put up a defense and someone must attack.  You take action against someone, that is cause, they take action against you is the effect, which then becomes the new cause.  Except when Buddha talked about these things he wasn't really talking about action, he was talking about thought.  You can chose Cause, thought that co-creates with God, or cause, thought that co-creates without God.  Doesn't really matter because God has the last word, the last judgement if you will.  Jesus came several hundred years later and taught us in a moment of Grace (loving thought, or co-creation with God) all Karma is burned.

Now we have Law of Attraction.  Best explained by Esther Hicks.  She says, You were non-physical (one with that which we call God), and you sent a portion of that non-physical being into the physical to experience life.  You experience life day to day and your life causes you to have desire.  That greater part of you holds the space of the fulfillment of those desires, and lights the path for you, and on any subject if you think along the same lines as that greater part of you, that desire is fulfilled and is fulfilled quickly.  If you think on any subject in opposition to that greater part of you, not only is the fulfillment of that desire delayed, but you can actual cause it's opposite to happen temporarily and the way you tell which is on it's way is by how you feel when you think about that subject.  So if you think about money and feel depressed or worried, your financial situation is going towards worse, and if you thing about money and are truly Joyful, it is getting better.  So if you can't think about something and feel good about it, think of something that feels good until you think about that thing and it feels good.  What's funny about that is it's the same thing Buddha and Jesus said thousands of years ago, said in a new way and people still aren't buying it.

Hasn't the majority of your life, at certain times, felt the same?  It's the way God set it up.  Ask and it is given, knock and the door will be opened to you.  When we go through life feeling the same way, we are asking for thoughts that feel the same way, which bring manifestations that feel the same way.  Throughout our day though we have those moments that feel happy and things we can think about that feel happy, and those are the moments we should milk.  Instead we'd rather complain about that one thing that happened that upset the apple cart and we go through the rest of our day feeling that way.

That's what Jesus was saying when he said, "Love your enemy."  If you can think about those things about a person that you love about them, and think them often enough they become your habit of thought when they are not there, they can only come around you when they are showing those aspects.  That's when we are in line with God, the major part of ourselves and what we want to see.

I started to get an inkling of this in college.  In high school I would sit there thinking of how boring the subject was, the mean things that were said to me on the way to school, or between classes, or in the last class, and I wouldn't retain much of anything.  By college I'd learned to listen without judgement.  It wasn't easy, it was a muscle I needed to develop, just as you would work your biceps or triceps. So I sat there listening without judgement and would just absorb what the professor was saying.  Not only would I remember what he/she said, I would actually understand it in practical terms.  I rarely opened my books, but got straight A's on tests, papers and projects.  I wasn't deciding what the experience was before I experienced it and just remained open to experiencing it.  Now I'm not saying it's always easy.  Just saying it works.

I can't tell you how many times I've worked a shift and had the person I was working with turn to me and say "God, people were assh#les tonight!."  My response was "Really? I had fun."  That's another aspect of trying not to judge situations.  Jesus hung out with criminals, and prostitutes, and just didn't have the same experience with them others did.  Because he tried not to judge them and did try to find something to love in them.

I find it funny that the people we most admire in the past.  People like Einstein, Jesus, Buddha, our founding fathers, were the weirdos, and liberals of their time.  Yet someone stands in front of us saying similar ideas, we look down our nose at them and call them liberal.  

I heard this once in a Muslim Wedding.  "The prophet was once asked what is more important than prayer, to which he replied the spirit of prayer.  So what is more important than marriage?  It is the spirit of marriage that prompts us to search for the treasures within."  The treasures within is the love.  We say God is love and God made us, yet we think we can be anything other than love.  Temporarily we can but in God's world, everything will eventually become what it truly is.  So why bother struggling, and why bother pretending we know what it's all supposed to look like.