Why not just jump to the good part -- Heaven, that is -- and skip all this crazy, frustrating, painful, human stuff?
Every major world religion (past and present) has tried to answer this question. In fact, there wouldn't be any religions without this question. Faith* asks the question with an open heart. Religion's job has always been not to answer the question but to control the answer, to control the theory which decides what other people can observe.
This is not to say that religious people don't have faith or can't have faith. Many have great faith in a loving God. But many more have no faith in themselves or each other because they've been taught by their religious leaders to believe in their own inherent sinfulness or karmic imperfection. (Take your pick -- both boil down to a belief in Materialist laws of cause and effect.)
What if all these religions are wrong? What if there is no inherent sinfulness and no karmic imperfection? What if the goal is not to escape our sinfulness through grace or to escape the cycle of rebirth through sheer willpower? What if the goal for human beings has nothing whatsoever to do with saving ourselves so we can get to Heaven or to a state of Nirvana?**
What if we're here on Planet Earth for an entirely different reason? A simple reason. A loving reason. Say . . . so we can experience a number of complicated things about God's Heart that some of us just can't seem to understand without "walking a mile in God's shoes."
Maybe we're here as human beings because, as souls, we're so determined and so loving and so trusting and so courageous that nothing -- not even the sure knowledge of our temporary suffering and anguish and loneliness -- can stop us from wanting (as souls) to know more about who God the Mother and God the Father really are as people.
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| This clock, made of ivory, gilded copper, brass, and enamel, is called "The Twelve States of the Soul," and was made by German clockmaker Johan Georg Gusderman of Kaemten in about 1680. It's part of the Kenneth Thomson collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo credit JAT 2018. |
From what I've just said, you'd have to conclude that if we want to know (as souls) what it feels like to walk a mile in suffering and anguish and loneliness, then this must mean . . . hmmm, now here's a thought you won't be hearing in church anytime soon . . . this must mean that once upon a time (long, long ago and far, far away) there was no Divine Love and existence was a real bitch until God the Mother and God the Father found redemption in each other.
As the song says, it takes two.
Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.
*(I define faith as a relationship with God that endures in the absence of sacred texts.)
**(Please bear in mind that I'm simplifying on purpose.)
For Further Reflection:
People love to know about their human ancestry. For reasons we can't describe, we're endlessly fascinated by our family trees and family histories. These days, it's popular to add a DNA analysis to the confusing piles of unnamed photos and undated letters we find in old trunks in the basement. Sharing historical information has recently become a way of bringing people closer, but it hasn't always been this way.
It used to be, in centuries past, that families lived in the same small region for many generations, so you didn't have to go much further than the local graveyard or the local parish register to learn more about your ancestors. You could also go to the pub or the sewing circle, where you could hear every nasty rumour about everybody's ancestors right back to the time of Adam. Heaven help you if you came from the clan or caste despised by your community for some ancient crime. There was no escaping the power of genealogy to build lives and also ruin them, depending on who your ancestors were. Forgiveness for bloodlines was almost unheard of.
Human culture has taught us to think about family history in some pretty strange ways that have nothing to do with learning how to love your God or yourself or your neighbour. We don't like to acknowledge it, but, over time, all of our most dysfunctional beliefs about families and family history have mutated into religious doctrines. We do this -- we drag our flawed theories about family into the history of our relationship with God -- because so many of us like the idea of having power over the people closest to us.
In order to get the family power we want, we take our understanding of God the Mother and God the Father and we beat the crap out of it. We take God's image and cut out all the parts that might interfere with our own authority. We then take the parts that are left (such as God's immeasurably vast talents) and rearrange them into a new portrait of the Divine that "proves" such religious theories as the human right to be right; human exceptionalism; human hierarchies of salvation; and monism (the quest to dissolve all humans into a single soup of Oneness).
We then use these theories to justify our treatment of God, our families, our communities, and our planet.
Your angels, however, are having none of it.
The story you've been told about God is in all likelihood one of the many cut-and-paste jobs that exist in today's religious and spiritual circles. (In some circles, God's image has been cut into such tiny pieces that nothing meaningful is left.) It's up to you, then, (with the help of your angels) to find the courage to open your eyes and ears and heart to God so you can rebuild a healthy, mature, loving image of your Divine Parents.
Deep within your core self, in the places of yearning you so rarely listen to except when your dreams overtake you, you're absolutely desperate to know more about your angelic history and more about your Mother and Father's personal journey of redemption, hope, healing, and faith.
Don't be surprised if your journey forward on the Spiral Path sometimes feels like a journey backwards.
There's an important angelic reason for this.
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