The Energy of Love Book

T H E   E N E R G Y   O F   L O V E

WHERE DOES LOVE COME FROM?

WHERE DOES IT GO?

by

Gay N. Blanchard

PRELUDE

Pure love (the real thing) is an energy which comes from God.  I have come to understand this after long years of questioning and studying, praying and listening.  This truth is so simple that perhaps only those who have struggled through the intellectual traps, psychological mazes, and paradoxical complexities which lead one to any simple truth, will believe it.  And maybe they would agree only that truth is simple – not that love is an energy which comes from God.  Everyone seems to have his/her own definition of love and his/her own personal ideas concerning God.

My belief is that God is a Man-and-Woman, soulmates who are one in heart and mind and purpose; whose mutual strength comes because they are free and separate entities who choose to come together in perfect, passionate, joyful union.  This ultimate consummation creates the Energy of Love.  In fact it creates everything which is good.  God’s Love-Energy is the power of creation.

God, the Man and Woman, have personalities, passions and physical aspects, and are resurrected beings.  They have evolved beyond the physical circumstances we as humans are experiencing and beyond the circumstances we perceive as spiritual, to a state of being which we cannot fully comprehend.  We can at best call it ideal, or perfect.  Our most excellent performance is comparable to their performance as is a speck of sand to a huge and lustrous pearl; but it is comparable because we are, potentially embryo Gods.

I believe you and I have always existed – at first only as “intelligences.”  The closest I can come to defining intelligence in this context is:  matter which has the ability to comprehend.  In other words, we always existed as comprehending matter.  In our present mortal state, the portion of this matter of which we are aware seems to be processed through the brain; the part which we rarely remember may be resting in the heart-center.

At some crucial point of choice, our original intelligence received spiritual shape and form, as it was embraced in God’s love and born as His and Her child.  One difference between this birth and birth into mortality is that here our physical makeup is generally the same as that of our parents; in our heavenly birth, the body created for us by God inherited only His or Her spiritual likeness, with the potential and opportunity to become like them in whatever other ways we might choose.  Freedom to choose has always been God’s gift to us.

I do not think God dipped randomly into a huge sea of intelligences and invented a use for whatever He-She came up with.  Rather, God chose each one of us – separately, knowingly – for a particular purpose suited to the uniqueness of our original intelligence.  I believe we then lived with God and began to make the choices to either fulfill our inherent eternal purpose or to turn away from it.  We continue to make those choices.

As children of God we inherited three particularly wonderful gifts:  God’s own goodness; the freedom to progress; and Love-Energy flowing through our veins as our life-sustaining nourishment.  On Earth we have inherited other qualities, which usually mask those three gifts:  we feel guilty and conscious of our “badness;” we feel generally restricted and bound; and we have blood flowing through our veins instead of Love-Energy.

Why are we now so alienated from the truth of our real selves?  Many who believe in the Bible blame Adam and Eve for “falling” and thereby being responsible for bringing us all into a world of misery.   Those who believe man evolved from amoebas may perceive our less-than-perfect human nature to be the result of natural survival instincts.  Neither of these theories, however, explains the real truth of our being.  They simply give possible explanations for the alien circumstance in which we now find ourselves.

Adam and Eve did fall from heaven to earth – from perfection to imperfection.  They were the first of the souls created for this world to choose to experience the particular kinds of opposition and challenge this world provides.  Such opposition and challenge includes having a physical body which is subject to a unique environment and to a unique genetic inheritance.  This “product” of environment and heredity is not our true self.  It is a maze through which we journey in mortality in order to find that SELF.

I do not believe any of us are victims of Adam and Eve’s choice though.  I believe we each made our own choice to inherit the consequences of descending from heaven.  In our own time we each made our own choice to eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge-of-good-and-evil.  At that critical point, each of us began to “see through a glass darkly,” as Paul put it – which means we now see distortion rather than accuracy, perversion rather than truth, illusion instead of reality.  I believe we made the choice to become human because we had discovered from our experiences in heaven, that it would give us the ability to progress further toward fulfillment of our personal purpose and eternal destiny.

I think it is still true that we are good, we are free, and we are alive with love.  Those gifts from God are inherent in our souls.  So how did we lose our awareness of them?  How can we recover it?  That has been my personal search.  This book is a record of how I, personally, experienced the loss and restoration of pure love in my own life.

Hopefully, these experiences can be a guideline to help you recognize what has happened to the Energy of Love in your own life.  The experiences will be different, but the results similar.  If you wish to recover pure love, it is my belief that the process will necessarily include Jesus Christ.     

The information in this book is not academically “documented.”  Too often we try to borrow oil from someone else’s lamp, or rely on another’s authority in making spiritual choices.  The process used in writing this book was to depend on the inspiration of my own mind, the wisdom of my own heart, and the light in my own being as I listened to the Lord’s direction.  The same process is required of the reader in determining whether or not it speaks truth.  As individuals we must each be willing to move into the dimension where God communicates, if we would comprehend the truths of God.  That dimension will be found inside ourselves, not through another’s documentation.

PART ONE

LOSING LOVE

CHAPTER ONE

The Power of Fear

I can’t remember much about my childhood except that I was afraid of everything and everyone.  At first the shock of new sensations frightened me.  Newness pushed and squeezed me away from the security of gentle womb-waters.  My first breaths of life were painful, and pain was new.  Eerie unfocused light hurt my eyes.  Strange sounds, jarringly different from heaven’s harmonies, frightened me.  A helpless infant, I was at the mercy of some no-nonsense doctor, a crotchety nurse, and my nervous mother.

“Doctors have to be totally objective; feeling limits the accurate use of skills,” the doctor rationalized as he swatted my bottom until I responded with a thin wail.

“It’s not fair that we nurses do all the work and the doctors get all the money.  That baby can just cry while I have a cup of tea.”  So I cried against the hospital’s bright lights and my own rapidly beating little heart.

“Why won’t my baby eat?  What’s the matter with her?  Why won’t she stop crying?  Oh, take her away – I’m too tired.”  I felt breath drop away as I was roller-coastered up into the nurse’s arms and then down into the bassinette. 

Of course I hadn’t yet heard that “perfect love casts out fear,” but I was an early victim of its antithesis, that fear casts out perfect love.  In heaven I had been accustomed to having Love-Energy flow freely between me and God.  The day I was born, fear impeded my connection with that love.

It is probably accurate to say, for all of us, that our ability to receive pure love is impaired at birth.  This is not God’s fault, because He-She continues to send a perfectly constant flow of Love-Energy to us wherever we are.  The fault lies in the fact that the love flow between mortals is imperfect and inconstant, and we quickly become victims of that fact.

We all have love-receivers and love-transmitters built into our souls, but they are in various states of disrepair.  A tiny baby probably has as pure a receiver as there is in the world, so at first I wasn’t to blame for love’s interruption.  The transmitters of doctor, nurse, mother, etc. were at fault.  They passed messages to me which damaged my receiver that very first day.

The doctor may have learned in medical school that to be more than “objective” invites unwanted rapport between patient and doctor; or he may have learned in practice that it invites  law suits.  He was certainly not aware that God’s pure love flowing through him would allow him to execute his skills perfectly and lovingly.  The nurse had probably forgotten the purity of her desire to ease the pain of others, which had motivated her to become a nurse in the first place.  So instead of finding joy in making my first moments warm, she passed along her own personal problems and fears to me.

And Mother.  Poor Mother.  Any love energy I received from her had to get through her Victorian attitudes of propriety and reserve; through her unquestioning acceptance of the scientific fads of that particular era, which discouraged early nurturing and “too much touching;” through the genes that made her short-tempered and hypertensive; through the loneliness of being married to a workaholic who was rarely home; and through the frustrations of her unfulfilled potential.  In short, it had to get through all her private wrestlings with the “lone and dreary world.”

When I consider it rationally, I know my mother loved me.  But I can’t remember feeling her love very often or hearing the reassuring words I love you spoken.  With the unrelenting judgment of a child, I decided, It doesn’t matter how much you know somebody loves you, if you don’t feel it, it just plain doesn’t count.

Now, as an adult, I know why that was a correct decision.  Feeling is the means by which we recognize we have been touched by the vibrations of Love-Energy.  There need be no question about whether the brain, the heart, or some other part of the body is the instrument of that feeling – they all tune in and respond together.  The touch of love, when it is freely received, is felt by the total self.  That feeling is a montage of joy, light, purity, enthusiasm, peace, healing, motivation, inspiration . . . the best of everything!  And it always sparks a positive response.

Most mothers truly love their children.  How sad it is that that important message is not convincingly conveyed because of damaged transmitters and receivers.  Fear was the first thing that damaged mine. 

CHAPTER TWO

A Child Discovers Pain

My big brother, Teddy, caught diphtheria when he was two, and he never recovered.  He didn’t die right away – just slowly deteriorated.  I remember him only as an invalid, lying on a cot in Mother’s room, and I remember the pretty lavender casket when he died.  I was seven; he was fourteen.  It was not a great loss for me, since I hardly knew Teddy.  Mother had tried to protect me from the reality of my brother’s illness by never talking about it and by keeping me away from him.  But she hadn’t protected me.  I felt Mother’s pain as a great emptiness in me which I didn’t understand.  After Teddy died, Mother continued the same pattern, imagining she was protecting me from her pain by avoiding the subject.  It still didn’t work.  I became an innocent victim of her pain. 

My younger brother, Rene, also became a victim.  She would call him “Teddy,” unconscious of her mistake.  He grew up feeling that somehow he didn’t have a right to exist, because he wasn’t Teddy.  He didn’t know he had a value of his own, and neither did I.  I certainly had no idea that I was good – that God had created me and said, She is good.

Turning to me one day, Mother said, “Lila dear, take Rene with you and go out and get me some mint for the punch.”  Holding hands, we ran out into the yard, catching summer sunshine on our faces, blue sky in our eyes and cool grass on our bare toes.  The fragrance of spearmint on the ditch bank conspired to keep us dawdling.  We watched a robin play tug-o-war with a worm on the lawn.  We pondered the changing shape of a vagrant cloud, and marveled that sweet peas could come in so many colors.  We pinched yellow snapdragons onto our ears for earrings. 

“Lila Gay Nelson, get in here this minute, and bring Teddy with you!  What in the world are you doing?  I need that mint now!”  My heart constricted with fear.  Rene looked bewildered.  He never could get used to being called Teddy.  Hastily breaking off some mint, I ran to the house where Mother continued her tirade.  “You just can’t be depended on for anything!  Wait ‘til your daddy gets home, and he’ll give you a good spanking!”  Mother didn’t often carry through with that threat, but she reported my short-comings to Daddy often enough that for the rest of the day I was tense with fear of his homecoming.      

The fact is that the few times my father actually did spank me were not nearly as traumatic to me as was the intimidating affect of Mother’s yelling day after day.  In stingingly subtle ways Mother conveyed to me the message that she would much rather be in heaven with Teddy than on earth with me – especially when I didn’t mind her.

Now she turned away to wash the mint, glancing heavenward, uttering, “I am so tired of this life . . .  Teddy, go pick up your toys, dear.”  The energy of love which Rene and I desperately needed to flow through her to us seemed to flow instead to Teddy in heaven.

At that time I had no way of knowing that pure Love-Energy, as soon as it encounters a barrier, or something that adulterates it, does simply return to its source, which is God.  But I interpreted correctly that Mother’s love was going to heaven instead of to me.

Probably Mother’s own pain and not lack of love for me had adulterated Love Energy and stopped its flow between us.  Her pain.  And my fear.  Both were responsible for the fact that we were unable to receive God’s love – but neither of us could see that.  Many years later, when my own child had a broken heart and denied my attempts to help, I began to understand how our stubborn behavior must frustrate God, and I wrote a poem about it:

CHASM

                                    Somewhere,

                                    close enough to call,

                                    you are hurting

                                    with terrible, anguished pain.

                                         But you do not call.

                                    Only your pain calls.

                                    It cries across the empty chasm

                                    where you have separated yourself

                                    and vibrates through my being

                                    as if it were my own pain.

                                         Love makes it my pain.

                                                I would hold you in the comfort of my arms.

                                                I would heal you with the wholeness of my love.

                                                Why won’t you come to love?

                                                Why do you choose to hurt alone?

                                                     Why must I love alone?

                                    Dear God

                                    Is this how we turn away from your love

                                    when you would heal us –

                                    because we cannot believe in such love?

                                         Do you also love alone?

                                    Oh God, forgive our stubborn lack of faith.

                                    We come to you running.

                                    Receive and heal us, God of Love!

                                    Let us be together.

                                    Let there be no more

                                         alone.

Many years later, too, in the process of my search to understand pure love, I looked up the definition of “adulterate” in the dictionary.  It said:  “To corrupt, debase, or make impure by the addition of a foreign or inferior substance.”   Then I realized that that is what my Mother, myself, and my child had done – what all mankind does with God’s love.  We manage to water it down, make it less than it is.  Actually, we can’t really change God’s love because pure love returns to God at the point at which its power is denied.  The thing we do is adulterate even further the less-than-pure positive energy which flows through people, which we call love, but which is only the nearest thing to love we have experienced.

As we adulterate love, we adulterate ourselves.  As love becomes less, we become less.  That is what must have happened in the Garden of Eden – humans lost touch with love’s purity.

At one point in mankind’s evolution the word “love” was categorized by the Greeks into three types:  “philia” (brotherly love), “eros” (sexual love) and “agape” (love of God).  This must have been an attempt to reconcile the confusing and contradictory ways the word is used.  Being aware, however, that brotherly affection, sexual attraction and worshipful adoration are not the same thing, does not clarify for anyone the true definition of love.  In fact it splinters our perceptions of the pure energy even further.  Instead of recognizing love as a living energy which has the power to bring all love relationships to perfect fulfillment, order and harmony, we try, unsuccessfully, to separate our feelings of love into disciplined categories – still another form of adulteration.

I wonder, when God said, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” if He and She could have meant, “Don’t adulterate the pure energy of our love as it flows through you.”

CHAPTER THREE

Jealousy:  Meeting the Monster

One day when I was nine, Mother brought home a new baby brother.  “Aren’t we lucky to get a beautiful little boy?” she asked me, as she smiled at the wrinkled, red face.  When I seemed less than enthusiastic, she said, “Babies are a lot of work.  You can be my best helper, because you are such a big girl now.”

Deciding it might be almost as much fun as having a new doll, I soon began to imagine all the things I could do to help with baby brother.  A little later when I heard the baby fussing, I followed through on my good intentions and started to pick him up from his basket.

“What are you doing?” asked Mother in a harsh whisper, as my arm was jerked away.

“I . . . I was going to change his diaper.”

“Can’t you see I’m trying to get him to sleep?  Don’t ever touch him without asking me!”

The message I received was that my help – which to me was the same as I, myself – was acceptable only on Mother’s strict terms and that her conditions would always be determined by the fact that the baby was more important to her than I was.  Little twinges of jealousy shot through me.  I didn’t know to call it “jealousy.”  I just felt as if I shouldn’t like that baby, who had certainly done nothing to deserve my mother’s love.  I had already lost some of my identity, and being jealous of Tommy damaged what little self-esteem I still had.

One of the tragedies of this encounter was that I learned to perceive loving as a conditional act, which is a sure way to adulterate it and send it on its way back to God.

Later in the week, when Mother came home from the most expensive store in town with new clothes for the baby and nothing for me, I cried, “You don’t love me!  You just love Tommy.  And I don’t love you or Tommy!”  I was a quick learner – an eye for an eye.  You make your love conditional, Mother, and so will I.  Bring me a new dress and then I’ll love you. 

Mother scolded, “What a selfish thing to say.  Of course you love Tommy.”  Suddenly I was backed into the corner, defending myself against being a selfish liar, when all I wanted was to feel loved.

“I hate you!  I hate you!” I screamed.

Perhaps becoming aware of my confused resentment, but not understanding the roots of my pain, Mother rubbed salt in my wound with, “Well, I love you,” which made me feel ashamed, not loved.  I picked up the baby’s bottle from the counter and threw it on the floor.

“Go to your room!  And don’t come out until you’ve learned how to behave!”

How does a child, alone in her room, learn good behavior?  Of course I didn’t.  I sulked with my back to the window so I couldn’t see the sky, and I convinced myself of three lies:  Mother didn’t love me; I wouldn’t love her or Tommy until she did love me; and love is conditional.  How unfortunate that jealousy made me a “quick learner” of such untruths.

Jealousy causes major dysfunction in the instruments in our souls which receive and give love.  This destructive emotion can be so powerful that it totally shuts down the love mechanism; but manifest in any degree it restricts the flow of love.

Everyone needs to be loved, and everyone needs to love – those are rather well-accepted facts of life.  The problem is that we need Pure Love, and the love which is offered to us is usually a watered-down kind that simply can’t meet our needs.  It is Pure Love, too, that we need to give in order to find fulfillment, yet we don’t even know what pure love is.  Often, what we call “needing to be loved” is nothing more than wanting our way.  We say, “You don’t love me unless you . . .” and “I’ll love you if . . .” using punishments and rewards as leverage to get desired results.  But conditioning our acceptance of others on their performance isn’t real love.

We mortals have decided upon inaccurate perceptions of God by projecting our own manipulative behavior upon Diety.  Rather that seeing God as He/She is, we see God as we are.  We imagine (because we measure worthiness by how many “points” a person earns through good behavior) that God puts us in competition for His/Her love in the same way; hence, the invention of a “jealous God.”  We imagine (because we withdraw our acceptance and punish them when others behave in ways we don’t like) that God withdraws His/Her acceptance and punishes us when we don’t keep the “commandments”; hence, the invention of a “vengeful God.”  We imagine (because we withhold our rewards from others until they do our bidding) that God withholds His/Her love until we perform properly; so we have no perception of a God who loves unconditionally. 

The truth is that God is not jealous, vengeful or demanding – but rather, forgiving, fair and generous.  God loves us perfectly.  A constant, uninterrupted supply of pure Love-Energy issues forth from God to us, all the time, with no conditions placed on it.  One reason we cannot receive that love is that we do not perceive it accurately. We have called God’s advice “commandments” and then have used our own conditional interpretations of that advice to pile up precariously contradictory stacks of laws and contingent letters-of-the-law, which we try to enforce with whip-cracking threats.  These illusory, unworkable masses of worthless religious dogma have nothing to do with God, who must weep over our self-inflicted misery.  Father and Mother in Heaven did not give us “commandments” to be used as measuring sticks by which to earn their love, but as methods for keeping love’s passageways open between us.  They told us the consequences of breaking those “commandments,” not to threaten us, but in hopes we would use that information to help us keep love’s passageways open between us.  If we choose not to follow God’s counsel, we are responsible for interrupting the love supply.  God never cuts it off.

CHAPTER FOUR

Enter Guilt

When I was in the seventh grade I had my first experience with falling in love.  Oh, I  had been peripherally in love before, with movie stars and heroes in books, but that was all fantasy.  This was real.  I could see him every day in fifth period when I went to music class, and I thought about him all the time in between.  The fact that he was my teacher, probably twice my age, and married too, with a baby, was irrelevant.  I loved him with a passion which consumed me.

What is that all-consuming passion?  It is the pure energy of God’s love going through one; not just into, but through.  Its passage quickens the senses with a tingling light which illuminates the beloved in prismed perfection.  The beloved, in his/her fallen state, is certainly not perfect . . . but one’s vision is perfect at the moment of the energy’s infusion, allowing a view of the beloved’s true, divine nature.  It is only for a moment that the energy remains pure; but its impact is so great that one lives in the shimmering consciousness of it for a long time – depending on how experienced one is in recognizing its eventual adulteration.

I was totally inexperienced in seventh grade, and my passion lasted all year.  When school was out, I grieved, and wrote a few timid letters, one of which he answered.

It is important for me to emphasize that sex was not part of this experience.  In the first place, I knew nothing about it, and my innate sense of propriety and rightness prevailed.  The greatest hope I cherished in my passion-filled little heart was that somehow it could be arranged for me to go to his home as a baby sitter.  I can’t remember what I wrote to him.  In my innocence I could easily have “hung myself” (from the viewpoint of a lust-conscious adult).

                        Dear Mr. Saxony,

I miss you.  Summer is boring without you.  Remember the day you dropped me off at my piano lesson?  It was fun in your car.

How is your little baby, and your wife?  Do you ever need a baby tender?  I wish I could do it.

                                                            Yours truly,

I don’t remember what he wrote back either – except that hearing from him was a miracle, and my heart tiptoed on the ceiling, spilling magic over everything.  My mother, the Victorian adult, failed to recognize the magic.

“Aunt Hattie told me you got a letter while you were visiting her last week.”

We were making Mother’s bed, and I silently continued smoothing the sheets.

“Well?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Who was it from?”

“If Aunt Hattie knew about the letter, she already told you.”

“Do you still have it?”

Did I still have it?  It was my most precious possession!  I quietly answered, “Yes.”

“Go get it.  I want to read it.”

I glanced at her, incredulous.  She really meant it!  My face felt suddenly hot, my stomach sick.  She had no right!  I didn’t move.

“Go get it!”

The letter was in a little chest in my room.  I took it out and read it one more time.  But the thought of Mother reading it poisoned the words so they didn’t say the same things anymore.  I felt like a criminal as I crept down the stairs.

Mother took the letter and read it with no comment.  Then she crumpled it in her hand, lifted the lid of the coal stove, and threw it into the flames.

“Don’t ever write to him again!” she commanded.  Something in her tone of voice caused me to feel dirty and evil.

I obeyed Mother’s edict because I was an obedient child.  But she couldn’t control my thoughts, and almost every evening that summer I sat out on the front porch secretly praying that (perhaps looking for a baby sitter, God?) Mr. Saxony would drive up our roadway.  Inside my heart I feared I had done something terribly bad, and I didn’t want to be bad, so after awhile my feelings of guilt blotted out that love.

How does a child who hasn’t really done anything wrong, who has no experience with the sins parents fear, get burdened with so much guilt?  What happens in the place where Love-Energy radiated, when it is gone?  Whatever fills that void it is surely less than love.  How much less depends on what stops the flow.  In this case, when God’s Love-Energy came pouring through me, pure and free, it encountered what is sometimes called innocence, but what, in the setting of a fallen world, must eventually be faced as ignorance.  My own innocent ignorance diffused the love.  It was replaced at first with an illusion of love.  Love is so powerful that even when the pure energy is gone, its residual effects may remain, allowing us to shape illusions which sometimes affect our behavior for years.  In this case, the illusion remained through all those months of idol (idle?) worship until it was shattered by my mother’s fear and my consequent guilt.

I can see now that my mother, protected and prudish, could not have had much personal experience with real evil, but as an avid reader she knew enough about it.  She knew there were men who would take advantage of little girls, and she assumed that a teacher who would respond to a foolish child’s “crush” on him might be one of them.  She didn’t explain that to me.  She just threw away my precious letter.

Mother probably didn’t intend to damage my sensitive spirit; she probably didn’t even realize I was hurt.  She was quite oblivious to my inner being – whether by choice or not, I can’t know.  For a long time I resented that, needing to be understood by her.  In my heart I blamed her because she was not all I wanted my mother to be.  Every time she disappointed me, I chinked more mortar into my grudge-wall.

We both damned the flow of love between us.  Was she more responsible than I?  Ultimately, it doesn’t matter because having love shut off is always a tragedy for everyone concerned.

CHAPTER FIVE

Prejudice and Pride

My parents were religious people.  Our entire lifestyle centered around the church – “the only true church.”        “I don’t drink and I don’t chew, and I don’t play with the kids that do,” was our general arrogant attitude.

During all my growing-up years my father was a presiding church authority of one rank or another.  I took for granted my own prestige as his child, feeling just a little bit superior in the overall human scheme, but at the same time feeling quite unworthy in God’s eyes.

I was proud of Dad’s authority, but I was afraid of him.  Once there was a party at school that I very much wanted to go to, a pep rally for the basketball team or something.  Dad, of course, said no.  One didn’t argue with him.  He knew he was right.  I ran to my room and slammed the door.  Dad was hardly ever home.  He worked for a salary all day and worked gratis for the church at night.  Usually he issued his edicts and left Mother to carry them out, but on this occasion he followed me to my room and came in.

“I don’t want you to be part of a rowdy pep rally,” he said.

“But everybody’s going!”  I initiated the standard teen-age debate and expected the standard parental rebuttal, “No, everyone’s not.”  But instead my dad said, with an emphasis I shall never forget, “You aren’t everybody!”

Now that was a profound truth.  I have since learned that each of us is – like a snowflake – one of a kind.  Dad’s ensuing lecture, however, took a different turn.  He impressed me, not with my personal value, but with the fortunate circumstances into which I had fallen:  being a member of the true church, being a free American and a descendant of brave, industrious pioneers, etc.  And then he laid on me the obligation to prove myself worthy of those blessings. 
    

Since most of the people who were going to the party fell into those same general categories, Dad’s argument was not a valid reason for me to stay home – but I did not figure that out for a long time.  With convoluted inconsistency, I felt ashamed for not measuring up to what God expected of me, at the same time felt self-righteously proud to stay home and prove I was better than the “sinners” who did go to the pep rally.

I was guilt-ridden at my lack of perfection, yet I never really thought of myself as a sinner.  On Sundays, sitting in meeting singing,  “Oh it is wonderful, that He should care for me enough to die for me . . .”  my heart responded with a curious sadness.  I didn’t understand why those mean people killed Jesus, or what it had to do with me.  I took the sacrament and fidgeted in my seat.  The sermons always had a modicum of hellfire-and-damnation thrown in to keep the requisite amount of guilt flowing through the congregation, but they were mainly recitations of things we must do in order to earn eternal life:  attend all church meetings, pay tithing, don’t smoke or drink, say prayers, keep all the commandments, etc.  Easy.  I could handle those things.  I was already doing them.  It was the sinners, not I, who had to worry.  Someday I would be a missionary and convert them.  When we sang, “Shall the youth of Zion falter in defending truth and right?”  I shouted “No!” along with the chorus, feeling comfortably self-righteous.

There was a good-looking boy in my algebra class who talked to me one day.

“Did you have trouble with last night’s assignment?”

“Yes!  It was awful.”

“I had to ask my dad for help.”

“Your dad?” I questioned, not relating to that resource.

  

“Yeah.  He’s an engineer.  He knows a lot about math.”

“My dad’s never home to help me.”

“Does he work at night?”

“You could say that,” I smiled (a little smugly).  “He’s always at a church meeting.  You know.”

Just then the teacher rapped for attention, so we didn’t finish the conversation.  After that though, I watched for Greg in the halls and hoped he would say “Hi” (I was too bashful to ever speak first), and I looked forward to algebra class with a new interest.

One day he said, “Ever listen to the Hit Parade?”

I nodded, “Deep Purple is my favorite.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.  “How long’s it been Number One now?”

“I think it’ll set a record next week.”

“Do you like to dance?”

“I love to.”

“Well . . . uh . . . maybe someday . . . uh . . . we could . . . “

“Greg, can you answer that question?” the teacher interrupted.  Greg was embarrassed.  But I couldn’t help wondering how he meant to finish his sentence. 

A few days later I found out, when he slipped a pale blue envelope into my algebra book as he left class.  On the linen stationery inside he had printed in fancy lettering:

                                    I have watched you, like a star,

                                    bright and beautiful, afar,

                                    wondering if your mystery

                                    ever could be known to me.

                             Will you go with me to the prom next week?

                                                                         Greg

I was overwhelmed?  A gentleman, and a poet, and he thought I was beautiful!  Oh, I would love to go with him to the prom!  But I knew there wasn’t a chance – my dad wouldn’t hear of it.  How could I tell Greg and still keep him for a friend?

Secretly I showed the note to my best friend, Margaret, and confided to her my dilemma.

“Yikes!” she exclaimed.  “You can’t go out with him!”

“I know, but I sure wish Dad would let me.”

“I mean you don’t want to go out with him?”

“Why not?”

“He doesn’t even belong to the church.”

“How do you know?”

“He lives over by me.  His parents smoke and drink.  I’ll bet he smokes when he’s not at school.”

“Really?”  Suddenly all the good and special things I had felt for Greg were wiped out by this second-hand information.  I had been taught that liquor and tobacco were not good for the body (which was true) and that people who used them were not fit to be associated with (which was not true).  I never had been taught to separate sins from sinners, so Greg suddenly became a “bad guy.”  The fact that he didn’t belong to the church (THE church meant OUR church) automatically made him ineligible as a friend.

With this bigoted attitude I had no qualms about answering his note:

Greg, sorry that I can’t go out with you.  My dad won’t let me date

people who smoke and don’t belong to our church.

I wasn’t even honest enough to admit to him that it was my own choice, but I blamed it on my dad.  With the best of intentions, believing I was being righteous, I had committed three major sins against love:  conditional acceptance, bigotry and dishonesty.

After that, Greg moved his seat away from mine in algebra and carefully avoided me in the halls.  When the school paper came out a few days later, I noticed an editorial with Greg’s by-line titled, “Judge Not That Ye Be Not Judged.”  It discussed the pain of being an outsider and the struggle of trying to win acceptance in a society where the predominant church guaranteed automatic rejection of all who did not conform to its precepts.  It also pointed out the destructiveness of gossip and its damaging results in the lives of both the victim and the gossiper. I knew it was his response to my behavior, and it agitated in me a vague uneasiness.
Was it possible I could have been wrong?  I tried not to think about it.

As I grew in the church’s acceptable ways, Sunday School lessons mentioned the Battle of Armageddon, pictured as a last great war where the whole world would be fighting – blood and gore and dead bodies and cataclysmic special-effects like a spectacularly grandiose Cecil B. deMille movie – with our church’s faithful members being the only survivors.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor plunged us into a war which fit that description.  I, personally, didn’t experience the blood and gore, and piously took the credit for that, imagining it was a result of my righteousness.  I also began to wonder how it was possible to love one’s enemies.

Little did I know that the Battle of Armageddon was getting underway right inside me.  No fanfare, no bright explosions, no gaudy costumes – just a frequent, nagging sense of contra-diction between my self-righteous pride and my conscience.

Eventually I learned that the real Battle of Armageddon is a solitary, personal inner war.  The adversaries are the two selves within us:  one, the offspring of God, and the other, the offspring of fallen mortals.  The God in us desires to destroy the barriers which interfere with Love-Energy’s free flow and keep us separated from God.  The mortal in us, however, is too proud even to recognize our need for God.

Pride is one of the most difficult barriers for mortals to penetrate because we rarely admit to it in ourselves.  We see it as a fault only in others.  The sin of pride was probably at the root of Jesus’ mote and beam story.  With the huge “beam” of pride in our own eye, we are incapable of focusing on our own sins and understanding our need to be saved from them.  Instead, our pride projects our own sins outward, and we see them as bigger-than-life faults in others.  We are convinced that others must repent, but we cannot see our own urgent need to repent.

Greg turned out to be a fine writer and a crusader for many good causes.  He would have added a wonderfully warm dimension to my lonely life.  How sad that my sins of pride and prejudice deflected his innocent offering of love, so that the goodness in me couldn’t respond to the goodness in him.

CHAPTER SIX

A New Twist – Perversion

My name is Lila Gay.  Lila was a unique name at the time.  I’m not sure where Gay came from, except that it went well with my older sister’s name, which was Joy.  My mother called me “Lila Gay” on formal occasions, but most of the time I was called just ordinary “Lila.”  That name has been recycled and is “in” again now, but I didn’t like it when I was young.

At the dramatically profound age of fourteen, making my grand entrance into high school, the name “Lila” seemed dull, unimaginative and ordinary, like a fade-into-the-woodwork fraidy- cat mouse (which I was).  On the other hand “Gay” evoked for me images of a sparkling, beautiful, refreshingly lively and charismatic mystery-princess (which I wanted to be).  Thinking perhaps that by changing my name I could change my personality and suddenly be popular, I started going by “Gay.”  The change was resisted somewhat by my family, a few of whom have stubbornly refused to this day to change their “Lila” habit, but generally it was quite easy.  In high school there were new teachers and new students who didn’t know me by any name.  They accepted “Gay” as a fade-into-the-woodwork mouse.

Fraidy-catting along into my senior year, I fell in love with another teacher, a woman this time.  In retrospect, I can see that in the initial illuminating bolt of energy which passed through me, I was feeling the pure love of a woman for another woman, the love which opens one’s heart to perceive eternal God-Woman’s wisdom, the love I now feel for my daughters. 

At any rate, God sent a shaft of pure Love Energy through me to focus on my office practice teacher.  Again, my ignorance quickly turned it into an illusion.  One good thing came of it though.  My obsession to please her resulted in my becoming rather proficient at typing and shorthand.  It also kept my mind off the fact that I wasn’t popular with the boys, which was just as well, since strict Danish Dad still didn’t want me to date.

Not until after I was forty did I hear the word “lesbian” and learn (more or less) what it meant.  Then I had serious suspicions that my dear friend, the lady schoolteacher, who lived with another “old maid,” had been one.  Had I been her innocent, ignorant victim?  Each day, in her private office during her free period, she greeted me with a “holy” kiss.  It was holy for me; I don’t know what it was for her.  Did all the energy I expended on her, feeling it as love, meet perversion and diffuse before it ever reached its object?

I remember one April day when violets spread their purple carpet under chiffon-green willow skirts, I spent all afternoon and evening picking the tiny amethysts, one by one, until I had a huge, fragrant love-drenched bowlful to give her.  It was an honest offering of my love.  I don’t know how she really received it.  I imagined it the way I wanted it to be – perfectly bittersweet, because I would soon be leaving her to go away to college.  If she perverted it,

at least the Love Energy want back to its source – to God, who knows what to do with love-drenched violets.

Perversion.  That is another term which explains how we prevent God’s Love Energy from flowing through us.  According to Webster, the word means:  (1) to cause to turn away from what is good or true or morally right; (2) to divert to a wrong end or purpose: (3) to misuse; (4) to twist the meaning of.  Keeping these definitions in mind, one is led to the conclusion that nothing has met with more perversion than love as it relates to sexual intimacy.

I believe that male-female sexual union in its highest, holiest, perfect consummation is a sacred act of God which creates life and the Love-Energy to sustain life.  Therefore, I disagree with the theory that “sex” was Adam and Eve’s sin.  Feelings of sexual love between a man and a woman may come from God and can be good, true and right, if practiced in the moral order of God.

Love between two women, or two men, may also be a glorious and precious gift, a holy relationship very much in the order of God.  Male-male or female-female communications may perhaps achieve an even closer understanding in some areas than male-female communications.  Sexual intimacy is not one of those areas.

Attempts of lesbians and homosexuals to unite sexually are perversions by every definition.  They are not morally right; they divert the sex act to unnatural purpose; they misuse all bodies involved; they twist the meaning of love.  For the practitioners of sodomy to try to justify their behavior by asserting that all men who ever loved each other were homosexuals and all women who did so were lesbians, is another egregious perversion.  Rape, incest, prostitution, infidelity, promiscuity, pornography, etc. must be added to the list of terrible sexual perversions.  Though many people have distorted the good purpose of a great many things besides sex, it is certainly the most glaring example of perversion.

Soon after “lesbian” entered my vocabulary, the once dependable dictionary was attacked by a cocky generation who intended to change the world by throwing away established rules and redefining words.  Way back in high school I had learned that I couldn’t change my world by changing my name; and now I knew that young rebels couldn’t change their world – at least not for the better – by redefining morality.  I was deeply troubled, hurt and incensed that one of the words they succeeded in perverting was my name – my beautiful, charismatic-princess name, Gay.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This chapter was written in 1989, before I became aware that it is “politically incorrect” to suggest anything negative about lesbians or homosexuals.  However, it is still one of the things I do not understand.  One of the first questions I am going to ask God (if He/She allows me an interview) is why so many brilliant, talented, artistic people are “sexually oriented” this way.  I can understand men loving men and women loving women with pure love.  I cannot understand the sex part; it seems unnatural and wrong to me.  It is accurate to say, though, that the perversion of sexual relations in any form is more responsible than any other thing for the loss of Love-Energy in today’s world. 

(I am still angry that the word “Gay” has been successfully redefined.)

CHAPTER SEVEN

Lust:  Confronting Love’s Counterfeit

As a teenager – because it was a requirement of the church’s youth program, once a year I attended “Chastity Night.”  It was a segregated meeting (girls only).  Local artists would passionately intone musical renditions of David’s 24^th Psalm – “He that hath clean hands and a pure heart,” and Solomon’s proverb about “Who can find a virtuous woman?” or songs on the same subject.  Then a special woman guest would speak confidentially to us about dating.  Sometimes she brought a little fashion show of stylish but modest clothing, to reinforce her message that it was a girl’s responsibility to never tempt boys by revealing any of her body.  We were warned against petting and necking, and impressed with the suggestion that a truly virtuous woman would save her kisses for marriage.  There were pictures of lovely brides and spired temples.  There were flowers, pink punch, and cookies.

Annually, at these events, I received the distinct impression that if I followed the prescribed instructions, I would be able to avoid all pitfalls and find myself worthy of some fine young man who would take me to the temple to be married, and we would live happily ever after.  Unfortunately, there was always a discreet vagueness in the instructions, and it was never deemed proper to be specific about the “pitfalls.”

And that was the extent of my sex education.  Somewhere along the line, and I’m bewildered about how she managed it, since I never heard her use the word, Mother had instilled in me that “sex” was a dirty word.  That word was avoided at Chastity Night too, so any idea that sex could be acceptable, or that it was even related to chastity, was foreign to me.  No wonder my dad didn’t want me to go to college.

“You don’t need to go,” he argued.  “You can get a job as a secretary right now.”

Mother intervened, “There are more reasons for going to college than just getting a job.”

“The main reason for college is to get trained so you can earn a living, and Lila already . . . “

“Maybe I don’t want to be a secretary,” I suggested.

“Nonsense!  You can’t let all the time you spent practicing those skills just go to waste.”

“It won’t be wasted.  I can take notes in shorthand, and type my papers, and . . . “

Mother came in with the clincher, “If she doesn’t go, the scholarship will be wasted.”

My practical father couldn’t bear that thought.  He hesitated, and Mother pressed her advantage.  “Remember, you and I met on that campus.”

Dad couldn’t argue with that fact, but he used the ammunition it brought to his mind.  “She hasn’t even started dating yet!”

Certainly not because I haven’t wanted to, I thought.

  

“And she isn’t old enough!”

“Dad, I’m seventeen.”

I’m not sure what reasoning Mother used with Dad in private, but I did go to college, with an abundance of advice and very little money.

There weren’t many college boys in those days (1943), because all eligible young men had gone to war, but many servicemen were taking their basic training on campus, living in the dorms.  We girls considered it our patriotic duty to go to the canteen and dance with them on Saturday nights.  I’m sure my father would not have considered it my patriotic duty, but the college was a hundred miles away from his watchful eye, so for the first time in my life I did what I wanted to do.

“Hi.  You wanna dance?”

“Sure.”

He was tall and blond, with a big Roman nose, and he looked good in his bell-bottoms.  We moved onto the floor and he said, “Do you live around here, or are you a college student?”

Nervous laugh.  “Well, yes, both.  I mean – uh, my home is down the road a ways, but I live here while I go to college.”

Long silence as we moved to the music.  He was a good dancer.

“Where are you from?”

“Pennsylvania.  Harrisburg.”

“A long way from here.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you get homesick?”  That was a stupid question.

He rose to the occasion.  “A big tough sailor?  Who ya kiddin’?” with a rueful smile.  So I knew, sure, he was homesick.

After a strenuous jitterbug he said, “Do you want to go outside for some air?”

Immediately red flags went up, relics from Chastity Night.  What if he tried to kiss me?

“Uh – it’s kind of cold.”

That was the wrong thing to say.  He put his arm around me, saying, “I’ll keep you warm,” and guided me to the door.

The sky was crisp with stars.  A breeze carried the scent of apple blossoms on its cool breath.  I was glad for the arm around me and melted into the mood.  Everything seemed magic and unreal, as if a page in one of my old fairy tale books had come alive . . .

. . . the princess laughed and turned her face to meet his eyes . . . deep pools full of mystery and . . . passion? . . . he bent his head and kissed her perfectly on the mouth . . . as the clock struck twelve . . .

I was panic-stricken!  He had kissed me!  For a frantic moment I stared at him with terror in my eyes, then tore myself away and ran home.

My roommate wasn’t there.  The dance at the canteen wouldn’t be over until the clock really had struck twelve.  How could I wait that long?  I had to tell somebody!  The next hour dragged on.  Finally she came in the door and I was too ashamed to say anything.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing . . . “

“Why didn’t you wait for me?”

“I, uh – oh Betty!  I turned to the cold wall and cried.

“What is it?  What happened?”

My voice was muffled into my shoulder, “He kissed me.”

“What?”

It was the end.  I turned to face her and blurted out, “He kissed me and now I’m going to have a baby and what will my parents do?  Oh, my life is ruined?  Everything is ruined!”

“Back up a minute.  He kissed you and you’re going to have a baby?”

“Yes!” I wailed.

“You can’t have a baby from kissing.  What else did you do?”

“You can’t?  Kissing doesn’t make babies?”

“Of course not.”

“Are you sure?

“Sure.”

I was too relieved to think to ask her what does make them.  Perhaps she didn’t know.  She had been brought up like me, been through the Chastity Night school too.  But then she had already had two years of college, even ended up being valedictorian of her class.  She probably knew more than she told me then.

I never saw the handsome young man from Harrisburg again.  He was shipped out the next week.  But I have deeply considered what happened to love that night.  Until then, in my heart I had romantically believed that kissing meant loving, but I didn’t love the sailor.  I didn’t even know him, and he probably saw me as just another conquest who accidentally escaped.  Even though I seriously believed that kissing before marriage was a sin, I wanted to be kissed anyway.  I wanted it so much and so blindly that I forgot about consequences.  What feeling welled up in me so strongly, there in the fragrant night that all my powers of reasoning dissolved and let fantasy rule?

Now I know that it was lust, one of the greatest deterrents to love.  Lust usually comes wrapped in innocently attractive packages.  Sometimes, in hardened sinners, it’s a black, driving “I’m going to take what I want and I don’t give a damn about you” kind of emotion; but in most of us it presents itself subtly, disarming us with rationalizations so appealing that we never associate them with an ugly word like “lust.”  My mother was afraid of it.  My dad was afraid of it.  The Chastity Night ladies were afraid of it.  But no one had ever named it or defined it for me.

Nowadays it is difficult to believe that anyone could be as ignorant as I was back then.  I laugh about it myself sometimes.  Then I weep.  Because turning sex into a spectator sport hasn’t solved any of the real problems.  One can turn on the TV just about any hour of the day or night and get explicit demonstrations of everything from how to swallow each other while kissing to what goes on under the sheets.  Such exploitation and utter openness about sex has only encouraged the avoidance of responsibility in intimate relations.  It certainly has not done away with lust.  The most terrible consequence is that many people, both young and old, are tantalized into imagining that lust is love – perhaps the worst perversion of all – for to call lust “love” is a lie which will destroy any relationship.

If there is to be trust between lovers, and freedom from perversion, God must be recognized as the source of true love.

Love and lust cannot co-exist.  One reason is that lust – the drive for self-gratification – is always motivated by selfishness.  God’s motive in sending Love Energy to us is perfect unselfishness, and in order for the love to remain pure, our motives too, must be unselfish.  Love can flow freely through us on its way to someone else (mortal or God), but if we try to keep love in us, selfishness short-circuits the energy and it goes back to God.  If we let the love flow through us, we will radiate an inner glow which makes the universe of man brighter.

One mystical facet of Love Energy requires that it always flow outward, in order, magically, to remain inside one.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Subtlety of Selfishness

Whatever our upbringing, it is hard to escape becoming selfish.  If we are deprived, selfishness grows out of our need to survive; if we are pampered, it thrives on our demands for more.  It seems to me that selfishness is a manifestation of low self-esteem, or a lack of knowledge about one’s true self.  It is an attempt to pull energy into one’s self as protection against the insecurities instilled there by fear, pain, guilt, etc.  Tragically, it always backfires, because Love-Energy is deflected by selfishness, and pure love is the only thing which can reveal the whole person in us and restore in us a self-image capable of positive, outgoing, unselfish behavior patterns.

Like most people, as I grew up I measured the world around me by my own barometer – so conscious of myself that I was unconscious of my selfishness.  This was never manifest so glaringly as on my wedding day.

Yes, my Prince Charming did come along.  I fell madly in love with a big-man-on-campus who fit the model of maleness I had been programmed to accept.  In the ways that he didn’t match my own personal ideal, love’s illusions covered the difference.  I had fantasized that I would marry an Englishman who spoke with the elegantly mellifluous accent I adored, since Freddie Bartholomew and Laurence Olivier were two of my early idols.  Actually, my hero turned out to be a country boy with a western twang.  But he didn’t smoke, and he wanted to take me to the temple to be married, just as the Chastity Night ladies had promised.  I wasn’t so “good” that I saved my kisses for marriage.  Thanks to my roommate’s insight that kissing doesn’t cause babies, I enjoyed that bit of intimacy with only slight guilt.  I felt (and was sure I was the first ever to feel) that our union had been predestined in heaven and that we could do no wrong.

Sometime after I fell in love, I sneaked a look at a book hidden among my roommate’s college texts and learned about how babies really are conceived.  Reading about it, I was amazed and overwhelmed.  What a profound expression of love!  My body rejoiced and ached, yearning to be that much a part of the man I loved.  Enough passion to move worlds welled up in me.

 

Of course no worlds moved.  Just the Battle of Armageddon moved inside me – a battle of love versus lust.  I can’t be sure whether my innate yearning to belong to God’s perfect order of love protected me at the crucial moments when the man I loved had little control of his passions, or whether guilt, fear and ignorance controlled me, but I was still a virgin on my wedding night.  Of course it helped that most of our war-time courtship was carried on by snail-mail, since my “hero” had been accepted by the Naval Air Corps and was far away from me serving his country.

During the weeks before my marriage I didn’t actually wear a banner that said I AM THE ONLY IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE WORLD – but I behaved as if I were.  In the past such self-centered attitudes in me had been tempered slightly by a lack of confidence, but now I was THE BRIDE, and I expected all to focus their energy on making my wedding perfect.

My sister, an artist, designed an elegant flower motif for the wedding gown.  Even though, for a considerable time after the war, fabric was extremely difficult to buy, my mother found some satin for the underdress, and hand appliquéd satin flowers on a fine net called “bride’s illusion” – a painstakingly intricate chore – for the overdress.  My father, without complaint (to me at least) paid the bills, decorated the house and yard with flowers, got his camera and film ready.  Cousins sacrificed to make bridesmaid’s dresses.  Aunts and uncles and friends brought china, crystal, silverware, blankets, embroidered dishtowels, lamps, etc. so I could set up housekeeping.  In-laws traveled long distances to attend the reception.  I – I – allowed them the honor of serving me.

I’d like to think that my self-absorption was an attempt to blossom into a more secure state of self-assurance.  But I’m afraid it was just plain selfishness.  That the world did, and should, revolve around me, was something I took for granted.

The wedding day finally arrived.  After a morning in the temple where the ceremony was performed, everyone else went home to get ready for the reception.  My new husband and I took his mother’s car and said we’d be along later.  After a long lunch, a leisurely hour of window shopping and a round-about drive home via the canyon road, we walked in the front door and graced the living room with our presence.

“Where have you been?” my mother shouted.  “Don’t you know there are a million things to do before the reception?”  She laid a tray of freshly-dipped fondant cherries on the table, brushed back a damp lock of hair with her elbow, and began searching for the embossed napkins.  “I know I put them right here.  Lila, can you find the napkins?  Aren’t you going to do one thing to help?”

My father appeared with his camera.  “Where have you been?  If you don’t get into your wedding gown right now, the light will all be gone and we won’t get any pictures!”

My sister rushed from the laundry room, pink formal billowing over her arm.  “I hope you’ll have time to iron your own dress.  The rest of us have to get ready too you know.  Where have you been?”

I couldn’t believe it.  Why were all these people yelling at me and asking where I’d been?  Didn’t they know I had been on cloud nine, where I was supposed to be?  How dare they spoil my wedding day this way?  They ought to have some consideration for my feelings!

Did I have consideration for theirs?  No, I did not.  As I said, my selfishness was at its peak on my wedding day – the day of all days when I imagined that LOVE was at its peak.  How could I have known that love – the real thing – was almost an unknown quantity in my mortal experience?

White dress, temple marriage, pink punch, foil-wrapped fruit cake, gifts and flowers – all were done up in the acceptable fashion.  After the throwing of rice, my husband and I went to a hotel and consummated our marriage.  I gave myself gladly and freely for the joy of my beloved, and my own joy.  For days afterward, I walked around feeling him still in me.  How glorious to be ONE with him!

I lived in the illusion that we were one, but the fact was, we hardly knew each other.  Our physical bodies matched up nicely but our minds hadn’t really met, and our hearts were going their independent ways.  Ah, but the illusion of “happily ever after” . . . it is such a sweet illusion.

Do you know how the dictionary defines “consummate?”  -- “To make perfect.”  A second definition reads, “To complete by sexual intercourse.”  Isn’t that strange?  I am not aware of one single relationship that had been made perfect by sexual intercourse.  The way I know God, though, and His/Her Love Energy, I believe that if pure love were flowing uninhibited, through a man and woman who chose to consummate their sacred love in marriage, WORLDS TRULY WOULD MOVE!

PART TWO

LIVING WITH LOSS

CHAPTER NINE

Sins of the Parents

My whole life, it seemed, had been focused toward the day I would be married.  I saw that day at once as the end and the beginning: not in the sense that God is the end and the beginning of a perfect circle, but in the sense that one story ends and another begins.  It was for me the end of ogres, monsters, cruel stepmothers, wicked kings, dragons, pain, loneliness, fear – in short, of opposition as it had been manifest in my personal experience; and it was the beginning of living happily ever after.

I maintained that lovely illusion for quite awhile after my wedding day, seeing only what I wanted to see, pretending that my dreams of bliss were reality.  When the dragons began rearing their heads again, I was totally unprepared for them.

It was a lovely spring day.  We had gone with our new baby boy to visit Grandma.  While the baby napped, I took a walk to inhale the wonderful air in the apple orchard.

I’ve come to believe that God let us help create things when we were in heaven.  If so, I must have been on the Apple Blossom Committee.  I have such an affinity for them – the shape, texture and tint of the petals, their delicate fragrance, the grace of each pink-and-white-gowned tree, the intoxicating dance of a whole orchard moving in the breeze, apple blossoms tear-dropped with rain.  Romance and apple blossoms have been synonymous in my mind, too, ever since I saw “Maytime” with Nelson Eddy pushing Jeanette McDonald in a swing and passionately singing “Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart, will you love me ever . . . “ while the apple blossoms fluttered down around them.  Once, when I was quite young, Mother gave me a little notebook in which to write at least “one beautiful thing you see every day.”  I didn’t keep a faithful record, but I did write down “the apple blossoms” one spring morning.  Mother always brought lavish bouquets of them into the house when they were in season.

So it came naturally too me, as I walked through my husband’s mom’s orchard that day to pick a huge armful of blossoms.  I buried my face in their fragrance and visualized them doubled in my blue vase in front of the mirror.  Then I brought them in, put them in a fruit jar on Grandma’s table, and went to tend the baby.  The door slammed, heavy boots crossed the kitchen, and I took up the baby to show him to Uncle Lane.

“Who picked these apple blossoms?” came an angry shout.  “They’re going to have to pay for the apples!”

I had always known apple blossoms were created for beauty – it had never occurred to me that their purpose could be to make money.  I stopped in my tracks, not believing what I had heard, then quietly turned and went to another part of the house without confessing my “sin.”

Later, on the way home, my husband defended his brother, trying to get me to see the practical side of the situation.  I defended myself, trying to get him to see the aesthetic side.  Neither of us convinced the other, but during our argument over the relative values of apple blossoms, I saw for the first time how much like his almost-stingy relatives my husband was.  It really bothered me because I didn’t relate well at all to those relatives.

“I didn’t know your brother was such a miser.”

“He’s not a miser.  He’s just practical.”

“Do you think it’s practical never to enjoy apple blossoms?”

“You can leave them on the tree and still enjoy them.”

“But that’s not . . . “

“In fact you can enjoy them twice – later on, as apples.”

“I can’t believe you are defending his stinginess!”

“I can’t believe you’re too stubborn to see his point of view.  You’re just like your mother.”

I had vowed “I’ll never be like my mother!” so often – every time she had hurt me – that I considered it the supreme insult to be accused of being like her.  And Prince Charming should have known that.  As he spoke those condemning words, his rescuer-on-a-white-horse image became slightly tarnished, and I forsook my perfect-princess role and plunged into a punish-him-with-silence mood which lasted the rest of the day.

My brain wasn’t silent though.  It was trying to fathom how an ogre could still be lurking in the wings, imposing himself upon my happily ever after.  My folks and my husband’s folks were characters in the book I had closed.  The new book I was living was supposed to include them at MY convenience, never intrusively.  What a joke on me!  Not only did my husband and I continue to suffer the consequences of whatever love-loss was attributable to our parents, but through the genes we inherited we continued to pay the price for the “sins of the fathers” back to the beginning.  We were heirs to all the ways in which our ancestors had adulterated love.

I was ignorant of the ways God’s love-flow had been prevented in my own life, and I was even less aware of the ways in which my husband’s childhood years had damaged him.  It was a shock to suddenly realize that this man I had married was not perfect.  He still had things to learn before he would be everything I wanted in a partner.  Foolishly, I imagined I could change him to fit my desires.  Another big joke on me!  Later I learned that I could not even change myself in the truly important ways.  It took miracles from God to reverse the mighty changes the “Fall” had wrought in my spirit; and that was possible only when I, myself, chose to change – not when someone else thought I ought to.

It really hurt my pride whenever my husband said he could see my mother in me, but when I finally saw her weaknesses in myself I was devastated beyond comfort.  I had a little girl of my own by then who was old enough to play dolls.

“Drink all your milk,” I heard her instructing the tea party.

It was quiet for a moment.  Then she exploded, “Look at the mess you’ve made!  I told you not to put your glass so close to the edge!”       

My mother’s exact words – in her exact tone of voice.   My exact words – in my exact tone of voice, I recognized with horror.  Oh dear God, what had I done to my child?  That violent temper of my mother’s which I hated, which had hurt me so often, which I rejected with all my being, had insidiously wormed its way into my life as a habit, and through me, into my little girl’s life.

In a flash of pain, I realized that Mother was probably a victim too.  Undoubtedly she hated the uncontrollable anger flaring up in her, lashing out at those she loved, as much as I hated it in myself.  Where had it come from, this inherited thing that stifled love?  Was it in our genes, in the air we breathed, in our education?  Was there any way to stop the awful chain of pain?  I grieved, and I made solemn resolutions to change!  But the next time my child spilled milk, the anger rose in me again, and I heard a stranger inside screaming, “I told you not to put your glass . . . “

CHAPTER TEN

The Priesthood and Women

The church was the focal point of my life as I grew up because my parents made it so; but for as long as I can remember, I had a deep personal yearning for true spiritual enlightenment.  This desire made it easy for me to respond to the spiritual dimension, which gift I took for granted because I assumed everyone had it.  In my mind it was a foregone conclusion that the church leaders had it.  I saw the church as the means to get to the ultimate end – God.  Logically, that indicated that the higher one rose in church positions, the more spiritual and the closer to God he would be.  I had not yet learned that the spiritual dimension is not necessarily governed by logical rules.

It was a matter of pride in our church that the whole system was run by laymen – men who worked for a living out in the world and freely gave their spare time to the church when called by those in authority to fill a church position.  That there were no trained theologians didn’t matter because the system of indoctrination was thorough enough to ensure continuity of the “harmony ethic.”  Whenever the leaders wanted to change something, they would put it to a vote, and this “ethic” guaranteed that everyone would be obedient and polite enough to vote “yes.”  Little children felt important raising their hands to “sustain the brethren” along with the grownups, and after awhile it became so automatic that few people even thought about what they were voting for or if it made sense.  The possibility that this system could leave a wide margin for error was never addressed.  Young boys were ordained to their first priesthood callings at age twelve, then (if deemed worthy) they climbed the ladder of power progressively to higher callings.

When my husband was asked to be Bishop of a Ward (a fairly high calling) no one was more surprised than I, because I had long agonized over his disinterest in things of the spirit.  Still, I didn’t get the message that status in the church has little to do with spirituality.  I just felt guilty because I had misjudged him.  Oh, that early internalizing of guilt; how it continued to literally damn me from God and truth – and love.

Besides feeling guilty I felt inferior, because I was still at the bottom of the ladder women were allowed to climb, even though I was trying to do everything the church required.  I tried so hard, and I took the gospel of Jesus Christ so seriously that I became a real nuisance to the less-than-sincere people who were in power.  When I tried to “go the second mile” and live by the spirit of the law rather than simply by the letter of the law, I found myself out of sync with the general church population, who were comfortably shaping themselves into a prescribed mold which I found stiflingly tunnel-visioned.

One thing I didn’t agree with was the way the church leaders measured a person’s worthiness by his attendance at meetings.  I thought daily living behavior was more important than statistics.  I thought people were more important than rules.  I thought it was vital to the core of the gospel that we do the right things for the right reasons; the right reason is always that we freely choose to do right, not that we do so out of fear because of threats from those in authority.  Fear of punishment and hope of reward did not seem to me to be good reasons for keeping the commandments.  A heartfelt desire to do right was for me a better motivation.   

“They gave the ‘Duty to God Award’ to the Johnson boy today,” I said to my husband, the bishop.

“Yes.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Great! He’s the fifth one this month.”

“But he seems to have no real allegiance to God.”

“What do you mean?  He’s at all his meetings.”

“He’s the most obnoxious boy in his class – a class I taught last year.  He’s rude, crude, and bent on defeating God’s purposes, as nearly as I can tell.”

“Oh boys will be boys.”

“That’s a valid excuse for rewarding a boy’s bad behavior?”

“Some of our church’s greatest leaders were pretty wild kids.  They outgrow it.”

Somehow that didn’t comfort me.  I thought of the boy who had been the most spiritually attuned in that same class.  “What about the Pace boy?”

“Kenny?  We’ve got to work on him.  He missed three priesthood meetings last month.”

“Do you know why?”

“Well, his parents don’t help.  His dad’s not even active, and his mother . . . “

“His mother has been gravely ill.”

“Well, Kenny’s just not converted to the program.”

“But he is converted to the gospel of Jesus Christ.  He’s serious about doing what’s right.  During his mother’s illness he’s taken a great deal of responsibility with his younger brothers and sisters.”

“How do you know?”

“They’re friends of mine.  I taught Kenny piano lessons before he outgrew me.  That’s another thing he does that keeps him too busy to be at all the church meetings – he practices several hours a day.  He wants to be a concert pianist.”

“Well, he’s missing the boat if he thinks that’s more important than obeying his leaders.”

“Isn’t it more important to obey God?”

“It’s the same thing!  The church leaders are God’s representatives on earth.”

I couldn’t answer him.  I wanted that to be true.  I had believed it was true.  But my foundations, which had shaken a lot lately, began to shake again.  I had learned that my husband was the right man for the job of bishop after all, and not because he was “spiritual.”  Those who had called him to his position wanted a practical man to raise money to build a new chapel, and a good, hard working do-it-yourself-man to build it.  My husband fit the requirements perfectly.  The job did not involve spirituality.  My eyes had also been opened to the fact that, in the eyes of their superiors, the success of any given bishop depended not on his ability to communicate with God, but on his ability to make the statistics of his ward look good when they were measured against the statistics of other bishops’ wards.  It bothered me immensely that the focus was on numbers and competition rather on individual souls and cooperation.

Still trying to go the second mile, I produced a play to help raise money for the ward building fund.  The building was progressing well.  According to church specifications, it had a chapel, classrooms, offices, a gym and a small stage.

“Are these the plans they’re really using for the stage?” I asked my husband.

“Yes.”

“But they only have an entrance on one side.”

“So?”

“It’s impossible to stage a play with only one entrance.”

“Be practical.  There’s no way to put an entrance on the other side.”

“A good architect could certainly . . . “

“This plan is being used all over the church, so it must have been drawn up by someone who knew what he was doing.”

“It was drawn up by somebody who thought basketball was a more important part of the program than the arts.”

“Well, it is.”

“What?”

“We get more boys active through the sports program than any other way.”

“Boys?  Don’t girls matter?”

“Well, they don’t hold the priesthood.  And anyway we don’t have so much trouble getting them to come to church.”

“Can you see the contradiction in what you’re saying?”

“No.  That’s just how it is.”

“Why do men have the power in the church if it’s the women who have the desire for religion?”

“God organized it that way.  Not me.”

“That’s a cop-out – to blame God.”

“I’m not blaming God.  I’m giving Him credit.”

I had trouble with that statement.  I couldn’t give God credit for doing things that didn’t make sense.  Up to that point in my life, the authoritarian role men played in the church was acceptable to me because I was well indoctrinated with the idea that God simply wanted it that way.  It now began to dawn on me that maybe men wanted it that way more than God did.  At least I could see an inherent danger in allowing fallen men – even if they did hold the priesthood – to define God’s characteristics and motivations for me.  After all, they defined the priesthood too.  Didn’t that open the way for a conflict of interest?

I did want to be in harmony with God.  I wanted the powers of God’s priesthood to influence my life.  Was that happening?  When I dared to voice my concerns, they were interpreted by the brethren to mean that I thought women should hold the priesthood, which in their view was seriously heretical.  The women’s liberation movement was gaining momentum at the time, which may have contributed to their defensiveness, but it really had nothing to do with my questions.  I didn’t want to hold the priesthood – certainly not in the way men held it.  It appeared to be a lot of work and a burden (not to mention an ego trip) which I could do without.  I wanted to know where women fit in God’s picture, and why it was men who controlled the church, when it was women who were the more spiritually attuned.

Later I learned that even though men may be ordained to the priesthood and claim the authority to act for God, the degree to which they are actually able to do so is the degree to which their love-energy connection with God is functioning.  The same is true for women, regardless of whether or not they hole the official “priesthood.”  The real power of God is love-energy.  Priesthood power exists in a person only when pure love is flowing through him or her.  Holding the title of priesthood holder has little to do with acting for God . . . loving purely is acting for God.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Curse of Adam

“You play the piano very well.”

“Why thank you.  I enjoy it, but I don’t practice enough to really be an artist.”

“Your music has spirit.”

“What?”

“You feel what you are playing.”

I blushed and hid my pleasure behind a self-deprecating laugh.

“No really.  Not many people understand Schubert’s music well enough to bring out those fine nuances.”

I looked at him, genuinely surprised.  “Do you understand it?”  I was speaking with the building custodian who, while he dusted and scrubbed, had overheard me practicing on the church’s grand piano.

“Oh yes, I love Schubert – his lieder is some of the best.”

“Lieder?”  I didn’t even know the word.

“His songs.  I love to sing his songs.”

“You sing?”

This man had been unlocking doors, sweeping floors and doing chores in the meeting house for nearly a year now, and I didn’t even know that he sang.  I did remember my husband saying something rather patronizing when he hired him to the only paying job in the ward . . . “He can’t get a job anywhere else so I’m going to try him . . . most of these artists don’t know how to work.”  Yes, he had said “artist” and it had rolled right past me.  

The custodian smiled sadly.  “Yes, I sing.  That’s what I do.  There just isn’t any money in it over here.  If I’d been able to stay in Europe . . .”

“You were in Europe?”

“They appreciate tenors in Europe.”

“You’re a tenor?”  I was beginning to sound like an idiot.

“But the money ran out, and my wife wanted to come home.  We both felt the children should be raised closer to a strong church influence.”

“How many children do you have?”

“Three.  Our baby was born since we came back.”

“But why haven’t I ever heard you sing?”

“It’s not part of a custodian’s job.”

“But surely you . . .”

“Oh I do a little singing, here and there.”

“Could I hear you sometime?”

“Of course.  Maybe you could play for me, if you wouldn’t mind.  It’s hard to find a good accompanist.”

I did accompany him some after that.  He was a genius!  He should have been singing for the gods.  He told me once that he believes music is the language of the gods.  He spoke their language very well, caressing each phrase until it flowed perfectly into the air on a voice of elegant richness.  He had recognized that I played by the spirit because he sang by the spirit.  He was an inspired musician.  Some of our rehearsals lengthened into philosophical discussions about the spiritual dimension.  It seemed easy for him to talk about things which baffled other men.

He seemed, however, to be completely lacking in the skills necessary to be successful in the business world.  He didn’t have the ambition, the aggressive drive, the cold objectivity, or the will to compete; nor did he have the ability to make or manage money.  He couldn’t even earn a living in the art world, though he was a musical master.  He would never compromise his artistic integrity in order to do the popular thing or play the critics’ games.  He preferred to sing for the select few who valued his entire song, not for the greedy masses who “lusted after his high C-s and discounted all else,” as he put it. 

It was in a Sunday School class that I began seeing a connection between this phenomenon and the curse of Adam.  We had begun a study of the Old Testament and the subject was Adam and Eve.  Brother Young told the story the way men have always told it, making Eve the sinner and Adam the heroic martyr.  I raised my hand.  “Do we consider that being born into mortality is progressing or regressing?”

“Anyone want to answer that question?”  Brother Young asked.

Brother Hammond, who had made a life’s work of memorizing scriptures, reeled off a few of them to indicate that mortality is indeed progress itself, that it is absolutely imperative to come to earth and learn about evil in order to appreciate good.

“Well,” I said, “maybe Eve realized that.  Maybe we should thank her, not condemn her.”

Brother Young looked at his watch.  “We’ve got to move right along in order to finish this lesson.  Now when Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden . . .” and he described their respective curses.

My friend, the tenor, had a question.  “Why do you think God called earning our bread by the sweat of our brow a curse?  Is having to work for a living a curse?”

“Well, of course we all know that being able to work is one of our greatest blessings.”

“What is the curse then?”

“And I’m sure all you mothers would agree that bringing forth children is a blessing too.”

A few mothers groaned little laughs, but no one spoke up.  I wanted to ask if I was the only one who felt uncomfortable embracing the curse as if it were a blessing, but Brother Young ignored my raised hand, and soon the class was over.  I sat there for a while pondering.  I need answers to my questions, and when no one else provides answers, I will think and feel as far as my brain and heart can take me, and I will pray to God.

I came to the conclusion then that “earn your bread by the sweat of your brow” was code language.  It was like a parable, a simple statement with a deep interpretation.  One had to have ears to hear, eyes to see, and a heart to understand more than the limited ways of men in order to comprehend this curse.  The way I deciphered the code was that Adam’s bite of the apple contained a poison which caused a deep sleep to come over his spiritual awareness.  Lucifer was responsible for putting the poison in the apple, but it served God’s purposes in a way, by hardening men enough to be able to survive in the lone and dreary world without being destroyed by the sharp briars and thistles Lucifer had planted.  A man can’t be spiritually connected to God very closely and at the same time have the cold objectivity which allows him to compete for the bread he is required to earn.  I decided Adam’s curse must be that he was blinded to his own godliness, and could see only his carnality.  I concluded that the poison Eve ingested was milder.  It left her with just enough spiritual insight to be in a constant state of mourning over her loss of Eden.  Women feel that loss poignantly and painfully as they bring children into a world of suffering.

It seemed apparent to me also that people come with different degrees of curse-impact.  Creative artists, the “custodian” included, seem to have less of Adam’s curse and more of Eve’s.  That’s why they don’t compete well at “earning bread,” and why male artists are often labeled “feminine.”  Women who go out into the competitive world to earn their bread or to prove they can do whatever men can do, and women who are forced by circumstance to be breadwinners, gradually take upon themselves Adam’s curse.  They become harder, more aggressive, less compassionate, and believe less easily in phenomena they cannot see or control.

Recently scientists have developed a theory that right-brain functions (intuitive, imaginative creativity) are often more predominant in women, while left-brain functions (mathematical, practical objectivity) are stronger in men.  This explanation of one reason men and women may be different is helpful on an intellectual level.  But on a level where the individual yearns to be free to think and feel and be all of his/her personal potential, that theory is limiting and unsatisfactory.  At least taking the “curse of Adam” seriously helped me to understand that there are more profound reasons for male-female differences than have yet been explored.  As a woman, I feel that the ability to organize existence into smooth-running, harmonious order, is one of my innate qualities, even though under the curse I do not exhibit “left-brain” strengths.  And I certainly hope that men, freed from their curse, have the innate ability to understand and joyfully embrace the dimension of spiritual truths.  In my philosophy this must be so in order for oneness to be a reality between husband and wife.

I went home from church that day and wrote a poem.

TO ADAM

Oh Adam, Adam,

you left the garden in too much haste.

Shamed, looking down,

in too much dread and fear.

You left too quickly, guiltily,

not noticing that shades of Eden still were near.

         “By the sweat of thy face

              all the days of thy life!”

was ringing in your ear.

And when in tenderness God spoke

you’d gone too far to hear.

But Eve,

lingering to smell one rose,

to touch with love one soft-nosed deer,

and listen to the singing voices one last time,

heard the voice clear –

heard the anguished cry a father breathes

sending His beloved children forth

to learn of joy through learning trials.

Eve felt the shudder sob through Eden’s aisles

as God cried out His promise of reprieve,

         “Here is the key.  Oh, use it.  Please receive

             the power that will bring you home.

             Lo, I am with you ‘til the end of time.”

Adam,

if only you had heard.

If even now you’d listen to His word

and stop your sweat-stained labors to look up,

perhaps you’d dare to drink from His full cup

and use the key He proffers to your hand

to open by His Love

the promised land.

It occurred to me that if men continue to love their curse more than they love God, it will have to be a woman, once again, who has enough foresight to use the key which will open the “Promised Land.”

When I wrote the poem I thought the “key” was priesthood power, and the next to last line of the poem read to open for us all.  As I have become more aware of love-energy, I understand that the key is simply pure love, so I changed the next to last line.  Anyone (man or woman) who makes the choices which allow God’s energy to flow freely through him or her will be freed from the curse and will enter a new state of being – a promised land, a personal Zion.  A Zion society similar to the City of Enoch could be built by a group of such purified people.  Those who attempt to build Zion any other way will fail.

I have also learned, as I have pursued this question, other ways mankind was cursed in the Garden of Eden.  Lucifer, who is brilliant at plotting and manipulating opposition in all things and who has power on earth to do so, did one more crucial thing.  After the veils which obscured God were in place, he was able rather easily to trigger in man’s ego the idea that his genitals are his chief asset, that most of his energy should be focused on pleasing himself sexually, and that it will help him get what he wants if he calls his feelings “love.”  Lucifer intentionally left woman’s heart-connection with God intact, so that her perceptions of “love” included a great deal more than sexual satisfaction.  The result of this difference in viewpoint is that men and women rarely have the same vision of what will transpire when they fall in love.  Most men expect that physical union will satisfy all the requirements of love.  Most women expect love to be a much deeper union.  In order for physical union to be meaningful to women, a high-level union of mind and heart and spirit must also be achieved.  That misunderstanding – the difference in men’s and women’s perception of love – is enough of a curse to foul up everything.

And so it has.  

CHAPTER TWELVE

Looking Out For Number One

While my husband was bishop, he was more or less obligated to set a good example in all the areas of the well-rounded life depicted in the church’s “pie” diagram.  One of these was community service; so he went to a political mass meeting and was elected chairman of his party.  When November came around, he had to locate some election judges to hand out and count ballots, and since there was a dearth of volunteers, he asked if I would be a judge.  Of course I was working at having a well-rounded pie too, so I said yes.

It was an interesting experience.  I learned all the rules and regulations of the voting process.  One rule was that each party could have one or two “watchers” present to make sure the other party didn’t cheat.

In the early afternoon a man I had never seen before came in and presented his credentials as watcher.  He reeked of cigar smoke, and if I had had any experience with liquor, I would have known from the strange odor of his breath that he’d been drinking.  He introduced himself as Max Statler, and I recognized the name as that of the rich non-member who lived up on the boulevard in the mansion with walls all around it.

The voting was slow and the likelihood of cheating was even slower.  He struck up a conversation with one of the judges from his party.  I was too intimidated by this “gentile” to join in the conversation, but I listened with interest.

“What do you think of that Richards fellow who’s running for Congress?” he asked.

“I like him,” she answered.  “He’s honest, intelligent; I think he’ll make a good congressman.”

“You’re sure he’s going to win.  Been stuffing the ballot box?”

She ignored his teasing.  “Well you voted for him, didn’t you?”

“I always vote Democrat and just hope the candidates want to get re-elected enough to stick to the platform.”

“I’m sure he’ll represent the interests of the people.”

He snorted.  “You’re not that naïve, are you?  He’ll represent his own interests, which may, if we’re lucky, coincide with our interests occasionally.”

“My, you’re a cynic.”

“No, just realistic.  No one does anything, except for selfish reasons.”

“Oh come now.  You don’t mean that.”

“Yes I do mean it!  Look out for Number One.  That’s the name of the game.”

“But surely,,” my fellow judge protested, “you recognize all the good works . . .”

“Why are you here today?” he asked her bluntly.

She flushed a bit, but countered with, “I’m doing my civic duty, so you can exercise your right to vote.”

“Ha, your civic duty, eh?  You are placating your conscience, making yourself feel important, maybe catching up on the local gossip.”  Before she could answer, he turned suddenly on me.  “Why are you here?”

I thought of the well-rounded pie, and could only shrug my shoulders, embarrassed.

Then with an air of triumph he said, “Everyone’s motives are selfish.  Even Jesus Christ did what he did for selfish reasons.  He wanted the glory.”

That shocked us all into silence.  After he had gone, the other judges comforted each other with clichés, laughing easily about “that unfortunate godless man, who can’t buy faith with his money.”

Ordinarily, I too would have discounted Mr. Statler’s opinion simply because he was a non-member who didn’t know any better.  This time, however, such a rationalization couldn’t comfort me.  My mind and heart were still in turmoil from a speech I had heard one of the high church officials give only a few days before.  The theme of it was:  Be selfish.  Be selfish enough to keep God’s commandments so you can get the promised blessings.  The speaker went into great detail about which blessings were a result of which commandments, so we’d know what God owed us.  The climax was that if we were selfish enough to keep ALL the commandments, we could have eternal life for ourselves and live with God.

This sermon had not set well with me.  Even if its format was just a gimmick to get our attention while Elder Faust gave the same old message a different way, I thought it was a stupid gimmick.  Something inside me insisted that selfishness is never a good reason to do anything.  The whole speech seemed to be a total contradiction of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as I understood it; yet it was delivered by a man who claimed to be God’s representative on earth, one whom I had voted to sustain as such.

Hearing Mr. Statler flatly proclaim that Christ’s carrying out His Father’s will was an unmitigatedly selfish ploy for glory, brought Brother Faust’s counsel, “Be selfish!” into sharp focus and sent reverberations of frightening doubt through my soul.  Could it be so?  Is selfishness everyone’s motive?  Is it mine?  Was it Christ’s?  I had to know.

When the votes were all counted, I drove home, went in the bathroom, locked the door and knelt down by the tub.  My prayer was singleminded.  “Please tell me if Christ’s motivations were selfish!”  It was pressed from my pores over and over again with fervent energy.  After a time, a small warmth lit the center of me and gradually expanded into a bright fire which pulsed words through my being.  The words were, “Christ is perfect unselfishness.  He acts always from love.”

That was what I wanted to hear; but I knew my want was not the source of the answer.  Faith told me that the source was God, and that the light I felt was the “burning in the bosom” which I had been taught could come as an answer to prayer.  That I had experienced this rare phenomenon humbled me, but didn’t totally surprise me.  My faith was still simple enough to expect something of the sort from God.

Now I knew that unselfish love was Christ’s motive.  I knew it with a sureness that would have dared challenge even the blustering Mr. Statler, if I’d had another chance.  “Christ’s motives are not selfish!” I wanted to tell him.  I also wanted to tell him, “And neither are mine.”  But I wasn’t sure of that.  I wasn’t sure that my motives in trying to keep God’s commandments weren’t, at their root, selfish.  My quest to resolve this unsureness led me eventually to some profound insights about love and self.

There’s a fine line between loving one’s self with healthy self-esteem (part of the second great commandment) and being egotistically centered in one’s self.  I found that a subtle battle was going on between my ego and my soul.  I am defining “ego” in this context as the self-survival instincts of fallen man, which are basically selfish (“Look out for Number One”).  I define “soul” as the instincts of one’s original intelligence which became a spirit person through God and who now inhabits the same body as the fallen man.  Each of us is learning about good and evil through these conflicting elements in our self.  Our soul will tell us truth; our ego may lie to us.  It takes sophisticated powers of discernment to distinguish between the things one wants for selfish, self-serving purposes, and the things one desires because they are necessary for the righteous fulfillment of his personal destiny.  Selfish wants versus righteous desires is really the name of the game.  The choices in this battle are crucial.  They determine whether we will grow to reach our highest potential or settle for less than that.  If we choose to be all that God endowed us with the possibility to be, it is necessary for us to go deep enough into our hearts to find the pure thread of love which doesn’t lie, and separate it from the ego’s dishonest selfishness which deceives us with surface wants.

I didn’t know then, but I know now, why selfishness stops love energy’s flow.  Selfishness is a one-way street; it dead-ends creativity, it dead-ends productivity.  It dead-ends delight in all the beauty outside one’s self – as well as inside one’s self. 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Contradictions

No matter how hard I worked, being worthy was a great obstacle for me.

“What do you think it means to be born of the spirit?” a friend asked me.

“I’ll probably never be worthy to find out,” I lamented.

“Is it something you have to earn?”

“Well, I suppose so.  Isn’t everything?”  My mind was well programmed with the conviction that it was never right to get something for nothing.

“What makes you think you’re not worthy?  You’re as dedicated a member of the church as I know.”

“I don’t feel worthy.  As hard as I try, I don’t feel that I’m able to keep all the commandments.”

“Don’t worry about it.  Nobody can.”

“The men who lead the church must be able to.  At least they always speak in third person about the people who need to repent.  Doesn’t that mean that they themselves are keeping all the commandments?”  I was still naïve.

“Not necessarily,” my friend replied.

“But I want to – I have to – keep them all.  How else will I ever feel worthy?”

“You take it all too seriously,” she said and then changed the subject.

I guess I did take it more seriously than most people do, though I didn’t know that for a long time.  It took much awakening before I realized there were very few whose spiritual intensity equaled mine.  I assumed all the active church-goers saw what I saw, heard what I heard, felt what I felt, yearned as I yearned.   When my friend asked the question about being born of the spirit, I thought she too wanted to have that experience, but she was merely curious.  I was serious.

When I was young, innocent and trusting, I had believed whatever I heard at church, including all the rationalized contradictions.  As a serious adult, I found myself having either to defend these troubling contradictions or to find answers to resolve them.  I opted to find answers.  The contradiction about Eve – was she wise or wicked? – was just the beginning.

Our Sunday School class was discussing obedience.

“Obedience is the first law of heaven,” Brother Young flatly stated.  “Can anyone give me a scripture to defend that?”

Brother Hammond, of course, had one ready.  “There is a law irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of the earth upon which every blessing is predicated; and if we receive any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated.”

Someone else came up with, “The Lord says, ‘When ye do what I say I am bound; but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise.”

The teacher, to give his lesson practical value, asked, “So how many of you went to can tomatoes at Welfare Square last week?”

A few hands were raised behind smug smiles.

“Where were the rest of you?” the teacher cracked hid guilt-whip.  “Were you being obedient?”

“I think the Lord would have wanted me to stay home and take care of my sick baby that night,” I said.

“But the bishop told you to can tomatoes.”

“Well, who are we talking about being obedient to?  The Lord, or the brethren?” I asked, and I really needed to know.

“It’s the same thing.”  The teacher’s voice scolded, as he quoted a familiar line from one of the church’s prophets:  “The Lord says, ‘whether instruction comes from my mouth, or from the mouths of my servants the prophets, it is the same.’”

There it was again, that insistence that God and the prophet are the same.  It wouldn’t have seemed so contradictory to me had it not been that the brethren with whom an ordinary woman like myself was allowed to deal were neither prophets nor gods.  They were businessmen, farmers, doctors, blue-collar workers – just ordinary people like myself.  Our church had a scripture oft quoted by these same men, which said, “. . . yea, cursed is he that putteth his trust in man or maketh flesh his arm.”  To me that contradicted the brethren’s insistence that we be obedient to men.

A sister whose self-righteousness didn’t allow her to perceive contradictions spoke up, “I left my baby with his older sister.  If the bishop calls me to go put up tomatoes for the needy, I’m going to obey; and I believe I’ll get a reward for doing it!”

There was another contradiction.  I couldn’t help asking, “Is that why we’re supposed to be obedient?  To get a reward?  Jesus helped the needy because he cared about them, not for any reward.”

As usual, when we started getting close to discussing the real meat of the gospel, the teacher brought us back to the prescribed lesson, which left no room for conjecture.  We were simply supposed to do what the brethren told us to do, and we were supposed to accept that the instructions came from God.  Period.  A-MEN.

The most serious contradiction I faced involved our relationship with Christ.  We were told, “Christ is our Savior, and we must follow His example.”  My dilemma was – if we are able to follow His example, what do we need a Savior for?

A series of lessons was entitled, “What Would Jesus Do?”  The answer in each case turned out to be, “Take cookies to your neighbor,” which I don’t recall Jesus ever doing.

     Q.  How can we love our enemies?

     A.  When our son played on the championship Little League team, my wife made    

           cookies for everybody, even the team they beat.

     Q.  What does it mean to do your alms in secret?

     A.  I secretly left cookies on my neighbor’s doorstep when I heard she had the flu.

     Q.  Do you ever go the second mile?

     A.  They asked for one dozen cookies, and I took two dozen.

Well, it wasn’t quite that simplistic.  Actually there was an eight or nine point “catechism” which covered the basic categories of required performance.  Each point was as lacking in depth as baking cookies, but the brethren were able to manufacture from them duties by the dozen.  Our “must do” list read a little like Leviticus.  There was no way one could accomplish in a twenty-four hour day all the letter-of-the-law activities which obedience required.  In spite of the frantic pace “good” church members kept, the spirit of the law was nowhere to be found.

“What would Jesus do on the Sabbath?” was the subject of one discussion.

“Go to church, visit the sick, read the scriptures.”  These were acceptable answers, because that’s what we are supposed to do; and because we aren’t supposed to, Jesus would certainly not watch TV, work, play, picnic, shop, or travel.  Hmm.  Something seemed slightly backwards.

My study of Jesus’ Sabbath activities revealed that His behavior and teachings weren’t quite orthodox for His time – or ours.  He may have calmed the stormy seas, but he also made waves.  He rocked boats.  He got in trouble with the Pharisees for healing the sick on Sunday and for going into the corn fields and threshing grain into His hands.  In the synagogue He offered people enlightening truths which could have brought relief from the burdensome business of religion; but He was called a blasphemer, was hated and condemned, and was finally crucified for His behavior.  When I brought up these scriptural facts, however, I was either ignored or given a taste of how Jesus probably felt at church.

Ironically, much of what I understood of Christ had been gleaned from scriptures which are unique to our church.  I found our church’s interpretation of the immaculate conception to be profound as well as sensible.  In our philosophy God the Father is the literal, physical (“after the manner of the flesh”) father of Jesus Christ.  That explained for me how Jesus could do all the miraculous things He did.  He truly had divine genes.  He was different from us.  His purpose in being on earth was to do something for mankind which no one else could do – something very difficult, even for a half-God.

These insights into the truths of Christ’s origin and purpose seemed to me to be lost on the church leaders, who taught a doctrine which made Him no more powerful than they were.  If they couldn’t do something by working hard, they couldn’t imagine Christ doing it either.

“Grace” was a word that was continually being explained away.

“Faith without works is dead,” sufficed to preclude any possibility that Jesus could endow us with unmerited gifts.

“It is by grace we are saved, after all we can do,” meant that we have to earn Christ’s salvation.

I kept trying to earn it, and continued to be haunted by the contradiction:  If I can work out my own salvation by being obedient to the brethren, then what do I need a Savior for?

 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Receiving

My mother was a generous person.  She gave away flowers, fresh-baked bread, eggs, hand knit sweater, quilts . . . quilts.  I would hate to have to count how many stitches she put into the quilts she gave away.  She made them for newlyweds and oldlyweds and babies and children and then for the next generation of newlyweds.  When her eyesight was no longer sharp enough to thread needles, she would have me thread a dozen at a time, so she could quilt all afternoon.

But Mother didn’t know how to receive.  I blame that partially on the church’s work ethic, which made receiving almost a sin.

“Today’s lesson is on receiving,” began Brother Young.  “Have any of you been in a position where you had to receive?”  There was a moment of silence.  “Can you give me examples where people might have to receive?  Several hands shot up.

“If the husband loses his job.”

“I know a lady who had a nervous breakdown.  She had to have somebody tend her kids.

“People who are handicapped or crippled need help.”

“The whole church welfare system is based on the idea of preparing for emergencies which may make it necessary to receive help.”

“But we can’t expect the church to do it all.  We have to do our part.”

The lesson deteriorated to “take cookies to your neighbor” rather quickly.  These people were so obsessed with the need to do something, to be the performer, that the true concept of receiving never got off the ground.  The lesson ended with this summation:  “There may come a time in everyone’s life when it will be necessary to receive.  However, if you are faithful, you will soon be able to be on the giving end once more.”  Did the teacher mean for us to feel guilty about receiving?  Why did I feel that he considered “receive” to be a dirty word?  I left the class confused and empty – again.

As I said, Mother’s inability to graciously receive could have been reinforced in classes like that.  I do not know how she failed to notice that her attitude really hurt the people who gave her gifts.  She appeared to be self-deprecating and probably felt that such behavior was appropriate.  The one who offered the gift, however, felt that she didn’t value the gift, or the giver.

Mother spent the last ten years of her life in bed, reading.  Her body wasn’t very healthy, but mainly she just wasn’t interested in living.  Every week she would get one of us to drive her uptown to the library (she never learned to drive a car), where she’d get an armload of books and then go back to bed to escape into her fantasy world.  Toward the end of her life the quilts on her bed were getting ragged.  I thought that was a shame, considering the millions of stitches she’d put into quilts to give away, so I made a quilt for her.  I picked the fabric carefully – tiny soft pastel flowers on the front, lined with a pale green – and I quilted it with love.

When I gave it to Mother, she hardly looked at it and said her usual, “Oh, you shouldn’t have done that,” which I expected.  The thing that hurt was that she never used the quilt.  When she died, it was still folded on the shelf.

I didn’t know how to receive either.  How could I, given the “sins of the parents” and my own indoctrination in the church?  None of the people I associated with knew how to receive or thought it would be a valuable thing to learn.  The tragedy of this hit me with forcible pain after I learned about the love-energy connection between God and His children.  Our dilemma is comparable to that of being dependent on a radio to bring news which could save us from disaster, but the radio has no receiving set.  We turn the dials to no avail.  No message gets through.  We perish in a flash flood.  In the case of our connection to God, if we have no receiver – no ability to receive, because we think receiving is unacceptable – the result is that we never experience God’s love.  Its energy doesn’t get through to us.  We perish in a flood of hate.

     “For what doth it profit a man if a gift is bestowed upon him and he

     receive not the gift?  Behold, he rejoiceth not in that which is given

     him, neither rejoices in him who is the giver of the gift.”

I am sure there are many people who would gladly take a gift as powerful as love-energy if it were the prize on a game show.  There is a big difference, though, between taking and receiving.  Taking is a selfish act.  Receiving is unselfish.  Mother took the quilt, but she didn’t receive it.  I’m sure she would have been appalled had she realized that her behavior was selfish rather than selfless.  If she had really received my gift, she would have used it, enjoyed it, and somehow shared with me her rejoicing.  Receiving is an opening of one’s heart which allows a flow of reciprocal blessings.

Love-energy cannot be taken.  Selfishness is a barrier which deflects the energy back to God.  Only when love-energy is received does it enter the recipient and cause him to rejoice in the gift and in God, who is the giver of the gift.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Opposition In All Things

“What do you think the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’ really is?” I asked some friends.  They were not church friends, but artist friends – creative intellectuals who had explored a variety of philosophies.  We shared a common interest in music, art and literature.

“Oh that’s a myth,” the wife said.  “There’s no such thing as evil.”

My ingrained reflex was to console myself by thinking that only an evil person would say such a thing.  But these were not evil people.  They were creators of beauty and refinement.  I took seriously what they had to say.  The husband added, “If we believe that God is the creator of all things and that He is good, then it becomes obvious that He could not create evil.  Therefore, evil cannot exist.”

His thesis fit the logical scientific method for arriving at factual information.  Not knowing how to deal with such reasoning, I stuttered something about all the wickedness in the world.

“For instance?” he said.

“For instance, your neighbor who went out to get her mail and when she picked up a brown package was blown to smithereens.”

“It must have been her time to go.  Who are you to judge that it won’t result in good?”

“But her children are suffering!  And her husband!”

“Suffering is good for us.  We learn empathy, we learn appreciation.”

“And you don’t think the man who made the bomb and left it there to kill someone did an evil thing?”

“Who knows what good things he may learn as a consequence?”

The wife intervened, “Perhaps he was helping people work out karma from another life.”

“We see such a tiny part of the whole picture,” said the man, “that judging anything as evil is premature and can only show our ignorance.”

Although his argument had a certain validity, it seemed to me that he was seeing a tinier part of the picture than necessary.  “Don’t you believe anything in the scriptures?” I asked. 

“Well, of course a lot of truth comes through.  But one has to wonder about the accuracy of the stories.  Who wrote them in the first place, and from what perspective?  How many errors in translation have they suffered?  And then do we who read them interpret and apply them so they make some kind of sense?”

I could relate to that viewpoint, having been painfully exposed to some confusing interpretations.  “But you think everything God says about good as opposed to evil is a mistake?”

“I think people can’t understand God and shouldn’t try,” he said, and his wife added, “The beauty of the whole God concept is that we can’t fathom its infinite possibility.” 

“We are made in God’s image.  That’s fathomable,” I said.

“Why do you insist that God is anthropomorphic?” she continued.  “That view is so limiting.”

“Your nebulous view of God seems limiting to me.  There’s nothing really there to believe in.”

“Let’s just suppose that you’re right,” the man interjected, “and we are made in God’s image.  You agree that God is good, don’t you?”

I nodded.  “Yes of course.”

“Then how can we be evil?” he concluded his argument with a smile.

Did he want me to feel like a kindergartener?  I don’t know.  But my determination to find out what the tree-of-knowledge-of-good-and-evil really is became even stronger.  I had experienced enough pain, guilt, fear, sorrow, rejection, etc. to know that a destructive force exists which is separate from the God I worship.  Perhaps my friends were comfortable lumping together the known and the unknown, the positive and the negative, and calling it God; but I could only worship a being of righteousness.  I could agree there was much I did not comprehend of God.  I could not agree to call bad things good on the premise that a good God had created “everything.”

The story about “Lucifer, the son of the morning,” had always evoked a strange feeling in my heart, almost as if I remembered weeping when he was cast out of Heaven.  I got out my scriptures and read again all the references I could find about the war in heaven.  Two words jumped out at me:  Agency and Became.  It seems that when I search the scriptures with real intent of heart, seeking specific answers, that words and phrases do jump out at me with potent meaning formerly unnoticed, so even if the scriptures have been mistranslated by imperfect men, I know God can still reveal truth to us through them. 

“Agency” suddenly lit up a comprehension of the tremendous responsibility inherent in the principle of free choice.  On the surface, freedom might appear to be an easy thing – birds soaring through a clear sky, fleet-footed deer leaping effortlessly across deep meadow grass, me doing whatever I feel like doing.  Give Lucifer credit that he saw through that delusion.  He was able to convince a third of the hosts of heaven that it would be easier to let him make their choices for them.  The rest of us opted for the right to make our own choices; though many of us still don’t understand the inevitable connection between rights and responsibilities, between choices and consequences.

The fact is, God’s children make their own choices and experience the consequences of them.  Lucifer chose to rebel against God’s principle of free agency (because he wanted to control others) and against the law which keeps Love-Energy pure (because he selfishly wanted power and glory separate from God).  The consequence of these choices was that he “became Satan, yea, even the devil, the father of all lies, to deceive and to blind men.”

The important thing to realize is that Lucifer, by choice, became evil.  God did not make him that way.  We, too, by our choices may become less than God made us, or we may become the fullness of our potential.  Lucifer had the potential to be a being of love and light.  He was loved by all the hosts of heaven, who mourned his choice to reject that love.  By choice, he became the source of negative energy, in opposition to God.

Love-Energy is the power of God.  Its opposite, the power of Satan, must be hate-energy.  I have chosen not to deeply explore that power or the dimension where it exists, although I am constantly aware of if its existence in the world, and I consciously exert energy against it.  I learned at one point in my search that the more one talks about or thinks about or investigates the devil, the more power the devil has in one’s life.  The best way to avoid the devil’s negative influence is to ignore him by focusing thought and energy on the positiveness of God.  Some have called this concept the power of positive thinking.  In my experience acknowledging God as the source of positive energy is the real key to becoming a positive person.

Back to that tree in the Garden of Eden.  God created the earth and called it “good.”  Everything that is good – light, truth, beauty, joy, knowledge, generosity, love, is built into the environment of Earth.  But when Lucifer was cast out of heaven, he was sent to earth, where he became Satan, the purveyor of all that is evil – darkness, lies, ugliness, despair, ignorance, greed, hate.  Our choice to change our place of abode from Heaven to Earth and our state of being from spiritual to mortal, places us in a realm where God’s influence surrounds us at the same time Satan’s influence may be imposed upon us.  To eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil means to voluntarily choose to live in this opposition-filled environment.  It is a good choice from the standpoint of potential growth possibilities; but it entails great risk, especially if we lose sight of the eternal consequences of our choices.

Our natural tendency, when our experiences are negative, is to blame heredity, environment, God, the devil, the government, the weather, fate, or somebody else for our unhappy condition – thus avoiding personal responsibility.  While each of these factors does play a role in the individual circumstance in which we experience mortality, and while it is a fact that we can’t control them, we are not helplessly at their mercy.  We do control and are responsible for how we respond to each of them.  Most importantly, we control our choices regarding good and evil.  We decide whether we will be a positive force or a negative force, whether we will be part of God’s kingdom or part of the devil’s kingdom.  Each of us, alone, is responsible for those basic, crucial choices.  We become what we choose.

We cannot escape responsibility for our own choices.  Even if we become wise enough to say “Thy will be done,” to God, and really mean it, we discover (as Jesus did) that that does not release us from the responsibility of making our own choices.  When Jesus was faced with the prospect of crucifixion and said, “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt,” He may have hoped God would say, “Never mind” and pull a ram out of the thicket to replace Him.  But God didn’t make that decision.  Christ had to decide all alone (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”) whether to be our Savior or not.

God’s will, of course, is that all of us accomplish the full measure of our creation (as Christ did) and experience the joy of that fullness.  However, an even higher priority on Heavenly Father and Mother’s list of desires for their children is that our will be done.  They want us to be free agents – to choose God, Christ, Love – or not.

There’s a scene in the temple ceremony where Satan is bragging about how much power he has in the world.  “You can buy anything in this world for money,” he gloats to a struggling mortal.  But when he tries to buy the mortal’s relationship with God, the man cries out, “Depart!  In the name of Jesus Christ.”  The devil cowers and leaves the room and is not seen again in the whole ceremony.

At first I saw this scene as a kind of corny dramatization.  I have learned, however, that each of the symbols in the temple presents a key we can use to unlock the mysteries which separate us from God.  This scene showed very simply that we can get rid of the devil by calling upon Christ.  When we freely choose Christ as our love connection with God, the devil must leave us alone.  It is a comfort to know that God (good) is more powerful than the devil (evil), that love is more powerful than hate.

                                    CHOICES

     A wizened old milkweed

     pulled the ripcord today on his parachutes

     and let them fly

     to perform his last dance on the wind.

     Most of them followed each other into blind oblivion.

     A handful cooperated through five fences

     landing in a fertile field.

     One caught a vagrant east wind

     and whirled off to exotic adventures.

     Another landed at once

     to investigate the phenomenon of flying.

     Two chased each other across the meadow

     and fell in a haystack together.

        The last one went up

        and up

           and up

              until it caught fire

                 and became part of the sun.          

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Recognizing Need

One day (it seemed so sudden, for I wasn’t aware of having grown older) our eldest son was preparing to go on a mission.  All young men in our church were expected, at age nineteen, to devote two years to the Lord doing missionary work somewhere in the world.  Consistent with my determination to make not only myself, but also my family, worthy, I had raised this beautiful young man to want to go on a mission.  A picture had been imposed upon my mind of what his missionary experience would be:

1.  My son would have a mission president (the authority in charge of his mission) who would be a spiritual giant, a perfect example.  He would imbue my son with the spiritual insights he needed and would lead him through soul-enlightening experiences.  He would be an eternal friend and mentor.

2.  My son would have a mission “mother” (the president’s wife) who would be my surrogate.  She would generate the warmth and spirit of home for him.

3.  My son would go to a place where there were hungry souls waiting for the gospel of Jesus Christ.  He would convert and baptize them in record numbers, as the spirit of the Lord surrounded him like a mantle.

4.  My son would write to me every week, recounting miraculous happenings, and I would cheerily send him all the news from home along with delightful surprise packages filled with goodies and love.

5.  It would be the best two years of his life – and mine.

The letter informing our son where “the Lord” had called him to go arrived while he was at work.

“Open it!  Open it!”  His sister danced anxiously.  “I can’t wait to see!”

“We don’t open other people’s mail,” I said, wanting as badly as she did to know what was inside.  “Anyway, he ought to be the one to know first.  I’ll call him on the phone and tell him the letter’s here.”

By the time he got home, the whole family was gathered, in various stages of stress.  Finally the letter was in his hands.  He was reading it.

“Where?  Where?”

His eyes looked perplexed.  “The Rare – o – tong  - gun Mission,” he struggled with the pronunciation.

We looked at each other.

“What?” his father grabbed the letter.  “Rarotonga?  Where’s that?”

We got out the atlas and searched the index.

“I think it’s in Africa,” someone said.

“Maybe Australia?”

“It doesn’t sound like Europe.”

“South America, I’ll bet.”

After considerable searching we found it:  Rarotonga I., Cook Is 78 K j. I.   Page 78-79 was a map of the entire Pacific Ocean – North Pole to South Pole, Asia and Australia to America. 

K and j intersected where there was nothing but water.  In that vicinity we could make out in tiny letters, “Raroton--“  but if there was a dot to identify it, it was lost in the crack between pages.  COOK IS. was in bigger letters, covering on the map what turned out to be about 1200 miles of ocean and eight or ten tiny dots with strange names.

We became familiar with those names over the next two years, as our son was transferred from one coral atoll to another.  The facts of his mission developed in exact polarity to my expectations: 

1.  My son’s mission president met the rickety one-engine plane, which delivered him from Samoa to the primitive Rarotongan airstrip.  With no-nonsense (and no-spirit) efficiency, that man put my child through two or three weeks of hard-knock basic training, during which time he was expected to learn enough of the Maori language to communicate with the natives.  Then he put him on a little cargo boat sailing for one of those tiny dots, and left him on his own.  He did give instructions that all missionaries must send to him detailed weekly reports of their activities.  He did not mention that there was no possible way to send them, nor did he say that the forms bore no relation whatsoever to anything my son would actually experience.

2.  The mission mother was a rather bland and tired woman, who simply did what she was told, without warmth or spirit.  The weather was too warm for “warmth.”  My son saw almost nothing of her.

3.  When my son arrived at his field of labor, there was no one to convert.  All the people on the islands who really desired to know the gospel had already been baptized by earlier missionaries and had moved to more progressive places.  There were a few who had been baptized just for a lark or because they liked the missionaries.  My son and his companion (missionaries go in twos) spent Saturdays trying to sober up these “members” so they could hold church services on Sunday.  The rest of the week was the simple life of being stranded on a tropical island – atypical in that my son remained celibate (even when he found giggling native girls waiting in his bed at night), and he tried to get the message of the gospel through to anyone who would listen.  He sent me a picture of himself standing in the lagoon preaching to the fish.  That was before his camera rusted away.  I believe he did commune with the Lord quite a bit while he was there.

4.  The number of letters I received from my son in a year’s time could be counted on the fingers of one hand.  He was willing to write once a week, but what was the point?  He could send a letter only when the boat came – maybe once a month, maybe not for three or four months during hurricane season.  When he did put a letter to me on the boat, it was at least six weeks before I received it, devoured it, and was still left wondering and fearing.  (One of his friends was sent to the most remote island in the mission and was forgotten for a year.  He nearly starved to death because the mission president didn’t send any supplies.)  The weekly letters I wrote to him stacked up in remote post offices.  The packages I sent were either stolen by the natives or were moldy from age by the time he received them.

5.  My son, always an optimist, looked on his mission as two very interesting years in his life.  For me it was the two worst years to date.

When we are searching for it, something good usually evolves even during the worst times of opposition.  Until the mission, I had been in a state of limbo where my egotism and my feelings of unworthiness continually counteracted one another; so in spite of all my hard work, I really was going nowhere.  My brain was so saturated with the idea that I not only could, but must, perfect myself, and with the idea that God needed me to “take cookies to the neighbor,”  it had never occurred to me that I needed God.  After my son disappeared into a crack in the atlas, I knew I needed God desperately!  There was no other way to communicate with this dear boy who was so close to my heart.  Only God could take the vibrations of my love and deliver them instantly to that faraway place.  Only God could assure me that my son was safe and well and comforted in his isolation.

I had said prayers all my life – prayers were part of the daily ritual the church required – but I had never really prayed before.  I had never prayed a prayer in total helplessness.  Nor had I dared risk a prayer of complete openness.  I had thought that to “let go and let God” was the way of lazy cowards.  It now became my motto and my way of life.

During this initiation into total dependency on God, I first began to suspect that love is an energy.  I became aware of something new . . . in me? . . . passing through me? . . . emanating from me? . . . I wasn’t quite sure.  I knew only that it was good. 

     My fledgling has flown, half the world round,

     far out of reach of my lullaby’s sound . . .

     far past the edge of a wild warning cry,

     far beyond sight of my hungering eye.

     Oh how can I share my warm cloak of care,

     wrap him in love in that far other where?

     How can my comforting touch him out there?

     Gratefully, Father, I thank Thee for prayer.

     Take on its wings the thread of my strength

     and bind him secure in its infinite length.

     Let its sure pulse keep a rhythm between

     that sings of my faith in him, steady, serene.

     Bring through its channels his message to me

     that our hearts may be one in dimension with Thee.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The First Commandment

My discovery that I need God led me to wonder how I might also need Christ in ways I had not considered.  I had accepted the comfortable rationalization that “they” – the sinners – were people who didn’t belong to our church.  The reason I couldn’t make myself feel worthy was that I hadn’t worked hard enough, not that I was a sinner.  Could I have been wrong?  Could it be possible that even I needed a Savior to atone for my sins?

What does “atone” mean?  When some of the brethren came around for their monthly visit to our family, I asked them, “What exactly did Christ do in Gethsemane?”

“He suffered for the sins of the world,” one good brother said.  “He suffered so horribly that He sweat blood from every pore.”

My mind blanked out at that picture, as it had always done before.  “But why?”

“And He was nailed on the cross and hung there . . .”

Again my mind blanked out the picture I could not bear to look at and didn’t want my children to see.  “But what does it mean?”

“It means,” in a patronizing tone,“that people can be forgiven of their sins if they truly repent.”

I didn’t want to hear him recount the church’s five “R’s” of repentance (which I had never been able to perform), but he did it anyway, focusing attention on our children, who were obediently sitting in the living room chairs.  “First you have to Recognize the sin.”

“If sinning means hurting other people or yourself, I can’t do even the first one,” I said, “because I can’t begin to know everyone I’ve hurt, or how.”

“Where did you get that definition of sinning?” he asked in a tone that hurt me – and went on, oblivious of my feelings, with his rote discussion.  “If it’s a serious sin, part of your recognition is to go to the bishop and confess to him.”

“Are some sins not serious?” I wondered, but was again ignored.

“Second, you have to Regret that you’ve sinned, or be sorry.”

That’s the only one I could do.  I felt sorrow automatically whenever I knew I had hurt someone.

“Can anyone tell me the third step?”

No response from the children, whose minds apparently were elsewhere.  My husband jogged their memories, “You know.  You must go to the person you’ve offended and ask forgiveness.”

“That’s not an R,” said one bright child, who was on the fringe of listening.

“Resolve the problem with the offended person,” the home-teacher chimed in helpfully.

I remembered that the only time I had actually tried that step, the woman I had offended wouldn’t forgive me.

“Fourth, you must make Restitution.”

“How?” I cried from my heart.  For example, how could I ever repair the damage my blind-hot anger does to the soul of a trusting innocent child?

“Well,” his voice was condescending, as if I were mentally retarded, “return what you’ve stolen, go to all the people you’ve spread gossip to and tell them you were wrong – that sort of thing.”

Mm-hm.  And who straightens out all the people they’ve gossiped to? I thought, remembering  

the standard lesson on the evils of gossiping, in which the person who has torn open a down pillow in the wind, must retrieve every single feather.  I said, “How can you give back life to a child you’ve killed driving drunk?”

“Well, that brings us to the fifth step:  Refrain from committing that sin again.”

The brethren seemed content with that concise summary, but I was angry and confused.  “And after you’ve taken care of all that, Christ’s agony in Gethsemane and death on the cross is supposed to make sense?”

“It does to me.”

“But if you can do it by yourself, why do you need His atoning sacrifice?” I asked.  “Tell me honestly, do you really feel that you’re closer to perfection than you were – oh, say ten years ago?”

“Of course.  I can see progress every year.  Last year I was perfect in sacrament meeting attendance.  Right now I’m working on daily scripture reading.”

“And when will you be perfect?”

“Oh, not in this life, surely.  But I have all of eternity to work on it.  They say it’s easier to learn in the spirit world.”

My soul complained:  this soul-wrenching agony is not how I want to spend eternity!  I’ve been working at perfecting myself, one thing at a time, for nearly forty years, and I don’t feel

one bit more worthy – not in any way worthy of the sacrifice Jesus made.  I said out loud, “Do you really feel okay about having a goal which you go through eternity without reaching?”

“Oh yes.  I look on it as a challenge.”

“That would be hell for me,” I remarked honestly, but received only a pitying look.

The brethren got up to leave, smiling, shaking hands, “Hope we’ve answered your questions.  See you next month.”

They hadn’t answered any of my questions.  They hadn’t even heard my questions.  The fact that I’d asked them though, made me receptive to the answers when God made them available; so a few years later when the subject of repentance came up I was able to say:  To repent is simply to turn to Christ.  If there is something specific you have done which makes you uncomfortable enough to feel as if you want to repent, you already have repented in the sense of having recognized that it is not your true nature to do that thing.  If you turn to Christ with your godly sorrow and accept His love, it becomes possible for you to see that the mistake you made was a mistake because it was bad for you – not because you are bad.  The result is that repentance is a joyous experience which allows you to see yourself as a more beautiful, god-like person because  you know you have freely chosen away from something wrong because wrong is not part of you.  Repentance is between you and the Lord.  Only He can quicken your being to feel forgiven, to feel the peace of His understanding, to feel clean and new.

I didn’t know that though, as the brethren went out the door and one of the children said, “Why do you give them such a hard time, Mom?” and in the same breath, “Can we go now?”

Dad nodded and followed them out to more interesting pursuits.  Our fifteen-year-old daughter lingered.  “Can I go to the sock hop with Scott tomorrow?”  Her voice cut with a rebellious edge, as if she knew what my answer would be.

“No.  You’re too young.”

“But Mom, everybody’s going.”

You’re not everybody, I thought, with a twinge of déjà vu.  I meant that she was as unique and beautifully distinctive as a prismed snowflake, totally unlike “everybody.”  Then the déjà vu caught up with me, and I remembered my dad saying “You’re not everybody” to me, and I remembered feeling hurt and angry because I thought he didn’t trust me.  So I didn’t say it.  Even with the role reversal, it didn’t occur to me that Dad’s reasons for saying “no” could have been the same as mine.  I saw myself as being wise and caring.  I sill saw him only as the mean ogre.  It didn’t occur to me either to wonder how my daughter was viewing me.  I was trying to do the right thing . . . surely she must know that.

How to do the right thing was the question.  Guilt nagged at me for not being the perfect parent.  Fear welled up’ how could I know what kind of danger my precious one might be exposed to?  Pride prickled; what would people think if I broke the church’s “no dating before sixteen” rule?  All those things went through my mind as I struggled for the right words to say, and remembered a poem I had written about the frustrations of communication.

     Where is the word to reach another heart?

     Oh where the phrase

     to link your understanding

     with my thought?

     Words on words,

     carefully chosen words,

     lest you hear not my true intent

     or read mistaken inflections

     into the yearnings I would have you feel.

     And still I cannot be sure.

     Is there a way to oneness in our thought?

     Or must I despair your ever really knowing

     what is in my heart?

     There is one word,

     the word that was in the beginning

          “And the Word was God.”

     He can weld our thoughts in sameness

     and melt our understanding

     into one clear stream,

     if only we may be in tune

     and find with Him that oneness,

     to know together, Truth.

Saying a silent prayer that my daughter would understand, I finally spoke.  “I love you too much to let you go.”

She didn’t understand.  “Hah! Love?” her sarcasm stung as she slammed the door.

She was right of course.  It wasn’t love – it was just my best effort at it, which I guiltily realized wasn’t enough.  My heart constricted painfully.  Once again, intending only to protect and bless my child, I had hurt her.

“Once again I had hurt her.”  The words stunned me.  According to my own definition (sinning means hurting other people or yourself) I had sinned.  I probably hurt her, and my other children, as often as my mother had hurt me, and I continued to hurt myself – with guilt-trips, worries, fears, overwork, under self-esteem, etc.

Yes, Lord, I am a sinner.  It has taken me a long time to admit it, but I am a sinner.  Alone in the living room I began to cry.  I cried for myself and for my daughter, for my dad and my far away son, for all the unfulfilled dreams and broken hopes, for my perpetual sins . . . and I cried because I was a failure.  In spite of all my efforts to be obedient, I couldn’t even keep the first commandment.

Slowly, “First Commandment” registered in my mind as a small light that grew brighter.  Yes.  Love.

     Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,

     and with all thy mind.  This is the first and great commandment.  And the

     second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.  On these two

     commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

All the law and the prophets!  All of them!  If that’s true, God, why worry about all the other laws?  Why not simply learn about love?  I don’t know why it took me so long to focus my attention on that law, but once it was focused there, my life began to change.

PART THREE

THE RESTORATION

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Christ the Mediator

Is it stupidity, arrogance or unique insight which brings one to say, “Everyone in the parade is out of step except me?”  In my quest to learn about love, I learned about Christ; and I have not heard anyone else talking about what I learned.  It seems to me that if everyone could see Christ as I do (could get in step with me?) the world would be transformed by His love to a state of joy and peace.

The first miracle which changed my world occurred when I was searching to understand how Christ is our mediator.  Talking on the phone, a friend and I had come up with several scenarios which sounded like excerpts from a bad play – or an unsatisfactory religion.

            CHRIST AS MEDIATOR

(Our Church’s Version)

Man:      (entering Pearly Gates)  All my life I’ve born testimony that I believe in you,

               and I’ve kept all the commandments and been obedient.

Christ:    Oh?

Man:       Are you sure you’re Jesus Christ?

Christ:    Yes.

Man:       I’m not perfect yet, but I’ve worked hard at it, and now that I’m here I’m going    

                to work even harder.

Christ:     Could I see your credentials?

Man:       I just happen to have a computer read-out here, signed by the bishop.

Christ:     Yes.  Quite a resume of good works.  But can you give me the secret tokens?

Man:       Are you sure no one’s listening or watching?  Are you sure you’re Jesus Christ?

                Would you shake hands with me?

Christ:     Of course.  (they shake hands)

Man:       I guess it’s okay then.  (He repeats the ceremony of his faith)  Right?

Christ:     That is correct.  Come on in.  Father, after considering all aspect of this man’s

                life on earth, I would like to recommend that he be allowed back into your    

               presence.

God:       Well done, my good and faithful servant.

(Atheists’ Version)

Man:       (on his deathbed, or in the terror-filled seconds when he thinks he may be about

               to die)  Jesus!  Jesus! Help me!  I know I’m a sinner.  I’ve broken God’s

               commandments all my life.  But I believe.  I believe in your grace, in your

               mercy.  Save me!

Christ:    I’ll see what I can do.  Oh God, this man’s been evil all his life, but now he’s

               turned to me, and since I suffered for his sins . . . well, I’m pleading his case and

               I’d like you to forgive him.

God:       Okay.  If you say so.

(Evangelical Christians’ Version)

               Christ appears on world-wide television leading a grand ticker-tape parade of

               saved evangelical souls into heaven, while the unsaved souls writhe in hell. 

               (also televised)

(Catholics’ Version – setting, a confessional at the Pearly Gates)

Man:       Jesus, bless me, for I have sinned.

Christ:     Confess your sins my son.

Man:       Check with the priest at St. Vincent’s Church on Main and Center.  He heard

               my confessions regularly.

Christ:   Yes, I see them on record here.  Did you have the holy last rites before you died?

Man:       Fortunately, yes.  I had enough warning so the priest could get there on time.

Christ:     It looks as if you meet the requirements.  I’ll send word on to the proper

                authorities.

With a groan, I said to my friend, “Considering all the pomp and ceremony Catholics enjoy with respect to Christ’s agonizing torture and death on the cross, this scene should end with Christ laying on the man a cross of his own, which he can carry into heaven to prove he’s a Christian of the right denomination.”

After we’d chuckled about these imaginary scenarios, my friend changed the subject and related to me an experience she had had with evil spirits.  I didn’t take it too seriously, because I’d come to believe that she had such experiences mainly because she enjoyed going to one of the handsome brethren who “cast them out” for her.

I had taken seriously many things this friend had share with me about what part Jesus really does play in our personal lives.  I admired her for her spiritual insight.  Maybe I even envied her because I was so hungry for things of the spirit.

Feeling a little sorry for myself, I said, “Well, I guess I’m not important enough for evil spirits to bother about.  And I’m not worthy to have Jesus bother about me.”

“Don’t tempt the devil that way,” my friend waned.  “Oh, the doorbell’s ringing.  I have to go now.  ‘Bye.”

I hung up the phone and stared out the window at the sky.  My heart cried out silently, “Oh dear God!  How I long to know Christ, to see His face!  But I’m not worthy!  No matter how hard I try, I’m not worthy.  I’ll never be worthy!”  A tear salted my lips.  Then, right there in my kitchen, on this ordinary day, I became part of a profoundly real drama . . . a miracle.

Christ spoke to me, in an unmistakable voice which caused my heart to leap, and which wrote itself clearly in my mind.  ”You are worthy.  You are worth my life.  You are good.  You are beautiful.  I believe in you.  I love you.  You!”

I felt as if something washed through me, cleansing me.  I felt worthy.  I felt loved by Christ Himself.  His love washed through me and changed me forever.  My whole being – mind, heart and soul – experienced forgiveness, as I came to understand what Christ’s atoning sacrifice means.

My immediate reaction was to feel gratitude, and then I felt a surge of outgoing love that I had never felt before.  The love focused on Christ – not as a martyred idol, but as a personal friend who really cared about me.  I loved Him as a reality, not as a fantasy or a blind hope.  This exciting new energy went both ways – first from Him to me and then from me to Him.

It took quite a while before I understood the scope of what had happened in that momentous exchange:  that I had for the first time in mortality felt LOVE – pure, unconditional, unadulterated love.  I felt it come in to me and go out from me.  I felt it as an energy that moved in me to heal and bless and enlighten, but I didn’t yet understand it as Love-Energy from God.

How it was able to connect, to get through my damaged soul, was another miracle, a three-way miracle in which the sincerity of my search did count!  My part was that I had continued to make choices toward the righteous desires of my heart, even though their attainment seemed impossible and even though I had not consciously identified all of them.  God’s part, of course, is eternal and constant:  He-She is always there, sending Love-Energy to us.  Christ is always there, too, ready to be our mediator.  My choices to believe in God and to discover the truth of love had opened my heart enough that I could receive the pure love which emanated from God, through Christ, to me.

After that, I began to experience Christ as my mediator in a very real day-to-day process.  I now recognized His voice, and whenever He spoke to me, I knew who was talking.  I realized that He had spoken to me before, but my perceptions had been so damned by my feelings of unworthiness that I hadn’t trusted what I had heard.

Now I know that all my prayers to Heavenly Father-Mother are mediated through Christ’s love.  They are purified by His love, and I know they reach God with the pure intent of my heart made clear, in spite of my inadequate words.  Though my prayers are not perfect, they become perfect as they pass through Christ’s love; and God’s answers to my prayers are clear and plain when spoken to me through Jesus’ loving voice.

I was taught as a child that it was possible for the devil to appear as an angel of light, and that with a hand-shaking test I was supposed to be able to judge between angels and devils.  It was a phony formula.  God is the Source of Light, and the devil cannot counterfeit it.  Anything truly enlightening comes from God, mediated by Christ, whether we acknowledge their part in it or not.

As I have grown to understand the nature of pure love, Christ’s role as mediator has become clear to me.  He is the translator and transmitter of Love-Energy from God to the world, and from the world to God.  We say our prayers in His name with good reason. 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Christ the Healer

It may seem contradictory to say that my part in the miracle of rebirth which I experienced was to choose toward the righteous desires of my heart, when it happened at a moment when I was crying “I’m not worthy.”  To be unworthy is not righteous, nor has it ever been the desire of my heart.  The righteous desire was my longing to know Christ, to see His face.  It wasn’t a fleeting interest, but a yearning which had driven me all my life.  I had not always been able to define it with those words.  Early in my life it was manifest in my enthusiasm for church activity; later, in my rebellion against church hypocrisy.  The truth of my heart’s desire, however, had always been to return to God, and innately I’ve known that Christ is the way.

There is a fine line between a contradiction and a paradox – a line of piercing insight.  To get from the confusion of contradiction to the understanding of paradox, which lifts one to higher levels of truth, one must always make a sacrifice.

My daughter of the slammed-door episode had turned into a beautiful young lady who had the gift (sometimes a curse) of attracting boys.  She was having a New Year’s Eve party at our house and had invited one boy as her partner.  None of us knew that another boy who was smitten by her charms was outside alone.  In the morning we found that he had gathered twigs to write her name carefully on the snow and had tramped her name over and over with intricate footwork into the snow.  He had gone away leaving a presence more real than his physical self.

For the next several years his devotion to her was the closest thing I had ever seen in this world to unconditional love.  No matter where her fickle heart wandered, he was faithful to her.  Whatever opposition got in the way, his love stood firm.

It was impossible for me not to love him.  I recognized something mysterious and familiar in his eyes, and I became his ally in his pursuit of my daughter.  Probably my love for him was closer to unconditional love than anything I had experienced before.  His shortcomings were made insignificant by my love.  At first I was a bit alarmed that I could love him with so much intensity.  I had not experienced such depth of feeling since falling in love with my husband.  Yet this love was different in that all my energy was focused on making the beloved happy.  Before, most of my energy had been focused on my happily-ever-after desires.  Another difference was that the sexual dimension was absent, which, interestingly, expanded all other dimensions (mind, heart, soul) to a magnitude I had not imagined.  That is to say, my yearnings to have a oneness of mind, heart and soul were expanded, and my visions of how wonderful that would be brightened dramatically.  Oneness did not happen – not with that young man, nor with anyone I have loved.

However, the overwhelming passions which awakened in me, even though not sexually oriented, still made me wonder if I were stepping out of order.  I prayed mightily about it, and that was the only time I can remember the scriptures just “falling open” to the answer for me.

     “For behold, my brethren, it is given unto you to judge, that ye may know good

      from evil; and the way to judge is as plain, that ye may know with a perfect

      knowledge, as the daylight is from the dark night.

     “For behold, the spirit of Christ is given to every man that he may know good from

      evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to

      do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of

      Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God.

     “But whatsoever thing persuadeth men to do evil, and believe not in Christ, and

      deny Him, and serve not God, then ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is

      of the devil.”  (Moroni 7: 15-17)

I had committed myself to the quest of finding out what love is.  That quest continued to focus my energy more and more on Christ, and on beauty, light, truth – inviting me to do good.  So I relaxed with my love for this boy, knowing with a perfect knowledge it was from God.

As I received enlightenment through my studies, prayers and experiences, I shared some of it with the young man, in letters and poems.  Well, I thought I was sharing it.  Actually, I was learning it.  Wonderful, freeing, profound truths about love were affirmed for me as I wrote them down.  I have know way of knowing, years later, whether the young man understood or received any of it.  I do know his mother MISunderstood it, as she took it upon herself to censor his mail.

One day my husband came home from work later than usual and brought into the house a heavy mood of foreboding.  He took me into the bedroom and closed the door.

“The Jordans came to see me today,” he said.

“Oh?  Why?”

His face was ashen.  “They say you are having an affair with Rocky.”

A bomb exploding the house could not have shaken me more.  I was speechless.

“Well?”

No words would come.  I was trying to fathom this ridiculous – no, he’s really serious – situation.

“Is it true?” sharp, demanding.

I could feel red heat rising up through me – embarrassment, confusion, despair, anger, fear . . . I wanted to scream but . . .

“They showed me some of your letters.”

Everything that had been so beautiful, so pure, suddenly became hideous, as I saw it through the evil world’s perverted eyes.  My heart broke.  It broke with a swelling, throbbing, agonizing, soul-rending shatter.

For at least a year afterward I was deep in hell, feeling only pain, seeing only ugliness in myself.  It was when I was groping gradually out of this terrible devastation that my broken heart was open enough to receive Christ’s healing love.  Only then did I begin to understand the principle of sacrifice.  

I had heard about making sacrifices, and more or less rejected it as pagan ignorance.  I had wondered why Abel’s sacrifice was acceptable and Cain’s wasn’t.  I had read about the sacrifice of having a broken heart and a contrite spirit, and turned away in fear at the prospect, rationalizing that it surely wasn’t necessary for me.  Not until I had made a sacrifice, did the paradox of sacrifice come clear to me.

The difference between an unacceptable sacrifice and an acceptable sacrifice is the same as the difference between taking and receiving:  selfishness as opposed to unselfishness.  When one’s motivation in sacrificing is to get (take) a reward, the sacrifice is unacceptable.  It is a paradox that only when one sacrifices with no thought of reward, is he rewarded.  Paradoxically, too, an acceptable sacrifice is a sweet sacrifice, offered in love, but almost always born out of pain.  A broken heart and a contrite spirit are precursors of the acceptable sacrifice.  This means that true sacrifice is never premeditated, because one does not deliberately set out to get a broken heart; and trying to work up a contrite spirit only results in humble pride, a humorous and ineffective contradiction.  It is when life’s circumstances break one’s heart that he has the choice to lay his heart on the altar and turn to Christ with the pain, or harden his heart against the pain in bitterness and anger.  It is when life’s opposition strikes one’s spirit down that he must choose between letting Christ save his spirit, or giving up his spirit to the ravages of self-survival or suicide.  We don’t need to decide whether or not to make sacrifices.  We just need to decide where to turn when we find ourselves being sacrificed.  Will we turn to our own egos, or to Christ?

If we turn to Christ, He will perform miraculous repairs in our love-receiver-transmitter.  Only Christ can mend the broken heart with such artistry that it is expanded in radiance, comprehension, and new life.  Only He can put us in touch with our own goodness so we are able to receive graciously, gratefully, the Love-Energy of God and to transmit it freely.  The damage done to our souls by the cruel oppositions of mortality must be healed.  The perfect healer is Christ.

After Christ healed me, I didn’t make the mistake again of believing the lies of ignorant people.  I did not let the damaged perceptions of others, whose hearts were blind to purity distort what I knew to be holy and true.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Christ and the Godhead

When our youngest child turned eight (the age in our church when one is baptized and given the “gift of the Holy Ghost) I wrote for her a small book about how the Holy Ghost could help her.  It contained things I had been taught:  that the Holy Ghost was a “personage of spirit,” a revelator, a still small vice, one who will bring things of God to our remembrance, and one who will help us choose between right and wrong.  An artist friend of mine illustrated the book with lovely, warm pictures of a child and a kindly, white-gowned man angel.  We assumed the Holy Ghost must be a man, I suppose, because of our male priesthood orientation; if he were part of the Holy Trinity, He must be a man.

It was soon after my personal birth of the spirit that I learned what the Holy Ghost really is – or I should say “who” it is.  I was having a “conversation” with Christ, asking questions as usual.  “What’s the difference between the Light of Christ and the Holy Ghost?” I wondered.  “We’re supposed to have both of them as our guides.”

I had asked this same question at church and received the vague answer, “Everybody has the light of Christ, but in order to have the gift of the Holy Ghost you have to become a

member of our church by being baptized by one who has priesthood authority, and then have that gift conferred on you by one who holds the higher priesthood.”  That, however, wasn’t the answer to my question.  It was only a plug for the church.  I was gradually learning that the brethren didn’t have any other answers.

Christ did.  “People have come to call the energy I send to all God’s children the light of Christ because they don’t understand the LOVE of Christ,” He said to my heart.  “Everyone has the energy of my love radiating to him as a strengthening power.  Whether or not a person feels it, or uses it, depends on the choices he makes.”

“I used to think I had to make myself worthy before I could feel it,” I said.

“Ah my dear, that has been a stumbling block for you.  Many people don’t feel my love because they are ugly instead of beautiful.”

“How can you look at all the awful things we do and still believe we are beautiful?”

“That’s where the Holy Ghost comes in.”

“Oh yes.  Back to the original question.  So if the Light of Christ is eally the power of your love, what is the Holy Ghost?”

“You mean who is the Holy Ghost.”

“Yes.  Do I?”

“You are.”

That answer made me go weak. For a moment I questioned the source of my information.  Was I listening to Christ or to my own ego?  I kept listening.  Light washed through me.  Warmth held me.  Love spoke.

“The Holy Ghost is your own divine nature, the TRUTH of you, the real you.”

“You mean the part of me that is child of God?”

“An offspring of God – no longer a child.” 

“The Holy Ghost is supposed to be a personage of spirit.”

“So?”

“I see.  I see.  It’s my own spirit!”

“Who can remember the things you have experienced with God better than yourself?”

“And be the small voice with the large insight.”  I was beginning to get excited.

“If you would believe in that divine nature, you would see how beautiful you are and understand why I love you so much,” Christ said.

“But all the stupid things I do . . . all the mistakes I make . . . if I were really that beautiful . . .”

“You would make fewer mistakes if you chose to see your goodness.”

“It’s so hard to see.  It’s hidden in a maze of so many mixed up genes and habits and . . .”

“Look deep into your heart.  Deep.”  His voice penetrated the depths of me.  “Who do you want to be?”

“I want . . .”  There were so many thing I wished to be, I couldn’t even begin.

“That’s who you are.

“All of it?”

“All of it,” Christ said softly, with so much love that I had to believe.  “You wouldn’t be able to imagine it all, if it weren’t already in you.”

Later I got out my scriptures and read everything listed in the concordance under “Holy Ghost.”  It all fit.  The Holy Ghost, for each of us, is his own unique, individual spirit:  the part of us that still touches God and can remember truth.

This remarkable concept explained too, why sinning against the Holy Ghost is the only unforgivable sin.  If we choose not to be ourselves (as Lucifer did), God will honor that choice because free agency is a constant in God’s government.  Even the love involved in Christ’s atoning sacrifice can’t reverse the consequences of a choice against one’s self.  Of course there is always grief in Heaven at the loss of a loved soul.

Even the Holy Trinity part fit, after Christ explained it to me.  “Father and Mother love each one of their children with such encompassing joy, that they see each one as part of the Godhead – part of the Family, if you will.”

“Why hasn’t anyone explained that to us?” I asked.  “It’s such a healing thing to know.”

“Well, it is written down a few places, by poets and prophets.  It’s hidden in symbols and broadcast in sunsets, and always communicated on love’s wavelength . . . but so much of truth gets lost in the shuffle,” He said sadly.

Yes, indeed.  Hardly anyone wants to believe in goodness, or light, or truth.  When I tried to share this new insight, I was looked upon as a blasphemer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Peace, Freedom, Love

During my lifetime the “sexual revolution” occurred.  I’m not sure what the people who coined that phrase meant by it, or what the revolutionaries hoped to achieve as they handed out flowers under the banners of “Peace, Freedom, Love.”  I am aware that their new attitudes continue to do great damage to the love connection between God and mankind.

Peace, of course, was never achieved.  Drugs helped the rebels fantasize temporary illusions of peace but were at the same time insidiously destroying every chance at inner peace.  The plan was to fight battles with humanity in less violent ways, but there were still battles – unproductive ones too.

“Free love” is a term connected with the revolution.  Both words – free and love – are used incorrectly when it comes down to the facts of what has happened.  “Costly sex” would be a more accurate term because those who have revolted against moral values have not experienced freedom or love, but rather have paid a high price to have promiscuous sexual intercourse.  The highest price is the loss of love and freedom – and peace.

Sex is not a synonym for love.  In fact the misuse of sex has probably done more to destroy real love than any other thing.  There is only one context in which love and sex can be compatible in this opposition-filled world, and that is the context of an honest moral-value system where people follow God’s counsel to remain chaste until they are prepared to make a marriage commitment.  Such commitment includes being faithful to the marriage partner and responsible for children who may be born to the union.  Moral integrity provides the only channel through which Love-Energy can flow freely.

To have sexual intercourse is not a “right.”  It is a responsibility.  Always two individuals – and potentially three or more – are at risk when the sex act is performed.  No one should take that risk unless he or she is willing to deal with the long-range consequences.  The intimate privilege of using another person’s body requires deep caring about what happens to that body and to the soul which inhabits it.

Two beautiful young people fell in love.  They met on a blind date, unaware of each other’s backgrounds.  Because they were looking for the best in each other, they saw it.

“How was the concert?” I asked my daughter.

“Great!”

“And how was your date?  Did you need to be as nervous as you were?”

“No.  He was nice.”

“Nice.  Do you want to elaborate on that?”

“He’s good looking; he’s polite; easy to talk to.  We have a lot of things in common.”

“Such as?”

She didn’t answer that question, but went into a bit of a trance, muttering, “He has profound eyes . . .” which turned out to be the end of that conversation.

The next time he came over, I saw what she meant.  He did have profound eyes.  They didn’t exactly match the rest of him, which was “slick, shallow high school macho-man; but one got the feeling that soon he might grow to match those eyes.  My daughter certainly believed he would.  She saw him as if he already had, and he saw the beauty in her.  After a few weeks of dating, they were electrified by the vision of divinity which Love-Energy lit up in each of them.

On the sidelines I was touched by the radiance which emanated from their relationship.  Since my energy at that time was totally focused on understanding love, they provided me with a good case study.  I had considerable opportunity to observe, and sometimes to participate in the “energy exchange.”

“What do you know about pure love?” I asked them one day.

They looked at each other, sending off gold lights.  “Oh, we know something about it, he said.

I mean pure love,” I said.

“What’s that?” my daughter asked.  “What’s the difference?”

“Well, pure love is the Love-Energy as it comes to us through Christ from God.”

“I never thought of love as an energy,” she said.

“It feels like one though,” the energized young man said.  “I like that idea.”

“If we don’t distort the energy, it can purify us,” I said.

“Is that what purification means in the scriptures?” asked my astute daughter?

“Yes.”  And I tossed out another idea.  “Maybe if enough people were purified, the Lord would come.”

“Hey, I’m not ready for that! the young man protested.

“Mom is though.  She can’t wait.”

“And why aren’t you ready?” I pursued.

“Gee, he said, as if questioning y good sense, “I’m not perfect yet.  I’ve got a few things to work on.”

“Such as?”

He looked embarrassed – reached down and picked up a little rock to toss.  “Well . . .”

“Never mind.  This isn’t an inquisition.”  I tried to relieve the tension.  “I only wanted to point out that what you think you need to work on may not be the thing that will make you feel ready for His coming.”

“Yeah?”

“What should we be working on?” my daughter asked.

“Letting go, and letting God,” I answered.  “Opening your hearts to receive His love.”

My daughter had been exposed to my philosophies long enough that she had some idea what I meant; but the boy was still very much a victim of the church’s work-ethic teachings, and he was inbued with the belief that there was some kind of disgrace inherent in receiving anything that you hadn’t worked hard enough to earn – especially blessings from God.

“That’s too easy,” he said.

“Have you ever tried it?” she wanted to know.  “It’s not as easy as it sounds.”

“Especially for someone with your indoctrination,” I added.  “Why don’t you try it, if you think it’s so easy?”

“I’m not convinced that it’s the answer.”  He copped out with a rationalization that justified, to himself, his blindness and his laziness.

I spoke from my intense longing to have love be.  “Oh my dear children, I know it is possible to receive pure love, here and now.  It’s a rare and wonderful gift!  Maybe it’s a new thing in the world.  Maybe receiving God’s love is the only way the world can get ready for Christ’s coming.  You could be the first couple to have a pure marriage – to raise your children without sin unto salvation.  If you would just choose love!”

He looked at the beautiful girl, her long hair shining in the sun, her eyes golden bright.  “I choose love,” he said.

Unfortunately, like most men, what he really meant was “I choose sex.”

Probably the greatest reason men and women don’t understand each other is that their definitions of “love” are different.  When women say “love” they usually mean a lot more than sexual union.  They mean commitment, loyalty, sharing of thoughts, oneness of feeling, harmony of body and soul . . .

My daughter meant that, and like most women, imagined her lover did too.  When the young man’s passions reached the height of his past experience (yes, the seventh commandment was one of the things he had to “work on”, physical consummation was the easy way to get relief.  Most men seem to want relief more than they want fulfillment.  I doubt that they comprehend the difference.  They have learned that it’s easier to get what they want from a woman by saying “I love you,” than by saying (what they really mean) “I want to have sex with you.”  After they get what they want, they are offended, angry, and deny responsibility when the woman expects from them what she thought “love” meant.

Anyway, the trusting young girl was caught in this dilemma, let the young man have his way, and that was the beginning of the end of that romance.  After awhile, the beautiful young man, profound eyes and all, had a broken heart, but continued to experience conflict rather than peace, and bondage rather than freedom, because he chose sex over love, selfishness over God, and lies over truth.  The beautiful young girl had a broken heart too, and went into a series of depressions which for a long time damned her from her choices of love, God and truth.

I wanted so desperately for my love – God’s love in me – to be a power which could purify these two dear people.  I wanted to give pure love to them.  I tried.  I hoped and prayed and exerted all the energy with which God quickened me toward their purification; but I couldn’t make it happen.  Love is freedom.  Freedom is love.  God’s love always frees us to make our own choices, and the young lovers’ choice to ignore what they knew of God’s order doomed their relationship to failure and robbed them of that opportunity to be purified.  Hopefully, someday they’ll have other opportunities and make better choices.

The order of God, distilled down to the simple truth, is the righteous use of Love-Energy.  Since that energy is generally unknown in the world, however, God has given us rules of morality which offer a measure of protection against the disasters inherent in sexual promiscuity.  To be strong enough to maintain moral values raises a person’s level of self-esteem so that he is more receptive to the truths of love, and so that love’s energy is better able to get through to him.

Christ understands the dilemma of fallen mortals – that we must continually make choices between our carnality and our divinity.  He knows that the drive for sexual release is an animal instinct, but that the desire for sexual fulfillment is a divine attribute.  He knows that love is the energy which makes the difference in whether we use our sexual powers like animals or like gods.  He offers us the energy which keeps love pure and which lets us use it righteously.

In our disoriented-from-truth society, sexual climax is considered to be the highest level of feeling available to mortals, so it is sought after in every possible way by people with both good and evil intentions.  The more selfish and godless a person is, the more deviant will be the methods he uses to glut himself with this sexual “high,” and the more careless he will be about who gets hurt in the process.  The more unselfish and God-oriented a person is, the more his pattern will be to use sexual powers righteously and responsibly, which will free him to seek for even more profound ways of communicating with those he loves.

Contrary to popular opinion, erotic sexual experience is not the ultimate “good time.”  In fact it is one of the lesser pleasures attainable in the wide scope of mortal possibility.  If it is the most one strives for, he has very limited vision, hope, or creative ability.  Most certainly he will never get rid of the static on his love-connection long enough to tune in to pure abiding love, and will never even begin to comprehend ultimate joy – wherein all the senses of body and soul are quickened to climaxes of rapture which make what we mortals know of sexual pleasure fade into insignificance.
    

I tried to tell that to the young man, but the selfish attitudes of the sexual revolutionaries were more important to him than anything I said – even when he was in hell for his bad choices.

The hellfire-and-damnation preachers enjoy crying, “It’s God’s retribution!” when they see people suffering the terrible bondage of no love, no freedom, no peace:  guilt, fear, suicide, unwanted pregnancies, abortions, child abuse, disease the horror of AIDS, etc.  Others cry bitterly, “What kind of God would allow such suffering?  There is no God.”

I feel that I must put in a word for the God I know, and make an attempt to place responsibility for these tragedies where it belongs.  God does not mete out retribution, nor is He-She responsible for our suffering.  God’s function is to love us and to provide for us the Energy of Love, which is a healing, blessing, always-positive force.  The advice God gives us (“commandments” is our word, not God’s), if we follow it, assures the best way of life we can enjoy here.  It suggests behavior patterns which protect us against the adulteration of Love-Energy, as well as from the influence of negative-energy forces whose purpose is to destroy love.  If we choose not to follow God’s advice, we ourselves are responsible for the unhappy results.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Glorify God and Believe

So where does love go?  What happens to the incredible high of falling in love?  Who ever chose the word “falling” to describe the phenomenon of experiencing love anyway?  Ascending or radiating or savoring would be more appropriate.  Falling is the out-of-love sensation.

I remember that every time I passionately loved, I vowed with every ounce of my sincerest integrity, I will feel the glorious intensity of this love forever.  Nothing can change it!  I meant it too.  I believed it.  Every time I fell in love, I made the same vow, sure in my conviction.  And every time – sometimes because of my choices, sometimes because of the beloved’s choices – those passionate promises faded into disillusionment.

As I have come to understand the workings of Love-Energy, I can see technically what happens.  Being able to explain it is little comfort though.  To be able to do something to help keep the love pure . . . ah, that would make life worth living.  That’s why I’m writing all this down – in the hope that it will make a difference in the choices people make.

One is first zapped with Love-Energy when for some eternally vital reason, God steps in and clears the static from one’s love mechanism long enough for a quickening to occur which allows the divine nature (actually the truth) of the beloved to be illuminated.  While the love-transmitting set is functioning properly, the vision of truth is a greater reality than are the facts of life.  But of course none of us behaves in harmony with the truth of himself.  We perform however we have been programmed to perform by our personal experiences with love-damage.  As these obstacles manifest themselves in the forms of guilt, fear, jealousy, lust, selfishness, etc. the vision of perfection fades, and our distorted perceptions come gradually back into focus as the greater reality.  Usually in this circumstance, we label the beautiful vision illusion and file it away with our other shattered dreams.

There are two keys which must be used if a person is to hold on to the love and become an instrument through whom Love-Energy is manifest. The first is, Glorify God.  The second is, Believe in the Love.

My views on Christ and love had gotten me in trouble with high church officials.  In an interview with one whose power of authority extended over the area in which I lived, I was accused of having written things which were damaging people’s lives.

“Whom have I hurt?” I sincerely wanted to know.

“Quite a few people,” he hedged, “in far-reaching places.”

Since my circle of close friends was small, and since I didn’t communicate to “far-reaching places,” I found his accusation hard to believe.  “My intent has never been to hurt anyone,” I remonstrated.  “Please give me their names and addresses, so I can get in touch with them.  The gospel of Jesus Christ, as I understand it, is never harmful.  It is a joy and blessing in people’s lives.  If I have conveyed any other message, I certainly want to clarify myself.  Who are the people I have hurt?”

“I’m sorry.  That information is confidential,” my interrogator said with a benign smile.

I was furious!  How dare he accuse me of sinning against my fellow human beings and then deliberately prevent me from trying to make amends to the people he claimed I had hurt?  I reached for strength to remain calm, and said, “Can you tell me what it was that I wrote?”

“Well, there was a paper about love . . .”

“Have you read a paper I wrote about love?” I asked, perplexed.  I had never shared any such thing with him.  He coughed uncomfortably.  “Who showed it to you?” I pressed.

“That’s confidential,” he said again with a bit of an edge to his voice, as if I ought to know better than to ask.

“I’d appreciate it if you would be more specific about what the real problem is.”

“It was about pure love . . . I think you called it pure love . . . but I would have to question that choice of words.”

“Why?”

“Well . . . people are always vulnerable to temptation.”

“Yes.  That’s why we need Christ to purify us.”

“Church members always have to stay on guard or Satan will deceive them into believing lust is love.”

I noticed his third-person reference to they (the sinners) and decided to try to bring my point closer to home.  “Meredith probably loved Brother Welch with pure love; and Brother Welch has a spirit that radiates love to everyone,” I said.  “Their relationship was simply misjudged by unenlightened gossips.” 

Meredith was the daughter of the man I was speaking to and Brother Welch was, for a brief time, conductor of the church’s famous choir, in which Meredith sang.  The reasons for Brother Welch’s “release” after only a year as choir director had been officially reported as “personal.”  Unofficially, various rumors precipitated a juicy scandal:  mishandling of choir funds, too little discipline, too much charisma with the choir ladies, jealousy of people in power, etc. etc.  My own opinion had been formed simply by observing Meredith’s eyes when she spoke of Brother Welch.  I saw something holy there.

Just as “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” so is ugliness; and my interviewer must have seen differently than I did.  At my mention of Meredith and Brother Welch, his face drained of color and he became livid.  His voice changed from bland to threatening. “Don’t call that love,” he managed to say between clenched teeth.  “That had nothing to do with love.”  He looked at me as if I were evil incarnate and abruptly ended the interview.    

As I left his office, it struck me how ridiculous was the admonition I had heard all my life to “avoid the appearance of evil,” because it is impossible to know what another person sees as evil.  Depending on the mind set of the observer, everything one does could appear to be evil.  More useful advice would be to avoid offending one’s own heart.  To be true to the goodness inside one’s self provides the best insurance against doing evil.

Not long after my conversation with her father, Meredith moved to New York, where she worked for awhile and then married and had two sons.  The next time I saw her she was back home, divorced.  Rumor had it that Brother Welch had threatened to sue the church for defamation of character, and the church had threatened to excommunicate him if he did.  If that were so, he must have believed that men on earth really have the power to separate him from God because he chose not to make any more waves.  His reputation was tarnished; his career went downhill.  But he stayed in the church.

This is just one example, from many I have observed, which illustrates how we deny instead of glorify God when He/She introduces us to pure love; and how we choose not to believe in the love, but to believe lies which distort it.

Meredith’s father had obviously imposed his own lusts on his interpretation of the situation, and he was representative of all the church leaders who judged it.  The two people actually experiencing the love, believed those brethren – who told them they had done (or soon would do) something evil.  The two also probably believed their own fears, guilts, lusts, more than they believed in their love.  They did not know that if they had glorified God as the source of their beautiful feelings, God would have quickened them to understand how to use the love righteously, would have strengthened them with the power to do so.  They did not know that if they had believed in the love instead of in their own weakness, nothing could have destroyed it.

I am not saying they wouldn’t have been the victims of other people’s perversions of truth and of the mean persecutions of blind fanatics.  They surely would have been.  But they, themselves, could have become new people – purified people – whole, in a true freedom, which is certainly worth any price.  Or if even one of them had believed in the love and glorified God in it, that one would have been changed by the miracle of purification.  The miracle happens just one soul at a time anyway.  How else would one believe it?

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

The Crucial Choice

Not knowing what else to do with my unmanageable comments and questions, the brethren made me the focus of a “witch hunt.”  Quietly they were collecting bits and pieces of evidence which, when manipulated and taken out of context, could be used to prove I was a heretic.

I was still ignorantly believing that their intent in going to church was the same as mine – to find God – so I fell easily into the traps they set.  Before the trial that would justify them in getting rid of me, I was in an interview with the bishop.  (This was a new bishop.  My husband had been replaced when his usefulness was exhausted.)

“I’ve been very concerned about you, Sister Blanchard,” the bishop began.

“Thank you,” I said, “but you needn’t be.  I’m in a better place than I’ve ever been.”

“Oh?” he raised his eyebrows, pressed his fingers together. “Tell me.”

“The Gospel of Jesus Christ is really working for me.  The ordinances aren’t the answer.  They simply point the way to the real happenings.”

“Just what do you mean by that?” he frowned apprehensively.

“Well, for instance, going through the ritual of baptism didn’t change me; it was only symbolic of the actual birth of the spirit which did change me, mightily!  I thought I had to earn Christ’s love, but He has always loved me, and He loves me now, just the way I am.  I feel His love!”  I went on to express the powerful energy of Christ in my life.  The bishop sat unmoved.  “We love Him because He first loved us,” I finished.

“Where do you find that?” he asked.  I showed him the scripture in the first epistle of John.  His only comment was, “Look, here in the very next verse it says If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar.”  Then he looked me squarely in the eye.  “Do you sustain the brethren, Sister Blanchard?”

I looked squarely back.  “I sustain them in righteousness.”

“And do you imagine you are qualified to judge their righteousness?”

“I feel responsible to choose what I can sustain and what I can’t.  Isn’t that what free agency is about?  I don’t think the brethren are infallible.  Do you?”

“Sister Blanchard,” he leaned back in his chair and looked at me pityingly, “I want you to know that I have prayed hard and long about you,” then leaned ominously toward me, “and I am prompted to tell you that you are deceived.”

All my life I had believed that the men who claimed to hold the Priesthood of God had an “in” with heavenly powers which I didn’t have.  So when the bishop said God had told him I was deceived, I went into mild shock.  Surely in his position of enormous responsibility he had at least as much right as I did to inspiration from God.  Why would God tell him something different than He told me?  I left the bishop’s office shaken and confused.

Next morning early I went to the temple, fasting and praying.  All day I pled with the Lord to resolve my dilemma, which had distilled to a choice between the church and God.  Up to this point I had perceived them to be the same thing.  I begged for insight to help me.

Nothing.

All day long in intense agony, and still nothing.

Emptiness.

Hopelessness.

Despair.

I’ve been suicidal a few times in my life – reached a point of pain beyond which I couldn’t endure.  This was one of those times.

I drove to the canyon and stood under cold stars, wishing I knew how to not be.  Life after death was a fact in my philosophy, so mere death was no answer.  I wanted to vanish away.  Not knowing how to accomplish that, I decided to live without God.  Who needed a God anyway, who would play such vicious games with one’s soul?

I worked at it for a week – moving coldly through the daily routine, slamming the door on my mind if it tried to think, ignoring with bitter resignation my heart’s pain.  At least I tried to do that.  The strange thing was that if I relaxed vigilance for one moment, I found myself talking to the Lord in the old familiar way.

     Thank you for putting dew and sunshine on this rose.

     Go with my child through today’s adventures.

     Along with these other nutrients, Lord, put love in the soup.

     A thousand thanks for such a blue, blue sky – and oh, I love today’s cloud patterns!

     When my children sleep in this bed, let them feel peace.

     Oh Lord, what a sunset!

And after awhile it sank in that I had made my choice.  I had chosen God.  No matter what the brethren did or said, I chose to believe what I heard from God.  I didn’t want a God who would say I was deceived when I was filled with more light and joy than I had ever known.  I wanted, and could worship with undying devotion, the God of Love I had come to know.  I chose, freely, God-the-Father-the-Mother-the-Son – and myself-the-holy-ghost as part of their Love Family.

If the brethren didn’t know my God, well too bad for them.  They could continue taking their answers from some lesser being than the loving God I knew.

Once again I had lost my life to find it.  And once again, from the ashes of death, Christ resurrected a phoenix.

This experience reinforced in me how important free agency is to God.  However hard we pray for Father or Mother God to make a choice for us, they will not do it.  When we are praying for guidance to make a crucial choice, and find that the “heavens are like brass” over our heads, then the place to look for guidance is deep within our own soul.  The Holy Ghost there will keep our decisions in harmony with the truth of our divine nature, which is at the same time harmonious with God’s will.  Once we have decided on a course of action using our free agency, then God will pour out to us love and reassurance in a confirmation that it was a good choice, and will bless us with strength to pursue the course we have chosen.

Having made this enormous breakthrough, I was closer to Christ than I had ever been – so close that He showed me a picture of Gethsemane and of the cross which I could understand.

“Remember how much you hurt that night under the stars?” He asked gently.

“Ah yes.  I remember.”

“I felt that pain, your pain, in the garden of Gethsemane.”

“You did?”

“Yes.  I felt your desperate, helpless anguish of that night, and of every time in your life when you cry out against the opposites of godliness.”

“And you felt everybody’s pain that way?” I asked in awe.

“Yes.  But your pain is what matters.”

His concern was so personal.  My heart expanded with joy.  My mind still questioned.  “You didn’t suffer for our sins?”

“Well, He said, “if sinning means hurting yourself or someone else . . .” and I could feel Him smile, as if we were conspirators in our understanding of sin, “yes, I felt all that hurting.  It was the pain of those who were sinned against.”

The concept was overwhelming.  I gasped and could feel tears prisming in my eyes.

Then He asked me, “Do you suffer when you sin?”

“Oh yes!  I hate myself.”

“But I still love you.  I see the good, righteous person in you, and I care that your sins hurt you.  I felt that too – your pain at being untrue to yourself.  I understand how the Fall made you an alien to your true self, and how hard it is for you to believe in your goodness.”

“There is so much evil in the world.  I still can’t look at you carrying all that.”

“Look at the love.  It was love I felt.  Love for you.  The pain was in knowing mankind would not receive my gifts of love.  When you receive it, there is no pain – only love radiating between us.”

I saw a picture then of Christ kneeling in the garden,  pouring out His love for me to God, the Source of Love – and of God reaching to draw me into a holy circle, where I was whole and protected.

“And the cross?” I asked, needing to reconcile that horror.

“Father, forgive them,” He said.  I waited, still not understanding.  “It was the only way to repair the broken love connection between God and man.  The divine genes in me connected me to God, the mortal genes connected me to mankind.  I became the conduit through whom Love Energy could flow back and forth.”

The Way, the Truth, the Life, my mind remembered, as it began to comprehend the power in so perfect a love.  And I didn’t see Christ on the cross anymore, pierced with agony.  I saw His one hand extended, touching God, and his other hand reaching out to me, waiting for me to choose Him and complete the love-connection.  I grasped it tightly.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Christ and Forgiveness

The bishop sent his official messengers (two for protection) to deliver the papers informing me that I was excommunicated from the church.  A suffocating aura of fear pressed into the room with them.  Their faces were shaped into masks of terrified pity, as if they were sure this action condemned me to hell.  One muttered the required phrases of regret, avoiding my eyes, and then they slunk away.  I felt sorry for them, and I could imagine that the bishop was glad church protocol allowed him to delegate such a distasteful assignment to his clerks.

That the brethren decided to get rid of me didn’t surprise me; and of course it didn’t change my relationship with God and Christ.  I wasn’t prepared, though, for the aftermath of the bishop’s announcement to the church membership that I was now unacceptable.  In keeping with the secrecy attached to the entire proceeding, he avoided specifics and gave as reason for his action “conduct (on my part) unbecoming to a member of the church.”  This precipitated a deluge of speculation and rumor which labeled me “leper.”  Even my friends defected to the safe side.

At The Breakfast Table

“I can’t believe they did that to Gay.  I don’t know anyone who lives the spirit of the gospel better than she does.  It’s just a shame.”

“You aren’t suggesting the brethren made a mistake?”

“They must have.”

“That’s dangerous talk.”

“Why?  We don’t believe men are infallible.”

“We do believe criticizing the brethren is the first step on the road to apostacy.”

“That’s what they tell us.

“You’d better believe it, or you’ll end up where she did.”

“But she’s such a good person!”

“She must have been way out of line somewhere, because I know all the men on that council, and that many good men can’t be wrong!”

“I ought to call her . . . but I wouldn’t know what to say.”

At The Football Game

“Did you hear that Gay Blanchard got X’d?”

“No!  Really?  What for?”

“What do you suppose?”

“It’s usually adultery.”

“Yeah!”

“You know something I don’t know?” with a jovial elbow to the ribs.

“Hey wait a minute.  Not me.  I saw her alone with ---------- once though.”

“Hmmm . . . if he gets X’d next . . .” coarse laughter.

Over the Back Fence

“Isn’t that something about Sister Blanchard?”

“I say it serves her right.”

“Well, I always did think she was uppity.  Acted like she knew more than everybody else – even the brethren.”

“She taught a class my daughter was in.  Sharon came home one day and told me something really strange she’d said.”

“What was it?”

Oh I don’t know.  Sharon was thrilled with it.  But I went to the bishop and told him I didn’t want that woman teaching my daughter.”

“So what happened?”

“He gave her a different job . . . leading the singing, I think . . . where she couldn’t do much damage.”

In the Foyer After Church

“I’m glad that Blanchard woman finally got what she deserved.”

“So am I.  It was long overdue.  She actually thought women should hold the priesthood.”

“She claimed she already did hold it.  Started her own cult.”

“Did she?  I heard she was a polygamist.”

“She probably is.”

“Well the church is certainly better off without her.”

At the Women’s Group Planning Meeting

“Do you know why they excommunicated her?”

“She’s a witch.”

“Really?”

“You know the brethren tell us not to delve into the mysteries.  But she did anyway.  She held secret meetings and went around proselyting for her dark church.”

The rumors that got back to me were sickening, and I didn’t even hear half of them.  I felt the hostility, though.  I wasn’t prepared for the hostility nor for the feelings it evoked in me.  I began to hate those ignorant men, who sat smiling behind their polished hardwood desks in black suits, white shirts and neat ties, pretending to make judgments for God.  I was angry.  I wanted to go into their temples and tip over the tables!

The church had provided me with my lifestyle, my society, my environment.  Now all that was gone.  I didn’t even want to go to the grocery store, where the ladies turned their backs, whispering, glancing, and quickly going around the corners.  I was livid when my thirteen-year old daughter told me that her best friend’s parents wouldn’t let her say the blessing on the food any more, and soon wouldn’t let their daughter be her friend.  The fact that my children were discriminated against was so unfair! 

I knew I should forgive all the bigots, hypocrites, liars and gossipmongers.  After all, Christ had forgiven me, and I was a disciple of Christ.  But I was hurting and didn’t know how to forgive.

A well-meaning friend, concerned about my bitterness, gave me a how-to book to read.  This one was about how to achieve peace of mind, which, according to the M.D. psychiatrist author, should be our only goal.  As with the other how-to books I’ve read, the solutions dealt with retraining the brain to new thought patterns, which in turn led to new behavior patterns.

I’ve never been able to do it – to discipline my brain into making myself behave better.  Occasionally I have admired and envied those who claimed they could do it.  On other occasions, examining the deepest resources of my being, I have questioned their honesty.

“You mean you really can discipline yourself to forgive the people who have hurt you?” I asked the person who had given me the book.

“Surely.  Just reason it out.  Not forgiving fills you with stress; so forgive and the stress is gone.”

“I can see the reasoning is logical; but reasoning doesn’t change how I feel.”

“Well try harder; you can make yourself do it. You’re a strong person.  Discipline is the key.”

“Mmhmm.”  It made perfectly good sense.  All the how-to books made good sense.  So why don’t they work for me?  Am I just too lazy to work hard enough?  A feeling of inadequacy overcame me.  I changed the subject.  “Is wanting to forgive someone so you can have peace of mind a good reason to forgive?”

“The best.”

“And wanting to free yourself from burdens?”

“Of course, what else is there?”

“There’s the other person.”

“Well didn’t you read the book?  You love the person who offended you.”

“Can you make yourself do that?”

“Yes.  Retrain your brain to always see others as loving or asking for love.  Retrain your brain to see the god in them.”

For me, the church’s “I am a child of God” philosophy had always extended to “ you are a child of God too.”  So my brain didn’t need retraining to believe people are potentially good.  I sincerely believed that even the blind church leaders who excommunicated me were potentially good.  “Seeing the good in them only makes me angry that they choose against it,” I said.  “It doesn’t evoke forgiveness.”

“Use your will power.  Retrain your brain,” he repeated.

Your brain.  He had said brain many times.  Finally it began to register in me that the how-to programs are products of the brain, requiring discipline of the brain, and they are logically achievable because the brain defines all the words in ways which don’t include anything the brain can’t control.  I could also see, in a flash of insight, that the reason they don’t work for me is that my heart defines the words, and my heart’s definitions require more power than I have – to forgive, to love, to change in any way from my fallen patterns.  My brain had chosen to forgive long ago; but my heart’s definition required that I feel forgiveness as a pouring out of energy to someone else, not simply as a mind-soother for myself.  My brain had always chosen to love too; but for me, love was a word that my brain didn’t even register as something separate from my heart’s feelings.  And love either happened for me or it didn’t; I couldn’t try to love so hard that I made it happen.

When I got right down to analyzing it, it seemed that the brain’s definitions are always ego-centered – “what’s in it for me?”  The brain translates even such other-related words as love and forgiveness into actions of benefit to ME.  The heart’s definitions also include YOU.

The more I thought about that, the more I was drawn to consider the endowment ordinance I had walked through when I was married in the temple.  The ceremony had secret penalties implying death by beheading with a knife, and death by slicing the heart with a knife.  Promise of obedience to a higher law was exacted before each penalty was pronounced. 

The whole ritual with paganistic overtones had been confusing to me, and made me uncomfortable.  However, because I took everything in the church seriously, I needed to get this ceremony put into perspective which made usable sense.  Here again my brain couldn’t just accept it for what it appeared to be.

The thing that bothered me the most was that the word “love” was never used in this ceremony which was supposed to seal families together forever.  The words were cold:  sign, token, penalty, law, priesthood.  My heart cried out to understand what God really was getting at behind the strange symbolic representations.  Please Lord, breathe some life into these cold words.  Show yourself to me in these stark symbols.  What does it all have to do with me being able to forgive?”

As my prayer radiated out, the word life returned to me, shimmering.  Could the symbols of the head and the heart have something to do with life – not death?

The life of the head is the brain.  Scientific methods depend on the brain’s reasoning power for answers.  Knowledge is a brain function . . . the knowledge of men.  What about the knowledge of God?

The head symbol in the ceremony comes first in a representation of mankind’s climb from the lone and dreary world back to God.  That must mean one needs to receive the endowment of knowledge about God first.  It is a mighty endowment, but it is just the beginning.  Unfortunately many people see knowledge as the end.

If one is content living in the dimension where the brain’s reasoning defines everything, he will – by his own choice, not by an angry god’s wrath – cut himself off from further endowment.  That’s where the penalty comes in.  It’s totally a matter of choice whether one stays on the knowledge-of-god level, or progresses beyond it.

If one’s choice is to dare the risk of going on, he will make the acceptable sacrifice, and his understanding will be opened to a new, higher law – the law of mercy.  In this law the heart is the instrument of enlightenment, as it reveals the feelings of God.

It’s difficult to get the idea across to a pragmatist that feeling is a higher level of comprehension than reasoning.  He will argue that men can’t trust their feelings; and he is right, if one considers only the self-centered lusts of fallen man.  However, by the time one gets enough knowledge to see the need to comprehend feelings, he will be in close touch with his spirit and on guard against his lusts, and he will know that we can trust the deep feelings of our hearts.

In truth, we never have to make a choice between knowledge and feeling.  Christ said, “I am come not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it.”  He meant that His new law, where feelings matter, is in addition to – not in place of – the old law where knowledge matters.

Different circumstances will precipitate the sacrifices people make when choosing to move beyond the law of knowledge, but the decision they make as a result of the sacrifice will necessarily be the same.  They will turn to Christ, for that is a prerequisite to progressing into the law of mercy.  In fact, Christ is the key to understanding the entire temple ceremony.  Even though the word is never used, love is what the ritual is all about – Christ’s love for us.

Heartfelt conversion to Christ is an experience not understood by, nor explainable to, people whose choice is to stop with brain-powers rational conversion.  It is truly a birth of the spirit which changes everything from a flat dimension to a spatial one.  Through Christ we come to comprehend, in addition to the knowledge of God, the feelings of God:  mercy, grace, unconditional love, forgiveness.

Ah Lord, here we are back to forgiveness.  And yes, it is for you too, a matter of the heart, not just the brain.  “How do you do it from the heart?” I wondered.

Christ had a question for me on the subject of temples.  “Do you remember what I did in the temple?”

“I remember you threw out the money-changers.  Some say it was out of character for you to get that angry.”

“Do you know why I was angry?  Because they were doing something unworthy of themselves.”

I could relate to that.  My own words came back to me – Seeing the God in them only makes me angry that they choose against it.  It doesn’t evoke forgiveness.

Reading my thought, Christ said, “It’s all right to be angry at unrighteousness.  You have to stand against it in order to be true to yourself.”

“Then how do you forgive it?”

“Don’t you see?  The sin is not the sinner.”

How simple.  The words which had been a lifeless platitude, suddenly sprang into moving, breathing, feeling inside of me.  I felt love for the men who had sinned against me, and I felt forgiveness; at the same time I felt passionate anger against their unrighteous behavior.  And all of it was right.  I was at peace with it.  I received from Christ not only the endowment to forgive, but the endowment to stand against unrighteousness and have peace, as both feelings abided in me harmoniously.

In the Telestial Law – the law of justice, or punishment and reward – a mighty change of brain can be accomplished by will-power and self-discipline, resulting in ego-centered peace of mind.  The mighty change of heart though, can only be accomplished by Christ, and when a person has that experience, his focus becomes other-centered.  His desire for peace reaches to all.  

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

Christ – the Way

I have remarkable children.  In their separate searches to discover truth, they have investigated many things.

“Mom, what do you think about reincarnation?”

“I haven’t thought about it much.  I was taught that we only have one chance to live in mortality, so we’d better make the most of it.”

“I’ve been reading this book which documents people’s past-life experiences.”

“How can they do that?”

“You know how some psychiatrists hypnotize people and take them back to childhood so they can discover forgotten traumas?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s like that – only you go back further than childhood to other lives in other places and times.”

“Sounds fascinating.”  I pondered that idea a bit.  “But what purpose does it serve?  Most of the people I know have enough trouble coping with this life, and don’t need complications from another one – or other ones.”

“I can see how it might help put this life in better perspective.”

“How?”

“Maybe if we remembered other lives, we’d have more clues about how to get it right in this one.”

“How to get what right?”

“I’m not sure; but they say you have to keep coming back until you get it right.  People who believe in reincarnation think that every time we come back it’s to learn particular lessons and work out our karma with particular people.”

“Karma?”

“Like the reason I’m your daughter is because I was your mother in another life, and we both have to see things from the other point of view and work out a better relationship.”

“Hmm . . . how are we doing?”

“Be serious.”

“Well seriously, if there is anything to it – this is my last time around.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I got it right this time.  I’ve learned what I need to know.”

“Really?  What’s that?”

“Every knee shall bend and every tongue confess that Jesus is the Christ.”

“That’s all you need to know?”

“Don’t toss it off lightly.  It’s been a life or death struggle for me.”

“Well, I’ve been exposed to some of your battles with the church, but . . .”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with the church – my relationship with Christ, I mean.  Once I thought it did.”

She looked puzzled.  “But Christ has always been associated with churches in my experience.”   

“Yes.  It’s unfortunate how many ways churches have garbled His simple message.”

“I can relate to that,” she laughed knowingly.  “Garbled church messages is one reason I’m looking into reincarnation.”

“What does that philosophy say about Christ?”

“They think He was a great teacher; that during the years when the Bible gives no record of Him – between ages 12 and 30 – He was in the Far East studying with the spiritual masters.”

“I question that.”

“Why?  They seem to have quite a bit of circumstantial evidence to support their idea.”

“Jesus needed no man to teach Him.  God was His teacher,” I said, and added, “If He did visit the Far East, it would have been to teach the masters, not the other way round.”

“Well, what do you think about this idea?  That each of us has a Christ self, and that Jesus found His own Christ self and provided the example which we can follow to find ours.”

“I think that concept fails to acknowledge Christ’s differences from us.  It’s the same attitude I rebelled against in the church – the presumption that we can follow Christ’s example.”

“You don’t think we have a Christ-self?”

“I think each of us has a divine nature, which is our own true self; I have come to believe that what the scriptures call the Holy Ghost is, in each of us, that potentially perfect person.  Each of us also has available to us the “Light of Christ” or the “Love of Christ” to help us find and believe in our best self; but Christ is the only one who really has a Christ Self.”  I found it difficult to put into words my feelings on this subject.  “Christ did too many things we can’t do for us to imagine we are able to follow His example.”

“How do you see Christ as different from us?” she wanted to know.

“Well, in the first place, He was fathered by a God.  Genetically that would make Him very different from us.”

“Yes it would,” she acknowledged.  “And it would explain His otherwise unexplainable powers.”

“I believe it also exempted Him from the curse of Adam.  He didn’t have those blinding veils over His consciousness which make mortal men so spiritually inept.  He could see the big picture of eternity and His own place in it better than we can.”

She thought about that for awhile and then murmured, “No wonder He was so misunderstood.”

“And still is!” I couldn’t help noting.  “People who believe Jesus Christ was nothing more than a great teacher, or an example we can follow, have missed the whole point of His coming to Earth.”

“Well, what did He come for then?”

“To be our Savior – to be our connection with God – to make possible for us eternal life in resurrected bodies – to keep LOVE alive!”

“Well the people who wrote this book,” and she opened the reincarnation book she had been reading, “don’t have any trouble with the resurrection part.  For them it’s proof of reincarnation.”

“But resurrection isn’t reincarnation!” I protested.  “They aren’t the same thing at all.”

“No?  What’s the difference?”

“Well resurrected people don’t come back – at least not as mortals, and they never stay here long.  What I’ve finally got right is that resurrected beings are immortal.  They are pure and live in a pure environment, free from opposition.  And that’s where I’m going to be.”

“But how do you . . .”

“Christ didn’t come to show us how to do an updated remake of mortality’s tragedy.  He came to show us how to rise to a higher level of existence – and how to abide in the presence of God.”

“If  that’s so, how do you know you’ll be resurrected?”

“The sealing has happened.  I belong to the Family of Christ.  I have received His gift of love.”

I’m not sure how much of that my daughter understood, or if she believed me.  Probably deep in her being she did, where her own soul yearns to live with God.  But that love-sealing with Christ has to happen to one before he or she can truly comprehend it.  One’s own love-receiving set must be repaired by Christ.  One’s own heart must be healed.  He is the Way.  The thing one has to get right in this world is that Christ is the only way to get out of it.

For a moment my daughter was quiet, thinking her own thoughts.  Then she stood up and crossed the room to the mirror, where sun shining through crystals in the window was casting patches of rainbow.  She touched one, humming a little snatch of a song we’d made up about rainbows and love.  “Do rainbows work the same magic if they shine on your reflection in the mirror?” she wondered.

“I’m sure they do,” I reassured her.

Then she looked closer at herself.  “I’m getting wrinkles around my eyes!”

“Nonsense!”

“Yes I am.  Look right there.  And I found a grey hair the other day.”  I laughed.  In comparison to myself she seemed like a fresh, dew-lit rosebud.  “Do you think they’ll ever find the fountain of youth?” she asked, as if it were suddenly important.

“Lots of people have tried.”

“But is there such a thing?”

“I believe there is.”

“You do?  Seriously?”

“Yes.  But the truth about the fountain of youth has been lost in mythology – and more recently in cosmetology,” I opined.

“Explain that.  Where is the fountain of youth?”

“Still in the Garden of Eden.”

She laughed cynically and flung up her hands, “Hah!  That’s a lot of help.”

“Remember what God did after Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden?”

“Mmmm . . .” she thought a minute.  “He cursed them.”

“No.  Not that.  And let me correct what you just said.  God isn’t in the business of cursing.  God’s business is love and freedom.”  I tried to explain, “Adam and Eve made the free choice to learn about evil, and they experienced the consequences, or ‘curse’ of that choice:  mortal life in a world of opposition.”

“Okay.  I agree with that.  What did God do then?”

I quoted from the temple dramatization, “God said, Let cherubim and the flaming sword be placed to guard the way of the Tree of Life, lest Adam put forth his hand and partake of the fruit thereof and live forever in his sins.”

“Why would God do that, if His/Her business is love?  Isn’t the Tree of Life supposed to represent the love of God?”

“Yes, and I’ve wondered the same thing.  Why would God cut us off from perfect love?”

“Do you know the answer?  Why?”

“Because the Tree of Life is the mythical Fountain of Youth.  If we ate from that tree, the energy of God’s love would keep us young, at the prime of life, forever.”

“And God doesn’t want us to stay young?  That’s not very nice.”

“God doesn’t want us to live forever in our sins – that is in the oppositional state of mortality in the presence of evil.  Heavenly Father and Mother hope we will choose to live with them forever, as resurrected beings, where we can create freely in an environment of peace and love.  That is why Their plan includes a Savior, Jesus Christ, to bring us home.”

“I see.  Then we can’t get past the flaming sword until we’re dead.  Is that it?”

“Not exactly.  We can’t get past the blinding light that guards pure love without Christ.  Christ is the Way.  In the most profound sense, if we trust our lives to Christ, He lifts us past cherubim and the flaming sword, back into the Garden of Eden or into the presence of God, where we can eat from the Tree of Life – or drink from the Fountain of Youth, if you like – and live forever free from our sins.”

Her eyes moistened with longing.  “But not here . . .” she said sadly “. . . not now.”

I looked into her beautiful soul.  “Possibly,” I whispered, “if enough of us would choose Christ.”

What do you think?     

POSTLUDE

The Knowledge of God.  The Feelings of God.  The Being of God.  These are the three endowments represented in the temple rites.  It is difficult for me to talk about the Being of God.  I have heard about people who stand on the seashore, on mountain tops, in the awesome sequoia cathedrals and cry, “I am God!” into the void.  Such a proclamation may be a recognition of one’s own divinity, his place and purpose in an organized plan, or it may be only another ego trap.   What one chooses to do with the insight of his godly possibilities makes all the difference.

There is an order in God’s plan, which we cannot escape or circumvent.  There are no shortcuts on the road back to God.  One must make the choices which allow for orderly enlightenment (milk before meat) so that one experiences and comprehends each law to its fullest before being quickened to abide a higher law.  Learning to live in harmony with the order of God is simply the process of learning to use Love-Energy righteously.  It does not include absorbing a catalog of confining, restricting rules, but rather requires the letting go of whatever inhibits freedom or adulterates love.

In the Law of Justice, where reason is the limit of comprehension, Love-Energy is unable to flow freely.  While survival techniques in that law acknowledge with rational fairness that everyone is entitled to equal rights, the greatest concentration of concern nevertheless revolves around first person singular – I.  Consequently, “love” is defined and experienced selfishly, which automatically limits its power.

In the Law of Mercy, where honest heart-feelings are added to knowledge, Love-Energy has a great deal more power.  The New-Man-in-Christ has acknowledged his need for help outside himself.  He has sacrificed his carnal self and chosen to receive from Christ the gifts which sanctify his soul.  Christ becomes his teacher and the source to whom he looks for light and love.  To the degree that he perceives and receives truth accurately, he is able to use Love-Energy righteously.  It is still a matter of his making a choice.

Those who abide in the Law of Love are free from the burden of choice with regard to Love-Energy.  In the environment where God lives, Love-Energy is used righteously, because everyone who abides there is quickened with the fullness of his/her own goodness; so, by nature, each one is totally in harmony with that energy.

The penalty, if one chooses not to move into the Law of Love is that he cuts himself off from the possibility of eternal increase.  It is in the realm where love is law that creation takes place – creation of new worlds and of new life to inhabit those worlds.  There cannot be any mistakes in a government where such total responsibility is inherent.  Where God dwells, righteous use of Love-Energy is an absolute.  If someone, like Lucifer, decides he wants to do things a lesser way, he must go elsewhere to do them.

After one has actually received the endowment of the being of God, he will not say “I am God.”  He might say “I am in God,” or “I am one with God,” or perhaps simply, “I Am – thanks to God.”  But he will always glorify God, not himself.  Christ set the precedent and gave the key to loving purely when He said in the Lord’s prayer, “Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.”

We know that Christ, Himself, loves us.  His personal energy radiates to us, personally.  Otherwise He would not have chosen to be our Savior.  Even as powerful as is that energy, Christ still turns to God as the source of pure and perfect love.  Christ, of course, has tremendous power and light in His own being’ but His consistent acknowledgment of God’s power proves the absence of selfish or ego-centered motive in all His works.

In the same way, each of us has a personal energy which emanates its own individual essence, and which uses its power of choice.  We, personally, choose where we will focus the power that is our own.  Some choices further our progress, some delay it.  If we choose to glorify God with our personal energy, rather than giving credit to ourselves or to some lesser being, we also prove absence of selfishly ambitious motive.  That choice automatically opens the channel to God’s love, and allows us access to pure knowledge, feeling, and being.  We receive from God a quickening (growing) of our unique self, as God adds His/Her light to ours.  In the act of glorifying God, we make the choice to add our own personal light to Him/Her.  The vibration of love becomes stronger.  The whole burns brighter.

Love-Energy remains pure by moving always in circles.  In a smaller personal circle from Mother-Father God, through Christ, through the individual, back to and through God; and then in a larger circle which includes all who are One with God.  One is glorified by God when he glorifies God.  That is LOVE.