THE GOD I KNOW Chapter Seven

The Purification of Passion

The God I know is a being of great passion. Their love for each other and for us is alive and warm and exciting. The passion which flames in Them draws to itself all good, all beauty, all light, all truth, all joy – from which perfect ingredients They create Love-Energy. Because They see US as good and beautiful, They hold OUR beauty to Them-selves. Our goodness is always the living, passionate reality for God. Our evil, or carnality, as far as God is concerned, is a theatrical mask. Our lives in mortality are a drama which They watch through the passion of Their own deeply-felt laughter and tears, as They live with us the playing out of our lives through the passion of our laughter and tears.

As mortals in this drama we experience passion two contradictory ways. On the one hand, we feel passion as the motivation for our loving, worshipful, creative or otherwise constructive actions; and on the other hand, we feel passion as the motivation for our hateful, jealous, angry, greedy or otherwise destructive actions. We learn passions, both good and bad, from our environment. Our divine nature (which is our only nature at birth) responds positively to our good experiences. Our carnal nature develops as we respond with pain to bad experiences. We learn to feel negative passions by being hurt, and we instinctively turn against the people who have hurt us, not being able to separate the people from the deeds. It takes the healing of God before we can feel deep inside the knowledge that we are against evil, not against people.

Until we receive that gift from God, we justify our carnal passions and reconcile ourselves to the oppositional turmoil of envy, anger, jealousy, competition, greed, pride, etc. All these negatively passionate feelings can be categorized as “lust” – lust for power, fame, selfish pleasures, riches, sexual stimulation, revenge, etc. Lust becomes the all-encompassing negative passion. It is the opposite of Love, which is the all-encompassing positive passion.

If we would have our passions purified, so that they are harmonious with God’s passions, we must begin by learning the difference between divine man and carnal man, the difference between unselfishness and selfishness, and the difference between love and lust – which technically are the same differences.

Our carnal natures are completely selfish. Self-preservation is the first law of carnal man. To surive at whatever cost is his dominant instinct. This drive puts everyone else in the world in competition with ME, “Number One.” At the same time nobody wants to survive alone. Carnal man lusts after erotic pleasure with the opposite sex. The drive for sexual gratification is close to the survival drive in its intensity. Since both drives in the carnal man are entirely selfish, he is always in competition for supremacy with those he pretends to “love.” Carnal man is not capable of pure love. His behavior towards others is always motivated by the greedy attitude, “What’s in it for me?” The big need in his awareness is to satisfy Number One with the greatest degree of thrill and excitement, at the expense of whoever is available.

The more we choose to be carnal, the more sure it is that selfishness will dominate our relationships with others, and the more sure it is that what we feel for them will be lust, not love. Our selfish carnal natures feel more secure when others are less secure. Carnality precipitates quarrels, violence, cruelty, abuse and ugliness in our relationships, because we use others to meet our own selfish ends. We do not comprehend love.

It is the nature of our divine self to desire to be a contributing part of God’s creations. Our divine energy naturally radiates out to others; our divine heart cares about others; our divine yearning is to share with others and find happiness with them.

It is in our divine nature that we find the ability to keep Christ’s injunction to love God, ourselves and our neighbors. God is the Source of the Energy which is Love. In order for this energy to remain pure, it must flow in an unbroken circle – from God to Christ, through Christ to us, through us back to God. If we break the circle (God and Christ will NOT break it) the love is no longer pure.

As John said, (I John 4:19) “We love God because He (They) first loved us.” We learn to love purely by RECEIVING Their love, by opening the door of our divine nature and letting it in.

Receiving God’s love for us is the first step in loving ourselves purely. As God’s love pours through us, we are quickened with a light which enables us to see ourselves reflected in God’s eyes – to see ourselves as God sees us. We are able to love this image of ourselves with pure love. As we return the love to God with our gratitude, the circle remains whole, the love remains pure.

In order to love others purely, we will always remember to glorify God as the Source of Love and the purifier of our passions. When the person we love does this, the circle of love remains unbroken and the love relationship remains holy and in order. If he or she does not glorify God, the circle is broken for that person, but remains whole for us as long as we do acknowledge God’s power in our love.

In our divine natures we are all good, but we are not all the same. As we learn to know our own unique goodness by honestly separating what we desire to be from what we desire to reject, we can also see what is good in other people that we would like to be part of. Our own goodness increases as we come to know others and embrace their goodness. When we love people, we offer them our goodness. If they receive it, their own goodness is increased by our love, and our goodness is increased by their love.

All the righteous passions which we experience are felt through our divine natures. While carnal man can experience only counterfeits of love, divine man is aware of and responsive to real love, the pure love which comes from God. Much of the passion which we experience in mortality is a part of this love.

Because we have come to define passion in terms of the pain we have experienced as a result of the lusts of others and our own lusts, part of our carnal inheritance is to fear passion. Religious leaders have used this fear as another whip to force us into their prescribed molds, and have taught for centuries that we must suppress our emotions and bridle our passions. But passion, by God’s definition and in Their behavior, is the moving force of love; so one of the consequences of our fearing passion is that we also fear to love with honest feeling. When we are thus stripped of feeling, there is no power left in love. It becomes a valueless pretense, better defined as “pity for the less fortunate, and idol-worship for the more successful.” By God’s definition pity and idol-worship have nothing to do with pure love. Those feelings motivate us to do good deeds for our own satisfaction – to have our feet licked by the pitiable or our heads patted by the enviable. They are carnal satisfactions, but they are not love.

Another consequence of denying ourselves the power of our own feelings by suppressing our passions is that we become blind to the power of God’s feelings, and we see God and “worship” God as we are (hard-hearted), and not as God is (open-hearted). This mistake allows us to justify the lusts in our own passion, because we judge God to be jealous, vengeful and cruel, as we are. The God I know does not have any of those attributes. They stand passionately against jealousy, vengeance and cruelty.

We find ourselves in an unhappy dilemma with regard to our passions. Shall we bridle them or let them run free?

We ARE cursed with the selfish passions of lust as part of our inheritance in the fallen world. But at the same time we ARE BLESSED with an inheritance from God which is just the opposite, the unselfish passions of pure love. We have built into us the capacity and the need to truly love and to be loved unconditionally.

Now the truth of the God I know is that They passionately want for us all the good things of the earth. They want us to be able to feel all the joy of righteous passion and none of the destruction of unrighteous passion. This can happen through the process of purifica-tion – and God, dear God, provided a Savior through whom our passions can be purified.

Jesus Christ, too, loves us with great passion. It is this passion which moved Him to give His life for us. His experience in the Garden of Gethsemane was the passion of loving us so much that He deliberately chose to feel all the pain mankind suffers as consequence of sin. Therefore, Christ knows us inside and out. When we are feeling our own pain, when we are torn apart by our own imperfections, He is not ignorant of what we are going through. He knows our pain and our passion. He felt it in Gethsemane and He feels it with us as we are experiencing it. He has the power to use His passions perfectly and if we turn to Him, He can heal us. When we reach out to Christ in repentance (godly sorrow for our sins), He touches our hearts with perfect empathy and we are made whole.



It works this way: when we feel a carnal passion such as hatred (or any other negative passion) some of its force is directed toward the person we hate, so that he may – or may not, if he is insensitive – feel the discomfort of our hostility; most of its force, however, remains inside us as a poison which insidiously distorts our perceptions and works against US. We hurt others with unkind and unreasonable behavior. The more people we hurt, the more we hate. All the energy of our passion is used up in destruction.

When we turn to Christ, His love in us opens our eyes and our hearts to a clearer understanding of our divine nature, and enables us to recognize that we truly do not hate any person. We hate something evil which we are feeling through their behavior, or perhaps through our own behavior -- bigotry maybe, or arrogance, or cruelty, or selfishness, or blindness, or jealousy. The truth is that we want to reject the negative things which are brought to our attention by the ugly behavior of others (or ourself), and we want to take into ourself the positive things which are brought to our awareness by the beautiful behavior we witness.


The miracle occurs when we see clearly that we truly want to stand against evil -- in ourself and others; and we truly want to embrace good – in ourself and others. By the power of Christ’s passionate love for us, we are quickened to greater awareness of our divine nature, so that we are able to feel the energy of our passion as a constructive power. Instead of hating ourself or others, our passion will be directed against hatred itself, which is an unembodied evil. When by the grace of God we can feel to separate ourself from the hatred, it becomes impossible for us to hurt anyone with it. We reject it with the same impersonal rejection we would feel if a drug to which we were allergic were offered to us. We would simply know that it was something we could not tolerate, and it would become extinct in our consideration. It would be dead to us.

As soon as hatred becomes dead, all the passion we would have expended in keeping it alive, is freed and can be used constructively. We do not destroy hatred or lust or jealousy, etc. as God does not destroy evil. But it becomes non-existent as a feeling inside of us. The passion we do feel is love. We will stand with love and with God against hatred (or any other evil) because our feelings inside are alive with good and constructive passions.

Christ purifies our passions by the act of experiencing our feelings with us, taking them into Himself and returning them to us free from perversion. Our passions which would destroy are cleansed by His passionate love, and transformed into passions which build, uplift, create and heal. This is the miracle of purification.