I don’t know how to love Him. What to do. How to move Him.
I’ve been changed, yes really changed.
In these past few days, when I’ve seen myself,
I seem like someone else.
I don’t know how to take this.
I don’t see why He moves me.
He’s a man. He’s just a man.
And I’ve had so many men before.
In very many ways He’s just one more.
Should I bring Him down? Should I scream and shout?
Should I speak of love? Let my feelings out?
I never thought I’d come to this! What’s it all about?
– Andrew Lloyd-Webber & Timothy Miles Bindon Rice, from “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (1971)
To read a debate about whether Jesus is God or man, and to see learned people insisting that He has to be only one or the other makes your eyes cross. To see our beloved Father Richard Rohr trying to imagine a future for Christianity, which I love him for attempting to do even though I think he knows the religion has no future makes me sad for him. I grew up in a church in which we were taught that Jesus on earth was “fully God and fully Man,” and that still makes sense to me even now that, amazingly, Jesus has spent the past two thousand years healing all the millions of people damaged by Christianity, and He has thereby grown even vastly more spiritually elevated than He was when He was Jesus on earth, and I have actually met Jesus. I know Him personally. In fact, I don’t know how else you would describe the amazing Being that Jesus has become! His extraordinarily silken and immensely powerful personal energy, and His selflessness and grace are confounding. He is literally God now. That is beyond doubt. And yet, two thousand years past His final incarnation Jesus chooses to present in the astral body of a Man who looks amazingly young and mild. He looks Mediterranean, less than six feet tall, with curly hair and olive skin. He is nearly always barely smiling, as if He has thought of some lovely secret. And when He looks at you, the love in His eyes is indescribable. Not even your own mother ever has loved you the way that Jesus loves you. Fully God and fully Man. My childhood minister, dear Steven Turrell of blessed memory, was so completely right! But Jesus at the same time is so self-effacing that if it were not for the Lord’s amazing personal energy, you wouldn’t even much notice Him now. And that seems to be what He prefers.
Achieving the Godhead level has been easy for Jesus. The Godhead level of our astral reality is at a very high consciousness vibration, and Thomas tells me that Jesus has even surpassed that at this point in His personal spiritual development. But He always has loved people so much, just naturally and confoundingly, in the same way that some of us especially love puppies. Every human being deeply touches His heart, while my Thomas says that He himself mainly sees people’s flaws. Thomas has come to think that perhaps Jesus sees people’s flaws as simply adorable, in the way that some folks might see a puppy’s clumsiness as cute, perhaps; but for whatever reason, Jesus has always been obsessed with loving people. So over thousands of years, my Thomas has watched the being who six thousand years ago was his own little brother continue to grow spiritually from there to become Jesus the Christ, the King of Kings, and elevated spiritually far above all the rest of humankind. For my whole life on earth Thomas has told me no part of this story. But now apparently Jesus wants it to be known, so now Thomas is answering my questions freely and letting me share his answers with you. This is all still new to me, and it feels illicit, but apparently we will be putting much of this information on Jesus’s website. (Good grief.)
This feels like a kind of Catch-22. And in a minute you will see why I call it that. My whole business career has been spent as an attorney and general advisor to closely-held and primarily family-owned businesses. So naturally I have been thinking about what I might advise Jesus to do in this situation, if He ever were to ask for my advice. Of course, I never would offer Him advice unsolicited. But it seems to me that He could do a lower-key and positive version of a Second Coming thing. Why not? He has sufficient power over matter to demonstrate that He is in fact Jesus the Risen Christ, and not just some imposter; and perhaps He could be based at the Vatican for His temporal protection. He might then teach the world from there. He doesn’t have to have just some nobody like me create a website so He can gradually share His teachings with the world. He doesn’t have to start all over again from the beginning!
So Thomas very briefly indulged my fantasy. Sixth-level beings are very tall and thin when they appear on earth, and they glow. Well, Jesus could create a church-Jesus astral body maybe ten feet tall and glowing. Thomas reminded me that Mikey Morgan once appeared at one of our nightly meetings in an astral body of a snowboarding kid, and he randomly kept switching into a ball of light and then back into a kid again. I said, “Great! Jesus can do that, too!” Thomas tried last Halloween to get Jesus to touch a pumpkin on earth and blow it up just for the fun of it, which suggestion had horrified Jesus. Thomas told me now that blowing up something at the Vatican by touching it with one finger would be a way for Jesus to convince the Pope that He really is Jesus. I said, “Yup! Good plan.” And I also thought that Jesus could materialize something for the Pope, because I bet that He could do that, too. Something holy-looking. Something in gold, perhaps? The Pope would love that!
So then Thomas gave me a frank look. He said, “You really don’t know Jesus at all, do you?”
“What?”
“Ten-foot-tall church-Jesus? Something in gold? The Vatican?”
He has to be safe…”
“Putting Jesus in the Vatican would be like putting matter together with anti-matter,” Thomas said, and he actually chuckled to himself. I hate it when he gets smug like that. It means he sees a gotcha in this for me somewhere.
“I do know Jesus! Stop toying with me!”
He said, “My confused little friend, our Brother Jesus is not a Christian. He died on earth three hundred years before the religion was even born, and Christianity teaches nothing that Jesus taught. And He certainly isn’t a Christian now. Not after He has had to love back into health so many hundreds of millions of damaged people! Damaged by the religion! What makes you think He would go anywhere near the Vatican? What makes you think He wants to look like church-Jesus for the Pope? He does it for Christians as they are coming home because He loves them and it makes them happy. But, for the Pope?”
He was right, of course. What was I thinking?
“I know you would love to find a way to get out of creating His website because you feel so unworthy of doing it. And of course you are not worthy! There is no one on earth who is worthy now of doing anything for Jesus. But, He cannot do it. And I cannot do it. I have been preparing you for your whole life to do this for Him. You worry that whatever you do will disappoint Him. But it will not disappoint Him. It will delight Him.” Then Thomas added – and here is what I see as the Catch-22 of this situation. “He wants you to see Him as just a man. I think He even tries to see Himself that way. Our Brother has the power to move on the hearts of all the world if He chooses to do that. He could transform the world in a heartbeat of time. But He wants to begin His ministry again from the beginning, and build it from there moving heart by heart, and erasing the false religion in the process. And who are we to tell Him that is the wrong thing to do?”
My God. If Jesus chose to do it, He could end every problem on earth in an instant. Just transform every heart, and then maybe touch The Empire State Building and blow it up to further make His point. Then He might say, “Any questions? Didn’t think so. Now open your Gospels and there are your lessons. Start learning.”
I sighed. I knew what this was going to mean. “So, no Second Coming. And I’ll have to take another lifetime. Maybe two.”
Thomas also sighed. He said, “We both will.”
This is the whole thing about being Jesus. I have been thinking about it ever since Thomas and I had this conversation. Jesus really is God! He has the power to fix everything on earth in an instant, if He chooses to do that. But if He does choose to do that, then He destroys the value of the earth as a spiritual school, so therefore He never can do that. What He can do is what He first set out to do two thousand years ago. He can again establish His movement to recalibrate humankind toward positive spiritual growth. He first came to earth to study us and figure out how we can best grow spiritually.
And His teachings based on what He learned back then still work amazingly well! I know how well they work, because a dozen years ago I personally tried them, and I was internally transformed within weeks. And that transformation has been permanent. It forms a bright line in my life: I cannot even remember now what I was like before. So if Jesus wanted to do it, He could at once produce a similar transformation in every person on earth! But, then what? Bringing the kingdom of God on earth will be a slow process when we do it in His planned and deliberate way, and intentionally so, since once it is completed, the earth will then become useless as a spiritual school. Except for the fact that, of course, in a reality without time there will then be eons laid down into which people can continue to incarnate for their personal spiritual growth. Jesus had of course thought this all through long before.
But the thing that really astonishes me as I read again the debate linked at the start of this article is that both of the worthies taking part in it seem to be clueless about the primary role of consciousness. That really does confound me, because in fact the primacy of consciousness is central to everything! Since all that exists is consciousness, and since you and I are inextricably part of the one Consciousness that continuously manifests reality, in fact, each one of us is fully God and fully man! Just think it through. Of course, you know that insight is profoundly right, and Jesus is the eternally-living proof. People so desperately want Jesus to be Magic-Man! The Son of God! And NOT precisely one of us. Because then that lets us off the hook, don’t you see? But Jesus’s life story is of a normal man who simply has always loved people more than most of us love people. So over the centuries, and then over the millennia, Jesus has simply loved people so much that He has raised His personal spiritual vibration even above the entire Godhead’s spiritual vibration. So now Jesus is the exemplar for us all. What He has done, so can we do, too!
And Jesus did not only die for us. Dying for us once? That would have been so easy! No, for the past six thousand years, Jesus the eternally living Christ, our sweet and perfectly beloved Brother has been living for us, healing hundreds of millions of damaged Christians and rearing all those aborted children. And now, it is His full intention to teach every last eternal one of us to achieve the same spiritual level that He Himself has achieved. It doesn’t matter to Him a fig how we might see Him. He loves each one of us infinitely, and until the very end of non-time. He sees Himself forever as our Teacher. And that little seventeen-hundred-year interruption in our spiritual lessons that was Christianity has been to Him little more than just a single summer’s day gone by.