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LOTUS OF THE HEART
All is Welcome Here
Living in Love beyond Beliefs
"I tell you for certain that everyone who hears my message and trusts in the one who sent me has timeless life and will never be judged guilty. Such persons have already gone from death to life."
*Gospel of Jesus, John 5.24
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A Phoenix, Arizona, newspaper had the following in January 1999:
Early yesterday, January 6th, 1999, Bill Bennett was told his wife had been killed in a robbery. But five hours later, authorities said she was really alive. Michelle Bennett was kidnapped during an apparent robbery at a Castle Boutique adult bookstore. The kidnappers shot her several times and left her for dead on a trail near the Lost Dutchman State Park. She is listed in critical condition this morning after surgery.
The family of Michelle had identified the body through a picture and had accepted her death.
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The French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) remarked: "Everything has been figured out, except how to live." Jesus clarifies that the principle question, however, is not about how to live but regarding Life that is deathless, which is absolutely not about how to live the life we almost always say is life. By this deathless Life he means Life so much more than a duration within what we call time: this Life is eternal Life, not everlasting life, as usually misinterpreted in Christian communities. Most Christians seem to think a so-called afterlife is simply a perfect continuance of this life and a perfect continuance of themselves. Jesus never speaks of life as we know it in time going on forever, and there is no basis to want to continue as some perfected version of self - such a wish is our naive infatuation with ourselves as a self. Life within time is always subject to death, while a perfected version of ourselves is still what we are now, only improved and subject to death.
While many would seem to want to welcome this timeless Quality - at least many persons of religious faith sing, talk, preach, and brag about it, and seek to convert others -, often such a Gift offered - possibly usually even among professing lovers of this Life - is felt more as a ghostly intrusion than an angelic visitation. To the self, such an offer is an invitation to be dismantled, to be done away with, to be a nobody, to die and be buried dead, and the self will often recoil from such a blessed Gift, for the only life it knows is a life short of Life and, so, short of Life now.
Jesus, and any teacher of Truth, does not first call us to respectability. Jesus, wrongly, is often presented as a great moral teacher or religious sage, or other-worldly Savior. Jesus was more. And, Jesus invites us to death, a death that opens to a vista of sacred discovery only attributable to deathless Grace, the fount of deathless Life.
The first question for us is neither "How shall I live?" nor "Do I have life?," but "Does Life have me?" If Life has you, you are already resurrected from death to Life; you are not on a delay plan, waiting until death of the body. This Life is here, this Life is now. And, as we are drawn more and more into the influence of this Life, this Inspiration, life as we knew it is transformed under the silent, gentle, sometimes fierce touch of Grace.
*Move cursor over pictures for photographer and title.
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