Lesson Nine: Notes on the Three Paths

Lesson Nine: Notes on the Three Paths

 

 Like Saint (Mother) Maria of Paris, opened up so much understanding and wisdom, contrasting the two loves, which truthfully we could state as anti-christ love vs Christ Love. We see that a great portion of the world, in fact the culture itself functions on “false” or better-stated “anti-christ” love.  It is the reason why the greatest portion of the wealthiest families who have bonded together, the Globalist families who have created genocide after genocide, war after war, are majority Jewish and/or of Luciferian sects, like Skull and Bones, and her sister organizations. These things can no longer be hidden under cover of “conspiracy theory” this is just the history and fact of our present world. Most of them believe that they are “acting to save the world.”  They believe they are the “good guys.” So they act out of love for the world. I think this explains a lot of killing in the world, always the people are deluded into believing “they are the good guys” and they are killing the “bad guys.”  All the hellish death cult of Islam holds this delusion, as do the Cultural Marxists, and the doctrinaire Marxists and Communists, and other cultists.

The take away from the last lesson, is that even the most fundamental natural human affections, a mother’s love for her own child and all the other natural familiar loves, are subject to degradation caused by sin, and unless purified and restored in Christ, can and will become to greater and lesser degrees, damaging, and even killing. Without the purifying presence of the Holy Spirit in mercy, all families grow estranged, or they unite in delusion and deception, as we have just stated of the Jewish and Luciferian Elite.  It would be very difficult and maybe impossible to find a real person of The Way among them. 

The previous success of the extended families and nuclear families in the West, which was a very powerful thing, and strong political power, in our former Constitutional Republic was due to the degree to which Western Culture was Christian.  The horrible degradation of the “just love and be nice” culture, the toll paid in moral relativism, hedonism, death and destruction, is the direct result of the Cultural Marxist insurgency into the Churches, the destruction of the family and a massive mind war against all things Christian, operated by our Psychological Operations Media, all of it, all the media. If you don’t believe the media is anti-christ, take time to read this link (http://lettersfromthegulag.blogspot.com/2016/07/shadow-governmentjewish-controlled-media.html) So at this point all the family owned small press is gone, the Luciferians control everything that is aired on T.V., movies, video games, published in News Papers, Books, Magazines.  It is a rushing river of Luciferian Propaganda in which the Flame of Jesus Christ, that he promised would burn, is submerged, gurgling underwater. 

How do we stop being part of the great river of Chaos, consumed and destroyed by the great river of Propaganda?  No time in the history of the Church have the words of Saint Paul had more immediate, life and death meaning, “Be not conformed to this culture, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your NOUS (heart-mind), so that you will know, (instead of the psy-opts herding of the Luciferians, who are herding you to illusion, delusion, confusion, deception and death; selling you Hedonism as “just love and be nice”) . . . so instead you will know what is God’s Way, THE WAY, to healing health, truth and LIFE.

So adding tools to our understanding capable of withstanding not just the slings and arrows, and the fiery darts of the Devil, the apostles were privileged to battle, while wearing the full armor of God, but the flame throwers, and howitzers and a sea of mind altering drugs, hypnotic electronics called “psychotronic manipulations” and subliminal hypnotic suggestions of consciousness that cause the implantation of autonomic triggers, common with the 24/7 connection to the Matrix, and a host of other weaponry being deployed against us:  We are going to talk about “Three Paths” two of which are erroneous. The path of received “religion.” The path of emotional spirituality and the path of rational theology vs the Royal Path, The Way, which is genuine surrender to God’s good, acceptable and perfect will, by DOING Righteousness, DOING Love, Breathing in, bathing in the Holy Spirit, etc.  

A friend who was asking me to teach him about The Way, said to me the other day when I hesitated in prescribing a regimen of spiritual discipline and prayer,  “A goal without a plan is merely a wish.”  That is profound.  So, I gave him a simple prayer rule and a course of study, a plan of action as it were. But really, before we can plan an action upon this battlefield, we have to KNOW IT.  We have to reconnoiter, firstly by identifying the enemy, next by examining his weaponry, and strength of his forces.  We have to understand every weapon of deception he owns, (all his methods of psychological warfare) most especially the false weapons he places in our hands as genuine. What a great strategy! To provide for your enemy fearsome looking FAKE weapons.  Any general would laugh and be proud of that ruse.  And that is exactly what the Luciferians have done with Christianity, provided it with a boat load of FAKE weapons.  They look like they are “of the faith” they make noise like they are “of the faith” but they are impotent show weapons, powerless.  (Having a form of Godliness but devoid of POWER.) God’s word is not powerless. When we speak truth, it cuts through the web of the matrix and exposes the Luciferian core.

We have so far, identified a few false weapons, but the last lesson was profound, identifying false/anti-christ love, expressed in “just love and be nice.” Think! that is the answer to everything, “just love and be nice.” But they are calling on anti-christ love, a false weapon exposed in the last lesson.  

So now we are going to expose more false weapons the Luciferians have sold us under the banner of “enlightenment”; theologies to keep us harmless excepting, “just love and be nice.”  Just like there is anti-christ love, parading as Christian, there are anti-christ theologies parading as Christian as well.  WE have to face these head on; we have to learn to recognize Satan’s tools, and where those tools have wounded US, where we are foolish enough to depend upon them.

The Three Paths of Theology/Spirituality

David Richard Berkowitz, the serial killer who terrorized New York City in the 1970s received his theology/spirituality from his dog, Sam. He called himself, "the son of Sam."  At least he was honest. 

To understand Jesus' words, the words of the Apostles, the New and Old Testaments, in fact to understand the Gospels one must always distinguish between the "secular/rational" theology of the West, which is base in philosophy and science, and the reality of "sacred" theology, which is not opposed to either philosophy or science, but is not defined by either. We also have to recognize the lying spirit, the anti-christ spirit of a great portion of this so-called science.  Some of it is carnival like and easy to recognize.  For instance, when a birth Muslim Apostate, turned Evangelical Christian Apostate, who re-embraces his “Muslim Roots” and immediately writes a book financed by the Jewish Press, claiming to be a scholarly work by a “International Religion Scholar” who owns a Masters of Theology from anti-christ central, Harvard Divinity School; a book entitled “Zealot: The life and times of Jesus of Nazareth” you don’t have to read the book, it is a no brainer, you know what is in it. And of course I wasted my time reading Zealot by Reza Aslan, and he did not disappoint; it is anti-christ drivel, wrapped in faux scholastic intellectualism.  Should anyone be surprised when his previous book was “No God but Allah God” which of course confirmed his birth Muslim Theism.  And of course what is his reference for a supposed history of Jesus of Nazareth, two pagan sources, which affirm that Jesus was born a Jew, lead a popular movement and was crucified by the Romans.  He ends up writing such stupid statements as this, “It is difficult to place Jesus of Nazareth squarely within any of the known religiopolitical movements of his time.”  <smile> There is a reason for that idiot; it is because he started his own movement that has huge historic record of which you pretend does not exist.  Can it get anymore absurd than this? And this in modern times passes for “scholarly offering.”

Sadly a lot of other “theology” produced by so-called Hermeneutical experts is a lot more sophisticatedly deceptive. Most of it in fact, from the good ole, “Abingdon Bible Commentary,” to the Jesus Seminar, to “The New Bible Dictionary,” to the “Oxford Companion to the Bible (Metzger/Coogan)” and many, many more are written from . . .  and the whole school of theology is based upon, the presumptions of “Naturalism” which is the Closed Circle of Materialism I noted in Lesson Three: “For them as insane as it is, matter and time created all things. 

“What is the insane part?  They never ask, "From whence comes Matter?"  Or if they do they answer, "From pent up energy." (The Big Bang Theory) But they never ask, "From whence comes this energy?" or if they do they answer, "From highly condensed and compress matter." You see it is a closed circle, no more sophisticated than the imagination of ancient pagans, since in fact, with all its scientific pretensions, it is just that, perennial paganism.” This is the total demythologizing of sacred scripture and filtering every story through a materialist sieve. It is always a great ‘truncation’ as with the Abingdon Commentary, and/or a complete denial of the Scriptural Revelation as was the Jesus Seminar.  The Jesus Seminar one of the strangest events in my life, which actually sponsored the world’s greatest textural critics, hermeneutical experts to meet together, a few hundred of them, to then vote on what Jesus actually said and what he actually didn’t say. Again, it is a no brainer, since they produced a Culturally Marxist, Politically Correct Jesus who denied his own Divinity.  I’ve never researched it, but you can bet the money behind the project was Jewish and Muslim. Since it denied Jesus’ Divinity, we know it was anti-christ.   

There is another kind of Biblical research that has been most beneficial to anyone who loves the sacred scriptures, and that is the work by the conservative Christian (Protestant) Biblical Scholars, of the 19^th century, who honored the Bible to such an extent they have done such a complete analysis of it, it is quite amazing, and in the process they created for us a number of tools that have improved the depth of scriptural knowledge for anyone willing to take the time to use their tools. Of course this includes the work, and the work built upon the likes of the Anglicans Milton Terry, Sir Lancelot C.L. Brenton, H.G. Liddel, Dr James Strong’s Greek and Hebrew Concordance of the Protestant Bible, with the Plymouth Brotherhood, Englishman’s Greek Concordance of the New Testament, being the grand daddies of them all.  There are a host of others and with the explosion of technology and the digital age, all these resources given the power of computer speed. Any person today has instant free access to Biblical and Church resources that an expert would not have had, had he keys to the libraries of Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford one hundred years ago.  These resources are not without problems, especially the Darby school and the subsequent fruit of error produced in the Schofield Reference Bible that created Christian Zionism. I’m thinking that was not an accident. But still the biblical research tools these people produced are a great boon to English speaking Christianity.  The problem is you cannot depend on their “conclusions” in many cases, when they start to teach theology from their scriptural anatomizing. They became hyper literalist, AND myth makers, a really strange combination. The common core, fostering attacks on the Church, like the ole saw, “Didn’t Jesus say, ‘call no man Father.’”  Be philosophically consistent, Jesus said in the same passage not to call any man your teacher.  So forget about Father’s day, and Teacher’s day, and what are you going to call Dear Male Progenitor, the Paterfamilias now? If you plan to go to heaven (he said mockingly).

It is a simple statement but it will take a while for Westerners to grasp the meaning and truth of the following sentence. Sacred theology is defined not by theory, but by practice, it is Worship & Work – both are actions.

In the West most “theologians” are theorists and technicians, schooled in secular/rational theology, something invented in the scholastic era of the Roman Catholic Church, and do not understand, or it seems have simply forgotten that Jesus and the Apostles and the early Church Fathers, knew nothing of this, so of course they did not see through the prism of rational and secular theology, as modern fundamentalist and liberal rational theologians do. What Jesus, the Apostles and their successors were trying to share was an organic experience of the healing presence of God, not a theory. 

They were, or at least some of them were experts in the Old Testament Scriptures, because it did not take the Church very long to start preaching about all the prophecies and the Archetypes of Jesus Christ, that were obvious in the Old Testament Scriptures, what some have called, “Types of Christ”, “Types and Shadows,” like Saint Paul explained how Jesus was the Second but far superior Adam, the first of a new creation and by implication, how Mary was the second Eve. Then there was all the symbolism of Christ in the Tabernacle, and the later Temple. So they were theologians, but when they looked at the Old Testament, they neither interpreted it rationally and literally, or simply as mythology, yet they never demythologized the Old Testament and interpreted it “in the light of Christ” and better stated, in the LIFE of Christ they were already experiencing and living.  They realized the depth and richness of God’s revelation over time was so clearly Holy Spirit inspired that it contained layers of meaning, sometimes multiple layers that addressed the “then” current situation, yet created meanings, symbols, prophecies, and archetypes of Jesus Christ. In fact, from the first verse in Genesis to the last stories of Jewish history, it was all about HIM, Jesus Christ; everything pointed to HIM.

Now speaking of Biblical Hyper Literalism:  The sermon preached by the first Martyr Stephen (now if I were properly Orthodox, you would know it because I would say, “Proto-Martyr” which of course means FIRST Martyr) anyway, as that sermon is recorded he got some stuff wrong, as Luke recorded it in Acts 7:2-53, also noting that Saint Stephen was speaking by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. You would not believe the linguistic hoops that the Hyper Literalist biblical scholars go through to explain how this error is not an error.  If you are interested you can read for yourself at this link – (https://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/ted_hildebrandt/ntesources/ntarticles/gtj-nt/koivisto-acts7stephen-gtj-87.pdf )

Without “rational theology” we would note this and not care. As a Sacred Theologian, I don’t care. That little tidbit is interesting but means, what?  Now, if I were a Biblical literalist, another form of rational theology that would be a conundrum, after all they believe scripture to be “literally” inerrant and there is an error and an error (more than one) in the longest sermon recorded in the New Testament. On common sense grounds, they have to ask (1) Did Stephen preach it correctly and Luke recorded it wrongly? Guess what?  ERROR. (2) Did Stephen get it wrong and Luke recorded it right? Guess what? ERROR. (3) Did Stephen say it right, Luke record it right and it is actually the Old Testament and not the New that contains the error? Even if this unlikely scenario were fact, it is still . . Guess what? ERROR. Of course this exercise is foolishness. I walked you down this little rabbit hole as an example of Rational Secular Theology, to show you just one example of how totally ridiculous hyper-literalism is.  The Bible is Inerrant, because it contains exactly what the Holy Spirit, who is present in the Church intended it to contain. No more, no less. It is perfect in its wholeness. This is its only measure. Its wholeness is Jesus Christ. Every verse in Scripture is interpreted, Catholically, that is “of the whole.” 

The Way is not about Scripture; it is about experiencing the Healing Reality of The Faith, which was once and for all, delivered unto the saints. It was delivered in oral form and in Ortho-praxis, in other words, according to what the Apostles SAID and DID – Correct worship and practice, which reflected Ortho-Doxia – rendering correct Glory. This ACTION saying and doing was happening AS part of what was said and done was being rendered in written form.  The Correct worship and practice in correct Glory, existed before the written New Testament, and the New Testament Scriptures are a product of that Ortho-praxis and Ortho-doxia, but do not contain it. It is “contained” in the active worship in the Tradition of Christ’s Church, in the Saying and Doing.

Now, I am not saying that some of the secular/rational concepts don't have instructive value; they do, but they can never be substituted for experience. The “concepts” are not the experience and reality of the thing. The outline or in artists terms the "cartoon" is not the object itself, even the most sophisticated portrait is not the person. Even if the New Testament were a perfect schematic of the Church, and perfectly defined it, which it does not, it would still be a schematic, a map, a design and not the thing in itself.

Remember from the previous lessons, we have one goal and that is to experience Christification. That’s it, nothing else matters.  With that in mind, let me state, that many come to the Church and rather than truly finding and experiencing Christ’s incarnational presence, settle for a mere description, a mere formula, the schematic, a mere cartoon of the Church. These are “first and second path people” who cling to “received tradition” as if that is an end of itself, or retreat to emotionalism and/or rationalism, the two sides of the same coin of “soulish” behavior, unregenerated, unrenewed, disconnected from Ancient and Real Christianity. Even though they may be perfectly following the cycles of services and prayers.  Please note these are not trivial mistakes. Just like the previous lesson about the two kinds of loves that in some elementary expressions seem so similar, they are not the same and have serious in the world consequences, so do the erroneous Paths of Traditionalism, Emotionalism and Rationalism. Each is and has been killing in examples played out in history. Not just robbing people of true healing but actually poisoning people, destroying morals and even taking LIVES. 

Until the Third Path (The Way) is warmly experienced a realistic view of Christianity is not possible, because one substitutes instead some formula, some cartoon, some institutionalize or clericalized stricture (Stricture not Structure) capable of pointing to, but incapable of capturing the experience of Christ’s incarnation. Those holding only the “cartoon” the “schematic” THINK they know what it represents; yet they only have a hollow concept and no experience of its reality. Ultimately the Church is “life in the Holy Spirit” or scripture and tradition are both liars, as is the witness of myriad saints. The Church is also and more primarily, collective and mutual communion in the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ - a subject for another time. We have already touched on this communion in the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, and we will have much more to say about it in later lessons.

I don't want to suggest that God's Holy Spirit is limited by anything I say. There is a wonderful story in Greek orthodoxy about an Arab/Muslim whose son was very sick. After famed Muslim physicians had given up hope for the boy, a neighbor told the boy's father about the priests in Constantinople who continually healed people by baptizing them. He set out with his wife to take the boy to the Orthodox Christian priests, but on the way, the boy came very close to death. Stopping at a pool of water, the father took the boy and washed him in the pool saying, “Allah, I baptize my son, in the name and as the priests do in Constantinople.” They camped assuming the boy would die that night but he revived and became completely healthy. Seeing the wonder, they decided to continue to Constantinople and learn about this miraculous power that had saved their son. The Christians took them in, and enjoyed the story of their son's baptism and healing. They taught them the Christian faith (and if I were really Orthodox I would have said, “catechized them” which means instructing them in the faith) and when it came time to receive them into the church, the priest Baptized first the father then the mother, but when they attempted to baptize the son, no matter how they tried they could not submerge him in the water. After three priests tried to submerge him into the water without success, the elder turned to the people and said, ‘No priest can truly baptize, who God himself has already baptized.’”

The Orthodox Church knows, her history, Tradition and the healing life she possesses, where the Apostolic Church rests in objective continuity from the very Cross of Christ. She does not know the work of the Holy Spirit outside her purview. 

“Inasmuch as the earthly and visible Church is not the fullness and completeness of the whole Church which the Lord has appointed to appear at the final judgment of all creation, she acts and knows only within her own limits; and (according to the words of Paul the Apostle, to the Corinthians, 1 Cor. 5. 12) does not judge the rest of mankind, and only looks upon those as excluded, that is to say, not belonging to her, who exclude themselves. The rest of mankind, whether alien from the Church, or united to her by ties, which God has not willed to reveal to her, she leaves to the judgment of the great day. The Church on earth judges for herself only, according to the grace of the Spirit, and the freedom granted her through Christ, inviting also the rest of mankind to the unity and adoption of God in Christ; but upon those who do not hear her appeal she pronounces no sentence, knowing the command of her Saviour and Head, "not to judge another man's servant" (Rom. 14. 4).”

The Holy Spirit is not limited by the visible confines of Orthodox Christian ecclesiology. But rather she stands as a bulwark, against the sea of theological/spiritual errors that would destroy her healing reality. She was originally called, “The Way” and that is what this book is, one man's understanding and experience of “The Way.”

Archpriest Symeon Elias

Lesson Eight: False Love vs Divine Love.

Nothing is more misunderstood and misused for heresy, apostasy and carnage, than the “Gospel of Love” truncated into humanism, thus becoming a killing mechanism.  The Cultural Marxists have become experts at (1) harnessing the killing power of this love, actually creating Genocide based on it, 1.7 Billion abortions worldwide, just since 1990, not to mention the ethnic cleansing, purposeful starvations, artificial droughts, soft and hard genocides and constant war.  And (2) Beating us up for rejecting it.  If this is not the Tribulation what could be? More people were slaughtered in the 20^th century than ALL the last twenty centuries combined. More Christian martyrs in the 20^th than all previous years of the Church’s history combined and the trend has since increased.  

These Cultural Marxists condemn anyone as “unloving” and “hate-filled” who rejects this false paradigm of their culture of death.  We see this same killing mechanism making claim on the “Gospel of Love” in the humanistic philosophy of Pacifism, where insanity rules, where God’s wisdom nor Christ’s life is present, where only the righteous, only those holding real and proper love are called to be passive. We have witnessed this lie in the preaching of Jihadis to Christians, reminding Christians that they are supposed to submit, since martyrdom is "our" crown, and we must love and forgive to be good Christians – meaning surrender to barbarism, degradation and persecution. We see the same use of this false “Gospel of Love” in the Gay propaganda and agenda, where exposing our children to Sodom, as education, and parades in the public square in the U.S. is “loving” but Vladimir Putin’s laws against Gay Propaganda in the public square in Russia is hate filled.

Saint Maria of Paris talked about two types of love.  It is instructive:

In this world there are two kinds of love: one that takes and one that gives. This is common to all types of love — not only love for man. One can love a friend, one’s family, children, scholarship, art, the motherland, one’s own ideas, oneself — and even God — from either of these two points of view. Even those forms of love, which by common consent are the highest, can exhibit this dual character.”

What? Doesn’t the magic word LOVE explain it all? Doesn’t the modern form paralyze good people from acting for the good, in fear they may be seen as “unloving.”

“Take, for example, maternal love. A mother can often forget herself, sacrifice herself for her children. Yet this does not as yet warrant recognition as Christian love for her children. One needs to ask the question: what is it that she loves in them? She may love her own reflection, her second youth, an expansion of her own “I” into other “I”s which become separated from the rest of the world as “we.” She may love in them her own flesh that she sees in them, the traits of her own character, the reflections of her own tastes, the continuation of her family. Then it becomes unclear where is the fundamental difference between an egotistical love of self and a seemingly sacrificial love of one’s children, between “I” and “we.” All this amounts to a passionate love of one’s own, which blinds one’s vision, forcing one to ignore the rest of the world — what is not one’s own.

“Such a mother will imagine that the merit of her own child is not comparable with the merit of other children, that his mishaps and illnesses are more severe than those of others, and, finally, that at times the well-being and success of other children can be sacrificed for the sake of the well-being and success of her own. She will think that the whole world (herself included) is called to serve her child, to feed him, quench his thirst, train him, make smooth all paths before him, deflect all obstacles and all rivals. This is a kind of passion-filled maternal love. Only that maternal love is truly Christian which sees in the child a true image of God, which is inherent not only in him but in all people, but given to her in trust, as her responsibility, as something she must develop and strengthen in him in preparation for the unavoidable life of sacrifice along the Christian path, for that cross-bearing challenge which faces every Christian. Only such a mother loves her child with truly Christian love. With this kind of love she will be more aware of other children’s misfortunes, she will be more attentive toward them when they are neglected. As the result of the presence of Christian love in her heart her relationship with the rest of humanity will be a relationship in Christ. This is, of course, a very poignant example.”

As a prison chaplain, I have seen the extreme examples of selfish maternal love, the broken men and women, locked in perpetual adolescent emotional and mental development, some still battling and manipulating their parent even from prison. Some of them were enormously talented and skilled, yet, even into their thirties and forties, still not an autonomous adult, every action done for effect on the other. Murderers, rapists, robbers and thieves, dangerous, deadly yet still momma’s boy. And I witnessed the other side, the mothers of monsters, telling me how precious their boy was, how, misunderstood he was. A very public example was Jeffery Dahmer’s mother, who stated on “60 Minutes” that Jeffery was a “good boy and misunderstood and that people had failed to help him because he was different” after he had killed seventeen boys and young men and eaten parts of them. Speaking of a poignant example, if you have the stomach for it, click this link, and see the reality of his homosexual fetishism and cannibalism.

Warning very, very graphic images.
http://disturbinghorror.com/Serial-Killers/Crime-Scene/Crime-scene.html

Selfish Love, can create monsters.

I have no doubt that Jeffery’s mother, genuinely loved him, in a selfish maternal way that destroyed him. You know from reason that her view was a psychosis, a mental sickness, an emotional, rational and spiritual blindness.

Please excuse me for the rawness of this lesson but I want to put a sharper edge on Mother Maria’s words when she says the following:

“There can be no doubt but that love for anything that exists is divided into these two types. One may passionately love one’s motherland, working to make sure that it develops gloriously and victoriously, overcoming and destroying all its enemies. Or one can love it in a Christian manner, working to see that the face of Christ’s truth is revealed more and more clearly within it. One can passionately love knowledge and art, seeking to express oneself, to flaunt oneself in them. Or one can love them while remaining conscious of one’s service through them, of one’s responsibility for the exercise of God’s gifts in these spheres.”

I love composing music. For me, most of my music is like a prayer and some of it is just fun. A great bit of it was composed in empty churches, or in empty symphony halls, as I tested work I had done on wonderful grand pianos.
(https://soundcloud.com/piano-butch-robinson/still-breeze-by-piano-butch-robinson)

I understand to my gut, what she is saying about loving art and music, not as a narcissistic expression of ego, but an exercise of God’s gifts.  The greatest pleasure when I released my first original compositions was the large box of “fan mail” it produced over the next two years, where people wrote and told me the most marvelous stories of healing, mostly healing of the emotions, of the soul that they experienced in the peace of the music. My oil paintings hang on the walls of our home, not because I am a “show off” but because they are beautiful and my sisters-in-law love them; I think more than my wife does, though she has some favorite pieces. 

I have a beautiful Icon of Saint John Maximovitch, which I painted, not drew, not using the proper stylized form of the Iconographers, but still it was done prayerfully. I treasure it, not because it was a product of my “ego” but because it is beautiful and an especial link to that precious saint.   

The reason I am sharing this, is to point out that The Way is not sterile, it is not some ZEN spirituality of negations, zooming out of consciousness into twilight sleep, or meditation. The Way is REAL. It has hard work, play, art and music and poetry and literature and all the good expressions of the full range of natural human emotions. While we as spiritual warriors train in the knowledge of the cunning evil one, (to be wise as the serpent) we are also called upon to seek what is beautiful.   Philippians 4:8 “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” When we love those around us, these are the things we want to share, an economy in the joy of living.

False love, mere selfish emotional love, for ourselves, or anything else, can harm us, can even kill us, or makes us monsters.  It you doubt it go back up to the Dahmer link and see what selfish love can produce for yourself.

We have seen the display of the selfish “love of the motherland” give carte banc to the psychopathic, genocidal plans of the eugenicist Julian Huxley first Director of the United Nation Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (read for yourself here (http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0006/000681/068197eo.pdf) and the New World Order of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  They do not have love for the motherland, but they have used blind love for the motherland held by the majority of Americans to create chaos in the world, that rivals the work of other Utopian Madmen of history. Herman Goering explained how you tap into this enormous power for destruction.

“Naturally the common people don’t want war, neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.  It is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in every country.”

Christendom – all people claiming the name Christian – have been grossly naïve in this regard, failing to follow Jesus’ instructions to be “wise as serpents”  - that’s hard to do, when your religion is based on selfish sweet self-centeredness. To dare go down the viper’s pit and examine the methods of the evil one disturbs one’s Sweet Centered Peace. Don’t dare mention what is NOT nice! Remember Saint Maria’s words for the purpose of walking The Way, that is to GET REAL, “The Church tells those who are at peace and asleep: ‘Go to church, because there you will feel real anguish for your sins, for your perdition, for the world’s sins and perdition. There you will feel an unappeasable hunger for Christ’s truth.”  Upon the way the Holy Spirit walks with us, guides us, emboldens us, for PURPOSE, to comfort us IN the battle, not to remove us from the battle. Jesus said, Matthew 10:34 “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”  And  Matthew 10:36 ^“And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.” And Luke 12:49 “I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?”

Goering paints the picture as the only resisters to war being “pacifists.”  He does not take into account Christian people who believe in “Just War.”  The trick has been to convince the Christian people that wars purposely created by the Luciferians, the Globalist Utopians, have been just wars, when in fact all wars fought by the U.S. in the last century, have been wars of conquest and aggression with the possible exception of World War Two.  The rest have been grand deceptions, able to fool Christian populations by the means just as Goering suggested, by False Flags, the sinking of the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor (which was a set-up), the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and 9/11. This is a very simplistic overview, because the incidents of these false flags go back in history past Nero’s burning of Rome, because he wanted property cleared for a new palace, and knew he could blame the Christian for his crimes.  

I am painting a more stark, and graphic picture of the “Two Loves” than Mother Maria painted, removing them from the weak language of “psychology” to the very real ramifications in human suffering.  Selfish love, un-regenerated love is deadly, and can be used by Satan as a powerful tool of deception. I don’t know how many murderers I have held their hands and prayed with, who had tears streaming down their faces, still feeling deep love for the woman they murdered. Women they loved with such selfish passion, that if they could not have her, no one else could. Some wept not out of guilt for their horrible act of murder, but because they still truly missed her and as horrible as the grief was, missing her, having murdered her, there selfishness still made that less painful than the thought of suffering her absence while her living life with someone else mocked him.

Real Life, Real Love:
Those who picture The Way in Zen like spiritual terms, merely as the path to create personal spiritual growth, fail to grasp it at all. It is the ROAD of BATTLE, the battlefield as it were challenging everything that is false, false in us, and in the world.  There is no evil that is not false when measured by the Icon of Christ in the heart, the love that is not egotistical, but rather ego-all, taking pleasure in the victories, accomplishments, skills, talents, healing and growth of others.  Grieving with their hurts and losses equally. 

I wrote in the 1970s this line, “Lord, am I egoless in the morning, ego-all at noon, egotistical in the evening when ego-all should bloom?”  As an old man now, I hope I take pleasure, as if it were me, in every good accomplishment by everyone I love, and pleasure in the good fortune of friends and relatives, and strangers.  This is what real love demands. 

“One can also love the idea of one’s own life simply because it is one’s own — and enviously and jealously set it over against all other ideas. Or one can see in it too a gift granted to one by God for the service of his eternal truth during the time of one’s path on earth. One can love life itself both passionately and sacrificially. One can even relate to death in two different ways. And one can direct two kinds of love toward God. One of these will look on him as the heavenly protector of “my” or “our” earthly passions and desires. Another kind of love, however, will humbly and sacrificially offer one’s tiny human soul into his hands. And apart from their name — love — and apart from their outward appearance, these two forms of love will have nothing in common.” – Saint Maria

Indeed they do not have anything in common, because one love is of the fallen creation, part of the world that is winding down, that has been compromised to sin, that has and is producing death, that has to be regenerated and created anew, and the other is regenerated and redeemed, fired at its core not from the selfishness of the Id, but the broken and bleeding heart Jesus created to connect us INDEED (in DEED) to the God whose essence is love. There is no static and passive way, or “spiritual” as in removed from ACTIONS way to experience this, IT HAS TO BE LIVED. It has to be WORKED, as Saint Paul said, “with fear and trembling” in the view of the awesome fearful God, who has the power to allow us to wither and cease to be, or hold us closely and eternally. We have to choose moment by moment.   

Saint Maria asks, “(is) an asceticism which puts one’s own soul at the center of everything, which looks for its salvation, fencing it off from the world, and within its own narrow limits  . . . spiritual self-centeredness and a fear of dissipating, (remember me speaking of Martha as fearing silence, because she battled with the constant fear of simply disappearing?) of wasting one’s energies, even though it be through love? — this is not Christian asceticism.”

Now we know why it is impossible to BE a solitary Christian, to damn the world and seek our salvation. It cannot work.  We are talking about real love here. No Christian “anchorite” (hermit) ever manages a solitary hermitage, at least not for long, because the moment he reached near crystal clear witness of Jesus Christ people would beat a path to his cave, or cell, and knock down the doors. And even those not yet fully prepared did not dare turn the seekers away, but instead always ready to risk their own soul for the healing of others. Stepping out in healing love, is not just the possible sacrifice of the body. We all have clear images of that, but when we start attacking evil, or as Lao Tsu said, “When one is called to chop wood for the master, one has to be careful not to damage ones own hands.”  We put our soul at risk out of love.

(μείζονα ταύτης ἀγάπην οὐδεὶς ἔχει, ἵνα τις τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ θῇ ὑπὲρ τῶν φίλων αὐτοῦ.) Ask any Greek scholar, it says SOUL (psyche) not Life, which has far greater significance than merely a hero’s sacrificial death. John 15:13 – KJV - Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life SOUL for his friends.  Are you willing to risk “soul damage” for the good of another? Are you willing to sacrifice your Sweet Centered Peace? and your spiritual feelings? Are you willing to face without mask every evil? Are you willing to risk reputation damage? Are you willing to risk appearing and maybe actually being the fool for someone else’s good?  Wasn’t Saint Paul expressing this love when he wrote, Romans 9:3 ^“For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh:”

In the Cultural Marxist assault on America’s “Christian Culture” they coined the word, “do-gooder” which parodied all Christian societies of charity. The people of those societies, in literature and movies, were always sexually repressed, uptight, Victorian moralists, full of judgment, who always acted out of their self-righteous superiority complex, masking their own weakness, moral depravity and hypocrisy, in sugar coated meaningless acts of charity. The cartoonist, Al Capp, of Eastern European Jewish heritage, invented a little creature he called a Shmoo. Shmoos wanted more than anything just to sacrifice their lives for someone.  If you showed interest in a Shmoo, if you just looked at it the wrong way, it would immediately start preparing itself to be your dinner. This was a subtle mockery of the Eucharist, Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, and every Christian who wishes to serve others. “Shmoos are delicious to eat, and are eager to be eaten. If a human looks at one hungrily, it will happily immolate itself — either by jumping into a frying pan, after which they taste like chicken, or into a broiling pan, after which they taste like steak. When roasted they taste like pork, and when baked they taste like catfish. Raw, they taste like oysters on the half-shell.”  When Capp introduced the little Shmoo characters, he had Lil’ Abner an Appalachian Hillbilly fall into the valley of Shmoos. There, against the frantic protestations of a naked, heavily bearded old man who shepherds the shmoos, Abner befriends the strange and charming creatures. "Shmoos," the old man warns, "is the greatest menace to hoomanity th' world has evah known!"

"Thass becuz they is so bad, huh?" asks Li'l Abner.

"No, stupid", answers the man — and then encapsulates one of life's profound paradoxes: "It's because they's so good!!"

Do you think it is Jesus’ evilness that still to this day has people wishing to crucify him? Do you think it is because Christians are bad that Ted Turner would stand before the 1995 U.N. Human Rights Conference in Beijing, China and announce that Christianity was “the single greatest threat to world peace”?

Gaining this love, the willingness to do what is right regardless of appearance or consequences to yourself, that is to always do what LOVE demands, without regard to how it makes you look, will not make you popular. And if you DO righteousness and DO love and DO pure religion, undefiled before God, (that is serving the least of the least, risking your soul for the depraved as well as the innocent) don’t think the end will make you a hero.  If you truly enter this path, you will give up the care for your image and reputation.

“Christianity should ascend the Cross on behalf of the world. It should incarnate Christ himself in the world. Even if this Cross, eternally raised again and again on high, be foolishness for our new Greeks and a stumbling block for our new Jews, for us it will still be “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24).” Saint Maria of Paris.

Note: Christian love and Christian sacrifice is not mindless Shmooism. We don't wish to sacrifice for the sake of sacrificing.  Neither do we want to sacrifice for "merit" for the selfish benefit of the sacrifice itself. (what meaning if you give all you have and your body to be burned) and so surely we do not want to do it for "merit."  We are willing to use all of our powers, talents and abilities, breaths and heartbeats of our living, up to and including the sacrifice of our souls AND our bodies, to reveal to the WORLD, TRUTH, who is a Person. Truth that is LIFE.  TRUTH that is The Way. Why because True LOVE and True LIFE cannot be separated. I stated it in that first equation, "Christianity is the LIFESTYLE created by gaining a relationship with a Person and with many people." But it isn't just any person, but TRUTH, LIFE, and LOVE, without which there is only bondage, illusion, delusion and death.

Lesson Seven: Christianization – Enchurchment?

We all saw the Twin Towers go down on 9/11, and any observant person knew from the very first moments as the first tower was falling, that something new was at work here.  Had the buildings “pancaked” as is the official claim, the materials left, the pile of rubble would have been, floor on top of floor, in rubble some 20plus stories high.  It was obvious to the architects and structural engineers that even if it was a controlled demolition as many immediately suspected, that would not account for the missing material. We also knew that different than any other controlled implosion, where the dust follows the building toward the ground, massive amounts of dust from the Twin Towers implosion was lighter than air, and blew away. What people at first took to be “smoke” from burning fires a great cloud that rose from the site for weeks was 99 percent dust.  Dr. Judy Woods said in her excellent book “Where Did The Towers Go” two things that we can apply here to our quest to understand the reality and nature of The Way. (we speak of THE WAY that is truly healing and life engendering) “When you have eliminated all the known possibilities, the facts you are left with is the answer no matter how improbable or impossible it may seem.” And “A new technology requires new terminology.” So she coined the word, “Dustify” to explain how the greatest portion of the twin towers, did not pancake by implosion, but dustified in mid-air and blew away.

Part of my exercise in writing about The Way, is to challenge people to look at our relationship with Jesus from new and different angles, to bust up hackneyed words and phrases that have lost all meaning or have been distorted out of any relationship with the Ancient Christian Way.  We have to, to say anything REAL, create a new vocabulary or cleanse our old vocabulary for English speakers, especially Roman Catholics, and Evangelicals and even for some birth Orthodox, because in the West the vocabulary for salvation theology (soteriology) has become so corrupted by rationalistic/scholastic/legalistic meaning, the LIFE has been drained from it.  Protestant/Evangelical truncations have created such distortions, that when you use the words in their proper context, (inside the paradigm of The Way) those who are other wise religious, (heterodox) hear them in a competing and different context (inside paradigms that are NOT The Way).

When an evangelical uses the word “Saved,” as a friend just did yesterday saying, “In the simplest terms - what is necessary for salvation?”  What can you say?  “The Orthodox Christian answer is death, uh . . you gotta die.” As the famous father and teacher and former president of Saint Vladimir’s Seminary, Thomas Hopko, famously said many times.  Yet even that answer in the Western Paradigm is nonsensical. “Didn’t Jesus say, ‘I came that you may have life and life abundantly?”’  Fr. Tom (Memory Eternal) would have quickly said, “Yeah, but you gotta die to get it.” You see what I mean or you don’t. Either way let us do some eliminations of known possibilities that don’t and won’t work so that we may discover what is left, as improbable and impossible as it may seem, and accept that as real.  So let us invent some new terminology capable of giving us a better Icon, a better verbal picture and conceptual approximations of, The Way, and the LIFE of The Way.

Evangelism is REAL, it has been real from the day that Jesus sent his disciples out two by two to preach the good news.  But I have to ask you, if you are an Evangelical, and are familiar with the “Born Again” theology: Have you ever wondered why there isn’t a single instance of Saint Paul quoting Jesus, saying, “Remember, ye must be born again.” Did he write to anyone and admonish them to go tell everyone they needed to be “born again.”  Well, it is most likely that Saint Paul never heard Jesus teach, and he did most of his writing even before the Gospels were written. Paul finished his writings and was martyred a decade and probably two, before Saint John wrote his gospel where you find the quote, “Ye Must Be Born Again.”  Can’t you see the bumper sticker? For Paul, any quotes coming from Jesus would have had to be verbal and second hand, or given him by direct revelation. 

The youngest Apostle John who was constantly present with Jesus is the only one to record Jesus’ statement about being “born again” and repeats the theme in his “letters” speaking of being born of the “spirit, water and blood”, also about being born into righteousness. He says in effect if you can DO righteousness, then you are born into righteousness, because righteousness is born of him.   Then speaking of the work of The Way, John says that those who are born of God do not commit sin; for HIS seed remaineth in him: and HE cannot sin, because HE is born of God. (The HE is Jesus Christ. This is a statement from God the Father’s perspective. Grace in Jesus Christ covering our sinfulness, not yet conquered.) Then he says, the part that the Born Again people leave out, that is, if you do sin you are not born of God. “In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother.”  “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God.”  He says that there are three witnesses in heaven to our spiritual birth, The Father, the Eternal Word and the Holy Ghost, and that upon earth the witness is the “spirit, water and the blood.” Let us be clear, this is “The Spirit of Christ, the water from His side, and the blood of His sacrifice.” We have to BE of all three.  Yet even with Saint John in his writings there is not a single instance recorded where he stood and reminded, “Remember Jesus said, "Ye must be born again.”  Not once in all of Saint Paul’s teaching or Saint Peter’s teaching or any of their successors is recorded them standing and imploring men and women to be “born again.”   Why?  When it is the constant theme of the Evangelical sects, the foundation and pillar of their theology and preaching. All of the New Testament writers talk about being “perfected” in love.  Jesus said, “Be ye perfect (complete and whole) as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” How can that ever be except we become PART of HIM?

Saint Maria of Paris, when writing about the very real Evangelical Way of the Church, stating that it was the shining light and was even reflected in the faces of some, outside “The Church”  - she was talking about the Orthodox Church, and admitting that she witnessed genuine “evangelicals” outside the church, people holding in their core the true Icon of Christ.  I’ve known a few.  I use the stark example of the SAINT, Corey Ten Boom, whose teaching and presence exuded Jesus Christ, yet she acted anything but like a modern evangelical. After speaking about the true evangelical light shining “outside the church” St Mary quickly cautioned, “Here one must immediately introduce a clarification so as to prevent well-intentioned or deliberate misinterpretations of the evangelical way of religious life. Obviously it has no relation to the current evangelical sectarianism which has extracted only a selected list of moral precepts from the Gospel, added to this its own distorted and impoverished doctrine of salvation — about being “born again” — spiced this up with hatred of the Church, and then proclaimed this peculiar hodgepodge as a true understanding of Christ’s Gospel teaching.”

Add caption

Wow! That was harsh, impolitic, and uncalled for, “We all believe Jesus is Lord don’t we.” The sectarian evangelical responds, “You are just sowing division in Christ’s Body.  The Orthodox Church is no more real than any other denomination.”  And the rejections roll on and on.  But what does Saint Maria mean here? Does the Born Again theology of Evangelical Sects match what the apostles taught?  No it does not match even what Saint John taught, and he was the one to use the imagery the most.  In the opening lines of lesson one I stated “Christianity is the LIFESTYLE created by gaining a relationship with a Person and with many people.” I used the word lifestyle so that this would not be confused with solitary spiritual discipline, or religious pursuit, because I know just as Saint John states, “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.” Then he explains the sacrificial meaning of THIS love, using the image of Jesus’ incarnation, and suffering, and stated that Jesus went through it all so “that we might LIVE THROUGH HIM.”

So let us dangerously and just for the purpose of creating different perspective, like an artist painting the same scene from different angles, throw out some words.  First Christian.  Why, because it has come to mean everything and thus nothing. In the Ancient Christian Church it had huge meaning a meaning that created millions of converts and martyrs. Today it means culture, nothing more. Most “Christians”, especially Evangelicals and Mainline Protestants, have abdicated even that reference to Christ and call it Judeo-Christian.  Some even see themselves as Judeo-Christians, they have fallen in love with the particular name Yahweh, since that makes them feel more Jewish, and from their NIV Bibles, I think, (Translated Jehovah in the King James and LORD in the English Septuagint) and are clueless that the name Yahweh, really was the name of a primitive pre-Jewish, Canaanite fertility god. There is nothing uniquely special in the name Yahweh, no more than in the generic name God in English, Deus in Latin and Theos in Greek. Like Sunday, and Easter, these are adopted words.  So out goes Christian, and we will use the phrase, The Way, in its ancient meaning, associated with Christ. 

Next let us dangerously throw out (at least for now, for our purposes) the word Church, since it has different meaning for different sects, and Catholic since it has lost its meaning as well.  When you say Catholic to a Protestant they see, robes, funny hats, ritual they don’t understand and some fellow in Rome making outlandish claims.  When you say Catholic to a Roman Catholic they see the structure of the Roman Rite, the Catechism and Vaticanism. The Orthodox sees the same things and have abandoned the use of the word except in specific theological definition similar but different than the Roman use of the word.

We will keep the word (o)rthodox but with a small o, since there are still some orthodox people of The Way, in the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church and even in sects outside the “church” as Saint Maria acknowledged saying, “the evangelical way of spiritual life, which is as eternal as is the proclamation of the Good News, always alive within the bosom of the Church, shining for us in the faces of saints and at times lighting with the reflection of its fire even righteous people outside the Church.”  Then she cautioned that she was not talking about the “Born Again” sects, though she did mean some few, in those sects, I’m sure.  She certainly recognized Corey Ten Boom and her sister, as those reflections when they met and worked together for the inmates inside Ravensbruck Concentration Death Camp.

So we are talking about, (1)The Way, (2) The orthodox Way, (3) let us be specific and say, instead of the misunderstood word Church, “The Apostolic, orthodox, Eucharistic Brotherhood, IN Christ.”  I know that’s mouth full, but we have to be specific because we are NOT, talking about Baptists and their theology, Methodists and their theology, Roman Catholics and their theology, or even the Clericalized Orthodox Church, because Orthodox Christians see, Byzantine Rite, and the Philokalia.  You see, we are not talking about enchurchment, or Christianizing.

Our evangelical friend asked, “I’m considering the Roman Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church, but I don’t have enough knowledge to choose.”   My answer is I don’t care. I’m not going to lead you to a church, I am going to impart to you the tools to grasp the guidance of Christ, why? Because where does Jesus Christ lead us, except to Himself.  Introducing one to a system, without grasp of the object named Jesus Christ, is merely a religious act, and maybe not a life engendering act.  It beats introducing someone to a gay bar, strip club, pool hall, ball team, movie circle, the Masons, but only to the extent that the particular church system does not reflect the same fallen culture.  I’ve signed all my letters for years with the following paragraph (if I was writing a Christian).

“Our Heavenly Father Let us not be caught in the fear of servile religion; keeping Tradition out of ignorance and offering our "correctness" as sign of righteous enlightenment. Let us not be caught in the tyranny of our rational minds, which creates "innovations" upon the faith, which leads us to hold prideful "theologies" that diminish God to the level of our understanding, or worse, which deny Him altogether. Let us not be caught by the tyranny of our emotions, mistaking our soul's phantasy producing powers for the working of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life. Let us not be caught in the mere form of the visible church, but in the LIFE of it, who is Jesus Christ, the Living Word of God, present to all that truly seek Him. Let our keeping of Tradition spring from the warmth of your Love, from a heart that seeks continual repentance, from a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart you will not despise. Amen.”

Again, Saint Maria of Paris, “Enchurchment” is often taken to mean the placing of life within the framework of a certain rhythm of church piety, the subordination of one’s personal life experience to the schedule of the cycle of divine services, the incorporation of certain specific elements of ‘churchliness’ into one’s way of life, even elements of the Church’s ustav. (ustav = the church’s writings.  For the undivided church the unity of the Ante-Nicene and Post-Nicene Apostolic Fathers, for the divided church the writing of the scores of Roman scholastics, Augustinianism, Thomism, many “ecumenical councils” the council of Trent, then innovative dogmas, the literature of the mystics and popes etc., etc., etc. For the Orthodox, the Philokalia (which means “love of the good”) but don’t tell an “Enchurched” Orthodox that, he will tell you there is magic in the title in Greek and it should never be translated. To publish it with the Title “Love of the Good” would be blasphemous.  For Protestants a SEA, of competing and confusing literature, oceans and oceans of error and shallow inspiration and sentimentality.)

NO, we are only going to examine The Way as taught by the Apostolic orthodox (little o) of Christ’s Eucharistic Society. And in this, it may lead us to be “enchurched” but this is not our goal, that’s for the Father to draw, through his Holy Spirit and Jesus to reveal himself, also through the same Holy Spirit.

An Archbishop I knew thirty years ago used to say, “It is Christianity, not “Churchi-anity”  and he thought he was saying something profound but he was not. Again Saint Maria of Paris, “Christianization,” however, is generally understood as nothing more than the correction of the bestial cruelty of man’s history through inoculation with a certain dose of Christian morality. And in addition to this it also includes the preaching of the Gospel to the whole world.”  That sounds GREAT! Right? And yet no cigar, NOT EVEN CLOSE; Though I suspect that is what most people are thinking when they question, about the “Christian life” and “how do they get saved.”

The Way, The orthodox Apostolic Eucharistic Way, is Christification, and Christification only.  And Yes, like Father Thomas Hopko’s quote above, - “They ask me how do I get saved, how do I get born again, like it is something you pick up at a fast food joint, and I answer, The Orthodox Christian answer is death, uh . . you gotta die.”  And so is the answer on The Way, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).  And quoting Fr Tom, “For most of us that’s gonna take a while.”   The Christ part is all that allows us to flop prone and helpless upon The Way, like the squirming infant we are, unable to feed ourselves and constantly making a mess of everything, next is learning to raise our heads, etc.

Saint Maria taught this lesson in her actions that day when she stepped in line and voluntarily walked into the Nazi gas chamber. It was the same answer Jesus gave, when he created the water and blood, that would allow the Spiritual Birth upon The Way. He chose to suffer and die and die on a Cross. No one KILLED him. HE laydown his life for us.  Again Saint Maria, “The image of God, the icon of Christ, which truly is my real and actual essence or being, is the only measure of all things, the only path or way which is given to me. Each movement of my soul, each approach to God, to other people, to the world, is determined by the suitability of that act for reflecting the image of God which is within me.

“If I am faced with two paths and I am in doubt, then even if all human wisdom, experience, and tradition point to one of these, but I feel that Christ would have followed the other — then all my doubts should immediately disappear and I should choose to follow Christ in spite of all the experience, tradition and wisdom that are opposed to it. But other than the immediate consciousness that Christ is calling me to a particular path, are there any other objective signs which will tell me that this doesn’t just appear this way to me, that it is not a figment of my imagination or my emotional feeling? Yes, there are objective indications.

“Christ gave us two commandments: to love God and to love our fellow man. Everything else, even the commandments contained in the Beatitudes, is merely an elaboration of these two commandments, which contain within themselves the totality of Christ’s ‘Good News.’ Furthermore, Christ’s earthly life is nothing other than the revelation of the mystery of love of God and love of man. These are, in sum, not only the true, but the only measure of all things. And it is remarkable that their truth is found only in the way they are linked together. Love for man alone leads us into the blind alley of an anti-Christian humanism, out of which the only exit is, at times, the rejection of the individual human being and love toward him in the name of all mankind. Love for God without love for man, however, is condemned: “You hypocrite, how can you love God whom you have not seen, if you hate your brother whom you have seen” (1 Jn. 4:20). Their linkage is not simply a combination of two great truths taken from two spiritual worlds. Their linkage is the union of two parts of a single whole.

And as we pointed out, Saint John who used the words, Ye Must be Born Again, explained what being Born of the Spirit was, just as Saint Maria stated, and what being Born into DOING Righteousness was, and what being Born into DOING love means. All of these and many more are steps upon The Way.  On The Way to What? To being Born In Perfection as the Father, which is in heaven, is Perfect!  This is the actual birth, everything before that is mere gestation in the womb of God's Grace. But we are not unconscious fetuses, rather we are choosing moment by moment whom we will serve, what we will feed our minds, how we will protect our NOUS (our spiritual center and intelligence) from poison. This womb, this life requires active participation, not isolation, because our lessons are learned, in the context of our living, in our joy and suffering, in our successes and our failures, in the entire web and texture of our experience.

Lesson Six: Natural Salvation

Mother Maria of Paris' actions, Corey Ten Boom's actions and the actions of Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, were not mutually exclusive. I don't want to write biographies of these people, but I want you to Google and read about them, please read more than Wikipedia. I will share what the media will not share for some reason, the end of Mother Maria's life, as told me by the eye witness, Corey Ten Boom. In 1945, hours before the Ravensbruck concentration camp would be liberated, the allied guns heard only a few miles away, the NAZI guards were busy killing their pregnant consorts and the witnesses to their worst tortures and crimes. In the line for the gas chamber was a pregnant Jewish girl, a whore, NAZI collaborator and consort, hated by the rest. Saint Maria, prayed angels to surround and took her place in line, without guards seeing it. Corey reported praying angels to surround and make them invisible as they covertly moved about the camp, the penalty for which would have been getting shot.  That day the count was made and it was right and Maria marched into the gas chamber, a sacrifice for the unworthy, something only a fool would do. 

When I think about this act, when hope in that death camp had to be high for the first time, knowing it was just a short time they would be rescued, Maria did not let that hope blind her. Why did Mother Maria have to do what she did? Because the words she had written on page, were written upon her heart, and to be REAL she had no choice, she had to act upon foolish love.Mother Maria wrote while she was in Paris: "The Bodies of our fellow human beings must be treated with more care than our own. Christian love teaches us to give our brethren not only spiritual gifts, but material gifts as well. Even our last shirt, our last piece of bread must be given to them. Personal almsgiving and the most wide-ranging social work are equally justifiable and necessary.

"The way to God lies through love of other people, and there is no other way. At the Last Judgement, I shall not be asked if I was successful in my ascetic exercises or how many prostrations I made in the course of my prayers. I shall be asked, did I feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the prisoners: that is all I shall be asked."

Truth when he walked among us said, "Let your light so shine before men, that they will see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven." People think this means acting pious and religious, in this thought people are fools. 

Our salvation, our "healing" is IN this world, not removed from it, but rather not OF it; the energy of it flowing from the new creation, the which Jesus Christ IS the New Creation he is creating IN us. (creating his eternal home, IN us)  This is the true healing and it is shared by every faithful human of ancient times. Ordinary people who kept the single commandment God had given, "Go, be fruitful and multiply." Besides the one commandment, there was Natural Law, it was written on their hearts, it did not require letters on stone, and it was universal among humans, who were not yet corrupted, merely compromised by Adam's sin, and made subject to death. The human race was not instantly depraved because of the sin of Adam as the fundamentalist, and Blessed Augustin teach.

Lao Tsu paints a wonderful picture of the progressive corruption of humans. It is comically TRUE. "A man of highest virtue acts without regard to virtue, and that is why he has virtue.
A man of lowest virtue never strays from virtue and that is why he is without virtue.
The former never acts yet leaves nothing undone.  The latter acts but there are things left undone.
A man of the highest benevolence acts, but from no ulterior motive.
A man of the highest rectitude acts, but from ulterior motive.
A man most conversant in the rites, acts, but when no one responds he rolls up his sleeves and resorts to persuasion by force.
Hence when The Way was lost, there was virtue; when virtue was lost there was benevolence; when benevolence was lost there was rectitude; when rectitude was lost there were the rites.
The rites are the wearing thin of loyalty and good faith, and the beginning of disorder."


(So you won't think I am way out there, Saint Paul told a very similar and more gritty story of the progressive corruption of humankind - read the first chapter of the book of Romans.)

There is more truth in the words of this pre-Christian than most Christians today would want to admit.  But it does give us a picture of those "trying to become saved," and the selfish motive of "trying to become a saint" this is antithetical to the True Way. Yet it may be the best we can do at first.  I read last year the "autobiography" better the collection of Pope John XXIII's diary entries. It covered many decades and it was little wonder he spawned the heresies he did. It was decades of plodding, boring self-absorbed narcissism. 

Now returning to ancient times: Every one of these faithful to Natural Law, pre-Christian people met Jesus and he took them to himself, in the commonly called, "Harrowing of Hell" when his body lay in the tomb, the sacrifice of his flesh and blood complete, at this time having already conquered death by death, he took captivity, captive. Represented in that "captivity" were the faithful prophets, faithful patriarchs, faithful slaves, bondsmen and servants, and masters and Kings and priests, noble primitives, hunters, herdsmen. BEFORE Noah, and BEFORE Abraham, BEFORE Moses.  All the faithful population of the earth looked forward to healing salvation, even if they could not name it, by simply keeping the Natural Law, that is not doing what is contrary to human nature.  AS Saint Patrick might have said, simply responding moderately to their natural lusts, and rejecting in every instance the hostile lusts. We have no idea how many followed this noble primitive path, and how many sinned gravely and were corrupted in their flesh.  We know by the time of Noah, all but a tiny handful, were totally corrupted.

The Jews (the Chosen People) were constrained in a new law for an example, in other words, as a means for God to progressively reveal himself in time, until he was born of the Virgin Mary and stood before us the  man, Jesus of Nazareth. That revelation had to happen in time, so the Jews were chosen to be used for that purpose and that purpose ALONE, as an object lesson to create the context whereby man could have an inkling of what they were and are seeing, when they saw and see Jesus. Without that sequential revelation in time, and the TRADITION it created in time, which was also partly rendered in the sacred writings, we now call the Old Testament (and yes in other books that both Jesus and the apostles quoted), Jesus himself would have had no common, conceptual language whereby he could explain himself, in a way that would leave an INDELIBLE mark on human history and change the nature of every subsequent thing.  From the very moment of God's Incarnation in the womb of Mary, all of human history since, every conversation, every act, has been in the context of building his reign upon earth, or resisting and/or actively trying to destroy it.  There is no other context whereby men may experience life upon earth in the great battle of the tribulation, the great period of suffering. Whether they are a conscious warrior, wearing the full armor for the battle, actively attacking the strongholds of evil, pushing back the very real society of devils and demons, and witnessing with the blinding flashes of his sword, as Mother Maria, Corey Ten Boom and others have done, or a primitive in a jungle, living a subsistence, life, having never seen or heard of Christians, the Church or Jesus Christ, all are caught in the grand struggle. It is the passion of the EARTH itself, or Saint Paul was a liar. Paul said that the whole created order groans in travail, awaiting the Revelation of the Sons (plural) of God. (So the prayer of the heart is even our ecology.)

So Natural Law was the first rule towards salvation. The Law of Moses was the second rule towards salvation, but for the Jews only. There is, of course, a shadow of this more restrictive law in the Hammurabi Code, the Babylonian law, but none of these were salvation. The only healing/salvation whereby men may become imbued with eternal life is the Divine Human Nature of Jesus Christ. This is as true for Adam and Eve as it will be true for the last faithful Christians, whose death will signal the Return of Jesus Christ in Glory with all the faithful of all ages with him, both the saints and angels, ready to engage in the last battle that will destroy sin, evil and death upon earth, when everything will be regenerated, by those who have become Sons of God and were already regenerated, new christs, new creations.

The regeneration of this place, this earth is by the Revelation of the Sons of God.

I'm sorry to inform you folks, but all those images of heaven, humans being wispy souls existing in some "floaty place" called heaven, is pagan. For faithful Christians, one is ever a human being, with all the attributes of humanity, never a wispy disembodied anything; one is a human being, either part of the Church Triumphant, that exists in Glory, now at this moment, which is the powerful support of the Church Militant that is here upon earth, that is always and in every place Catholic (of the whole - both the Church Triumphant and Church Militant). The Church Militant is in a life and death battle, in this period of the great tribulation that has raged from the moment of Christ's Cross to this very day. In this great battle, the Saints and Angels of the Church Triumphant "have our backs" so to speak, in combat terms. From the moment of the death of the last faithful Christians on earth, all the faithful will be of the Church Triumphant, existing in God's unshielded and uncreated Glory, wearing flesh that can never fail, where we may view God face to face, each of us having become by nature what Jesus Christ already is; at our core we will be HIM.

Jesus Christ is the Begotten of the Father before all worlds, the Son of God, we are Sons of God, the created and re-born of God: "But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."  Jesus is both the Eternal Word of God, Begotten of the Father before all worlds, and the FIRST re-born Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary.  What he created in that divine human conception and birth is what we become in him, with him.

Is it any wonder, that Orthodox Catholics venerate Jesus' mother, Mary, as both the Mother of God, and our mother as well. She is our true mother, who gave her flesh to, with the Holy Spirit, create the Divine Human Flesh and Blood, and Divine Human Nature we share in a mystery of new creation which outpaces our conceptual ability to fully speak. 

"When Christ, who is our life, shall appear then shall ye also appear with him IN GLORY."

"For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, (religion and superstition is a childish thing) I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now, we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (meaning as God knows us, we will know him) And now abideth faith, hope, charity (active love) these three; but the greatest of these is charity. (active love.)"

I did not myself know, as I wrote prayerfully why I had to invoke the memory of Saint Mother Maria of Paris, my lovely Sweet Friend and Saint, Corey Ten Boom, who contended harshly with a bitter, bitter young boy and teen; andRev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and I could add to the list Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and a host of others in contemporary times and those saints and martyrs, filling the history of the Church Militant to the Cross of Christ.  It is because each of these people proved that the Natural Law, understood by the most primitive people on earth, the simple rule of love, is still the true Gospel, where then it functioned upon the hope of salvation in the future, today it is an active work and function OF healing/salvation, played out in the living Liturgy of our lives; where our living becomes most natural looking to the person without spiritual eyes; we are ordinary, we are acting and responding to family, friends, co-workers, strangers, and to events in history, as these aforementioned people valiantly did, yet with extreme repentance, the humility to do what love demands, we become better and better at it, hoping that in every way that could hinder our walk of The Way, we disappear, cease to exist, in every way that is "contra" to his will. And in this disappearing is our TRUE humanity, our TRUE personality, our TRUE personhood, our TRUE creativity etc., etc. It is loss of only what Saint Paul calls "caca," that is excrement.

When we give "ourselves" up,  as Jesus, the Apostles, the Holy Fathers and all the saints of every age have said we have to do, saying we have to do this to be "HEALED", we don't give up our True self, but our false self, built upon all that is false, all that is not real, all that is not eternal, all that is not good, all that is not beautiful, all that is not lovable, and lovely, all that is not brave, all that is not baptized in LOVE. We KEEP everything TRUE. You see, even Martha who I described in the previous lesson, clung to everything that was false for 70 plus years, trying to give it reality, until she disappeared upon her death bed all resistance gone and instantly took upon herself the Glory that had been struggling with her, IN HER since her Baptism.

"If we suffered with Him
We will reign with Him
If we have died with Him
We will live with Him
If we deny Him, He will deny us
If we are faithless, He remains faithful
Because he cannot deny himself."

Being taught the simple Gospel, Jesus Christ and him crucified for our sins, accepting Baptism FOR THE REMISSION OF OUR SINS, is not a mere symbol, but the promise that we will "die in him." And the seal of the Holy Spirit, is not a mere symbol, but the promise that we will become imbued with him.  The Eucharist, physically taking to ourselves Christ's Divine Human Body and Blood is not a mere symbol of the thing, but the ACTUAL thing, as Jesus, the Apostles and the Saints and Holy Fathers of ALL ages have taught and testified to.  This is not a symbol and promise of New Creation, this is participation in that New Creation.

Don't accept some gnosticized, protestantized truncation of this very real LIFE, some theory of it, some mental images of it!  Rather, wash in its Sacred Waters, bathe in the oil, the anointing of it, eat the Body and Blood of it, accept the true FULLNESS of the Gospel. "Is not THIS cup (not any cup) of blessing we bless, the Blood of Jesus Christ?"  Who asked that question, indicating it most certainly is?  "Is not THIS bread we break, the flesh of Jesus Christ?" Who said that?

Homework: read about Saint Maria of Paris, Blessed Corey Ten Boom, and Rev.Dietrich Bonhoeffer martyr for Christ.  Also find what I referenced in the paragraph above and realize for yourself, who said this, who made this claim, this radical claim that the Bread and Wine of the Altar are ACTUALLY Jesus Christ's Body and Blood, in a mystery, we cannot articulate nor define, because it outpaces our conceptual language.  We do know that it is an experience of anamnesis, which is more than commemorating, or remembering, but stepping into the eternal moment, where Jesus Christ is both spiritually and physically present.   One of the Holy Fathers (saints) speaking of the "symbol" of the Eucharist, the "symbol" of Jesus' presence, the fact that the "symbol" represents Jesus, "the bread and wine do no represent Jesus' Body and Blood, they re-present Jesus' Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity. THIS is the meaning of anamnesis."


(And I Believe) in one Lord Jesus Christ, the son of God, the Only-begotten, Begotten of the Father before all worlds.  Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten not made; of one essence with the Father, by Whom all things were made:
*Who for us men and for our salvation came down from Heaven and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made man;
* And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried;
*And the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures;
*And ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father;
*And He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, Whose Kingdom shall have no end.
*And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, and Giver of Life, Who proceeds from the Father, Who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified. Who spoke by the prophets:
*And I believe in One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
*I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.
*I look for the resurrection of the dead,
*And the life of the world to come. Amen.
 
+++
 
You put on the purple garment of your flesh, made scarlet with blood by Divine Grace, glorious, wise Martyr Father Jacques Hamel, and having bound your head with the crown of incorruption and life, holding in your right hand the trophy of the Cross like a sceptre, you reign with Christ rejoicing for ever; and in the radiance of His glory, implore Christ our True God to grant us His mercy. - Amen.