My view of the christian story

Address

Unitarians have been celebrating the fact it is the 450 years anniversary of the Diet of Torda.   The Inquirer shows that wonderful picture of Francis David speaking at the Diet and proclaiming the freedom of the pulpit and the right of people to follow their own religious conscience.

We don’t have anyone like Francis David.

Francis David had moved through all the denominations.   He had been a Roman Catholic and he had been a Lutheran.    He had not been satisfied by those religions because they tried to stop him thinking about what he really believed.

That freedom of religious belief is what has given the Unitarians their identity.

Our paper, th Inquirer has been full of reports of the recent theology conference held in Leeds.    To be honest I have not read all of it.

It is always interesting to read or hear what other people believe about religion.    Other people’s views can help to distil our own thoughts.    But I have a suspicion that there is an agenda to push the Unitarians back into the mainstream of the Christian faith.

I could never do that.    I left traditional christianity a long time ago.   Having left I don’t know whether I have moved back, moved forward or just slipped sideways.   Because so much of it has stuck to me.

What is indisputable, is that  Jesus, whether real or unreal, fact or fiction, god or spiritual human is the most significant person of the last two thousand years.   In a way when we think about our religion and our culture, we cannot escape the importance of his presence in the last two milennia.

I thought I would use the freedom offered to me by the Diet of Torda to tell you what I think.

And my thoughts start with the Wise Men who came from the East.   Why are they in the Jesus story and why their religion ?

   They were Zoroastrians.   Since the time of Alexander the Great, the Zoroastrian religion had spread through his empire.  It as they who carried the ideas of life after death, judgement at the gate of heaven, it was in fact a bridge, wicked souls fell off it, good souls walked over easily.  

It was the Zoroastrians who Introduced the idea of a spirit redeemer, the Saoshyant, who would come to pass judgement at the end of time on the souls of those who had fallen off the bridge.

This is what Christianity was to pick up.

In the Jewish religion, it was the Pharisees who had been influenced most by be Zoroastrians and were changing the laws of the Jewish people. and it was the conservative Sadducees who were resisting all change.

    In the Bible story Joseph, Mary and the baby fled to Egypt.   No one seems to know what they did there.  There were Jewish religious exiles in Egypt and one of the best known of the mystical religions was Gnosticism, based on a cosmic spiritual being whose body like that of the Egyptian god Horus was broken up and all the pieces scattered throughout humanity as shards of spiritual crystal light.    

That shard of light exists in everyone they said but it has to be discovered and then it will light up and you will be spiritually one with the god.

By the age of twelve Jesus and his family are back home and he is already well versed in the Jewish scriptures and is a strong debater with the elders of the synagogue.

Then he is a grown man gathering a following of disciples, healing the sick and performing miracles.   Why?   What did he want to achieve?   

Some will say that he wanted to reform his religion.   He wanted everyone to break the rules and release themselves from the strict rituals about the Sabbath and the Book of Exodus which controlled a person's life in such detail.    He swept through the country with his healing and miracles.   He preached to thousands.    He preached the equality before God of all people.    Tax gatherer or Roman centurion, or woman, master or servant or slave.

But in challenging their religion, he was challenging the very identity of the Jewish people.    Even today Jewish people are defined by their religion more than by any country, caste or colour.

What sort of a person must he have been?   If he was just a man, was he Gentle Jesus meek and mild or an angry reformer with a mission to change the whole status quo of society?  

After eighteen months he led his followers on a great march to Jerusalem with a prophesy of change.   It was like Gandhi's salt march to the ocean or Martin Luther King’s march to Washington.    

But for Jesus, The thousands who heard him preach never came with him.  They had only gathered to see a spectacle, like the old billy Graham fans.   They all stayed with the tried and trusted ways of their culture and their identity.   They did not want change, well not to their religion.   They did want to get rid of the Romans but that revolt came later.

That was the end of Jesus, he had few followers left, none at all in Israel after a while.  Some twenty years later, stories were circulating about this Jesus and he became a legend and not real person.

It was Paul who changed it again.    He became a follower and he too tried to change the culture and the identity of the people but he was too eventually rejected and tried as a blasphemer by the Jewish priests.

Paul had taken the religion of Jesus outside Israel and created a new religion with Jesus becoming the spiritual  Christ, a cosmic God of Light, giving light to his followers.  

And Paul succeeded because he could give his followers an identity.   The gentiles he preached to were not restricted by religious rules.    They had been used to many gods.  Paul offered them a personal God who gave them a religion and a promise of real freedom.  

He wrote and told them Christ the god, the light of the world was coming to judge the world and coming soon.    In his letters he deliberated with them on belief and lifestyles.   His followers he said were unchained from the restrictions of everyday living and even the laws of the land.   They organised into churches and forsook the temples and synagogues they had been going to.

It caused a lot of trouble because groups of Christians sprung up all over the empire with their loyalty pledged not to Rome but to the Christ in heaven.

That couldn’t last.    Paul’s letters show how some groups fell away from his teaching and how they fell out with each other.    For the authorities it was a rebellion.   People saying they were above the laws of the land and only subject to the Christ.

So the empire took control by establishing this runaway religion as the state religion.   They made it establishment and ruthlessly put down any dissent.   The church was ruled from Rome.    The people lost that freedom and were given the identity of the church.    Angry reformers were crushed in the flames of the stake.   And it lasted more than a thousand years until the church was undone by its own corruption.

This country formed its own version of the church, the state religion of the Church of England bound together by the Westminster confession of faith and the doctrine of the trinity.     Great Britain was identified as a Christian country,  Everyone in it a god fearing Christian.   Even though people have stopped going to church, most people will still identify themselves as British and Christian.    Peake’s commentary was the authority.

It is why the Unitarians had such a hard time in the early years.  They dissented from the identity of church and state.  For that they were vilified.

They followed the teaching of Jesus, they believed in the fatherhood of god, the humanity of Jesus but they also believed in religious freedom and reason as a tool for exploring faith.

They were probably most influenced by the writings and leadership of Dr James Martineau who wanted to reform the structure of the Christian religion but was not successful.

Martineau’s writings were an authority on Unitarian faith.    They probably still might be.  He said the authority of the human spirit was conscience.

But the world has changed and that Unitarianism too has had its day.    Unitarians have lost that identity as Christian dissenters, because now everyone is a dissenter, they show their dissent by not bothering about church at all.  

Everyone believes what we believe.   Following those Jesus qualities of being a Good Samaritan and living a good ethical life.  We say most people are Unitarians without knowing it.   The spiritual light is not necessary.

We Unitarians are small in number because we have lost an identity.   We have a new corporate identity logo.  But what does that identify?

We have to ask ourselves if we are a faith community then what do we have faith in?   If we are a spiritual community how do we display our spirituality.   How does it bond us as a community ?   

How are we seen by the world and actually is that important ?  Can Unitarians be  a recognisable community that gives it members an identity that inspires their lives.

Over the years I have often asked the question.   ‘Whom or what do the Unitarians worship when they meet on a Sunday?’.   To their credit they have never answered.

We no longer have a Dr Martineau.   We no longer have any kind of  spiritual leader who will give guidance on our faith and practice.   No one to explain and elucidate on the writings of our past sages.   Martineau, Channing and the others are all history.

There is no one to say to us collectively, ‘Here is some guidance to help our current thinking,  or these are our spiritual values that we should be proclaiming, or this is what our history tells us’

All other faiths have their spiritual leaders or their gurus but not the Unitarians.    Would we have an identity if we had our own guru?

It is my view that when we gather to worship, people are not particularly worshipping anyone or anything.  

What we do do when we gather with our hymns and readings and talks is simply to affirm ourselves as Unitarians.   That we have a  personal faith and we belong to this church..   It is a pleasant experience.

 The content of the worship may or may not inspire us, it is being here together that makes us Unitarians.     That is the bond.

Jesus was trying to change the system.    Not just the system but each person too. to seek the light of the spirit and let the light shine within them.  

That all people should be treated as an equal whether women, slave, centurion or tax gatherer,

To be a community.

His teaching was in the parables and the miracles.

The Christianity of today is collapsing and the Unitarian bow wave ahead of it disintegrating.   My view is that we need to go back to that early beginning.     To that spiritual light and then follow its trail through our history.    From Imhotep to Ptolemy to Jesus, to Paul, Galileo, Trismegistus,  Johann Valentin Andreae, Rudolf Steiner to Martineau.

Each has a message and a teaching for us to distil.

The truth of the spiritual light is not found in the Hebrew Bible nor the Good Friday story of dying for our sins.  

I wonder sometimes if we Unitarians should re-examine our Christianity.    Do we still believe in the fatherhood of god and gentle Jesus meek and mild ?    Do we still tie Jesus to the Old Testament of the faith that rejected him ?    

Or should we think of the preacher from Egypt who found the mystical light of god within his soul ?  And had a passion to teach the world what he has found no matter what the cost.   And think too of all those that have followed that light down the paths of time.

Who will teach us and who will inspire us?     Do the Unitarians need. Guru?

But that is only my view !

      

So why do you go to church ?

So why do you go to church ?   I was asked.   The answer was easy. ‘Because it lifts our spirits.’    It lifts our spirits through music and singing, through prayer or contemplation, by being challenged or inspired by the words we hear.   By being in the company of like minded people.

 

We are spiritual people.    The spirit within each of us is actually who we really are.   We all look different, we all might behave and act differently, we might have different ideas about clothes and passions and possessions.   We don't say of a person we know them because they wear green.   That green is just part of who they are, their aura, part of their spiritual being.

If we weren't spiritual people what would we be?   I suppose not far different from the cows or sheep in the field.   We would eat and sleep and have children.  But we are more than that.   We have an awareness about ourselves.  We have an awareness of where we are, of the sky and the stars.     We have minds that can travel without limit through time and space.   We can visit the memories of yesterday and we can dream of the future.

We can have ideas.    We can plan for future times.    From our imaginations we can construct machines,  bridges and buildings and we can even change the layout of nature.   Like the universe there are no barriers to what the mind is capable of.     The only limit is ignorance.    Unfortunately we can construct anything either for good or ill.   There is a reason for that.

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff who around in the 1940s was a a kind of spiritual guru. He said that although everyone was a spiritual person, many were asleep, or sleep walking.   They lived their lives but their spirits were not awake.  They thought spiritual uplift was found in material things or seeking earthly pleasures.   That was all short term stuff and often it lead to unhappiness and stress, because their spiritual self did not grow by acquiring material things or through short term happiness.

The person who is aware of being a spiritual person is able to grow and increase in wisdom and understanding.   They are able to reach for something within themselves which is both higher and deeper than they have known before.  It leads to a feeling of balance and a sense of joy in life, as the Buddhists say, joy in the joy of others also, because we develop a better relationship with our fellow beings.

We go to church because it lifts our spirits.    Years ago I used to go to church and it never did lift my spirits.  So I stopped going.    I realise now that I had reached a spiritual plateau and couldn't go any further.     The church had never said that belonging to it was a developing process.   You couldn't listen to a sermon and disagree with it or put forward a different interpretation.   

They said, ‘This is the teaching.  accept it, believe in it and you are safe for heaven.   If you disagree, you won't go to heaven’

It always seems to have been the same.   If we were to look at the history of some religions, it can be seen.  Religions that came from long ago, when an enlightened prophet, had a real insight into the workings of the spiritual dimension.    

Their word spread, then  they would have a following, their teaching developed into a new religion, but then after many years, it stalled.  It stalled when the followers said the enlightened founder was their only authority, therefore nothing could be challenged or changed.  They then became set with a rigid structure.  There were rules about what you should or should not believe, what you could or could not not do - in some you could not dance or sing or be merry, in some you were told what you had to wear.    Spirits went into straight jackets

So religions come and they stall.  After a while they lose the power to influence or lift the spirit, because people and the world have moved on.    Sadly the original message from the prophet is often still valid but it has been altered and is no longer recognisable.

I go to meetings of the Theosophical Society in Bolton.  Their founder, Madame Blavatsky said that what she had discovered and written about was only a beginning.  She expected the study to continue.   Yet there are followers who will say but Madame Blavatsky said….. therefore how can we dispute it?

I have ben preparing a talk on the Rosicrucians.  They are part of a tradition that goes back to the beginning of humankind, to that time when people believed about being Spirit more than flesh.   There were legends then about how the world and humanity began.

A common one was that there was a creator spirit who brought everything into being and the creator existed within everything created as Spirit, including within humankind.    

And the creator created gods that people could visualise, make carvings and pictures of, and create legends that explained the true quality of the creator spirit.

They believed that Humankind began as Spirit beings, below the level of the angels, but in time these spirit beings materialised into human form.   As humans they were born into every life with a memory of the creator spirit.      

But life distracted them and they fell away from the spiritual ideals of truth, beauty, justice, equality.    They created their own gods and stories and legends about them - but these were false gods.   False gods represented the desires and prejudices of the people themselves.  They created virtues which were not true virtues.

What was really real they could not comprehend.   Plato described the true forms of truth, justice, beauty as being understood only as shadows on the wall by those who came to seek.

These early people believed there had been earlier civilisations that had been greater but had been lost. .   They believed that these early civilisations were closer to the angels and once had spiritual powers of clairvoyance and empathy that had since been lost.    

That succeeding civilisations lost these powers. There were angels who were not angels at all but inventions of people.  

One was said to be a spiritual guide but wasn't.   Belief in this angel led people on a spiritual path that was purely selfish.   That led individuals to isolate themselves, and others, from empathy and care for the world they lived in.   They thought that by separating themselves from the world they had achieved a spiritual height.

And there were false angels who led people to think they found spirituality in material things.   The creation of happiness through shopping and owning things, in being better than anyone else.   

How was anyone to know that true happiness came through connecting their own spirits closer to the one absolute spirit.

Some of those early prophets did have a sense of the path that would lead to true happiness of spirit.

They said that the person of Jesus was a spirit person who was sent to show a way back to the true spiritual path.

He taught that many had wandered off the true path.   Some had wandered away to a material kind of spirituality - like the organised church.  Cathedrals and doctrines deceived them into thinking they were spiritually mature but they couldn't see that they were stalled.

Others took to a spirituality that was based only on the self.   Believing oneself to be pure through study or exercise but actually not enlightened at all.   It was these paths that were misguided truths and led to so much destruction and negative energy arising in the world.  And there were the sleepwalkers.

The true path was through developing the spirit through the study of everything without exception, -  nature, science and philosophy.   It was  through developing an inward strength through contemplation, to realise that everything, including ourselves is part of the Absolute, or call it God.  No doors should be closed on knowledge because knowledge leads to understanding.

In the modern world this requires people to be wary of the many truths that are fed to them.   To look and ask for themselves if what is said or read or tweeted or put on Facebook is helping the world and ourselves to be purer and nearer to the absolute god.  The truth about life and nature and god can be learnt but not taught.  It is learnt through questioning and exploring.

Those who do embark on that path to spiritual enlightenment soon begin to find a real joy in life.  They develop an understanding of other people.    To be empathic and recognise the hurts and sufferings that are hidden within both within themselves and in others, and so understand them.

And those on that spiritual path will seek a community of like minded people, where they can be freely spiritual, not confined in a religious straitjacket.

You can understand when someone says they go to church because it lifts their spirits.

Lammas Meditation

See that pilgrim walking slow.  A measured tread.  On a path of time  towards a shrine.  Seeking peace, seeking love, seeking meaning, seeking life.
Changing from yesterday into today, becoming tomorrow.   Each pace a change, decaying and growing all in one yet becoming new and staying the same.
The dawn brings light from the dark shadows and the sun colours the day.  The promise of the day is evening and evening will bring shadows and a new dawn.    Nothing is still.
In the seed of the mother sowing the corn is the seed of her daughter who will reap it.   The barleycorn will grow and fall and live and fall again.
The pilgrim sees it all and walks with measured tread.  Sees also a world with the inward eye that is filled with places seen and people known and dreams of what might be.   Sees places that never are and places and people that never will be,
Pilgrim, celebrate, eat the bread from the first cut grain of the harvest to celebrate life and death.  Cut and carry the last sheaf of corn to the hearth and plant in the spring and dance to the circle of life. And walk on.

Time for the next Reformation ?

Without vision, the people perish.    I had a dream that there was a mighty God at the very centre of the universe.   I don't know if this God was real or just imagined.    Talking to him was the archangel Raphael who had been to see our world.

The world is in a mess again.   There is fighting between nations and there is fighting between religions.  There are millions in refugee camps, more displaced within their own countries.   The earth itself is damaged and they continue to damage it.

And only a few call out against it and their voices are weak and they don't really make much of a difference.

The world is divided against itself.

The vision of the leaders is for power over one another.   Their assemblies are separated from the people.   And the traders are speculators with the fruits of the earth and they seek only greater wealth for themselves.   

And if some do have a vision it is a vision for austerity.    There is suffering everywhere.

I don't have a good feeling about this world and wonder if it might not be better just to destroy the people and let it start again.

But the God said, I can't destroy this world so long as there is goodness in people.  

They need to sort themselves out.  

And there’s the rub of my dream.    Who is responsible for this world.

What have we, people of faith, got to do with it ?    Some will say this mess is because people don't believe in God, some will say it is all god's will.  Others will say it has nothing to do with God.  It is all to to do with us.

But we are people of faith.  The teaching of the first gospel was that we should love one another.

I grew up in a traditional Christian family.  I suppose we were a God fearing family rather than a god loving family.   We believed that God pulled the strings on this earth and there was a string attached to everyone of us .

We believed that God saw into our hearts and would punish us for our wrongdoings.  We believed that God was working his purpose out in the world and there was a reason behind everything.  

Probably more than anything else we feared going to hell.

How times have changed.   At least in those days,society seemed orderly.  We had no fear of the future.   It was easy to find a job and keep it, or change it and there was always the promise of a pension at the end of your working life.

Our leaders had strong personalities.   I admired their oratory.  There was a mystique about Parliament, and police and all the institutions.   There was a mystique about church.

Where did it all begin to change ?   Maybe it was in the sixties, maybe it was simply in me.

Today, I feel I am living in a world where everything has collapsed   The house of cards has fallen down and we are all standing around looking at it and wondering if it can ever be rebuilt.    

And I am a person of faith.   We are all people of faith.   What are we to do as we look at the house that has fallen down ?

Do we have a role to play in this fallen world?

The Unitarians in the United States, the Unitarian Universalists, recently held their annual general assembly, a gathering of the movers and shakers.   I looked at some of their events via Youtube.

They were reflecting the oneness of humanity and the music was inspiring, a heady mixture of spirituals and hymns to emphasise that music cuts across all cultures.

The preacher of the anniversary sermon gave a powerful address which began with him recollecting a meeting with Martin Luther King.   King had said never to give up the fight.

Fifty years on and the fight still needs to continue - especially in the wake of the Brexit result, where racial tensions and violence have increased.

The second thing that Martin Luther KIng had said was that the fight had to be maintained by the churches.   They were the source of goodness in the world.

Churches working together can have a voice that is heard.  When I first arrived in Bolton as a new minister I was quite inexperienced.

Luckily I found a good friend in the Vicar of Bolton and in Rev  Jim Hollyman who was at the URC church.   We were all town centre ministers.     We used to meet together on a weekly basis.    We were a mutual support group, I found it very helpful at times.

It was Jim who took an initiative  and said if we ministers can get along let us bring all our congregations into this.  We did.   It was a process where we defined who we were and how each of the six churches involved were different, what we had in common, what boundaries there were between us.  It was love one another in action.

We all wanted to keep our identities.   We did not want to become some homogenous group, so we recognised the boundaries between the different faiths and we agreed to accept them and not use up energy trying to break them down.

With that we became Christians together in Bolton Town Centre.    We spoke with one voice to Bolton Council and other agencies.    It was not to be moral guardians but to promote the voice of goodness and fairness - the basic teachings of the Gospels.

We shared pulpits and we set up the town centre chaplaincies.     As a Unitarian I was hardly in the middle of the Christian spectrum but I did believe in the one doctrine of Christianity that comes from the very source - that is to love one another for we are all children of God.

We still preach that.   One of the problems we have at the moment is that we only seem to preach it to each other.

Unitarians like to boast how they helped to change the world in the nineteenth century.   We like to say it was only us but that is not true.   All the church denominations were social crusaders.   They achieved so much.

But that was then.    I can only speak for the Unitarians but when the battle for social justice seemed won and the state took over so much that the churches had voluntarily run, schools, libraries, clinics etc, we were left only with our faith.

And people seem to be managing very well without faith in what had become a consumer driven world.   The old teachings of Christianity were being demolished. John Robinson with his ‘Honest to God’ and then then David Jenkins, the Bishop of Durham questioning the tenets of the creed.

One of my Unitarian friends describes the Anglican church worship as being led by priests in mediaeval costumes practicing a mystery religion that follows a long gone agricultural calendar.

Churches are mostly regarded as irrelevant in the modern consumer driven world.   We Unitarians with our Freedom, reason and tolerance seem more irrelevant than all the others.       People vote for freedom of worship by not worshipping at all.   We apply the test of reason to our reading of scriptures.    The modern person doesn’t read them at all.  And does tolerance mean we must tolerate the intolerable.     The medical profession speaks of tolerance as a way to measure pain and discomfort.

What we need to offer is inspiration.  Inspiration to find goodness in yourself and create goodness in the world

Our wonderful consumer driven world is not interested in faith yet it lives in a vacuum.   Consumerism does not give long term satisfaction.   It is transient.  It does not give faith.

So the vacuum is being filled with dissatisfaction with life, unhappiness, a sense of hopelessness, a perpetual yearning for more of the consumer fix.

But also it is being filled with a yearning for the spiritual.    Meditation, eastern religions and Yoga, a revival of paganism as earth centred spirituality.

There is a need to find love of self as a whole person.

One of the speakers at the Unitarian Universalist annual meeting was a well known broadcaster called Krista Trippett.

She talked about a new reformation for religion, a new reformation for the churches.

We as individuals, she said, thanks to the growth of technology are much more aware of ourselves as individuals.    We are not just one of the herd that doesn’t really count.  

We are also aware that we are part of a global community of humankind.    Our spiritual side is aware of the suffering going on in the world and feels a sympathy for it and a link to it.

But our trust in governments doing anything about it has gone.   We see what we see now.

So what do we do as people of faith?   What do we do as communities of faith.    Reformation, she says, The reformation begins with building bridges.

Building bridges between individuals - actually getting to know one another.   Knowing what it is that is so hurting in someone that it comes out as anger.    It is about holding conversations with one another - and actually listening to the answers.

She said we rarely listen to one another.   We greet one question with another question because we want to dominate the conversation.    Listening is an art form.

And build bridges across communities.    As we are doing today.   But keep expanding the bridges, create true friendships, build new bridges, create a web of friendships - between groups and cultures, listen and understand one another.

And where can all this building and listening begin?   In the churches.   That is where the Reformation must start - because it won’t start anywhere else.

Love one another, let love be the doctrine of our faith.   Love that is Caritas, caring, that is charity, giving, love that is agape, sharing.

.

A  vision to inspire ourselves,

inspire our communities, and release that goodness in humanity which leads to an understanding of God.

A reformation of faith, else we perish.

The Trinity of the self

Now here's a question.   What is reality?    Of course, reality is what we see and feel and touch, taste and hear.  Reality is the physical world we live in.

We live our lives day to day doing mostly physical things.   By definition we are animals, bilaterally symmetrical, segmented, triploblastic, coelomates.   I learnt that years ago at school.

But we consider ourselves to be more than animals because we are more than just a physical being on a treadmill requiring us to find food, shelter, procreate and protect our territory.

As well as being this physical person firmly anchored in reality we also have two others, the emotional person and the spiritual person.   All three are ourselves but they are individuals that are part of us  yet they are also linked together.   Upset one of them and the other two will suffer in one way or another.    We are three people in one.

If we are emotionally upset, our physical health is affected.   Many illnesses are the direct result of the person being damaged emotionally.

Sometimes it is difficult to understand why a person is emotionally upset.  It can be caused by either of the other two bodies, or both.

It makes us complicated creatures, but with these three persons we have been able to overcome the disadvantages caused by having nothing of natural animal protection, no protective scales or fur, no great physical strength nor strong teeth or talons.

Human beings overcame these deficiencies. By being able to set traps, control and domesticate animals and build shelters as well as devise weapons to defend them.

The emotional person within us is reactive, responding to notions of our own and responding to other people - and animals, and nature.  We can be very unsure of ourselves, easily stung, easily rebuked, easily made to feel unworthy.   We can do to ourselves what people outside might also do to us.   We can beat ourselves up emotionally without anyone else's help.

If we can control our emotions, physical existence can be fine.   Our emotional person is positively aroused by beauty.     Beauty can affect us deeply, whether it be by nature, or poetry, painting, music, words, situations.  Emotion is also triggered by situations, the sight of suffering, sharing the experience of joy.

It is quite a thing, this emotional person that we are trying to hide within our physical persona, it is volatile, active.

Yet we can often read one another’s emotional personas.    How easy sometimes to know when a person is unhappy or distressed or troubled.   You don’t have to ask.      

We can communicate or signal an emotional state and we can receive the signals from others.   You would think we would all be able to help one another, share in joys and sorrows.

But it is not always the case.

And it is connected too to the spiritual person.    But what is that for?    Some will say that it contains the personality or character, that actually it is the life force itself, but somehow it seems more than that, if that at all.

We make our connection to our God, our religion, our understanding of divinity through the spiritual person that we are.  And it can be alive or it can be dormant.   There do seem to be people who have no interest at all in anything spiritual.     

Yet they can have a ‘religious experience’ where they sense that something in them has been woken up.   It might trigger an emotional experience but it is not itself an emotional experience.

When our spiritual person is alive and active, we do have that sense of awe and wonder, do feel that religious connection to something greater than ourselves.    

And when it is active, how often do we read of people having a totally different viewpoint about life?    Almost as if they see the physical world differently, they treat other people differently.  Reality is different. They can be emotionally more stable.

The spiritual person within is on a higher level, perhaps a higher level of consciousness.  Is able to stand above some of the the mundane worries of the emotional and physical world.

It is said they are connected directly to something greater that is not altogether of this world - as if connected to other worlds entirely - that are all spiritual.

Through the study of religions and through experience the spiritual person develops.

We know too that Religion has its pitfalls because it is so easily manipulated.    Religion can be spirituality misunderstood, or it can be simply used to hold power over other people.

Religion has the awful history of having mistreated many people, even cruelly in its name, but I can't help thinking such awful things were done not by those who had the spiritual person within themselves open and active.  Rather cruelty is a sign of being  spiritually blind, or of that spiritual person being asleep

To be a killer or a terrorist claiming to follow a religion suggests they are deluded and out of touch with their spiritual persona.

St Paul wrote of two spiritual experiences.   The first on the road to Damascus when he was stopped and challenged in the light.   And secondly which he records as a visit to the fourth heaven.     A spiritual place or experience which could not be described in words.   St Paul talked of being possessed of grace.   We could say that is spiritual enlightenment.    Grace is the spiritual person waking up and connecting to that higher something, receiving an inflow of something positive that is often described as a feeling of intense love.

Many people try to describe this experience of spiritual connection but find it difficult to express in words.    The writers of the mystical tradition wrote in metaphors - the interior castle, the dark night of the soul.   It always seems to have been a unique experience.

The spiritual person makes reality feel different.   Reality becomes the physical world plus something else.

There was a branch of early Christianity known as Gnosticism.     Many of the Gnostics believed that Jesus was more a spiritual person than a physical teacher.   

They said that he exemplified what it was to be a pure spiritual being - the outpouring of love which was able to heal the sick and cast out demons, the teaching about love towards fellow beings, no matter who they were or where they came from.

As if he was the mystical role model on how to live life as a strong spiritual person.   Many of the stories of the apostles are about them falling short of that perfection.    Peter and his denial, Thomas and his doubting.    It was a high ideal for his followers to aspire to.

It made me think that the purpose of belonging to a church, or any religion, is to build up that spiritual person which is within ourselves.      

In our worship we can be more aware of ourselves as spiritual people before anything else.  Our prayers and our hymns connects us more closely to those ideals of what we want to be.      It is about the spiritual person becoming stronger and therefore more connected with that otherness, that spiritual dimension which we feel is God.

Worship has a purpose for the spiritual person that is us.     It seems very simple but while as a spiritual person we are seeking the higher levels of consciousness and a connection to the divine, opening ourselves to grace which is love,   the emotional and physical can be going their own way, as if all the problems of the world still exist in spite of going to church and attending worship.

However, as the spiritual person becomes dominant within us, the more settled the emotional body can become, less extreme, less excitable, and that in turn makes for a calmer physical body.

Many things in life occur in threes.   St Paul wrote about faith, hope and charity, (charity meaning love for others) and said he greatest of these as love.

Si it can be with our three personas, physical, emotional and spiritual.      The greatest of these is spiritual.      The spiritual person within us knows how to love the world and all that it is, is connected to a higher level of understanding and receives an inflow of love called grace.

What becomes reality becomes something greater and wider than all else. When the spiritual is dominant, you become a singular person!