Jesus Christ, Revisiting the Mystery
Several responded to my early posts about Jesus Christ and asked that I share more. As I consider this request I notice I am not totally at ease. But I am certainly much more at ease than I would have been even six months ago.
Why the dis-ease with the topic of Jesus Christ? Mostly I suppose because all of my years of church life did not encourage, or sometimes even allow, independent thinking on the subject and person of Jesus Christ. Knowledge about Jesus Christ was imparted from the outside via the Bible and other sacred texts. Yet one could claim a personal relationship with Christ, and that seemed to draw positive response. Or suspicion. But if someone like myself, who was not as comfortable with taking in dogma just because an official church body said it was so, spoke out asking what exactly did a personal relationship with Jesus Christ mean and how exactly did one arrive at that relationship, people would get quiet, or perhaps give a proper church answer. This self-made prison has been a hard box for me to get out of!
I know people who have had experiences with Jesus Christ. Pat is one of them. Also some Pathwork leaders I know have had such personal experiences with Jesus Christ. The experiences were meaningful, even powerful. Often they were spontaneous and uninvited. I accept their experiences and realities. But many others are like me and have not had such experiences of connection with Jesus Christ.
Relationship with Jesus Christ comes in various forms. There are those who relate by holding on to dogma about Jesus Christ — Jesus Christ being the Son of God, or the Second Person of the Trinity — or the role of Jesus Christ — He died for my sins so that I can go to Heaven. But these have a different feel for me than a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Then there are those who do not relate to relationship with Jesus Christ but speak freely of “Christ Consciousness.” Here again, for me the personal relationship seems missing in this expression. And Pathwork Lecture 258 does speak clearly of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. So I hold openness for said relationship.
I have not experienced a relationship with Jesus Christ as vivid and memorable as ones that others have described and I am not drawn to dogma about Jesus Christ. So that is my truth. But there have been changes, progress if you please. I find I am more open to such an experience of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ; I am not so defended and rebellious against rigid dogma of my past that I throw the baby out with the bath water. And I feel at peace in making this confession of what is true for me regarding Jesus Christ. In a way it is kind of a clean slate, clean of a lot of images of what I have thought such a relationship might be like or require of me.
I am aware that I experience a great deal of peace in this place of mystery. I was going to say place of confusion, but I do not feel confused, just in the unknown, in the Mystery. This feeling of peace in the Mystery is relatively new to me. Earlier I would have felt the wrath of the Church or some authority coming down on me, trying to save me or convert me to some particular truth I should believe, all projections of my inner law abider. Now I merely sit in the Mystery of not knowing. Comfortable that I am not being required to know what seems to me cannot be known, or at least not known in a conventional intellectual kind of way.
I have a hunch that a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is not so much a mental or Will experience but more of a felt heart connection, and I am rather new to heart-felt connections. Hence it makes sense that I am challenged to have a heart-felt connection with Jesus Christ, or God, when I’m struggling so to have a heart-felt connection with Pat, family members, or close friends. Before I can experience a heart connection with Jesus Christ, I have to be able to experience a heart connection at all! So first I must allow my capacity for love and for a heart connection to grow and mature in me.
I do feel an openness to such heart connections. While I am not aware of having experienced same, I am open to the possibility that I have this capacity. So this means letting that potential grow, letting the seed of love and connection grow into the tree of love and connection.
Perhaps this is enough revisiting just now. I am just happy that I am not feeling my inner hammer coming down on my lack of experience with a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Perhaps by clearing out most of the images I have of what such a relationship might be like I make possible an authentic experience of relationship with Jesus Christ to emerge, in its own time, in its own way. I find in this moment that I am at peace in my truth and open to the Mystery of Jesus Christ, whatever that might be.