Playing with Jesus

From time to time I've decided to share some of my spiritual experiences - the things that make me who I am.  Today, I decided to share how my relationship with Jesus Christ as my teacher has circled around almost 360 degrees throughout my life.

When I was a small toddler (somewhere plus or minus 2 years old) my dad served a charge (3 small churches in a traditional movement) in North Dakota, for one year, before returning to Ohio.  It was there that my parents, after discovering that I was missing, found me in the sandbox outside.  But I was not alone.  It seems that I had somehow gotten into the den, up on my father's desk and hauled his prized picture of Jesus out to the sandbox, set it up in one corner and was playing away.  Shocked that I had grabbed this prized possession, my mother asked me accusingly, "What are you doing, Bobby?"  The story goes that I replied immediately, "I'm playing with Jesus!"  And it seemed so sincere that I didn't get yelled at, though the picture went back immediately to my father's desk. 

As a minister's son, I had heard enough about Jesus and the Bible to keep me happy for the rest of my life by age 12.  I immersed myself in science & math and kept Bible study or talk of Jesus at an arm's length.  Then we found Unity and my spiritual side got a chance to soar without the traditional approach that I now openly bristled at.  I embraced the Christ Spirit within us all, and though I knew my Bible well, shied away from too much concentration on Jesus.  It reminded me of the hypocrisy that traditional Christianity represented to me.  I went off to Renselaer Polytechnic Institute preparing for Chemical Engineering.  But half way through I ran into a "Crisis of Purpose".  Examining what I now realized I needed from life, I was horrified to realize that it was the ministry, but placated myself by saying "Only in Unity!"

In Unity ministerial school, I abhorred the "Bible Punchers" and stuck to learning to teach Spiritual Principles.  In a sense I was still the engineering student.  I used Bible and references to Jesus minimally (though I was well versed from childhood).  I spoke of the Universal Christ Spirit instead.  However, as associate in Miami, my senior minister, Charles Neal, insisted that I would start each lesson with scripture, so I researched appropriate scriptures for each subject that I undertook.  Being a creature who often depends upon comfortable patterns, I ended up starting each lesson with scripture for more than 38 years now.

But my next breakthrough came after I followed my 1st wife into the Sufi Movement.  One day as we were declaring ourselves disciples of Hazrat Inayat Khan and doing all sorts of practices to "connect" with the teacher, I realized that I was resisting because I had not put this effort into Jesus Christ & I believed Jesus to be a superior spiritual example.  In an instant I knew that I truly was a disciple of Jesus Christ and I needed to use every technique I had learned in Sufism to connect to "my Teacher"!  Thus, began my deep inner commitment to being a disciple of Jesus Christ, not just a student of the Christ Spirit.  I guess I was back to "playing with Jesus".

Though I was quite talented at Metaphysical Bible Interpretation, the Bible still reeked of traditional Christian slant that was taught almost universally and I wasn't a fan.  The Bible became a necessary evil to prove validity.  I had a personal relationship with "my teacher", "Jesus Christ",  & I suspected that "Church-ianty" had messed up the Bible like it had messed up Jesus teachings.  For years I simply tried to wade through the garbage to get to the "good stuff".  Jesus has always been a partner in my ministry.  What more did I need?

About the time I was coming to Orlando,  Bible came together and totally "jelled" for me.  I saw that from the "Mystical Point of View" (remember mysticism is immersing yourself in the "experience" of God), everything in the Bible (especially the Gospels) teaches how to function in the higher invisible "Kingdom of the Heavens".  My perspective is very different from the fundamentalist interpretation, but from this perspective, the Bible conveys amazing depths of understanding about how to navigate these Higher Realms - all of it - no cherry picking necessary.  You just need to maintain this mystical perspective to see the higher message in every part of the recorded story of Jesus teachings.  All of a sudden, the young man who disliked the Bible punchers has become one, as he matured in his spiritual path.  I don't need the Bible to teach what Jesus taught.  But I've learned to love the language and can use it to illustrate every aspect of higher spiritual awakening that we can pursue.

These days my goal is to follow Jesus into the Christ Spirit, to surrender identity until I merge with the whole and express individually in whatever manner is appropriate.  I see that the "Light of Life" as Jesus called it is that Christ Spirit that unites us all and is our true source.  And I struggle to meet Jesus in this Christ Spirit as he suggested we would in the Gospel of John.  Humility becomes the doorway to majesty and the idea of separation is the true enemy, not any other person or groups of people.

Jesus has always been with me, even when I was not so eager to acknowledge him.  But now as I declare that the mind that is is Jesus Christ is in me now or the Life that is in Jesus Christ is in me now, I am beginning to understand what it means to be Jesus, yet know that you are the Christ Spirit.  And I am beginning to understand that Bob must eventually lose this fear of loss of identity and enter the Christ Spirit out of which both Jesus and Bob have expressed.  Only then will I have proved myself a true disciple.  I may not in this life have the strength to make that final jump.  But just holding the aspiration has proven to be the most powerful thing in my life.  It would appear that I've been playing with Jesus all of my life, even when I didn't realize it!