“Lord Christ of the Resurrection, dwell deeply in the center of my soul.”
This is a prayer mantra I use every day as part of my quiet time. After reading from scripture — itself a rewarding endeavor — I sit back in my chair, with my back straight and hands at my side. I then recite in my mind’s voice that mantra which I found in a book on Celtic spirituality. It has come to mean much to me over the years. I highly recommend making some quiet space in your life before you get going.
I want to use this mantra to begin some work on why it means so much to me and many others to be a devout follower of Jesus the Christ and what it means to allow the relationship that God initiated with Jesus to enter into the center of who we are as persons. We will be working on this for a while.
It is, I believe, God’s desire to know us, to enter a relationship with us no matter who we are, or where we are in our lives, what we may have done or not done. It is the whole reason for God’s presence in our world in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus was perfectly human and perfectly God. I know this is hard for many to get. But somehow we got here and for some purpose. Anyway, Jesus, God and human being, came and ate with people the culture of the time had condemned. People with leprosy were looked at as people being punished by God for some big transgression against God. They were shunned. They had to walk down the streets crying at the top of their voice “leper, leper, leper. Stay away.” That was the rule of the time. Jesus, God and human being at the same time, hugged them in the sight of everyone. We will be coming back to the real nature of what sin is because sin is not what we have come to think it is. The word used for sin in the Bible has more to do with being something you are not rather than moral wrong doing. To “miss the mark” is the literal translation and it means to aim at something but miss it; to aim at something and end up somewhere else.
It works like this.
We have mentioned before how in every person there is a deep longing to “connect” with God. It does not matter whether you say you believe in God or not. The deep longing is there; it’s just that you “connect” with Gods of your own making that are easier to see and reason with. It is as if when God put the puzzle together which is you, God kept the last piece so that we will look for it. Many find the missing piece in worshipping and following God, or the Son of God. Many choose to find “connect” with gods of this world of which there are many. You know that. I don’t have to tell you this.
One of the greatest God of our own making is the God of Self. Me, mine, I. Ego. Ego however really mean to Ease God Out. This may sound cruel or idiotic, but you cannot worship two Gods. It is so easy to take our eyes off of the God we cannot see and turn towards the gods we can see.
This is the root cause of what is called idolatry. Which is the real Sin from which all other sins originate.
More coming.
