Thursday, April 15, 2010
Dear God,
I am ashamed to say I have hesitated to write. In fact, I have delayed writing for several days.
My dearest son, Richard,
Those reading this will be fascinated to know why you have been reluctant to write. They believe if they had such gift (the ability to talk to God) that they would never hesitate. They are thinking there must be some sinful reason for your hesitancy.
I do not believe in sin and the reason is not sinful.
Yet you claim you feel ashamed. If you do not believe in sin, how can you feel shame?
An excellent question. Care to answer it?
No, but I do care for you to answer it.
Sin is a contrivance of organized religion. It is meant to cause one to feel guilty. More than this, it is meant to force one to conform—often to society’s mores and in some cases to the laws of the local government.
Interesting explanation. It seems to me that you are feeling guilty regardless of whether it is caused by “the contrivance of organized religion.”
I feel guilty exactly because of what is implied in your first statement. Being able to receive messages from you is a gift. And I feel as if I am abusing it by taking it so for granted that I can ignore it.
You certainly can choose to ignore it. You have done so quite well for the last several days.
I felt no urgency to write.
Your hesitancy began on a day you wanted to work on the revision of your book.
May I pause this conversation?
No. You may not pause it, but you may interrupt it.
Ok. Ok. So I see you are using semantics against me. Fine. I would like to interrupt our conversation and hold a conversation about the use of “your book.”
We have held this discussion before and we are in agreement. We—that means you—agreed not to get hung up on it.
Yes, we did agree but I cannot remember if we recorded it. I still bothers me when you use “your” to describe our book.
Let me clarify it one more time then. I will gladly do so for our readers benefit but then I do expect you to let go of it.
I thought God had no expectations of us?
And you accuse me of semantics? (Wry wit.)
I do not have expectations—not of you, not of our readers—not of anyone. But I do have preferences.
So let me rephrase: I would prefer if you were to let go of this issue regarding if the book is the property of you or of you and I.
You have received my dialogue and recorded it. You have participated in these conversations and recorded your part of the dialogue. There is literally not a single word that has not been written by you.
Furthermore, I have gotten you to understand—and therefore agree—that the word your contains the word our and I thought we would not have to discuss this further.
I wish to clarify one more very important thing. I am not a judgmental . . . punitive . . .vengeful . . . or vindictive God. I never was. I never will be.
I do not possess an ego although I will admit to occasionally finding it entertaining to act as if I do. I cannot be offended and do not desire to be worshipped.
I seek only that which every soul seeks: to be loved as I am, for who I am and not some preconceived idea of who I am or more accurately, a misconception of who I am.
With that said, I am not offended by giving you the byline for y-our book.
We were discussing your hesitancy to write. Which you have obviously overcame as these long paragraphs give witness to.
The last time I wrote to you, we got distracted and the writing ended up being a discussion about sacred lovemaking.
You may call it a distraction but I thought it was a perfect conversation held in perfect timing. It was relevant to what was and is happening in your life. It also brought a new understanding about a very old subject.
We, that is: you and I, continue to bring new understanding about sexuality and spirituality. And it is these subjects that I wish to discuss with you prior to you once again visiting the vision you have about your book.
This conversation is not a distraction from your revision work but a clarification of your present vision of the book
For the benefit of our readers and to help you to focus on our discussion, please list what you think the vision of your book is.
“How I came to love myself” and I hope our readers will “learn how to love themselves.”
This is a very simplistic staring of a very complex issue for all of mankind. All of mankind struggles to simply love themselves.
To love thyself is the highest honoring of God. The easiest way to fulfill the first commandment—to put no other gods before me—is to love oneself. In loving yourself, you love and honor me.
Now, my dear son, Richard, you more romantically stated this vision when you recently changed the name of y-our book.
Once again, please, share that statement.
“A memoir of how I found peace and harmony for my life and along the way found out how to love myself.”
(After cutting and pasting this statement, I thought about revising it, sure that I could improve it.)
There you go again. Already you want to tinker with the phrase. That’s fine as that is what writers do. My son, regardless if you think so, you are a very good writer. You, my son, touch hearts, and that is no small thing.
I realize I touch hearts.
You do not just touch hearts, but profoundly touch hearts. Even in your so called casual acquaintances, you touch hearts. Even in such circumstances, they feel blessed to have known you, to know you.
You recently have been exploring sexuality and spirituality. Or I should say you have been more deeply exploring it. Our last conversation is an example of that.
It was very brave and candid of you to speak of your desire to make sacred love to another man’s wife.
Am I not breaking another commandment? “Thou shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.”
Do you truly covet these wives?
I think I do. Before answering, I even looked up the definition.
Let’s examine that for a moment. The phrase you are currently looking at says “without due regard.” It seems to me that you gave not just “due regard” but very careful regard.
In our last writing, you spoke of the desire but also the conviction not to act.
I will not make your desire a sin, nor should you.
But clearly my desire—by definition—is wrong.
And I tell you, it is about your intent. Do you wish to possess the women in question?
I don’t think so. Not in the way I think you mean.
Okay. I see I need to be more precise.
Do you wish to have intercourse with the women in question?
Do you wish to spill your seed within them?
Do you wish to take them as your wife?
I wish to do none of those things nor would I as long as they were married.
Your desire is to make sacred love to them. You gave a very detailed description of that process during our last writing. You even spoke of physical arousal and how you would handle that situation.
Yes I did.
And it was a beautiful description of how sexuality and spirituality mix.
Nonetheless, I will bet any husband reading it will think I desire to violate their wives.
But the wives and women reading it strongly understood your intentions. And more than a few desired to be made love to in such a manner. An equal number wondered what it might be like for you to continue the process to include sacred sex. Such wonderings are no more sinful than your desire.
Please tell me of your desires.
My desires always involve love. This is particularly true of the desires I shared in our last writing.
Yes, I do want to touch these women’s naked bodies but only in the most sacred of ways.
You wish them to feel loved in ways that only sacred touch can express. We are both aware that such lovemaking can be very healing. In fact, you cannot touch in such a manner and not heal. You cannot be touched in such a manner and not be healed. You are very aware of this my son, as you have recently been healed by touch.
It is through your heart that you desire to touch in such a manner. I repeat, through your heart—not your penis.
I bet most men reading this believe I am just using words to justify my lust.
Such thinking comes through the penis and the testosterone of the testicles. You are not so encumbered.
Which makes it easy for me to look beyond hormones.
Man, men, are quite capable of looking beyond their own testicles—but seldom do so. They see lust where none exists. They are insecure for they know they could be better lovers. They know beyond question that women desire to be made love to in the sacred manner which you have described. They believe you are using words to entangle their wives desires.
Aren’t I?
You know better. It is not words that you are using, but love. A pure unconditional love that surpasses physical desire. A love that common lust would besmirch. Such love can be physically expressed without moving into sex acts.
Sexuality and spirituality can and do mix.
You said that’s what you wanted to talk about.
It is. Or more accurately, I want to talk about the sexuality and spirituality that is contained within your book. At the present it is more than thirty percent of the content and you have been worried about that.
I have been. It seems disproportionate to the rest of the content.
Once again I will remind you that you worry too much. But as it seems to be a common human condition, we will look beyond it.
I am not sure that the discussion of sexuality and spirituality serves the vision of the book.
Let me clarify your vision. You articulated it much better in the romantic phraseology than in the simple statement: “learning to love yourself.” You did not simply choose to love yourself and then proceed down a path to pursue that. As in life, such a journey of self-love is seldom so straight forward.
Instead you sought to find inner peace and harmony. Most of your spiritual journey has been in search of these. You went through many transformations along the way including an exploration of many different organized religions. These all served your spiritual growth.
You came to a new understanding about yourself, about life, and about God. I was always there.
You have always held a deep faith in me. Such faith continually brought you to action—often in servitude to others. This is not so different from today. While others may observe that you serve only yourself—including your desire to make sacred love to another man’s wife, you and I know you do so in service to others.
Yes, my son, I am saying that making sacred love to another’s partner is an act of love, of service, I would even say an act of service to God. For through your touch they may be healed and thus come closer to me. Through your touch, your loving touch, they can literally be touched by the hand of God. You, my dear and brave son, often move beyond other’s understanding of what an act of God is or is not, and simply act. You do what you know in your heart to be true. And I tell you, your actions glorify me. You do so in service to me, and in service to others.
This is an old habit of yours and I would also say is the reason you came to earth. But I digress. Beyond your faith, we were discussing your path of personal growth, particularly your spiritual growth. Along your path in varying degrees you have found peace and harmony.
Bio-feedback meditation brought you peace during your cancer experience. It also helped you begin to understand self empowerment. You came to understand your own whole role in healing yourself. That is, you started to work in harmony with other healers to heal your body.
Through your exploration of various organized religions, you started to understand the power of ritual—very specifically the ritual of communion. You came to feel my presence during the liturgy of communion. This too brought you peace, but it was being in harmony with me that brought you the deep sense of peace that you so craved.
Throughout your exploration you continually sought that which would strengthen your connection to me. You sought to be in ever-deeper harmony with me and this gave you an ever-deepening sense of peace. Your faith—which was already deep—was also strengthened and deepened.
A natural outcome of this faith was action, that is, service to me as well as too others. While in organized religion you often served the greater community of the church and this too brought you a sense of harmony and closer to me.
Along the way many different spiritual authors brought you new understanding about life, yourself and about me. But you also learned about love.
You learned you had many misconceptions about love—about what it is and what it is not, and how love acts and how it doesn’t act. You learned servitude is not a sacrifice but a gift of love freely given. Along the path of exploration about love a couple of things happened.
First, your concepts about who I am and what I’m about changed. You discovered that I am love itself. And if that was true, then many of the things you were taught about me did not make sense.
The more you learned about me, the more intensely you loved me. In fact, you fell in love with me. No, no, let me restate that. You fell OUT of fear in me and feel in LOVE with me.
As you fell in love with me you slowly started to fall in love with yourself. And I do mean slowly. So slowly that the increments of progress could only be measured in the heavens.
So now we come to the present. You are in the process of revising your book. Within those pages is the journey of finding peace and harmony. Also within those pages, within your life’s memoir is the hidden story of how you came to love yourself. Your path of self discovery, of personal growth and learning to love yourself is not so different from many others.
Your memoir chronicles your exploration of various aspects of yourself and how you have found peace and harmony within and for your life. Your exploration has resulted in loving yourself. Granted, it has come in small increments but it has come. And I, for one, am proud of you for the journey and your personal growth.
As we have discussed spirituality, we now come to sexuality.
I wondered when you were going to explain that.
My dear son, you cannot rush this explanation anymore than you could your exploration. Your understanding about spirituality did not happen overnight. Your spiritual transformation was brought about by a thousand little experiences that resulted in both a deeper understanding about me and a closer relationship with me.
So too has been the exploration of your sexuality. Just as you are not the man you once were, you simply are not the lover you once were.
Agreed.
You have explored sexuality as few men have.
I think I was forced to.
I acknowledge that the damage done to your body during your cancer experience forced you to explore the sensuality side of sexuality more than the physical. You slowly learned that sexuality is about the connection rather than the release of seed.
My son, you are worried if your book’s discussion on sexuality and spirituality is disproportionate but I tell you it is not.
Sexuality is easily thirty percent of being human. I grant that many suppress sexuality within their lives and would argue that the aforementioned percentage is too large. That is a shame as the expression of sexuality is an excellent way to experience a closer relationship with me. That is, sex can be a beautiful way to experience me.
Many are not going to be comfortable with that idea. Or with the idea sexuality and spirituality are connected.
I absolutely agree with you—they are not going to feel comfortable with the ideas expressed here. That discomfort and moving beyond it is the point of this conversation.
It is not just important but essential that you include the information about sexuality and spirituality that is contained within your book. It is a grand exploration of these two subjects and it will expand minds and, I dare say, hearts.
My son, I know your heart and you mind and your desires. I know your greatest desire is to love the world and to effect change and if along the way you can provide healing, then you would like it all the better. I tell you clearly that the sharing of your exploration of sexuality and spirituality will do just that.
You have held this long conversation with me to convince me to not edit and or delete the sexuality and spirituality portion of my book.
You were/are full of doubts regarding its relevance and its importance. I ask, I politely and lovingly ask that you not edit it heavy-handedly.
Many of my closest friends and even members of my family are not going to understand why that portion of the book was written in the first place. Many of the same people did not like the last writing I shared, and I doubt they will enjoy this one either.
There are those who are serving to help you edit who will question it as well. If you chose a traditional print house to print this book, then the publisher would question it as well. But I caution you please, please, please consider these words carefully: the message within these writings as well as the section on sexuality and spirituality within your book are important. I cannot emphasize this enough.
I tell you, it is important. It is no small thing. The impact of your words is great. People will be healed by them. Their hearts and minds will be expanded, and I repeat, they will be healed. You, through your words, can release many, many, many from the bondage of guilt over their sexuality and the expression of it. My dear son, I also wish you to know—through your actions, through your sharing, you will also bring them closer to me.
There are also an equal number of people who will judge my words as being simply wrong.
Regrettably, that is true. They will not be able to see beyond their small-mindedness to see the greater truth. Yet it is important that they be exposed to your words as well.
Many people know of the connection of sexuality and spirituality but simply wish I was more discrete about it.
There is a time and place for discretion, but discretion should not be confused with censorship.
I realize, my son, that this portion of your book could be controversial. Within that controversy—even within objections to the shared material—are planted the seeds of understanding.
Whether to edit or not to edit, to share or not share all boils down to one thought that once again I am faced with: Who do I chose to be?
Indeed. And you didn’t come to this planet to play small.
I will do my best to edit judiciously.
Your courage is admirable.
We shall see. I have not yet published the book.
Anything else you wish to discuss?
Please do not downplay your personal courage. There are not many who would so openly share their lives.
Many, many people have written their memoirs.
Few are as revealing as yours is. You are so candid that many reading it wince. Others are left slack-jawed in awe.
I’m not sure about them being in awe, maybe in astonishment or outrage. I am sure there will be outrage.
You make that statement yet presume to downplay my admiration of your personal courage.
I do. I seldom feel courageous but am simply going about doing that which I have to do.
Is there anything else would like to discuss?
Let me make a brief statement about you hesitancy to write that you spoke about at the beginning of this writing. Once again this writing has not gone as you would have envisioned; nor did the last one.
A hesitancy to hold such conversations is a normal reaction within the human experience. There was no urgency to hold this conversation and so postponing it was also perfect. Thus this writing has arrived in perfect timing.
Do not allow others misconceptions about what it must be like to talk with me confuse you or misguide you.
I have often declared you to be my messenger. This is no small thing and in the human experience is more burden than blessing. Yet each time I call upon you, you step up and the ink flows upon the page.
In this case, in this writing and within your book I am asking you to convey a message about sexuality and spirituality. Doing so is far beyond your comfort zones and makes a difficult task even more difficult. By doing so you increasingly set yourself up for ridicule and judgment, yet you do not shirk from that which is set before you. I tell you, my most beloved son, you are not just a messenger, not just MY messenger, but a GREAT messenger. You are because I say you are.
In all humbleness, that remains to be seen. I will acknowledge I am one of your messengers. Whether I am a great messenger will be determined at a later date.
My beloved son, I will repeat: you are a great messenger because I say you are. I do appreciate your words offered in humbleness.
They were offered in the reality of my life.
And yet it remains you are one my most blessed of messengers.
Blessed be you.
(With my head bowed in humbleness and acceptance.)
Thank you.
Amen.
