To take the stance on contraception, it seems that we can blame the Church for the over-population we perceive, resulting in poverty and misery for want of a simple answer:  contraception. But this assumes a logical process of thought whereby everything has a direct answer. In political and poverty terms it is argued that contraception is the answer. Seems simplistic does that.

The Church has a wider role than merely reacting to issues on a simplistic basis. The issue of “allowing” a ruling according to the needs of the political aspects on earth is not about the Church responding to the world view of the problem. It is about the wider issues of life in relation to the greater journey. If it were so simple as to get the Church to directly react to a world problem on the political stage, then its position as a wider body of contemplation in line with higher aspirations in the world spiritual sphere would change intrinsically. If the Church decreed that contraception was the answer to solving or containing world poverty, then that would imply that it was the proper answer for now and always complete in itself. If enlightenment and world peace are subject to simple decrees, then the Church merely becomes a tool for application of the perceived world answer to a perceived world problem.

Whether we agree or disagree with a stance is irrelevant; it is whether we can appreciate a wider view. The Church has a political role on earth as it is looked to to offer guidance in the way we live in relation to political governance. It could easily conform or change to whichever political views preside in any age. But its purpose is to provide a balance and to rise above narrow world political notions of what is right or wrong.

What if we perceive the argument to be more related to the way we treat each other, the level of respect we hold for each other in terms of equality of respect – do we really respect others as we respect ourselves? Then education and development is the answer, not a mechanical response to the symptom – which is what absolute promotion of contraception against poverty assumes.

Within any organisation, be it political or Church orientated, there will be corruption and narrow perceptions based on personal, national or international drivers. Where the Church has been found lacking in suppressing its own ills, as in the dreadful cases of abuse of children, it should be made known and exposed for what it is. This goes in inside as well as outside of the Church, as it might in any institution. And all corruption when it is exposed shows a successful development of being enlightened and facing the truth. If that happens within the Church then it shows that the Church is continuing to develop, that it is now enabled to expose the truth as it should – as within so without in the world. We can liken it to our own individual journeys whereby we come to terms with facets of ourselves instead of continuing to deny them, pretending that we are already totally good and in no need of development.

To view an entire institution and its ideals against all of the problems in the world, and how it affects them within the narrow confines of given decrees and without knowing anything else about its reason for being, is not appropriate. Within the Church, as within any family or organisation, there is conflict, disagreement, politics and strife; it is human and has failings. Its ideals will remain to be striven for and its conscience and understanding will continue to develop and evolve. The Church provides us with vehicles of attaining learning, discipleship and developing – ultimately to take responsibility for ourselves and to consider issues with pity, rather than follow an absolute rule book. Whatever we gain from a Church will be based on our own intent and seeking.

As an individual member of a Church, you might choose to agree or disagree with certain facets, according to your own point of view and your own development. You might choose for contraception at a personal level, which is allowed in your life according to your conscience and according to the freedoms you might enjoy in society, but it shouldn’t preclude you from being part of a Church whose ultimate stance on contraception appears to be directly against your choice. In a relatively developed society which embraces many facets outside of church thinking, we have many more choices than those where rules have to be adhered to for the sake of the rules. The development of societies is based on wider thinking and wider freedoms of choice, usually afforded us when the society is rich enough economically to support wider education and knowledge.

(© 2010 Eileen Baker)

I was in some desperation;  my son’s illness had come back again.

So, I asked him “What do I have to do?”  I was desperate for instructions.

And I startlingly got an answer.  From somewhere inside – but they weren’t mine – came these words:

“Eileen, it is not what you must do, it is what you must be”.

That was a bit of a shock. My name was spoken, it was a direct response to my question.  It made me wonder what on earth it meant.  But, I had asked and I had got an answer.

Quite startled that these words came up inside of me, I was left dumbfounded.  So away I went and pondered for a long time on this message.  What did it mean?  I mean, living is about doing isn’t it?  Isn’t it about what we do?  Blah, blah etc. etc.  but I began to realise that there is a very clear distinction between doing and being.  Easy to confuse are they and I hadn’t really discerned the difference between the two verbs before.

Eventually, during the same year some months later on I was back at the abbey and I went to the shrine and I said this:  “Ok, then, I have pondered the differences between doing and being, so what must I be?”  And this answer came back:

“Be still.  Listen.  Be a vessel.”

Dumbfounded, off I went again and just pondered upon this message for a long, long time and I remain pondering on both messages to this day.  But, gradually, it came through to me that by being still and listening I was actually becoming a vessel for presence.  This means that without interfering and “doing something” about something, I was just becoming aware and being there without thought, without judging the situation and without providing a solution.  Just being there and being aware.

Part of the changes in my life included taking positive steps towards keeping in contact with people that I had hitherto dismissed;  that is doing but it is directed from the source, the spirit, the real being of who you are and when this facet directs your actions, it is different and not judging, not trying to persuade someone to do something different, but just by being in contact, listening and speaking of things of common interest.  No, if and then, just being.

Similarly, with the whole situation around my son, I began to detatch from the situation insofar as not giving opinionated thoughts and judgements, I just was fully there in the present and lived each moment thus whilst being aware that I was following the discipline, the messages which came via that shrine.

So there I had it.  A fundamental shift in my ‘being’.

God speaks to us;  we just have to listen.

This occurrence was so baffling, so new to me that I have pondered it ever since.  But I know that it happened and I know also that I could not have come up with either response.

Miracles are not necessarily with divine lights and seeing images and witnessing a change from the normal order of things around us. They are subtle, gentle avenues to changes in our perception.  Mine began to change after I’d desperately sought an answer.  but I had thought it would be an answer of “do this, that and the other”.  And it wasn’t.  It was a call to reflect inwardly, to ponder, to be.

The miracle remains.  I am changing in a way that having read such a thing in a book might not have “spoken” to me.  But in the way that I have been encouraged to look further within at my own being, at my own witnessing and at my own presence being a conduit to the sublime, as opposed to blocking it by my “doings”.

To be; to recognise oneself as being without doing.  To come from the being and not from the doing, elicits ultimate enlightened doing instead of thought-directed doing;  as in cause, effect.  If I do this then that.   It is about learning to be still within instead of trying to control through action and doing.  So the quotation from Descartes “I think, therefore I am” is challenged and overcome.  ”I am” is about the being, and “I think” is about the doing.  Thinking is of itself the beginning of the problem, the process of thought as in philosophy leads us down to sorrow and depression.  Being takes us to the place of quietness, stillness, the place without doing or thinking.

It is a hard lesson and one which continues; I often fail, but I keep trying and I have those words within my heart  for ever now.

Thanks be to God.

(© 2010 Eileen Baker)

Perhaps the Power of the Not Quite There Yet (towards Eckhart Toll’s “The Power of Now” that is) will do – for now?

Sometimes we feel and know that we are behaving in a way that is not true. Then we feel guilty so perhaps our conscience is telling us this and that is at least a power in itself.  Not perfect and not in “the now”, but a start maybe.

We cannot seem to overcome our behavioural ‘norms’ because it is too embarrassing to do something completely spontaneous, without prejudice and yet with a feeling of knowing it is the right thing. That is why we feel guilty.

Throughout a lifetime of going and being part of ‘our’ groups we become institutionalised or programmed and why not? It helps. It helps us to ‘function’ but it doesn’t help us to grow.

What if someone comes over to us (a stranger) and offers a welcome, or wants a welcome? What if they are someone not like us, what if they are different to our ‘norms’ and they are the type of person to whom we feel a dislike, a prejudice? Do we discreetly snub or just ignore them? Or what if a stranger is not acknowledged and we feel that they are not our type of person so we won’t bother. Well, they are not like me, so it’s ok. But there is the guilt.

Over the years this gets compounded and, despite our inner knowing of disharmony – for no other reason than being confirmed in our behaviour and adhering to our ‘norms’ – we carry on. But there is the inner guilt.

Thinking of what people might think of us is the key dark hole. We stay there because at least we are accepted in this with others who think the same. Thinking and thoughts can control us and they do.

We will often not do something overtly different to our set of norms because we are too frightened to leave them aside. It is frightening to be exposed. To be left without our protection.

So thoughts rule us. The personal thoughts of what ‘our’ people are thinking about us can govern us and keep us within the boundaries.

These boundaries are our prejudices. We might argue that they are not ‘prejudices’ that they are ways of living and functioning and getting us through life and along our way.

But our true nature is nothing to do with our race, our nationality, our family, our friends, our politics with a small and a capital ‘p’ and our thoughts are from our ego and they are dangerous. That is why we carry guilt. Because we know our true nature deep down. It might be so deep that we do not recognise it for what it is so we just feel uncomfortable and carry on.

What is our true nature then?

Our true nature is to be free of all boundaries and restrictions and prejudices. This is the essence of life.

I cannot make this mean anything of sense without declaring a fundamental understanding of what life is – at least in as far as I can make sense of it, not in the comprehensive sense of knowing the whole universe and the ultimate meaning of life. But in order for me to make sense of what it is exactly that Christ was teaching and what other religions and/or spiritual directions tell us, I realise that we are one being, but that we must reincarnate on this earth and live out different lives, like an actor on a stage. And if life is but a stage (as Shakespeare famously said) then we can also say that a stage is life. In this way we take with us our prejudices and play out our lives but with the underlying divine direction to learn to rid ourselves of these, to let go. But our conscious mind or our ego doesn’t know that. It is a bit like being thrown a huge puzzle to put together but with lots of pieces missing. Or like the Irish joke that goes like this: When I asked the Irish man how to get from here to there, the Irish man replied that, if I wanted to go there, I had better not start from here then!

The thing is that we have to start from here. We have nowhere else to start from. But that joke is not as silly as it seems as it holds a deep truth.<!–more–>

Often, I have pondered the words of The Lord’s Prayer. Actually, it is a lifetime’s work to understand it. It is related to why we are here (again). It is not a set of words put together for ‘worship’, it is a key set of words put together for enabling us to grow and to understand why we are here; it is about asking for help in our current predicament – our life – whilst we are travelling this incarnation; this is the journey. I am not speaking about ‘the meaning of life’; I haven’t got a clue and I haven’t got much of a clue about ‘the meaning of this life or my life but as the universe is a huge place and there are billions of unexplained things going on and I have got just my one person, I reckon that if I start with ‘what is the meaning of my life?’ then, huge as it is, it is not as huge as trying to figure out the unfigurable. And perhaps it is as good a start as any.

Our Father, Who art in Heaven,

Hallowed be Thy Name,

Thy Kingdom Come,

Thy Will be done on earth,

As it is in heaven.

God is in heaven, so we can reach him only by praying or meditating (praying is contacting the God outside of us and meditating is contacting the God within us – wonderfully explained in the book “The Magic Road” published by The Seekers), by looking into ourselves and by contacting him for help from our deepest being, our soul. We can speak to him from our soul, not from our ego. This is because our soul has no barrier to him. Our ego does. Our ego uses logic and barriers whilst our soul uses knowing and love (that is why we feel guilty when we act from our ego and our soul is made unhappy).

We direct him to send his kingdom. We do not ask him to. We tell him to.

We direct him that we want his Will to be done on the earth, just like it is in heaven. Which implies that at the moment his Will is not being done here in its entirety, unlike in heaven where it is being done.

Give us this day our daily bread.

We direct him to give us what we need to progress through this life, day by day. Which implies that we need to be aware of the present, of the now, to understand the lesson or the food for thought as well as having the material food we need.

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

This is one of the most puzzling lines of the prayer. If you read it in the way that we are asking God to forgive us in exactly the same way that we forgive others, we might realise that this ‘forgiveness’ is a bit baffling. We rarely forgive, that is why. Which means that if we rarely forgive then we ask God rarely to forgive us. That is what we are asking. But why would we ask that? Why wouldn’t we ask to be forgiven anyway, even though we might not forgive?

True forgiveness is to live your life in such a way that absolutely no grudge, prejudice or injustice affects the way that you feel at your deepest level and in the way that you behave towards people. That you feel constantly at one with everything around you – not because everything is good, but because everything is not good.

So how on earth do we get out of this one?

Chronologically speaking, there is no true differentiation between all of the great religions of the world. Buddhism was around long before Christ came to earth. What Buddhism teaches is to find awareness and that re-incarnations allow us to go through all of the lessons that we need in order to achieve this. When Christ came there was no contradiction, just a move forward because he actually provided a way out of continuous re-incarnations to achieve the ultimate with divine intervention. His sacrifice on earth was to take upon himself all of those guilts that we feel and enact out of human nature; living in Sin is living without God, that is all. His way was to give us heaven sent Grace to enable us to find our way forward beyond the constant karma and re-incarnation as Buddhism teaches by giving us a direct and unconditional foregiveness from God.

In a Buddhist depiction there is an analogy about receiving something (a package) from someone else that we do not want; perhaps it is hate or jealousy or anger. Buddhism teaches us to send this package back to its sender with love, so that we do not carry this and so that the sender will work out those issues his or her self. In Christ’s New way the story changes though: Christ teaches us to take the package upon ourselves and then let it go upwards to the Divine, to God. In this way, both parties are relieved of the burden and both experience foregiveness as the sin is taken away.

This does not contradict Buddhism, it merely takes us all on to a different way forward with the Christ himself intervening on our behalfs. He is giving us a way out and a way forward.

And lead us not into Temptation, but deliver us from Evil.

Still pondering these! Well, I am only human you see and definitely not quite there.. .. .;

(© 2008 Eileen Baker)