Category: Gott Mit Uns – God With Us

Who Are the Children of God?

January 31, 2024 / Rivan_Elan aka Pastor Daniel / 0 Comments

Epictetus and the Bible both had the same answer. The first century Roman Philosopher writes: “If a man could only take heart to this judgement, as he ought, that we are all, before anything else, children of God and that God is the Father of gods and men, I think that he will never harbor a mean or ignoble thought about himself… We ought to be proud, but we are not; as there are these two elements mingled in our birth, the body which we share with the animals, and the reason and mind which we share with the gods, men in general decline upon that wretched and dead kinship with the beasts, and but few claim that which is divine and blessed.” -Epictetus, Philosopher of Rome 1st Century AD

This passage comes from page seventeen Chapter III of the book The Discourses of Epictetus and the Enchiridion which is available through Royal Classics; the 2020 Edition.

Today we will look at the wisdom of Epictetus and how it dovetails closely with the teachings of Saint Paul in the Christian Bible. Epictetus was not a Christian but, as I have said repeatedly Wisdom Literature appears to be remarkably the same from culture to culture. This is not too surprising because, for the most part, humans are genetically the same from continent to continent and people to people. Wisdom, offered by sage observers of human nature provided teachings on how to live successfully in a challenging and troublesome world based upon their observations of the world and their observations of people and their actions and reactions.

One of the philosophies of human nature and how to act that developed in the ancient world was Stoicism. While some stoics completely rejected emotions, and I do believe that is unhealthy, I do agree with the stoics that if we let our feelings and emotions dominate our life and our decisions then we are embracing an animal nature and denying our ability to reason and rise above the animals. This reliance on human reason and logic is a hallmark of the Western World that we rarely teach in schools or universities today. It is an ability that, ultimately, has created Western Civilization through logic, mathematics, and scientific inquiry. This is a civilization and society which is the most advanced and richest society the Earth has ever seen (at least that we can verify within our historical record.)

Stoicism is a philosophy that centered around self-control, self-knowledge, and maintaining a positive mental attitude as well as knowing your place in the Created Universe. Which, as Epictetus said included the knowledge that we are all children of God. Many of the philosophers referred to this as ZEUS or IUPITER as they were familiar to all. But most of the philosophers actually spoke of a God of Nature behind both Nature and the popular concept of gods.

Christianity told people the same, that we were children of the Living God and that our body was the temple of the Holy Spirit. Saint Paul said in one of his letters “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” The indwelling of an immanent God was indwelling in the entire Divine Creation (an idea called Panentheism – See Below,) but in a unique and special way in humans. In the Bible God speaks to the others and says, “Let us make man in our own image.”

This recognition that we had a divine nature eschewed complaining and whining about bad luck and stoics would have scoffed at today’s epidemic of professional victims and constant whining on social media about how tough life is or how you have been wronged. Many stoics became powerful men who had command of themselves and could therefore command others. One of the most famous and admired emperors of ancient Rome was the stoic Marcus Aurelius and he wrote a book of meditations that we can study and read today. I am actually much more familiar with the stoics Seneca and Marcus Aurelius (which is why I bought this book on Epictetus – to fill in gaps in my knowledge, I hate not knowing things. No matter how much I learn in this life it will just be a drop in an ocean of knowledge, but I believe that you must embrace your own drop of life to be part an active part of that ocean.)

Epictetus was a Roman and a Stoic who lived in the first Century AD. He was born a Caucasian slave at Hierapolis, Phrygia (now called Pamukkale, Turkey,) and spent his youth as a slave in Rome, owned by Epaphroditos, a wealthy freedman and secretary to the Emperor Nero. Epictetus was intelligent and had an interest in philosophy so his owner let him study Stoic philosophy under Musonius Rufus. As was the way in Rome the more educated the slave became the more status he had and the more valuable he was to his master. There is some confusion as to how Epictetus became crippled. Simplicius states that he had been lame since childhood while Origen stated that he had been deliberately crippled by his master when angry. We will probably never know.

Epictetus was freed sometime after the death of Emperor Nero in 68 AD when the youth was in his teens but we don’t know the year. We do know that Emperor Domitian around 93 AD banished all philosophers from the city of Rome and Epictetus went to Nicopolis in Epirus, Greece where he founded a philosophical school centered around stoicism.

I mentioned that his words were similar to several of the teachings of Saint Paul and this is not too surprising. In fact, I think it would be surprising if some Stoicism had not crept into Paul’s “gospel” because he grew up as a Jew but also as a citizen of Rome in the city of Tarsus. This was a city that held one of the three great centers of the Stoa (A College of Stoic Philosophy,) in the ancient world.

“If a man could only take heart to this judgement, as he ought, that we are all, before anything else, children of God and that God is the Father of gods and men, I think that he will never harbor a mean or ignoble thought about himself…We ought to be proud, but we are not; as there are these two elements mingled in our birth, the body which we share with the animals, and the reason and mind which we share with the gods, men in general decline upon that wretched and dead kinship with the beasts, and but few claim that which is divine and blessed.”Epictetus, Chapter III, p.17, The Discourses of Epictetus and the Enchiridion by Epictetus

So, in brief, Epictetus says everyone has two natures. An animal nature which is tied to the biology of our physical body and a Divine nature as children of the Father of gods and men through our higher brain functions. He encourages us to live up to our Divine heritage and not lower ourselves to acting on our baser impulses like animals.

I find it interesting that modern feminism has encouraged women to act out and sate their baser passions (like animals in heat,) rather than aspire to a higher idea or goal. In a sense they somehow believe it is liberating (?) to imitate the basest and most visceral failings of men and animals. I have noticed in my dogs that they really don’t have much ability to resist a bitch in heat. I have known one or two men with the same lack of self-control.

I will never understand how lowering yourself and giving full play to your animal nature somehow will make you a better person worthy of emulation and pride in self. I have watched numerous videos of women insisting that their body count doesn’t matter only to refuse to say what theirs is. This must be because down in their heart they realize that it very much does matter. At least a gentleman doesn’t tell or brag about it. But Gentleman, like Ladies, both seem to be a dying breed among the youth of today.

Still, everyone is entitled to ruin their own life in their own way. I cannot be terribly sympathetic when there are thousands of years of anecdotes, testimony, and tales that let us know that such behavior generally leads to ruin. My father always pressed the Biblical Proverbs on me telling me that I can either learn from the mistakes of others or learn by “the school of hard knocks” by getting knocked on my a** by life again and again. He told me that its much easier on you and your friends and family to learn from others. But, as I said, we are all welcome to fall on our faces and refuse to learn any other way, in fact many do so.

I cannot say that I always listened to my father. No, I first had to fall on my face several times until I recalled, “Oh, my Dad said something about this from the Proverbs in the Bible.” Eventually, I chose the easier path of going back to read philosophies and proverbs of the past. They have stood the test of time for literally thousands of years. Why? Because human nature evolves very slowly. This is why philosophies, such as communism, which rely on “creating a new man” are all dead-end philosophies because we evolve extremely slowly. Therefore, every generation needs to be retaught what previous generations have learned. Otherwise, you are forcing yourself to start over from scratch when the knowledge may well already be out there.

I remember complaining to my youngest son that it seems that all the movies of the last ten years are crap. He didn’t know what I meant until we sat and watched some old movies from the 70s and 80s that are classics. “You’re right he said. They are much better stories and have deeper characters.” I think the problem has to do with something the YouTuber Call Me Chato once said: “I have never seen a generation of directors, scriptwriters, camera men, and others who were LESS interested in learning the art of film making. They just throw something together and expect it to be good without considering the decades of trial and error that went into developing the movie industry.” That seems to be a problem that exists in other fields besides movies. Talk about doing everything the hard way.

Contemporary generations, more than any previous to them, seem to be unaware of the continuity of human knowledge. Every thing they know, every device they use, and every technology they covet has been built upon a long history of scientific discoveries preceding it and preparing the way for it. Knowledge is like people in a way. If you do not know where you have come from, and do not know where you are in relation to everything else, you have little to no chance of finding your way to where you want to be.

The worst work I have EVER seen is the Rings of Power by Amazon (well, except perhaps The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and The Banana Monster). I could go on for hours (and I have,) about all the problems there are with the elves and story in this Amazonian monstrosity… and I was really looking forward to it. But I never even got through the third episode before I gave up on it. But I have watched several excellent movies since 2020 – none of them were made in Hollywood though.

OK, that was a tangent, but it is an example of not listening to the wisdom of people who have gone before. I talk about that a lot. One of the things that is ancient knowledge is this idea that we have, in us, a spark of the Divine and we can either feed it so it grows or embrace our animal nature.

This brings me back to Epictetus. To realize we were created by the Living God, the Father of gods, is to know that we have a place in the universe and are not here by accident or chance (as radical materialism tries to ram down our throats…a theory that is no longer even sound scientifically although that is where it supposedly came from.) I believe that for fulfillment we need to have the higher mind engaged in what we do. While we should not indulge the animal self exclusively, I would point out to Epictetus that we are, in fact, also animals and we should not ignore our nature either. I believe in finding a harmony between the two.

Now, let us go no farther without addressing the warped character of American religious communities. Thanks to the Neo-Platonists and Manicheans (like St. Augustine,) who have had such a lasting effect on Christianity we view ANYTHING material or “of our animal side” as (almost) evil or at least dirty. This is not what I am saying. As the rabbi said, “God’s first commandment to humanity was to be fruitful and multiply.” Further, the ancient Hebrew mystics taught that it was in the moment of orgasm that we got a glimpse of the joy that would be ours in the world to come. A glimpse of the feeling of being one with God in the mutual climax of sex as two people come together and become one (even if only for a moment). You have to do some serious thinking of why did God put that there? It certainly wasn’t because he hated our bodies and our natural desires. God created those as well. Scientists today, although many don’t want to use the word God, they say there must be an intelligence behind everything because it all fits together with a mathematical precision.

Please note, I am not a Platonist or Manichean or Puritan who believes all nature is bad and spirit is good. We aren’t creatures with a body, a mind, and a spirit. Instead we are body/mind/spirit creatures. They are intertwined.

It was God who created the world and called it good. What we need is a full realization of that fact to find a balance, living in accordance with the world God gave us and feeding our spirit and our body, our reason and our heart. This is what is needed to make us “real” and not artificial. To give us life and that abundantly (as Christ promised.) Much of Christianity in America seems to hate sex – I think it goes back to our puritan roots. They say they don’t but then they act like they do. So, I am definitely not talking about rejecting our animal nature entirely.

But to focus on “that wretched and dead kinship with the beasts” as Epictetus says, while it may bring brief moments of pleasure that pleasure will be paid for by hours, or perhaps even years, of strife and sadness. It is the lingering regret that pays for the fleeting moments of joy and feeling, but regret is a feeling too and it is a poor exchange. Further, whichever side we feed…whether it is our kinship with the Creator or whether it is the beast within us that will be the side that grows in us and will eventually obtain dominance.

In the words of another Roman proverb we have discussed “Do what you are doing.” Be wholly present in everything you do bringing together the body, mind, and soul as one united effort that is wholly present in every aspect of your life.

This is something the younger generations desperately need to learn. Their life is empty and lonely, I believe, because they are not even living it. Friends can be sitting together at a table and absolutely none of them are even there. They are all electronically off doing something else on their phones and completely missing the visceral interaction with other human beings that produces the oxytocin and other chemicals that keep us happy and ward off depression.

Virtually no one is actually “doing what they are doing” and wholly present in the moment with their body/mind/soul fully engaged. They are too busy doing something else, checking their cyber world and getting cheap hits of artificial “likes” or “comments” and missing the real thing which is at the table with friends. In trying to keep track of everything and not be “left out” they are being left out of their own experience of living.

As they walk from point A to point B they are not experiencing the world. They are missing the singing of birds, the smell of flowers and trees in spring, the fresh smells of grass or cleanliness of a summer rain, they miss the rustle of leaves in the fall and the crisp cold air of winter and the crunch of snow under their feet. The are slaves to the notification chime and each time it rings, like Pavlov’s dogs (look it up on your phone,) they respond to the chime. They are not lords or their own life, neither is God, rather the media companies are.

I speak from experience about not living your own life. When I was a counterintelligence agent my mind was always on a case or the “fate of the free world” that hung in the balance. I went for years when I would be getting in my government car and I would look around and say, “Wow, the trees are full of leaves…I think I missed Spring.” Then suddenly the leaves were all about my feet and it was starting to sleet. After that, I turned back to heed what my Father had taught me long ago but I had set aside as “old fashioned” or as “wisdom for a happier day” which was to “listen to the trees – their talking to you if you listen. Cottonwoods talk to us more than any other tree. You can hear them in the rustling of the leaves in a breeze.” I finally, after missing years of my life, realized that it was as relevant for me today as it was for him decades ago…just as it was relevant for St Paul and Epictetus in the first years of the Roman Empire and as it was for every other human who has ever lived.

In the Proverbs it says that the female personification of Wisdom (the Holy Spirit) danced with God for joy at the moment of creation for God and with God. It is this sense of the Divine that takes joy in the act of living life and doesn’t let life fall by the wayside as we look dreamily toward heaven, the next life, or tweeking our profile picture. We all need to find our joy in the here and now and we need to dance a little ourselves with our friends.

As one theologian said, every moment we are either choosing “God” or “not God” and moving closer to our Divine nature or farther from it. I urge you to heed Epictetus and feed the Divine nature within you and remind yourself of that nature when you need to strengthen your confidence and resolve. I used to preach, and I often said to my congregation, “Children of God, remember who you are!”

So, while I agree with Epictetus, we all need to realize that we are the children of the Living God and start acting like it. Choose to live out of our higher nature and remember that we were made “stewards” of this world which we are a part of. A steward protected and cared for the estates of his Lord while the lord was doing other things. Somehow, our English Bibles have translated this idea of “stewards of Creation” as us having “dominion.” A steward does have such authority, but a steward is subject to answering to his or her Lord and will not be absolved for responsibility for his or her Lord’s creation. We need to accept our identity as children of the Living God, children of the Emperor of the Universe, that is truly something. But also we must accept our roles as caretakers of all that is natural and that we are a part of this world and that when it was created, with all its sex, emotion, desires, and reason God said that it was “good.” That too, is truly something.

“Do you not know that your body is the temple of the holy spirit and that God’s spirit dwells in you?” – Saint Paul.

Realize that you are a child of the living God while simultaneously you are part of Creation created to be stewards of that creation, linking the Divine and the material in the dance that we call life. You are supposed to live it and be wholly present in your life, and (as God said,) be fruitful and multiply. Live your life to the full, find someone to love and share your lives with each other, marry, raise the next generation and delight in watching your children grow, and learn to be wholly present for them as well. Then, eventually let yourself slow down as they replace you and get their own chance to lay on the grass and look up at the clouds, or to ride their bike as fast as they can, or to walk hand in hand with their mom and dad, and later with their lover and have a chance to live THEIR life and overcome THEIR challenges and make a mark on their world.

“I came that you might have life, and that abundantly.” That was Jesus mission but it seems many of us have missed that.

That is the meaning of life. It was right before us all the time. The meaning of life is to simply live it. Remember that you are a child of the Living God, created as one with nature, and you are to live life to the full.

That is the secret of life…to live it and remember that you are somebody. A child of the Creator and we are all family. Called to live our life as those who went before us. Live and grow, find a mate, have and raise your children and let your grandchildren be your joy in your declining years as you watch the next generation live and grow.

Saint Paul calls for us to be transformed by the renewal of our minds as we learn new ways to live and think of God, the world, and each other.

NOTE: Pantheism and Panentheism

Pantheism can speak of many gods or it can include an idea that everything has a divine spirit or is a god it its own right. Panentheism, in contrast, does not mean that everyone is God, but that God is immanent in everyone and everything. Immanent simply means that God is permanently pervading and sustaining the universe by Its presence through the Holy Spirit, or the Shekinah in Hebrew. It is similar to the idea of the Force in Star Wars which Obi-Wan Kenobi explained surrounds us, penetrates us, and guides us. Many churches today emphasize the transcendence of God while neglecting His presence and day to day interaction with His creation. Ancient Hebrew mystics taught that all of the universe existed in the mind of God and if God would ever stop thinking of us we would blink out of existence. I find the similarity between this ancient belief that we exist in the mind of God and the modern idea that we live in the “mind” of a computer matrix to be uncannily similar.

Panentheism was embraced in the concept of the Force in Star Wars and was developed by George Lucas in talks long into the night with his friend Joseph Campbell, a philosopher and expert in religions and cultures of the Earth.

Original version was posted on SabersEdge.Online with some differences.

Who Are the Gods?

January 18, 2024 / Rivan_Elan aka Pastor Daniel / 0 Comments

I have often said that English was a terribly unclear language to translate the Bible into. Now English is not bad at everything but it seems to have some unique weaknesses in the fields of theology and philosophy where I think Greek, German, and Latin manage better. I say this because of all the poor translations that I have found in the Bible in the translations from the original Greek and Hebrew.

As yet another example I offer the word “love” which is so often used by the writers of the New Testament who wrote in Greek. In Greek there are 8 different words for love and each of those words is simply translated as “love” in English. There is eros – sexual love; philia – brotherly love (as in Philadelphia); agape – unconditional/sacrificial love; storge – familial love; mania – obsessive love; pragma – love through obligation or duty – such as love of country; philautia – is self-love; and there is ludus (ok, this is Latin/Roman but some translations are translated from the old Latin texts instead of the Greek or Hebrew,) – ludus speaks of playful or non-commital love and can include courtship and flirting. Rarely, do pastors and parishioners seem to bother with a full explanation of what the original passage meant (see more here: 8 Greek Words For Different Types Of Love | Dictionary.com ). In addition, koinonia which is a state of fellowship, community, or partnership can also be spoken of as love.

Also, there is shalom, shalom is simply translated as “peace” in English from the Hebrew. However, shalom actually means a state where the entire earth is in a state of mutually supportive and fulfilling relationships – this includes our relationship to the environment, each other, our animals, the animals of the wild, relationships between nations, businesses, and anything else that you can imagine under creation. Cornelius Plantinga brings this out very well in his excellent book Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be; A Breviary of Sin,. Yet, in your Bible shalom is translated as “peace.” Shaqat, which means to be quiet or undisturbed. In some bibles this is describes as peace or peaceful. For other translations of shalom in the bible see: The True Meaning of Shalom // Defining Shalom — FIRM Israel

I have already spoken of the frivolities of translation that go with “diakonos” depending on whether someone is a man or a woman [for more on this see: What is a Good Bible? – ofNaturesGod.com ] and the mistranslation of the word for murder ratsahk/mut as “kill” in most versions of the ten commandments. For further discussion on the ten commandments you can see: Why is “You shall not murder” in the Ten Commandments? | GotQuestions.org and You Can Kill, But Not Murder: The Case for the Ten Commandments – The Dennis Prager Show

This did not include harag – which can also be translated as kill but means to slaughter, murder, or to slaughter the enemy after the battle.

Let’s talk about the plural Elohim. Many ministers will buy off this word as saying it along with the statement “Let’s make man in our image.” is simply referring to God as the Trinity. Others will just say it is the angels (from the Greek Angelos which means “messenger” and is used for nearly all of the different servants of God in heaven that are often mentioned by name or species in the Bible.) Yet Elohim really is more accurately the court of the gods. El means “god” and “him” refers to a race or a people. Elohim represents the entire heavenly court including the various children of God who were the gods of the nations of the Earth (such as the Prince of Persia.) You will remember the Ten Commandments says “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Repeatedly the Bible says that God is the God of gods whom they all have to answer to and that he is God Most High. All of these are unnecessary distinctions if there are no other real gods.

I always find it fascinating when people say they believe in the Bible exactly as written make all kinds of exceptions for things that don’t fit their theology or lack of belief in ghosts or spirits, or their belief in other gods, or lack of belief in demonic possession or magic all of which are taken seriously in the Bible.

In the book of Job, it mentions the divine court at the beginning where these heavenly beings are all assembled, and the Satan comes before God to accuse Job. The Bible also mentions some of these gods mated with the “daughters of men” and begat the Nephilim in the Bible and god was not pleased.

This is all a very complex concept and I can see why most pastors and teachers take the easy way out because many parishioners ask because they want comfort and reassurance not knowledge.

When I had rejected God (long story that but it was after I had been a counterintelligence agent and seen some dark things.) I studied the religions of the world, analyzing them as an investigator or intelligence agent to see if I could find any truth in them. (You would rightly find it significant that after I did this study I became a pastor of the United Methodist Church – before I decided they had turned from the Biblical message and were indulging in heresy.)

In the Greek and Roman pagan religion we have hints of a supreme being the gods must obey. For just one example Jupiter/Zeus has his lightning bolts. He can strike where he will with the first, to do more he needs the concensus of the major gods, to launch the final lightning bolt he needs the agreement of some force greater than the gods of Olympus. This force is unexplained and many assume it is the fates but the fates are named and this force is not. Like the example I will offer next you have to dig pretty deep into Greek texts to find this out but it is there.

In Norse mythology there is a force that goes beyond simple destiny that the Gods are subject to. It is a deep and mysterious force that was there when the gods were born and will be there after they die in Ragnarok to preside over the rise of the new gods. In this aspect, the tree Yggdrasil which shelters the new gods during ragnarok and connects all the universe together bears, in some texts, an interesting similarity to the Holy Spirit. The Well of Wisdom is at the base of Yggdrasil just as Wisdom (which was there at the beginning of the world with God) is a trait of the Holy Spirit. This force too, is not clearly defined (although Yggdrasil is more clearly defined.)

Let’s look at a good teaching that explains this further. I cannot give you an embedded video because Youtube has it as age restricted. Apparently, children cannot understand it. Personally, I think children understand so much that their parents would be uncomfortable if they knew. Anyway, here are two links to the same video: The Unseen Realm (youtube.com)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV2CUWcKMa8

Another interesting post on this is from a different perspective where Metatron examines the words around the name of God from a literary standpoint – Metatron is a highly competent scholar on ancient studies and several languages from a secular standpoint: The Truth About The Biblically Accurate Name of God (youtube.com)

Our Coming Task – To Recombine the Fragments of Divine Truth

July 9, 2023 / Rivan_Elan aka Pastor Daniel / 0 Comments

Our New Task [Note: When this was written I believed it would be the last post I would ever be able to make so it is a stream-of-consciousness presentation of everything I wanted to say in the coming year…OK, some of what I wanted to say. Also, I edited this on 30 August AUC 2776. I thought of deleting it because it was a mish mash but that seems disingenuous so I edited it. Originally it was a rushed job before I thought the site would be deleted. It needed work. – Rivan Elan]

I have not given this website the attention it deserves. I concentrated on political and social matters through SabersEdge.Online. However, I have come to realize the actual sickness in our society is from a stunted spirituality that is confused and lost. Increasingly I came to understand that by addressing social and political issues I was playing an endless game of whack-a-mole that I could never win.

The real problem is spirituality or a lack thereof. The hunger in humanity can only be satisfied by the Divine Presence that our society has lost. If you truly have an encounter with this presence you will know it. God gave the gift of discernment and I have seen people who were Buddhist, pagan, and also Hindu that all radiated the presence of the Divine…sometimes more than some of my parishioners. This does not change that I believe the Bible to be the best information source available to the Western World to discover the truths of the Divine. It is not God, it is religions and dogma I tend to have issues with. But whatever discipline you follow the Holy Spirit can lead you to all truth.

I do not have the money to continue this website. I need 200$ to renew my subscription by the 14^th of July and it is apparent to me that I will not get it now. So this is my parting message and gift to you all.

[Note: Obviously, we were received what we needed and good triumphed ;-).]

Initially, everyone should bury themselves in their religious tradition and learn all they can. But this is not just mental. You must connect with the Divine Presence. Seek out the mystical traditions of your faith; for in these lie the true answers and experience of the Divine Presence. Saint Paul said to Christians 2,000 years ago “I feed you on milk because you are not yet ready for solid food.” Sadly, 2000 years later Christianity is still wallowing in the milk of infancy and any attempt to grow in God’s presence and experience has often been crushed by religious institutions and marginalized.

This is not surprising. Religion is a good that can be twisted to harm. Religion comes from the word Religio which means “to bind us back.” In other words, it begins as an attempt to reconnect us with the Source of All Life, the Ground of All Being, the One of Many Names.

Unfortunately, religions create institutions and institutions are about power. Power does not like people who reconnect with God because earthly institutions cannot control them – so they attack them as they have Jesus and innumerable spiritual leaders and saints of the past. God and the Divine Power and Presence are always a threat to Earthly Power. Yet it is the key to reconnecting with Nature and Nature’s God. We must do it.

Once you have immersed yourself in your religious tradition, if you reach the point where you find that it is the way to the truth and the light you may notice what I did. Religion is a block to that Truth.

When I studied Greek and Hebrew I became increasingly aware of limitations in translation in English versions of the Bible. Rather than translating true to the original they translated according to the dogma that they followed, thus obscuring part of the truth and the path to God. Sometimes, this is simply a matter that there is not always a one-to-one correlation with words. Words in one language can carry levels of meaning that do not exist in another.

At some point, you may, if you seek union with the Divine Source, reach beyond the limits of the religion you follow. This is because an infinite God may not be fully realized in any one religion. We can connect to It but we can never fully experience It. However, we are each called to experience the Divine as fully as we are able.

There is not a “doing it right” or “I am farther than you” situation here. We are each called to do what we can when we can. We each experience the Divine in our own way. The Bible says the way to God is straight and narrow and if we deviate to the left and the right we will miss it. This is true.

However, religions often mean by this that you must follow their own dogma and non-biblical (or partially biblical) injunctions and if you deviate outside of that you are apostate. They limit your growth and understanding of the Divine to what their understanding is. This is a pale imitation of God.

The truth is that every life giving, thriving faith, has a piece of the Divine puzzle. Not every religion is equally true. Not every religion is the same. That is not what I am saying. But there is a unity in multiplicity and a multiplicity in the Divine Unity.

Rather, every religion is incomplete. Some are more incomplete than others. All have the truth obscured by surface levels of teaching that too many never seek to move beyond. In truth, I think that the majority of people are fine at this level. Many are fine enjoying the waters near the shore and have no yearning to explore the depths of the ocean. This is where religions are. They are the waters near the shore that everyone has access to. But every religion also has mystical traditions that explore the depths that resonate far beyond and away from the safety of the shoreline.

If you begin to explore these depths you will find that the Hebrew, Sumerian, Vedas, Brahmins, Chinese, Egyptian, and other ancient traditions lead us to a Divine Core and to the extent that it is reflective of the Source, the Creative Power of the Universe, the All, it is a reflection of the Divine. Similar imagery rests in each: Yggdrasil – the World Ash Tree, the Tree of Life, the Djed column of Egypt, and so on. This core pillar of creation that binds everything together, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge in Eden. There are always masculine and feminine principles that are present and a vast, unknowable, mysterious mystery that is behind it all.

I created ofNaturesGod.com to explore these for those who were ready but was cautious because too often I had seen students fall off a “deep end” drown and turn away because they had gone too far too fast. They were not ready. Too often we read and think but we don’t take time to experience and make those experiences a part of us.

This will only be here for awhile. On the 14^th, if I don’t get support from somewhere this will disappear and all the posts will be erased.

Perhaps the world was not ready, perhaps I was not ready to fulfil the potential of the site. Either way I encourage you to devote your understanding and your heart to connecting with Nature’s God. This is the Creator/Creatrix of All and I invite you to broaden your understanding and experience thereof.

The existing religions have existed for thousands of years (except for Islam which is barely a thousand.) I believe the next thousand years we will be called to bring together the disparate parts of these religions – the elements of truth that lie in each – and to set aside the errors that have grown in each and to experience a spiritual enlightenment that will be as transforming as the intellectual enlightenment of the 17^th and 18^th Centuries was transforming. As the faith of Ahkenaton tried to be transforming. I believe this is what God is calling us to do and for that reason, many spiritual leaders have been placed here with us today to bring people to this understanding.

This is what God called me to do but I too often let events in my life distract me. Every time I approached the point he called me to be at I let myself be brought down by divorce, career failure, conflict with the church, or conflict in personal relationships. I am now going to do what I can to reconnect with the Divine and see if I can return reach the place that I first approached in my teens or early twenties before I was derailed by a sexual relationship.

Please understand, sex is powerful and good, but misused it can hinder our spiritual growth and create pitfalls that mire us down in a level of reality that is difficult to escape. That is why so many religious adepts swear off sexual contact entirely. It is powerful. Ideally, it should be part of a reality that embraces both spiritual and physical life in the oneness of God but I have only very rarely found relationships where that actually happened.

Too often, our societies prejudices separate the spiritual from the physical and the mental from the spiritual and the mental from the physical. We must achieve the point where these artificial barriers are broken down and ESP, spiritual healing, mental learning, physical wisdom, and our relationship to creation is all part of a Divinely ordered oneness. These are things that God has made part of our nature. Military experiments indicated that everyone has some extra-sensory ability but (like running,) not everyone has the potential for being an Olympic athlete.

I encourage you to find your own path toward that oneness with the Divine.

Beware of distractions. Only the Divine Spirit and an active relationship with it can guide you. You also must test any spirit that you connect with to ensure it is the One. There is evil. Although American Christianity is deceptive about it.

The Hebrew Bible speaks in only one passage about “The Satan”. But all through the Hebrew Bible there are little “satans.” Satan in Hebrew means enemy or accuser.

Because several of the early church fathers, such as Augustine, were originally Manicheans, they brought their ideas of an all-powerful good god and an all powerful evil god into Christianity with them. These beliefs colored their writing and made Satan more powerful and independent than he truly is. God is the Source of All Life and evil has to parasitically feed off of life to survive.

Evil can only exist as a parasite to the life provided by God to His created beings and order. If they were cut off from the Source of Life they would cease to exist. We are connected to the Source of Life so they feed on this life through us. Their only connection is to suck this life and joy from us. These are spiritual enemies that abound and seek our destruction. But English translations emphasize a “devil” and not the myriad of enemies the Bible actually speaks of.

My contact with these creatures has convinced me that they feed off our life energy because they have none of their own. Having cut themselves off from the Source of All Life all they can do is draw the energy of life and love from our own existence to keep them from oblivion. God is the Source of All Life and Satan, as well as the many other satans that English Bibles also call Satan are our enemies. I have stood between them and my parishioners more than once to help people resist their influence.

Here is a link to one of my videos. I may try to proceed with video and see if that works.

I was hoping to bring others to this understanding and thought this might be the venue to begin doing that. But God has not blessed my efforts and I do not have the financial support to continue. [Obviously he did before it vanished]. However, that does not mean that you should abandon the path. I encourage you to read Wisdom of the Mystic Masters by Mr. Weed or is it Reed? You can find it online.

There is one warning though. In it he has a meditation that activates the heart, throat, third eye, and crown chakras. He says that he won’t use the others because they are physical and we are too caught up in sexuality in our society. He is correct. What he failed to understand was that we need all the Chakra activated and interacting to lead a balanced life. It was not that the “lower” Chakra were too strong in our society it is that they are sick and warped in our society. What Indian religion calls Chakra exist in every mystical tradition on Earth, even Hebrew mysticism through the writings of the Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism. We need to bring everything (our lives and the chakra,) into line and order with the Divine Purpose.

Sexuality is for interconnection and procreation.

Current gender confusion is trying to further distance us from the created order that reflects the divine. As the Star of David represents the combination of the Male (the upward pointing triangle,) with the female (V shaped triangle) into a coherent whole so is sexuality supposed to combine us into a spiritual unity with our mate. This symbol too, is in nearly every religion on Earth and means essentially the same thing. It is a one-ness that is mentioned repeatedly in the Bible as man and woman becoming one flesh. The gender disphoria and homosexuality is not due to evil in our society but due to a separation from God. Too many religions point to these as unacceptable to God without fully realizing that ANY sin is unacceptable to God. We are all unacceptable in our natural state and need spiritual healing by unity with the Divine One.

Even if someone was fully healed I am not sure that God would desire a committed life-long homosexual couple to separate. They have already connected. Would not breaking that connection be wrong? I don’t know. The Bible says to remain as you were when you came to Christ. Obviously, if I was an axe murderer I wouldn’t keep doing that but they aren’t really the same. I remember the story of Amazing Grace [see: ] where the author wanted to be the best and most compassionate slave trader ever…it took a couple years for him to realize that being a slaver was NOT Christian no matter how “nice” he tried to be about it. When he realized that he wrote “Amazing Grace.” But it took time for him to reach that point. In the book the Screwtape Letters “uncle Screwtape” (an experienced demon,) advises his Nephew Wormwood to have his charge (who had just became a Christian,) to try to change everything at once. ‘He will become so frustrated in his failure he will be more surely ours than he was before.’ I don’t think we can judge in every case what another should do, they would have to make that decision with their God. It is not for us to fully know or understand everyone else’s relationship with their Creator.

The Bible says: Who are you to judge the servants of another? Meaning that we are all servants of God. When we judge others we are usurping the Master’s role. That is not good. Still, we are called to model the right behavior however we conceive that to be. We all must proceed with the understanding that we know but a part of the Divine Whole.

Above I mentioned that there is but one way to God and we must not deviate to the left or the right. This does not mean that any religion is totally correct. Think of this as like the lid to a soda at Kwik Shop. There is a circle perimeter and in the center is a little nipple where the lid was connected to the form (or Source.) We are on the perimeter. At any point we are at on the perimeter there is only one path for us to take to reach the center. If we deviate to the left or right of the line created by connecting the point on the perimeter to the Source then we miss the Source completely. There is only one path for each of us to the Source. It is not the exact same as your friend’s path or a Saint’s path but their journey CAN inform ours.

One of the strengths of the Bible, or in studying the lives of the Saints or great religious leaders like John Wesley, is that it provide many examples of how people faithfully lived out their lives to be true to their experience of God. Although I have talked with a Muslim and we compared the words of Christ and Paul with the teachings of Mohammad and found a wondrous similarity, one advantage the Bible has is that it was written by many authors and they each experienced the same God differently. Somewhere in there, we can probably find an example that is close to our own experience and speaks to us in our own path. Everyone has favorite Biblical figures and stories and they are all different.

One of the things a minister is asked to do is to ask themselves who they relate to in the Bible. I resonated with David because he was a soldier and a bit of a stinker. He repeatedly failed God but God described him as his favorite because whether he failed or succeeded he did it with his whole heart. I have noticed that Great Men succeed marvelously and fail dramatically. They all have human shortcomings but succeeded despite them. I have had my failures and some dramatic successes against evil. I also related to Samuel and Amos, and Hosea. I wear a Saint Joan of Arc medal around my neck to remind me how she kept to her path when everyone doubted her. Saint Ignatius was also a soldier of Christ and Saint Francis was an unsuccessful soldier who became a radical pacifist. I am not a pacifist but I also am drawn to Saint Francis. Find the Saints and lives that inspire you and learn from their successes and their failutes. But put your faith in God and not in a religion. By that I mean ground your faith in the God that the religion points to and don’t become a slave to the dogma to the point where you blind yourself to things God my be trying to tell you.

I have done both. Blinded myself to truth because it was against the dogma I was taught and so I was unable to believe in the God I was taught when I came face to face with evil as a counterintelligence Special Agent and turned from God. My turn away from religion ultimately led me back to it as I saw elements of the Divine in every religion I studied. The same elements. The same glimpses. Yet each religion seemed at odds with the others. Please understand, religions are not all the same. They are all limited but they are the best and most grounded starting points we have to Oneness with the Dviine. Most will live their whole lives and never need to go beyond that. I have a hunger to explore every aspect of the Divine so I probe deeply. I want to be fed on solid food and not just the milk of the Bible and Christianity that St. Paul spoke of.

For instance God never told us to put his writings into a Canon (the Bible) and to close that canon. The Bible is closed but God never stopped talking to us. He never said He was done talking to us or done sending messages to His prophets. We did that. We closed the canon so religion could have a core to prevent people from falling into error. If people were connected to the Divine they wouldn’t have needed that closed Canon. But they weren’t and false teachers were leading people into error. I believe God guided the Council of Nicaea in its choices but there is not one Bible. There are about three or four. The Bible originated in the Middle East and North Africa. The One we have is the one that predominated in Western Europe but the Eastern Orthodox and African Bibles include (although 95% the same,) a book called the Shepherd of Hermas and a couple others. In the West some of these books are preserved in the Apocrypha of Catholic Bibles. None of thie invalidates the Bible we use. The Bible is very useful but those who believe it is the final word of God worship the Bible and not the true Living God. And that is idolatry.

Anyone who has had an actual experience of the Divine knows that language is wholly insufficient to communicate the richness of the Divine Presence. IF you have not had such an experience fervantly pray for one. The Bible says that we should knock and the door shall be opened. Seek and you shall find. Ask and it shall be given unto you. The Divine will reveal its presence to you. Beware of imitations. The satans are also very powerful and can overwhelm our senses. Surround yourself with light in your mind and pray for Divine protection and then ask for God to reveal Itself to you and to come into you life in a tangible way. Ask until it happens. You will know when it does and it will transform your life. If you turn away turn back to it. Jesus said anyone who turns from the plow after he is called is not worthy of the Kingdom. I have turned away and the satans used that verse to keep me away until God pointed out to me that NO ONE is worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven it is all given by Grace. When people judge someone unacceptable they are usurping Divine Authority.

Now we ARE called to provide warning to someone when we honestly believe they are in error and they will need to work out there own salvation with fear and trembling. That is where we fail. Too often we have confidence in our own efforts and don’t proceed with the fear and trembling. God says many will come to me in that day and say, “Lord Lord!” and I will say, “Get away from me you doers of iniquity I never knew you.” and they will say that they taught, cast out demons, and did wonders in God’s name. But their heart was never one with God. God wants union with you whole heart and too often we keep back part of our hearts for our own use. We don’t devote all to the Divine. Those that do are rare. We call them saints, avatars, or great spiritual leaders. That is how rare they are. Sometimes we might call them aunts or grandpa’s or gramdma’s and they shine with a light that their family sees but does not transform the world. But it transforms the lives of those around them.

The Living God is worshipped in Spirit and Truth and in the way we live and is not solely found in what we live or believe. Western Society buts too much faith in beliefs. But in Hebrew the words are clear if action does not reflect belief then the words are not real. Belief must affect every aspect of your life or it is an empty mental exercise. It is not solely in the words we read. Jesus is called the Word in Greek. But the Greek word used is a word of command. It is a Word that creates immediate action. We lose this meaning in English. Just as there are four words for With in Greek, at leasts seven words for Love, and Hebrew distinguishes Satan from satans in English translations all of this is lost. But it is a start. For this reason, I have found that the Bible is one of the absolute best sources to discern God’s intention as long as it is read with the guidance and presence of the Holy Spirit and not just by the mind – which can make mistakes. The mistakes are small and the Spirit can correct us in our mistakes, if we open ourselves to It.

Anyway, sorry I was not more active with this site and devoted too much time to whack a mole with the political and social problems. Our Republic cannot survive cut off from God.

Our society lies to you everywhere. One of those lies is that Christianity is a white European religion. It is not and it never has been. It was inspired by Semitic peoples in the Middle East and has more roots in Eastern Beliefs than it does in Greaco-Roman beliefs. To some degree our merging of Christianity with Western Philosophy – while giving new and valuable insights – also obscured the original message. That is whay I said we would be better off to study the Old Testament in the original Hebrew and take it for what it says and not for what we are told it says.

One last thought. The Holy Spirit, Wisdom, Breath/Wind/Spirit of God in Hebrew is always female and Elohim the name of God is plural . What does this mean. You will have to ask the Living God. For this is my last post – unless God or one of His servants sends me $200.00 to renew my subscriptions for another year in the next few days.

This is from my site SabersEdge.Online and has contact info: (see also https://sabersedge.online/be-part-of-the-struggle-for-freedom )

SabersEdge strives to be your voice and the voice of everyone who has been driven to silence by people who will attack you if you speak out. I was a soldier and I will speak out. My whole life is about fighting battles. I have always fought for America and Americans and I am fighting for you but I cannot do it alone. We can do it together.

You can reach us at SabersEdge.Online@gmail.com ; or at PO Box 433, Leavenworth, KS 66048; or support us through Patreon: SabersEdge Association is creating Videos, Blogs, and Writings for Education and growth | Patreon

May the Force Be With You and Guide You and I wish you all the best.

Rivan Elan / Pastor Daniel

Tested and Proven in Struggle As Children of the Living God

April 3, 2023 / Rivan_Elan aka Pastor Daniel / 0 Comments

It is common verbiage of Christians to ask if someone is “saved” and it was an important question in a society founded on predominately Christian culture and values. But it doesn’t make sense to most people today. It is confusing language. Saved from what and for what? Here, in Romans 5:1-11, Paul refers to us being “reconciled by the blood of Christ” but he goes on to use stronger language and says that we are no longer “enemies of God.”

Romans 5:1-11 – Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

This idea that we might be enemies of God will be surprising to some. “Surely,” they may say, “I am not an enemy of God. I’m basically a good person.” But it’s not so much a matter of good or bad but whose side are you on? Are you building a better world according to God’s plan or are you working against it?

To bring this into focus let me tell you a story.

Our society spreads the lie that we and the environment are like machines and so with certain actions, we can predict definite reactions. This is a lie. Neither we nor the environment is machines rather, we are organic and organisms have complex interactions that are hard to predict while machines are…well…mechanistic and much easier to predict.

As for the environment, we know that is not easy to predict because in the early 1970s, we were all taught in school that we were in an ice age and that pollution was going to cause an accelerated cooling that would destroy the world by the 1990s and cover all of North America and Europe in glaciers forcing the entire population of the US to move to Mexico and Europe to move to North Africa. Unless we acted immediately to do what society told us needed to be done – which was to stop killing trees. We needed to switch to plastic bags and cups instead of paper – thus giving our money to the petroleum industry so they could make us plastics. By the 1990s It was clear that no ice age was coming so they changed the emergency. About that time Al Gore began spreading the lie that global warming was going to destroy the world in about 20 years – that was over 30 years ago, but who is counting? We were told that an increase of a few degrees would melt the polar ice caps and flood all the coastal cities of the earth. We have already passed their initial period and the hypersensitive panicky people never bothered to notice that the temperature increase would put us back to the ambient temperature that existed in the year 1000 A.D. A time when humanity flourished and was not dying en masse. No the environment is not a machine nor is it easily predictable. Anyone who watches weather reports should know that. Predicting a week of weather can be hard enough without thinking about years from now. The world is an ecosystem made up of living organisms that must be treated with respect; a respect that the elite of our society does not have. They want us to trust them to fix the problems that they created. This is not only in the environment but in nearly every aspect of society and wholeness yet the experts have presided over the steady dissolution of a healthy environment. Now the plastic they encouraged us to use to “save the trees” (and make them richer) is polluting our oceans. Even those meaning to do well can be enemies of God and creation because they don’t know better and are not led by the Spirit of the Living God. They are strangers to the Divine Plan. And if you don’t know the plan how can you work with it?

In the same way that the world is organic and not a machine so are we. If we were machines we could replace our parts and continue functioning without a problem. But we are not and we cannot. For years I weighed over 350 pounds and had a 54-inch waist. I was too heavy and my back, my knees, and my feet always hurt. I never actually felt good during that time. My body was not made to carry that much weight and even stairs were difficult for me. I lost over a hundred pounds and now weigh closer to 220, but I was overweight for long enough that I gained a fatty liver as my body tried to purge my great mass of toxins by filtering them out. Eventually, when I caught Covid it seemed to attack my already weakened liver and my liver started to fail. If I was a machine we could replace it with another liver and I would be fine. However, I was told that even if my liver was functioning at only ten percent efficiency it would still work better than any transplant I might get. The liver I was born with was created for me and grew with me and would always work better than anyone that was added from another source – as long as it worked that is. Unfortunately, my fatty liver, abused by years of being overweight and eating over-processed foods, did not survive the assault of Covid on my body. It spiraled into oblivion and I was hospitalized more than 27 times in 2020 for my liver. In January 2021 it failed and I was rushed to the hospital from Lincoln to Kansas City in an ambulance.

Now, because I am not a machine but a complex organism, I have to take medicine every day so that my body doesn’t decide that my new liver is a foreign body that it must destroy. In other words, my body, trying to protect me from a foreign body would actually be killing me by attacking the liver that I need to live.

My own body can kill me by trying to save me. It would be my own worst enemy and it would just be doing what it thought was best for me. In the same way, we, a part of this world, can be enemies of God and attack the creation, harmony, and interaction of the Divine Order.

The cells of my body don’t know that if it attacks the liver it will die. My own body can become my enemy – although it doesn’t mean to be. It doesn’t know any better. In the same way, someone who is not “reconciled to God” can be an enemy of God without meaning to be. They can go about what they think is a good or even a compassionate act, and be working against the will of God. Perhaps this is what the Bible means when it says “There is a way that seems right to man, but it is a way that leads to death.” We don’t mean to be an enemies of God (unless we are a psychopath or a narcissistic sociopaths,) we just don’t know any better. Like my antibodies, we don’t know the plan and are acting against it to our own detriment.

As it happens, through meditation, my body has healed more than twice as fast as the doctors said I would need to recover. I believe this is because I can, in some rudimentary way, communicate with my body through meditation and prayer. Something has made a difference that the doctors weren’t expecting and I think that is what it is. In the same way, we need to be open to communication from our Creator, the Living Force if you will, and what it intends for us so that we can learn our natural place in the natural order of life.

The Greek word used by Paul here (that is translated as “reconciliation” is the same word that is used by Xenophon in the work Cryopaedia to signify “being brought into the royal court and introduced to the king.” This is the concept that Paul is using to communicate what happens when we are reconciled to the Living God through the cosmic sacrifice of Christ. Paul goes on to describe that this is necessary for us to live a life of “peace” with God. But not just peace, Paul who was a Jew, understood “peace” to be “shalom.”

This is another place where our language has a poor substitute for the original concept. Shalom is not just peace. Like so many words I have noticed translating from Hebrew, Greek, or even German into English the English language is a poor language for discussing the concepts of philosophy or theology. Ideas that other languages can encompass in one word we need a full paragraph or more to communicate the same idea in English. Our words are just too vague. Shalom, we translate as “peace” but Shalom is not just peace. It is a state of the mutual state of interdependence and universal flourishing in a universe in the truest meaning of the word. By that a mean a universe that is a “one-ness” of interconnected relationships where everything affects everything else in a ripple effect that ties us all together. Shalom describes a ripple effect that is mutually uplifting and enlightening throughout the Creation.

What Paul calls “reconciled to Christ” and what common vernacular just calls “saved” is a rich concept where we are introduced to the Living God (Divine Monarch of all existence,) so that It knows us and we know the Divine not as a stranger or as a slave but as a friend and ally. But more than that. We are taken into the family of the Living God and welcomed as children and heirs of the Divine promise and Realm. This is so complete that we are transformed from being an enemy of the “king” to being an ally and heir as a child of the Living God and by entering into the “kingdom of God” or Divine reality we enter into a state of mind where we can be led by the Divine Spirit and understand the mutual interdependence and flourishing and our place in it. A healthy relationship with, not only the Living God but with all of Creation.

This is a relationship with our environment that secular environmentalists can only dream of.

Through this reconciliation and we are brought into the “Divine Relationship” and a unity with the Living Force that created the Universe; we are united with the Creator of the universe and brought back into harmony with creation (or at least we have the door opened so that we can reach that point – if we so desire.) But, like everything else in life, it takes practice to live in harmony with the Divine and the Creation. We have become alienated from the natural order and, as Yoda says in the epic Star Wars, “You must unlearn what you have learned;” or as Paul says in his letters “you must be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Unfortunately, as Rev. John Wesley once said, most Christians sit on the threshold of the Kingdom of God and never fully enter into it (by which he meant they were reconciled but never fully entered into interaction with the Living God and Creation as we were designed to live). This is where so many Christian churches fail in my opinion. They act as if once you are saved it is all over. Instead, it is only the beginning of a new life in the presence of the Living God. You still need to learn to live in harmony with the Living Force. Only through being reconciled with the Living God can we ever truly reach our full potential in life and live in harmony with the rest of God’s creation. It’s like swimming against the current. Most people in life are swimming against the current but when you learn to walk in the Presence of the Spirit of God it’s like swimming with the natural currents of life instead of against it. Only then is the door open to us to truly be all that we can be.

This passage does not stop with being “saved” (the reconciliation that Paul speaks of.) No, this passage starts there. Reconciliation with the Creative Force that created the Universe and whose Will maintains the natural order is where we begin living the life we were intended to live. But we live in a world of challenges and trials because things are not what they were meant to be. Christianity describes this as a “fallen” world in which so many have turned away from the Divine Plan that the creation itself is “groaning” awaiting the “revelation of the children of the Living God” This passage goes on to describe that as well. But, it says, our challenges and trials (once we are reconciled to the Living God,) help us to become the people we were meant to be.

To use our bodies again for an analogy we are born with bodies that will become able to walk and even run. But we have to learn how. Our muscles must be strengthened and we must learn to coordinate our movements and learn to balance on our feet. If we never faced the trial of falling down and being unsteady, if we avoided this basic challenge and struggle of life that God intended, we would spend the rest of our life crawling (but even to crawl that was something we had to learn.) In the struggles we face in life, we learn how to do more. When we watch our children pull themselves up on furniture and move along it they use the furniture to aid their balance. We know, as parents, that if we don’t let them try and even fall sometimes, they will never learn to walk. Eventually, they try to take a few steps to move from the couch to the table. They always fall. They fall repeatedly and if we didn’t let them try and fall as parents we know that we would condemn them to crawl the rest of their life. In the same way we must learn to walk in life we also must learn to walk in the Holy Spirit. And that starts with reconciliation and living in the Spiritual Disciplines to improve and strengthen our relationship with the Living God.

The word Paul uses for the trials we face in life is thlipsis, a Greek word meaning ‘suffering, trials, affliction, hardships, trouble.’ We all face these things in life, and some people – those not strengthened by the Holy Spirit, may be broken. Once we are reconciled to the God of Nature/the Creator of Nature itself we are not broken by our trials but strengthened by the Spirit of the Living God through those very trials as part of the spiritual body of believers. Through this, Paul says, we have hope and our hope does not disappoint us.

These sufferings, trials, and afflictions that we face in life teach us how to maintain our equilibrium (or balance,) as we walk through life and adversity. Paul says these struggles build our endurance and help us to more clearly see God’s plan for our life and creation more. This endurance leads us to the character we need to become the people that God created us to be and to reach our full potential in life. This character, Paul says, then brings us back to the hope we had when we were brought into the royal court and introduced to the Divine Monarch of the Universe.

Here Paul uses another word, dokimus, it is a word that means that we are now “proven” and “tested.” Here Paul says that through our struggles we have “stood the test” and proven to be trustworthy, or of “sterling worth.” The words he uses indicate the process by which valuable metals are heated and their impurities are burned away to stand pure and of increased value. This is the process of making fine silver, gold, and even iron or steel. In each case, metallurgists test the metals for their impurities that degrade the metal. The heat of the fire burns those impurities away making a finer product. More beautiful gold or silver or weapons and armor that are stronger and more durable. Paul uses this word on purpose because he knows that the trials and struggles we face in life purify us just as the heat of fire purifies the metals. In so doing we become stronger. The impurities and distractions of life burn away and we see more clearly what is important. Only in this way can we be “proven” or “tested” for the life that is to come. This is how we become the person we were intended to be when the Living God formed us in our mother’s womb (as it says in the book of Isaiah.)

With greater endurance and character we become the tools for creating a better future in which we can boldly go where no civilization has gone before. Let’s look at that passage again:

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace [shalom/harmony/universal flourishing] with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand [a cosmic sacrifice that wipes clean any wrongdoing or failure in our life and gives us a fresh start, if we but claim it we are “saved”]; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God [as Children of the Living God and Creator of the Universe]. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings [thlipsis, the Greek word meaning ‘suffering, trials, affliction, hardships, trouble.’], knowing that suffering [suffering, trials, affliction, hardship and troubles] produces endurance [testing, purification, and strength], and endurance produces character [we are now proven and purified by the fires of our struggle strengthening our character], and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit [our guide and spiritual source of renewal and strength] that has been given to us.

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners [enemies of God working against the Divine Plan,] Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood [reconciled by being introduced and adopted in the Divine Court], will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life [through the death of Christ we were reunited with the Divine and now, finally, can truly start living]. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
Romans 5:1-11 [Annotated with comment]

We become the tools for the Tikkun Olam. This is the Hebrew phrase that means the repair of the world. Reconciled, proven, and tested, where we now work side by side with the Creator to repair and heal not only the Creation but also our fellow Saints in the spiritual body of believers. In other words, we are no longer “enemies” of God as we go through this life but co-creators with the Living God working together to create a better future and bring things more into alignment with how God intended things to be. Every day we choose to be faithful, or not, to the Divine Plan. In every act, we choose to work with the Divine or against it. We must be faithful to the same Living Force that gave us life and created the very universe itself, no longer as enemies, but as companions and Children of the Living God, heirs to the Divine Realm fulfilling our potential and becoming all that we were created to be until the universe is restored to a state of Shalom and universal flourishing.

An Amazing Story

October 16, 2022 / Rivan_Elan aka Pastor Daniel / 4 Comments

Amazing Grace is more than a much-loved song it also has a moving story behind it. This song is one of the two most commonly used songs at funerals and is often used in movies when a “religious” song is needed, it is one of the ten top hymns cited by pastors as significant in their “call to ministry.” In fact, in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott plays “Amazing Grace” to honor his fallen comrade Spock at that officer’s funeral. The song grew in fame and use through the American Civil War and during the Viet Nam war as well. But the story behind it is as fascinating as the song is moving.

Once you know the story it gives new depth to the all the words but especially the beginning:

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
Amazing grace by john newton, 1772

This song, beloved in the African American, and virtually all Christian communities, was one of over 200 hymns written by John Newton. Newton, ironically, was a slave trader and the son of a slave trader. Born to a Puritan mother who died just shy of his 17^th birthday, he first went to sea with his father at the age of 11 on his father’s slave ship. He became a careless libertine and drank heavily. As happened to many careless, raucous, licentious libertines in a seaport he was impressed into the British Navy, which heavily “recruited” drunk young men. He attempted to desert from the Royal Navy and received 8 bloody lashes across his back with a whip while tied to the mast for his escape attempt. Flogging was a common punishment back then and continued even into the 19^th Century where it persisted in the naval and military communities long after it stopped being used for civilian punishment.

Later, he followed his father’s path and became a slaver who hauled cargoes of African slaves to the New World for the Plantations in North and South America and the Caribbean. While serving on the ship the Pegasus Newton had some disagreements with the crew and they sold him into slavery to an African king and princess and marooned him in Africa. John Newton’s father engaged another ship captain to find and rescue him and, once rescued, he was sailing back to England when the ship became embroiled in a horrible storm. The ship’s side ruptured and took on water, and John Newton prayed for deliverance. Whereupon the cargo shifted in the storm in such a way that it closed off the hole and the ship was saved. John viewed this as an answer to his prayer and from that point on became a Christian. Although not a very good one, at first.

What so many fail to understand is that Christians are not paragons of virtue. As the saying goes churches are a hospital for sinners and not a museum for saints. Every cross should be read as an “under construction” sign perhaps along with “please excuse our mess.”

So, John determined to become a follower of Christ. What did that mean? Perhaps he had seen something about what that meant through his mother in his youth, and he now sought to learn what it meant to be a Christian and he started by regularly reading his Bible. But, in his own words he said:

“I cannot consider myself to have been a believer in the full sense of the word, until a considerable time afterward,” – John Newton

While he wasn’t sure what it meant to be a follower of Christ he knew that compassion and the “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” had something to do with it. He therefore determined to become the fairest, most compassionate slave trader the world had yet seen. He made three more voyages as the ship captain of slave ships the Duke of Argyle and the Arfrican. In 1754 he suffered a stroke and retired and in 1772 he became an Anglican Priest and finally came to the conclusion that being a slave trader was incompatible with being a Christian. Henceforth, he was an ardent abolitionist.

In 1772 he wrote Amazing Grace, and in 1788 he published a pamphlet that graphically described the horrors of the slave trade. The pamphlet was widely read and the description galvanized the opposition to slavery in the English world John Newton campaigned hard for its abolition. He lived to see the international slave trade abolished for both England and the newly minted United States (where the law banning the slave trade was signed into law by Thomas Jefferson who almost three decades earlier had written “all men are created equal” and so eloquently abjured the crown for trading in human beings – although his draft condemnation was not accepted as part of the final draft of the Declaration of Independence. Both the US and England stopped the international slave trade to their shores at the beginning of 1807 and John Newton died in December of that year, having seen this great work implemented in his lifetime.

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved.
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.
Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far
And grace will lead me home.
The Lord has promised good to me
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.
Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
and mortal life shall cease,
I shall possess within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.
When we’ve been there ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’ve first begun.
–John Newton, 1725-1807

AUSCULA – Listen With The Ears Of Your Heart

October 2, 2022 / Rivan_Elan aka Pastor Daniel / 1 Comment

The core of spirituality lies in listening. Saint Benedict said that we need to learn to “Listen with the ears of our heart.” In other words, we need to listen to that inner voice of intuition through which the Divine Presence speaks to all of us. If we will but listen. Perhaps this is why the first word in the Rule of Saint Benedict is Auscula, listen.

The example of Jesus is that he frequently retired from the crowds and withdrew into the wilds to pray. And we know how Jesus prayed because he told his disciples not to pray with a multitude of words. So, for Jesus, as for so many great spiritual teachers, communication with God had more to do with listening than with talking. Yet for so many of us, our own spiritual life is very different.

Too often our prayers are not about listening, learning, and then acting upon what God has told us, rather they look more like a want list. This stripped down to its starkest terms can be viewed as similar to saying, “O.K. Lord, this is what I want you to do. This is your assignment list for the next month. Your “Honey-Do List” from me. I would like you to…” once we have run down our list of what we want God to do we say “Amen.” Then we get up and go on with our life. Rarely, if ever, do we continue to sit in an attitude of prayer and allow the Divine Presence to tell us, “O.K. I understand what you want from me. Now let me tell you what I would like you to change in your life. Also, have you noticed that your neighbor lost their spouse? Have you said anything to them or spent time with them? They are very lonely you know. And, I would like you to reconsider the way you treated that phone solicitor the other day – that is a very hard job you know and they are just trying to survive. And you were a bit short with the grocery checker at the supermarket. You do know that was her first day, right?”

John Wesley had several “methods” for helping him in his spiritual life. One of them was his review of his day in prayer at each day’s end. Before retiring this Anglican priest would ask that the Living God show him where he did well and what opportunities he had to minister to others and represent the Divine Creative Force of the Universe to people that he encountered throughout the day. He encouraged all those who followed him “the Methodists” to do the same. In this way, he would learn from God in his prayer time as to how he could improve in his own life.

Meditation is another way to listen, depending on how you practice it meditation may facilitate listening a great deal or at least a little. Lectio Divina is yet another. I have already talked a little about meditation in my blog and my videos and soon I will talk about Lectio Divina.

But another way I want to discuss listening is to be aware as we go through our life that the Divine Presence is always with us. We don’t have to be in “prayer time” to hear God speaking to us. If you look at the accounts of the prophets in the Bible, and often of prophets in other faiths, they could hear God speaking through what was happening in their life. This is not easy. It takes a great deal of practice and openness to the Divine Presence – an openness that becomes a habit and not just something that we do sometimes.

I placed a Holy Water font at the front and rear exit to the house so that when I leave I can use it, make the sign of the cross, and say a quick prayer asking the Divine to show me, as I am out in the world, show me what I can do for you to make the world and the lives of those around me better. It only takes a couple of seconds. But it reminds me to be aware of the Presence of the Divine and what it might be saying to me.

In the Old Testament, the prophets would say things like, God took me down to the Potter’s wheel and I watched and he told me that God was forming us like this pot. And the pot developed a blemish that started small and became larger until it was deformed and the potter broke down the pot and reformed it. So God can renew us. Or that the potter took the unformed clay from the mud of the earth and turned it into a beautiful finished product. The prophets sometimes had dramatic visions in their meditations and during prayer and other times they simply knew that God was delivering the message through what was happening around them.

I remember a woman whose husband had died. Her family was close to her and helped her through the immediate time of the funeral but when she was left alone she was faced with the dramatic silence of being alone. She went to sit at her husband’s grave side and when she left she was starting to drive out of the cemetery and had to pull over because she could not see through her tears. She cried out to God and said “I cannot do this alone!”

Her deepest desire was to get help and reassurance from God. She looked through the windshield and realized that a beautiful butterfly had come and landed upon the glass. It sat there with her for a while and then flew off. She understood the symbols of Christianity and knew that the butterfly (which had fought its way out of the chrysalis to leave behind its worm-ness and become a beautiful butterfly,) was a symbol of rebirth and the presence of the Holy Spirit. She told me that at that moment she realized God was saying to her that this was a new phase in her life but that God was with her and she didn’t have to do it alone.

Similarly, my mother, after my father died found herself sitting on my Dad’s side of the bed in a similar state of despair. She didn’t know how she could go on. She heard what she described as an audible voice that was so clear that she looked around the room and then perceived it was the voice of God. It said, “Do not be afraid. I am with you.”

My father would walk with me and would often see something that prompted him to quote proverbs. He would show me how squirrels were busy in the summer gathering food so that they could live through the winter months. He would often say, “Listen to the trees, Daniel. Cottonwoods will talk to your more than any other of God’s trees. Hear the wind rustling the leaves? God can speak to us through that if we learn to listen.” I asked him once, as he sat on the bank of the lake with his fishing pole if he was catching any fish. “No,” he answered. “Sometimes, I just put the pole in the water because people leave you alone if they think you’re fishing. There’s no bait on the hook. It gives me time to think and talk to God. Come sit with me awhile and watch the way the light sparkles upon the water.”

If we truly wish to grow as faithful, spiritual beings we must learn to take action and live out our faith truly. To live out our faith we must be formed and study what it means to walk the spiritual path. I feel that the best means of study is Wisdom which has been proven by longevity and some of the oldest spiritual writings that have prevailed in the formation of human beings are the easiest to obtain. For over three thousand years portions of the Bible have guided people in their spiritual life and they are easy to find to guide us.

Faith is nothing if it does not include action in every aspect of our lives. If our faith is not revealed in virtually everything that we do and all of our interactions then it is not real. Instead of being an integral part of us, it is just a jacket that we wear when we desire to be seen as “spiritual.” This is a superficial trap. To truly be spiritual we must, as Saint Benedict said, listen with the ears of our hearts and the more we listen the more we will hear.

Action without meditation and divine guidance, as we are told in the Bible, makes us like a clanging gong or a clashing cymbal. We will always lose our way on our own if we don’t listen to that inner voice. If we don’t spend a substantial amount of our spiritual life reading, listening, and being aware of all that is around us then we will not realize what God is trying to say to us and we will truly be alone. The Divine Presence is always with us. We just need to learn to listen. The beginning of Psalm 19 tells us:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
    night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice[b] goes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world.
Psalm 19: 1-4

This holds true as much with our relationship with the Divine as it does with our relationships with people. My Dad used to say, “God gave you two eyes, two ears, but only one mouth. There is a message in that. You should watch and listen four times as much as you talk.”

A Time For Prayer and Meditation

August 10, 2022 / Rivan_Elan aka Pastor Daniel / 2 Comments

Prayer and Meditation, Orienting our Hearts and Minds to the Divine

When we think of prayer many of us think of Christian prayers that are either written out or extemporaneous. I believe both are valuable. But every religion has prayer and meditation. It is an act of striving to communicate with our deepest selves as well as the Living Force, the Ground of All Being, the Source of All Life. Every religion from the Far East to Rome to the Bible Belt of the Midwest has references in their scriptures to ‘prayers rising like incense‘ as well as to the importance of meditation. I hope you will join your intentional prayers, meditations, and light to ours by keeping the prayer list from ofNaturesGod.com in your heart and mind.

Join Our Community & Prayer List

In this blog, I will give a very brief introduction to prayer and the importance of having a regular time of prayer as part of our Spiritual Discipline and practice. In future blogs, we continue a brief series focusing on prayer and how to “listen with the ears of our heart.” Then we will look at Centering and Mediation. However, because of the nature of blogs, we will only be able to scratch the surface here but we will go into much more detail, for those who are interested and join the ofNaturesGod community through Patreon. We cannot do that here unless that was all that we did here and there is much for us to discuss and many facets of our spiritual lives to cover here.

Indeed most religions have practices that include lighting candles and/or incense during a time of prayer and meditation. This symbolizes that the prayers rise to heaven even as the smoke rises from the candle or the incense. Although I am clear about the Divine Presence is everywhere about us and within us, and that it is the presence in which we live move, and have our being I still light a candle and incense on my home altar each morning. I do that not for God. Not to appease some Divine overlord or make an offering to keep him from smiting me. I do it out of love to help orient my thoughts and my actions for the day to the Divine Presence. As I go about my morning and day seeing the candle or incense burning reminds me of where my heart draws its strength from and that we are not alone. As I light them I say a quick prayer to the Trinitarian Presence as I understand it:

Queen of Heaven,* Lord of Light, Eternal Holy One be with me and guide me this day, strengthen and guide me as I go about my business, and defend and sustain me against all trials.

(or something similar).

For many, prayers of this sort coupled with a quick prayer at bed, rising, and/or before and after meals is the extent of their prayer life. It was the extent of mine when I was a child. My life changed when I was 12 and had my first religious experience and my heart turned more to God. I would like to say I have served th Lord of Life faithfully since but my spiritual life has been ups and downs rising to the gates of heaven and wallowing in the muck of swamps that were largely of my own design.

I want to talk to you about taking your spiritual life deeper.

First, you must understand that we are creatures of habit. Because we are physical creatures ritual is important and has a powerful effect on our spiritual life. That is one thing I like about Catholic services. They are deep in ritual. However, because we are physical creatures we run the risk of going about these rituals habitually without thought and without engaging our hearts or emotions in the actions. Rituals practiced in this way are worse than useless. I say they are worse because following these rituals of prayer or whatever we may do, even attendance at Mass or Worship and service to the poor IF they are done without engaging our hearts, or if they are done as a slave seeking to avoid the master’s punishment, they can give us the illusion that we are doing something “spiritual” and that we are right with God when we are not. However, if we perform the ritual as a way of moving our hearts and consciousness toward the Divine Source they are very powerful. Scott Cunningham, a Wiccan, to be sure has described Wiccan Ritual as Prayer with props. These rituals are powerful as a way to give our body something to do as our mind and heart orient upon the Divine. Similarly, I found that praying the Catholic Rosary sometimes “got my mind out of the way” so my heart could pray directly to my Creator. The Bible says when we are distressed sometimes the Spirit intercedes for us with “sighs to deep for words.” Indeed, it was reading his books on Wicca that made me realize he had directed his heart to that Creative Force that controls and created the universe. A Force that I knew, among other names, as Yahweh or Elohim.

It is possible to “go through the motions” and never orient your heart to this Divine Source. To just do the ritual with your body and mouth while your mind and soul go elsewhere and worry about grocery lists, your project at work, what to feed the kids, or any of billions of questions we could consider instead of touching the Source of Life. Jesus said, many will come to me on that day (when they die and on the day of judgment) and say “Lord Lord!” in joyful greeting and he will say, “Get away from me you doers of iniquity! I never knew you!” Unfortunately, I think many who attend our churches, as well as many who don’t, may be in that group who are rejected. In other words many who follow rituals or religious practices but never engage their hearts or enter into a living interacting relationship with the Divine may believe they are being spiritual because they are doing the right “things” but its like turning on a lightswitch that has no power to it. You can flip the switch all you want – you may do the right thing but the light will not come into your life. You need to complete the circuit and activate the power. The power of our heart, our intention, the emotion and not just of our mind.

I often qoute a diddy that Fr. Hoolighan, an Irish Catholic, once shared with me:

Mr. Business went to church; he never missed a Sunday; But Mr. Business went to hell; For what he did on Monday.

Saint Benedict told us the most important aspect of prayer was not speaking but learning to listen with the ears of our heart. How do we do that? While I will go into more detail in future blogs this question of how do we live, breathe, and pray in the prescence of the Divine is vital to all of us? We will cover that two blogposts from now and go into even more detail in our community. Indeed, that is one of the things I created the ofNaturesGod Patreon community to help with but I will strive to help everyone here in a general way, as I am able: www.Patreon.com/ofNaturesGod

Because we are creatures of habit if we can resist doing things habitually. Doing them without thinking and without engaging our heart or intention and keep our whole existence focused on the Divine then the rituals can actually help us get in touch with our Creator, that Creative Force that brought forth life and ordered all creation.

Time of Prayer and Meditation

If we have and keep a regular time of prayer and meditation our body orients its internal clock toward the Ground of All Being. If you create such a regular habit and you miss your time of prayer and meditation you are likely to have your subconscious remind you, “Aren’t we usually praying or meditating about now?” Similarly, when we enter our regular time with this Living Force, our body, our consciousness, and our soul all naturally orient toward the Source of All Life because doing so has become a living ritual. If we get it into the “habit” of doing so at a particular time our body and consciousness adjust. This does not preclude us from doing so at other times as well for the Divine Presence is always with us. But because we are physical creatures having a regular time in which we are not interrupted, when we consciously turn our hearts toward that Presence in which we live, move, and have our being, is very valuable to us for our spiritual development, our health, our balance, and our resilience in life.

I learned from one of the Saints of the Church to put up a sign to salesmen and people who come to our door (or maybe even to tell family members,) that you are in a time of prayer and not to be disturbed.

“Please Be Quiet and Do Not Knock on the door. I am at my regular prayer time and I will not answer. Please come back later.”

A note like this or something similar can reduce your interruptions. Shut off your phone and shut off the notifications on your computer or go where you cannot hear them to ensure that your full heart and attention can be oriented toward the Divine Presence. If you are distracted by noises outside play soft music without words (that is important because words will distract you – even if they are holy songs.)

I was in deep in prayer and struggling with an issue that I had not talked to anyone but my wife about. My prayer time had actually become kind of a time where I was arguing with God and telling the Creator of the Universe that He/She/It had made a mistake and that I was really not the person to do the job that I felt the Lord of LIfe was pushing me to do. (Yes, I will argue with anyone.) During that time I had a knock on the door! Didn’t they read the note? I usually ignore it but something made me answer this time.

“May I help you?”

“Hi, you probably don’t remember me. My sister brought me with her to your church once last year to listen to your preach and we met briefly after church.”

“Yes, I do actually remember you. How can I help you.”

“Well, I don’t know what you believe about Christianity. I know people have different ways of thinking…”

“Yes,” it was clear to me whatever it was was difficult for her so I thought I needed to say something to help her get out what she was trying to get out.

“Well, I was praying and God told me I need to come here and tell you something. May I tell you his message so God will leave me alone and I can get back to my regular prayers?”

“I think I know what you mean,” I smiled. “Yes, you may tell me what message God has for me.”

“God told me to tell you: ‘You need to accept the power that God wants to give you.’ Does that make any sense to you?”

“Why yes, it does. In fact, I was just arguing with God about that very thing when you knocked. I guess I need to listen and obey instead of arguing. I think God would like me to tell you, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’ That was a very important message to me. Thank you.”

She left and I never saw her again.

But I will never seriously entertain anyone who tries to tell me that the Creator, the Universe, the Ground of All Being, the Source of Life, the very Presence in which we live move and have our being doesn’t care about us and doesn’t interact with us. My entire life is an experience to the contrary and I would say if yours has not been it is not because God doesn’t care about you but perhaps it’s because you are too busy or self-absorbed to hear the Divine Force which may speaking in that still small voice heard by the prophet Elijah in the Old Testament. Quietly speaking, and waiting for you to slow down, be still, and listen.

If you haven’t experienced that, if no one has ever taught you to listen with the ears of your heart, follow me here or join me on Patreon and I will help you learn to listen with the ears of your heart so that we may all grow close to the Source of Life.

[Watch for the upcoming blogs on A Place of Prayer and Listening With The Ears of Your Heart.]

Against the Darkness!

July 31, 2022 / Rivan_Elan aka Pastor Daniel / 0 Comments

I know that many think there is no evil but I have experienced something that seems to feed upon negative emotions, suffering, and destruction and it hates the light, joy, and love. In its presence, the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand up and I feel cold, sometimes dizzy. Things that terrorize children and cause them to scream and point when adults no longer have the eyes to see, where animals brace and growl with the hair on their back standing up and they jump if you reach out to reassure them. Perhaps you want to call it something else but it seems to me that this is exactly what evil is and how it has been described for millennia.

I have performed a couple of exorcisms as a pastor and investigated infestations of an unseen presence. Besides paranormal groups, my youngest son and my wife have worked with me to investigate various unseen presences. I was contacted by some friends of a family member who needed a minister to accompany them to an investigation in Omaha. In this investigation, there were two children that had died but continued to come up and play with their toys. Their toys would roll, bounce, or otherwise go across the room, and it was a flat floor – the wind does not account for the ball bouncing down the hall toward us. However, the toddler girl who was still alive in the family was terrified of a “diamond man” who came into her room.

The investigation seemed to indicate that the deceased grandmother was present protecting the spirit children and the young girl who saw the diamond man. Both the husband and the wife had experienced the man’s mother (now deceased,) coming in and sitting on the edge of the bed, as she did when had been alive. They not only felt her sit down but when the lights were on they could see the indentation in the bed. She seemed to remain in the house and would hurry the spirits of the children into another part of the house when the “diamond man” showed up. Talking with the family we decided to cleanse the house with sage and prayers and try to get the diamond man to leave without banishing the children or grandma. As far as I know, it worked. I didn’t hear from them again.

This story about the grandma sitting on the bed reminded me of when I was just about to fall asleep, I was very depressed and down. My wife and I were staying in different places and were not getting along. I was lonely and I felt my German Shepherd get on the bed. I had two but the female seemed to have the idea that when my wife was gone that she became the alpha female and I woke up once or twice with the dog in bed with me with her head on my wife’s pillow. The dogs weren’t allowed on the bed because I had asthma back then. Anyway, the lights were off and I felt the dog climb up onto the bed, kinda surreptitiously like so that I wouldn’t notice. I did notice because I knew what it felt like and had caught her trying that before. “Claire get down!” I commanded as I sat up and turned on the light (we had named our dogs Francis and Claire after St. Francis and his sister in Christ. It was then I realized that Claire had died a couple of years ago and Francis was in the hallway and came to the door to see what I had yelled about. I shut off the light and lay back down. “Claire, you can get back on the bed if you want to. I miss you.” She had to be put to sleep due to cancer and as I held her when she died she licked my wrist. Kinda broke up my son, and me.

There are other times I know of spirits making a difference. I had a parishioner awakened once by her husband. “You need to get up the house is on fire!” She immediately got up and dressed and turned around, asking her husband what was burning. It was then she remembered that her husband had recently died. I could offer many other stories. Another parishioner feels she was warned by God that her husband was dying. She was alone in her house doing dishes and someone said “Go check on Verlin.” She was startled and thought someone was in the house with her. She searched the house but no one was there. She went back to her dishes and heard it again only louder and more insistent, “Go check on Verlin!” She got into the pickup and drove out to the field where he was working and his hand had been severed by the threshing machine. She drove him to the emergency room in Cameron, which was miles away, and they were able to save his life and re-attach his hand. He was in shock so he couldn’t have helped himself. The voice saved him.

As I told my son when he was little and came up and told me about a little girl he saw. With kids, you never know if it is an imaginary friend or what. But I have always believed the reason we don’t see things is we have been taught by society that this stuff isn’t real. So we come to dismiss the information our senses take in. Children don’t yet know this but I have become convinced that everyone has at least some potential in this area. (Army experiments reported in Military Intelligence magazine in the 80s – the unclassified experiments, obviously – demonstrate with 98.6 percent statistically significant results that everyone has some sort of psychic or telekinetic ability. But it’s like walking and running. Almost everyone can do it but that doesn’t mean everyone can be an Olympic runner.) Anyway, I asked my son to describe her. He did and I had seen her in the house too. (A friend told me she had known everyone who had lived in my house and no one died there. But the girl wore a shift that looked like it was from the 1800s and I venture to say that she couldn’t have been sure that no one had died in this spot then.) “Did she scare you?” I asked my son. “No, she wasn’t scary at all.” “I don’t think so either son. I think she is just someone who died and is here because we can see her. Maybe she’s lonely, I don’t know. But you tell me if it gets scary at all and then we can do something about it.”

When I was young I explored the occult and summoning things from other realms. That didn’t go well. I left for the Army but people complained about things in my folk’s basement where I had lived. When I came home on leave I woke up and saw an evil-looking face staring at me. I told my sister who was a pastor and had first taught me to meditate and who was “powerful in the Force.” But we didn’t do anything since we decided it must have been a dream. But, we noted, that my German Shepherd at the time, refused to go downstairs to my bedroom and living room. He stayed on the landing. He always slept on or at the foot of my bed between me and the door. Always. But not here. We went out to dinner and left him downstairs since my mom didn’t like dogs or animals in the house. When we came back he had tried to get out of the basement landing. We knew that because of this 120 lb. The German shepherd had gouged scratch marks a quarter inch deep in the door leading to the upstairs. Curiouser and curiouser. He never had had such anxiety before…maybe it was the new place? Later, my mom called a furnace repair man. She took him downstairs and showed him the furnace. She was then working in the kitchen at the top of the stairs when she heard this man run up the stairs and slam his way through the door to the outside. She followed him out and he was trying to light a cigarette but his hands were shaking. My mom asked him if something was wrong and he said, “No, I’m alright I was just startled. You didn’t tell me you had a dog it surprised me and I guess my imagination ran away with me.” He smiled uncertainly. My mom was confused. “I don’t have a dog,” she said. “Do you have some kind of pet, grey and black, furry, and about yay big?” He held his hands about 2 feet apart. “No,” she said. He didn’t say anything. She went back inside as he looked away and smoked his cigarette. After a while, she thought she should see if he was alright. He had left leaving his tool bag and a thick binder downstairs. She called him up and reminded him he left his stuff and asked if he wanted to get it or if she should send it to him. He said no. He didn’t want anything to do with anything that is or had been in her basement. Then my mom finally decided maybe there was something going on. She called my sister and my sister went downstairs and investigated. She wrote me that I had opened a portal and when we got back she would help me with how to do, and close those things.

The darkest encounter I had, besides my portal, was ironically in a church. The thing I exorcised was the darkest encounter I had experienced up to that point. As I said, when the pastor told me they thought there was something in their church and God seemed to tell her in prayer that I could help. While I thought that it was odd since I had always thought that demons couldn’t enter hallowed ground I thought perhaps some parishioners had brought negative energy in with them and that was why she said she couldn’t feel the presence of the Holy Spirit in there. She could feel it in prayer and preparing for her sermon but when it came time to preach she said it was like there was a heaviness upon her and she had trouble just getting through the service.

I had never felt anything when I had visited but I tend to shut off my feelings so I am not bombarded by things day to day. Since I am used to closing off my feelings day to day I hadn’t felt anything and I thought there might be some residual negative energy there from a family with a bad attitude maybe some generational stuff and just some “bad vibes.” But I had written a prayer naming who I thought the chief actor was. And prepared by a ritual bath, prayer, and meditation, and blessing of my accoutrements and garments. When I got to the church I entered and stood in the foyer and opened my awareness up. It was like I was hit with a wall of dark energy so powerful and malignant that I staggered backward as if I had just been hit by a wall of wind from a massive storm. My wife steadied me and kept me from falling over, yes, I was literally staggered. With god’s help, I rallied and started reading the prayer I had prepared. As I read my prayer it was difficult and when I came to the part where I named the person I suspected and the forces of darkness my throat closed and I couldn’t speak the words. I could only read part of it invoking God’s presence but not the power phrase that would banish any evil and darkness. I determined to do what I could read as much as I could I began blessing every room, every window, and every doorway. I blessed the pulpit, lectern, and the chancel area especially thoroughly with holy water, incense, and prayer and visualizations. I finally came to an ancient full-length mirror in a children’s Sunday School room I looked into it and immediately felt as if I was falling into it like a vortex, it felt like some sort of portal. I gave it some extra attention and closed it as I had been taught. Anyway, at some point I somehow knew for a fact two things: 1) I could now read the whole prayer, including the banishing commands; and 2) whatever was there in that church and watching me did not know that I was able to complete it. So I kept this information to myself and did not change anything I was doing until I reached what I had determined was a key room for this dark presence and then finished the entire prayer giving the banishing commands in a loud command/drill sergeant voice. Instantly we heard a door slam. We had opened every door in the church and I thought someone had come in and ran out in a huff during the ceremony and prayers. It would have had to have been someone with a key because all the external doors were locked. No one was outside and no one had left the building. We went through looking to see what door had slammed but they were all open and the external access doors were all still locked. But the door slamming was so loud it echoed in the church. Years later I was talking to someone who said, condescendingly, “Yeah, we tend to find what we think we are going to find.” “Yes we do,” I agreed. “But that is not relevant here. EVERYTHING I have ever read and believed said that demons and evil presence cannot stay on holy ground that has been blessed. This was a church and I didn’t think this evil presence could be there. It was absolutely NOT what I was expecting. I expected a vaguely uneasy feeling, not a presence more powerful than I was.” Later, I reflected upon it and realized that in the mainline denominations there are a lot of ministers who say the prayers and go through the ritual but don’t speak with their hearts and emotions in it. So they are just repeating empty words and not actually blessing anything. Prayers from a priest like this are of little use. One pastor came to the aid of a family and prayed for them, apparently thinking it was just psychological and if he went through the motions they would be better. It got worse. He came back and almost through a Bible at them and said “This stuff isn’t real. You need to read your Bible and come to church.” I found that interesting since, if HE read his Bible, he would find that stuff in there. As he would in nearly every other single religion in history if he read their scriptures. An angel destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, another killed all the firstborn of Egypt in a single night. Even fallen and cut off from God the fallen angel or demon would be…something people on their own cant deal with. Fortunately we are not on our own.

Oh, I forgot to mention. One of the neatest things I have seen: the tech guy was setting up the equipment for the above house investigation. One of the things he used was one of those sensors that are used in VR gaming so that you can move and act out in the game. The leader of the investigation was a musician by trade and a song came on the radio he liked. He started dancing in the kitchen, by himself, to the music. The tech guy motioned me over. We looked on the sensor’s screen and you could see a stick figure of the guy dancing. The amazing thing was there were two little kids (presumably the ones who had recently died and were still playing with their toys,) dancing with him. One on either side. It was fascinating to look at the man, dancing alone, and then to look at the screen and see the three dancing together.

After this event, I began to think that I didn’t want to deal with this stuff but also that God had raised me up to deal with this stuff. I was praying to God about it and saying that I am not the best person for this spiritual fight because everything says you must be pure and holy and I was “just me.” In the midst of my prayer time, there was a knock on the door. It was someone I didn’t know but she said, “I don’t know if you remember me but you are my sister’s pastor and I heard you once. This may sound really weird to you but I was praying and God gave me a message for you and he won’t leave me alone until I deliver it. I don’t know what it means but maybe you do.” That was different. “OK, what is the message?” “You need to accept the power that God wants to give you.” When I was twenty-one I had a near-death experience and almost died in an army hospital. The angel told me I could come into heaven if I wanted but that God sent me here for a purpose and I had not yet accomplished my mission. It was up to me whether I returned to Earth or entered the kingdom at that time. I had a parishioner tell me once I had great faith. I said “no I don’t Faith is an assurance of things unseen. I have been to the gates of heaven and seen it. So I cannot claim to have faith. I’m too stubborn and I had to be shown.” This stuff is all very real.

But before you cry ghost or demon you should always try to rule out every single logical explanation that you can think of. My son has always liked ghost hunting shows and I am very critical of them and skeptical. That may seem odd considering my experiences but I think some of the shows are hilarious and fake…a few are not. Some of it is my experience as a counterintelligence agent and security director. I have done over 3000 investigative interviews and have both experience and training in investigation and reading the body language of liars. Sometimes it is apparent in these shows. But I greatly respect Ed and Lorraine Warren as well as the clairvoyant Derek Acorah and the work they did in their life. But, as my pastor friend said, “Fr. @@@@ has told me that out of hundreds of cases in Nebraska the Catholic Church has only acknowledged a few as demonic. We were talking and he didn’t believe in demons except as a psychological construct. I responded, “M., did you hear what you just said? A few ARE demonic.” Please don’t experiment with this stuff. Someone I know brought into their life something I call efreets by experimenting with psychic phenomena and astral travel, they appear as a smokey column with red eyes. The family started all sleeping together because their toddler was terrified. I don’t know that these ARE efreets. That is just the creature of myth that most closely resembles it.) It terrified the family until I got rid of it. At some point, the most logical explanation IS that there are ghosts or demons.

People, please do not try to deal with any of this on your own or treat it like a game. Don’t read this and think, I want to experience stuff like this! These things can scratch you, pummel you, and even hurl you against the wall. And, as some investigators have found out, sometimes, once you get their attention. They focus on you. People I know who have paid for their mistakes.

Pray that you don’t find out this is real. But if you have, I would like to hear about it below in the comments.

Of Nature’s God

July 30, 2022 / Rivan_Elan aka Pastor Daniel / 2 Comments

Here we are talking about whatever it is that is out there that gives meaning, life, stability, patterns, and some semblance of order to the Universe. It has been called many things, “Das Ding an Sich” (the Thing in Itself), the Ground of All Being, the vast otherness, the Divine, the Force, the Living Force, the Ancient of Days, Fate, Destiny, the Universe, YHVH, Allah, the God of Nature (or Nature’s God), or simply God (and for some this concept is a unitarian one, for others a trinitarian one, and still others a multiplicity. )

I believe in Panentheism. Most people understand pantheism and many confuse these two terms just as so many confuse cavalry and calvary. Like the two “c” words the two “p” words are very different.

Panentheism is the belief that the divine is in all things. Not just reflected in all things but it is what Paul TIllich said is what we live in, move in, and have our very being. That is another word for God I forgot…Being. What Moses was told when he asked what God he was talking to he was simply told “I Am” or “I Am That I Am” or more colloquially “I be what I be.” Obi-Wan, in a galaxy far far away and a long time ago described it as an energy field that surrounds all and connects all living things. It can and will guide us if we let it. Master Yoda said it surrounds us and protects us from harm.

Some people have trouble separating these two thoughts: that everything is itself divine of its own power and might, and that everything is infused BY divine power and might. Saint Paul in the Book of Romans says, “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and the God’s Spirit dwells in you.” God is not only close but part of us. If you look at The Call you will get an idea of some of what I am speaking of here.

But why bring up Yoda and Obi-Wan they are fiction. Be serious. I am. The Force was developed when George Lucas spent long hours of conversation with a great scholar of gods, heroes, and myths named Joseph Campbell. The roots of the Jedi lie in ancient Eastern Culture and it is no accident that they resemble the mystic masters of antiquity in powers and attitude.

But I’m a Christian and that was developed in the West not some Eastern religion, some would argue. My Bible instructor at Seminary would have disagreed with you. He would have said that Christianity is largely Western Greek Philosophy artificially grafted onto an Eastern Religion and to properly understand the Bible you have to understand that the Bible came out of the Middle EAST and they had a more Eastern than Western mindset in the Old Testament while the New Testament was a mix.

For me, it is a vast mystery that we can interact with and I have no interest in arguing whose God is better or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I am interested in exploring what people have said about this bewildering vast presence and expanding my knowledge of it. I invite you to come along. I will often refer to this power that created the Universe, Natural Laws, and the fascinating pattern that underlies all existence at the micro and macro levels as The Divine, God, the Force, the Living Force, Tao, Nature, the Universe, Nature’s God, or by the name that is used by whatever source I am quoting to give knowledge.

In general, I honor the ancient scriptures and will try to meet them where they are, mediated by my own experience of the divine, my powers of reason, and tradition.

I invite you to come along.

I am Rivan Ělän’. (Prounced Rivǝn Ělän´)