We have lived in the Twin Cities area for over 40 years, but I keep a soft spot in my heart for the farming area in northeastern North Dakota that we originated from. The conservative, traditional Western (Western civilization, not Western United States) values, honored by most North Dakotans, are my personal set of values.
I continue to subscribe to the home county paper, The Cavalier Chronicle. I do this to attempt to stay grounded with the sensible, humane culture of my youth. One of my favorite articles weekly in the Chronicle is a Christian message shared with the public. Now I am not a Christian, but I do believe Jesus is divine and the son of God. I am quite fond of Jesus and Christians, so I hope no one holds it against me for being influenced by the analyzing the messages that this public sermon provides weekly.
Here is the sermon from the week of March 1, 2022. It was on Page 7 and was entitled: The New You: “When we receive God’s Holy Spirit, a new life begins. Life no longer turns on rules imposed on us. Our inner self governs, bringing goodness and integrity. We live from the inside out, not outside in. This week in church, join others who are born anew.
You must be born from above. John 3:1-17.”
My response: My first impression is admiration that so many rich ideas are presented with so few words, and how those concepts are interwoven to create a Christian narrative: The adult is born again, this time spiritually, once she has invited the Holy Spirit into her heart, soul and being; now in a state of grace, a free gift from God, freely given by God, not earned. Her new life as a born again Christian now commences. For a Mavellonialist like me, a parallel experience would be asking the Divine Couple or the Good Spirits to deliver into our hearts and psyches, the gift of divine grace so that we can be born again as thinkers, believers, loving adults, and existers.
I do not quite agree that life no longer turns on rules imposed upon us. Rather, I suggest that a living angel will make the rules of the world—politically, socially, and economically—that he agrees to live under--as a citizen socially self-contracting with others to live in this federal state of ordered liberty.
What happens in the world, in all areas, deeply influences how the private person is succeeding or failing to be a spiritually and morally good person. Remember how groupist we are innately, so willing to suppress our personal desires and our consciences to gain or keep cheap, fleeting social approval. We need, as living angels, as individuators-anarchist supercitizens, to be very politically active running the affairs of the world around us, so that the conditions optimum for personal and collective well-being are instituted and perpetuated, the rules governing all of us from outside of us.
The aim of the citizens in a community, a county, a state and a nation is to bring about a free market constitutional republic where the people are governed by leaders and rules that do not conflict with the knack and power of citizens to govern themselves from within, where goodness and integrity are pervasive.
With a state of society where most people were supercitizens and living angels, the worldly conditions would be God-centered and yet secular and material, but organized in such as way as to not be corrupt or conflict with the inner life of believers living like monks, in this world, not of this world, ruled by inner forces, while not going against rules generated by rulers in the outer world.
For God to return to earth, it would be that the secular world would be a world of grace and justice and liberty, and people could speak and live their spiritual openly and publicly if they so wished, or quietly and internally withdrawing from this world in prayer and meditation while still in this world.
I would define being born again as a worthy and achievable goal. It is not only doable but is consistent with self-realizing, and maverizing may be the most powerful, empirical evidence that once is born again and is living this rebirth.
No comments:
Post a Comment