Meditating to Heal

Incarnational, Queer Love

Who are we to judge? We judge by man’s laws, not God. God loves all His children; therefore, God loves those who love no matter whom they love. We must do the same if we profess to be children of God. Jesus was tortured and executed because He threatened the power of those who had a narrow interpretation of Mosaic law. Those who label themselves as part of the LBGTG population also threaten those in power.

Jesus asks us to follow two commandments; Love God with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself. If we love God, then we have no room in our hearts to not love our neighbor, no matter who our neighbors love.

© Russell Kendall Carter

Imagine a space, that –

between us; with

God’s presence,

our gatherings are blessed.

With God,

what was separate –

joins us in harmony,

joins in love.

Between those in love –

there can be no gap.

© Russell Kendall Carter

     I find that as humans we are hoarders; we fear letting go of those material possessions that seem to be so important. Deep inside, we know that these are temporary; when we die, we die alone, walking into God’s eternal kingdom. Unfortunately, it is the same with our spiritual possessions, and by this, I mean what we have been taught in Sunday School. Those ideas and those statements we are made to memorize are also possessions we fear to lose.

     Now that this pandemic is ebbing, we are anxious and excited to return to our churches, not remembering that God does not live in our churches. God lives everywhere, particularly in our hearts. For this entire year, the Holy Spirit has been nurturing us, keeping our souls free of trouble, unravelling the horrors of what could have been. Our churches have not provided the necessary comfort we have needed. Facebook services just do not satisfy our souls; so, we look elsewhere. Few turn to God directly, because we are taught that only through our clergy can we speak with God.

     Jesus never said this. Jesus always said our faith has cured us. Nowhere in his teachings can you find mention of the church or the clergy as conduits to God. God is within us. There are many ways to interpret this. I choose that God, through the Holy Spirit, is always within my spiritual and blessed being. I cannot see this; I can only feel this as I spread love with all I meet.

     John reminds us in Revelation that all we must do is knock on god’s door; as we enter, we are greeted, nurtured, and fed.

     I rise each morning singing with praise for God for He shows me a new world of Love each morning, allowing me to let go of my mortal fears.

© Russell Kendall Carter

My destiny is Love;

I am something unknown,

Making Love more important.

I live in openness,

for God to grant creativity.

I have no stability,

for it is illusion –

without Love.

I await Jesus in my heart;

His every word is pure.

This is my destiny!

© Russell Kendall Carter

We are naturally transformed as we age in spirit; I believe that this is a natural occurrence, otherwise we could never cope with the world around us. If we practice stillness in our hearts when we meditate or pray, we grow spiritually along with our growth as humans. The obvious outcome is sharing our life with those around us. We cannot be hesitant about this. We must be one with all.

Stillness is the key here; without this stillness we can never attune our soul, our spirit, to leave our self-created cocoons. I agree that with this comes a general awakening to God’s reality and ever presence in our lives. We must practice meekness in our relations with all, allowing God to do His work.

I know that my greatest gift for my fellow man is to show up and be present in his or her life. I must leave my ego behind; leave my preconceived ideas of what should be and prevent any material jealousies to taint this process. I must be still within the present. Together in the moment of stillness, we ground ourselves in the Word of God, ground in His Love. God’s Love is the bread of life.

Let Love be Genuine!

I find that every day after I meditate, I desire to write. I take a phrase or two from the Bible; I take a word or a thought from a prayer or another meditation that I may read and then I turned to writing. I write simply because in my own mind I have a difficult time understanding how decrepit and sinful the American Society has become, even though it is supposedly based on Christian values.

Jesus said that the greatest commandment is that we should love God with all our hearts and with all our minds and with our whole body; and then He said the second of these is the same as the first: to love our neighbor as ourself. Love our neighbor as ourself!

If we were to love our neighbors as ourselves, understanding that both of us are children of God, we are equal, regardless of what color we are, what religion we practice, how good or not so good we are. We are all God’s children; so, for us to say that someone is not as good as I am because I am white, because I am male, because I am straight, makes no sense at all.

What we must remember is that if we truly love in our heart all with whom we come in contact, there can be no room for hate, and if there can be no room for hate, love creates a logical order so that all in God’s realm will succeed. Physically we may different; some of us are athletes, some have greater intellect, some are maimed by society, both psychologically and physically, so in that respect, in the purely human respect, we are not equal as far as our abilities are concerned; but we are equal with God and according to our constitutional law.

Never despise, condemn, or never speak with anger of anyone, and God will give us peace. Let us use the invitation of love to restore a genuine Godly society.

© Russell Kendall Carter

We are born from the womb to a bright world of wonder. We are guided by God’s representative, our mother, into a world of promise. Yet the pressures of man’s society force us to make decisions that lead us further away from our prenatal promises of light and life, causing us not to believe in God, or at least not to trust in God.

We are taught to make our own decisions that more often than not causes others to be left behind, when in fact, by biblical rule and Jesus teaching us, we should do the opposite. Unlike an animal that knows its master, we do not know God, and if we did, we would probably ignore him. Few of us follow scripture.

When we are called to make the right decision, or rather, when we make the right decision, according to God’s wishes, we rise from spiritual darkness to the new light of rebirth, greeted by a wonder world. I also know that when we die, we experience the same awe and wonder entering God’s world that we experienced when we entered this, the difference being everything!

When God breathes life into us, the Holy Spirit enters; we are born of water and the Spirit. We feel it in our very core, the thinking heart given by God, that this spirit-enhanced life is to be shared. God invites us to share this goodness (Godness) with all.

© Russell Kendall Carter

Spiritual Unity

I found today’s message from the CAC to be very much in line with my faith in God. I love the passage in Psalms 104: “I will sing to the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live. May my meditation be pleasing to him, as I rejoice in the Lord.” I consciously make every attempt to live up to what Richard Rohr says of Plotinus, “If we are in unity with the Spirit, we are in unity with each other, and so we are all one.”

We are all connected through our creation and through the Love of God. When Jesus breathed on his disciples giving them the Holy Spirit, He was in effect also breathing this Holy Sprit on us. This is our eternal brother and sisterhood. This is the guarantee that Jesus promises when we love God and love others as ourselves. As long as I live, I will praise God by loving all of His creation.

I also agree with Rohr when he writes that the most terrifying organization in our country composed by very devout Christians. But how they have distorted the teachings of Jesus. It is like they have never studied the Bible. I love reading the Bible; I meditate on it every day with the Love of God in my heart and soul. However, I also understand that the Roman fathers long ago turned the teachings in both testaments into a code of punishment, banishment, and torture to force people into a narrow way of thinking.

This is not what God wants.

I love the idea of community; I also love to write about community. In my daily meditations this morning, I read Proverbs 19:1 – Better is the poor that walketh in his integrity. I am also reminded of the parable about the woman placing her two coins I the synagogue offering. There is nothing closer to God’s truth than living God’s word.

I think of how we in Virginia care for the poor of the world. We don’t! being a student of human history, I am aware that I have many neighbors a who live in a desperate state of need. And, when I think of my human brothers and sisters all around the world who live on a smidgeon more than a dollar a day, I am truly embarrassed to live in a country that seems to put the subjugation of the poor to a lower status than it already is.

I give Five or ten dollars to the poor begging at intersections; I apologize for not giving more; I am not a rich person, although I live on much more than a dollar a day. So, I serve God. My wife and I have for years worked to ease the life of those less fortunate; but now we are older and must leave that for younger people. So, I pray. I know when I pray, I pray for God to give me the strength to write (and He hears me), to write to those in charge to look seriously at the condition of the poor in Virgina, The United States, and the world. I am sickened by our leaders’ allowing multi-billion-dollar corporations the laws allowing them to pay no taxes, which could well go to improve housing, education, and salaries of those oppressed in our world.

I get disheartened when I hear that we are a Christian nation . . . really?

© Russell Kendall Carter

Our lives are a series of events that cause us to reverse course – often; we are remind of this in song by Malvena Reynolds and Harry Belafonte: “Turn around and you’re tiny, turn around and you’re grown;” and from Ecclesiastes and Pete Seeger, “To everything (turn, turn, turn) there is a season (turn, turn, turn) and a time to every purpose under heaven.”

I am inspired by the reminder in the Bible “We hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” Fr. Richard asks, “What has been unveiled.” This Pentecost morning God reminded me to get my mind out of gear; put it in neutral; be still and listen. I open my heart to discover what it is I am missing. God tells me to turn around; look at those who try to harm me, those who may hate me, and open my heart and love to them, love them, pray for them, because they also are my brothers and sisters.

Jesus is lord over all, and we praise how great thou (Jesus) are; however, I must work at acting that way. On this Pentecost Sunday, God asks that my turn around, see how my enemies, the poor among us, and those suffering in silence need God’s love that I am blessed to bring.

Thus, I turn around and face those whom I may have denied my love and prayers and open my heart as God asks.