GETHSEMANE
While I have not been engaged in traditional Christianity for more than forty years, the images of this Lenten season and of this Holy week are more intimate, profound, and transformative than ever. Something shifted in me decades ago when I discovered that I was not to walk a path of worshipping a historical Jesus or any Messiah. I am here to walk and to live the path of Christ Consciousness, which is a living, vital, presence within me.

The man Jesus has been used as one of the most divisive figures in human history. I find that tragic beyond description. Those who use him to exclude and even damn others seem to have lost touch with the essence of his message. While the records we have are woefully incomplete and repeatedly manipulated what scripture, we do have left is ultimately a message of love and personal empowerment for all people. Not just “Christians.”

Yeshua was an actualized Jew who never set out to establish a new religion. He carried, embodied, demonstrated, and taught a message that all people are Loved within the One God, and that the Power of that One God is in us and can be used for the good of all creation. It is the personal empowerment message that got him politically killed. The murder by crucifixion had nothing to do God or Its Will. No sacrifice was or is needed. It is unintegrated human shadow that murdered this Enlightened Master and has murdered countless others since.

And so, though I am not Christian, I do embrace and live by what I call Christ I Am principles. I am here to make the same demonstration Yeshua made but at the symbolic level. While at times I may feel crucified by others it is ultimately my own self aversion and rejection I am here to heal. I am here to go into my own internal garden and to deal with the grief, fear, anger, and shame that has yet to be integrated.

And so today I am spending concentrated time in my own Gethsemane. I am leaning into my emotional pain and I am asking to be shown what I do not know I do not know. I am looking at the painful stories I tell about myself, and I am praying to be freed from my self-inflicted bondage.

My mantra is “Source Will be done.” Though theology most often attributes the garden prayer of Jesus to mean that God’s will was the inevitable crucifixion, I wholeheartedly believe the Will was always about the resurrection. And that resurrection happened in consciousness before the crucifixion. It was a rising-up in forgiveness and atonement. It was an in incredible stability in the face of human depravity. No matter what they did to him he remained connected and humble in the Greater Goodness and Life that Is God.

It is my turn. I am staying rooted in garden consciousness. I am declaring within my own field “bring it on.” I want to see, feel, open to, and release all that has held me in bondage. I am ready to surrender and to allow the Christ I Am to happen in me.