Integrity

Both the letter of James and what Jesus says according to Mark’s account, are calls for integrity.  Jesus was hard on conventional religiosity – pointing out the real difference between insisting on rituals like ritual washing before eating and yet having little love or compassion in their hearts.

Jesus quotes Isaiah and says “ These people honour me with their lips but their hearts are far from me” and calls religious people like that “hypocrites” which of course is Greek for actors – people simply playing a role.

In my experience the very emptiest of religion can be the most ritualistic where you know there is no spiritual heart and is a triumph of form over substance. In another rhetorical flourish Jesus called the Pharisees who approached religion in this way “Whitewashed tombs” meaning that everything is pretty and well ordered and respectable on the outside but is dead on the inside. You could say with some justification that Jesus hated religion, but what he means is more nuanced because what he actually railed against was unspiritual, empty, religious forms.   

And Jesus’ brother James takes up this thought and runs with it. James himself and the Jerusalem church he led clung much more closely to traditional Judaism and its outward forms and Mosaic law than did Paul (who himself was of course an ex-Pharisee), but despite that or perhaps because of it James recognises all too well the inherent danger of rites and rituals and beliefs themselves becoming detached, cast adrift from our actual lives and the way we live them and the way we relate to people and treat them.

James famously goes that one step further of course and in a way quite shockingly says that no matter what you say you believe in, it is completely useless until it is enfleshed in your life. And even further than that the implication of the last verse of the reading from James today is that in many respects he doesn’t care what doctrines you believe – because pure and undefiled religion lies in how we treat the vulnerable and weak. 

“Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves” (v.22)

It is the lack of integrity in religion that people really hate. From the really major and obscene things like priests abusing children, to simply talking about love and acceptance and welcome and then refusing to offer someone the communion bread because they don’t belong to our club or are deemed in some other way unacceptable.

Going back to Jesus he says “In vain do they worship, teaching human precepts as doctrines. You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human traditions”. That should make us all shake when we read out our doctrinal statements - I’ll say no more.

What is the commandment of God that Jesus accuses the Pharisees of abandoning? Well it forms part of the start of every Communion service. Jesus maintains that the entire law and the prophets – that means the entire body of scripture – the commandment of God - can be summed up as “Love God, and love your neighbour as yourself”

The teaching from both readings today – from Jesus and his brother – is show a little integrity. Integrate the inner and outer you. What we do should be an accurate reflection of what we say we believe. There has to be an alive spirituality underpinning the rituals otherwise we run the risk of becoming a whitewashed tomb – looks and sounds good but is actually dead inside.

None of us are perfect, least of all me, so if our goals in terms of our actions are still a fair way off from our talk, which is likely (!) we should at least though be “on the way” to integrating the two and we do this through Spiritual practice.

Nurturing a lively spirituality which is a relationship with the divine and integrating that into our lives was the premise of the Spirituality days we held here at Gainford. Not an optional extra for people interested in mysticism but according to Jesus the heart and soul, the beating heart of true religion.

Just because you are a character doesn't mean you have character. (Pulp fiction)

According to the author of Ephesians we are in a battle against what is described variously as “the wiles of the devil” or “the rulers, the authorities of this present darkness” and the “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” and “the flaming arrows of the evil one”.

He also talks about some forthcoming “evil day” at which point I’m afraid I have switched off and I’m gazing out the window, so far removed is it from my experience.  I simply don’t see my life and faith as a battle against evil spirits.

As a culture we have long since stopped attributing everything wrong or bad that happens to us to deliberate malevolence by some objective embodiment of evil commonly termed the “devil” or evil spirits. In fact when we hear of the child murders and violent exorcisms that still happen in London today in communities of West African descent our reaction is mostly one of horror and disbelief that this kind of thing, these kind of beliefs can still hold sway in some cultures. There was a call just last week to criminalise labelling a child as possessed by evil spirits as child abuse.

But just because our view of the world and the way we interpret it may have changed out of all recognition it doesn’t change the fact that we are still beset by trials and tribulations, by fears, temptations, and we all have the potential to do things that we are not proud of.

The way to plot a course through all of this, in accordance with what Ephesians says is to cultivate virtuous patterns of thought and behaviour which will protect you (using the biblical language) or using a more modern idiom will empower you to resist the wrong path, give you character to stand for what is right or from being easily manipulated to participate in evil acts.

An Israeli journalist who got close to Adolf Eichmann at his trial expecting some incarnate devil radiating evil termed the now famous phrase “the banality of evil” when what was actually encountered was a petty bureaucrat.  We, each of us, have within us the potential for good or evil, so if we want to foster the good because evil is destructive and counter productive both to our own well being and the well being of our society, if we want to empower ourselves to be able to resist taking the wrong and sometimes easier path we still need the virtues that Ephesians lists..

Truthfulness, righteousness, peace, trust, and all of them in accordance with the divine will and character so in practising these values and virtues we are close to God. Using biblical language they are a gift from God

One of the most frightening things about what we still term “evil” such as the Holocaust for example, is that the vast majority of people involved were just so ordinary, so mundane. They didn’t have horns and a tail – they were just like us. The truly frightening thing is that they are no different, but their value system and the virtues they prized became warped. I encountered the same thing when I worked for a very short time as a prison chaplain. The first murderer I met was a frightened young man crying in his cell contemplating spending the rest of his life behind bars.

But why should we cultivate these values in our life - what good does it do us to be or possess all those things? Because it pleases God? Excellent but human beings are pretty mercenary....is there anything else?

Well the unarguable truth appears to be that people who foster and live more virtuous lives are actually more content, better adjusted, more fulfilled. Virtue appears to be its own reward. In short they are happier.

Happiness isn’t a very theological term and is seldom used. Religious people, theologians, priests, ministers are much more likely to ask whether you are saved, whether you believe the right things, attend services, and pray. They seldom, in my experience of church life ever ask anyone if they are happy. Happiness is deemed irrelevant at best but actually human beings strive for little else. We want what makes us happy, or at least what we think is going to make us happy.

Our society values material possessions above all else – that is where true happiness lies. Everything is advertised and sold on the underlying premise that the new car, the bigger house, the new kitchen, the new dress, the new ipad is going to finally make us happy and we are continually surprised when it doesn’t. This avarice extends beyond pure “things” to thrill seeking, drugs and drink as ways of making ourselves happier.  They keep us entertained fleetingly and then we go back to our default position.

In surveys of lottery winners, after the first flush of extreme happiness, after a while they normally just return to the same psychological state they had before they won the money. They have more things, but not more happiness.

Cultivating virtues, building character is not a fashionable thing to do.

But if we return to Ephesian’s list and the wider concept that certain things will help protect you and build you up and make you a happier human being (and is of God) while other things are destructive and ultimately leave you feeling unhappy and embittered, then we have a rationale for encouraging virtues and the virtuous life that people can readily accept.

Why should I lead a virtuous life? Because that is what God appears to want is good but If part of the reason is that my personal happiness and the greater well being of society depends on it, we are closer to something that might resonate in my opinion. Being honest and truthful, doing the right thing when there is no advantage for us, trusting that we are held and ultimately secure, feeling connected to God and the world, all have their root in Love and our creed is surely that God is Love.

The main virtues according to Paul are faith hope and love – the greatest of them being love. The fruit of the spirit again according to Paul are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self control.

If we cultivate those we are cultivating God in our life and protecting ourselves by promoting happiness and well being against all that leads to unhappiness and a society bent on self destruction.

As I have written recently, this is not the whole of the story. True happiness comes not just from “within”, these things have to be nurtured alongside solid relationships, friendships, and in my own opinion a very strong special and close relationship with another person – Love made flesh – for completeness. Happiness lies not just from within or just from without, but from between the two.

Walk this way

The OT reading set for today from proverbs throws light not just on the meaning of the Eucharist as written in John and undergirds what is being said in Ephesians but for me throws light on the whole core message of Christianity. It is just a few verses so here it is......

Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars. She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine, she has also set her table. She has sent out her serving girls, she calls from the highest places in the town, “You that are simple, turn in here!”. To those without sense she says, “Come eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity and live, and walk in the way of insight”.

That one little passage is dripping with so much relevant symbolism. We have lady wisdom, the female attribute of God, built on seven pillers . The significance of this is that In Hebrew numerology Seven is the Hebrew number of perfection. It is perfect or “complete” because it adds the number of God which is 3 to the number of the world which is 4. So 7 is Perfect meaning “complete” because it unites creation with the divine. As an aside, the reason there were only six water jars in John’s first sign in his gospel – the turning of water into wine is that 6 was incomplete – imperfect - and Jesus was squaring that circle.

 There is sacrifice and there is the banquet of bread and wine, to which the weary and lost are all invited and is so reminiscent of the Eucharist . In this divine banquet you will find life – the life of the world I talked about last week – that fusion of divine source and divine creation – and through this revelation of the true nature of things you will find insight – which is enlightenment, lit by the eternal light – the light that enlightens every person as John writes in his prologue.

Seeing everything in that light, everything we previously thought was patently obvious about the world is suddenly illuminated and we see it as it really is. Insight is being able to discern the inner truth of things and situations. When the light of God is turned on – I AM the light of the world - when we see this light in all things shining back at us we may experience the peace of God. Peace with God, ourselves and each other.

Read with insight the entire message of Jesus we can see here is laid open for us written down centuries before Jesus was even born. What the early church perceived was that the wisdom that had been revealed in words to them became a wisdom discernable in a human life so that words became the word or wisdom made flesh.

The wisdom brought forth in Jesus’ life is the wisdom that lies within us all. The spirit – that spring that wells up to eternal life, as Jesus told the woman at the well, is the divinity within.

We are caught here because we are trapped by words and concepts that are inadequate, but  “believing in Jesus” means (for me) believing in the Jesus way and seeing in Jesus the revelation of what is true for all of us, rather than worshipping a unique and innately different kind of being. He is showing us the way to the Father – the way to atonement and peace. In following his way – we too have it within us to find eternal life. As an aside it is a fact that Jesus never once asks anyone to worship him in the New testament but around 26 times Jesus asks that we follow him. Walk in his footsteps. Walk in the way.

It is a way of insight, characterised by wisdom and peace and the way it bears fruit in our lives is in both word and deed.

For the life of the world

“And the bread I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh”.

One of the best reads on the subject of the Eucharist is called “For the life of the world” taken from that verse in John by an American Orthodox theologian and I was instructed to read it by none other than Rowan Williams just before he ordained me priest in Canterbury.

What the Eucharist is or is not has exercised my mind for a dozen years. It is what I do every Sunday. In the established churches it is the one thing that I can do and you can’t. So what on earth is it?

I have told everyone before that I come originally from a low evangelical church where we didn’t celebrate the Eucharist every week and where the churchwarden still complained that we had too many of them. From there I immersed myself in an Anglo catholic monastery for two years where every single day I had a tasteless piece of plastic pushed into my hand and told that this was the “body of Christ”. That concentrates the mind I can tell you.

Then I went East and in Orthodoxy I experienced a different approach yet again and now all these years later after all I have experienced, I ask myself again what is it really all about...... and I can only give you the benefit of my experience of all these different approaches and my own theological thinking and have arrived at a few conclusions that may help some people I hope.

“The life of the world” What does that mean?

For some, this life means “religious” or “spiritual” life

Lost and confused as most of us are we can be encouraged to take refuge in a purely spiritual life, in a journey inwards fed with spiritual food so enabling us to endure the “other” secular life with all its frustrations and tribulations, so we can keep smiling in a deep religious way.

This way of looking at life comes in all different shapes and sizes but the result is more or less the same. It makes the secular life, the life of eating and drinking play second fiddle, almost an irrelevance. It is clearly a second class way of living and less important than the spiritual life of prayer and contemplation.

In contemporary Christianity this spiritual emphasis is counterbalanced by those who understand these words “For the life of the world” as “for the better life of the world”. They are activists committed to the social gospel. Christianity is primarily a religion of action – action to change the world that has been lost to us. They will often feel aggrieved at the spiritual ones for spending too much time praying or in silence, and exhort them to get up and get stuck in.

Whichever avenue you go down the underlying problem remains the same. It is one of dualism.

It is Spiritual versus material, sacred versus profane, supernatural versus natural.

But in the Hebrew Bible these dichotomies never existed. In the Bible the food that man is given to eat in order to live is given by God and it is given as communion with God.

The world is not just “material” and limited to material functions, as opposed to specifically spiritual functions by which we relate to God.

All that exists is God’s gift to mankind, and it all exists to make God known to mankind. In the Hebrew bible God blesses everything he created and in Biblical language this means that he makes all creation the sign and means of his presence and wisdom, and love and revelation.

In the story of the garden of Eden, the fruit that Adam and eve ate only differed from all other things in that it was forbidden. It had not been given or blessed. Therefore It was food that was an end in itself, a world loved and enjoyed for itself and not as a vehicle for communion with God.

The world is a fallen world only in so far as it has fallen away from the awareness that God is all in all. Our dependence and love for the world became a short circuit cut off from the life that created and sustains all things. So we still love, but we are still hungry because our love only extends to the world itself rather than a way of communion with God.

We forget that breathing is a communion with God, that eating can be receiving life from God in more than its purely physical sense.

In the truly Christian sense, when we see the world as an end in itself and devoid of God’s presence, we live in a flat two dimensional world because the world cut off from its source is a dying world and communion with it is a communion with death.

The life of the world devoid of presence of God is just the appearance of life. The figure of Adam sitting outside paradise weeping is a picture of mankind itself,  hungry for communion with life, with God yet unable to satisfy that hunger because we have removed the source of life from our perception of the world.

Jesus saw and perceived this connection within himself and all things and referred to God as his father. In the Eucharist which he instituted we set right what has been lost.

In eating and drinking bread and wine we truly commune with God. It is no longer spiritual versus material, natural versus supernatural. They are one and the same thing. The material is a vehicle for the spirit, a carrier of God’s presence. As i said last week, this is why I am a Christian, but I am not religious.

I say this because In a sense, religion is only needed when there is a barrier between man and God and we need people to perform cultic acts to set up a meeting between the two. What we say about Christ is that he tore those barriers down don’t we? There is no division between man and God, between the spiritual and the material.

This is why the early church had such freedom. They had no need of scared geography, no temples, no interest in the places where Jesus had walked, no pilgrimages. That all came later. There were no need for temples because the new people gathered in his name was the only temple needed. The fact that Christ was present was far more important than the places where Jesus had been. Jesus is important because in Him is the answer to all religion, all hunger for God. He was and symbolised in his own body the communion with God that is innate in all creation.

When we eat bread and drink wine we are communing with the entire world and the source of the entire world. It is a bringing together of the material and the divine and in our communion what changes is not the bread and wine – the Eucharistic prayer is not a magic spell - but what is most needed is that our perception of the bread and wine changes and what it then symbolises. That changes our perception of ourselves and all life. 

I find myself in you

Starting from a position where you are being asked to interpret these kinds of miraculous events as literal history remembered (where the event being literally true is critical) is problematic. Either you don’t believe that these kinds of things ever happen so you then you are forced to dismiss the stories out of hand as nonsense, or you kind of just about able to convince yourself that these things may have happened. But that usually doesn’t get us much further on because we end up just gawping at a miracle – exactly what Jesus didn’t want to happen.

The third option is to see the question of whether they were historical events or not as pretty much irrelevant . Once that question is safely parked, because in truth it is unanswerable, we can concentrate on the spiritual message they are meant to convey. These signs are vehicles for spiritual truth. And John’s gospel pointedly never uses the word miracle to describe these things anyway. He uses the word “signs”.

Now signs by their very nature point away from themselves to somewhere else. That is what a sign is and what it does.  Where do these signs lead us. To where are they pointing?  

Well in John’s sign of the feeding of the 5000 he is pointing us towards the spiritual meaning of the communion service that we are here sharing this very morning. In John’s gospel there is no account of the last supper and Jesus breaking and sharing bread, and yet the gospel is nevertheless all about what the Eucharist actually means.

In the simplest spiritual terms I can come up with, the significance of the 5 loaves and two fish is that this was everything the boy had. Absolutely everything was given. In a spiritual sense our whole minds bodies and spirit are put at the disposal of God. How I interpret that in practical terms is that we learn that actually we are not the centre of the universe, the true centre of the universe which is also our true centre is the divine mystery that we name God. We sacrifice self interest to gain something much greater – which is in fact turns out to be a greater sense of self located in God.

In dying to self interest we find a greater sense of life. The only way to test this theory is to actually try it and put it into practice. To use the picture language of the story, our lives are to be given, and then blessed by God and our life and talent and potential is unlocked and multiplied and is shared out amongst many people.  In God’s hands , what little we think we have can be used to great and lasting effect – if we have the guts to actually let go and do it.

And this problem is the subject of the second sign – the walking on the water. There is significance to the fact that in the story It was dark.  For the disciples were in fact in a spiritually dark place – just as we can be so often. The storms on the lake are a metaphor for all the storms of life that batter us and frighten us. Psychologically the root of all fear is the fear of death and oblivion.

The spiritual message of Jesus is “Do not be afraid. I AM”. In the midst of all of life’s dramas and tragedies, joys and sorrows, in the midst of all that frightens us, including death itself, God IS.

In the story, after being frightened not only of the storms of life but also frightened of the message that was coming towards them, they were mired in confusion. It was only when they perceived and understood – in the image from the story “when they wanted to take him into the boat” that they immediately reached safety. Immediately, the boat reached the land.

In understanding that God stands in and through all of life’s challenges, in that moment of clarity, “he who hears my word and believes on the one that sent me (I AM, God) has eternal life. He has eternal life NOW. He has already crossed over from life to death.”(5:24)

It is that conviction, that God stands at the centre of life, so we can only trust in his loving care, that we then can offer our lives to be blessed and shared out for the benefit of many and find a truer deeper, richer sense of who we are.

Like so much spirituality. It is just so simple and yet also not easy. Simple but not easy.

Training our minds to see life in a different way so that new way becomes our automatic default position is a lifetime’s work. What tends to happen in my experience is that we get flashes of wholeness and peace but we can’t hold on to it for very long. At the first sign of trouble we can revert to our lost and fearful ways all too easily. But through spiritual practice, continually reinforcing a different way to see God and the world, of which this Communion service is an example, we make progress one little bit at a time, with the hope that the next time trauma breaks into our lives we will have better tools to cope much more easily. 

Love in a hopeless place

I have written before of a watershed moment in my spiritual and religious development which happened to me in my first ever trip to Romania, not as a priest but to help in a children’s hospice for kids dying of AIDS.

I looked into the eyes of a little girl who couldn’t speak, was mentally and physically disabled. Had full blown AIDS and was soon to die. It was looking into the eyes of that little girl, innocent yet suffering and not even going to make it to her teenage years that all faith in a healing God drained from my body.

Most of you will know that the first funeral I ever took was of a nine year old Romanian boy called Logan who died of AIDS and was buried on a dusty hillside in this grimy industrial town called Cernavoda – a name which literally means Black Water.

But that wasn’t the only spiritual experiences I had on that seminal visit to that country that would see me four years later pack my bags for Bucharest.

There was another, that I won’t go into now that told me in a very deep way that “God is”, and that despite everything I was meant to be in that place. It wasn’t that God was not a reality – it was that my understanding of the nature of God had to be smashed open and put back together again in a new way. A belief in a God that heals had to be radically altered.

About four years after these experiences on post ordination training I wrote an essay entitled “why God doesn’t heal” which earned the comment from my tutor, who now works in Durham as it happens as probably the most depressing piece she had ever read. (I wear that accolade as a badge of honour). Unbeknownst to me at the time she has a disabled child.

This is by way of saying that my relationship with healing stories in the Bible is shall we say rather ambivalent. And yet I do believe in healing in a holistic sense with a faith that could move mountains.

Healing for me implies peace and wholeness in a much wider sense than the mending of bones and curing leprosy.

Spiritual wholeness and peace are where these stories lead us. Wholeness and peace depend on incorporation. The whole tenor of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians this morning is basically one of “Once you were separate, now you are a part of it”. “Once you were without God, now you are in God”. His narrative uses the Jewish/Gentile division as his base line and then tells how we are now all one, children of the same covenant.

I used to ask myself where God was in that orphanage in Cernavoda. God, in St’ Lawrence’s hospice was a Scottish nurse called Lorna Jamieson. She worked all the hours God sent , in terrible conditions with hardly any resources, to try and alleviate the suffering of those children. She brought as much healing and peace as she could muster to make sure that they spent the last days and hours of their lives in as little pain as possible and knowing that they were loved.

I knew then that this was true Christian healing.

And Lorna could love like that because she felt loved. Her resources came from deep within her, enabling her to go on against sometimes almost insurmountable odds.

It is those internal spiritual resources that I am nowadays trying to cultivate both is myself and try and share with others as much as I can.

To enable ourselves, to empower ourselves we need to be able to dig deep and plumb huge reserves out of which we can operate. This is why I push contemplative prayer and meditation. This is why I try and communicate spiritual concepts that I have actually experienced as being true. 

Jesus wanted his disciples to retreat to a deserted place to re-charge their batteries. Retreats like this are wonderful and helpful, but what about when the retreat is over and you have to re-join the rat race. Wouldn’t it be great if you could take that place of refreshment and resource with you and be that calm refreshing place and draw your resources from there in the midst of life.

To find and live out of that centre, which is God, is the goal of the spiritual life and in finding that centre is the spiritual practice that enables us to find and live out of that centre. It is there that we find the healing, the wholeness and peace, which results in the kind of compassion exhibited by Lorna.        

You are not alone

“I was caught up to the third heaven – whether in the body or out of the body I do not know – God knows”.

Paul is trying to describe his conversion experience on the road to Damascus

And according to Paul, this conversion experience which he also writes about in 1 Corinthians is an equivalent experience to what the disciples experienced in the resurrection “appearances”.

If in the broadest sense these experiences are what are known as “theophanies”  basically meaning an experience of the divine, which in the Bible is communicated as an “appearance”. So was this then the same thing that Jesus experienced at his baptism?

I would say yes because the result was the same. They all experienced an intense feeling of “connection”, a better word for our purposes is “communion” with the divine.

It was expressed in different ways. Jesus expressed it as an intimate familial connection, so that he referred to God as Father, and then encouraged us to do the same and address God as “Our” Father.

The disciples expressed their sense of connection with the divine in Christological terms, and talked of being in Christ, through the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit. Whatever words you use, they are, I would say describing that same sense of connectedness with the universe that is the common property of all creation, but a connectedness that human beings have largely lost.

Another common theme is that feeling connected with the divine leads in all cases to feeling a close connection with other people because God is common to all people and all things. So Love of God and love of neighbour are two sides of the same coin and one melds into another.

Holy Communion service  is an expression of our connectedness with all things, all people, and the divine. It is the antidote to the alienation and fear that stalks and blights so many of our lives. And because Christianity is at heart a sensual incarnational religion being touched by God is mirrored in human touch as I believe Neil was saying last week. Being held by God has flesh put on its bones when you are held by a person.

In this same ball park, It has also helped me enormously to think of Sin in a completely different way than it is commonly understood. The central premise of Christianity is that it offers atonement – which is union or a reconciliation or communion with God. Reconciliation is the antidote to separation not evil. Sin, for me, is the state of separation from God and existential loneliness I talked about a few moments ago.

Sure enough, bad things, “evil” things you might say naturally flow from this state because evil things have their root in fear and self interest but the primary problem is separation or at least a perceived sense of separation from the divine.

Jesus discovered that this perceived state is actually an illusion and that the kingdom of God is within us.

Jesus wanted to bring together what was separated, even if that separation is only a misconception and invites us to go beyond our minds to see that too.

 Knowing that we are actually intimately connected to the source of all things and all things that emanate from the source is the result of these wonderful ecstatic revelations that people like Jesus, Paul and others are experiencing and which then subsequently transform their entire lives.

A flat two dimensional understanding of your own life, alone and disconnected from everything else looking forward to oblivion when we die is transformed into a fullness of life, eternally connected with everything and everyone else.

It is a challenge to think that it could all be just so simple. That the secret to life in all its fullness is about a change in perception, When you attune yourself to the truth of the universe, it liberates your very being. You might want to call that salvation, you may want to call it enlightenment, or atonement. The point is, that it is within our grasp, our gift, to transform ourselves by going beneath our minds to perceive that truth and by adopting practices that reinforce that truth.

Not everyone is ready to receive that truth of course. Jesus recognised that some are so blind that they will never see, and he referred to them as being spiritually dead. “Let the dead bury their own dead” he once sarcastically said and he warned that talking to some people was like casting pearls before swine so don’t waste your time, just accept what you cannot change.  And here too in this story we have instructions just to shake the dust from your feet from people who are not ready to hear.

Don’t be so anxious. The truth remains true no matter how many people accept it or deny it. And what is true has to become true for you – true to your own experience, or remains just another fancy or clever idea alongside many other fancy ideas.

Once you take something like this seriously, and start to practice spiritual practices that work for you, that truth starts having the power of truth for you.  And there is the challenge – to not just change our minds but through adopting spiritual practices to allow our change of mind to permeate and transform our entire lives – our body, mind and spirit.