I wanted to acknowledge Good Friday in today’s post, and it turned out very differently than I’d thought. The title and image are a content warning. This post isn’t faith-affirming. If you’re looking for something that will help you honor the Savior today, this post isn’t it. Hit the back button and I hope you have a warm and faithful Easter weekend.
When I was in my mid-twenties, I remember a sacrament meeting talk on Easter Sunday. The speaker was describing Christ’s physical agony in great detail. This was back in the 90s, before we knew words like “triggered.” I was starting to sweat and my head was swimming. Pretending to rub my face, I was actually sticking my fingers in my ears and, when that didn’t work to block out his words, I was bouncing my fingers in my ears to turn the speaker’s words into a meaningless wow-wow-wow. I should have just left. I didn’t.
I’ve always had this problem. I loved my Savior and had many beautiful spiritual experiences with the Atonement. But descriptions of his physical suffering freaked me out and shut me down. As a teenager I picked up a book by Truman J. Madsen about the atonement. Somewhere in that book, Madsen said that whenever he was tempted to sin, he pictured a nail being held against the Savior’s palm and himself being the one to swing the hammer. That’s what sin was to him. After he visualized that, the temptation went away. I was horrified. Every time I sinned, (like daydreaming at Church because I was bored, or yelling at my brother), I was swinging the hammer to drive the nail into Jesus’s hand. I didn’t know the term “intrusive thoughts”. I just couldn’t get that image out of my mind for months.
I was in my 30s before I got into therapy and started talking out my parents’ relationship. My father had a lot in common with God the Father, in that you could never meet his standards. They changed periodically, he didn’t communicate them very well, and they were always too high for any ordinary human to comply with them. He got really, really angry when we (his kids) failed to live up to his expectations. Sometimes. Other times he was fine. You never knew what was coming. Similar to the way that obedient living sometimes brings blessings from God, but you can’t expect those blessings because that’s the prosperity gospel and that’s false doctrine. Or whatever. You can’t expect punishment for disobedience to be consistent either. The point is, neither God nor my father were super clear on a bunch of things, and you either got punished or you didn’t, but there wasn’t a way to tell ahead of time. Also, I had to believe that God and my father loved me, no matter what.
Fortunately, I had a Savior. Jesus was the Savior who suffered so God the Father wouldn’t send me to hell. My mother was the earthly savior who suffered so my earthly father wouldn’t hit me or hate me for being a failure. She was successful where I was concerned. She couldn’t stop Dad from hitting his sons and being disappointed in his other daughters. I joined my mother in trying to be a savior for our family. If I could just be good enough to atone for my mother’s sins and shortcomings, maybe my father would stop punishing her for everything her children did wrong.
Therapy doesn’t work very fast. It went slow, but when I finally internalized and accepted that my parents’ relationship was horrible and the pressure they put on me was emotional abuse, my testimony of God and Jesus and the Atonement went away. I didn’t intend for that to happen, but I also couldn’t stop it. There were too many similarities between my efforts to please my father because I loved my mother, and my efforts to obey all God’s commandments because I loved Jesus.
I tried thinking harder and talking myself back into having a testimony. Jesus was a God. Jesus did this voluntarily out of love. This was the only way to redeem us. It didn’t work. I can’t handle the emotional patterns underlying the atonement. I can’t have the feelings that underlie a testimony of the atonement without dragging my entire self back into that dysfunctional relationship with my parents. I understand most people don’t have my experiences and don’t feel this way, and that’s fine. I’m not trying to convince anyone; just telling my story.
When I found out that the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, were actually written decades after Christ died, and mostly written by people who didn’t know Jesus, I was relieved. Maybe all that stuff about him saying he was the Son of God here to atone for the sins of the world was put in later. Fine by me.
The thing is, I love Christ’s teachings. I love his concern for the poor and hungry. I want our entire society to follow his example in offering healing to all the sick. I grit my teeth in anger at religious hypocrisy too. I would have followed him; I love what he taught. I’ve read and studied the New Testament gospels; I’ve taught them in Sunday School. Even though the idea of Christ suffering for my sins horrifies me on a deep and fundamental level, I want to live by his other teachings. How should we treat each other? What do we owe to our fellow humans?
I’ve spent a lot of time pondering Christ’s teachings in light of my loss of testimony. Which principles do I still accept? Would the world be a better place if this particular teaching was universal? In a way, I’ve become more thoughtful about Christ since losing my testimony. I honor him this weekend, just not the way most Christians would want me to.
We have a lot of people here at Wheat and Tares with nuanced testimonies, and a few stalwart faithfuls as well. If you’re comfortable with doing this, please share how your testimony or thoughts about Christ have changed and evolved over your faith journey.
Happy Easter.
Wheat & Tares 
Wow. Honestly, I think this is the perfect post for Good Friday. Granted, part of my Holy Week celebration was rewatching Martin Scorsese’s R-rated, and some would say heretical film, The Last Temptation of Christ, so put an asterisk in front of everything I say about this season. Agnostic Mormon here.
When I went through the first night of my faith crisis midway through my mission, I remember kneeling down next to my bed for personal prayer before bedtime, unable to fully appreciate the trauma I was undergoing, and that years of religious PTSD were about to follow. But I also remember brushing right past Heavenly Father and essentially demanding my own personal special witness of Jesus Christ. I wanted my vision/visitation, and I wanted it right away.
Didn’t happen.
My faith journey took me on a yearlong journey through other Christian traditions, learning about grace, and essentially dispensing with the Mormon-concocted notion of Elohim and Jehovah as Father and Son. We’re reading the Bible wrong. Plain and simple. Essentially, the Church’s demand that I only pray to the Father placed an obstacle in my quest to have a personal relationship with Jesus. I’ve suffered great cognitive dissonance over the Church’s refusal to acknowledge a clearly evolving understanding of the godhead during Joseph Smith’s lifetime.
I like the way you describe your connection to Jesus. It seems more grounded. As I delve further into being agnostic, I find myself enjoying the Gospel in a similar way. And I still enjoy the metaphorical messianic connection people project onto Old Testament passages. I grow less and less concerned about pleasing Eternal Father, and just let the nature of God be the great mystery, which I often contemplate through the life of Jesus of Nazareth. I’m closer to the New Testament Gospels today than I was on my mission.
Anyway, thank you for sharing your perspectives with us on Good Friday. I found them moving and thought-provoking.
I recommend to everyone the book Sapiens. The author, Yuval Noah Harari, explains how throughout history mankind has invented myths for a variety of reasons and religious myth is at the top of the list.
My view of Christ has changed drastically since I left the Church. I still believe he actually existed. I believe he was an inspirational and influential teacher. But I see no evidence that he organized a Church or demanded that he be worshipped. That was all done after he died when the versions of Christianity that we have today were invented. I believe we can become better people by following his teachings. But I also believe there are elements of the Torah, the Quran, and a multitude of other “religious” books that are inspirational including the Book of Mormon. But most if not all of them are based on a myth that there is a chosen people and a chosen belief system that excludes the others. I doubt it.
I think we should all try to follow Christ’s example. That doesn’t mean I believe he was the Son of God. Nor do I believe Mohamed was chosen. It’s not that complicated.
The main way my beliefs have changed is that I no longer believe Jesus is divine. That would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
It’s quite freeing in a way if you can deal with the nihilism. Deal with life on its terms, enjoy as much as you responsibly can, and don’t worry about keeping score.
I am with Jake. This was an affirming and thoughtful Good Friday post for me. I still choose to believe in Jesus’s divinity. What that actually means I am less and less sure, but I will try to explain part of it, for me:
I hope I would have followed Him had I lived in His time and place, but I am not sure that I would. I am pretty wrapped up in my own life. My guess is I might have vaguely approved of and admired Him, but gone about my life and then tsked and sighed when the news came of Good Friday came. We always get it wrong, I might have muttered to myself. And I would have pitied His poor mother. And then gotten on with the day’s work.
What I am saying is that Jesus was a revolutionary and I am not. I am a thoroughly, boringly, practical soul: steady, reliable, pragmatic. He asks of me more than I am willing to forego, and yet He accepts this and loves me anyway. That, for me, is the miracle of Jesus. I can never be everything He might want, and somehow that doesn’t matter. I do not disappoint Him. Nobody I know is like that. But He is.
I’m so glad I read this.
This is my favorite line because it mirrors how I’ve felt through all my doubts and questioning, and have used this as my moral compass:
“The thing is, I love Christ’s teachings. I love his concern for the poor and hungry. I want our entire society to follow his example in offering healing to all the sick. I grit my teeth in anger at religious hypocrisy too. I would have followed him”
Janey,
My dad sent me your post to read. It’s well-written, interesting, and thank you for it. I feel like I can relate. And to share in response to your request, I want to say that I’ve gone from believing in all of The Church’s teachings about Jesus pretty literally for over thirty years, to writing the following rhyme last year, somewhere around this time. Thanks again, and Happy Easter…- Andrew
I read that Jesus bought us with His blood.
If that’s true,
To whom did he pay that bloody price to?
His Father?
And if so,
Once paid, where did that bloody price go?
To a blood bank in Heaven?
Into bottles, like wine?
Into Heaven’s cold storage to keep for all time?
What kind of Father wants blood from one Son,
To make him feel good about bad things done,
By the rest of his children, especially when,
Those children keep doing those same things again?
I wish that His Father would lighten up,
And learn,
If good pays for bad it will just return.
After all,
Please know,
For every ebb there must be a flow.
Without the dirty you can’t have the clean,
Pleasure in life can’t be felt without pain,
And blood doesn’t clean anything, it stains.
Thanks for sharing your powerful story, Janey, and just what I needed today. In some ways, it mirrors the deconstruction of my own belief system, including my understanding of the atonement of Christ.
Several years ago when I was still mostly TBM but also in the early days of my doubting and questioning, I remember a high council sacrament talk in which the speaker used the imagery of Jesus in the garden “bleeding from every pore” to make the rhetorical point of “how many drops of His blood were just for my sins? Or each of yours?”. Even then, I found that to be a bit manipulative and unnecessarily guilt-inducing. To be fair, the HC speaker was a convert and former Southern Baptist (I was living in the deep south at the time), so that tracks with his religious background. There were probably also similar talks about imagining yourself “swinging the hammer” like you mentioned earlier, also consistent with those hardline Baptist teachings. It all bothered me for reasons I couldn’t yet explain. Later, I came to the conclusion that any lesson about the Atonement that results in me feeling guilty, or ashamed, or otherwise bad about myself, whether intentional or not (and they often are), is just plain wrong, and contrary to the Gospel.
In contrast to Janey, I really appreciated the rare talks on the Atonement that focused on the physical, literal, visceral, gritty details of Jesus’ suffering and death. I feel like most of the time, we avoid that kind of teaching because we have to keep the gruesomeness toned down for the kids in the audience. As a result, I think the LDS version of the Atonement treats it like fairy dust, like Jesus said a few words, waved a wand and made our sins disappear. Just another one of many areas in which the LDS Church treats its adults like children. Pretty much every GC talk that deals with Christ’s atonement these days is similarly hollow, and bereft of any substance, just promoting an oversimplified, magical worldview that believing in Jesus will make all your problems go away. Moreover, to teach this version, we tend to minimize and gloss over Jesus’ actual ministry and teachings.
I’ve since discarded a belief in a penal substitution Atonement. For that to be true means God has to be a cruel dictator by default, demanding all His children suffer for being imperfect humans; but it’s all good, because his oldest, most favored son stepped up and said “It’s OK Dad, I’ll take the hit for this”…which sounds ridiculous stated that plainly but it’s pretty much the LDS version in a nutshell. And since we believe in a Godhead (God and Jesus as distinct, separate beings) one wonders if their eternal role is actually to be in opposition to each other, where God is the abusive parent that demands our fealty, but Jesus is the sympathetic older sibling that constantly intervenes to protect us from his abuse. In the temple endowment, Jesus is at best a minor background character, who’s main purpose is to act as a middle manager. No, I don’t think Christ’s role in all of this is to be a cosmic whipping boy. And if God is just acting within the established laws and constraints of the universe (does he answer to an even higher Super-Duper-Mega-God?), then he really isn’t that powerful, and this is a really f—-d up universe.
I’m very much in favor of a historical Jesus (a wise philosopher/sage who taught love, kindness, forgiveness, helping the poor, etc) but I’m not completely ready to discard the divine Christ just yet. Perhaps “the atonement” is just a grand metaphor for empathy that got corrupted and co-opted by early Christianity; an injunction for each of us to learn to truly understand another’s suffering, then take action to alleviate it wherever we can. And while Jesus lived under the thumb of an oppressive regime, it seems the only thing that really pissed him off was hypocrisy, specifically religious hypocrisy. He freely challenged the legitimacy of the religious authorities of his day, so as Christians we should all feel compelled to do the same today when we see flagrant abuses of religious power.
I now view Jesus as a moral philosopher who challenged many Israelite traditions in favor of a higher thinking and who preached non-violent protest. Many of his philosophies ring true and are relevant today. Jesus was a champion for the poor and afflicted in this world. He believed in the goodness of those, such as the Samaritans, who were commonly looked down upon by the Judean community. He fought against the legalism of the Pharisees and emphasized the spirit of the law as opposed to the letter of the law. Jesus’s followers turned him into a god. However, there is no evidence from Matthew, Mark, and Luke that Jesus promoted himself to be a god, only in the later-written Book of John do we find that. His followers also fused his teachings with Jewish, Greek, and Roman religion to create Christianity. The Johannite community (who wrote the Book of John) and Paul in particular turned Christianity into a Hellenistic religion fused with many elements of traditional Israelite religion and many of the great Christian thinkers including Origen, Jerome, and St. Augustine furthered the Hellenistic and Roman elements in much of Christianity. I no longer believe in atonement philosophy, the resurrection, or virgin birth. I don’t believe in the concept of sin, but believe that there are immoral acts whose immorality we can identify through scientific, legal, and cultural reasoning. I don’t believe that Jesus still actually lives or that he is a god. God, I believe, is not a transcendent human-like being, but only an immanent force of nature that we come to understand through a combination of scientific and moral reasoning. There could be life after death, but I don’t hypothesize on that at all. I think humans should focus only on the here-and-now and foreseeable future for their own individual lives and the lives of those who come after them. They shouldn’t dwell extensively on an unforeseeable future, such as the afterlife, about which they know very little about.
i think many of us are trapped in penal substitution theory. Let’s check out other theories about the atonement. I think there must be something better out there.
Thanks Janey for your very “Faith promoting” post. I was reminded today of one of those, Priest dies and goes to heaven jokes. He shows up, crosses over the threshold between earth and heaven and sees a sign that reads “Heaven this way”, he then turns and sees another sign which reads “Lecture about Heaven this way”. This, for me, characterizes much of what has become disillusioning to me, a sense that testimony feels shallow and meaningless, focused more on affirming certain truth claims, things we profess “about” God, and much less about a personal experience with the mystery of God(liness). One of the most common metaphors used in scripture to describe our relationship with God is marriage. I love the symbolism of the marriage metaphor, and it says a lot about the mass exodus from organized religion. Marriages rarely thrive in a transactional environment, where the relationship is roles based, defined by obligations, duties, and legal contracts. Sure, marriage will also never thrive without these things, but ultimately, without intimacy, (and by intimacy i don’t mean physical) it becomes a business arrangement where resentment can flourish. Relationships governed by obligations are a recipe for divorce, and thousands of people are divorcing the LDS church, not because they are imperfect, but because they refuse to make amends for the skeletons that feel like betrayal.
Jack Hughes – I share your sentiments regarding the problems with “The Atonement” and how Christianity frames its purpose. I simply cannot wrap my head around God needing his “pound of flesh” so he can forgive. The concept of penal / substitution or satisfaction violently contradicts any meaningful understanding of “Grace” and “Mercy”. As Shakespear states, “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” Either Grace is a gift or it is not Grace anymore. A God that requires the suffering of the innocent in exchange for forgiveness is not a God worth worshipping, maybe one to be afraid of, but not seek intimacy with.
Terryl Givens beautifully wrote the following: “It would be tragic if the mechanism by which The Atonement was carried out displaces, in our mind, the effect it was meant to achieve. Atonement does not necessarily describe something Christ did, but something he hopes to achieve. Not just a description of his heroic sacrifice, but the product of that sacrifice”.
I appreciate, at least, the suggestion to step back from the canvas and allow the infinite beauty of the painting to begin to unfold. I don’t understand the concept of “Atonement” being something completed over a long weekend for the purpose of mending some cosmic rift and satisfying a rather arbitrary need for “payment” or “punishment” for sin. Our inherited protestant language obsesses about our depravity, but sin, although risky, is no more the exit point from God than it is the bridge by which we come to encounter his Grace and mercy.
It also makes no sense intuitively that Christ suffered so that we don’t have to suffer. It doesn’t appear to me that his Atoning sacrifice was to eradicate suffering from the world, given certain conditions are met, but instead to give it meaning, purpose and possibility.
Christ incarnate, in the Garden, on the cross and the empty tomb all paint a symbolic portrait, that there is a way, that in fact, sin and suffering are not the end of being, but part of becoming holy. Christ’s sacrifice confirmed that the crucible of mortality is an educative project, filled with all the risks of becoming bitter and cynical, or learning from it in a way that hurls us towards the beauty of resurrection Sunday. We, as latter-day saints, perpetuate the idea that we are saved by “Obedience”, but this has not been my personal experience, nor do I believe it’s the message of Jesus. He saves us “From Sin”. From, meaning the objects place of origin. Salvation doesn’t come “From” obedience, it comes “From” sin. Sin is the bridge by which I come to encounter God’s Grace and Mercy.
Perhaps a critical reason Christ came to the world was to show us that what had been insisted upon in scriptures was backwards. Perhaps the reason he died was not to pay for some collective guilt to appease the demands of scarce justice, but rather to show his commitment to the principle of loving our enemies, of doing good to those who despitefully use us.
Maybe His kingdom is really not of this world. But rather of a world where we live according to His teachings in the sermon on the mount. And where our guiding impulses are forbearance, patience, love and mercy.
Thank you for sharing this with us Janey, and for the invitation to reflect on and share our own thoughts.
When President Nelson told us to stop using the term “Mormon” and instead use “MemberofthechurchofJesusChristofLatterDaySaints”, I thought, “I’m just going to tell people I’m Christian.” I seek to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, and be a disciple of Christ. I have also embarked on a study of other religious traditions (Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Baha’i, Universal Unitarianism, Islam, Sikhism, etc…). I’ve found truth in all of these religions. I have found that learning about other faith traditions has helped me to be a better Christian, and that following Christ would help me to live the principles found in other religions. It seems that all religions teach that we have divinity within us, and the religions are there to help us recognize and live true to that divinity (although sometimes religion can distract us from the divinity within ourselves).
I believe that Christ is “The Way” and that he set the example for us. Jesus Christ is one who recognized the divinity within himself and lived true to it. In Christ’s atonement, he became “At One” with all of creation and with God. He invites us to do the same, “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us”. (John 17). I seek to be At One with myself, God, Christ, my fellow men/women, nature, and the universe. Jesus Christ and his example and his atonement help me and strengthen me in this endeavor. Mormonism is the place I seek to do that from, partly because it is my home and my native language. Easter (and every Sunday) is a great time to reflect on this. Thanks for providing this opportunity to share my thoughts.
I am a believer, but I don’t believe in penal substitution. I prefer the older, more original theory which became known as Christus Victor, and to a lesser degree substitutionary atonement. No one theory seems to fit perfectly, but our teachings appear to be 100% in penal substitution. I like part of the ransom theory, but a problem with the ransom theory is the answer to the question of to whom the ransom is paid. Some NT passages seem to support it. A better fit, for me, is Christus Victor, in which Christ fought the fight against evil (and those who support evil, namely Satan and his ilk) and defeated them, as evidenced by death and hell’s inability to keep the dead Jesus prisoner. We do not teach the harrowing of hell, in which the dead Jesus not only descended into the world of the dead, but conquered both death and sin (or hell). Plenty of NT passages support this theory also. As I understand it, penal substitution became a thing with Martin Luther and then much more definitely with John Calvin. Before that was substitutionary atonement, taken from the Jews with their scape goat. In my non-theologian mind, I kind of blend Christus Victor with substitutionary atonement. Penal substitution is a form or subset of substitutionary atonement, but I’m not keen on the penalty. I prefer the taking of sins on Himself, and then his defeat of death and hell. It is complicated. And all of these words, including other words such as grace as so loaded with centuries of history that it is difficult to discuss them. But I agree with the posters above that penal substitution, which is definitely in the ascendant, and dominatingly so, leave much to be desired and leaves too many questions with no good answer.
Lovely comments, everyone. It’s so comforting to see where our thoughts converge. We all benefit from a community of believers. I kept wanting to highlight a particular line that really resonated.
Jake C. – “I grow less and less concerned about pleasing Eternal Father, and just let the nature of God be the great mystery, which I often contemplate through the life of Jesus of Nazareth.” That’s it! I’m getting comfortable with letting the exact nature of God remain a mystery. I don’t have to claim to know any specifics.
josh h – yes this: “But most if not all of them are based on a myth that there is a chosen people and a chosen belief system that excludes the others.” As you mention, the good parts of every religion are the teachings about being kind and treating others well. And then tribalism sets in. Why does just one group have to be right?
Toad – there’s a scripture in the Book of Mormon that has an anti-Christ teaching people that there is no afterlife. Focus on this life. The BoM seems to assume that focusing on this life makes people selfish and destructive. I disagree. Focusing on this life can also lead people to try and improve this life. I don’t think it goes all the way to nihilism, but I can see why some might think that.
Margie – I loved the self-knowledge of knowing that you’re not a revolutionary! And that’s just fine with Christ.
Andy – thanks. 🙂
Mormon Mouse – I’m glad you commented. Your poem about Christ’s blood is thought provoking. I’ve also wondered why Christ had to pay in blood. Who required that? God? I read an essay about that question a long time ago, but then the author (Cleon Skousen) got excommunicated so apparently the church disagreed. Also, this line in your poem destroys a whole lotta imagery but it’s so obvious, but only once you say it: “And blood doesn’t clean anything, it stains.” Being cleansed by blood is a ridiculous thing to claim and I’d never thought of that before. Thank you.
Jack Hughes – I like the idea of rejecting teachings that produce guilt. Christ’s love should not be a guilt trip, you’re right. And we’ll agree to disagree about the value of focusing on Christ’s physical suffering. 🙂 I’m going to think about this line more: “Perhaps “the atonement” is just a grand metaphor for empathy that got corrupted and co-opted by early Christianity.” Somewhere in Alma, there’s a scripture about Christ becoming mortal so he could really understand what he was healing. A grand metaphor for empathy indeed!
Brad D – I really liked your comment. It’s a very pragmatic approach. You said, “I don’t believe in the concept of sin, but believe that there are immoral acts whose immorality we can identify through scientific, legal, and cultural reasoning.” I’ve been thinking for a while about a post that talks about how to rank the seriousness of sin, and it would look at the impact actions have on innocent others. Immoral means harm to others, not just violating a rule that prophets tell us is important to God even though it’s not a harmful thing to do.
toddsmithson – you’re exactly right that a transactional relationship with God (obedience = blessings) is deeply flawed. “thousands of people are divorcing the LDS church, not because they are imperfect, but because they refuse to make amends for the skeletons that feel like betrayal.” Yeah, this. No one is expecting the Church or those people in it to be perfect, but the refusal to acknowledge all the stuff on the shelf eventually persuades people to give up.
aporetic1 – Mormonism is my native language too. Even as I stray pretty far afield, I interpret everything through a Mormon lens. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Georgis – before this post, I hadn’t thought much about different theories of the atonement. I grew up with the penal substitution theory, which obviously caused me problems. I wish there was more discussion and teaching of the theories you describe.
Jesus had something to say about this… Matthew 23:30-35
@Mike Sanders
So I read the suggested verses and I remain confused.
What exactly is the interpretation of the text that you’re trying to imply here and what your point regarding it in reference to the person being quoted?
I realized when I left the church that I had a big question that was unanswered that I don’t think the lds church ever addressed. Why would god need an atonement to forgive anyone for anything anytime? It really seems unnecessary since god is the one forgiving anyway. Why would we need to have this plot detour to have a half mortal half god human sacrifice for overcoming death and sin? I had just assumed this was a necessary step when I was a member. Now it seems overly complicated and unnecessary.
either god will forgive me or not. Either there is some kind of afterlife or not.
Either way Jesus role seems more important as a teacher than as a sacrifice. The sacrifice part of the story is still tragic and beautiful even if I don’t think there is any godly requirement for it.
I’m a believer all the way. Despite that, I have struggled a bit at times with concepts of justice and mercy. It’s all too easy to think of them as abstract or invented concepts, but over time, I’ve found it easier to think of them as natural laws on par with gravity or Newton’s laws of physics. I don’t expect to be able to fully comprehend them until I’m an Exalted being. I do believe that the Father and the Son have done everything in their power to use these laws to benefit us to the fullest extent possible, born out of the greatest Love possible. I haven’t yet been convinced there could be better ways of going about it, even with a lot of speculation on my part.
I admit I don’t know anything. I really like Adam Miller’s concept of Original Grace. I don’t think it matters really what anyone believes or “knows”. I think it matters what we do, just like in the corrected “I am a Child of God”.
I feel deeply committed and convicted with the necessity to follow Christ as the Spirit leads me to do. I think of Christ in terms of the 4 gospel narratives.
On Easter Sunday I saw an Easter bunny on a motorbike.
I had hot cross buns for lunch, and ate my chocolate easter egg which took most of the day as it was about 4 inch diameter.
Do you associate these things with easter?