We held our first Christ Enlight Gathering here in Milwaukee yesterday, June 5th. We had a nice turn out, and a great time together. My thanks to Gordon Kirchoff for the excellent music he shared with us, and to all who took the time to join us. The good news is that we have advertised our Christ Enlight Gatherings on Meetup.com and the response there has been very encouraging. I've promoted, and will continue to promote our Gatherings, because I believe our message is extremely important.
What is that message? To explain, I need to ask you to step out of the box for a moment. Lay aside your preconceived notions about spirituality and religion, and allow me to ask you a question: What if everything and everybody shared an unbreakable connection to Divinity? What if humanity was inherently Divine rather than inherently flawed - Divine by virtue of the fact that the stuff from which we were made was Divinity itself, and so it's all good because it's all God? What if we were perfect and getting better all the time? What if we are just who we were meant to be, and if mistakes and challenges were lessons to be learned and never punishment from on high? After all, why would Divinity punish itself? Finally, what if we allowed ourselves to use our reason to ask questions about our understanding of religion, spirituality, and God - questions like, "Does that even make sense?" That's precisely what we do at a Christ Enlight Gathering!
We examine our assumptions to see if they still ring true. We encourage each other to catch ourselves doing something good instead of always looking for flaws in ourselves. We look to our human (and Divine) potential and recognize that spirituality isn't a passive journey in which we ask an external God to either rescue us from our problems or bring us the things we need. Rather, we believe that we co-create our reality with God, and so while prayer and meditation are essential components of the spiritual life we also need to take responsibility for our lives. We recognize our own prosperity, a prosperity that comes not from the endless search for more, more, more; but rather a prosperity that comes from learning that we already have everything we need.
This is a very radical stance, one that challenges many of the traditional assumptions of religion. Interestingly, it is a stance that is supported by the scriptures of every major religion, if not by the institutions that perpetuate religion. Speaking of religion, you may wonder what our religious perspective is - are we Christian? "Christian" is a term that means many different things to many different people. We come from many traditions, Christian and other, but our religion is loving kindness, compassion, and truth. We exist in the creative tension that exists when people of differing beliefs come together in honest, respectful discussion and sharing. We speak of and teach about Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Krishna, Mohammad, Moses, and all the great wisdom teachers from many traditions. We do so to learn about the Divinity that dwells within us and all of creation. We find labels less helpful than relationships, and we believe that all beings come from God and return to God after transitioning this life. We are spiritual beings having a human experience, we were never born and we will never die. Most importantly, we do not believe a loving God would create a place called hell where It would punish people eternally - though we do acknowledge that many of us create and live in a hell on Earth.
If that sounds interesting to you, check out our website at www.ChristEnlight.org.
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