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Preface
“ The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal god and avoid dogma and theology.
It should be based on a religious sense arising
from the experience of all things natural
and spiritual as a meaningful unity.”
Albert Einstein
Humanity and the earth need a new song—a song of equality. This song will be sweet to the ears of all people and all things of the earth. It will replace the present disharmonious raucous one of domination and inequality. We the people will sing into existence this song of peace, prosperity, equality and freedom for all. Future generations of our children and their children will know that we finally had enough of the inequality of peoples and species, and enough of the destruction of the earth by relatively few with their controlling and destructive paradigms.
A revolutionary movement of action and consciousness is needed now. From the mountains, the jungles and the deserts to the oceans and the seas, from every hamlet and village to the cities, large and small, people need to unite as one voice and sing a song of love—Power to the People, Power to the Earth!
Who Am I to Call for a Revolution?
I am the Morning Star. Like many of the prophets of the past, I experienced the divine ‘call’ as something heard and as something seen—in the form of a vision and a voice. I do not come from an established priesthood or hierarchy but I, as well as my wife, have been passed on the lineages and traditions of various indigenous spiritual practices.
My vision occurred on the Big Island of Hawaii in October of 1993. My wife, Sherry, myself and a native Hawaiian healer friend were leading a group of our students to various sacred sites to experience the spiritual knowledge of the Hawaiians and the magic and power of the land. This was not the first time or the first group that we had brought to the Big Island. But this time we wanted to honor the land and the Hawaiian ancestors by conducting a very sacred ceremony called a ‘burning or feeding the spirits.’ After an intense apprenticeship, the power and authority to conduct this ceremonial work was passed on to us by Mom and Vince Stogan, Coast Salish British Columbia elders and shamans.
A burning is a timeless ceremony that actually involves cooking food and then burning the food so that the substance and energy of it is taken into the Otherworld. This type of ceremony honoring the gods, goddess, and ancestors by a burnt offering is ancient in form and can be traced as far back as the Egyptians. In fact, our friend told us that this ceremonial way was part of the Hawaiian spiritual tradition centuries past, but was a lost art and seldom practiced today.
A ceremonial burnt offering is also recorded in the Pentateuch, the Old Testament, in the story of Abraham and his son Isaac. Abraham is supposed to take his son into the mountains and offer him as a burnt offering to God. At the last moment, God sends an angel to stop him from sacrificing his son. And in the stead, provides a ram for Abraham to sacrifice in the place of his son.(1) This story does point out a sad fact of history where at certain times and in certain cultures, humans have become the sacrificial food of the gods through the corruption of this most sacred ceremony of honoring God and all the unseen reflections of God.
(1) This story was used by the liar Paul to give importance and religious credibility to the crucifixion of Jesus: “Friends, God ultimately did not require from Abraham, nor does God require from us, what God had not done or would not do. We see in this story of Isaac’s near sacrifice the prefiguring of the Passion of Christ, God’s only begotten Son.
In God’s later covenant, what we call the New Testament, we as Christians believe that God made the ultimate sacrifice for humankind in the death and resurrection of God’s son Jesus Christ, an act God never actually required of anyone, be it Abraham, or the people of Israel, or us. The Lord God demands no human sacrifice, and yet there would be a human sacrifice—not bound and laid upon an altar, but ridiculed, tormented, whipped, and nailed to a cross. In the Gospels Jesus is gradually revealed to be the sacrificial Lamb of God. This time God sacrifices his own son.
Jesus had to go to the actual cross, to create survival value for eternity, and to embrace a death fit for a criminal, in obedience to his vocation, in the ultimate expression of love for a sinful world. Jesus finishes in the faith that God began with God’s servant Abraham. And God’s life-giving love raises Jesus from the dead, so that all who believe in him, though they die, will also rise again to eternal life with God, in perfect love. As Paul tells us in Romans, ‘Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’” Sermon: June 29, 2008 by The Rev. Eileen Weglarz, www.stmarksmtkisco.org
Further excerpts from the Preface of The Greatest Lie Ever Told
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