The Power of Inner Healing
As a spiritual seeker, I love reading about other faith traditions and spiritualities. As I get older, this learning is less about head knowledge, knowing facts and concepts, and more allowing the wisdom, truth, and medicine of that tradition to sink into me.
The beautiful benefit of this is that it helps me to see my own Christian Lutheran faith tradition with new eyes. When I compare teachings like reincarnation, karma, enlightenment, magic, spells, energy and vibration, chakras, shamanistic work, and others to how I was taught to see my faith, everything gets very exciting and interesting! And it also has me questioning some of the things we believe are absolutely necessary “Christian” beliefs.
As a Lutheran, the debate between being saved by Grace through faith over Works Righteousness seemed fundamental. It was so ingrained in me, it felt like these were the only two ways to see salvation. Works Righteousness briefly states that we must fan the flame of faith within and do the good things to find grace with God. Luther (based on Paul) argued that no, nothing we can ever do will impress God because we are in bondage to sin, it is purely God’s grace that gives us salvation. All we have to do is believe, which we could argue is a work in and of itself.
I find this argument old and tired because it is based on a foundation I don’t relate to. I do not believe we are fundamentally bad. I believe that every one of us has a beloved Soul that is created by God, thus we are instantly and eternally Children of God, pieces of God. This is our True Self, the one that will not die. This True Self is always connected, as if by an umbilical cord, to the Source, the Great Mother, who loves us and is waiting for us patiently and lovingly as we go on this earth journey.
We go on this earth journey to mature as Souls. We cannot fully know, grow, and realize what we need to without this experience. But earth is hard. It’s like going to the gym or bootcamp where we suddenly regret our desire to get in shape. By definition, we forget our connection to God, we focus only on what we see, we lose touch with the vast spiritual dimension, and by feeling alone, scared, and confused, our journey toward courage, maturity, wisdom, and compassion begins.
In this scenario, we are EXPECTED to mess up. God holds NOTHING against us. You would never expect a baby in a high chair to take a spoon from their mother and suddenly feed themselves with great dexterity and hold a deep conversation. Absolutely not! And yet Christianity speaks of “sin” in a way that assumes we are trapped in something God hates and has no compassion for, in which the only remedy is some magical death ritual.
The doctrine of Original Sin correctly observes that we seem to have unconscious motives and self-sabotaging mechanisms, inner critics, shadows, and “demons” that derail us. And yes, if we are in charge of muscling through that to get God to accept us, we will fail.
But the premise is wrong. Psychology, meditation, channeling, Hinduism, Buddhism, Indigenous beliefs all have beautiful insights into the human spirit and mind that can give us an alternative understanding. My own personal experience gives me a different perspective. In fact, millions of personal experiences with the Living God say otherwise. That we are loved and worthy, and we are capable of healing. Salvation is a kind of healing, a harmony within that will echo and resonate without. When we heal, the world is a bit more healed.
And there is no one way to do this. An amazing guru once said, “All spiritual pathways are the shadows of those who learned to fly”. We are grounded on earth so that eventually we learn to fly. And we are not alone. We have Great Ones who are itching to show us how. How to find our power, our compassion, our wisdom. How to grow our wings.
I believe there is room in Christianity to learn from all these beautiful voices around us. That which heals must be from God. So, let’s get to the business of healing, shall we?