3rd DAY OF LENT – FASTING/FEASTING FOR THE NEW GOLDEN AGE
A TIME OF RETREAT
3rd DAY OF LENT – FASTING/FEASTING FOR THE NEW GOLDEN AGE
(These devotionals can be best understood by reading them in order)
Nancy B. Detweiler, M.Ed., M.Div.
A Light for my Path
In my ASH WEDNESDAY devotional, I asked why we have considered ourselves to be dust. It is important to pursue this question a little farther.
In Genesis 1:26, we see Mother/Father God creating humankind in our image. We were initially created as spirit beings, as God is Spirit.
In Genesis 2:7, we find a 2nd creation story: “then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” Now, we are physical beings, breathing the breath of God while living in the Garden of Eden.
In Genesis 2:16, we read God’s instructions: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” God granted us freewill choice.
In Genesis 3, the symbolic story of our freewill choice to experience living on the plane of duality where we will acquire knowledge of good and evil … of Light and darkness … of positive and negative energies. This choice required that we leave our home in paradise—the Garden of Eden—because there is no duality in the higher dimensions of reality. Once we left the Garden, God explains: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:19)
Mother/Father God granted us the gift of freewill choice … we used that freewill choice to request permission to experience living on the plane of duality. God honors that freewill choice and allows Earth humans to leave their home in paradise. In order to do so, we involuted into denser physical beings that were suited to living on the plane of duality. We became dust and subject to death. Our physical bodies return to dust once the soul has vacated. Still, we have been spirit beings having the physical experience.
The good news is that this is not the end of the story. The Bible is the story of humankind’s evolutionary soul journey back to Garden of Eden … back to the New Earth.
Mother/Father God was not punishing humankind by honoring our freewill choice to experiment with life on the plane of duality. It has been an experiment that we all agreed to; it was never intended to last forever. We asked permission to evolve spiritually by experiencing the challenges of evil (life in which we believe ourselves to be separate from God) and learning to always choose the good (to recognize God as indwelling us and to be an outer expression of that indwelling God). Our soul’s goal was to speed up our spiritual evolution.
We never intended to lose our way back to the Garden. We did not intend to forget that Mother/Father God dwells within each of us. Yet, somehow we did.
During the Lenten Season of 2013, we have the opportunity to fast from thoughts and feelings of separation from God – and – to feast upon the knowledge that the kingdom of God is within us … that our I AM PRESENCE continues to be the breath we breathe, our life force.
