Editorial

Take It and Eat It Up

Back to basics. What is the Christian mission? To teach the Gospel and to heal the sick. The Gospel: that Good News. What version do we use? Roman, Orthodox, precanonical, Revised, New Revised, Protestant, Postmodern? The recent pronouncement of "informed" Bible "experts" (the Jesus Seminar), using all the tools available to modern scholarship, is that only ten per cent of the sayings attributed to Jesus are authentic. A tithe of text remains.

We're living in the age of the autodidact, the self-taught, where each is a self-styled authority. The conservators of doctrinal Christianity see great peril massing at their doorstep. To some, the whole Christian superstructure seems to be on the verge of becoming a mausoleum or museum, or hopelessly anatomized into a myriad of sects. Ecclesiastics see authority being wrested from their auspices and claimed by individual laity. They see Christianity being pressed to serve a multicultural agenda that relativizes all religion and even admits enlightened humanism as equal partner to its democratic ranks.

Nor is this disrupting trend likely to subside. On the contrary, the collapse or destructuring of traditional systems will accelerate in these predawn hours of the emerging Aquarian dispensation. Max Heindel's relevant analogy is of the breaking down of a building to its discrete units so that they may be reconstituted according to the needs of the new structure. The need to believe, the power of belief, remain. What is believed changes, is amplified, modified. The credal core of Christianity abides. Christ is the cornerstone of the belief system. But what structure is built on that foundation? The edifice of Christianity is founded on the Incarnation of Christ in Jesus, the Crucifixion of the personality, and the Resurrection of the Christ Spirit. All obvious and occult truths are implicit in these three facts.

Our concern, as students of the truths given by the Brothers of the Rose Cross, is that what we espouse not be a stumbling block, but a stepping stone. We must cast our net out of the "right" side of the boat if we are to encounter a "school" of fish. We can "fish" haphazardly or follow the direction of the One Who knows (ICHTHYS). As we propose and promote "new" concepts, it is vital that we be seen as exemplars of the (old) law, not as mere anarchists or self-styled cultists, for then our privileged knowing scares and scandalizes.

A delicate balance exists between self-reliance and personal responsibility for proving the truth of the Teachings and demonstrating universal fellowship and interdependence in Christ, which has been the Church's function. All too easily can self-responsibility be perceived as anti-authoritarianism and egotism. We want to exercise great care not to mislead potential beneficiaries of the Teachings by seeming to advocate proud un-Christian autonomy. So we take pains to distinguish between the personal self and the Christ-instilled transpersonal Self.

While Aquarian energies already are taking an apparently negative form, impelling many to "do their own thing," be a law unto themselves, proclaim unlimited rights for their persons, repudiate the value of historical experience (including all formal religions), it is especially incumbent upon us who are in possession of potentially unsettling information that we be judicious and circumspect in our personal affairs and genuinely attentive to the needs of any who impinge on our lives. Knowing the easy confusion that may arise in the minds of others who, out of fear of what is new (and therefore threatening), may rush to judgment, we want to be sensitive to what in our conduct might be seen as abrasive or contentious or self-seeking. Especially as we are called to cultivate greater reliance on the inner truth, the Christ within, are we under constraints not to have that fealty construed as pride and unneighborliness.

We must first personally receive the Good News in substance, even as Holy Communion, for that is really what it is. The crux of the gospels, the Bread of Truth, is the gift and giving of the Being of Christ. As He says, "I am the resurrection and the life." If we ingest and digest this Good News (Christ resurrected), we become membered into It (Him), as both exponents and exemplars, as both apostles and disciples. This membership in Christ constitutes healing. We are healed and can share healing in and through our persons. As we receive, so we give. The messenger (angel) becomes testimony for the message (evangel). Living the life, we shall not only know the doctrine, we shall show it. This is the ultimate form of teaching, and makes for the surest healing.