thesoulpurposedotorg

Forget the past, for it is gone from your domain! Forget the future, for it is beyond your reach! Control the present! Live supremely well now! It will whitewash the dark past, and compel the future to be bright! This is the way of the wise. – Paramahansa Yogananda

Many churches in this area of Ohio where I am today, as well as the area of NY state where I live, have the phrase “Jesus Saves” written bright red letters somewhere on their edifice. This always annoys me, not because I disagree or want to hide from this truth but because the words are code language understood only from the inside – inside that particular church as well as inside of the experience of Jesus Christ as savior. It’s a language from another era that doesn’t quite compute. It begs the question – what exactly is Jesus saving? In a capitalist society, the society at large might wonder if its in a bank or in stocks and bonds!

Indeed, we do need a savior. The quote I’m meditating on above speaks of controlling the present as the way to whitewash the dark past. I can’t do that without a savior. By “savior” I don’t mean one who rescues me from past descisions or changes my circumstances with a magic wand. That view of Christ as Savior is the unique distortion of North American christianity. No, the Savior we need is: the Christ that dissolvesthe delusions, Christ Jesus who cleans the temple of our heart from the lies and self-loathing as he swept the temple in Jerusalem, the child Jesus who frees us to ask questions and to be wise, the infant Jesus who trusts enough to be a vulnerable one of us. But if we look for a rescuer from up on high somewhere outside of this human experience, then we will waste our time on this earth and miss the point of it all.