Post date: Oct 12, 2010 10:27:31 PM
I was contacted last week by a very nice woman, who requested to register her daughter with The Prayer Registry. I wrote her back and asked for her daughter’s passing date and I referred her to my website so that she could take a look at the calendars. When I didn’t hear from her I contacted her to remind her that I was still waiting for the information regarding her daughter. This is the email I received back from her:
Thank you for following up and please accept my sincere condolences for the loss of your son. After looking at your website I have decided not to participate after all. I am a Christian and God explicitly forbids consulting with mediums and spiritists for He alone is the source of all knowledge and truth.
I wrote her back and as much as I wanted to express my views on this subject, all I wrote was that I respected her beliefs and I wished her the best. After years of trying to open people’s minds to the presence of spirit, I have come to believe that unless someone is open and interested, that it is best to let them be. However, there is nothing to prevent me from blogging my views on this subject because I do have strong feelings about this.
I believe that when it comes to loss and bereavement the only real solace comes from connecting up. The desire to connect up is only natural, especially in the case of parents and children, but with all loved ones really. Sometimes I wonder what kind of a God people are willing to believe in?
I pay particular attention to the phrase that reads, “God explicitly forbids consulting with mediums and spiritists for He alone is the source of all knowledge and truth.” First of all, if we look for where and when God did this forbidding, we will have to turn to scriptures that were not written by God, but by men. I think it is important to understand that. I will not out rule the possibility of divine influence, but it is imperative to understand that once information is interpreted by a human being and put into human language, it is no longer the direct word of God. I don’t know if the direct word of God could be put into words. The fact that some religious leaders will call their opinions “the word of God” is very scary, for if people believe them, then they are obliged to follow them. In this case, the woman in the email has been convinced that she will be violating the direct word of God if she consults a medium and so her hands have been tied.
I am concerned when people take the bible literally. It is important to keep in mind the fact that those who first recorded the bible stories in the written word, were not even eye-witnesses to any of the biblical stories they recorded. Instead what they recorded were stories that were first passed down for hundreds of years by mouth. By the time they were written for the first time, they had been interpreted and altered by each storyteller who spoke them, only to then be subject to further interpretation and alteration by the hand that wrote them. Of course, as different religions emerged, each put their own particular spin on the stories. I’m always amazed how each believes their particular version to be the TRUTH in capital letters, which of course means that everybody else is dead wrong.
Sometimes I wonder if people have lost all common sense. Let’s analyze this from a common sense perspective. I believe that my child has gone on into the realm of spirit. That means that I believe that physical death is not an end but a transformation into another realm of existence. Now, this reassures me because it shows me that there is a grand plan in which we do go on and the word death a misnomer because what we really are is reborn into the next step in the plan. Now if this is true, and I believe that it is, then it is within this grand plan that our souls are infinite and that the love goes on. Now if you believe in God, then it is God’s plan that our souls are infinite and that the love goes on. So, I ask you, does it make any sense that the same God who endowed us with infinite awareness and infinite love would forbid us to connect up with our loved ones? What could be more natural than a mother or a father wanting to connect with their beloved child whether their child is in or out of their body? And what in God’s name does this have to do with the devil? We all KNOW that the love between parent and child is sacred. My idea of a loving God is one who would bless any true channel that could allow for contact between the worlds, so that loved ones could share a word or two and express their continued love and loyalty.