Quote:
Originally Posted by Terry
Suddenly a proclamation would be made, there's a brother among us who is not one of us.
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Well, Jesus made that proclamation as well. For years I worried that I was Judas reborn. I still do. When the Network Norwich and Norfolk Lee-ites called me a dark, frustrated person whose ambition had been thwarted, I had to stop and wonder, is this true? Why am I posting here, anyway? I mean, I don't agree that "Jesus is the Father" as Lee put it out. It doesn't fit with word usage as we understand words, it is not logical as I understand logic, it doesn't have a history in the Christian theological perspective (the Son is the Son and the Father is the Father), and yet why am I here, arguing, on a forum of church affairs in a city of southeast England?
Ultimately all I can do is to forgive others their trespasses, and hope that I in turn will be forgiven. Jesus promised this: "As you do to others so will be done to you." And I assume, at least in part, that I'm really the person that I accuse Lee of being: selfish, ambitious, a show-off, egotistic, narrow-minded, petty, grandiose, etc. Why else am I here but to puff myself up and show off my feeble writing skills? So I have to repent, and to forgive. I also must reform my behavior and be quick to hear, but slow to speak (type).
Really, all we can do is try to be honest with each other. Be real. I was once for "the Hive", for "the Body", and quick to point my quivering finger at those who weren't True Believers, but eventually I saw it as a sham. However, that doesn't all of a sudden make me a good person. I'm still a wandering sinner, hearing the voice of Jesus calling me home. And the way home is not to quarrel with one another, to judge one another, and to project our own repressed anxieties on others. Lee arguably did this, and I've read some of the writings of the Dong-ites in Brazil and they're similar. Feverish and self-centered: "You're not of the Body!" No objectivity is allowed to pull the subject out of the trance; it's a complete, hermetically sealed, fully subjective world. And just because you've recruited a few unstable souls into The Cause, it doesn't mean it's more real. I could point out 50 groups from the Heavens Gate cult to the People's Temple to the Branch Davidians. A group delusion is still a delusion, just a shared one.
But what am I doing? Anything better? I wonder.