The
Kingdom-A Present Reality
“The
kingdom of God is a present reality, experienceable by the individual
in this life...a psychological experience requiring of the individual
a new moral consciousness, a commitment to an inner way,
self-confrontation, and a giving of priority to inner values versus
outer values. The kingdom brings to the individual his own wholeness,
meaning, and creativity, so that the rewards of the kingdom are felt
in this life.”
John
A. Sanford (The Kingdom Within, 1970)
One
of the perks of working with a son in the antiques business is going
through other people's old stuff. When he buys remnants of estates, we go
and pack up everything that's left and cart it away. Recently, one
such 'clearing out' produced John Sanford's book quoted above.
Sanford, who died in 2005, was a Jungian Analyst and Episcopal
Priest, who lived in California and wrote many books about the
intersection of psychology and religion. He had a particularly clear,
'psycho-babble-free' way of writing that is a joy to read. As I
flipped through the pages, this underlined quote came up and seemed
to me especially cogent for our times.
We
know that Jesus told his disciples, “the kingdom is all around you
and you do not see it.” They were confused, sitting as they were
in the midst of Roman occupation, a captive people. The disciples
must have shrugged, and thought Jesus able to access some rarefied
heavenly reality that they surely could not see. And here we are,
two-thousand years later, just as confused. We watch our people in
power fight about whether background checks should be required before
guns are sold, while our children are shot in their school rooms, and
lunatics bomb, maim and kill perfectly innocent citizens going about
their daily lives. We might ask, as did the disciples, “Where's the
'kingdom of heaven' in that?”
Surely,
you will not find the kingdom on any city street here or abroad. You
will not find it among our leaders in Washington or as an integral
part of any government. Most of the time, you will not find it in our
churches or our great cathedrals. Because the kingdom of heaven, as
Sanford explains, is an inner reality, and not an outer one. The only
way we will ever see the kingdom outside ourselves, is when all of us
possess it within ourselves. We must travel within and live from the
conscious awareness of our own potential wholeness. We must take the
time to look without blinders at our own moral compromises, and
forgive ourselves for being less than we hoped for. We must make
peace within before there will be peace without. The
kingdom of heaven is a spiritual reality in the present moment and it
exists within you.
In
the spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment