I am the Lord of the Dance!

Dance! Dance! Wherever you may be.

I am a recovering alcoholic.  I am also recovering from the impact that Christianity had on my heart. Both these processes are ongoing.

I was brought up in the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland. This is the city of Armagh, the city of saints and scholars, neither of which applies to myself.  I love this city but it haunts me in many ways.  I was in that town scripted someone who it seems had the word ‘sinner’ on his forehead like a scarlet letter.  Then there was the other idea.  This was that God had a plan and that I had better get in line.

This invitation is still being dressed up in new books and sermons.  Essentially it is old wine in new wine skins.  Both of these invitations to recognising that you were a sinner and that God had a plan for you seemed intent on creating feelings of guilt.  As someone with very low self-esteem at that time this was an emotional experience that until I left Northern Ireland when I was twenty-one years old.

Little has changed. This is, in part, the reason why this site exists and for The Work I do.  It is an invitation to the awareness of the beauty that is at the heart of creation and which you are created to express without any sense of guilt.

Guilt has a value when it arises from one’s internal wisdom.  It is an invitation to correction, to take action that follows Love.  It is corrosive to the spirit when imposed from an authority outside oneself.  There can be outside corrective instruction but there is no place within such instruction for the invitation to feel guilty.

This writer is for conscience and not guilt.  Conscience is there as a protection, not a punishment.  Close it down and you wound yourself and shut down your power.

For years I was a reactionary to the word ‘sinner.’ If you attend some of the Protestant churches I have attended you would suspect that this word was an obsession.  This writer thinks that in many places the institutional mind reigns rather than Love.

I am less of a reactionary than I was but my alter ego Mrs. Batty still appears when I hear or read about us ‘all being sinners’ who need to follow God’s plan.  Mrs. Batty can be a bit of a ranter.  It is my work to keep her contained.  She has a problem with what wisdom traditions refer to as ‘right speech.’  She likes to shout her mouth off and say exactly what she wants and consequences be damned. One thing about Mrs. Batty – she is sure she is right, which is always a dangerous card to play.

So let me share where I am now as a recovering mystic/seer wounded by the institutional mind called christianity. I deliberately am using the small ‘c’ to indicate the small mindedness of that mind set.

Am I a sinner? The answer to that is ‘Yes.’ Am I to feel guilty? The answer to that is ‘No.’

A sinner is someone who misses the mark, misses the centre.  The centre is Love.  So a central to the sinner’s experience is the absence of Love.  All I do is invite awareness to this absence.  This does not condemn any of us. Your are being invited into a love affair that was created to last forever and you are one side of it that, paradoxically speaking, you are never apart from.  You certainly leave Love but it never leaves you.

Does God have a plan for you?  At this stage in this storyteller’s life the answer is ‘Yes’ and it is ‘No.’ God is not a planner.  All those who tell you God has a plan are focused on time.  When you question them you will find that most, if not all of them, think that eternity is a time beyond measure.  This is one key to knowing that they do not know.  Any teacher who teaches the invitation to the timeless, who has not been graced the knowing of eternity here and now, ought to shut up.

God is not a planner because a plan has to have a beginning and an end.  God – Creation – is in love with creation.  This is why creation is.  It is a manifestation of Love in form. To say that God has a plan would involve you in saying that there will come a time (within the timelessness of Creation) when God ceases to Love.  This is childish nonsense. Not only that. It wound the mystic heart that is a heart seeking missile for the Beloved.  It screws up this inner guidance system.  Not only that but it sets up an idea of a chosen ‘elect.’

God is a dancer.  You are a part of this dance of eternity that is stepping into higher and higher forms of Love.  If there is a plan it is contained in the word Love.  How this Love is expressed needs a boundary.  You are that boundary designed to contain the boundless.  This is more a love affair than a plan, more a dance of the timeless than within the prison of time.

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