For more than 2000 years clerical Christianity has been on crutches, using the inveterate habits of paganism and Judaism, of theological arrangements, rather than fully embracing the glorious and wise message of Jesus. Catholic theologies have injected the divine content of these messages into impure human models that have contaminated its pure spirit. That is why the time has come for the so-called Christian humanity to free itself definitively from these obsolete and alien theological disorders and to begin to move in the right direction. The Gospel of Jesus does not need these pagan and Jewish elements, these absurd ideas of redemption through complicated magical ritualism, nor the disgusting killings of innocent animals.
The quintessence of Jesus' message has nothing to do with these heterogeneous conceptions; the Gospel enjoys perfect spiritual autonomy, perfect maturity, and vigorous health to walk on its own. The essence of the Gospel is summed up in the mystical experience of God's presence and its spontaneous overflow in the form of ethical living with all God's creatures.
When the synagogue theologian wanted to know what was the most important thing in human life, Jesus did not speak of sacramental ritualism or blood redemption, as our theologians teach but spoke of the experience that man must-have of the presence of God and the fourfold love of God that the integral man feels in himself when he becomes aware of this divine presence with his soul, mind, heart and all the forces of the body.
Jesus describes the integral man as soul, mind, heart and body forces. If he had only demanded that man love God with his soul, we would have found him normal. But the fact is that he demands of man to love God also with the mind, the heart, and even with all the vital forces of the body. It requires that the Kingdom of God be manifested totally in man, that the divine Self of the soul acts as a leaven leavening the human, mental, emotional, bodily ego. Thus, Jesus assumes possible this total permeation of the mental-emotional-bodily ego by the divine factor of the spiritual Self. If a man cannot achieve this full permeation of his whole nature through the mystical experience of the spirit of God, he does not fulfil the first and greatest of all commandments.
This total permeation of the human ego by the divine Self supposes that the mental-emotional-bodily ego permits and prepares this invasion, that the human ego voluntarily allows itself to be invaded by the power of the divine spirit of the Self. This fourfold love for God could be represented by two crossed lines, vertical and horizontal, where vertically would be the words soul and body and horizontally, heart and mind, designating, so to speak, the four cardinal points of human nature.
What is this but self-knowledge and self-realization in the language of modern philosophy and psychology?
For the soul to properly permeate the other human sensory properties, it is indispensable that they be emptied of their own content; let the mind give up its thoughts, let the heart empty itself of any desire and let the body suspend all its personal feelings, and let this ego-emptying receive the Christ-fullness: that man establishes in himself a great vacuum, the abolition of his noisy physical-mental-emotional egoism. Only in this way can divine plenitude flow freely into this human emptiness. Theo-fullness only plenifies ego-emptiness.
Without these requirements, it is incomprehensible and one cannot love God with all one's soul, one's mind, one's heart and one's strength.
What did Jesus do in his 18 years in Nazareth, of which the Gospels do not speak? And what did he do in the 40 days of his loneliness in the wilderness of Judea? And what did he do during the three years of his public life, when he spent nights at the top of the hills or in the silence of the wilderness? He simply attuned the soul, mind, heart and body to the spirit of the Father; he was intensely aware of the real presence of God, which was normal and easy practice for him, and so essential that he urged his disciples as the true liberation of man, the first and greatest of all commandments, the only thing needed.
Given this, it is unfortunate that the Christian churches still resort to borrowing from ritualistic paganism and begging for bloodthirsty Judaism. They make Christendom believe that Jesus recommended these obsolete practices, long surpassed.
Theologies are not ashamed to beg these strange elements from other ideologies, as if Christianity did not possess riches infinitely superior to all this and lacked its own identity with spiritual autonomy: self-knowledge by divine mysticism and self-realization by human ethics, “in which all the law and the prophets consist.”
It causes amazement and strangeness that this still archaic posture, which is based either on the ignorance of spiritual leaders, or on the lowness with which they force their adherents to these ancient traditions, as if it were the true spiritual heritage of the Gospel’s message.
When the so-called clerical Christianity will have the decency to accept the words of Jesus: “Call no one upon the face of the earth your Father your guide, your teacher - for one is your Father, your guide, your master.”
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