|
|
Feature Article (Archived) |
|
NO
ONE CAN BE LOST No one can be lost; all partake of the universal Divine. We are all ideas of the Supreme (including perhaps our temporary suffering in various purgatories for our chastening). But we do not belong to ourselves—we are not our own idea! The Lord has thought us up, and will have to dispose of us in some fashion more appropriate than condemning us for playing the role assigned to us. The scriptures are our highest literature. But how could we revere any scripture that propagates the idea that some will be saved, some will be lost? The whole notion of some to be saved, some to be lost, is pure egoism. Since we ourselves can conceive of universal redemption—cannot God? Cannot the Supreme? Cannot Christ? To ask the question is to answer it. Could we worship a God that condemned anyone—giving him no hope of ultimate salvation? That would be diabolism, not divinity. For some, and perhaps for many at the end: There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. But only temporarily. All sorrow eventually will be turned into joy as slowly each person, however long it takes, turns to the Light that is his/her truest happiness. As we come to see that it is one energy diffused throughout humanity, driving some to be saints and others to be sinners, and one power, one life, one consciousness, one existence, one reality, operating through one and all, we shall not be able to exclude any from the divine mercy, or from our own. Christ’s views on this are very clear in the parable of The Prodigal Son and others in the New Testament (Luke 15). For example, the parable of the lost sheep in which the shepherd is anxious and searching for the one lost sheep out of the 100, rejoicing and celebrating when it is found. And the father of the prodigal son, while loving the virtuous son, loves the other equally. The father and the shepherd in these parables are intended to be allegories of the Lord, needless to say, and represent Christ’s convictions. They should be ours, too. If they are not, let us cultivate them—ridding our minds of all vestiges of the old idea of exclusivism, rejection, selective salvation; thus we make ourselves worthy of our higher natures—the pure, compassionate, all-embracing Light flowing into our minds from our souls, and from the beyond. For none
of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.
See also Words of Wisdom: Reincarnation
|
|
