Dear readers, to celebrate this very rare Easter Sunday April 24, 2011, I offer the following excerpt from my upcoming book “Remember, You Belong: Discovering the Love that’s been Waiting for You”. May you be blessed to know that the world has become again new, and you are forever loved.
By the spring of 1998, I knew that I was Hildegard of Bingen in a past life. So many wonderful synchronicities, dreams, visions, and other mystical emotional experiences of my entire life were aligning perfectly with this new awareness, so that I was looking forward to my place on Earth with the future of humanity as I had never before. Still, two points were troubling me in relation to the visionary German abbess.
One, I felt fairly obsessed with trying to decide whether she had ever known personal romantic love. I could feel her love of God, that was filling me to new heights of familiarity, no question of that! But I wondered if she’d faired any better than I in finding a soulmate for life, a peer with whom we could really belong. And two, I felt rather sheepish to admit that unlike Hildegard, who spoke often of our Savior and (as I learned later) saw Him in sapphire blue, I remained unconvinced that the story of Jesus was true. He seemed more like a poetic beautiful myth, or at best a composite good philosopher. God was so very real, but God in human form? I just wasn’t getting it, sorry to say.
On the morning of March 25, 1998, I awoke refreshed from a pleasant little dream about a friendly rust colored fox and grey squirrel chasing each other playfully in a park and kissing noses. I thought it was just another symbolic puzzle for my journal collection, amusing but also disappointingly trite. But then something else happened. I lay in bed awake and, without falling back asleep, I went directly into a vivid alternate reality that fully surrounded me. I was lucid and this was startlingly real.
I was seeing like a guest from the eyes of a woman who was both gentle and sad. She had black hair, a little curly, and wore blue and brown clothes with a cape and hood over her head. I felt that she/I was someone very distinct, and she was so terribly missing someone most dear and precious to her. She went to a cave where he had been lain, where he was dead, and to her surprise the cave was open. She walked into the entrance in wonder, and I felt such a wonder too, at the incredible feelings of intimacy and importance. I was being brought along with her to share in something so monumental, and I was honored to be her trusted friend. She knew that I was inside of her head, sharing with her everything that she saw and felt.
Inside the small cave room we could see some rows of ghostly seated white forms, facing forward to the back of the stone space, away from us. As we entered there were strange sensations of moving into a powerful energy field like nothing of this Earth. We heard many whispered gentle voices, saying “do not be afraid”, “be prepared to see a lot”, and “it’s going to be okay”. For a moment I backed out startled and felt separate as Carl, seeing the scene as if watching something on a TV. Then I went back into the woman’s head and we went forward again.
All the white outline forms rose to greet us. There were many gentle voices rising and falling likes waves on a beach. The forms came into focus as shining light people, and they parted for us to see better what they had gathered for. I heard clearly “do not be afraid”, “he’s not of your species”, “he’s assured us that he’s working for your kind”, and many other comforting murmurs about Jesus.
When I heard the name Jesus I pulled back out of the TV again. I though oh geez, what is this, some kind of new agey science fiction version of the life of Christ and resurrection? But I felt peaceful, so I reconsidered. I thought: it seems reverent, it seems genuine, just not everyone is going to go for this kind of thing! When I decided that I was in personal agreements with the event, I was drawn back into the woman’s head, where again I intently felt her own feelings and saw from her eyes.
This woman was amazed and a little bit curious, but she was not frightened, because she just really loved Jesus as a person. She loved him so dearly, so intensely, with a passionate devotion that caused me later when I wrote of it in my journal to well up in longing and tears, to feel a poignant sharpness in my chest, and to breathe with heavy labored emotions.
She and I kept peering forward through the luminous forms as they moved aside. I was amazed to hear multiple voices with subsonic components. The soothing tones of the glowing beings said more mysterious things that we caught in pieces, such as “we’ll keep him one or two more days, then you can see him”, all in response to the woman so dearly wanting to love and hold her beloved again.
I was beginning to wonder more clearly in my own amazement “am I inside of Mary Magdalene?”, when suddenly we could see all the way to his face, the face of our dearest one Jesus. We could just glimpse him at the far end of the room, past the shoulders of the parting white spectral forms. He looked surprised, healthy but going through wonder too, even as he was missing Mary as much as she was missing him. He just wanted to hold her and be held by her too again.
Respecting the couple’s feelings with total admiration, I softly studied the face of Jesus. He looked pretty much like I had been raised to expect: the kind sincere gentle face, with brown hair and beard and moustache. The hair was shorter than usually depicted. He appeared intelligent and searching, with deep qualities I could relate to that made me feel safe.
“Mary!” I heard him cry out in our minds, as his expression confirmed to his beloved how much he too wanted her back. He met her/our gaze of affection with his own of great tenderness, and then his eyes began to shine and glow. It got a little scary because his pupils disappeared as an intense blue white light streamed out from him, totally filling us and the room. He was becoming not human, the transformation was startling, and we just wanted him to stay human and be with us again. “Come back, what’s happening to you!...” Mary called out. But the blue white light came up over us like a search light, and whoosh! I was completely energized and overwhelmed, so much that my eyes snapped suddenly open and I sat bolt upright in my bed.
This brief timeless experience electrified me beyond anything I’d ever known. I was high for days and months afterward, as I’d catch myself repeating suddenly at intervals and weeping “Jesus is real, Jesus is real!”
That he loved her as much as she loved him, that they loved as I too hoped one day to know love, in the love that humanly personal and intimate with the devotion that reaches from beyond the grave… this touched me as I had never been touched before. There He stood in all the divine energy of God flowing through human form, and the most important relationship on Jesus’ mind, even as he was being transformed to the next step of cosmic evolution, was to be in the arms of his personal beloved again. The most tender longing of one human being for another could contain everything, everything, there was no loss.
Mary Magdalene was the first to see her beloved Jeshua, Jesus, return. As much as the Bible is otherwise biased to the view of male disciples who doubted that the Lord would first visit a woman, they could not keep this telling cosmic detail from recorded history.
Some people might find this concept offensive for the one who has been called the Savior of all humanity, that the first relationship he needed and wanted to return to in this world could be so personal, so romantic. Or that Jesus could even have a significant other, that he could be so human while so divine. But why, are we not all aspiring to live as He, and do we not all long to know our own love? I found the revelation to be absolutely beautiful, perfect, glorious and magnificent. It changed my life.
Later I discovered that the esoteric traditions of Jesus and Magdalene belonging together as a divine couple have been popular throughout the ages and are making no small comeback today, but I had not steeped myself in this material at the time. Why would I have let in such ideas, when I had not even thought that Jesus was real? But after I had become unexpectedly and wholly initiated into this perspective, I had the greatest validation of my own heart that I could ever require.
As the poet Hafiz says “All a sane man can ever care about is giving Love.” And to whom but the mate of your own eternal soul can you give more of your personal and unique heart of love, united by whatever forms you may find yourselves near and far? In the total joy of wedded souls you circulate together from and back to the source of all Love itself, planting your own sacred heart in the other to whom you are most closely created in the tender trust and enthusiasm for life itself, giving thanks to receive back again from the one you treasure most.
Jesus had awakened in me the power to know that God is totally personal, and that the divine begins here with the most intimate experience for which we are made in Earthly form to desire. Somewhere in this vast Universe, all of which I am truly called to love, there will be one beauty most rare to whom I am destined to return, and this one will be from their soul missing me as much as I am from my own missing them.
Later, I discovered that the morning of my precious new vision of love, which had birthed in me a new hope for the dream of a personal beloved with whom I would always be joined in the very eyes of God, was itself a significant day of the liturgical calendar year. I had not been raised Catholic in this life where it is more commonly spoken of, but March 25 is a full nine months before Christmas. Nine months being the term of a pregnancy, March 25 is celebrated by Christians as the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Archangel Gabriel announced to mother Mary that she would give birth to the one known to us today as Jesus, the Savior, God in human form.
Here then was the risen dear Jesus who was now to me so totally and perfectly real, not only as a model teacher for all who would love as God would have us love One and All, but also as the fellow human being who would always know and hold onto the irreplaceable partner with whom he most specifically and personally and inseparably loved to belong and belonged to love. May their union and all unions of eternal love be blessed and comforted forevermore; now I know they are.
