Session 7
Chapters 55-65
Ch. 55 - Having given ourselves to Christ we are liberated into spiritual awareness and presented by our Lord to God, the Father, who rejoices in our freedom and gives us back to Jesus whom we continue to follow now proceeding from our silent centers to love the world with Him. Nothing gives God greater join than our freedom to participate unencumbered in the evolution of all things in love.
Ch 56 - God and our own soul are one.
Therefore to know ourselves is to know God and to know God is to know ourselves.
Our sensuality must be drawn up into our essence. Flesh must be consummated by Spirit.
Ch. 57 - Christ is our true mother in whom we are endlessly born and from whom we will never be separated. Christ is enfolded in God and we are enfolded in Christ who dwells within us born there by his own mother, Mary.
Ch. 58 - Our essence (soul, True self, ground) “dwells in totality in the Trinity.” Our sensuality (flesh, ordinary self, to some degree false self though sensual self is not negative) dwells only in the Second Person of the Trinity, the Christ current of God, who is one. The Christ is the manifesting aspect or current of the Trinity, so it makes sense that our manifesting, sensual self dwells only in Him.
Ch. 59 - We have a “triple task” - love God for creating us, pray to Christ for mercy and compassion, and look to the Holy Spirit for guidance. Love, pray, look. From this triple task we draw “humility, gentleness, patience, empathy, and aversion to error and wickedness.”
Ch. 60 - By loving God we pay off any debts we might have to God. To love God is to love what God has made.
Ch. 61 - When we fall our Mother God wants us to run into her arms as a child would. The end of this chapter reads like a mystical summary of Steps 1,2, and 3 of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Ch. 62 - “the goodness in nature is God.”
We will find everything we need and want within our own souls where God dwells. First we will find what we are looking for in faith and insight, then we will find what we long for in God himself, in the bliss of realized union.
Ch. 63 - “Human nature and grace are in complete harmony.” None will be lost.
Ch. 64 - Before the showings Julian experienced a great deal of pain, suffering, and loss and desired to be delivered from this world and carted off to the next.
She had a vision of a body lying on the ground, bloated and hideous. The body was a symbol of the suffering and misery that often comes upon us in life. A little child sprang forth from the body representing the “purity and clarity” of the soul.
“Let us accept our tribulations as lightly as possible, paying little attention to them, and surrender to waiting.”
Ch. 65 - God’s love for us is endless and should feel to each as if everything God does is done just for him or her. This creates such a unity among all people that no one among us should see him or herself as separate from his/her neighbors.