All paths lead to God.
June 6, 2017
God joins each of you together in a bond that is beyond your vision.
What you have shared tonight can be considered essentially as reflections on relationships—relationships with others, relationships with yourselves, relationships within the wider world. You are required as a human being to find pathways that allow you to move forward in your relationships, but you are also asked to include in that forward movement your relationship with God, for it is in your relationships with others that you are indeed relating to God. You cannot say “love God” when you have no love for some, for all belong to what God is.
All cultures seek to define a particular relationship with God or with a collection of Gods that relate in themselves to elements experienced by human beings. There are those who worship a God of water, a God of light, a God of the heavens, a God of the plants, a God of the earth, or the spirits of those who have joined us. There are cultures who revere numerous deities. Those deities serve a similar function as the relationship of a given culture to a single God. The God or Gods to whom all seek a connection represent a way of giving meaning, significance, and direction to the lives of human beings. God, as you perceive God to be, is really the same as the Gods of other cultures.
Whether many Gods or a single God, the reality is that it makes no difference, for you are finding ways forward that lead you to a closer connection with a Presence that is greater than your own, a Presence that sustains and nourishes and directs, a Presence that begins life and that nurtures a transition to our life. One God or many Gods—it is really of no significance. God is; Gods are. You are one, and you are one with the Gods. You are one with God. You are one because you belong to the totality of all that is contained in what we refer to as Spirit.
The journey of humankind is a journey of relationships. It is a journey of learning compassion. It is a journey of expanding vision and understanding. It is a journey that enables each person to feel a connection in a relationship. The relationship may be between people or with concepts or philosophies. The relationships may be between people and ideals, hopes, relationships based on common suffering, common challenges, common successes, common identities of spirit. Whatever those relationships may be, your lives are infinitely entwined. What you have shared together certainly focuses your thoughts on the importance of those relationships.
What is your relationship to God? We don’t mean are you a believer, but rather what meaning do you give to what you believe. You must understand that your beliefs change. They go through cycles of intensity. Sometimes your beliefs are deeply felt. At other times your beliefs are barely understood. Your beliefs may be profoundly questioned. Your beliefs may, for a time, seem pointless, meaningless, ill-defined, misdirected, or nonexistent. But your relationships to your life are, in a sense, a gathering together on this changing belief system within which each of you and all human beings exist. No one lives with a firm set of beliefs that are unchanging in one’s lifetime, and therefore no one exists whose relationships to others are unchanging. All human beings must accept that those relationships are vivid at times and difficult to perceive at others.
Relationships are about priorities. What you believe to be important to you at this moment has everything to do with how you relate to life around you. When that sense of importance or priority changes, the relationships you experience also change, and that is okay. Your lives are not directed in a straight line. The paths that you follow are never straight. There is a reason why those paths that you belong to are never straight, and that is because of the changing relationships, the changing priorities, the changing perspectives that must accompany each of your lives.
We always ask for you to seek out ways of expressing love. We always ask you to find ways that are loving. Whether those ways of expression are in thought, action, or commitment is not so critical. But the means by which you become more loving will of course vary, and because of that, the paths of your life must also change in their direction.
As we have always indicated, all human paths lead to God. That cannot be denied, for you are on a journey whose goal is to become fully Love, and that journey is not achieved in a single lifetime. You may experience a single human life, but your journey began before your human life and will continue after that life. The journey has only one goal, regardless of the nature of each path.
The relationships you experience in human life must take into account the validity of the path of another. You’re not asked that your path and another’s path should be parallel. You cannot judge another’s path. You can observe it, and you can recognize its differences, and you may express concerns, but the individual on that path is no less or no more sacred than you are.
We emphasize the equality of all human beings. That is not an equality of behavior. It is an equality of spiritual worth. There are some who are more in touch with that presence of spirit than others, but not being aware of the spirit within is not a reason to judge another. You cannot judge someone for speaking a language that is different from yours. You can nevertheless affirm that the other individual has the same value, but because another language seems far different from your own is no grounds for judgment.
You do have a responsibility nevertheless to stand up for what you currently perceive as all good, for what you perceive as all spirit. You do have a responsibility to stand against the behaviors, actions, and attitudes of those who are opposed to what being loving really means. There is no sin in taking a stand today that may be very different from a stand you take sometime in the future as you measure that time. You can only stand for what you believe, but those beliefs must always be reflective of patience and forgiveness. Your stance must always reflect what it means to support and affirm an individual’s right to be present. The stance must affirm the validity of another’s spiritual presence.
As was expressed already, you are not asked to support whatever another does. If what is done is clearly wrong, then you have every right to express those concerns. But in expressing those concerns, find ways of affirming the other in some way. That affirmation may not be one of approval. Rather, that affirmation may be an element that unifies you and the other individual. Expressing how you are unified helps give perspective to expressing and responding to differences that you feel are fundamental. Those differences are not “you are right and someone else is wrong.” The differences are “you experience an inner direction of spirit affirmation and another finds difficulty to relating to such a central truth.”
Relationships are part of why you are given the life you have. Relationships are the basis for learning to express yourself in a loving manner that reflects your current understanding of God. Human beings will never be totally at peace, but human beings can find more common grounds, more opportunities to acknowledge what unites with less tendency to be dominated by the differences. In order for this to happen, you must continue in your efforts to be understanding, to be loving through affirmation of value, yet allowing yourself the ability to disagree. Recognizing what you share is not being blind to where your paths may cross one another. You are only asked to give honor and recognition to the individual as a spirit being on a path.
Stand up for what you believe. Be willing to be counted in your beliefs. Be open to the changes in priorities. Be open to the changes in what you feel to be spiritually motivated. Seek common grounds that unite you with each person with whom you may be in disagreement. Pray for the spirit of the one who creates pain. Pray for the culture that inflicts harm. Pray for all those who you feel are barriers to the expression of God’s love as you experience and understand it.
We, your guides, love you solely for who you are, not what you do, not what you say, but for who you are. What you do and what you say are part of your pathway, but they are not who you are. We see who you are. We pray that you may continue to grow in your capacity to see your neighbor.
Be blessed in the vision you have. Be blessed in your capacity to expand that vision. Be blessed in the love you can express, and be blessed in the certainty of the goal of all paths.
Amen.