A Reunion with your Heart
And what is this whole Motley Mystic thing, anyway?
Welcome to the Motley Mystic!
Hey there, you lucky reader, you’re looking at the first ever issue of the Motley Mystic newsletter.
What is a Motley Mystic? It’s how I describe myself because even though I come from an evangelical Southern Baptist background, I have, over the years, discovered the Truth speaks with many voices. There’s no one religion, dogma, doctrine, philosophy or thought system or institution that has completely captured the Truth. They all can share that ultimate Truth that only love is real, but none has completely captured the essence of that Love.
I call myself a “motley mystic” because I am a conglomeration of many religious and spiritual traditions that I have explored over many years. I find the Truth - that only Love is real - in Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Islam, atheism, metaphysics and the writings of spiritual and secular thinkers throughout the ages. We’re all circling the Truth and to claim that any of us can find it in just one place is to miss the whole point of the journey we're taking in this bodily world. We'll explore that point, and more, in this newsletter.
I suspect I’m not alone in all of this. You, too, may be a motley mystic. After all, recent polls have shown that those who describe their religious beliefs as either “none” or “spiritual, but not religious” is growing rapidly as traditional forms of religion decline. Chances are you may resonate with this idea of motley mysticism and, if so, then this is the newsletter for you!
It is my intention to post something at least once a week for our free subscribers and more frequent, in-depth posts for our paying subscribers, who will also be able to post comments and get some chances to connect with me personally.
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If you want to know more about me, there's a whole section on that and I invite you to drop by the website of Jubilee! Circle, the spiritual community I founded in 2010 in Columbia, SC, where we're still going strong and broadcasting weekly on YouTube and Facebook.
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Hope to see you soon!
Candace Chellew
(aka The Motley Mystic)
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A Reunion with Your Heart
Many years ago, I discovered that there were people on the internet who were wrong, and in sore need of my intelligent and forceful correction. This was in a time before that little addiction called Facebook. This was a whole different addiction known as Yahoo Message Boards.
On these boards lived men and women (well, you never really knew which gender they were unless they told you) who constantly told gay and lesbian people that they were an abomination to God and were going to hell if they didn't change their ways. Now, this being the mid-1990s, I myself wasn't too sure whether or not being a lesbian would also exclude me from being a Christian. I had a sense that it didn't and I was reading books and studying the issue. I really wanted to find the truth and understand if I could truly be gay and Christian.
The only place to find online community back then were these message boards, so I went there, and what I found pissed me off. I spent countless hours arguing with these people, telling them not just about the scholarship I was reading that said the Bible never condemns loving, committed gay or lesbian relationships, but also telling them my personal story about I've always felt differently and knew, on a deeper level, that I was born a lesbian.
These boards are where I learned what the phrase "Internet troll" meant – and still means today. These people were impossible. They would not just attack the scholarship I presented, but would attack me personally. They were relentless. There were days that I got so frustrated I would just cuss them out. Which is, of course, exactly what they wanted so they could say, "See? These queers are just mean and hateful."
One day, after literally years of fighting online with these trolls, making my arguments and defending my arguments, I was invited to speak on a panel at the University of South Carolina, ostensibly about the marriage equality amendment that was pending then. Inevitably, though, the session turned into an argument about the Bible and homosexuality. There they were, all my Internet trolls materializing in bodily form offering the same objections and arguments I had heard over and over again online.
And I patiently answered them all, one by one. I had all the scholarly explanations for their hysterical fears about gays and lesbians and the threat the believed we posed to good Christian society. Afterward, I had a stream of people telling me how impressive my answers were to those pointed questions and how calmly and authoritatively I had answered them.
In that moment, I realized that I owed a deep debt of gratitude to my message board tormentors. They had been the best teachers anyone could ask for. In their relentlessness, and sometimes their nastiness, they had trained me to handle those kinds of questions out in the real world. They had honed not only my skills at answering their questions, but they had helped me formulate not just what I believed, but why I believed it. They had given me a great gift.
I had not entered the fight seeing them as teachers. Instead, as Jesus says in Luke 6:42, I had seen them as people with really big, honking boards in their eyes. I thought I could be their salvation, showing them that gays and lesbians were not three-headed monsters, but real people struggling to understand their own sexuality and their relationship with God. Instead, they were my salvation. They showed me the big, honking board I had in my own eye about them.
Before beginning my arguments with these amazing teachers, my heart and I were very far apart. I had been taught that the very core of my being was something abhorred by my creator. I went online to convince others that it wasn't true, not really knowing myself if it was or not. In the process, I discovered not just my heart, but their heart as well – the heart of unknown teachers who stood ready to offer me some seemingly pretty harsh lessons if I was just willing to be open to them.
I really didn't appreciate their lessons at the time, but now I realize they were helping me build my spiritual muscles by giving me something to push against. Those kinds of teachers are in everyone's lives, and usually we see them as an annoyance or an attack.
How would it change the way we lived if we could recognize that the battles we're fighting, with others, and within ourselves, are simply God's teachers' put into our lives to show us the path God intends for us to walk? What if those teachers are simply there, not to antagonize us, but to show us the way to become whole and reunite us with our own hearts?
Deshen is de-shit
"Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!" that ancient prophet Isaiah proclaimed in the first verse of the 55th chapter of his eponymous book of the Hebrew scriptures. "Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price."
To which our ego says, "Yeah, right. Everything comes with a price." And this is how we live in the world, certain that we must pay, or sacrifice something, to get anything we may need or want. Isaiah, however, says no, in the realm of God, in that true, Divine Self that we all possess, nothing of this egoic world means anything. Here, you need no money, no power, no prestige. Here, in this place above the ego, we find a satisfying life, a place where we can "eat what is good," or eat “rich food.”
The King James Version says it a little differently. It promises than in this place our soul can "delight itself in fatness." Which literally means, that in this soul place where our heart is at home, we live into our true nature of abundance.
That Hebrew word for "fatness" – deshen – though, is derived from the ashes produced by the burning of sacrifices that were then used as manure to "fatten" or grow food in the fields. This is where our teachers in this bodily world come into play. They provide the deshen – the rich manure that we can use to grow into the spiritual beings that God intends us to be.
I took a lot of crap from my internet attackers, and that crap helped me grow into a person with a strong faith that has reaped a lot of good spiritual food from the fertilizer they freely (and gleefully) provided. I didn't have to pay one dime for that manure. I didn't shell out anything but my time and dedication to their lessons, but what I reaped was a priceless treasure that restored my soul.
I was thirsting and hungering for knowledge about God and myself, and what these harsh teachers gave me was sustenance. They filled me with manure and it produced all the spiritual wine and milk I could ever need to sustain me for the journey to becoming who God would have me be. There is no way I can pay them back for all they have provided.
I invite you to think of your antagonists in your own life. Who has attacked you the most? Can you see how they have changed you or improved your life? Can you see that their challenges to you have given you the spiritual deshen you've need to grow into the person God would have you be?
What those beautiful trolls did for me was to pull me out of my defensive ego and into my higher, Divine Self where there was no question in my heart, or my mind, anymore that God created me as I am and loves me just as I am.
Isaiah, speaking for God, says that God's thoughts are not our thoughts and God's ways are not our ways, but God can use our thoughts and ways to elevate us to those higher, Holy thought patterns. This is what good teachers in our lives do. Our ego-thoughts are completely separate from the thoughts of God. The ego is constantly competing with the outside world – trying to get ahead of others, or outdo others, or out-argue others. Our ego is always trying to win points, to win admiration, to be proven right above everything else.
These thoughts are not God's thoughts, but I believe God brings us teachers who will challenge us to recognize when we're stuck in our ego's thought system of a circular firing squad. However, we have to be open to seeing even those we consider to be our enemies as our dearest and most valuable teachers. The people who drive you around the bend, who make you so mad you can't see straight, or who frustrate you so much, those are the most excellent teachers God could find to help you master your ego thoughts and rise above them into the divine thoughts of our higher self.
A Course in Miracles teacher and author Marianne Williamson says the people who challenge you the most were "sent from central casting" to help you find your way in this life, to help you learn how to overcome ego and find your way to the rapture of living from your higher, Divine Self. All you've got to do is take that crap they give you and use it to grow an abundance of love in your heart for them and for yourself.
Who would we be without those jerks?
"The goal of the curriculum," A Course in Miracles tells us in Chapter 8 of the text, "regardless of the teacher you choose, is 'Know thyself.' There is nothing else to seek."
However, the Course is clear that we cannot find ourselves alone – instead the only way to find ourselves is through relationships with others. For an introvert like me, that's not exactly good news. Relationships, as we all know, can get messy. We offend one another, we piss each other off, and we often have to ask forgiveness from one another when drift off into ego and do hurtful things to others and ourselves.
But, unless we are willing to engage with one another, and see everyone we meet as our teacher in this bodily plane, we will forever be caught in those unholy thought forms of the ego.
"Whenever you are with a brother," the Course says, "you are learning what you are because you are teaching what you are. He will respond either with pain or with joy, depending on which teacher you are following."
We learn where we are in our spiritual walk by how those around us are reacting to us. Are we bringing more love into the world, or are we bringing more fear? Look around at those you encounter on a daily basis. Do you leave them happy? Or do you simply add to their suffering?
Jesus tells us that whatever is in our heart is what comes out of our mouths. If our heart has an abundance of pain and fear, then we speak that pain and fear into the world and cause pain for others, but if our hearts are filled with an abundance of love and compassion, then that's what we'll give to the world through our words and our actions.
The good news here is this – we have a choice about what we fill our hearts with. When Jesus warns that "the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil," the Greek word used for the word "evil" means that the person in question has come under a bad influence. It doesn't mean that the person is inherently evil.
What Jesus is saying, then, is that we can either choose to fill our hearts with the lower egoic thoughts of greed, hatred, fear and selfishness – or we can fill our hearts with good treasure – those holy thoughts of love, compassion, mercy and justice. However, we need our teachers, those who are willing to challenge us, to point out those times when we are under the bad influence of the ego and are producing more fear than love in the world.
If we are aware of those teachers around us, the Course says the ultimate goal is that we will no longer need those teachers. There came a time when I no longer needed my Internet challengers, because I realized that it's not me against them, but that the only way to find myself, is to find myself IN them – to see that I was once where they are, but the Holy Spirit has taken me on a journey to help me find my way not just to myself – but to that larger "us" that IS the kingdom.
We cannot find God on our own – that turns into an "us and them" search where the main question becomes "Who am I compared to them?" The question really is: "Who am I without them?" Whenever there is a "them" you can be sure the ego is in charge in that moment, because the ego always sees us against them. However, when I could see my attackers from that higher perspective "them" transformed into "us." Who am I without those teachers? I am nothing but an ego.
If, however, I refuse to make those teachers a "them" and instead recognize that they are simply another part of me helping to hone my awareness of my higher self, then I can bow to them and recognize the gift of unity they are offering me.
What those teachers taught me, and so many new teachers continue to teach me, is where I'm drawing lines in the sand, where I am putting up barriers to love. While the ego enjoys drawing those lines, the spirit delights in the challenge of stepping across them and showing us that we cannot find our way in this world until we recognize there is no "us" and "them," but only "some of us for all of us."
We who are seeking to walk this holy path are responsible for seeing the holy innocence in everyone, including ourselves. And when we can do that, we'll all be reunited in the one heart of God that beats within us all. That's something that will make you say: "Oh, Yeah."
Music for the journey
Jack Johnson – You and Your Heart