Living Up To What Our Conscience Mirrors To Us
Baptism
You lift off the helmet of knowing,
gently drop it.
You take off the armor of being right.
Unbuckle the chain mail of good enough—
lift it over your head,
with a little awkward squirming to get it off,
it’s so tight.
You unbutton the coat of deserving,
untie the padding of what people thought,
remove the vest of good intentions, the shirt of the past.
You lose even the underwear of should have, couldn’t.
You drop it all. Leave it.
You wear nothing but pure air of presence,
vulnerable skin, raw flesh of being,
ready as a newborn.
You go down into the water,
and are raised up, clothed in pure light.[1]
As I wrote last week, the prophets mirror to us humans what we are doing wrong on this planet. God created us with a conscience, an inner knowing of what is right and what is wrong in our behavior. If we listen to our consciences and don’t do the things that harm other people, if we help the poor and needy as more than 2,000 verses in the Bible tells us to do, then, we will have a clearer, more positive view of ourselves and of all others on this planet. We will be in God’s will even though we may sin now and then, since we human beings will never be perfect as long as we are alive on this earth and living in these human bodies. As the now retired Pastor Steve Garnass-Holmes wrote above, if we are willing to do our best to follow our consciences, which God implanted in each of us, then we can be present to life, “ready as a newborn” to be baptized and then “raised up, clothed in pure light.”
From then on, we would be present to ourselves, to God, and to those people we meet, no matter any differences among us. This sets up on a path that is so different from being in the world and living as our culture dictates! We would be able to see where fear wants to take us and opt out of the way we have been taught to fear here in the U.S. For example, we white Americans who mostly lead our country are very self-protective, now for centuries, because we enslaved captured Africans, and, after the Civil War declared slavery illegal, still we mistreated them terribly. Within 20 years after the war was over, the Jim Crow Era took over our land and made sure that the African Americans were denigrated, lynched, and never accepted for the full human beings that they had always been. Now in the 21st century we have made some progress toward accepting African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asians as the full human being that the Bible science has declared them to be: men and women across the globe have 99.9% of the same DNA in each of us,[2] making us virtually equal except for some teeny, tiny differences among us. We are asked by God to love every human being and to care for them, too, as He does:
In the Prophet Joel’s words:
“’Even now,’ declares the Lord,
“return to me with all your heart,
with fasting and weeping and mourning.’
Rend your heart
and not your garments…
Return to the Lord your God
for he is gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and abounding in love,
and he relents from sending calamity. “[Joel 2:12-13]
If we’re following what God teaches and science affirms, we will move from fear and prejudice, self-protection and projecting our sin. We will see every human being as unique and equal to every other member of the human race. What a difference that would make in how we see the community of human beings who populate this Earth. Then, we might see each of our human brothers and sisters as interesting, as someone to learn from. What questions would you ask the strangers you meet? What if the immigrants from Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries had asked the Native Americans how they saw life in America and passed it down to us? The natives had a reciprocal relationship with the Earth that provided them food and water and filled their needs,[3] whereas we immigrants basically did whatever we wanted to the land as long as it produced the food and work we wanted. What if we had been interested in the tribal leadership in the Native American Communities in which the head of the tribe could be a man or a woman, but he or she did not stand over every tribal member, but was just one person of the tribe who had a purpose to realize in the tribe? [4] That is how a real community works. That would be the opposite of the power structure in any of our American government jobs or companies in which managers at every level had power over those below them and, for those at the top, there is no one over them.
In order to be able to listen to one’s conscience which will lead each of us to our true selves, we need to face all the places in our lives, one by one, where we set aside truth and promote the kind of power we want in our lives, be it prejudice or judgment or unwillingness to care for other people or whatever would constitute sin in God’s eyes. Really, it takes a lifetime to face all this stuff. If we stay with the fear-based decisions that we make, then we will never know our full potential as a human being. If we project that fear onto all the other peoples in this world, then we are denying the true nature of all human beings. We can hang on to these fears and feel totally justified in letting them drive our opinions and actions in this world, but we will always be living in fear and we will have no idea of the potential within us to live in love and union with God and with all other people.
We must remember that this Earth is a community of communities, of species of plants and of animals and of human beings. It only works if the communities function as they are meant to. Think of today’s world where so many countries are literally falling apart like France and Germany where the alt-right is undermining the established countries, in Venezuela even before our president started attacking their ships was in chaos, Iran today, Palestine, and others where chaos reigns. Community is not working in these places and others. Wars between Israel and Hamas have destroyed Palestine and undermined the life of the Palestinians with no one trying to put that nation back together. It is a disaster, and who cares?
If we are to be a community of human beings across the world as well as in our own nations, something very basic has to change. It’s only the people who feel called to support communities within any nation or in the communities across the world who will be able to make a real difference in the fight against global warming. Where do you stand? For or against the community where you live and in your country? In your church and in other groups? In your state and nation? In the world? What do you feel called to do in this world that is falling apart? What truth do you need to speak? What people do you need to help? What will you say to our government and all its chaos today? What do you want the world you live in to be like? Are you willing to work to make that happen? I sure hope so, because how else will anything change? How else will we be able to support the life of our planet and all the residents here—the plants and animals and insects and human beings? Your family and friends? Everyone here? We will have to work in community to make this happen, but together, with God, we will succeed!
[1] Unfolding light by Steve Garnaas-Holmes, “Baptism. December, 2025
[2] biologyinsights.com, https://biologyinsights.com › how-much-dna-do-all…
[3] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants,(Milkweed Editions , Minneapolis, Minnesota: 2013)
[4] Ibid, page ?