Your Sacred Soul

The creation story in Genesis teaches us that when God created this natural world, the sea, the plants, and the animals – that God declared them all to be good. When we get to the part where God creates us humans, God again declares us to be good. In Genesis 1:31 it says, “God saw everything that God made, and indeed, it was very good.” I can not stress this enough! We are sold a bill of goods by many preachers today that incite us to be shameful of ourselves. They teach that our souls are inherently dirty and need to be cleansed by the blood of Jesus. They also teach that they know the steps to take to receive this cleansing. I believe that nothing is farther from the truth than that. You were born good. Each and every one of us was born good. Each and every one of us was born with an inherent understanding of God and God's love for us. Preachers and teachers who want to be powerful try to shame us and pit one group of people against another – the rich against the poor, white people against people of color, queer and non-queer, men against women, and Christians against non-Christians. The want us to intellectualize, rationalize and quantify our faith. I do not ascribe to these teachings.

There is a tension within most of the Christian epistles regarding who we are in Christ and how we are to live; between being free from sin and being humanly unable to not sin. There is this tension because we live both on the earth and within the realm of the Divine and Holy One. Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of God is within us, not to look around or wait around for it. Jesus also tells us that we are not to consider the Kingdom of Heaven to be like the Kingdom of Earth with its hierarchies and power struggles. We are people living in the intersection of the temporal and the eternal. We are also people who have both finite bodies and infinite lives. We are bound to fall short of the call of God and our own expectations. We are bound to sin now and then. Grace tells us to not beat ourselves up over this and justice tells us to dig deeper within ourselves to find the Divine and Holy because it has been birthed within us.

This Thanksgiving, I encourage us to remember that we live in the intersection of the temporal and the eternal, of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Remember that you are free in the grace and love of the Divine. Let this sink in to your soul and motivate you to express your appreciation of this gift through encouraging each other in your faith and in your lives. We are also called to let this motivate us to good deeds. Focus on the truth of your sacred essence – your sacred soul – and the freedom it gives you to live and love. And above all, be thankful.