I didn't watch a lot of the Aretha Franklin funeral from yesterday, but I did see a few clips.
It was just the right amount of that world to remind me of the best parts without dragging me back down under the weight of the worst parts. All in my assessment, of course. Other people have their own experience of the Black church.
Me, I resonate with the Jesus parts, and especially the singing about how much we are loved and supported by Jesus. I loved the melding by Fantasia of one of the gospel hymns with James Taylor's "You've Got a Friend." You've got a friend.... in Jesus, of course.
You could see how the people in the audience were moved. It brought me back to a time many years ago when I too was deeply moved by such a message. It was Denise Austin that time and the place was Glide Memorial church in San Francisco.
The Return to Love
I stopped going to any sort of Christian services when I was about 15, so at that point in my mid-twenties it had been many years since I'd attended one. They were always depressing environments for me because I never wanted to go. I hated the old testament and didn't believe a word of it. In my mind, there was no way the "judgmental God" of the old testament was the same god Jesus was speaking for. Two completely different messages.
Thankfully Austin decided to sing from the loving, supportive perspective of Jesus, as she sang, " "Come on home. It is time to come home to God."
Such simple words, but they reached into the very core of me. It literally felt as if it was God singing directly to me, asking me to please come back to Him, to please make peace with Him.
My life really did begin to improve rapidly after that. Things were still very hard for me for years after that, but they became just a little less hard feeling. I began to make actual progress at improving my life once I was able to allow myself to feel loved and wanted. And not a conditional human love, that could be lost just as easily as it was gained at any time. No, the eternal, unyielding love of the Divine, of that which IS love itself. I was finally able to start letting it in as I had done in early childhood.
As I wrote about in my previous article, that ability to accept just how lovable we are is the key that unlocks every door that might block our well-being. All the good is constantly being sent to us, but it is our own conditioning that causes us to block it out, because we don't feel we deserve it.
The Point of Departure
That was the big problem I had with the religion I was raised in in the first place. It was all about being born in sin, when we were born perfect reflections of love itself.
It said we had to suffer in this life for joy in the next, yet joy is the very nature of our being and suffering is a reflection of being cut off from that. I could go on and on.
Basically it was a true teaching of love corrupted by those who wished to enslave others and get them to cooperate with their own enslavement. They had to be taught first to see themselves as originally evil and in need of redemption so that some other group of humans could be put in charge of that redemption. So that they could be abused and exploited but not dare rise up against it, as if to do so would be to rise up against God. Not even question their own oppression, as if to do so would be to question and challenge God. And they had to be taught to cut themselves off from their true power, which is the ability to directly receive the blessings of Divine Love by simply feeling worthy enough to let it in.
Well the slavemaster is not God or God's agent. Nor is the preacher or priest or whatever. If it's in a man's body, it is a man. If it's in a book, it's a book. Only God is god in my life, and only that ever-present, all-powerful, all-pervading Love will ever be praised by me.
Always First
And I will put no other before it, no matter how big a following those other ideas may gain across the centuries and miles of this planet. I will not be confused by any amount of fear-mongering and threatening damnation, or promising riches in some after-life in exchange for self-abuse now.
I find my angels here in this heaven on Earth, and I let it all in. And when you allow yourself to let it in and let it flow through you to touch the world, you get to be one of those angels here in this world, where they are actually needed, just as Denise Austin was for me that day so many years ago. And perhaps Fantasia was for someone sitting in that audience that day too.
Such is the power, and the glory, for ever and ever, amen.