My Love, Why are you repenting?

My Love,

Why are you repenting for sins that you didn’t commit?

The only mistake you ever made was forgetting the truth of who you really are.

Remember.

***

Whether you believe Jesus came to earth to be our savior or you regard him as an important prophet, what I think we can agree on is that he only spread messages of love and offered compassion to all he met.

Yet somehow around Easter, we seem to totally forget this and instead focus on fear, death, darkness, how we are bad, and the sins that we committed.

Before I dive in, let me get one important piece straight. “Sin” simply means “to miss the mark”, or to act out of alignment with one’s true self.

And Jesus knew this. He knew we could only act “wrongly”, or out of fear, when we had forgotten who we truly are, extensions of Love (or, God). Therefore, when Jesus said “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34), he meant it. In fact, I believe he meant it so much so that he actually never even saw a need for forgiveness because how can we forgive what didn’t actually come from us, but rather there persona we developed through fear (this is an important idea from A Course in Miracles, a metaphysical text in which Jesus was supposedly channeled)?

Still, instead of focusing on the Resurrection, life, light, and the rise above the ego, fear, and forgetfulness, we’ve been instructed to focus on our unworthiness, which Catholic’s repenting for being unholy when in fact they have only forgotten their own sacredness. This belief of being separate from Love is one of the sly ways that fear comes to be the primary driver in our lives as we either strive to prove our worth or feel defeated and prove the belief of our unworthiness.

It’s so weird to me now, seeing myself as a kid being instructed by teachers, priests, and parents to “give something up” (albeit quite small, like a favorite snack) to help earn my right back into favor. Of course, my teen self secretly hated and loved the 40 days of lent, which was an excuse to feed my eating disorder and control it more. I didn’t know then that fear and control went hand in hand.

What I’m finding inspirational now, in my mid 30s, is that if Jesus and Mary Magdalene and so many other shamans, prophets, and mystics could rise above their egos (fear-based selves), the stories in their minds, judgement, and feelings of unworthiness, then maybe I can too. Maybe I can forgive the parts of me that made mistakes, the parts of me that prosecute me daily for the perceived mistakes, and quiet the nightmares that live in my head. Maybe I can believe in my inherent goodness and see the world through a lens of love. Maybe I can die and become reborn, to resurrect only the part of me that is Love.

And that is a cause for celebration. I just can’t do it by shaming myself to get there. We only move beyond fear by loving our way through the darkness and then discovering there was only Light.

***Another important point that is often only casually mentioned that it was Mary Magdalene who first saw the resurrected Jesus because she could best “perceive him”.