Vachon Imagined

Jesus, or the spirit of life itself, present in all forms, belongs to everyone. I don’t necessarily need to tell you this, but I do need to remind you of it. We all need those reminders sometimes.

The reminder that our tears are from God. Our laughter is from God. Our grief, our joy, our breath, our becoming, all of it. Nothing exists outside of God. Nothing and no one.

Time is the disillusionment of God. God simply is; time confines.

Time puts Jesus into a religion. Yeshua, the Son of God, the child of God, as we all are, knew religion. He knew the Torah. He knew tradition. But he did not lose sight of God within it. This is what makes him, and you, and me, free of sin: the recognition that we are free of separation.

There has to be a certain amount of trust in that assumption. And that trust is what becomes knowledge.

Think about an old-fashioned clock, one that you have to wind. Set it at 2:30 and let it move forward an hour. Now set it at 10 and let it move backward an hour. The hour still translates between the two. An hour is happening, but so is movement. So is God.

God does not prefer a direction.

God can move backward and forward, in infinite directions, and still simply be.

We experience time as sequence: before and after, birth and death, past and future. But sequence is something we experience rather than something that ultimately confines God. We mistake the movement of the hands for the reality of the clock itself.

Time is the disillusionment that confines the spirit of Christ to one body, one image, one religion. And ironically, religion is the very thing Yeshua challenged when he walked this earth, not necessarily because religion itself was evil, but because it could become a substitute for the God it was meant to reveal.

All of us live in time. We live in process. We live in bodies, histories, cultures, traditions, and stories. In that sense, we are inherently religious creatures: we are always creating meaning, organizing experience, naming what we encounter. But we are not religion itself.

And once you understand this, Christ is already happening.

Christ already happened.

Christ happened before Yeshua lived, and Christ happens beyond the boundaries of Christianity. Even those who have never heard the story of Jesus participate in the life that Jesus revealed.

Why?

Because they are life.

He is life.

And nothing exists outside of it.

This does not mean that our differences are unreal. We are different people. We have different bodies, histories, languages, beliefs, and experiences. But difference is not necessarily separation. Many waves can still be one ocean.

This is what Yeshua was pointing toward: not that divinity belonged exclusively to him, but that the life moving through him was the same life moving through all of us.

The historical Jesus can be placed on a timeline. Christ cannot.

Jesus can be placed within a religion. Life cannot.

A human being can be given a name, an image, a birthplace, a death, and a story. But the reality that gives that person life cannot be confined to the story.

And that is the freedom.

Not freedom from being human, but freedom from believing that being human places us outside of God.

Our tears are God.

Our laughter is God.

Our movement backward and forward is God.

Our knowing and our not knowing are God.

We are not trying to become something separate from God. We are learning to recognize that we never were.