Meeting the true Second Coming
- the tale of a modern heresy -

Joel A. Wendt
 written in the Season of Pentecost, 2015. 

Say or write the words “Second Coming” and many practicing Christians will leap to all manner of assumptions.  The first might be that you are a jerk or a fool, and the second that you are a member of some kind of fundamentalist cult, fascinated with an End Times eschatology.

My problem is that I know, from direct experience, that this is true: The Second Coming in Clouds of Glory is happening.  Right now.  Today.  Yet, how do I take such a treasure, share it, and not turn the whole thing into a horribly weird tale.  Certainly there is no need to hold a press conference.  That should never happen.  No pearls before swine.

Everyone, including practicing Christians,, needs to approach such a theme/event with some sanity, more than a little rationality, and well spiced with a reasonable amount of skepticism.  Lets try that here. 

A good first step, to my thinking, is to consider this dry, somewhat alone assertion above, as a theory.  Borrow something from natural science’s methods, and just suggest people consider the possibility it might be true.  Then we get to ask, seek and find evidence, some even empirical.  Don’t demand such an idea be taken on Faith, but rather the opposite.  

Now a theory needs to be defined, in a way.  The bald statement above (The Second Coming in Clouds of Glory is happening) is okay for openers, but there needs to be more ... a lot more.  For some, there is even uncertainty whether or not the Second Coming can only come on a road where the next event will be the Day of Judgment.  Many believe It can’t come now as a separate event.  That It must mean we are in the End Times. 

Also for many, to talk of the Second Coming we have to quote the Bible.  The Bible is the principle “authority” for all things Christian, is it not?  Let me deal first, in a heretical way, with the “authority” of the Bible.

We all know the Bible is a rather inconsistent book.  It tells tales that to our modern ears and sensibilities are not justified.  For example, this book suggests slavery is okay, as well as stoning, and much else besides.  Someone who doesn’t know or admit these inconsistencies has a problem.  Biblical literalism doesn’t work because it basically comes down to hypocritically cherry picking matters contradicted elsewhere in the same text. 

When we assert the Bible is the Word of God, in every possible way, we are actually working against the Holy Spirit, by trying to confine or imprison God into a book, which Book we know for a fact human beings wrote, and today other human beings insist on the right to interpret.  This is not a good practice, and gives a justified reason for too many of our thoughtful young to mistrust all things “biblical”.  By confining God/Christ to a book, we basically assert: He can’t ever say anything new, and especially anything really useful for our time.   I don’t accept that we  get to set any limits on what Christ does or does not do.  Ever.

Notice please that Christ told us there is more, when He said this in the Gospel of John: 16: 12-15: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.  When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

What is “the Spirit of truth”?  Let us suppose that this spirit of the truth is the Holy Spirit.  Again, we are just being theoretical in a way - telling a tale as it were.  Not trying to force a conclusion, or demand something as an article of Faith.  Approaching the situation gently. 

2000 years ago, for the Incarnation, we had the Good News stories of the coming of the Anointed One: Christ.  The people of today are not like what people were like then, in those ancient times.  Our consciousness is different, and the modern world has natural science all over it - top to bottom.  We need to be cautious.  Nobody is going to just believe the Second Coming is happening, and if they did that, it would be a mistake.  Since He loves us without limit, He takes account of all of that.  Even in this little story,  I’m not meant here to convince, or settle the situation for all time.  This is a kind of romance.  The Divine is our lover, and we get to be just as skittish and careful as is required of any intimate relationship in its first stages.

For example, all my encounters with Him left me even more free than before.  They were personal, and intimate.  I was known and seen.  If I needed healing, that is what I received.  The pathway to these experiences I more or less initiated, for in various Ways I opened the narrow gate myself.  I asked, sought and knocked, and just as promised He was there. 

I also understood that no one was just to believe me when I wrote or spoke of this modern Good News.  Following Him, I too must be a lover.  Gentle, kind, careful of all the hearts that the message is to touch.  Moreover, He isn’t asking me to do this.  He is not commanding me.  Rather, as part of my practice, I get to choose how to love my neighbor in the same way I love Him and myself.  Properly understood His teachings in the Gospels are the equal of natural science.  Empirical, exact, and even practical.  They work.   We just have to practice them.  Not just believe them, but practice them.

In a complicated world, it is a complicated tale.  Let me narrow the extensive field of possible questions to just a few (keeping in mind that not all that is written below will even begin to answer all the quite justifiable questions in all the many hearts and minds that read this).

In our time, many in natural science try to tell us that we have no souls.  That there is no empirical evidence of souls or spirits.  Consciousness and mind are artifacts of a purely material organ called: the brain.  Even the common shared idea we have of a “self” is asserted to be probably an illusion manufactured by a godless big bang, followed by billions of years of evolution that created, by accident, all that there is today.  There is, according to the supposed incredible brain of Stephen Hawking, in his book “The Grand Design”, no need in physics for a God. or oddly enough, even for philosophy.

Curious term in that title, however.   Hawking wants to fight against the idea of intelligent “design”, with the idea of a Grand Design, seen and known by a special group, who know better than the rest of us.  No hubris there, no sir.

Natural Science, presently, is an art lacking religion, or so it seems.  If you study it, which I have, it has made a lot of mistakes and denies the existence of most of them.  Just consider: In that famous Bible, there is a “Book of John”, three in fact.  A main idea in the first two books is that there is an anti-Christ spirit, and we know that spirit by the fact that it denies the Father and the Son.  So the science that denies it makes mistakes, also denies the Father and the Son.  This anti-Christ spirit dominates many thinking intelligences of the whole world.  What better time then for Him to come again, when people of Faith really could use His help. 

What about science’s mistakes?  Among the literature created, as a consequence of the Second Coming, are many books and essays helping explain these so very human mistakes.  New books: on physics, Man or Matter, by Ernst Lehrs; on chemistry, The Nature of Substance, by Rudolf Hauschka; on a more living mathematics/geometry, Physical and Ethereal Spaces, by George Adams; and then this little jewel by Ron Brady, about the failures of Darwinian evolutionary theory to be testable: Dogma and Doubt.  Or look up this website: The Nature Institute.

Meanwhile Christ has not come like a giant power flashing rays of death from His eyes, as some would have it.  Rather gently -- as a lover.   So where then do we find Him?

Exactly and precisely where He said, in Luke: The Kingdom of Heaven is inside you.  Not out there, but inside us.  In the invisible places, the quiet places, the places only we can see because they are so intimate.  Picture then the modern world.  Billions of human beings, all to be loved, for there will be under Christ no lost or forgotten sheep, however far they stray.

So, the science of today, that makes mistakes it denies, and has the hubris to believe it can know everything, tells us we have no self, and that the material brain is the source of an illusion.  We have no freedom, and no inside worth noting.  Should we believe them - these priests that deny the Father and the Son?

How about we get to decide for ourselves.  Would that not be a most wonderful gift from Him, that we get to look inside, find the kingdom of heaven right there, and don’t have to believe what science wants us to believe.  Or believe the preachers of hell and damnation, either.  And not just that, but we can make our religious journey scientific.  That’s right.  The journey through the narrow gate is a precise, exact, and empirical Way.  The equal of natural science in all regards.

On this journey, which we each get to take individually - no tradition or system of beliefs is to tell us anything, whether it is scientific or religious.   So He helps first a few, then a many, find their Way.  He loves them and they love Him.  And from the kingdom of heaven, inside of us all, in Clouds of Glory, He comes again.  No need for Him to appear in a physical body.  No need for us to wander the world to seek Him out.  He is simply right there, intimately with us and within us, just as He promised.

What are “Clouds of Glory” in the sense of the mind?  The consciously evoked imagination might be one way to conceive of this.  The ethereal or thought world, might be another.  Not something physical, however.  Something spiritual - something through the narrow gate and in the yet unseen world.   How do we make this journey in a modern Way?

We look within, in that place natural science declares makes illusions.  We explore our own mind (spirit), and our own consciousness (soul).  We do, as Emerson learned: “In self trust all virtues are comprehended”.  Emerson - who also said: “Nature is a thought incarnate, and turns to thought again as ice becomes water and then gas.  The world is mind precipitated and the volatile essence is forever escaping into the state of free thought”.

2000 years ago there were forerunners.  We called them Apostles or Disciples then, and think of them today, perhaps unrealistically, as Saints.   Factually, they were just ordinarily human beings, touched/called to be fishers of men - in reality: story tellers.  I am one of many tellers of stories for the Second Coming.  I’ve been there, - in the kingdom of heaven that lives in my consciousness - and I’ve seen.  In the ethereal world, the world of thoughts.  The world of the imagination, entered by the Way of prayer and trust.  Einstein had the sense of it: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Quite a few of us already know this, instinctively. Those who have the time to devote themselves to a life of prayer meet Him.  Its just that it is also possible these days to be religious and not deny a true Way of science.  I will show the way to many such “stories” of the world, in which Religion, Science, and Art are united.

This is just an introduction.  A gift of roses for others.  New kinds of roses, though.  Never seen before.  Take your time.  There is no hurry.  One matter that He teaches these days, is that given that the kingdom is here, now, each moment of consciousness is precious.  Each individual biography a grace.  And, if you want to know more there are many tellers of the Good News of the Second Coming.   I’m just one.  Saying hello.  Nothing more.

Some of my books, and a fun essay: “The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything”; “The Mystery of Evil in the Light of the Sermon on the Mount”; “the Way of the Fool”; “Sacramental Thinking”; “New Wine”; and, the essay: “I am not my brain - the map is not the territory”.  Via the Internet, go here: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/thetree.html

Our Faith is being rewarded even now.  The confusion of natural science, that all is matter and that there is no spirit, has been overcome.  There exists a counter-Copernican revolution, today.  Right now.  The Romantics.  The Transcendentalists.  Anthroposophists.  Many others.  One last story.

I meet, around 1984, a young woman, half white, half Cherokee.  She told me that when she was old enough to be admitted to the deeper ceremonies of her People, she heard the shaman/priest  use the word Christ, a few times, sprinkled among the Cherokee.  After one ceremony she asked him why this was so.  His response:  “We’ve always known there was a Spirit of the Earth.  Now we know His Name.”

All that said, the proof is in the pudding, which is why this text is accompanied by five books, from my own hand.  Of course, you have to eat the pudding to know whether it is nourishing or not, don’t you.

Joel A. Wendt, age 74, 6 Monticello Dr. Paxton, MA, 01612 hermit@tiac.net 916-671-5727