Christopher and Riley have guest Morgan Aldous back on the podcast this week to explore correspondences between the alchemist’s ascent of the Mountain of the Adepts through seven stages of alchemical transformation and our own ascension of the eight rungs of the ladder of the Beatitudes to personal transformation as taught by Christ in His Sermon on the Mount. The correspondences they find between the widespread idea of the eight beatitudes as rungs on a ladder, ultimately leading us upward to the presence of God and the peace found therein, point the way to personal transformation and peace, and peaceful community with our fellow man in a Zion society.
Mysticism, properly understood, is a process or pursuit of divine oneness or communion with God. While that seems like a worthy aspiration, many can feel uncomfortable with mystical practices such as transcendental meditation. Mystics over the centuries have largely been misunderstood, characterized as heretical, or marginalized to protect orthodox authority. Indeed, Joseph Smith was treated similarly by religious leaders of his time; and yet today within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints there exists a strong, literal, materialist tradition which becomes the filter through which we view God, leaving many with unmet spiritual needs. In this episode, Riley and Christopher suggest that our image of God and the ways in which we represent the divine, are inherently incomplete, and were never meant to be the truth of all things. While structure, dogma, practice, and liturgy are all important in pointing us to the truth of God, the first-hand, spirit-filled experience of divine communion itself, untranslated and ineffable, is far more profitable. Fortunately, this pursuit is not only possible but a present reality. ...
Christopher and guest co-host Shiloh Logan talk about the idea of divine unconditional love. There is some religious controversy over what God’s “unconditional love” means. It has come to mean many things to many people, and there is no congruent doctrine from LDS Church leaders concerning the phrase. For as many statements come against unconditional love, there are more things said in favor of it from LDS General authorities and church leaders. But what are we to do about this? Is God unconditionally loving? Is there a way to contextualize and reconcile the words of the LDS church leaders who speak against “unconditional love” with those who speak about it and forward the message? What does a conditionally and unconditionally love God look like? What are the implications of the conditional/unconditional loving God upon the Sermon on the Mount? While the phrase “unconditional love” is a relatively new phrase within Christian literature, can we find evidence of God’s unconditional love in scripture? What would that look like and how would we find it? ...
Christopher and guest co-host, Shiloh Logan, talk about the third Beatitude on meekness. When we read of Jesus’ temptations after 40 days of fasting and when Satan showed him the whole earth, our typical interpretation is that Jesus recognized and rejected the temptation–from a rather contemporary Lockean standpoint–because the world was already His (because He had already mixed his time and labor in creating the world). Why would Jesus worship Satan to receive something that was already His? Yet Jesus would soon explain that this was not the reason the world was His. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ taught us that the meek inherit the earth. The earth was His, not because He had mixed His time and labor with it, but because He was meek. That is the foundation for our possession and claim on the earth. But what does this mean? What is the connection between meekness and inheriting the earth? Satan’s temptation was to take power and control over the earth, but these are not God’s ways. God’s power and glory are found in His “grace, equity, and truth, full of patience, mercy, and long-suffering, quick to hear the cries of his people and to answer their prayers” (Alma 9:26). This power and glory are not found in control or coercive dominion, but they are found through meekness. ...
