At a time of not knowing-

[Questioner]

I guess i just need to express sometimes.

You found a good forum for that. Please keep right on expressing.

I have a sermon for you. Please take only the parts that apply to you, and let the rest go on by.

I know some people for whom loving someone, and agreeing with their ideas, are all wrapped up together. In their view, these are two strands in the same rope. If you think differently, could you really love them? (All this is on a deep emotional level, not in words, of course.)

My Mom is judgmental that way and has broken off acceptance and contact of almost everyone in her life, including me. So my heart goes out to your situation.

I can empathize with the desire to be compassionate, to not make someone suffer. Yet sometimes another person's suffering comes from their own pain, not from the well considered and open-hearted values you live by. As I see it, if the other person's pain comes from their own hatred of feeling uncertain inside their own mind, then you are not actually responsible for that pain. This has been a hard lesson for me to comprehend. Perhaps it is what this lifetime is supposed to teach me.

It seems that your Mom might at times be one of those people who is terrified by not knowing for sure, yet also with more loving acceptance than my Mom is able to provide. Even so I can appreciate the sadness at seeming to lose a mother's love. When the reason given is that you dared to think for yourself, that this will make you unacceptable to both God and to a parent. It is a bitter thing to be told all this.

You can love her and respect that she has different opinions. Returning that same level of openness is something that conflicts with what she feels she needs for safety and security.

This gets you feeling guilty, as though it was wrong to choose for yourself what you believe about God, truth, and eternal life. Yet you know this makes no sense. How could it possibly be a selfish, egotistical thing for you to seek to honor truth and your conscience the best way you know how? What could be wrong about that? What God worth serving would hate you for understanding more than one spiritual tradition? What Heaven worth reaching would reject you for not living by one particular group's limitations on the unity and forgiveness of the infinite creator? How could it actually inflict pain on another person for you to have a larger view than them?

These are deep questions and there is one thing I have discovered through all of it that might help you too. Set aside for a moment the apparent issue as defined on the surface: the facts about spiritual existence. I believe that this may not actually be the issue.

The issue may actually be that your Mom is afraid of the unknown, and tries to find something definite to cling to. When she finds something that seems to give her the comfort of absolute truth, that resolves the uncertainty. Then you come along and suggest that what she found is just one relative answer among many. Now she is flung back into the stormy sea without that life buoy.

She loves you but she hates the storm of uncertainty.

How can she save herself from drowning, and save you from drowning, and respect your choice as an adult, and protect her child from the risk of Hell, and know she's totally right, and admit that her religion is a matter of faith that one person can't choose for another? There is no one right answer to all of these desperate questions. She swings back and forth, trying to not let any of these waves push her under. But the harder one thrashes about, the more water one gulps in.

The solution is not in the facts about the Bible. The solution is in a heart at peace. Facts for the head do not heal the fear in the heart. Someone filled with divine love does not need to fear any other person's spiritual emptiness. Someone certain that God's love for them transcends any mistakes does not have any need to make sure others are free of any mistakes.

Well, this is more about what I have been learning, but perhaps there is something in it that could help you. I suggest that you consider, on your own, finding a counselor who respects all spiritual paths, and explore the psychological aspects of right and wrong and control in relationships. The real answer may be that the doctrines of Christianity are not the real issue at all.

Sometimes when a person doesn't know how to talk from the heart, they instead talk about the facts. Your Mom comes to you with fear that God might not love someone who doesn't accept the right facts. You can help heal that fear, by loving her despite her not accepting the right facts about how much bigger God's love really is compared to her fears.

Focus on the love, not on the alleged facts that are clung to as a way to cover up the fears. When the heart is at peace, the head has no trouble with the facts. When the heart is at peace, it's not troubled by fearing the facts. When the heart is at peace, if the fact is that we just don't know, it can still know at least this: right here and now is where we can find the love of God.