He Walks with Me and He Talks with me, but we Never Met up in Church – A Christmas Story

I was raised in a Christian home. Well, sort of. My mother and grandmother made me go to their Christian Science (CS) church, which is pretty well known for doing things differently than mainstream religion. In my early teens, I outright rejected the formula. Following this, my mother and grandmother became more distant. They behaved as if I’d rejected them. I suppose I did in a way. But even in my youth, I was aware that I was unable to play-act with the false identity that had come between us – a lineage of deeply wounded females that had found a pious way to pretty up their pain. I was unaware that I would break this chain and more.

Most people are acquainted with the CS church’s dismissal of doctors and medicine. I watched my diabetic grandmother die after refusing her medications. And in my early twenties, I watched my mother slowly fade with what we can only guess was cancer. It was truly awful. Indeed, grownups have the right to choose these things, while their loved ones have no power to intervene. I loved my mother with all my heart. Months later, she came to me in a dream and embraced me with a love that spoke to all that she was unable to express while in form.

As a child, I hated going to church. I couldn’t tolerate the hypocrisy, even though I didn’t have the words for my feelings. I remember begging my mother on Sunday mornings to please let me stay home. There were too many wonder-filled things to do outside without having to squish into that sad place every week. After she pressed me over time, I found words for my feelings. The people. The believers. I couldn’t bear their hurting eyes and voices – the “loud” parts of them that failed to disguise what they honestly felt inside. It made my skin hurt. And whether in church or not, I found it abusive to my body and soul to even think of socially performing outside of my truth, but at the time, it was what my mother expected me to do.

All that said, as a young girl, I found myself magnetically drawn to the Jesus character in this big book of stories named The Bible. Anytime my mother would read what Jesus said, it would make me feel warm, tingly, and safe, like being wrapped in the sweetest of songs. Outside of the angel-beings in my childhood, this was my first real introduction to a human who spoke true things. My mother told me that he lived 2,000 years ago, but for me, he was still very much alive inside the Song of Presence. Later, I found that this vibratory feeling had a matching word – resonance.

While I did waver from time to time in my life, it was from this moment forward that my primary source of guidance and information was my feeling-body-instrument. It kept me informed or sang to me. It showed me what was right for me (harmony) and what was not (discordant).

Throughout my life, friends and family would do their best to entice me into their religious clubs. My high school sweetheart and I eventually had to part ways because I was resistant to his family’s pressure to complete a ritual in their church. You see, for the relationship to go any further, it was made pretty clear that I must recite a script in front of their minister. Following this performance, the congregation would then celebrate me as saved, and all of this tension would finally be over.

Why didn’t I do it?

Because the resonance I felt with Jesus’ words was not present in theirs.

They were good people. The best. But it wasn’t for me.

As the years went on, Jesus would visit me from time to time in my dreams. His communication was always profound and would often signal a major course correction in my life. As I hinted in my book, he even played the starring role in my 1998 bioenergetic (Kundalini) event. Jesus’ signature frequency of Unconditional Love has never betrayed me, unlike the pained eyes and voices of some who claimed they followed him, but it was a version of Christ that I was unfamiliar with. I learned that I must trust the Presence itself and not the people and their interpretations that would, in the end, “hurt my skin.”

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.

John 14:3-4 KJV

So why, after rejecting organized religion, would I have such a close connection with this Presence throughout my entire life? Clearly, to most religious folk, I’m not one of them. But in my heart, I see it this way: I never agree to a “body” of knowledge outside the resonance of my own.

There was a time in the mid-1990s, in San Diego, CA, that I found myself experiencing depression, which eventually culminated in the above-referenced Kundalini event. But all of what I have laid out heretofore was to share my most treasured Christmas experience ever. I’m guessing it was December of ’95 or ’96. I was feeling more and more like a societal reject. Things that made other people happy, clearly did not make me happy. I was lost and began regularly condemning myself for not being normal.

I disliked Christmas, much in the same way that I had had an early distaste for my mom’s church. On the way home from a Christmas gathering, traveling south on I-5 shortly before “The Merge,” I began crying and sincerely asking why we humans keep going round and round with these silly rituals, and what did any of this actually mean anyway? It was clear to me that if Christmas ever did have genuine meaning, it was hijacked long ago. Other than the magic I’d seen in my young boy’s eyes, I found nothing authentic packaged inside the stress of ritual consumerism. I then became aware of myself shouting, “I bet you weren’t even born on December 25! Lies! It’s all lies!”

Suddenly, I sucked in a huge breath and held it. At the same time that tears were spilling out my eyes, something sweeter than multidimensional honey began filling my heart. It then expanded and swirled all throughout my body. I held this breath for what felt like an eternity. And then I heard, “Pull off the freeway now.” It was that voice that speaks inside every cell of my body. The angels spoke to me this way as a child. Jesus, The Mother, The Father, or the Presence speaks to me this way too. You pick the identifying word that has meaning to you. It’s all Love to me.

I pulled off the road immediately. After I put the car in park, I exhaled with a huge sound and a wailing came through me that I imagined might be breaking open the earth and sky itself. I wept myself into timelessness.

It was him. My body remembered the vibration, the song that sings me back together again. Eventually, I felt complete with “the merge” of this divine call and response, tears still streaming down my face. Then, in every cell and fiber of my being, the music of this Presence said,

THIS is Christmas.

Got it. Thank you. And though we never met up in church, in my dreams, in my heart, and on the side of Interstate 5, we have for sure.

My love to all of you. Thank you for being in my life. No matter the religion you were born into, even if none at all, may the True Presence fill you this Holiday Season, and remind you of how much you are loved, now and all ways. ~ Eileen (EM)