Home Religion and our relations
- This page is part of an ERW course: Home Church.
- By John Eagles, May 17, 2007.
There are two different types of relationships that determine and influence our lives. The first type is the relation that goes inside, the inner relation that we have to the Creator. The second type of relation is that which we have to other created beings and things.
There is a fragile balance between these two types of relationships. We were created by God. Of course, we were conceived by our parents, but because all creation was once set up by the Creator, there remains an inner link of all created beings to the Source. The link to God is invisible as all relationships are, but because God too is invisible, many people neglect their connection to God. The relation to God is one determined by love. In love for God, you can feel God. When people don't have love for God, they also cannot feel God anymore and God may appear to not exist.
Who we are and what we are is most of all determined by the relations we have. When you love God, then God's love can flow into you. When you have a good relationship to people around you, your life and character will be influenced by that. When we are conceived and born, our identity is mostly determined by the relationship and identity of our parents and by the nature of their relation to God. From that moment on, how we further develop, is determined by the relations we have with the Creator and with the beings and things around us. We do have a choice in this, but we cannot escape that we have relations to God and beings and things around us and the nature of these relationships determines how we develop.
We are in continuous change. Influenced by the people around us, our relation to God can deepen or become more estranged. When we deepen our relation to the Creator and we express the love we receive from God in our relations to other beings and things, we are transformed through that process.
The relations that influence us the most are those with people and things who are closest to us. God can always be close to us. The people nearest to us are living in our home. This home usually is first that of our parents. Later most people set up their own homes.
Home Religion is the practice of religion in your own home. In your home you can meet God in yourself and in the people around you, and you meet the beings and things who are closest to you and who influence you the most. In the home we can also meet the spiritual world, for example in the form of ancestral spirits and angels.
When people have been estranged from God, it is because in their personal or ancestral history there have been influences of other people or spiritual beings who damaged your relation to God. The only way to find back your good relation to God is through a process of restoration of your relation to God, simultaneous with restoring relations to people and beings closest to you. The home is the ideal place for such processes of restoration.
To understand more about this process of restoration, we can make use of a story given in the Bible about our first ancestors, Adam and Eve. Regardless of whether you believe that Adam and Eve really existed, but their story gives us insight in how people have lost their relation to God and how human relations became disturbed.
For the sake of deeper insight, we can understand ourselves to be like Adam or Eve and by restoring what went wrong in the story of Adam and Eve, we find back our original relation to God and to fellow man. What happened to Adam and Eve is what has happened to all of us. Religion as the practice to find back our original self and our good relation to God and to other beings and things, is ideally performed in the environment where also the fall away from God occurred. This environment is called 'home.' The home is the place where you as Adam or Eve are living.
In the story about Adam and Eve we can distinguish a few stages in which gradually man became more separated from God.
The first stage is described as Eve being tempted by a snake. The snake stands for the archangel Lucifer, an angel who had fallen away from God. The first stage of separation from God is caused by spiritual influences.
The second stage in the story is when Adam and Eve had a relation to each other that was not centered on God. This second stage of all can be seen as a more physical separation from God, because after this, Adam and Eve were refused entrance to what is called the Garden of Eden, the place where people live in unity with God in an ideal environment.
The third stage of the story is when Cain kills Abel. The Cain-Abel relationship stands for the relation between brothers or between sisters. The problems of Adam and Eve had transferred to their children. Murder and war entered human history. This third stage describes the separation from God as a historical and inherited problem.
When we practice Home Religion, we need to learn to recognize and overcome the problems as described in the three stages of fall away from God. To find back our unity with the Creator, we must learn to overcome bad spiritual influences, we must learn to constitute well the relation between men and women, and we need to learn to have a loving relationship as brothers or sisters living in a family or, in a wider perspective, as brothers and sisters living in a larger community.
