Philippians 1.9-10 (CEB):

This is my prayer: that your love might become even more and more rich with knowledge and all kinds of insight. I pray this so that you will be able to decide what really matters and so you will be sincere and blameless on the day of Christ.

Philippians is an amalgamation of two or three letters Paul wrote to his favorite community, but he only ended up in Philippi because he listened to his intuition (Paul called it the “Holy Spirit”). Prevented—Paul claims by the Holy Spirit—from preaching in Asia, Paul made his way west to Macedonia. There, in the relatively small town of Philippi, Paul nurtured a faithful group of Gentile converts to The Way (as the original Jesus movement was called).

Philippi was a Roman town and many of its inhabitants were Roman citizens. This meant that the Imperial Cult dominated religion in the area, and with the exception of Judaism, other religions would not be tolerated. This was especially true for this thing the Romans were calling “Christianity,” which taught people about a God who frees people from slavery and oppression, a God much more powerful than the Emperor. So, Paul wrote to the Philippians, it seems several times, to encourage them in their faith, to urge them to study fervently, and most importantly, to trust the insight of the Holy Spirit before making decisions.

The group in Philippi, working so hard to define a new way to believe in God, reminds me of a small group of friends that hung out at the University of Utah in the 1980s. We were a merry band of spiritual sojourners from a variety of religious backgrounds: a Catholic, a Presbyterian, a Jew, a couple of Jack-Mormons (people who didn’t adhere to all the tenets of the LDS Church but still primarily identified LDS) and a couple of undeclareds, which is what I was at the time, even though I also identified as both Jewish and Roman Catholic (it’s a long story you can read about in other posts).

Spiritual but not religious

Even though we were from different backgrounds, religion had universally disappointed us to the point we called ourselves spiritual, but not religious. We still believed in God, we just no longer believed in the God that organized religion had taught us—judgmental, petty, egotistical, and hateful of anyone who’s religion was different from theirs. For us, God needed to transcended religion, because the idea that there was “one true religion to rule them all” seemed not only archaic, but also ludicrous and offensive.

But once the old, patriarchal and anthropomorphic language for God is gone, what is there? How does something as amorphous as “energy” or “love” translate into a caring God, one who incarnates as ascended masters, a God who lives in every one of us, carpenters, pastors, teachers, doctors, Buddhas and Jesus’ and Mohammeds? in Utah, we began to understand the power of seeing the world like St. Francis, who found God’s fingerprints all over creation.

God is more than nature, God is natural

Utah is a state overflowing with raw, fantastic beauty. Its magical Northern landscape of snow-capped mountains towering over sunlit valleys is like a scene from The Lord of The Rings. In the South, red deserts are filled with precariously assembled stone arches, Martian ruins once only imagined, come startlingly to life. Utah is full of the cosmic energy flow of creation and it is impossible to ignore. It’s no wonder Brigham Young declared, “This is the place.”

Obviously, Utah looms large in my spiritual development, and I will always love it there. But moving there was not any more intentional than Paul’s detour to Philippi, and had I not trusted the intuition Paul talks about, I could have missed the entire experience. I only ended up in Utah because my family was moving—regretfully—and I had to decide whether to stay in Louisiana or move to Utah with them. I had just started college at home in Louisiana, so it was a gut-wrenching decision.

I could have stayed in Lake Charles by myself, but something about an adventure in Utah tugged at me. Plus, I’ll be honest, I liked living at home and hanging out with my family. It just didn’t feel right to stay in Louisiana without the rest of my family, so I went with my gut and moved to a place I knew nothing about, except that Mormons lived there and the lake was salty.

It turned out Utah was a little too salty for my family and everyone except I returned to Louisiana a year later. I stayed nearly ten years, on and off, and it turned out to be one of the most spiritually enlightening decades of my life–all because I trusted that inner voice, what many mystics (including Jesus) refer to as “the still, small voice of God.”

Intuition is NOT Instinct

Culturally, most of us think of intuition as “having a feeling” about something. We’ve all made wrong turns in unfamiliar cities and had our bodies wrench up in warning, an evolutionary response to uncharted territory. Intuition is that thing that absolutely no one pays attention to in horror movies, always choosing to go into the possessed demon house, instead of just backing away. Just. Back away.

Intuition is not instinct. Instinct is raw, animalistic. Biblical authors rage against instinct all the time, as in 2 Peter 2:12 (NIV): “But these people blaspheme in matters they do not understand. They are like unreasoning animals, creatures of instinct, born only to be caught and destroyed, and like animals they too will perish.” Our human instinct is to survive at all costs, like any other animal. Instinct creates a society where we are all out to get our own at everyone else’s expense. Human intuition serves a higher purpose than human instinct, because intuition is our God connection, signals from God’s communication network of love flowing through and from the Conscious Universe.

I would like to say intuition is an undeniable connection to God-awareness, but as it turns out, intuition is entirely deniable. Just like those characters in the horror film, we consistently run headlong into disasters because we’re not paying attention to our intuition—the still, small voice of God, the touch of the Holy Spirit. We don’t even trust it’s a real thing, so we don’t stop to listen to it, and when we do get that undeniable, intuitive sensation telling us whether something is safe, or good, or useful, we brush it aside as our mind playing tricks on us. With respect to the individual spiritual development that is necessary to take this planet to a different operating level, we are our own worst enemies because we refuse to believe God might actually be communicating with us. That’s the realm of biblical fantasy and science fiction, right? Communication with the supernatural God of the universe? Burning bushes and shouts in the night, Ethereal visits from disembodied Angels–that sort of stuff is fantasy and metaphor more fit for Netflix than serious theological scholarship.

God is perfectly natural

We might say we believe in God, but when it gets down to it, most of us stop short of attributing anything supernatural to God. And direct, intuitive communication with God sounds pretty supernatural.

Except it isn’t. There doesn’t have to be anything supernatural about God, especially if we believe in a Conscious Universe. If God is the universe (and beyond) then being in tune with God, “hearing” God, is perfectly natural. I don’t think God “talks” to us through burning bushes and in English. But I have sensed God’s communication quite often. God might not literally speak to us, but through the natural world, God is definitely communicating.

As we’ve been learning, we are the energetic, harmonic music of God’s very being. We are tuning forks naturally capable of receiving God’s Lovesong. That lovesong is intuitive. We need to practice receiving it, and we need to learn to trust it.

I’m urging us to practice tuning into our intuitive selves, through prayer, meditation, coloring, listening to or creating music, art, sitting at the beach, reading a good book, climbing a mountain or riding a bike through the desert. What quiets your mind and connects you to nature, helping you recognize we’re all a part of the same thing, God? Practice finding that God space, that Christ-mindset.

Currently, it seems like the world is running on fear-based instinct rather than love-based intuition. We’re divided into packs of wild animals, intent on destroying all the competition in order to hoard all the resources and “win,” an attitude every author in the Bible condemns. Paul reminds us that love is the key to knowledge and insight, and that it is knowledge and insight that reveal how unnecessary it is to compete with each other for resources and love. Love is what discerns between intuition and instinct. Love is what makes us different from a pack of Hyenas tearing apart their kill. Unfortunately, love only works if we’re courageous enough to truly listen to our inner voice and finally tear away from the pack.

And when one of us leaves the carcass of competition, hopefully others will follow us into the compassionate communion of God’s intuitive love.

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