To make something sacred is to push it away from us and make it distant and unattainable. To make everything sacred is to make us live in our heads! The early church told its followers what was sin and what was not sin. That took all the work away from the common person. They didn’t have to search in their hearts and examine things for themselves. It was all cut and dried everyone was a sinner. Confession took care of that. You sinned and then you confessed. It was pretty simple.
The Protestant had a conscience and needed to be answerable to that conscience. That was much more difficult. The Protestant needed to become a priest, his or her own priest. That meant they had to remove themselves even further from worldly things, even further into their heads and into spirituality. But really what was happening was the transformation of sacred objects into sacred concepts.
A person was still required to live in obedience, reflection and humility. External authority still remained external authority but now the external authority was a purely nonphysical authority, a concept! The release from worldly things was replaced by even stricter chains that were spiritual in nature and enforced by the conscience.
The path forward was to make all things sacred to the point where individual ego and self-awareness no longer existed. It was only then that everything turned inside out so the still small voice of conscience and the Christ spirit in the heart could be heard. When a person found God in all things they also found God within their own hearts and that was when they were able to listen to their own internal authority for the first time.
Once we are able to find God within our own hearts we can find God in the hearts of others as well. In fact, the same God that is in our hearts exists in the hearts of others because we are all part of the same heart! There is no external authority because my internal authority speaks with the same voice as your internal authority even if it may tell me something different than it tells you because your purpose in life is different than my purpose. In this way we learn to trust and to love others no matter how different they are from us.
There is no longer any need for external authority!
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