“The thing Jesus was best at,” my friend Jerry once said, “was making people feel better about themselves, re-introducing them to some lost, forgotten value in themselves – a value that had been put down, attacked, denied, ignored, or discriminated against. He saved people by this, freeing them up to live their lives more fully.”

Jesus “re-introduced” people to their center, reminded them of those things about themselves that had been robbed from them by the people and demands of their life.  Jesus freed them up to be the persons they were born to be, before they had gotten lost in trying to please others, gain status, compete for things that never satisfy. He got them in touch, once again, with what they needed in order to be whole, “saved” by life, within the context of their present circumstance. 

Plato said that we once knew all we needed to know, but that going through the birth canal made us forget everything. We spend the rest of our life, said Plato, re-membering, gathering back into our consciousness, what we knew before and lost by the process of living. This, too, speaks to me of center, that resonance within with that larger spiritual source that stretches back to generations before me and beyond — to that intersection with the sacred, of which I am part.

Jesus “freed (people) up to live their lives more fully,” not in the so-called next world, but in the world in which they found themselves; to live their lives more fully with their families, in their professional choices, in their personal circumstances. He showed them what it was to be loved. He made them feel they counted in his eyes and they began to count in their own.

This was the eucharist he offered each person with whom he came in contact – He showed them how to give themselves over to something larger than themselves and that, by doing this, they got back themselves, their true, whole selves. The bread he gave them was the spiritual alchemy by which they allowed themselves to be changed into the persons they most longed to be but hadn’t known it. Jesus intended this eucharist to be shared from one generation to the next.   

It was the humanness of the people afterwards in trying to talk about Jesus that made Jesus into a model of perfection rather than a model of wholeness, as Jesus would have preferred. Jesus saw people “like sheep without a shepherd” – like people who have lost their center — and he set about to shepherd them in ways he saw God shepherding them. He reminded them of the beauty of nature, of the love that breaks down walls between people, of the truth only life can reveal.  

Beauty, truth, a loving intimate relationship – these save us. Beauty heals. Love heals. The truth that we are more children of the universe, of nature, of life, than children of the tribe from which we come heals. These fortify us from those around us who would rob us of our center, who would demand we become who they need us to be, who tell us what we need to be happy instead of allowing us to discover this for ourselves. 
 
As Plato suggests, we have to pull back into ourselves what we already know but have forgotten, lost, because of life’s demands, or because of the careless, abusive way some of us have been treated at the hands of those who profess to love us. That truth lies at our center. Becoming who we are meant to be in life, discovering what the ancients called our daimon, our purpose, our meaning, is our soul work.

It is not easy work. We circle around and around the truth of something and it still sometimes alludes us. We think we have a handle on who we really are and what we really want and then lose the thread entirely. We hear that little voice within that tells us exactly what we need to do and we just don’t trust it. We think the best that is in us lies out there, “beyond our strength, beyond our reach,” when all the while it is “very near.” (Deuteronomy 30: 11)

This possibility is not, for me, about some paradisal golden age in the past, as it was for Archaic man. It is not about an eschatological golden age in the future, as it might be for some of my more fundamentalist friends. It is, for me, about the daily living out of what is best about me in the present moment of my life. This is the only center from which I can act and choose my life. This is the only center from which I can release and develop the person longing to be free in me. This is the sacred of me.

I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s often-quoted poem, Wild Geese. “You do not have to be good,” she begins. “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You have only to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” You have only to remember who you really are, what you really love, and who it is that loves you. You have only to remember that the beauty in nature heals and that the truth you need is already within you.

Whether we are robbed of our center by others who abuse, neglect, or ignore our need to be an authentic self, or whether we give away our center to someone else in order to be loved and accepted — we have to reclaim, re-member, re-assemble that core spiritual reservoir in ourselves in order to fully experience life.

It is the hard work of leaving behind our earlier messages and scripts and discovering new ways to connect with the divine in us, Carolyn Myss says in her book Sacred Contracts, that frees us to live more fully in the now. Connecting with the beauty and the love and the truth hidden within our ordinary circumstances is connecting with this divine energy. It is a letting go so that we can re-member who we really are at our core, our center.