Who is a heretic? What is a heretic? One needs a point of reference in order to use this word appropriately.
In the dictionary we see this:
1. a professed believer who maintains religious opinions contrary to those accepted by his or her church or rejects doctrines prescribed by that church. 2. Roman Catholic Church: a baptized Roman Catholic who willfully and persistently rejects any article of faith. 3. anyone who does not conform to an established attitude, doctrine, or principle.
Interestingly the origin of the word “heretic” derives from the language of ancient Greek: hairetikos, able to choose. I like this – that I am able (free) to choose what I hold to be true. I also like the more inclusive definition of the word, namely, a person who holds unorthodox opinions in any field.
The notion that I am a heretic came about following a meeting yesterday with a man in a coffee shop. I met Bob (not his real name) in order to give him a copy of a book that I wrote and self-published in 2011. Bob and I first met around 10 years ago, when our children attended the same school. We lost track of each for a number of years, but we saw each other again briefly outside a grocery store just before I left for my visit to Australia in May. We chatted a short while, long enough that we wanted to meet again and talk about mutual interests. I told him about books I had been writing, and he was keenly interested in learning more about this. So yesterday we finally met in a coffee shop.
Bob is an interesting man. He is a painter by profession and has his own small company where he advertises his work as “no job too small or too large.” He had his painter’s clothes on when we met for coffee. This doesn’t define all that Bob is. For one thing I learned that Bob is psychic and shared a few of his experiences that really piqued my interest. The book I gave to him is filled with psychic stuff. Needless to say we will meet again and continue our discussions about the world we live in that is separated by a thin membrane from the greater world of spirit.
The meeting with Bob reminded me that our discussion is not the sort of conversation I would have carried on 30 years ago when I was a Christian minister. I would have looked on such talk as “stuff of the devil.” As far as I am aware this sums up the attitude and beliefs of common Christianity – whatever branch or church group one might name, whether mainline Roman Catholic or Presbyterian or a small free style mission church. The subject Bob and I mostly discussed had to do with people on earth actively communicating with spirits in the life hereafter.
The subject of spirit communications has been my interest and passion for the past 8 years. Bob did not know this about me, and I did not know Bob is a psychic and receives spirit communications. I’ll be interested to learn the response of Bob to the book that I gave to him. It is a book that introduces the reader to the work of James Padgett between 1914 and 1920 and the communications that he received from Jesus and other Celestial spirits regarding “true salvation.” This is where the word “heretic” can be applied to me, and my diary can be titled “Notes from the Diary of a Heretic.” I’ll write about this later.
– Joseph