Mark J Janssen

Our world feels as if we humans are becoming ever more disconnected from ourselves and each other. Once we had the capacity to cordially disagree on topics. Now we find ourselves with knives drawn on almost everything. With everything we see and hear in the media, a lot of days we all just want to pull the sheets up over our heads.
Let’s take a pass on that.
Look around. There is so much death and destruction all over this planet. There are moments—sometimes far too often—when it feels like the Angel of Death is coming for us all.
Let me frighten you.
This is not the apocalypse. It is not the end of the world. It is not the time for the heavens to open and Somebody to descend.
Unless you’re on an airplane pulling into your destination. Then safe landings are a good idea.
Don’t expect the expected answer. Don’t look for the answers in life that always used to be true to be true in the future. They are no longer our reality.
Our old and no longer correct assumptions are challenged. If we have the guts to follow through, we are dared to think in new ways. Creation is turning us around. Regardless of whether we think we’re ready or not, we are face to face with the Maker that sees us.
It doesn’t matter whether or not we think we see our Maker. Our Maker sees us.
Pay attention to the Creator. All of the angels who guard, teach and protect us come from the Creator. Just like all of us. Perhaps it makes our cynicism easier if we imagine that this is the end of days.
It’s not.
If you are one of the people who believe that we are waiting for the Second Coming of Christ, here’s information for you. You’re a couple of thousand years too late. The first coming was the birth of the one called the Christ. The second coming was the resurrection. We are past the time of the Second Coming.
Move forward. Move on.
Do something new and different with your life.
Wake up to the reality that the spiritual currents which previously carried us are gone. We’re in a new time. Our Creator dares us to take all that has been good and bad in our lives and build new.
Feeling defeated by wars and shootings and famine is a feeling. The world lived through the World Wars and depressions. We lived through the 1950s and the 1970s with massive inflation and turmoil.
We lived through it.
In the 2020s we have a new current of life. Sometimes it feels overwhelming. As if life is too much of everything. Like no good can ever come back to us. If we want to feel defeated, we can. But it’s only a feeling.
Yes, I am disgusted with the madness in the world around us.
No, I will not give up on life.
Any time I hear the arguments for and against gun ownership, I get it. I was ten or twelve the first time I held a gun. It was a hunting rifle. And that is precisely what we did. I went hunting once in my life and decided I’d prefer the butcher shop. Guns are for hunting and protecting the livestock from four legged predators.
Wars or indiscriminate use of weapons is incomprehensible.
Life at this moment is risky. Do we have the courage to wake up to a new dimension of physical and spiritual life? Are we able to risk giving up what was safe but is no longer safe?
To let in the Spirit of the Creator? To listen to the angels telling us it’s time to move forward?
From where I now sit I can hear a toddler singing and making all sorts of happy young child talk. I have no idea what the child says. I do know that the sound of that happiness, that joy, draws me in.
The sound carries me. It makes me feel that yes, in spite of the horrors we witness in our world, life is possible. When I listen to that voice it is like listening to the angels. It is discovering all over again my ability to be human.
Am I adult enough to become more mature?
Spirituality demands that we grow up and out and in every which direction. Always. To the point where we no longer need to force ourselves to think about it. Where we grow because it is the right thing for us. It feels right.
Growing up spiritually demands sacrifices. We no longer need what have become negative thoughts and behaviors.
We get to learn to live for more miracles. New miracles. To expect that we can be positive persons. To be positive force for good in our lives, even if we do not think that we can do good for others. When we allow in positivity, allow miracles in our lives, the result is good for everybody.
Right now, that can feel hard. It can feel hard at any time, but in this time our world is heavy with sadness and mourning.
Our days are not about the Angel of Death.
They are about the Creator of Life.

To be spiritually alive we have to be in the “do” part of life. The part where we are in the middle of life, making things happen.
Living in the “don’t” kills any hope of a positive spiritual life, much less spiritual progress. It’s like the young woman I met who was a conservative Southern evangelical. She believed tarot cards were from the devil. At the same time, she loved the idea of angel cards. She blanched when I told her angel cards are just another form of tarot cards.
She thought she was living in the “do”—moving her spiritual life forward—because the cards had angel drawings on them. All the while blinkering herself to reality. Tarot cards are fine, but I have never understood the point of them. What the angels tell me goes beyond decks of cards.
The angels have also told me that anybody can hear God and the angels speak. We all have that ability. Most people simply refuse to open up or are afraid. They are afraid of God. Afraid of the angels. Afraid of themselves.
We are dared to stop living in the “don’t”. It’s too easy to be stuck, to seize up with fear. We can live our whole lives in the “don’t”. In negativity and fear of being happy and alive.
That accomplishes nothing.
That isn’t living. It isn’t being honest with ourselves. Life isn’t about the “don’t”.
It’s pretending to be brave while actually being spiritual cowards.
Life is doing. It’s thinking about what you can do. Do here and now. Think about the you whom you truly wish to be. The choice to be spiritually fulfilled takes more than sitting in a café. Drinking a cup of coffee and watching the world go by can be helpful if we are learning from the world.
What are the people doing who seem to have purpose? The ones running along talking on the mobile phones remind me of the old saying about being able to chew gum and walk at the same time. It takes something more inside, a sense of interiority, of intention, for us to move our spiritual lives forward.
Telling the young woman that angel cards are just another form of tarot cards was not enough. I was merely passing on freely available information. That is not the same as helping someone move their life forward.
I told her that she could learn what she wanted to know from the angels themselves. She could get even more and better information from God. She could do better than cards.
That idea confused her. The idea that she didn’t have to sit down with a special deck of cards and a person or book to explain the cards threw her off base. There is no magic in directly communicating with angels. God is always available.
We get there together. We help each other. It’s a community effort.
Staying awake is being fully engaged in life. Being in the middle of life means learning how to use our God connection. Once we make that connection, we have to work to keep it.
I have seen God and angels all of my life. I have also seen ghosts. I have seen devils as long as I have seen angels.
The bad may try to overwhelm the good, but it’s only a try.
To see God and spirits I have to stay awake. I have to do the work it takes to be open for communication. This is not a one-way street. I learned a very long time ago that communicating with the spirit world can be like listening to the radio. If you want a clear signal, get out of the wind. Stop inventing static.
If I pout and throw a tantrum because I don’t get what I want, I live in negativity. I am outside the sphere where life happens. Where all of the excitement occurs. Where being human is its best.
God waits for us. Sometimes God laughs. You think you can’t hear God laugh, but don’t pretend to yourself. When we are childish and foolish, God laughs.
I have heard God laugh. It’s terribly annoying. It’s notice that I am not living in the spiritual zone. I am removing myself from the God Squad. It tells me to get my act together because I am making my own life negative, dark and unhappy.
There is no joy in behaving badly.
It’s a reminder that I am living in life’s hallway. That is where life challenges people. One door has closed and I don’t see all the other open doors. I can’t even fathom that maybe a door slammed shut in my face because it was the wrong way to go.
It was the door of no spirit life rather than the door of eternally expanding spiritual life.
I need to put myself back in the place of creative spirituality. Not being there makes my life worse.
I get there by living through the mundane moments of life. My soul has the opportunity to expand during really horrible days.
Being awake, putting myself in position to grow spiritually and become ever more the person I was born to be, is a gift. It’s up to me to accept or deny the gifts of the Spirit.

There is a pseudo-spiritual, pseudo-psychiatric saying that we are to forgive and forget. Depending on your point of view, it goes back to the Bible, Shakespeare (King Lear) or Cervantes (Don Quixote). I strongly recommend that people look to either Shakespeare or Cervantes on this one.
The Bible never tells us to forgive and forget.
I have a history of greatly upsetting the psychiatric and religious communities when they tell me to forgive and forget. I tell them No. Absolutely not. Never.
Then I go on to explain that, as a historian, only fools forget the lessons time teaches us. It is how wars begin. Somebody forgot what happens when they trust people who are not to be trusted. Just because we may want to live peaceable spiritual lives based upon spiritual principles does not mean others have the same plan.
Here is what suggest. Be like me. I am a pacifist who believes one must always be prepared for war.
I am a mystic who conspires daily against hell. Does anyone actually believe that anybody anywhere sees devils? Maybe in the movies, not in real life. Except I do.
What you may not want to hear is that angels and demons are more real to me than humans. Humans baffle me. Spirits are my reality.
Hell is a very real thing. I’ve been there enough times to know that regardless of how bad people might think it is, it’s worse. However much someone may wish to pretend it doesn’t exist, it exists.
The closest representation I’ve seen are the tapestries and paintings of Tibetan demons. Looking at them could give most people nightmares. However, they are not as scary as the real things. Nothing is.
We don’t want to hear about that.
We want to pretend that we are all good people. If there is an afterlife—and who says there is—how bad can it be? We want to believe we will all go to heaven.
There’s an afterlife. I say so. Whether it is very good or very bad is up to each individual person.
Individuals actually have to do something in their lives that determines what becomes of us after this life ends. Whether we go to heaven is something we spend our lifetimes working toward. Or not.
You may not want to hear something which I’ve been saying to healthcare professionals loudly and obnoxiously over the last few years.
What are you doing about the new health crisis?
It isn’t Covid. We’re only a couple of years into the initial phase. We have another three to five years more of this coming at us. It isn’t long-term Covid or the tens of millions who have died or will died from this virus. It’s more brutal than any of that.
I ask them what they are doing about survivors’ guilt. How they plan to provide resources for the survivors. People who have seen loved ones die after long bouts with cancer, dementia, AIDS and goodness knows what other diseases know precisely what I am talking about. You know what this is.
How have you already managed your survivors’ guilt? It’s the psychological trauma that comes from outliving our loved ones, our friends and family. Did you go on with life? Did you remember to go to work, eat meals, pick up the dry cleaning and walk the dog?
Many people do not live or live well after the traumatic death of someone they love.
If we have survived prior deaths by thousands of blows, and if we are not caught in this current epidemic, we are the ones needed to help Covid survivors go on with their lives. Maybe it was hard enough dealing with our own traumas. Maybe we don’t want to relive all of those days and nights of horrors.
None of that matters.
We’re the living. Our job is to help others live. We are called upon to provide an example of what it’s like when someone has gone through the hell another person is in. We somehow fought our way through those battles. We picked ourselves up out of the mud, cleaned ourselves off and went on with it. We got our heads back above water.
Maybe we had help. In many cases, we did not. Sometimes it’s because other people didn’t know how to help us. Or we didn’t know how to accept their help for far too long.
Now we get to help another person go on with life. The facts behind the deaths may be different. The skills needed to live again are similar.
The word is this. If you have survived the trauma of helping another person with a deadly disease, don’t go away. Your life has just begun.
Your place is here. You don’t need to see angels. You do need to know how to steer your way through this maelstrom called life.