The call of God is in us all. It has been particularly resonant in me, Nat Tate, possibly because I have taken a different life path. Though I trained as a teacher, I avoided mainstream education. This alternative path is not recommended. My unprepared mind listened to this insistent soul-hunger, undistracted by the demands of a structured education, caree, acquisition, not even family raising. I experimented with life, survived on my art, ostensibly to move vision forward, plucking images from the ethers, but I had to fall back on my art to supply what survival demanded; trade for currency. I have never trusted the human condition, but have loved individuals. Now I see I had loved Christ in them, but always disappointed with their humanity that so reflected my disgust in my own.

God did graciously rescue me from myself. From the age of 28 to 42 I interfaced richly with Christ through mainly evangelical church culture. Losing my husband at 42, I fell back into total self-reliance until aged 59. Disconnected from Christ and structured Christian culture since 42, God's now inarticulate call still resonated. I trod water, studying for 21 years 'The course in Miracles' - not recommended. It's a channelled tome with only a starved, brilliant glimpse of the truth that is Christ, whom I did not re-reach through it.

By divine providence, a wee story I will not tell here, I acquired a www.bfnz.org.nz New Testament. You can't miss Christ in this. Every page is about him. Divine provision has become a very real field of experience for me since then. The lost years have not been wasted, but how much kinder they may have been had I trusted Christ. By the way this is the language of mysticism, of the contemplative tradition.

Meeting the person of Christ as he is presented in the New Testament gospels - as Jesus the man, then as the resurrected Son of God - has opened for me the spiritual portal of faith, and only faith via the heart can answer the call of God. Our reason, based on the scientific model - the religion of our one-fits-all modern education-system, can not reach, nor reveal, God.

I can only conclude that our culture has cut us off from answering the call of God, our true nature, the transcendence of all our need, corruption, pain and death. The call to God is still as clearly answered in the Bible as it always has been. Our human condition is corrupted by faith in our ego, our self-myth. Humanism. The Bible undoes the self-myth and the ego does not like it. It does not wish to die, so it won't read it, and will make up philosophies to dispute God, and feel far too "sophisticated" (sophistry = sham) for God. We could say, that old 'myth', 'the devil' (that which is in opposition to God; devil spelt backward = "lived") needs soul-bodies to live in to exist.

Jesus introduced 'God', unapproachable through our ego (our sinful nature which the Old Testament clarifies) as our "Father" in the new covenant that is the New Testament. Jesus the Christ, through his New Testament documenters tells us the unsettling end of our human story. The eternal life of Heaven is the discovery and effortless work of that story according to Christ. Understanding who Christ Jesus is, is the way and how of it. It's a relationship, not an abstract theory. It's a pity Christian culture has made such a stuff-up, with our human need to institutionalise good ideas, too often to oppress the Christ-life out by weight of its regulation and bias. And the rebels don't have it right either, unless they hear the Word of God (Christ) clearly, so to be aligned with his truth.

Fortunately God is fresh to us every morning, always accessible for an individual answering his call into the innermost place, so that we can re-align afresh. God's way is perfect, after all. Let him take us forward and out of our earthbound human condition. Nothing in man can do that. Left to ourselves we just revolve around and around. Christ is the active, accountable, effective portal through to our Spirit and to our destined nature. But be warned: we will be hated and killed by the egoic human nature for this stance, by our own often. Christ is death to those who are perishing in the human condition, and life to those saved out of it. And we work out our salvation from egoic death in fear and trembling, or we work it out in trust.