- Via Christa
- » The Via Christa Life
The Via Christa Life
By Linda Mihalic
Jesus the Christ came to earth to teach us what we must be and do to inherit the Kingdom of God. You are born knowing this in your soul, and you remain hungry for what you know will make you whole until you find it. Then you are ready to walk the Via Christa. We are the Elect, the Chosen because we elect and choose to serve God and His Son, our Master Jesus Christ. As her service, Edna Lister came to teach us how to do what Christ taught, how to be and how to act to return to God, our Source. She named us Crusaders of Light and Pioneering Mystics, and aptly so, because we have also entered the uncharted territory of Soul Ascension, which Jesus Christ opened. Faithfully she followed, carrying the Light, blazing the trail, and marking the dangers and pitfalls on the way.
Edna Lister said, “I always knew that everyone could walk with Jesus. At age eight, I saw the Master with my soul eyes, and knew that God was a personality as well as principle and law. I asked how to seek God ‘with all thy heart and with all thy soul,’ and was led to books I should read, but always the Bible remained my chief textbook. Like many, I first thought that the right goal in life was getting what I wanted. I desired a career in grand opera, but a stranger questioned my goals, asking, ‘What is that to thee? Follow thou me.’ Suddenly I saw the Master speaking, who then said, ‘Follow me, and avoid the appearance of evil.’” Thus, Edna Lister found her glorious destiny and avoided an unhappy fate. You can, too. “All I have given you has come from this,” she said. “I want these words to carry lines of Light to uphold you so that your strength, faith, and love for God shall be so great that nothing can upset your divine poise. Your soul’s faculties shall be open and the right answer shall register on your brain cells as you need it. Your words shall be so high in their degree of love and justice that no one shall be able to resist them.” This was her great desire for us—soul ascension.
Edna Lister’s personal faith led her to live by the advice of the great souls, including the prophets, who had traveled the way before her. Certain passages, she said, led her through the illusions of earth life, such as, “Though the Lord give you the bread of adversity, and the water of affliction, yet shall not thy teachers be removed into a corner any more, but thine eyes shall see thy teachers: and thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left.”–Isaiah 30:20-21.
“Do you love God more today than you did yesterday?” – Edna Lister
She often asked her audiences, “Do you love God more today than you did yesterday? Unless you do, you still do not love God enough.” Further, she claimed every promise that God and His Son Jesus have made to the Elect is hers and ours to fulfill: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.”–John 14:12. In pondering Isaiah’s service she always found the soul resolution to continue climbing to God.
The Via Christa Life is so much more than just following Jesus according to a plan worked out in the ancient world, where the fastest mode of transportation had four feet and information traveled at the speed of horse. Communication is nearly instant in today’s world. Yet constant communication with the world leaves your soul little or no time to commune with God, the Source of your being, or with His Son who came to show the Way. All organized religions fail over time because their very infrastructure creates an ever-increasing armor plate designed to shield them from change. By resisting change, they embrace the entropy of outdated doctrines and dogma, believing that the revelation of God’s Word is already full and complete. Increasingly, priests and ministers have lost their contact with the beauty of renewal through immersion in religious mysteries, the chief mystery being the action of the Holy Spirit, Holy Breath, and Holy Ghost in and through man. “Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.”–Proverbs 29:18. The vision referred to here is spiritual.
“Man is NOT the measure of all things; God is.”–Linda Mihalic
When the religious leaders cease to know the truth, they begin believing and preaching opinions about truth, and their own prejudices against truth. Many lose their faith. This loss of honor, loyalty, and integrity paves the way for the moral-mental cancer of homo mensura (man is the measure of all things) and its religion (secular humanism), which its advocates have viciously used to enshrine man in place of God. The moral relativists are wolves in sheep’s clothing who derive their power from sophistry—lying, manipulating and dominating others mentally, emotionally and physically. They destroyed Athens, then Rome, and are sapping the morality of our current civilization. They appear to be winning, but are not, nor can they ever. We know this because the truth of appearances is temporal, ephemeral. However, the truth of reality is eternal and unalterable by anything but the will of God. Further, the materialists believe only in tangible forms of substance—their dogma being “What we can’t measure does not exist” (or is a faulty perception, illusion, etc.) which eliminates the need for a God or an invisible soul.
Hedonists are materialists. Hedonism uses sophistry to persuade, to mentally manipulate embodied souls into believing that sensory pleasure is the greatest good. To the hedonist, man is a body whose every urge must be gratified to attain satisfaction. That describes the so-called “life” of a one-celled paramecium or amoeba, which is mere physical existence. Our Master said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”–John 8:32. As travelers on the Via Christa, we know the truth that we are souls who currently wear physical bodies. We know that we do not need to get or to keep freedom, for we already are as free as we think and believe we are. Self-centeredness is our greatest enemy for it blinds the soul to truth that God is the Good. What we really need is to remember who and what we are, which will cause us to remember why we are here and what we are supposed to be doing.
How can you do all this? Walk the Via Christa with Jesus, and by applying the universal laws of wisdom and love that he taught, ascend to the perfection of soul that Edna Lister showed us how to do. And remember His promise, “Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”–Luke 12:32.
Inherent in life on the Via Christa are such concepts as appearance versus reality, conscious awareness, attention to details, the golden silence, conquering self, idle words, illusions, self-delusions, and command of your emotions and thoughts. Each of these ideas is the basis for a particular kind of self-discipline that you must practice in ascending degrees to reach absolute soul mastery over the self. As Edna Lister said, “There is no easy way to conquer the self.” If there were, someone would have bottled and sold it by now. We offer no videos or animations on this site, and a minimum of diagrams and illustrations. So, reading the papers here is your chief option. Some people have found that reading this work aloud or listening to another reading it helps them to better grasp the meaning.
.
Edna Miriam Lister1884–1971
The original Pioneering Mystic,
Christian Platonist philosopher, American Idealist, Founder, Society of the Universal Living Christ, minister, teacher, author, wife, and mother.
Edna Lister met Thomas Parker Boyd, D.D. in 1924; in 1933, Boyd, Henry J. Kleefisch, D.D. and Edna Lister incorporated the Society of the Healing Christ in San Francisco. Boyd and Kleefisch ordained her in 1934, and she succeeded Boyd in 1936. Edna Lister ordained Lotus Judson Landis to the ministry in 1956, and she succeeded Edna Lister in 1971.
Linda Hildebrand Mihalic
1946 —
A Pioneering Mystic, Christian Platonist philosopher, American Idealist, minister,
teacher, speaker, author.
Linda Mihalic met Edna Lister in 1971, was ordained to the ministry by Lotus Landis in 1991, and today heads the Society of the Universal Living Christ, which sponsors The Via Christa site. She is the site editor.
The Via Christa site is and will remain forever a work in progress. The resources we provide are by no means exhaustive, and we expand them continually.
If you have specific questions about topics or concepts on the Via Christa, or would like to request prayer, contact us.