Sunday afternoons

We have just spent a lovely Sunday afternoon…loafing! Yes, that peaceful kind of loafing that includes naps, watching the light snow fall, an easy dinner eaten on the sofa around the Sunday newspaper, getting some minor stuff done of the kind that can be accomplished with a cat on your lap getting hair in the computer.  We never seem to make it to turning on the TV, watching a game, or going to a movie. And although we love taking a drive into the back country, hiking in better weather, or cross-country skiing, I’m still not able to handle getting soaked and frozen, so today we are just watching the trees outside as the snow falls, and sharing our dreams in the slow-motion tempo of a Sunday afternoon.

This really is the beauty of Sabbath…a day of rest, a day spent being happy in this wondrous world. The Daily Word today talked about the magic of grace, that wonderful and unexpected gift from God that we are given freely, without requiring our sacrifice or penance. It is ours without asking, as subtle as the beauty of the snow as it outlines every twig and branch – or as obvious as the accident just avoided, the health challenge overcome.  But it is ours to live with, to revel in. 

What would our world be like without God’s grace? God didn’t have to make the sunsets gorgeous, love beautiful, or lemon pie delicious…but that’s the way it is. And although this particular Sabbath’s grace is more about resting and enjoying things as they are, there is always tomorrow, thanks to that same gift of grace.  This world may not be perfect in our eyes, but we can make it better by passing our love on to others. We have the capacity to care, to give, to be that unexpected blessing.  

We are God’s love in action. We are God’s grace, too. Lets live up to it!

Of travels and love, lots of love

The Narrows at Dawn. This photo was taken along the edge of the Acoma Indian Reservation
on the last leg of my journey home. 

It has been way too many days since my last post. In the interim, I have learned that I was, indeed, accepted onto the ministerial path at Unity, been awash in the formal admissions forms for Unity Institute, catching up with things, and recovering from pneumonia.  So I am late. 

I love the drive home from Unity Village...I often drive in complete silence, not even the radio or the CDs playing. It gives me lots of time to process what I've learned. In addition, the road this time held a number of challenges post-blizzard. I was never unsafe, but I saw lots of evidence of people that had a harder time than I did. And it took me three days to get home.

In the process of the journey and the slow days recovering, I have had some interesting insights. I have been contacting all those wonderful people who have encouraged me and loved me, held my hand, and generally thought I was indeed capable of this strange and wonderful calling. As I go through my mailing lists, I am astonished, honored, and humbled by the number of them. In my case, it took more than a village to raise this Child of God! I have been blessed with their love and confidence in me, often long before I felt equal to it.

I’m not alone. Everyone who has tread this path successfully does so with an army behind them. Its too intense a path to travel by oneself. Even if we must take the individual steps ourselves, and we must, we still need love and support. As the Dalai Lama said, “Compassion and love are not mere luxuries.  As the source both of inner and external peace, they are fundamental to the continued survival of our species.” 

So I remain honored and humbled. You, dear friends, mentors, congregation, and teachers, have shown me love. You’ve shown me compassion as you’ve watched me awkwardly stumble and find my feet along the path. You've forgiven my errors. You’ve stood behind me, tutored me in some cases, and believed in me. Yes, I’ve made the steps myself. But I knew you were there, and I used that knowledge shamelessly in the inevitable dark nights.

Now I celebrate you in the bright days as well. Thank you, all of you, for being there for me, as you have been for countless others as well. I send you blessings, love, and compassion, learning from you those beautiful and necessary lessons you have so freely given. I am honored by your trust. I hold you in light and love. I see the Christ in you.

I will do you proud.

Interviews for Unity Institute

I am writing this from a hotel in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, waiting for both the roads and an acute sinus infection to clear.  The interviews for Unity Institute were yesterday at the height of the blizzard, three of them, two teams of ministers and a psychologist, who pretty much went through our internal landscapes with a steam shovel and a pickaxe.  Afterwards, the current group of ministerial students, who have been giving us marvelous support and prayer, went through the last part:  what happens if we are redirected, i.e., we cannot go to Unity Institute at this time.

Now, none of the three of us know the results. We were confident immediately after the interviews, but as the day wore on, much less so. The team has made their decisions, we’ve already heard that they wouldn’t need an extra day, but they won’t tell us the results until we are safely home (and not in their faces) on Monday. Because of the blizzard, we and the review team wound up taking dinner together last night at Unity Inn, but it was uncomfortable. The team wouldn’t meet our eyes, and so we know at least one of us has been redirected.

Oh, God, let it not be me.

What the ministerial students were so wise as to say is that a LOT of people get redirected to work on internal “stuff,” and that many of the current crop of students and quite a few working ministers have been redirected at first, some several times, and eventually made it through. The other piece about what they had to say was that in every case they heard about, the redirection was right; that there were issues that had to be worked on, or there were things that had nothing to do with them; those people had seen parents or immediate family members pass away that – had they not been redirected – they would not have been able to be with them in their final days. The upshot – and, as sick as I am, lets go for the upshot – is that Spirit always knows, even if we don’t at the time, and that our path is as its going to be, and be the best for both us and the people and congregation we are to serve. We are ALL bound to serve; it just remains to see in what capacity.

We were, I believe, authentic and transparent. And if our transparency results in a redirection and we can’t go to seminary right away, that is life in Spirit.  I guess the point is that sometimes God redirects our life; but it is never a mistake to Spirit, even when we don’t particularly want to go where God/Spirit leads us. We will find our way, our version of how to serve in the greatest capacity we have to deliver. When you think of how each person – you, me, that person at the bustop over there – truly is God inside, even if we are not manifesting it particularly well at the moment, you can see there is a Grand Pattern. We retain the ability to have free will within it, yes, but somewhere we fit in.

The three of us remain dreamers, guiders, lovers of this blessed humanity and the people we serve. Yes, we serve you, wherever, whenever, and however God leads us to do that.  

What did he say?

I say with some laughter that this is the last of the major loose ends in this series of articles…and it comes from my curiosity about the interesting use in the Bible of  “Son of Man” vs. “Son of God.” “Son of Man” is used frequently throughout the Bible, 178 times in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament…even Jesus seems to describe himself as "Son of Man." Its a wonderfully rich description, representing our entire race.  “Son of God,” on the other hand, is used only 41 times, all in the New Testament, and more often spoken by others than by Jesus. 

Easy, you say…Jesus is the Son of God, so of course he is mentioned only in the New Testament.  He describes himself as both the Son of Man and the Son of God. 

Actually, we have a problem trying to find out how Jesus really thought about himself – or what he really said. You see, the earliest of the canonical gospels, Mark, wasn’t written until about forty years after Jesus’ crucifixion. Matthew and Luke were written after that, and John was written some seventy years after his death. John is the most reflective of the growing traditions about Jesus rather than about what Jesus said and did.[1]  It seems no one was taking notes when he spoke, or if they were, they are lost in the dust of time.

So where does that leave us? Can't we believe anything the Bible says about Jesus?

I offer this:  Whether or not a man named Jesus came to say and do these things, its not the man, but the teachings we follow. Those teachings, profound and wonderful, lead to the tradition that says this incredible man came to embody all of those God-like characteristics that we call the Christ Spirit. And, if his teachings are even vaguely reported correctly, he said we are ALL children of a loving God, and therefore we are all sons and daughters of God, carrying that God-substance within us, the Christ Spirit. I know I have the Christ Spirit within me, and so do you. I know it, and I can feel it.

I'll back this up with my favorite Hebrew Bible passage, Jeremiah 31:33, “…This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

There is continuity there, Sons and Daughters of Man. We are also the Sons and Daughters of God. We have the Christ Spirit within us. It is written on our hearts.

---

[1] A good place to begin learning about modern Biblical research is the source I just used, Marcus Borg’s “Reading the Bible Again for the First Time.” Fascinating book.  He manages to marry a thinking person’s approach and a deep-seated faith without slighting either.

This beautiful world...

 The time has slipped by. I am reviewing some of my classwork before heading off to Missouri, I am in the middle of what seems to be a head cold, and I am still unpacking. You’d think, under the circumstances, that I’d be unable to write…when in truth, I have so much to write about, that I’m too distracted to complete any one theme.

So lets begin with a couple of loose ends from previous writings. The one I wish to address today stems from the first post of the year, where I was talking about how if we were perfect in our realization of the God-spirit carried within, we wouldn’t have things to grow beyond, to struggle for, and so we might be missing some fundamental joy in this life. If everything were perfect, as it is supposed to be in God-mind, would we be bored? Are angels be bored? Is that how we got here?

Popular thinking has God creating this world as kind of a trial run, a test, a learning spot for spirits trying to obtain perfection. However, in order to accept that concept, one has to see God as having human feelings and emotions. One has to see spirits as needing perfection, and living a life that can be separate - distinct entities that can “choose” to reenter this world and live again. Huh? This is not God as Oneness, Divine Mind, or even God as a Supreme Being. That’s not the all-powerful, omnipresent Oneness I know.

And yet, if there is only Oneness, the only reality is that of Spirit, God, and this earthly experience is unreal, like so many faiths believe, then why have this relative world at all?  I hear constantly that we are living a dream, we are spiritual beings having an earthly experience…if so, why? Why have this earth, this existence at all? Is there an answer without resorting to the God-as-reflection-of-ourselves with some human-like motive?

Charles Fillmore, founder of Unity, defined God/Divine Mind as Absolute Truth, the Divine idea which encompasses all Divine Ideas. Relative Truth is what we experience in the physical realm, this worldly experience. We learn that the relative realm doesn’t exist without the Absolute Realm or Absolute Truth. As I wrote in homework for one of the classes, "To our outside senses, the relative world is real, yet it does not exist separately from the absolute. Yet to say it does not exist separately from the absolute infers that it is a reality after all.”

Is it a reality?  I can understand that I am not my feelings, I am not my thoughts. Something greater is inside me, is my bedrock. But that’s a far cry from calling this gorgeous world “not real.” After all, we have a life outside those feelings and thoughts.

So, OK, what is the truth?

We might never know the answer. We can only guess, and dream up some of the wonderful theories I’ve heard. For myself, I want to keep the question open, and just say that it is what it is. I’m not ready to declare our beautiful world and people in it as being “unreal.” God is everywhere, everything, including me, you, and even that rock over there. Yes, I want to keep the question open.

The Son of Man

This has been an interesting time! I’m preparing for the interviews that will say whether my path is to be at Unity Institute for seminary…and in the process, so many fascinating things come up! I keep wanting to chase them all…for instance, in rereading Mark, the earliest of the canonical gospels, the phrase “Son of Man” kept coming up – “But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins…” Now THAT is an interesting thought! We can, should, and sometimes actually do forgive others…and obviously do need to do more of it for peace in the world, in our country, and of course with our loved ones and ourselves.

It also made me ask what other faculties were specifically assigned to “the Son of Man?” And did Jesus talk about himself primarily as such? Or was it a statement to remind all of us that our inheritance as Sons of Man had certain powers and responsibilities even at its primitive level, that it wasn’t just our God-expressing selves that had powers and responsibilities? 

I went to the Bible Gateway site online, and did a search on the phrase "Son of Man"…did you know that the phrase comes up 178 times, 82 of them in the New Testament alone?  There are only 22 references to the "Son of God" in the four Gospels, 41 in total, all New Testament entries.  Obviously there is much research to enjoy here! I’ll let you know the results when I’ve finished with them.

The other major “happening” in my life is the arrival of Mindy Audlin’s latest book, “What if Everything Goes Right?”  Wow! I had two copies sent, both as birthday presents for dear friends, but one of them will have to wait…the book is extremely well written, and I’m dying to do a class for our congregation on this…heck, I’m dying to spread this particular concept, period!  So stay tuned…

And pray for me, if you would, for my January 31/February 1 interviews! 

Acknowledging our infinity...

For those of you not familiar with some of the basic Unity concepts, this poem probably takes a bit explaining. You see, we believe that God is in everyone, is expressed as everyone. Our responsibilities as expressions of God are not to do as we will, but to do as we should…that phrase from Eric Butterworth’s “Discover the Power” has always meant to me that our responsibility is to do as God leads us, with the understanding that we must always be careful that, in our free will, we choose to do no harm or act in ways not consistent with God’s Goodness.  This poem was written as I began to contemplate what being “of God, as God” actually meant.

I’m meeting You on Your turf today.

I know that I am worthy because of You.

I know that You within me

Is equal to anything the world has to offer.

I accept your challenge –

To have my self-worth come from being You

While loving You as You are expressed around me.

I know that every rock and tree,

Every person I meet is you,

Whole and complete, as a different expression.

I live, aware of You Within as well.

Blessed with faith and power,

I go toe to toe with Your Infinite Love.

Yes, I’m meeting You on Your turf today.

Of course, that’s the way its always been, hasn’t it?