“To those who
have given up on love, I say, ‘Trust life a little bit.’”
~ Maya Angelou
Living in this world will break your heart. That’s a
guarantee. We humans are born half-baked and our development evolves for a
lifetime. That is a recipe for difficulty, for challenge, for sadness, and for
loss.
Of course, it is also a recipe for triumph, for success, for
happiness, and for manifestation. It is recipe for the realization of a nature
so immense and deep that we probably could not contain ourselves if we were
born with that knowing. Our divine nature, it seems, must be realized – it
can’t simply be explained to us. As children we may get glimpses of it, but we
can’t truly understand it until we are more mature, and never completely, it
seems. And the path to that understanding seems to be a double helix of love
and suffering.
“Life will break
you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for
solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to
feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.
You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or
betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple
tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their
sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
~ Louise
Erdrich, The Painted Drum
We are in very challenging times. War threatens, political
upheaval, the pandemic. And we are seeing that our progress in realizing a more
equitable society wasn’t really what we thought it was. We are in another round
of book banning and pressure on school boards to limit what is taught in
classrooms, of laws restricting some of our fellow citizens from being seen for
who they authentically are. Fear and ignorance, the two greatest challenges to
our human development, are clearly on the rise.
I see this as a personal call to learn our teaching more
deeply and to practice it more fully. To develop my own realization of my
divine nature to such a degree that I can more easily see through appearances
to the deeper Truth, the love, which is ever present. This has always been the
clarion call of the Science of Mind™
teaching. But for too long, this call has been seen as a focus on personal
development alone, with no extension into actively supporting the development
of compassionate community.
“I am often
struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so
much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of
love within the context of community.”
~ bell hooks
In Spiritual Leader Edward Viljoen’s important opening talk
at the CSL Convention in January, he spoke of the need to move our focus beyond
our personal development to a larger engagement. He said that were Dr. Ernest
Holmes alive today, he would call for us to go beyond tolerance of others to
embrace differences and celebrate the diversity within our human population.
His message was that it is time to up our game and lay the foundation for what
Centers for Spiritual Living will be in ten years.
Indeed, to do this properly we must have done our own work in
developing our capacity for compassion and releasing tribal impulses. Spiritual
growth means moving beyond seeing differences as a threat to realizing the
expanded possibilities of a more diverse community at every level, from our
spiritual communities to our nation and beyond.
The idea is not to stop focusing on “me” for the “we,” but
to see my own development as a process of preparation to grow into someone more
effective in influencing community for the better. I want to bring my best self
to every community of which I am a part. The spiritual reality of perfection
which is always awaiting my acceptance cannot be realized unless I become fully
receptive to it. This means that I can come to see past appearances – not
ignoring them but realizing that they can be changed. When I accept love as the
base of my being I am more likely to realize it in my life.
So, “Always Love. Always.” will be my mantra and my
intention. It will help to carry me through the suffering, sadness, and loss
which are in front of me. It will move me toward an acceptance of the nature of
the world as it is and lead me to find ways to influence it for the better. Once
I achieve that consciousness of love, I will be of greater use to my community and
a have a greater realization of my divine nature. In this way, I will express
greater love and less fear, greater compassion and less separation.
"People
must realize that no matter how infinite the Infinite may be, it can only
become to them what it can become through them. We must look at ourselves with
our own eyes. If we could open up, clean house mentally, and get out of
ourselves everything that ails us, I don’t care what the poverty is or the
misery is, everything would be allowed because the Infinite cannot refuse
anything."
~ Ernest
Holmes, Love and Law
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