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Love in the Time of Wars and Rumors of Wars

/ Church of the Harvest / 2 Comments

From a Sermon given at the Winter Solstice Worship Service on December 14, 2023.

This video may strike some as an odd choice for today’s topic. Keep in mind that all love songs are really an attempt on our part to understand our relationship to ourselves and the God(dess) within us. As you listen to Cher, perhaps think of her as singing from one part of herself to another.

I confess that when it was first suggested that we devote this worship service to the idea of Love, I found myself in quite a bit of resistance. It was not that the topic itself is a problem. It is a wonderful concept to explore. It’s just hard to have a conversation about something that is so profoundly important; and at the same time something that so thoroughly evades understanding by the human brain. There may not be as important of a word in human languages than “Love.”

Image used in conjunction with Fair Use Principals.

The temptation here when the energy of a meta concept, a gargantuan idea that cannot be reduced to a word presents itself, is to try to contain it by talking about what it is not. You all recognize some of this backward approach to the idea of Love. . .but to start us off, I offer a few reminders.

Love is not seasonal. Hallmark movies to the contrary, love is not something that occurs more at Christmas time, although the number of words that cross our lips supposedly about love during the end-of-the-year celebrations typically do increase dramatically.

Love is also not what you crave. The programming that is coming through the media and other cultural sources right now attempts to convince us that we must “prove” our love for children and others through gifts and monetary contributions. This is pervasive and destructive, and completely untrue. These messages of rampant consumerism are the result of an economic imperialism of sorts. They have nothing to do with real Love. 

Love is not connected to desire in any form. Quite the opposite. If you desire something or someone, if you are therefore attached to an outcome or a particular form of a relationship, as opposed to operating from the neutrality that exists in the center of your head, you have already lost (or rather, temporarily misplaced) your connection to Love. Love can only be present when one lets go of the need for the outside world to be or behave in a certain way. True Love only exists within the context of Freedom. When you cannot walk away from whomever or whatever you think you love, what you are experiencing is attachment, otherwise known as dependency and/or desire, not Love.

In fact, Love has nothing to do with feelings whatsoever. It does not originate in our emotional space. Love is perhaps best described as a state of being. If you are still talking about feeling love for some other person, please consider clearing your space of enough programming that you at least update your use of language. That will go a way towards helping set your intention to experiencing the real thing.  

You might be feeling a great deal of connection with another person or animal. That can be a wonderful interim experience, but it is not, in Truth, what Love is about.  

Love is also not really an idea. I started this sermon speaking of the inherent difficulty in discussing the idea of Love. But that is just the dilemma with which we naturally are confronted when our human brains try to process something that cannot be fully understood solely using the physical systems.

Love is a spiritual concept and therefore the most truthful experience of it necessarily involves both the physical and the spiritual aspects of being an embodied human.   

I’d like to switch gears now a bit. . .and talk about the “wars and rumors of wars” part of our time together. I was asked to address the topic of Love within the content of today’s reality where what one sees overwhelmingly in the world around us is hatred.

Useful words to keep in mind from Canadian philosopher and author Matshona Dhilwayo, used in conjunction with Fair Use Principals.

How do we dwell in Love when the collective energy does not?  Everywhere one looks there appears to be an endless ocean of hatred and strife. We have so many wars going on right now that it’s hard to keep track of them all. There are, of course, the major military and political struggles that are steadily growing in size, sucking in almost the entire global population. There is the intensifying war between human beings and Mother Nature herself that is affecting every living organism on the Planet. There is even the intense for now-somewhat invisible battle going on above our heads in regards to which group of humans will be in control of the space above us. And on the ground there are the life-sucking ever-present culture wars, over the hearts and minds of the people themselves. How does one love in a world full of such participants?

Laughing at our situation can almost always “lighten the load,” i.e. raise the vibration level. Still, the fact that human beings continue to project hatred onto each other is very sad, indeed. Image used in conjunction with Fair Use Principals.

As I was contemplating this question, I found myself drawn to certain words attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. He talked a bit about Love, including what it is not. He reminded us constantly that Love is not a product of the physical world, but rather that it originates from our relationship to the divine.

There is a very wise aspect to the phrase many people use of “falling in love.” Ultimately, true Love involves a kind of surrendering to the will of the universe. It is not at all dependent on where our brain thinks we are going. Just make sure you have done the prerequisite healing such that you “fall into” the “right” vibration, and not something you were programmed to accept as love. Image used in conjunction with Fair Use Principals.

The Christ who referred to himself both as the Son of God and the Son of Man, thereby validating both physical and spiritual aspects of being human, talked about Love carefully and sparingly. In lieu of trying to reduce our understanding of Love to words he told his disciples to follow his example. He admonished his disciples to “Love one another, just as I have loved you.” So major hint there: Love requires expressed action (or inaction as a form of movement.) And he also talked about the end times, the times we are experiencing in 2023.

You all know that in the Church of the Harvest we honor all paths to God, all spiritual seekers after the Truth, all religious organizations and cultural traditions, including those who shun references to the divine in any form. I typically use words from various spiritual traditions in these sermons, so please do not be put off if you are one of the many who squirm a little when someone references the Christian Bible out loud. If you so desire, you can read for yourself the words spoken by Jesus and quoted in Matthew of that book about the current time of famines, plagues, and earthquakes. Those words echo in the nightly news. His teaching about the many who will hate, and the many whose love will grow cold during these times, resonated deeply within in as I went through the process of creating this sermon today.   

What I primarily want to draw your attention to this morning though, is the use of the phrasing “wars and rumors of wars.” Why are rumors being mentioned here? Initially this looks to be a redundancy, two words or phrases expressing the same thing. They are not. Perhaps some of you will know what I mean when I tell you this phrasing is more an illumination of a key dichotomy.

I remind you all that Jesus was a master of energy, and fully capable of infusing into any of his words a meaning that can only be understood by those who bring more to bear to the passage than just a flat analysis. “Rumors of wars” is not just a watered-down version of the concept of wars. It is at the heart of what creates the violence of wars.

Human beings “go to war,” that is to say, we act out in a violent way towards each other and other forms of life, when we are in fear. When we have no fear, we have no motivation to behave horribly. If you are a science fiction fan what I would say to you is “fear is the mind-killer.” Except that unfortunately, fear kills more than just the mind. For those of you more comfortable with dialogue about spirituality, what I would remind you is that Hatred is not the opposite of Love. Hatred is only a byproduct of the lack of it. The true opposite of Love is Fear.

When Jesus puts “wars” and “rumors of wars” on equal status, what he is teaching us is that our path to salvation is to address our fears, individually and collectively. I think of this every day as I watch the nightly news media personalities, bless their hearts, struggle with their own fears and their convoluted versions of bringing to their viewers a mixed bag of facts, interpretations and illusions, as they try to report what they understand to be the truth of our physical world. Too often their version is distorted by their own individual fear(s) and the fear(s) that their listeners want to hear. 

 When we truly embrace our Creator in all its manifestations, there is no fear. There is only the complete understanding of the soul that it is loved and is Love. However, this often requires more “surrendering” than many are wont to do. It takes a lot of pure intention and a great deal of healing/release of the pockets of pain and fear we each have stored within before most individuals are willing and able to experience the completeness of what some might call God the father. 

Living in the vibration of love rather than fear takes extensive healing, persistence in one’s intent; as well as constant renewal. “Real Hero,” story by Brian Andreas with art by Matthew Andreas posted in accordance with Fair Use principals.

To have the lived experience of Love, the active version that The Christ modeled for us all, you have to face your fears. Only then does one reflect the state of being that is talked about when, as the Persian mystic Khalil Gibran puts it: “When you love you should not say ‘God is in my heart,’ but rather ‘I am in the heart of God.’”

Breaking through to the heart of Love requires great courage. It results from awakening to your own divinity as well as that of others, no matter what human flaws present themselves for healing journey, something that can be terrifying. Image of “Our Lady of Fierce Compassion” by Sue Boardman used in conjunction with Fair Use Principals.

I want to end by reading the truest words about Love in the face of Hatred, aka Fear that I have run across. These words, a selection from the poem entitled “On Love” by Gibran, speak eloquently about the fact that if you want to reside in the vibration of Love, you must find the courage to let yourself fall into the hands of the Divine. (p.s. Feel free to change the gender of these pronouns if it will help you hear the message).

When Love beckons to you, follow him, though his ways are hard and steep.

And when his wings enfold you yield to him, though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.

And when he speaks to you, believe in him, though his ways are hard and steep.

For even as Love crowns you, so shall he crucify you.

Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.

Like sheaves of corn, he gathers you unto himself. He threshes you to make you naked.

He sifts you to free you from your husks. He grinds you to whiteness.

He kneads you until you are pliant;

And then he assigns you to his sacred fire,

that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.

But if in your fear you would seek only Love’s peace and love’s pleasure

Then it is better for you to cover your nakedness and pass out of Love’s threshing-floor into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but all of your laughter; and weep, but not all of your tears.

And think not you can direct the course of Love, for Love if it finds you worthy, directs your course.



Allahu Akbar. Copyright by the Rev. Dr. Resa Eileen Raven, 2023.

Whispers From Mother Earth:  Live and Let Live; Live and Let Die

/ Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given at the Autumn Equinox Worship Service on September 24, 2023.

This morning we are going to be working with the energy of communication.  We are going to look at this concept from the largest vantagepoint, that of spirit.

As I like to remind folks in this spiritual community, communication is central to the mission of the Church of the Harvest.  According to our founding documents filed with the Secretary of the State of Washington we exist to “encourage spiritual growth in church members, the community, and the world-at-large by teaching and employing skills that enhance connection and communication with the Creative Source of the Universe.”

Communication as we are going to explore it today. . .has little to do with spoken words. Words can be completely valid in the context of examining physical events. But we are all MUCH BIGGER than that. . .and words often do not do justice to spiritual communication.

Words can often be very reassuring and helpful to our brain and the rest of our physical body. They can illuminate and guide the process of trying to make sense of what we are seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching. For spirit though, communication happens through images, not words. Words can slow us down and detour us from where we are trying to go.

Language can illuminate important points and guide us to inner wisdom. “Weave a Million Words,” words by Broms the Poet and art by Amie Crux used in conjunction with Fair Use Principals.

Spirit is always communicating. It is our natural state, a state that can be associated with joy and enthusiasm. There is SO MUCH communication floating around the airwaves that our bodies can easily become overwhelmed. On any given day, our bodies are the recipient and processor of billions of data interacting with and adding to our already voluminous storehouse of feelings, thoughts, and experiences. And that is just what is going on with our physical sensory systems. I don’t actually know a word for the quantity of data with which we are capable of interacting on a spiritual level. Even the descriptor “infinite” is not really enough.

Handling this amount of information with grace and ease has always been a challenge for human beings. Individuals and cultures have attempted to engage in all this communication in a variety of mostly ineffective ways. Most of us have repeatedly tried to isolate ourselves. Some have created entire lifetimes based on isolation, whether it’s choosing a career like a trapper or explorer in the wilderness, choosing to be born into an area bound by external isolative geographic factors like Mongolia, Tibet or the Artic; or becoming a part of cultures and communities committed to being cut off from the rest of the world like certain religious groups or entire countries such as North Korea.

Some of us try to remain around a multiplicity of others but find individualistic means to isolate, for example by becoming obsessed with the world of video games or social media; living with a disability to cut down the chatter; or getting lost in an addiction. On a society-wide basis various policy makers think erroneously that they can force others to isolate by banning books and access to the internet, shutting down schools financially or physically, or mandating distorted, reductionistic versions of history and culture in the schools and venues that are allowed to operate.  

These are short term “fixes” for a bigger problem. You have only to examine the “lone wolves” of our societies who are increasingly turning to violence; or witness the suffering of a person struggling with mental illness because they are tortured by more data than they have the ability to process, to realize these “fixes” are illusionary. They are fragile and temporary and can easily make things worse in the end. 

Folks, it’s the information age on Mother Earth. It’s the data revolution, the apocalypse when all that is hidden is revealed. It’s the time of AI where machines can work with more of the tangible than humans can; of 4G and stronger communication pathways being hijacked by commercial forces jamming up the collective airwaves in their battle over who is going to control space itself. It’s the time of weird new microorganisms in the very soil beneath our feet, popping into our awareness along with variations of more familiar old ones, sometimes viruses trying to restructure DNA in help us keep up.

We are shifting from the linearity of being obsessed with things; to the circularity of relationship to all of life, requiring a new focus on the basic organicity of nature.

To handle this shift and the increased volume of information that we must negotiate in order to make it, we are going to be required to learn to TRULY communicate. This means that we not only we need to learn to use words constructively with people; but also that we need to learn ALL the ways spirit engages with itself. We need to greatly level up our spiritual communication skills with ourselves, with each other, with all life forms animate and inanimate, with the Creator-of-Us-All and all created order.

That is where meditation comes to play. Those of us in this community and those elsewhere who practice some form of meditation have an edge, a head start, so to speak.

The great thing about sitting down and closing your eyes and turning within, no matter what type of meditation you are using, is that you are placing your physical systems in the back seat as you learn to communicate. Sure, it can be confusing for a while, maybe even a long time, maybe even painful at some points, as one begins to recognize how out-of-touch we have become in our collective groups that do not validate spiritual communication. If you keep going with the practice of turning within though, eventually that ability to communicate naturally begins to develop. You sort out which internal voices are your own, which belong to other beings, both those with physical bodies like family and friends, and those existing purely as spirit. . .and you figure out what you truly have to say.

These days a lot of people are using the phrase “speaking my truth” as a means of inserting their perspective into the conversation. Be very careful. Although this is a grand ideal, it remains out of reach for many or most. It often takes years of healing before one can truly distinguish truth from societal and familial programming. Speaking One’s Truth by Myron Dyal, used by permission of the artist.

I’d like to tell you a story now from a time when I learned a lot about the nature of spiritual communication. Twenty years ago, I was sitting at my desk in our meditation center in Lacey trying to work on some important paperwork. I was having trouble concentrating, something that was atypical for me. I tried to focus on the project but an internal dialogue was going on and building and telling me in no uncertain terms that what I really needed to do was stop working and start meditating. The various voices in my head were fighting with each other with escalating tension. I finally realized my responsibility pictures were losing the war. Not only couldn’t I complete the paperwork, I had become SO frustrated that I found myself wanting to throw something against the walls of the room. Instead, I yelled out loud to some unseen aspect of universe “I give up!” I began to meditate to see what was going on within me, what the message was that was trying to reach me.

Fifteen minutes later, after I had cleared a bunch of energy from my space and was considerably calmer, I called another church member and asked her: “What the hell is global warming? Does it have something to do with the depletion of the ozone layer?” This individual was a biologist who at the time was in charge of a large section of the Olympic National Forest. She responded that she did not know but that she had been seeing that term come through her emails recently, and she would look at the situation and get back to me.

Thus began my journey into understanding what Mother Earth had been trying to tell us/me all along. Please notice though, how spiritual communication works. When the divine needs to speak to us, first it whispers. If we do not pay attention, it sends hints. If we still do not let ourselves receive the message, it speaks more loudly and directly. Eventually if the stakes are big enough, it begins to shout.

Bhatapur, Nepal after their 2015 earthquake. Photo used in conjunction with Fair Use Principals.

When the social conversation is full of other shouting voices, the message from the one that really matters is not received. The Creator-of-Us-All then often has to pull the plug or take some other drastic measure to get us to pay attention. I have witnessed this dozens of times with my students who sometimes create what I call “crash and burn” scenarios where they have to endure a major health crisis, a car accident, a financial or relationship meltdown, or some such so they notice they have temporarily lost their way.

We’ve all done it. Multiple times. Don’t waste any time on guilt. We have all had those moments where we KNEW better because some little voice was trying tell us that the decision we were about to make, the person with whom we were about to engage, the experience we had just created, was NOT the right decision, person or experience. Nonetheless, we let that voice be drowned out by a cacophony of shoulds, perfect pictures, and various opinions and emotions from others.   

Back to my story, after my own crash-and-burn moment about global warming I spent the next several months and even years trying to understand my role in the collective crisis before us. I reached out to key “ahead-of-their-times” individuals who were discussing global warming. I read everything I could get my hands on in the scientific and popular press. I had returned to graduate school in psychology. That gave me the opportunity to process my increasing panic as I came to terms with the fact that global warming was going to end life as we knew. I turned every paper or project we were required to do into one about “global heating,” (a term that was subsequently abandoned because it was not “friendly” enough for the public to stomach.) I created power points and other presentations for everyone who would listen.

A few individuals who liked to follow my story listened politely. Most did not.

This sculpture entitled “Follow the Leaders” by Spanish visual artist Issac Cordal was created nearly 15 years ago and installed in Berlin in 2011. Cordal has been frequently commenting on climate change and often depicts images of ineffectual politicians. He reminds us that we cannot wait for others in so-called positions of power to change our relationship to Mother Earth. It is up to all of us! Image used in conjunction with Fair Use Principals.

Which brings to my second point about how real spiritual communication works, as opposed to just words expressed in the physical world. Spirit is interactional. It is not linear. Both individuals and collections of individuals have free will in regards to what experiences they want to have, including what they want to hear, pay attention to, understand, and work with. If you try to force communication onto others, at best all you get is the deer-in-the-headlights response. At worst you risk invading others energetically and having to deal with physical life consequences and/or karmic ones.

This is a humorous look at the mental trajectory many have been on. Humor can bring emotional relief to very difficult subjects, and thereby open up an avenue for action. Now is the time for action. Image is used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

After I got beat up quite a bit energetically and otherwise by my need to “rescue” the world from global warming, I eventually heard another message from Mother Earth. If I were to put it in words it would be something along the lines of: “This is not your work. This is my place. Your path is elsewhere. Leave it to me to speak with human beings about what must change for them to live in my paradise.”

 

Holy man attempting to honor the Hindu god Ganesh through the polluted waters of the river Yamuna in New Delhi, India where inhabitants do their laundry. In the Indian pantheon, Ganesh is known to be the “remover of all obstacles.” Photo used in conjunction with Fair Use Principals.

Which brings us to the present time frame. Mother Earth is busy whispering to some, speaking loudly to others, and shouting to many. What I have found fascinating to witness is not so much the collective crash-and-burn scenarios themselves, but the uniqueness of how they are actually received and experienced. Have you noticed that in addition to all the horrific mass casualty events lately that go as expected, there are also plenty of extreme weather events that somehow end up differently than they should “logically?” For example, we have huge destructive tornados that touch down destroying hundreds of homes but leaving a couple of houses or a church nestled in the midst, untouched in a way that cannot be explained by different building materials or landscaping. There are epic hurricanes that total all existing physical structures but against all odds do not harm a single human, even when large numbers of people are silly enough to stay behind.

Without the expanded perspective made possible by a full range of communication, people typically see themselves as separate from Mother Earth. Not so. This image of a mountain range that overlooks Cooper Lake in Woodstock, New York by Mighty Xee is used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

I am in awe of the ability of the universe to craft individual stories within powerful, huge collective events. 

As I watch all this, our human destiny has been a major subject in my ongoing conversations with the Mother Earth aspect of the divine. I know many of you are angry at what humans have chosen to do in our time on the planet; and many of you are pessimistic or even fatalistic about our survival as a species. I have heard the telepathic skepticism when I have failed to endorse the idea that it’s game over on Planet Earth for human beings.

On the other hand, I also know that many of you remain willfully ignorant at what humans have chosen to do in our time on the planet. Some of you who are rigidly optimistic or somehow convinced that our survival as a species is a given, have not appreciated my messages that humans may not survive climate change.

For myself, I have been waiting to hear what Mother Earth herself has to say on the matter. I come to you this morning with the whispering that I have begun to hear from her very recently. Of course, I can’t articulate much of this message, both because it transcends words and because each of you need to and will hear a different version of the message according to the dictates of your heart.

But here is my best attempt:

It’s not too late. It is very late. Humans still stand a chance to remain in the paradise I have created for you, but you must embrace my mystery. I want you to live and let others live. I want you to die and let die. If enough of you can do that, my grace will surround you in ways you cannot yet even imagine.

What does that mean? Again, the meaning here is different for each of us. But here are a few thoughts I have on the subject, take them as you will:

Life is not just a question of breathing in and out. Spirit is fully capable of creating the experience of have a body which is then more-or-less abandoned. Spirit is also fully capable of using the body for what it was designed–as a vehicle for great creativity as can be seen in some artists. Image used in conjunction with Fair Use Principals.

The life referenced here is not life as we know it currently. It is what some meditators label “lived experience,” which speaks to when spirit is fully or nearly fully embodied in physical form, therefore living out a life rich with creativity, joy, truth, freedom, peace, and social justice/service to others, amidst the full range of human thought and emotion.

Those who have experienced a religious background might use the terminology “born again,” if you can get beyond religious dogma into the essence of what it means to genuinely be reborn into a spiritual perspective.

For this kind of life, one must extend one’s aliveness to every other aspect of the whole. The life talked there is about making every mundane choice an act of sacred worship.

The practice of meditation increases one’s ability to communicate with all life, as this Buddhist practitioner and teacher demonstrated. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

Live and let live requires full engagement with all aspects of what God has created. It involves waking up the morning and being grateful for each breath, appreciative of the body giving form to and making possible one’s ability to experience the natural world, despite aches and pains, warts and physical imperfections.

It involves taking good care of the physical form—humans and nonhumans alike–while transcending the limits of said physicality with consistent ongoing awareness of and communication with spiritual reality.  

The death referenced here is not death as we fear it. It is the other part of eternal life, the shedding of old forms in order to make way for rebirth. There will continue to be many other human beings that choose to leave the Planet at this time; and start again afresh another time if they can. It is celebrating their departure, albeit awash with the grief and tragedy of it, and wishing them well in their next steps.

Most of this community know at least theoretically that death of the body is a temporary shift of state. Can you really embrace that truth?

The Old World is Dying but it still can offer solace to those who are attempting spiritual rebirth. Art by Alexandria Dvornikova used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

Die and Let Die has also to do with shedding the old collective forms we have developed over the centuries, those that are in conflict with Mother Earth which is almost everything. That is what is new about this time frame. Most everything has to go, or at least be destroyed and reinvented: political and economic systems, health care, housing, transportation and city infrastructure, food generation and delivery, everything.

When our current world order is dead, then we stand a chance. Then Mother Earth can return us to the living Paradise that awaits us. Why? Because creation and destruction are intimately connected.

Human beings can be at their best during moments of great destruction. This 2015 photo by Vladsylav Musiienko entitled “The Human Spirit,” used in conjunction with Fair Use Principals, was taken in Ukraine.

The Planet itself, of course, will continue in any case. The living heart that is the Earth itself will be here for the created order. It is just a question of whether human animals, the species that was given the learning opportunity of leading the world forward in conjunction with the divine can keep pace in this time of re-ordering.

It’s our move.

Raise your glass and give a toast to more communication as we sort out what is possible and what we will ultimately choose. Let’s talk.

Copyright by the Rev. Dr. Resa Eileen Raven, 2023.

Ancestors and Young Ones: Seeing the Old with New Eyes

/ Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Winter Solstice Worship Service  on December 27, 2020

Winter is traditionally the time of the year when life on Planet Earth slows way down, shifts into resting mode and begins to engage in the process of regrouping for the new seasonal growing period ahead.  Human animals usually use this time to engage in reflection about the events of the past few months; and to dream about the new directions we would like to take in the next phase of our cycle of evolution.

2020 has been quite the year, hasn’t it? A year for the history books. A year when our lifestyles, events taking place in the outer world and our society slowed way down.  That is not to say that events in individual internal lives slowed down. For some it did. For others it actually sped up, as people experienced confusion, acute anxiety and other busy, often chaotic emotional states. 

The pandemic and all with which we are dealing, has many of us in hiding. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

As the calendar year known as 2020 comes to an end, many are still lost to their fear, unable to believe in anything other than scarcity.  And of course, that belief in scarcity is mirrored everywhere around us by the society we have created. . .which then further feeds the fear.  For many people there is a frenzied dynamic interplay going on right now, a feeding frenzy, if you would.  Intense emotions are being triggered in their bodies which are then reinforced by irrational belief systems that are then surfacing in their bodies even more pockets of unresolved emotions that then cascade into greater distorted beliefs and on and on.  The amount of hysteria and totally weird conspiracy theories that are being promulgated right now by our national leadership as well as many of its citizens would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.

As the foundation for life on Earth vacillates wildly between conditional and unconditional love, transitions from separateness to unity of purpose, from fear to faith in the enduring, unending presence of our Creator, many of us are suffering from acute motion sickness.  

Here in this community known as the Church of the Harvest we’ve been working to keep our head above the waters, in order to swim to the new shorelines; and help others who don’t know how to swim at least dogpaddle or float their way to safety.

We’ve been doing this in these services most recently by talking about the nature of Truth. In other words, that Truth is the sole domain of the All-Mighty.  That for those of us human beings who are made in its image, it is in our nature to seek it, like sunflowers that turn their head towards the Sun, but not to know it in its entirety.  Those who adamantly insist on the Truth before they are actually prepared to hear it, typically scorch and burn up. 

Truth for us is a becoming. . .not an end product.  As such we need to constantly set our intention on staying humble and being open to cultivating as many ways to receive a greater version of Truth from the source of our being as we can. 

As a process truth-seeking also greatly benefits from engaging with as much of our physical reality as we can.  This is because the Sun that we seek shines down on our beloved planet and wants to illuminate all on Earth that can be activated and nurtured by its light and coaxed into growing.

Right now the universe is telling us that we must learn not only the disembodied truth that can be accessed by our minds but the larger truth, that aspect of the Sun that has been embedded in the very rhythm of our breath and the coursing of our heart as the Sun’s energy flows through the structure of our organs, muscles, nerves, tissues, and bones.  In other words, we have to not only be in touch with emerging truth with our mind, we have to learn to experience it in our entire individual body.

In my role as someone who tracks the energy of the collective unconsciousness, as well as the consensual reality–which is the part where we have made agreements on a soul level about what we are going to bring into the physical world–I have been watching closely as America collectively embraces a larger version of the truth about our country, its history and its place in present time.  Like an amphibian or reptile, we have been shedding our old skin and moving into raw, vulnerable new containers with astonishing speed. This new version of the truth, this embodied vision, comes at a price for many.  As greater energy flows through our individual and collective bodies, it often lights up old wounds to be acknowledged and cleared. Thus the pain and agony for many these days.  It’s shock and awe time.    

The interesting part to me has been that the emerging deeper levels of truth are just that.  Contrary to popular opinion, for the most part they are not brand new concepts or ways of approaching life but very old ones that are being re-imagined, re-contextualized, like beautiful old paintings that are suddenly seen as richer, more nuanced because they have been taken out of dirty old frames and instead, surrounded in gold so as to highlight their glory.    

Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Whether its adding 3,400 Negro League players to the statistics of the Major League Baseball such that their contributions can be honored, taking down monuments to white supremacists, renaming military bases and sports teams or starting the annual New York City Macy Thanksgiving Day parade with a land acknowledgement to the native tribes that lived in the area before being deprived of their homelands, the shifting of perspective is phenomenal. 

Those who are trying to swim against the tide are framing their truth as the USA “rewriting history” or “cancelling its culture.” We are indeed rewriting the history books by including the stories of marginalized individuals and groups that were previously excluded.  We are realigning less expansive cultural stories from center stage to their proper new place on the outskirts.  Unfortunately or fortunately depending on your own version of the truth, some who oppose this opening up of historical perspectives are getting swept out to sea.  The abruptness of the tidal waves of changes with which we are all now engaged, is shocking to us all.  For some, it is jolting us awake. For others, it is just jolting.  Many of the latter are attempting to lighten the load for themselves by closing down their world vision, something dangerously at odds with how the collective energy is moving.

The robust national conversation about the best multigenerational approach to the pandemic was no “accident.” (Can grandparents hug their grandchildren? Should young people be concerned about infecting older people even if they themselves are at minimal risk? Etc.) As the sun shines brighter on our natural world, humans are having to shift their perspective to acknowledge that time is an illusion to spirit. It will take all of us, young and old alike, to step forward into a greater truth. You are the dream of all your ancestors, art by Monica Fernandez. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

2020 is soon to give way shortly to 2021.  Collectively we have planted a few seeds to begin the growing season ahead; and we still have many more months of dreaming and resting and regrouping before we will have the entire new landscape seeded for the upcoming spring and summer.

Normally at this point in my sermon I make a number of suggestions. This year I have one brief further commentary and one major piece of advice.

Many spiritual seekers debate about the question of pain and suffering. Is it necessary? Is it inevitable? Like many other experiences, this depends on the individual’s path. For most, pain is a “useful” learning tool,, one that becomes less relevant as healing progresses, but most of us need to learn to tolerate and eventually transcend it. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

The commentary is about pain. For those of you who follow American mythologist Michael Meade’s wisdom, he has been talking about pain a lot lately as well.  I was struck by a posting he did recently that I will quote:

                    “The pain we feel comes from the cross-wise energies that

                   keep curving back and canceling the wise self and the good

                   word that waits to be expressed from within us. Persistent

                   pain is usually the indication that we have become trapped in

                   a life too small for our true nature.”

Because on a soul level we are learning to come more fully into the physical world individually and as a whole, most of us will have more pain to clear as we go through the transformative process.  Don’t be afraid of this. We’ve got the tools we need. The universe has our backs. And this community has your back as well, should you need and desire our help.  As 13th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumi tells us:  “The cure for the pain is in the pain.” 

You are, as always, the architect of your own journey. Use this time wisely. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

And speaking of Rumi, here is my biggest suggestion:  Stay open to new ways of understanding, ways that are beyond your present understanding. They are coming, waiting for us to receive them.  As Rumi said long ago:

                    “The Truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke

                   into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it and they looked at it

                    and thought they had the truth.”

We are beginning to see the natural world with new eyes. Earth has always been a planet whose “destiny” involves paradise. It’s just that the human species who right now are the co-creators with the divine, and therefore have a pivotal part in validating the master plan, have chosen heretofore to be largely out of sync with it and its creator.

Open your heart to the bounty and the beauty of creativity in the truest form it shows up in your life, but do so while acknowledging that only God contains the whole picture. Make your vessel ready to receive as much of it as you desire. 

Copyright 2020 by Rev. Dr. Resa Eileen Raven

Transcending Time and Space; An Exploration of Our Possible Future(s)

/ Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Summer Solstice Worship Service  June 23, 2019

Lately when the Church of the Harvest has gotten together as a community for our quarterly services designed to honor the divine and to help us move ever closer in the direction most pleasing to it, many of the services have been about time. Last year’s Summer Solstice Service was about the “Code-switching of Time; Flowing Gracefully Between Past, Present and Future.” The Winter Solstice Service was called “Dreaming of Things to Come.”

This was not intentional but neither was it coincidental.  We are all here to learn how to create as spirit within the time-space continuum of this glorious Mother Earth of ours. Typically individuals who are developing themselves spiritually are first drawn to the lessons involving space.  If we are successful enough with these challenges, we then move on to focusing on lessons involving time.

To understand the true nature of space, essentially we have to clear our individual energy systems from enough of our past experiences on the Planet and enough of the programming and other forms of energy belonging to other people–to our friends and family and community and society–to understand who we really are.

Mother and Child Twins by Gustav Klimt, Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Young ones fresh from the All-That-Is and basking in the spiritual glory of all being connected, come into this world through a physical body belonging to another human being, a mother. Even when we pass through the birth canal, even as we are born into a completely separate physical framework, and even when we take our first independent breath, we are almost completely dependent on many other human beings to maintain that breath, to prolong that life, for many, many years.

Humans are late bloomers. We take nearly twice as long as other primates to grow to physical maturity. As the species endowed by our Creator with the responsibility for life on Planet Earth, it takes a tremendous amount of experience to grow our brains such that they can encapsulate the consciousness required to make it all work. Scientists believe somewhere between 44 and 87% of the energy of our body (as measured by glucose levels) is consumed during infancy and childhood by our brain to bring us to adulthood.

Family by Diana Ong, Picture used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Until we become grown-ups we have to lean on others for our basic survival needs. In our contemporary societies that means we take on energy designed for other people and unfortunately as of yet, are not taught how to clear it when its usefulness is over.

As we grow we have less and less of a need to depend on information and other forms of energy from others, but unfortunately old habits are hard to break, particularly when you are not aware of them. Lots of people never get out of their pattern of depending on others, as opposed to interacting with others from a position of equality.  It may be years, often decades, sometimes many lifetimes before we do.

In these faster-paced days though it is not uncommon for people to figure out that life on Earth only really works if one learns to create one’s life from one’s own space.  When you try to force others onto the path you think they should go, when you attempt to force your will on the choices others make, then life always kicks you in the teeth, if not immediately, then eventually.  It can look like a “good marriage” or a “loving family” or a “prosperous“ country for many years. Having your partner seek dissolution of your bonds, your children move out of reach, or your community no longer function can happen dramatically all at once or quietly over time but it will happen one way or the other.  The song of our soul is one of freedom, and to have authentic relationships with other life we have to give others freedom, and we have to claim it for ourselves.

We have to put the pieces of the puzzle together to form a picture of what some people call our truest self, to understand the deepest desires of our heart. We have to let go of the dreams other people had for us, and even the dreams we had for ourselves that we have outgrown; and we have to acquire the skills to protect the remaining dreams, to nurture them, and begin to bring them to fruition.

Our work can then begin. Those “lucky” few, if you want to see them as such, those privileged few or those sufficiently “blessed,” however you want to frame it, those who have acquired a sense of their spiritual purpose are then free to move into the second part of the challenge of living in time and space, making the time part congruent with your purpose.  For many, learning about time is perhaps even a trickier lesson than learning about space.  It is not uncommon for some to figure out that life on Earth only really works if one learns to create one’s life from one’s own space. It is less common for people to figure out that life on Earth only really works if one understands the real nature of time.

Why? Time takes focus.

You have to find your own energy aka power, and then you have to learn to focus it.  Scattering your energy every which way ultimately just wastes it. I usually refer to this process of focusing as learning to “manipulate time,” but I don’t mean this is in the pejorative sense that one might assume.  In this context “manipulation” just means consciously changing the vibration in situations that are yours to control. When you learn enough from a spiritual perspective about what and how you want to change the vibration of your own energy system/field, then you can concentrate on changing how your system/field interacts with the world around you. You can flow with time.

Time is not the stagnant, never-changing force that our brains as they currently function like to imagine.

Time is not static.

Everything in the universe is in motion, and so also is time.  Time is a subjective illusive quality of experience as lived in a physical human body.

 

 

In Western civilization, Albert Einstein started us thinking in a new way about time fairly recently.  It has only been in the last hundred years or so that the consciousness of most human animals has evolved to the point that it can even tolerate this more advanced understanding of God’s creative order.

Albert Einstein was not afraid to “think outside the box” in many regards. This rare photo from about 1950 shows him in his favorite fuzzy slippers.

In his explanation of relativity theory Einstein told people: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.”  (I also have talked about my personal experience of having time “freeze” before my very eyes in order to avoid fatal injury in a major car accident.)

So why is the world needing to learn about time right now. . .and what has this got to do with transcendence?

Throughout history people have been fascinated by time, and specifically by those individuals among us who seem to be capable of seeing through the illusion that it is.  We have called them seers like Nostradamus or the Oracle of Delphi who was celebrated throughout Hellenic civilization, prophets like Moses and  John the Baptist of the Judeo-Christian Bible, saints like Hildegard of Birgen,

Many artists who turn to the collective consciousness for their inspiration are able to see the future, whether or not that is their goal. Morgan Freeman’s book Futility was published 1898 describing an “unsinkable” boat called the Titanic with 24 lifeboats for 3,000 passengers that hits an iceberg on its initial voyage. In 1912, 14 years later on its maiden voyage the Titanic sank with 20 lifeboats for 2,207 passengers.

visionary artists like Leonardo da Vinci or Aldous Huxley, mediums or psychics like Jeanne Dixon or Edgar Cayce,

These individuals excite our imagination and give us hope that the world is bigger than what we can see with our eyes. They also sometimes engender fear or false hopes that the world is predictable or controllable by other people.  The Truth is that each of us create our own individual reality including how it plays out temporally. Together we create a consensus reality that shares a common time framework. It is the latter of which I primarily speak this morning.

Right now the world is perched on a precipice, a cliff of sorts, and the only way forward for human animals remaining on Earth as its God-given caretakers involves a great leap of faith,  Changes to every aspect of our existence are required  including the time-space continuum within which we function.  As the very cosmos above us changes frequency, Mother Earth itself runs more kundalini energy throughout the surface of the Earth and the magnetic field within the Planet itself shifts directionally, so too is the basic fabric of the time-space continuum changing.  As co-creators with the divine, our job is to roll with the punches as much as possible even while we infuse those shifts as much as we can with good intentions for all and Love.

I am not going to make the mistake here of holding myself out to be the prophet of where these changes will take us in the upcoming days. What I am here to tell you is that we are all prophets, each in our own right, each over our own individual space.  Piercing the veil of illusion is a spiritual ability to which all human beings have access. It might be one of the latter stages for those who are exploring our spiritual nature, one of the more advanced steps on the path back to our Creator, but it is open to all.  Now is the time for you to explore your own abilities to “bend” time.

Yes, we are living in the apocalypse, the period that has long been predicted when all will be revealed.  One of the aspects that will be revealed to those who can receive it is the greater ability to manipulate time.  Yes, we are living in the “end times.” However in my opinion this certainly does not mean the end to all life on Earth; and it likely does not mean the end to human beings as a species of animal. Think rather of this as the end to a very long cycle of how we relate to the space-time continuum.

Some of you may remember 1999 when many people were convinced that our increasingly technological world was going to crash around us because computers could not change their Y2K code to recognize the upcoming new century? Many of you will remember when so many people were freaked out in 2012 about the Mayan calendar coming to an end because they saw this as the fulfillment of a prophecy about the physical world being destroyed? Some of you are aware of the approximately third of Americans who interpret many contemporary events as indication that we are about to experience the Rapture and/or the return of Jesus of Nazareth in his physical form? In each of these cases, there was/is a “kernel of truth” to what people were/are experiencing– hidden behind an ocean of fear. The colander of prophecy can sort the wheat from the chaff, but until people have found their own energy and are largely free from the troubling distortion of fear, partial truths can just contribute to the problem at hand.

As you explore your own version of space and time in your meditations and otherwise, I have three pieces of advice for you.

First of all as always, ground yourself as spirit to this physical planet so that whatever you create you can do so with the maximum amount of self control and safety.  Be sure the light that is you has this built-in lightening rod protection to help you weather whatever changes come your way. And a means to let go of the fear and energy that doesn’t belong to you or is obsolete, so you can be who you really are.

Second of all, continue to work to uncover your truest self.  Do the meditation and whatever other forms of healing you need to grow ever closer to the God(dess) of your own heart. This will strengthen you and help you discern your Truth and step-by-step transform you into a prophet in your own world.  It will also protect you from false prophets, those who claim to speak for God. The only God(dess) you need to listen to is the one that speaks within you.

Third of all, cultivate humility.  I’m not talking here about lack of confidence. I am talking about being slow to draw conclusions and open to the idea that by virtue of living through a body, even the best and brightest of us bring to this world a lot of distortion.

Every human being has the ability to be clairvoyant. It is part and parcel of our spiritual playbook, available to all. Clairvoyance is just a French word meaning “clear seeing.” However, if you have not already developed the skill set to separate your vision from the myriad of other sensations, biases, ego, projections, wishful thinking etc. it is best to be cautious about its usage. . .and be open to others who have enough love to challenge you. Cartoon used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Or as it says in Second Peter, Chapter 20 and 21.

Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Stay open to feedback from others even as, or especially as, you grow closer to your own Truth. Even as you learn over time to create a fresher more constructive version of reality for yourself, let the Holy Spirit take you to places you currently do not even know exist. In this way you will become a prophet in your own life.

Copyright 2019 by Rev. Dr. Resa Eileen Raven

 

Following Your Heart; Choosing Integrity in an Increasingly Fractured World

/ Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Autumn Equinox Worship Service  September 23, 2018

Today I want to talk to you about following your heart.  It is actually much more complicated of a topic than it would seem on the surface.   We extol each other constantly to follow our hearts.   This is the go-to advice for the vast majority of human problems.  Whenever somebody is having difficulty making a decision between different life choices, they are inevitably told that the solution to their dilemma is to “follow their heart.”

We’re very good at generating perfect pictures aren’t we?  We’re not so good about actually defining what we mean when we tell ourselves to follow our heart.  In other words, when it comes to the concept of following your heart, we often don’t get the conversation translated from the spiritual realm into everyday life on Planet Earth.  My goal this morning is to provide a certain level of what I think of as “technical information.”  In doing so, I seek to bring Heaven closer to Earth.

When you think about it, it is not so surprising that we usually don’t REALLY know to what we are referring when we tell each other to follow our heart.  After all, in our country and in our world, we pay very little attention to what is going on within each individual.  We are too busy trying to handle the trillions of bits of data coming at us from all around us at every second.  What we process and understand of our world comes primarily from our physical senses.  It’s what we see and hear that gets prioritized by our minds, as well as what we smell and taste.  Even when it comes to what we often label as “feelings,” it’s those galvanic responses, those sensations that are generated by our nervous system associated with our outer skin, states like cold or hot, the comfort of a lover’s caress, the prickliness of an allergic response, the anxiety, surprise and pain if we step on a nail, that gets the most attention.

For every human being there are a whole slew of other possible internal states of being, states of consciousness if you will.  And this is where the internal landscape sometimes can get very foreign for folks.  Often people will refer to any sensation, anything going on within them as a “feeling.”  If asked to describe the sensation further, maybe they can say more about what the feeling is and maybe they have no words for it.  Maybe they can tell where it seems to be located, and maybe not.  We are simply not taught to attend to what the Christ would call the “Kingdom of God.”

At best we may have learned from a particularly mature adult role model or in a school or counseling setting how to label and appropriately express basic emotions.  We are rarely taught the finer viewpoints such as how to distinguish between emotions that are our own and those we have absorbed from others, much less what to do about the latter problem.

When we are not using our emotions for what they were designed–a communication system between the individual soul and it’s physical body, all kinds of distortions and conflicts become possible.

And emotional states themselves are really only the beginning. They are a statement of what our body is going through.  They can have little or nothing to do with who we really are, that is to say, who we are as spirit.

Some lucky few are taught to listen beyond a “feelings” level to their own internal voice.  Usually, however, they do so by revealing what is inside for the benefit of others.  A great poet or painter or musician might express their true nature as a spiritual being through their art.  But rarely do we validate the poet or painter who is dedicating unwritten poems to the universe within.  I know I am not the only one who as a child constantly sang songs to myself with no real need or desire to share them with any other person. Eventually the chaos of the external world drowned out my musical encounters that were a reflection of lived experience of the divine within.

How many of us are taught to converse with the indwelling divine, something available to any and every soul on Earth?  Anyone?

So in a world made blind to the internal, let’s define some terms, shall we?  What do we mean by following your heart?  The heart here is clearly a symbol.

Photograph of the heart muscle and the veins that support it. Posted in accordance with fair use principles

When we tell each other to follow our hearts, we are trying to tell ourselves to follow the lead of our fourth chakra.  This key energy center, also known as the “heart chakra” is in the middle of your chest occupying the same space as your aorta, the main artery of your physical heart. I don’t imagine any of you really believe that you should be following the lead of your physical muscle, the organ that pumps blood.   Certainly that part of your anatomy is an important player in allowing you to be alive, but so are many other components of the miraculous machine we know as the human body.

Just like there is an area in our head which we call the center of our head, that contains both the physical structure of certain parts of our brain as well as the energetic structure of our sixth chakra, we each also have an area in our chest that contains both the physical structure of a large part of your heart organ as well as the energetic structure of our fourth chakra.

The fourth chakra is usually one of the last to fully open because as the chakra that regulates attraction, it can become a major center for stored pain. Many of us are attracted to pain. We seek it out. It is what we have always known and we tend to recreate over and over different versions of the same pain. It takes a lot of experience in the world and spiritual majority to understand we can use the energy of our fourth chakra for an entirely different purpose.

Just as the center of your head was designed to be the main resting area, the seat if you will, of your consciousness, the area in the center of your chest was designed to be the main resting area or the seat of your connection with the All-That-Is, that aspect of the divine that is everywhere and is everything, that is all of life.  Other names for this area include the “God(dess) of your Heart,” and the “indwelling-God or Goddess.”  You can experience the Creator in a thousand different ways but it is in this sacred place of connection within your own space that should you choose this with “all of your heart” the felt presence of your Creator can be at its most pure.

So let me tell you a little about the fourth chakra, this “heart” that our instincts are telling us to follow.   In classes I don’t speak about it very much because quite frankly, it is one of the last parts of an energy system about which most of us are capable of learning.

For those of you who are meditating on a regular basis, there is a natural progression that happens in your growing mastery of internal processes and your development on a spiritual basis.  Development is unique to each soul but it follows certain common pathways.  Just like the infant needs to learn to sit before it can walk, and walk before it can run, spiritual development often comes in stages. One sort-of-gross generalization that can be made is that individuals typically learn to clear out, balance and more effectively use their lower three chakras, the ones that contain information primarily related to manifesting on Earth through matter; as well as the upper three chakras, the ones that contain information primarily related to manifesting spiritually using the resources of the Heavens. . .before they put it all together.

The fourth chakra has many important roles to play in our spiritual life including helping us transcend our fear of mortality. It connects our physical body to other energetic bodies including our own. This piece is “Let Your Heart Shine Even in Death” by Myron Dyal, used by permission of the artist.

It is in these latter stages that one typically begins to concentrate on the clearing and developing of the fourth chakra.  The fourth is the energy center that requires the most balancing of both physical and spiritual, the most about creating Heaven on Earth.  You might work on an important fourth chakra picture here and there that is keeping you from otherwise progressing in other areas; but you are not likely to be very focused on your fourth chakra until you are fairly far along with your spiritual development.  It is one of the last pieces of the puzzle.

I think it is fair to say that most of the people in this room (including myself, I hasten to add) are currently facing the challenge of learning to own their fourth chakra and employ it for that which it was designed.  In fact I would venture to say that it is really the challenge facing most of humanity in present time.   Think of it as we human animals trying to overcome a lack of integrity.  Used here, I’m not talking about lack of “integrity” as some kind of character flaw.  I’m simply talking about “integrity” as all parts working harmoniously together.

We are each of us an intricate work of art learning to create as spirit in the physical world. Sculpture is by Susan Beatrice of All Natural Arts and is posted in accordance with fair use principles.

To make something work well first one has to assemble all the parts, throw out the ones that do not function any more, sometimes manufacture new ones, get all the pieces that are going to be rubbing up against other cleaned up, greased or oiled, and assembly it all into working order.

Right now we have a civilization based on a bunch of parts, most of which are obsolete or rusted,  crucial pieces missing altogether and everything slapped together with a bunch of duct tape, pretending to ourselves that it will now run.  More to the point we have a bunch of individuals often with great intentions who are at war with the out-of-present-time parts of themselves who actually think that the war they are fighting originates from other people.   It does not.

The fully activated fourth chakra understands that all is connected. Our physical bodies are not separate from the body of the Earth.

Since everything outside of you is in one-to-one correspondence with what is inside of you, all the conflict in your world can be resolved by working from your own energy system.  (It’s not that the strife in the physical world no longer exists when you are fully integrated.  It just does not exist in YOUR reality.  You can be content, even as the world goes to Hell in the proverbial hand basket).  From this vantage point there is only peace.  The conflict of the outer world will wash over you but not be experienced by those with a different purpose in their heart.

 

Jesus of Nazareth knew all about the kind of profound peace that comes from within, the peace that comes only from true connection with God; and he knew it was not the kind of peace that many would even recognize.

The peace of the Christ arises from freely surrendering all of one’s being to Love, aka the All-That-Is. In that space there is no need for or even possibility of power games, only the realization that all of life arises from, reflects, and results in the Created Order.

In his words from John Chapter 14, Verses 27:

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled, neither and do not be afraid.”

If you want to be at peace even as the world around us continues to deteriorate into chaos and disharmony, keep up the good work of grounding and meditating and working to clear what presents itself as obstacles to your greater growth.  Release those aspects of your past that are in your way of adapting integrity as your chosen state of being. Jesus is one of our greatest teachers here.  Follow his lead and make your heart chakra a sanctuary place for your connection with the divine.

Resting on the Heart of Jesus

There is a reason why medieval pictures of The Christ frequently show him displaying a flaming heart.  His integrity was complete, and so this Son of Man as he initially liked to refer to himself, became the Son of God, and showed us how each of us could achieve knowledge of the Kingdom of God within thorough the lived experience of the All-That-Is.

In my opinion you do not need to subscribe to what I like to call “the directional deficits” of traditional Christianity to follow the Christ. You don’t need to invite Jesus into your heart.  The Christ is already there.  You just need to turn within, pay attention and desire with all of your being the communication with and conjunction with the God of your own heart who awaits your presence.

Copyright 2018 by Rev. Dr. Resa Eileen Raven

The Art and Majesty of Co-Creating with God

/ Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Summer Solstice Worship Service  June 2017

Over the years in this meditation community we have had a number of worship services devoted to exploring the dichotomy of creation and destruction.  The vast majority of these sessions have been primarily about the latter, the destruction side of things.  For the longest time, it was important to help each other get over thinking that destruction is a bad thing.  Like every dichotomy that gets played out on Planet Earth, it is simply what it is.  Destruction, as well as creation, is not intrinsically bad or good.  We needed to get more comfortable with the idea of things coming to an end, things dying, if you will.  We needed to get more skilled at helping destruction happen with a minimal of suffering; and get ready for the times in which we now find ourselves.

And here we are.  You can call where we are in the U.S and the world right now the apocalypse if you want.  My preferred term for this time in our history is the Great Balancing. 

Whatever you call it, we are swimming in a sea of destruction of every aspect of our natural and human world, our environment and infrastructure, our way of life, played out in our political, social, economic and religious systems to name a few.

I was very happy after I realized the implications of being drawn to doing a sermon on co-creating with the divine.  Time for us to get on with reestablishing a new world order, so to speak.  This order is not the kind of order that humans build when we get lost to our need for domination and power over each other.  This world order has to do with the kind of order that naturally arises when we surrender ourselves to the indwelling God.  Or as the Christ would say, as quoted in John 14;27:

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; I do not give it to you as the world does. Do not let your hearts be distressed or lacking in courage.

 

As Ghandi reminds us.

In the interest of some of those in this community making  and helping others to make this miraculous transition, I thought we would explore some of the nuts and bolts of what it actually means to go about co-creating with God.    Co-creation is a concept that resonates with many people but few really could put their finger on the message that those words actually contain or how to make it happen.  So let me give it a shot.

We know that God is an awesome, majestic unending Creative force.  Indeed, one of the most common synonyms used by various religious people for God is the Creator; or the Creator-of-Us-All.

God the Creative Spirit by Alex Grey

Most people also believe that humankind reflects the creativity of the divine, that we are made in God’s image and so we are intrinsically creative.  But what does that actually mean. . .and how do we go about creating in conjunction with, as opposed to opposition to the will of the divine?

As I have been preparing this sermon, I have been watching the news about our current rash of extreme weather.   In my opinion, climate change is one of the clearest reflections of how much we have gotten out of sync with the divine.  Sometimes I can find a slight bit of amusement about the irony of someone like fundamentalist Christian Tony Perkins, leader of the highly influential, hate-filled Family Research Council saying that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for homosexuality and then having his own home destroyed by a flood.  More often I am filled only with sorrow, anger and on my better days, compassion.

But here’s the rub.  Our extreme weather events these days are both a consequence of our inability to understand co-creation; and a call to action for us to start getting with the program.  We can no longer sit on the sidelines and blame God, or attribute to God everything that is happening in our world.   Humans have a LOT to do with what happens on Planet Earth. When you look closely at the political discourse around climate change, the question of who is responsible is what you see at the core.  Too many individuals are trying to pretend, increasingly unsuccessfully, that humans have little or nothing to do with climate change.  For decades, humans have mindlessly slaughtered animals, fouled the oceans and waterways, desecrated the Earth through drilling, mining and most recently fracking, et. al.

The North Pacific Gyre is an area of trash twice the size of Texas consisting of 30 feet deep of mostly plastics, floating in the Pacific Ocean. There are many similar human-generated “dead zones” in our waters, including the 2010 death of about 68,000 square miles in the Gulf of Mexico as a result of the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill.

Many indigenous cultures acknowledge Nature as God, This is an image of Pachamama, the Inca Earth Mother Goddess by Jose Garcia Chibbaro.

Destroying the Earth was and is not a God-given mandate.  God is Nature and Nature is God.  God cannot destroy itself.

Humans?  That’s another matter.  You have to be really out of touch with God if you do not see that human animals have set the stage for our own annihilation through our treatment of our physical home.

 

 

It’s hard not to get lost in the fear in regards to our extreme weather events. In actuality, they can be seen from a spiritual perspective that the tornado is right on track, forcing us to wake up.

God/Nature is not punishing us through hurricanes, fires, floods, earthquakes, droughts, etc.  It is giving us our (final) warning(s).

We already have been co-creating with the divine from day one.  It’s our basic nature to do so. We have just not been doing so with any degree of awareness or finesse.   God creates the stars, the planets and the entire Heaven; and we decide how to invite them into our life.  We decide whether to base our health care decisions on the movement of Heavenly bodies through astrology or the science of the physical Earth through biology.

The divine’s awesome creativity is everywhere in nature. Anemone Stinkhorn, (aseroe rubra), a truly beautiful fungus.

God sets forth the rivers, and we decide whether to swim them, sail vessels or construct dams on them.  I’m being a bit simplistic in that all human behavior is based in part on spiritual forces so even the invention and application of technologies contain the hand print of the divine, but you get my drift.

 

 

 

We are in partnership with God one way or the other.  Whether we experience a loving and supportive relationship or some kind of toxic soup depends on our choices.

Over the centuries many people affiliated with many religions have lost their sense of God, lost their faith because they have accepted the lie that everything in our World is up to God.  In human history, loud are the periodic questions about why God allows so much suffering and the episodic conclusions that God has forsaken us.  Our Creator never leaves us.  The Creator loves us enough to allow us to create whatever hell or heaven on Earth we wish to experience.  It waits for us to wake up to the responsibility of free will; and participates joyfully in any partnership which we offer.

So, it’s 120 degrees in Phoenix.  Anyone here want to experience that?   Let’s talk about what we need to not make that a reality in Washington State and elsewhere.   This morning I want to talk about two aspects of co-creation and how to think about it, about which we all could stand to make some progress.

First and foremost, we need to figure out where God actually lives; or in the words often used in religious discussions, where God dwells.  This is one of the great mysteries, is it not?  For eons people have tried to make sense out of the idea that God is everything and everywhere.  And still we have evil and ugliness and things of that ilk that seem far from God-like.   People who do not understand dichotomies often try to resolve this confusion by assigning all the evil and ugliness to what I believe is a mythical creature called Satan or the devil.

Harrowing of Hell, image from England, circa 1240 CE

But then, how can you say that God is everything and everywhere?

We are not going to resolve this mystery today.  After all, mysteries are meant to be mysterious.  But  I want to give you a way to think about it and encourage you to start training your mind, if you haven’t already started this process.  Because it is a critical one.  There is a reason why Jesus of Nazareth talked more about the Kingdom of God than any other topic of his ministry.  He did so because this topic is at the center of human confusion.  Christ was VERY CLEAR.  The Kingdom of God is WITHIN.  Within each one of us, without exception.

God is everywhere and everything.  But God cannot be fully experienced unless we seek our Creator within us, unless we choose with our free will, to know the Father, the Mother, however you want to envision that Creative force, to acknowledge it living in our own God-given space.  The Living God, the indwelling God, can only be fully known within each individual.  Where does God dwell most intently?  Within you, waiting for your discovery of it, your communication, your adoration.  In the words of the 46th Psalm:

Be Still and Know that I Am

 

There is a second part to co-creating with the divine that is critical.  When people first learn to turn within, whether they do that through some form of meditation or prayer, religious practice, surrounding themselves with Nature, great works of art or music, or as my atheist Mother learned to do in the latter part of her life, sitting quietly with her own thoughts over a cup of coffee each morning—whatever the process, people generally have to contend with what in Buddhism is referred to as the “chattering monkeys.”

 

Buddhism emphasizes training the mind. The resulting serenity is reflected in its sacred art.

Encountering your inner world, you will probably find the chaos of the external world that you have fallen into the habit of letting have full access to your brain    You may find the voices of parents and teachers and others who have shaped your reality in the absence of you knowing how to shape your own.   You may even see images or run into stored emotion from periods of time long since gone, from your childhood and from other lifetimes.   For most people it is a process that takes a lot of time to find yourself in all that mess of repressed and out-of-date energies.

In this voyage of self-discovery, it is what comes after finding yourself that is so crucial to the art of co- creating with God.  Once you find yourself, you have to give yourself away.  Not to the world, not to another person, but to your creator.  You have to choose to lay down your resistance.  You have to surrender.

When you think about how many centuries of warfare we have created on Planet Earth, along with its perspective that surrendering is a bad thing, it is amazing that any of us want to or are capable of doing so at all.  But we need to.  We need to learn to give up our ego, which is what surrendering is all about.

Ego is a tricky thing.  Telling someone that they are dealing with their ego is considered an insult.  However, mental health professionals like to talk about “ego strength” as an important part of healthy personalities.  In psychology at least, we acknowledge that ego is not only common but also can come in handy at times.   So here we have another dichotomy.  Ego is neither bad nor good.  It depends on what we do with it.

Ego is the band aids we put over our owies to keep them from getting infected.   It allows us to put pain on hold, repress it until we are more ready to resolve it.  Hurts a little when you rip it off band aids but is really no big deal except for sissies.  Sometimes if the hurt has been huge, ego is like scar tissue, and then it’s a little bigger of a deal to recover from it.  You might even need the help of someone with surgical skills.  The point is, to move forward at some point you are going to need to get better and better at processing hurtful information, as well as resolving earlier repressed pain.

Since the universe is always moving forward, you can do the passive thing and let the universe decide when this point is and let it blindside you.  Or you can ask the universe aka God to set before you that which you need to heal at the time and in the manner that is most pleasing to it.  This is the essence of surrendering.  That is the essence of co-creating with the divine.  You find yourself and you give yourself freely into the hands of the Almighty

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As I write this, I am aware that most of you are primarily focused on the finding-yourself part of spiritual development.  If you want to start practicing the surrendering part of spiritual development, my suggestion is that you make this a part of your daily meditations, however brief.

For several years I ended most of my meditations with a mantra of sorts.  I would maintain a strong focus inward after clearing my space using the techniques you all know how to do; and then I would say slowly and repeatedly, speaking  to the God of my heart, “Make Me an Instrument of Your Love.  Make Me an Instrument of Your Will.”  The first statement was an acknowledgement of my individual path in this life; and my need for help finding it.  The second statement was the surrendering part.   After a couple of years I noticed that much to my chagrin, I was still tripping over my ego on a regular basis.  But I could no longer base major decisions on my ego.  When I would try, I would hit what felt like an invisible brick wall.  As our Muslim brothers and sisters would say:  Allah Akbar, God is greater.   God was answering my prayers and protecting me from the worst of my stupidities.

We all have a lot of learn.

My Creator became a greater participant in creating my life when I, with all of my heart, invited it to play an active role.

If you want to use universal words, surrendering is also a part of the Lord’s Prayer.  Repeat that sacred prayer if it has meaning for you.  Thy Will be Done.  Not My Will or Our Will, Thy Will.

Find your own methodology.  Create your own words but give your energy to the indwelling divine.   The extent to which you do this will dictate the amount of the peace talked about by the Christ you will experience.  As the Tibetan meditation master Ajahn Chah says:  “If you let go a little you a will have a little peace; if you let go a lot you will have a lot of peace; if you let go completely you will have complete peace.”

So back to it being 120 degrees in Phoenix this week.  Can we really change our descent into global heating enough to take the human species off the endangered species list?  Possibly.  Probably.  I don’t know yet.  But what I do know is that not only is the endpoint at hand, but so is the beginning point.

This I also know as truth:  We can’t do it by ourselves.  We are going to need to use our collective will and enormous creativity to lay our fate in the hands of the divine.

Glory to our Creator for all of the Beauty around us. Now let us do our part!

The solutions are far beyond what human brains can envision on our own.  Join me in asking for the intercession of the universe, as we learn to harness our own God-given creativity in the service of us all.

 

 

Copyright 2017 by the Rev. Dr. Resa Eileen Raven

The Lord’s Prayer, from the New Zealand Maori Anglican Liturgy

/ Church of the Harvest

The Lord’s Prayer, from the New Zealand Maori Anglican Liturgy:

Eternal Spirit, Earth-Maker, Pain Bearer, Life-Giver,

Source of all that is and shall be,

Father and Mother of us all,

Loving God, in whom is heaven:

The hallowing of Your Name echo through the universe!

The way of your Justice be followed by the people of the earth!

Your Heavenly Will be done by all created beings!

Your Commonwealth of Peace and Freedom sustain our home and come on earth!

With the bread we need for today, feed us.

In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.

In the times of temptation and test, strengthen us.

From trials too great to endure, spare us.

From the grip of all that is evil, free us.

For You reign in the glory of the power that is Love,

Now and forever. Continue reading →