Love That Beckons, Love That Remains

As many of you may already have heard through the ethers of connectivity, I have resigned as minister of Unity Center of Davis and accepted the senior minister role at Unity of Santa Barbara.

This decision is both sweet and bitter. The sweetness is the opportunity to raise the bar of my spiritual leadership in a well-established and dynamic spiritual community that seems poised to grow, quantitatively and qualitatively.  I believe it has all the right stuff in place to allow me to maximize my gifts as speaker, teacher, and inspirational presence with the staffing and resources that will fully support me in this role.  In other words I’ll be free of the other tasks that are not my gifts and afforded the staff support and compensation so I can follow my true calling with fewer distractions.

The bitter is of course in leaving you, such amazing loving, positive, faith filled community of seekers of truth who have rolled up your sleeves, opened hearts and hands and purses to co-create and sustain the wonderful experiment of Unity in Davis, CA for over 6 years.  I have such deep love and appreciation for each of you, knowing whatever effort I undertook was bolstered by those of you who on a strictly volunteer basis, mustered the love and joy for service;  and stepped up, again and again to keep the community alive and well. To have witnessed this miracle of birth, and growth and determination to thrive even in adverse conditions has been to witness the enormous power of love.

My love for this work, the irrepressible call to spiritual study and leadership has been equally awe inspiring, driving me to follow its often irrational course, with costs and consequences to my security and family stability. So often it has felt right to my soul and folly to my mind and I submitted to the former, and paid the price of the impracticality.

This time the call feels like a remarkably balanced opportunity that satisfies my heart and my head; a seemingly rare and precious pearl of a chance to follow a “heavenly” call with earthly support.  Every part of me knows this is the right decision. And still, the “rightness” of this decision does not mean there is not sorrow. I will grieve our separation. Humanly it tears at my heart to leave. Yet I know it’s my time to move on, and so I trust that Grace, a love even greater than what we have for each other, will replace the angst of our separation in its right time.

It was love that brought us together; a love for the ideal of sharing these powerful teachings in an inclusive, empowering community. It was love that saw us through when it looked like we lacked the resources to continue. It was love that motivated you and I to dig deeper into our willingness and capacity to offer whatever was necessary to maintain and sustain this community. That’s a powerful and beautiful testimony to the power of love and it gives me great hope that what love has done here, love will do here, going forward.

I only take the memory of that love story with me. The love that conceived, believed and achieved this community remains here embedded in your hearts and is activated, as it has been, by your will.

My hope and prayer is that you will stay close to each other and remember that the true Teacher is the Spirit within you, The Holy Comforter, that remains as always as close as your next moment of remembrance. I also leave you with the love of my life, Rev. Denese, who will be a wonderful reminder and loving presence during this time of envisioning your future as a spiritual community and calling forth your next spiritual leader.

And to those of you who have read this column and not been a part of our physical spiritual community I bid you farewell with this final writing. I’m glad to know that despite having never met each other you have found value in this sharing.

To all of you, who have found value in these articles or in our community, I say thank you and bless you. May love continue to guide our journeys and leave us better for what it has asked of us and what it has given us.

Love, always
Rev. Larry

Peace, A Core Value for a Core Issue

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn't make any sense. - from The Essential Rumi

Every Sunday at Unity Center of Davis, we conclude our service by standing together and singing the Peace Song. The first and last lines proclaim, "let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me." There is a variation of this refrain, that our ego sings many more times during the week that goes like this: Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with: her, him, that situation, this dilemma, this preference, that shift, this resolution, that outcome, and on and on it goes.

Our false self that sings this refrain is not connected to the whole of life, and clamors to reclaim the fragments of happiness that seem to be in the world of outer conditions and other people. When I am identified with my false self, I feel separated, and frustrated, and it is easy to blame my inner turmoil on what someone or something is "doing to me." It may take two to tango, or reach accord, but it takes just one to find peace inside oneself.

Real and lasting contentment, the peace that Jesus referred to as beyond human understanding, is not an effect of getting what we want in life, nor a negotiated agreement, nor the laying down of arms. A Course in Miracles says, Nothing outside yourself can save you; nothing outside yourself can give you peace. Ultimately, peace is the recognition of a deep sense of well-being in which this moment is acceptable just as it is, unconditionally.

Peace is more than the absence of conflict; it is the presence of a reality beyond the duality of your way or my way. Rumi referred to this as a place beyond right or wrong, and a place where we could meet each other.

The conflicts, which disturb our peace, are always some version of unskillful attempts to get our needs met. Conscious evolution can lead us to find satisfaction without harming. When we drop below the surface mind that thrashes and lashes out we can see more clearly what is really true. This is spiritual insight that first takes us inward, opens our eyes to seeing in a new way, and brings us back to the world with a more holistic, compassionate perspective.

The field beyond right and wrong is the unified field of our essential oneness, the great web in which we are inseparable from all of life. Once glimpsed, the ramifications of lashing out, or polluting, or blaming in order to redress some inner dissatisfaction, are seen more plainly as self-defeating and most certainly counter to any peaceful intention.

While we are evolving toward this enlightened perspective, we need constant reminders of the way to peace. I know of no better technique to correct my perception than calling upon Spirit to help me see rightly. Even when judgments are railing in my head and I am at war with everything and everyone one, there is the voice of Truth, that sees through the appearances and remains undisturbed. This voice can lead me beyond the field of right and wrong, to the still waters of peace. If nothing else we can sing the familiar refrain whenever we need to remember the way to peace, Let there be peace, and let it begin with me.

Monotheism and the Illuision of Separation

They said to Him: Shall we then, being children,
enter the Kingdom? Jesus said to them:
When you make the two one, and
when you make the inner as the outer
and the outer as the inner and the above
as the below, and when
you make the male and the female into a single one,
then shall you enter the Kingdom.
- Gospel of St. Thomas Saying 22

In Unity, and in the mystical heart of all major religions, Oneness emerges as a supreme foundational tenet. The notion that we are not isolated creatures but inseparable and at one with a universal spirit is at the core of many faiths.   How ironic that a belief in oneness is a common denominator across the battleground of religious beliefs that are often comprised of bitterly embedded camps of righteousness, which go to war over their individuated differences.  While Oneness reigns as a supreme ideal,  our everyday behavior suggests that separation is the prevailing perception and practice.

Across the faith traditions of the majority of the world's population prevails an idea that ultimate reality is a union of opposites. Even in the Garden of Eden story, the problem of Adam and Eve (the fall) is sparked by a decision to partake in the knowledge of good and evil - a choice that brings the suffering of duality over the perfect Oneness and Goodness that preceded it.

At the personal level, you and I make this choice in every moment; choices that separate us from Supreme Reality, and the oneness that is within us and all around us. Such choices do not cause an actual separation of course, since it is impossible to be apart from our Essence, yet these choices create the experience of separation.  That's quite enough for us to create a world of opposites, of lack, limitation, right and wrong, you and me, them and us, have and have not; all the ingredients that have us clamoring and dueling over our share of the good.  It could be said that a dualist must become a duelist. While this illusion is being played out through a separate sense of self, in truth we remain in union with an all providing Source that supplies our every need.

So how do we find our way back to this Unity consciousness, which is the cherished destination of all spiritual paths? One way is to deconstruct the false self that we've created; a self that we define and identify through bits and pieces of our personal reality.

When we answer the question, who am I, our initial instinctive responses reflect our beliefs about who we think we are.  We identify with our body, our careers, our desires, our emotions, and our thoughts.  We readily attach our "I am" to superficial descriptors, such as Caucasian man, Asian woman, plumber, teacher, sad, glad, curious, anxious, wealthy, or wounded. These become our identities. They define us, and close off our awareness to the self that has no boundaries, no defining edges, no separate sense of itself.

When we can begin to release these labels, we begin to dissolve the distinctions that wall off our connection with the allness of life.  Here's a process:  Recite these phrases in a contemplative fashion, realizing the significance of these insights as you say them:

I have a body, but I am not my body
I have desires, but I am not my desires
I have emotions, but I am not my emotions
I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts.

The very act of noticing these aspects of yourself puts you in touch with a self that can observe characteristics that you've formerly believed comprised your whole identity.  What can be seen and felt cannot be the true seer.  As you witness these aspects of yourself, you are less likely to identify and define yourself by them. This awareness moves us closer to unity consciousness, which as St. Paul noted, is living, moving and having our very being in Divine Presence.