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