Soundtrack for this week

http://youtu.be/7nVr4Ys8zKM

I keep thinking we should be hearing this song at school, if we keep hearing Joan Osbourne's song.

Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode 

Your own

personal

Jesus

Someone who hears your prayers

Someone who cares......

The ministry of your presence -- a portrait of Christology

I met a woman in Houston, who explained a concept that I love - the ministry of your prescence. She spoke of the idea that being around someone, being in their presence was it's own type of ministry. She was a kind woman who took care of babies at the church there, and I remember her explaining this idea as we shared a hug. Her presence was perfect for babies, her sweet ministry of kindness and love, was evident even without words.

This concept becomes more evident when we think about Jesus of Nazareth.  Who would he be without his sense of Christ. What would his prescence be like to be around? Is the ministry of his presence as the Christ so overwhelming that it would bring tears to your ideas? Would this ministry of his presence as Christ be so obvious that we can't seperate it?

I think about two situations of Jesus when I think about him being the Christ or not the Christ. One I think about is him with the woman at the well. She touched him and he said "your faith has made you well". But her faith in what? In her own Christ? Or in this ministry of his presence? I would argue it's the latter truly. So can there really be a Jesus without this part of himself - can we reallly seperate Jesus from the Christ?

The other situation I think about in this scenario is when Jesus turns the water into wine. At one point, his Mother was like (pardon my modern day paraphrase) "come on Jesus, just go ahead and do this". Which means he probably performed many miracles at home, which means that's his Christhood showing and shining.

Seperation of the two seems impossible and at very least improbable. We are living in a fantasy world to think of the idea of seperating the Christ and Jesus - because if there was no Jesus the Christ, the stories about his presence, his Christ presence, would cease to exist entirely.  

Prayer and the Fidelity Arrow

I worked for a time for a popular Unity prayer line and learned a few things about the way that we "do" prayer. One thing that was obvious from the beginning was that we pray "from" God and not "to" God. That said, one of my favorite prayers that we used was like this:

The Spirit of The Lord goes before you and makes your way easy and successful. 

The concept of this always reminded me of the Fidelity commericial. In this commericial for financial planning, the green arrow which created a line would just "show up" going before the person, showing them the right way. This God outside of ourselves, moving forward like a green arrow, fixing things prior to our arrival, feels oddly like a fairy tale. There's a magical God outside of ourselves going ahead of us, which assumes that God is not only an outside entitiy, but an outside entity that lives in the future, knows what we are going to do, and also, this entity can change the way things are going to be in our favor. When you are praying for success and in this case, when you really need a win, there's nothing more comforting than feeling like something will go before you and fix everything. 

Shall we pray to God's Presence and Power in the Cosmos, opening ourselves to the infilling of Spirit? Or Shall we center on the Spirit within, allowing it to emerge?

We are Unity after all, so we ask ourselves - how would Myrtle do this? Which one did she do? When you consider her, sitting in her chair, with a picture of Jesus in the other chair, the answer does seem to be that she prayed to God and certainly not from God. But the evolution of her consciousness includes the fact that she prayed from the space of God over time. "I am a child of God and do not inherit sickness" was her affirmation and being a child of God does imply that in time she would become a God. Kittens become cats when they grow up, and would it be any different for children of God? Is this not praying from the essense of the divinity that she is?

Of all of the ways that we look at prayer, I can't say with any great certainity that I would completely leave out the idea that we don't pray to the prescence in the cosmos. I may have all of the parts of God, but I have never created a planet. I have not nor do I know any other humans who have created a seperate species of beings that can live outside themselves. (Children not included.) Sometimes, in certain situations, it is nice to think that there is a presence so much greater than myself that I can give my now seemingly insigifigant problem in the face of the cosmos. If God is all powerful and all present, can't I turn over my challenges to this part of myself?  Some people have great success with this method of prayer, of praying to this being.

Theological questions tend to bring up more questions. Growing up Unity, I do remember certain points in my growing up years that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I could feel something completely, visualize it, I could create whatever "it" was. The magic side of focusing on that Spirit within can mean that you have great material success.  When we pray, we are trying to touch the Absolute. We are taking something grand and using it to create the life that we desire. We are molding the world we live in with the very substance of the Divine. Sometimes this requires using the idea of a great big God with skin on. Sometimes it means going within and living from that space. If both work for different people at different times, we have to accept that the answer isn't as simple as one or the other. Sometimes it's nice to think of a God that goes before you, like the Fidelity arrow, fixing everything along the way, and it is good be the one fixing everything, to be that empowered, as children of God, we are in training apparently, to be the "real thing". 

Embracing the negativity bias

A friend of mine recently was talking about a concept of a negativity bias. Instead of noticing that we have at a lake with a beautiful view, we are trained to stay safe, and so we notice the crocidile first.  This is an intelligent design - we are trained to think about the objects in our world that could create a risk of our own survival. In Unity there is a tendency to shy away from anything negative because of Law of Attraction. If thoughts held in mind produce after your kind, paying attention to your thoughts becomes an important task.  With the concept of a bias towards being negative, and the general idea that we would only want to create positive things, how do we move forward without beating ourselves up when the evolutionary safeguard pulls our consciousness into negative thoughts? Could this be the reason that positive thinkers often times are seen as unrealistic? 

One possible idea in all of this moving forward is this: that instead of using the negativity bias to create better, we attempt to ignore, downplay, or pretend it doesn't matter. Often times this can create the opposite of it's intention - by trying to avoid our tendency to the negative, we focus on it more, thereby giving it more power. This is where life becomes sticky and confusing - we avoid a natural tendency, and create through this avoidance. 

Charles Fillmore says, "Thinking PLUS feeling equals demonstration". The avoidance of negative feelings creates more negativity, because a pattern is created whereby we use our energy to create MORE negative feelings and situations into our lives. This is almost an elmentary Unity mistake - a rookie mistake if you will - of thinking that the way to create the life we want is to pretend it's the only thing that exists. 

The way to move forward is to use the negativity bias. In the movie Princess Bride, when Wesley and Buttercup are reunited, they end up in a swamp. The swamp has a few dangers, and because of that, they figure out the way to work around them. If we learn to work with our enviornment, with everything that is going on, we have a better chance of really creating the life that we want. 

Reflections of the Experience of Unity from a Home-Grown Native

Are you a refugee, emigrant, or home-grown native?

I am a home-grown native. I have the background of being raised in Unity and the more unique quality is - that I have stuck with Unity as my faith since my childhood. Unity is a faith of people who primarily find Unity later in life (which happened for my Mother) so it is a faith of personal choice. This is what makes growing up in Unity tricky - if you grew up in this faith - how did you choose it? One common thread of Unity people is talking about how they found this "best kept secret" and bonding over the fascinating ways that synchronicity brought them to the very place they are seeking. When you grow up in this faith, you don't have that tie, per se, because it is the faith you inherited. 

I choose this path - the path of Unity at age thirteen at a Youth Of Unity rally in Florida. This was a weekend for high school students which is led by the teens themselves. I remember how spiritual experience of being so far away from home church where I intellectually knew all of the right answers to being at a place of having a spiritual experience - this was the experience of Unity. I choose this path at the end of the weekend, when I was at closing circle, I remember walking to it, and experiencing heaven on earth. I was in my peers completely accepted - pure acceptance and love from teenagers is nearly unheard of for any heavy girl in America. This love and acceptance taught me more about what Unity really is - I really experienced the presence of God in that moment. 

A closing circle from a Youth Of Unity event at Unity of Fairfax, Virginia

An intellectual experience of Truth is common for home-grown natives - and often times - this is why they leave Unity. Oftentimes people who are responsible for teaching Unity Sunday school don't have a lot of Unity experience (they are either emigrants or refugees). I was taught as a child all kinds of things which are debatable if they are Unity or not. There would be times where I was having to be able to explain in the easiest way to write affirmations, or the best way to say prayers, or what the right answer was, was more important than just experiencing what Unity has to offer. We simplify Unity for children and sometimes the way that is done renders it impotent in it's working power. Youth of Unity provided an opportunity for me to experience Unity.

I worked with a woman once who was very traditional Christian theology. I was nervous about sharing my Unity faith with her - I grew up in the Bible Belt and it was generally a bad thing in my childhood to talk about going to Unity with people who were traditionally Christian. Somehow the question came up "What did you do on Sunday?" I told her I attended Unity, which I was scared to say. She told me a story about a friend of hers who had a near death experience. In the experience, she went to "heaven" and the hallway (which had a typical white hallway) had many doors. Each door had a symbol of faith on it. You picked the door you went through, but everybody ended up in the same room. I know there are differences in faith, vast differences and allowing ourselves the opportunity to be real with those is important, but I like that idea. I like the idea that in the end, we all end up in the same happy place. I envision that I will have the same feelings of joy and peace that I have at a closing circle of an event, where all of the energy that is the very essense of the Divine moves through me, in me, as me.