Midweek Faith Lift
August 5, 2026
“Generation & Re-Generation”
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Spiritual Passages
July 28, 2026
A small village depended on a watchtower built at the edge of the forest. One evening, the watchman saw smoke rising among the trees. He rang the great bell, awakening everyone. Some villagers became angry at the bell. “It is loud,” they complained. “It has disturbed our peace. Make it stop.” Others listened to what the bell was telling them. They gathered water, cleared dry brush, and prevented the fire from reaching their homes.
The bell did not create the danger. It revealed what already needed attention. Anger can be such a bell. Its sound may be uncomfortable, but it often announces that a boundary has been crossed, an injustice has occurred, a wound remains untreated, or something deeply valued is in danger. Wisdom does not destroy the bell. Wisdom listens to its message and decides what loving action is required.
Anger is like electricity. Uncontained, it can shock, burn, and destroy. Properly directed, the same energy can illuminate a house, power a hospital, or set machinery in motion.
The goal is not to eliminate the electricity but to create a conscious channel for it. Spiritual awareness becomes the wiring through which anger’s raw energy is converted into courage, truth-telling, boundary-setting, healing, justice, and creative expression.
And for some Humor:
A man told his spiritual teacher, “I have finally transcended anger.” The teacher accidentally spilled tea on the man’s new robe. The man jumped up and shouted, “Look what you’ve done!” The teacher smiled and said, “Apparently, your anger has not transcended you.”
And from the Gospel of Mark 3:4-6 we read:
4 Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. 5 He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. 6 The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. (NRS-UE)
This week our journey is Chapter 26 of Myrtle Fillmore’s How to Let God Help You, “Generation and Re-Generation” which is a very short, but powerful chapter. Just a note that this Thursday, August 6 is Myrtle’s birthday! She was born in 1845 in Ohio, the seventh of eight children. At age 21 she attended and graduated from a one-year course at Oberlin College, which gave her a teaching credential. She left home to serve as a teacher in Clinton, MO and then Denison, Texas where she met her future husband, Charles.
As I pondered this, I began to appreciate Myrtle from a whole new perspective. It takes courage, strength and a sense of adventure to move so far away from home and family to embark on a teaching career as a single, 22-year-old woman. Her parents were strict, fundamentalist Methodists, a path she also left as she left home. This would have been in 1866, at the start of the Civil War. All that was her life journey before she even embarked on a spiritual path that became Unity. Wow, just wow!
She begins this Chapter with the scripture: “No one hath ascended into heaven, but that he descended out of heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven- John 3:13 Her intention is to redirect our focus from our “earthly generation” to our “heavenly re-generation” with the start point assertion that we come from Spirit and we return to Spirit. The whole point of our earthly journey is not to advance our human self but to use our human journey, our “generative” journey to understand and develop our spiritual self, a “re-generative” process. This, she notes, was true for Jesus, as it is also true for us. The point of our human life is to embrace our human experiences to lift our consciousness to a higher level of being in this world; to ascend to a “heavenly” consciousness.
As usual, Myrtle is very direct in her message to us. She writes on p. 140:
There is little comfort to be gotten out of our struggles with experience here, if they count for nothing; but shown the golden purpose that links our efforts with life’s ascending spiral, we feel that we belong above and not below, and are reconciled with climbing.
Our human experiences and struggles are what link us to our higher, divine nature. Our human experience, like the one noted in the opening story, about anger, teaches us to pay attention to what is happening in us and around us because it all matters for our spiritual growth. We can claim, affirm and truly believe we are spiritually “highly evolved” and that as the person in the funny story, we have transcended anger. Which is all good until someone spills hot tea on us! And then we discover anger has not transcended us, as the wise teacher notes.
It is not an easy path to come to truly feel that we “belong above and not below” when it comes to our challenging life experiences. Remember last week how Myrtle shared that she had to say a “little prayer” every hour to remind herself of the beauty, wholeness and health of her body? We need that too! It is helpful when we are responding to an alarm bell of anger that arises within us. I love the metaphor of anger, our very human response to really challenging and outrageous situations, that says it is like electricity. I have felt that hot jolt of anger in response to disturbing circumstances and I have wanted to lash out in words that are more hurtful than helpful. Do my words add more heat than light to a given situation? Pause, Deb, breathe, and pray. And when I remember to do that, my prayer is very short: “God is solving this, God is solving this, God is solving this.” And then just stop and wait.
My intention is not to eliminate the electricity of my anger but to create a conscious channel for it. A higher use of this powerful energy that can be channeled to bring light to circumstances, situations and conditions that are harmful for me and for others. I need to re-wire my inner network through a higher amplitude, a more spiritual frequency so that I can first see what is going on inside me that triggered such a high voltage reaction. When I do that first, I experience insight into my own inner emotional landscape that affords me healing and greater empowerment over my choices and responses. And I am sometimes able to say to myself, “Whew, glad I didn’t say what I was thinking/feeling before I paused!” Sometimes, but not always!
In the Scripture from Mark, Jesus first asked a question of those who would observe and condemn him for healing someone on the Sabbath. The passage describes Jesus as becoming angry as he was grieved at their hardness of heart. Notice how his anger is connected with sadness that the Pharisees, the spiritual leaders of his time were so lacking in compassion. He put a question to them about the law, no doubt in an angry tone of voice and then he healed the man who was seeking healing. He does not condemn the man who is asking for help on the Sabbath; his anger is directed to those who would judge and condemn him for healing the man. And he takes positive action in their presence that pushes the Pharisees beyond their comfort zone, so much so that they conspire to get rid of Jesus. The electricity of anger went into healing and challenging the status quo…a powerful illustration of the higher consciousness Jesus sought to demonstrate.
This is what Myrtle would call “re-generation” in that the human level of consciousness is to follow the “letter of the law” as the Pharisees did. Human consciousness gave rise to or “generated” the laws that were created and followed in the Jewish religion regarding the Sabbath. Jesus “re-generated” that law to serve a higher purpose, a more spiritual channel of healing and compassion. We are called to awaken to that higher purpose, that higher consciousness and then to act in accordance with it in all that we do.
It is not always easy to do that, especially when we have a “dog in the race” so to speak and something we either greatly desire or something we do not at all want is at stake. I had a phone call recently from someone—none of you, by the way- who just wanted to “vent” if I was willing to listen. There was a lot of energy in the person’s frustration, anger, outrage at the actions someone dear to them was now, all of sudden unwilling to do. I could relate to that. You make big plans about something and the other party suddenly seems to be backing out of the deal. I just listened and let the person express all the anger, frustration, indignation and so on. It was the ministry of “Um Hmmm.” Finally, the storm diminished and the person said, “I think I just need to give this time and say nothing.” Wisdom had prevailed and it came from right within the person, not from me! My response, “I will hold you both in prayer!” Seems like a perfect instance of re-generation!
I will leave you with the words of Maya Angelou:
You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.”
May you realize re-generation in all your human experiences!
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb