Midweek Faith Lift
July 23, 2025
The Light of Love and Harmony
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Spiritual Passages
July 14, 2025
Picture yourself as a leaf. Make like a tree. Think of how you can manifest and express yourself by your uniqueness. The other leaves on the tree might say, “Hey, this is a maple tree, fit in. You should be this shape and color. You want people looking at our tree and saying it looks funny? So, you want to fit in, be liked, be one of the leaves. During the spring and summer, when the sun is shining and you have plenty of food, you turn the same green as all the other leaves, take the same shape, and fit in.
Then the fall comes and it gets cold, and some of the leaves who told you how to behave start dropping. You’re still hanging on, but you realize that it’s only a matter of time before you drop too. So, you start thinking you’d like to let everyone know who you really are before you let go of the tree. So, the green, which is really a cover-up, goes, and you become your unique, beautiful self.
You can hang on as long as you like, being your authentic self, displaying your true colors. It is a cosmic and, at the same time, personal matter of choice how long you hold on, how long before you’ve shown your true colors and lived your life, and then move into a new dimension. We’re not intended to hang on to this tree forever. It’s a big Universe, a big life. There’s much living to be about.
"When we fail to set boundaries and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated. This is why we sometimes attack who they are, which is far more hurtful than addressing a behavior or a choice." - Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection
Affirmative Prayer for today: Infinite Universe as I live into my true colors and express my unique energy in this human dimension, let me engage in a pattern that seeks to resolve all the disharmony into harmony that respects the boundaries of all. Amen.
When we explore the idea of harmony as part of the energy of love, we plunge right smack into our many human experiences, beliefs and perceptions that create disharmony. And the truth is, that is ok, that is part of our learning experience, even when we would prefer to avoid it. We have lived with being “nice” and getting along to fit in like the leaves on the tree, not speaking up or showing our true colors. There is a cost to the “price of nice,” because when times get tough, nice dissolves into dissension and disharmony. Not truly working to understand and resolve our differences, with a willingness to listen to each other, well, that’s where we are as a society right now, and it is not really working.
One truth about harmony, especially in music is that it requires many different notes, pitches and voices to create harmony. It is not uniformity, it is not everyone singing the same note or pitch. It creates a richer, more beautiful sound when there are a variety of notes. Our country is beginning to wake up to that and realize that the huge variety of people we have is our greatest strength, something to celebrate, not to fear. On at least one issue, the darkness of our present era is beginning to give way to the light of love, acceptance and appreciation of all people in our nation and all those who want to be a part of our nation. That is worth celebrating, even as we are unsure how it will unfold to resolve the conflict into harmony.
How is it that the power of Love brings about harmony in the midst of dissension and dissonance. Charles Fillmore, in Talks on Truth, p, 60 said this about the power of Love: “It insists that all is good, and by refusing to see anything but good, it causes that quality finally to appear uppermost in itself and in all things.” This insistence that all is good is one to pause and ponder right now, because there is much that does not appear to be very good at all. We all have that perspective, that what is there is not good, not from where we sit nor from the perspective of people who are actually experiencing truly awful things, like those incarcerated in Alcatraz Alley in Florida.
How do we call forth love in this circumstance? I am personally finding that to be a heavy lift right now, and struggling to find the good in all this. It is reassuring that recent polls say that 79% of Americans agree; this is not what we should be about. How do we find the good in what seems to be the dark night of the soul for our country? There is a scripture from Romans that Rev. Linda cites.
Romans 8:28
28 We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.
The question for us is to understand and express what the true purpose of love is and what it is not. The true purpose of love is to hold us all together, like the leaves on the tree. The true purpose of love is to hold each of us as we find and express our true colors, even as we are not all the same. We hold fast to the energy of love as the only true power in the Universe, even as we see humans express all that is not love.
When the harmonizing power of love is not being heard, our task is to realize, in our prayer time and in our daily life that this harmonizing power is natural to us. It cannot be extinguished in the human soul because it is a part of our divine nature. As Eric Butterworth writes in Discover the Power Within You 68, “we are not in the world to set it right but to see it rightly.” When we can see it rightly, from the vantage point of love, then we can know that all things are working together for good, even as it does not look or feel that way.
We long, in our human expression, to see the light, to see how there is good in this experience. And yet, the greater reality is that we can only appreciate and truly “see” the light from the experience of darkness. When we are in darkness we can truly discern the light. From Richard Rohr’s Blog “The Questions that Come at Dusk” from July 15, 2025 we read:
“I will love the light for it shows me the way; yet I will love the darkness for it shows me the stars.”
—Og Mandino, The Greatest Secret in the World
Sister Joan Chittister describes darkness as a fertile place for our questions with no easy answers:
There is a part of the soul that stirs at night, in the dark and soundless times of day, when our defenses are down and our daylight distractions no longer serve to protect us from ourselves. What we suppress in the light emerges clearly in the dusk. It’s then, in the still of life, when we least expect it, that questions emerge from the damp murkiness of our inner underworld…. These questions do not call for the discovery of data; they call for the contemplation of possibility.
Unable to answer the questions life asks of us, we come to humble clarity and service to others.
There is a light in us that only darkness itself can illuminate. It is the
glowing calm that comes over us when we finally surrender to the
ultimate truth of creation: that there is a God and we are not it….
When we can cultivate our power of faith, then we also cultivate the patience that allows love to finally come forth in all circumstances. We cultivate our capacity to speak up, to show up, to ask what is ours to do, and then to do it! We have an innate ability to restore harmony. When our boundaries are violated, we have the ability to speak up with clarity about how we want to be treated and how we treat ourselves. We can speak with a voice that is filled with our spiritual Power to point to instances of disharmony and call forth change, both in ourselves and in others.
The reality is friends, when we have experienced our own inertia, our own apathy, our own indifference, our own fears, our own darkness, then we are truly able to see and express our own light. We come to the humble clarity that our true call is to be of service to that which is greater than we are. And because we have experienced the darkness, the disharmony, we have increased compassion for the darkness that others still hold and experience. We cannot make ourselves or anyone else be in a place of understanding, wisdom, or emotional/spiritual maturity that we might want them to be. Pause, breathe and take that in again!
What we can do is engage in thoughts, ideas, prayers and clarity to speak words of truth from the heart, that help us all to navigate disharmony more skillfully. We pause and realize that we are actually pre-disposed to bring conditions into harmony for the highest and best good for all. When we think about something like a car accident, our first response is not blame; it is to make sure no one is hurt and to get help for anyone who is injured. We are working to restore harmony and bring forth healing. We patiently waited for that to happen when there was an accident during the Ames July 4th parade. We are actually hard wired for cooperation and harmony. Our survival as a species has counted on our cooperation and desire for harmony, even in our individual expression.
May we see the stars!
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb