Midweek Faith Lift
August 14, 2024
The Nature of God…Is???
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Spiritual Passages
August 5, 2024
"Truth is in our blood. It is the essence of our being. It is the best part of us, the core of what makes us human. It is our soul, our fundamental genetic beauty, and our spirit. We were created perfect, and despite the inevitability that we lose some of that perfection when we mature and develop in the midst of others who are wounded, we always retain the capacity to become perfect once again. The soul may be buried deeply, but as long as our hearts beat there remains hope." - Daniel Mackler, Toward Truth: A Psychological Guide to Enlightenment
One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain." - Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
Larry La Prise, the man who wrote "The Hokey Pokey" died peacefully at age 93. The most traumatic part for his family was putting him to rest in the coffin. They put his left leg in... and then the trouble started.
Affirmative Prayer for today: Living, loving, Presence of God, we awaken the energy of love, vitality and strength within us that is the healing energy of Spirit within each one of us, present, vibrant and real.
All of these messages from Spiritual Passages address the issue of trauma, which is what often prompts us to question the nature of God and even the “existence” of God. August 9 was Indigenous People’s Day in the US, reminding us of the collective trauma of our nation’s history and treatment of Indigenous people. We also have the collective trauma of slavery in our country, which is asking for healing. We have all lived through the trauma of the Covid pandemic, which again is calling for collective healing. All of this, along with our individual challenges can result in either clinging more tightly to an outmoded notion of God and faith or a complete abandonment of the notion of God altogether. We have seen both in the past 4 years, for sure.
I have had several Unity minister friends leave ministry and conclude that there is no God. These have been very challenging times and holding space for the “One Presence and One Power, God the Good” has proven too difficult. And yet, while we may want to abandon God, and I have been in that desert as well, it is my personal belief and observation that God, or love, never truly abandons us. In the Scripture, in Matthew 11:28-30, Jesus tells his followers:
Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
I used to scoff at that during times of great personal challenge, and then I learned the Hokey Pokey and I turned myself around! I actually found Unity and a whole new understanding of God, which opened my mind and my heart. I finally got over being mad at God and what the “church” of my youth had done to God and to me!
As we explore this journey of our continuing understanding of what God is, let’s first take a moment to refresh our memory of Rev. Linda & De Ann’s affirmative prayer flow:
I open to new possibility
I recognize God is
I integrate I Am
I realize I can, I have, I know
I appreciate the shift in consciousness
We are at the “God is” part of the flow and we recognize God, not as a “being” but as “beingness.” Most of us have a human understanding of God and we tend to create God in our image and likeness, making God be what we need him/her to be. In Unity, we work to avoid this very human inclination.
Eric Butterworth addresses this at length in the chapter “Relax. Let Go, Let God” of The Universe is Calling. We have learned to pray as a way of making “gesture” toward God, like a handshake. The gesture of extending an open hand to another was to show you were unarmed and the handshake was a bargain that you would not harm each other. But God is not one to bargain with in prayer, and our words are not for God’s ears, which is a very common understanding of God. The real direction of prayer is from the energy of God to you, to each of us. The true understanding is to realize the deeper truth that you are an expression of God and that “God is a deeper dimension of God expressing Godself as you,” to paraphrase Butterworth. The most powerful call to prayer comes from Psalm 46:10 “Be still and know the I am God.” That is simple, but not easy. Why? Because we pray with attachments to outcomes!
How do we typically talk about God in Unity? There are three perspectives of God: It is, You are and I AM. The “It is” recognizes the transcendent nature of God that is the Infinite Allness, that which is beyond our human understanding, the cosmos, the Universe or Spirit. Then there is the “You Are” aspect of God, or the imminent nature of God, which brings us into a sense of relating to God, a personal experience and sense of the energy and presence of God. Our relationship to the Divine is how we see and relate to the divinity we experience within ourselves, not outside of us. That is distinctly different from traditional Christianity and impacts how we pray in Unity.
And then, finally there is the I AM aspect of God which we experience as the immanent nature of God which is an interior, subjective experience within, we are realizing God; God is real within us. We call this the Silence, our Christ consciousness, and with it is the deep realization of our Oneness, that there no and can never be a separation from God, no matter what we do or believe about God. This is the essence of the mystical experience, which happens in all cultures and all religions- it is the Universal experience of the highest expression of God energy.
We pray from all these perspectives of God and there is no wrong way to pray. As Rev. Linda states on p. 58 of Discover Your Divinity:
Ultimately, the prime principle of oneness invites us to hold all three perspectives: God as transcendent, exterior, objective experience; God as the experience of one another; and God as an immanent, interior, subjective experience.
We are essentially describing the God within, the God between and the God beyond and we pray from whatever perspective speaks to our hearts and to the circumstances we hold in prayer. In reflecting on our individual and collective trauma, we pray from all perspectives for healing. My observation is that almost all prayer need involves some need for healing.
This is the healing that acknowledges the hurt and the pain and the prayer that gives us the strength to be with it, hear it and hold it rather than letting our busy minds try to outrun or escape it, as noted by Eckhart Tolle. When God is part of the healing process, then we acknowledge God as Principle, as the Universal Law of life, love and intelligence that is unchanging. As we pray about very difficult and troublesome conditions in our world and in our lives, we acknowledge that “mountaintop” perspective that is the God point of view. There is always more to the story or circumstance that challenges us than we can see or appreciate. That is the very reason we pray about it….and why Jesus so frequently went to the mountaintop to pray. Emerson said, “Prayer is contemplation of the facts (what is) from the highest point of view.”
The paradox of prayer is that we don’t pray to change how things are, but to change how we see things. We are seeking to activate that God energy within us that changes us. We are seeking that “God clarity” that speaks to us in the Silence. We are seeking awareness of God as Principle. Which, as Rev. Linda writes on p. 62 of Discover Your Divinity is “a fact or constant that has no opposite and is values-neutral…an invisible or intangible truth that becomes visible in our expression of it.”
What is also wonderful in Unity is our understanding of spiritual energy or principle as our 12 spiritual powers. These are familiar qualities in human expression which have deep spiritual energy that connects us directly to Spirit when we call on them as spiritual principles. We know them as Faith, Understanding, Will, Imagination, Zeal, Power, Love, Wisdom, Strength, Order, Release and Life. Wow, that is a lot of Spiritual energy!
As noted in the opening quotation, we were created perfect, and then we came into maturity within a wounded and imperfect world. Waking up, seeing our true, perfect essence and then making that real is the healing journey of prayer. As long as we have a heartbeat, we have hope, as God is always there, right in the heart of love. Even when we don’t “believe in God”, we open to the reality that is God and we learn to really love.
In the words of Pema Chodron: “When we protect ourselves so we won't feel pain, that protection becomes like armor that imprisons the softness of the heart." –
When we pray, the heart softens and we begin to heal and to love and to really know God.
Blessings on the path,
Rev. Deb