Midweek Faith Lift
November 5, 2025
The Power of Release-Cleansing
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Spiritual Passages
November 1, 2025
Here is a different edition of Genesis 2. And Adam said, "Lord, when I was in the garden, you walked with me everyday. Now I do not see you anymore. I am lonesome here and it is difficult for me to remember how much you love me. " And God said, "No problem! I will create a companion for you that will be with you forever and who will be a reflection of my love for you, so that you will know I love you, even when you cannot see me. Regardless of how selfish and childish and unlovable you may be, this new companion will accept you as you are and will love you as I do, in spite of yourself." And God created a new animal to be a companion for Adam. And it was a good animal. And God was pleased. And the new animal was pleased to be with Adam and he wagged his tail. And Adam said, "But Lord, I have already named all the animals in the Kingdom and all the good names are taken and I cannot think of a name for this new animal." And God said, "No problem! Because I have created this new animal to be a reflection of my love for you, his name will be a reflection of my own name, and you will call him DOG."
And Dog lived with Adam and was a companion to him and loved him. And Adam was comforted. And God was pleased. And Dog was content and wagged his tail. After a while, it came to pass that Adam's guardian angel came to the Lord and said, "Lord, Adam has become filled with pride. He struts and preens like a peacock and he believes he is worthy of adoration. Dog has indeed taught him that he is loved, but no one has taught him humility." And the Lord said, "No problem! I will create for him a companion who will be with him forever and who will see him as he is. The companion will remind him of his limitations, so he will know that he is not worthy of adoration." And God created CAT to be a companion to Adam. And Cat would not obey Adam. And when Adam gazed into Cat's eyes, he was reminded that he was not the supreme being. And Adam learned humility. And God was pleased. And Adam was greatly improved. And Cat did not care one way or the other.
Affirmative Prayer for today: Infinite Spirit of Love, I am open and receptive to all those experiences which create in me a clean heart, a heart filled with humility and wonder. Amen.
We are now in a new month and engaging the spiritual Power of Release, letting go, which has also really been a part of our process of Order, hasn’t it? For Divine Order to unfold, a frequent theme was letting go so that we could let come all the good that is our heart’s desire. In this journey with the Power of Release, we are going to do a deep dive into what this letting go is really like, how it feels and what it means for our life purpose. We are going to explore what it is like to live with our inner cat, who calls us out when we get too self-important and full of ourselves! We bless the cat, “human” or actual feline, who pulls us into the energy of release, of humility….and we all have one! We have an inner dog and an inner cat.
It is so interesting to note that if you look online for quotes about release, you find pages and pages about letting go of bad relationships, good relationships that have ended because of death, of bad habits like smoking, overeating and on and on. “You’ve got to stop watering dead plants!” is an anonymous directive for the power of release. I have watered an awful lot of dead plants in my life, hoping to make something work that was truly doomed from the start. Even after I could see that it was doomed, that it wasn’t really very good for me, I still wanted to keep trying! I think you call that co-dependency, right? It was my specialty for sure and it is still present in my life, but not so much in charge as it once was!
Like the Power of Order, the Power of Release is a process, an ongoing process that is our human/divine journey. Rev. Linda describes it as our power to cleanse, renounce and repent all of which sounds fairly ominous, so we’ll take it in small steps, ok? Because our human self is typically not able to let go all at once; it’s like diving off a cliff or jumping from an airplane or just jumping into the deep end of the pool. Some of us do those things easily, but most of us, not so much. The fear of the unknown, the fear of losing control, the fear of feeling shame and on and on, are all what keep us from letting go, the experience of release.
What is true for us is that we express the desire to let go, we engage in rituals to let go, like the melting bowl, but our human self holds onto the story even after the ritual is performed. When you go through a loss of a relationship, whether by choice or circumstance, there is the grief process, a process of letting go. It takes time. There is the shock, and then denial, bargaining, the anger and then some level of acceptance. This is the process of grief, which is the hard work of letting go, the very human emotional work of release, or letting go. Sometimes the grief is a delayed grief from an incident that happened long ago and we are now finally facing it. Grief is not linear, it is cyclical and we circle through all the facets of grief until we are ready to stop.
Part of this process is that of waking up, which is inherent in this energy of release. It comes with a profound realization that the “story I have been telling myself” about my childhood being happy, my first marriage being a good one, I am happy in this job, relationship, our country is on the right track…..all kinds of stories that we realize, deep in our hearts are not true, not true at all. That waking up process is painful, necessary and humbling and there are many instances in life when we simply cannot avoid it even when we would rather go numb and not feel anything.
The human and spiritual truth is that the grief process is inherent in the process of letting go, and it does involve a sort of cleansing. There is the beginning of cleansing where you get rid of the clothes, the physical items that represent the presence of the person, the pet, the devotion you had to a cause that turned out to be false. We usually feel all sorts of feelings during this process…anger, gleefulness, vengefulness and finally some kind of peace. We should note that this is not a place of completion of the release process, it is a place for a pause in the process to feel the relief, the freedom and the lightness of spirit that comes with Release.
All release happens through the heart. The heart is a flexible muscle that opens and closes as part of its function. Likewise, our capacity to hold on and to let go is much like the heart and part of our power of Release. The Spiritual Power of Release is our capacity to decide what we want to hold and what we want to release that is no longer of benefit to our well-being. The heart has the capacity to “gather and scatter” to hold onto and let go of. What do we draw into that circle of energy and what needs to flow out.
This gathering and releasing is a semi-permeable membrane that affords us the time and energy to wake up, see what is really there and make choices that contribute to our healing. If you keep picking at a scab, the wound will never heal. We have to let go of the “nit-picking” patterns so healing can happen. That is why the spiritual Power of Release is so vital and important to our well-being. Otherwise, we are like the Dead Sea where there is no inlet and no outlet; no real flow so no life at all in the Dead Sea, just stagnation.
The only real way to change this pattern of nit-picking is to go higher and deeper into the Source, into the realm of Spirit, into a higher consciousness, what Neil Douglas Klotz calls the “ruha” larger breath of life that holds us all. Our human self is very cooperative and gives us what we ask for, even when we don’t realize we are asking for it. The higher realm of “ruha” takes what our small self wants and transforms it only when we let go. He references the scripture from Matthew 18:18, “whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” When we let go of what binds us in the earthly realm, we are then “loosed” into a higher, broader “heavenly” or Christ consciousness.
Here is how he translates this from the Aramaic on p. 72 in Aramaic Jesus: Book of Days:
If your heart chooses to enclose a part of itself in a circle of material stuff, then that part is closed off to your soul, the world of light and connectedness, shemaya. If your heart chooses to release that circle and untie part of its occupation with material stuff, that same heart portion will open to and make its home in shemaya.
Our heart is what chooses and there is no judgment of the choices we make, simply a description of what happens to a that part of our soul that stays tied to the material stuff that has us bound up in pain.
So friends, as we engage our Spiritual Power of Release, we go to a higher and deeper Source of Light, the always “on” 24/7 ruha, or Light of Spirit. The higher Truth is that a portion of our heart, our soul is always living in this Light no matter what decisions we make. When we pray, we meditate, we embrace humility and learn from our prior choices, we are able to act once again in our embodied life from a new, higher consciousness that yields ever increasing fruit.
May it be so…..blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb