Midweek Faith Lift
June 24, 2026
Spiritual Understanding: Illusion or Truth?
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Spiritual Passages
June 16, 2026
An Illinois man left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him there the next day. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick e-mail. When he typed her email address, he missed one letter and his message went not to his wife, but to an elderly preacher's wife, whose husband had passed away only the day before. When the grieving widow checked her e-mail, she took one look at the monitor and let out a piercing scream. At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw the email on the computer screen: "Dearest Sweetheart, I just got checked in. Everything is prepared for you to join me tomorrow. I love you. P.S. It sure is hot down here."
"Whenever we shine our Light into another's life, it leaves a timeless mark, a lasting radiance. It teaches how we can heal our world, that Love and Light are real; everything else is illusion. Light shared stirs up the embers of compassion, the greatness of Spirit that is everyone's true gift to this world." - Roger Teel, This Life is Joy, p. 41
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years." - Mark Twain
Happy Father’s Day to all! As I sat with all of this and the chapters in Myrtle’s book, How to Let God Help You on “Spiritual Understanding” the “Secret Place of Spirit” I came to see how perfect they were for Father’s Day. Parenting is the kind of process where a whole lot takes place “below the level of conscious awareness,” kind of a behind the scenes endeavor, and my observation is that fathering is a lot like this. We walk knowingly and unknowingly into the hard moments, trusting that at some point we will shine a light, our spiritual light into the life of another that leaves a timeless mark, a lasting radiance. But like Mark Twain, we may not know that for many years, if ever! He says it is only 7 years, but these days, it seems more like 20 years for sure, if then.
As we cultivate what Myrtle Fillmore calls “Spiritual Understanding” it really entails developing the power of discernment, or spiritual wisdom, to gain clarity about what is really true, about what really matters, about what is illusion and what is real, what is Spiritual Truth. Myrtle wrote her thoughts in letters all through the late 1800’s into the early 1920’s and the book was compiled from her writings in 1956 by an editor after Myrtle passed in 1931. What I would note is that Myrtle is describing the 12 Powers of Unity long before Charles, her husband, wrote his book by that name!
One of her most accurate observations that holds to this day is that the world lacks spiritual understanding, focusing on doctrines and teaching about Jesus rather than understanding the true message of Jesus. True then and still true today! She made predictions of how the world would unfold when humans came to have true spiritual understanding of the difference between Truth and illusion. Her focus in gaining true spiritual understanding is to put your attention on Spirit, not on things of this world. She writes:
Don’t bother about what others may think or say about you. God loves you and approves of what you do when you are doing your best to follow the Jesus Christ way. The opinions of others cannot get you down or lift you up….you are to forget the past and its disappointments: God is helping you …to know that you are to do everything as though you were doing it for God. (P. 84-85)
Wow, that is a tall order, Myrtle, do everything I do as though I were doing it for God, or for the highest good of all. That is a big challenge in our modern world.
In our TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, “me-focused” world this sounds outrageous and way off the mark. And yet, Myrtle says it is the only key to true happiness or joy or heaven. She says it is simply “knowing the real from the unreal” and when we know this we are already in heaven, no matter what our external condition may indicate. Heaven is a state of consciousness, not a place we go after we die, which is part of what makes the opening email misdirected to a preacher’s widow so funny. There are illusions on almost every level with that one! And yet, her screams at reading it say that she accepts the illusion of hell and the further illusion that her husband is there and she is joining him soon. When you receive the wrong email, it is important to laugh and let go of your illusions for sure!
Our human selves can relate to this woman in believing illusions like this because we have all done it! And we understand social media because we want to be seen and to know that we matter. We want to post something that helps people, that is seen and matters. That is a universal human need/spiritual need. But what would it be like to know that we are truly “seen” by Spirit, by Love and to learn how much we matter in the context of our human relationships? I think that is the harder path, the path of true belonging. We don’t sacrifice who we are, we actually learn who we are when we take that risk of being vulnerable, of being fully seen. We learn that we are seen only when we truly see another. We see into the whole of them, into the Christ of them, we see beyond all the humanness, the noise of them that is so off-putting and annoying. And the true spiritual mystery is that when we truly see another, we also truly see ourselves.
Myrtle’s antidote to all the illusions of the world is to spend significant amounts of time in the silence. Not just a few minutes on Sunday or here and there throughout the day, but dedicated time in silence. It is only when we leave behind the noise of our thinking, our humanness, our feelings and become truly silent that we can listen, really listen for the voice of Spirit, of love. Sally pointed out to me this past week that silent and listen have the same letters, they are anagrams of each other. When we are silent, even in the midst of the noise of human behavior and actions, we can observe and listen with our hearts. This opens the door to spiritual understanding rather than judgement and condemnation. That is the message of Jesus, that is the Christ Way. It is simple, but it is not easy!
One last thing that Myrtle notes is that to seek satisfaction and pleasure in the outer world is momentary, it does not last. It is like the moonlight, sometimes it is very beautiful, but there is no element of growth in it. She says, “It does not help the power within us to come forth. The silence is like the sun; it is always shining. It brings forth the best that is within us…” (p.90) We let go the pleasure of the senses to enter the joys of Spirit. I love what Hafiz says about the sun:
"Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, 'You owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky." – Hafiz
That is the energy of Love, of God, of Spirit and that is what we embrace, that is what Jesus offered to those who follow him.
Richard Rohr’s June 16, 2026 blog, “Living Out the Good News,” Huston Smith, religious scholar shares these observations about the earliest Christians who called themselves “Followers of the Way:”
One of the earliest observations by an outsider about Christians that we have is, “See how these Christians love one another.” Integral to this mutual regard was a total absence of social barriers; it was a discipleship of equals. Here were men and women who not only said that everyone was equal in the sight of God but who lived as though they meant it. The conventional barriers of race, gender, and status meant nothing to them, for in Christ there was neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, slave nor free. As a consequence, in spite of differences in function or social position, their fellowship was marked by a sense of genuine equality.
Their second distinctive quality was happiness. When Jesus was in danger, his disciples were alarmed; but otherwise it was impossible to be sad in Jesus’s company. And when he told his disciples that he wanted his joy to be in them, “that your joy may be complete,” to a remarkable degree that objective was realized.
Outsiders found this baffling. These scattered Christians were not numerous. They were not wealthy or powerful, and they were in constant danger of being killed. Yet they had laid hold of an inner peace that found expression in a joy that was uncontainable. Perhaps “radiant” would be a better word. “Radiance” is hardly the word used to characterize the average religious life, but no other word fits as well the life of these early Christians.
To be in this world, but not of this world is the path of Jesus. As Henri Nouwen says:
The great conversion called for by Jesus is to move from belonging to the world to belonging to God." - The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 125
Myrtle Fillmore would certainly agree!
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb