Midweek Faith Lift
November 27, 2024
An Attitude of Gratitude Brings Altitude
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Spiritual Passages
November 15, 2024
Scientists Discover that Memory is
Stored in Cells Throughout the Body
'God is everywhere at once'
It's common knowledge that our brains and, specifically, our brain cells store memories. But a team of scientists has discovered that cells from other parts of the body also perform a memory function, opening new pathways for understanding how memory works and creating the potential to enhance learning. "This discovery suggests that in the future, we will need to treat our body more like the brain," said New York University's Nikolay V. Kukushkin, a clinical associate professor of life science at NYU Liberal Studies and a research fellow at NYU's Center for Neural Science. "For example, consider what our pancreas remembers about the pattern of our past meals to maintain healthy levels of blood glucose or consider what a cancer cell remembers about the pattern of chemotherapy."
"The mystics agree that when I think of the past, all I really know is a certain memory -- but, they add, that memory is itself a present experience." - Ken Wilber
"At the center of the Universe dwells the Great Spirit. And that center
is really everywhere. It is within each of us." - Black Elk, Oglala Sioux
"Gratitude is the heart's memory." - Macrina Wiederkehr,
Seven Sacred Pauses
Affirmative Prayer for today: We recognize God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. We feel the God energy that is vibrant in every cell of our body temple and we experience that energy as love. The love that we are permeates all that we think, say and do right here and now and we are so grateful. Amen.
Isn’t it interesting that science keeps verifying what we teach and believe about the spiritual path? The energy of God, of love is stored in the memory of all the cells of our bodies! I especially love the statement that “Gratitude is the heart’s memory.” We also note that our pancreas cells remember the good food we have eaten to maintain healthy blood sugar! Perhaps we should apologize to our bodies in advance of the meal we are sharing after the service today! Our body is a storehouse of memories, positive and negative. We have muscle memory of tensions we experience, and of course our bodies store trauma memories as well. But as the mystics noted, even those memories are happening in the present moment, which gives us a path of spiritual power to speak words of truth to our bodies about our present experiences!
When we consider the potential for learning that is in every cell of our body temple, it is kind of awe-inspiring. It means we have agency with respect to our own bodily reactions to the events and circumstances of our lives. If our body is storing fear, we can speak to where that is being held and to how it is impacting our present sense of well-being. That is what this whole prayer journey has been about for the past year and what our spiritual journey together is all about, empowering us to speak word of Truth to our mind, body and spirit. One of my favorites regarding fear is to remind myself that fear is just “False Evidence Appearing Real.” Another one for that is “Forgetting Everything is All Right!”
How do we teach our body this perception of our experiences? We have for sure know that we have agency, the power to choose our attitude, and we assert that power. Richard Rohr, in his November 10 blog, “Disconnection Leads to Devastation” writes:
….the greatest dis-ease facing us right now is our profound and painful sense of disconnection. We feel disconnected from God certainly, but also from ourselves (especially our bodies), from each other, and from our world.
When we pause and pray, we remember and we heal. In that moment of pausing, the most critical step is to re-connect with our own holy trinity within, our Observer self that witnesses, our Human self that is our body, and our Divine self, our higher self. We breathe and then we remember that an attitude of gratitude brings altitude. It raises our consciousness and that is what we want to make real in prayer in each now moment. We have the power to feel and realize gratitude! And the energy of gratitude is of the heart, is healing and raises our consciousness.
Some of us may be with family members who are particularly challenging for whatever reason during this coming week at the Thanksgiving table. We pause, we breathe in and remember a moment of gratitude for our own lives and how we live them. We keep breathing until our heart rate goes down and our fight, flight or freeze response subsides. That is our human response and we just observe what we are feeling in our bodies. We learn where we hold fear, we breathe and then we teach our body, mind and spirit to stay fully present to our experience right now. That is truly empowering, especially when we pause to realize that the cells of our body are capable of learning a new response and remembering it the next time a challenge arises no matter what the source!
The power of gratitude is the power of Divine Love. When we consciously embrace gratitude, we are consciously teaching our bodies to move to the heart, out of the head and embrace what we know to be true of God and true of love.
As Richard Rohr continues in that same November 10 blog, he writes this:
God is not a being among other beings, but rather the Ground of Being itself which then flows through all beings. As Paul says to the intellectuals in Athens, this God “is not far from us, but is the one in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27–28). The God whom Jesus reveals is presented as unhindered dialogue, a positive and inclusive flow, and a waterwheel of outpouring love that never stops! St. Bonaventure called God a “fountain fullness” of love.
Nothing can stop the flow of divine love; we cannot undo the eternal pattern even by our worst sin. God is always winning, and God’s love will finally win in the end. Nothing humans can do will stop the relentless outpouring force that is the divine dance. Love does not lose, nor does God lose. That’s what it means to be God!
We participate in this divine dance with a practice of Gratitude. It is an active process, not a reaction to positive outcomes or pleasant experiences or delightful surprises. The active practice of gratitude is empowering and gives us agency to step into our true spiritual powers, all 12 of them! In our human self, we can imagine all kinds of awful things that will never happen and we can physically brace for the worst. We now know that no matter what happens, we can teach our bodies new responses that are grounded in gratitude and love.
Finally, I want to share a story with you that Jim Trenberth sent me many moons ago with the tag line “this’ll preach!” I read it and replied to his email, “It sure will!” I just didn’t know when…..well today’s the day. As you listen to this story, listen with your ear attuned to all the “body reactions” you would have and how you would physically feel in this situation and then enjoy…
This morning, not long after waking up, I went to put the fur beasts on the front porch and I could hear motorcycles. Quite a few of them, racing around at a high rate of speed off in the distance.
That’s weird. It’s pretty early for that nonsense.
No wait, that’s not motorcycles…it’s buzzing. Close buzzing. Right over my head. BEES!
I quickly brought the fur balls back in and taped a sign to the door: “Do not let cats out here, there are swarming bees.”
Then I proceeded to evaluate this roiling group of 50 + invaders at my doorstep, not clumped together like a migration, but all actively swooping and looping, prodding my drainpipes and eves for inlets, climbing in and out of the seams where the wood met the brick to claim them for their colony…if they hadn’t already. I could just picture the rest up inside that roof building an unseen infrastructure.
What was I going to do about this? Something needed to be done, right? Of course it was early Sunday morning and there was no one to call to come take care of this.
So I went in and out of the garage, getting and grabbing and running through every scenario of every solution I could think of until I had completely lost and wasted 45 minutes. When I stopped.
Why did I stop?
Because this was out of my control. There was nothing I could do about it right this minute. And there was nothing that absolutely needed to be done to protect anyone right now.
In reality, they were all of these little things swarming around my home with the potential to cause me or my loved ones pain.
But they had not.
Nothing had happened.
And there was no guarantee that anything would happen.
So I walked away.
In the remaining minutes of my morning, I went inside, threw on some clothes and shoes, hopped in my car with wet hair, without makeup, backed out of the garage, and drove off.
I walked into church after the worship songs had already started and was accepted by a packed house just as I was.
Late, disheveled, hungry, and with buzzing chaos out of my control that I just had to let go. So I did.
And guess what? When I got home…they were gone. Every last one.
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb