Midweek Faith Lift
Invite Them All
March 27, 2019
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
We are in week 4 of our preparation for “Everything is Better with Friends” Sunday on April 7. We have been exploring all the dimensions of this experience of going to church with a friend from the perspective of the friends we are inviting and from our own perspective. There is that person who is really ready to return to some kind of spiritual practice and community. We saw that video the first week. Then we learned about the Apostle Paul who made tents and got to know people by hanging out with them and then sharing then he started speaking about love and the people following “the Way” of Jesus. And thereby established communities of those also followed “the Way.” We learned about seeing the whole field and the empty chair. When we pause and pray, breathe and take time to see the field, the shot lands, the invitation resonates and the person we invite says a genuine yes!
We have been cultivating all 4 corners of our container of welcome: prayer, a deeper consciousness, mindfulness and compassion. All 4 practices are a necessary part of preparing the field for the mustard seed to sprout, as we learned last week. Prayer allows us to pause and breathe and see what is there, who is there. A deeper consciousness allows us to understand the true “why” that goes with doing this inviting. Why invite someone to Unity? Because: we really want others to know the joy that we feel in waking up to the greater reality of our true nature. We want to share the experience of the Presence of God that we inhabit here each week. We cultivate mindfulness in our meditation practice because it is in the quiet that we see all that is there, all that is ours to do and what is ours to heal, what is ours to forgive. We also become aware that our friends most likely are seeking healing, too, and some of that healing may be related to “church.”
And last week we added Compassion, which is like the yeast, which leavens the energy of love and forgiveness through our whole being and through the whole loaf! It is that love and forgiveness that allows and supports our growth, our healing and our continued awakening. It also supports the growth, healing and awakening of our friends. When we watched the video last week, it became clear that how this is going to look and who is involved breaks all stereotypes and expectations! YO, Mrs. Edwards! Can I give you a ride to church?!? It is soooo close, and yet so far! It is yeasty!!
What brings people back to church more than just on Christmas and Easter? Well, just like stages of human development, there are stages of spiritual development, and each stage suggests an ever-deepening understanding of who and what we are as divine/human beings. As human beings, our first task in human development is to build a strong “container” or sense of identity, as humans. This process involves a lot of “doing” related to establishing an identity, a home, relationships, family, a career, community, financial stability, security: a proper platform for our life. We can spend so much of our life energy and focus on this part of life that we see it as the very purpose of life. And yet there is more!
It doesn’t necessarily mean that we do this first task well; we just get overly focused on it. The real questions arise when the container fails or falters in some way, and then we face the second huge task and that is the one where we look at the contents of our container and begin to ask what our container is really meant to hold. That puts us right up against the bigger questions of meaning and God. That is when we come up against the second part of life, or the task within the task, as Richard Rohr describes it. Here is what he said in his March 17, 2019, Center for Contemplative Action meditation/blog post:
But it takes much longer to discover “the task within the task,” as I like to call it: what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing. Two people can have the same job description, and one is holding a subtle or not-so-subtle life energy (eros) in doing his or her job, while another is holding a subtle or not-so-subtle negative energy (thanatos) while doing the exact same job.
We respond to one another’s energy more than to people’s exact words or actions. In any situation, the taking or giving of energy is what we are actually doing. What we all desire and need from one another, of course, is that life energy called eros! It always draws, creates, and connects things.
It is when we begin to pay attention, and to seek integrity in the task within the task, that we begin to move from the first to the second half of our own lives. Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and being honest about our motives. It is hard work. Most often we don’t pay attention to that inner task until we have had some kind of fall or failure in our outer tasks.
That was certainly my personal experience. It is usually when our container breaks, gets stretched or even shattered that we find our way back to some kind of spiritual path. That was certainly the situation for our co-founders Myrtle and Charles Fillmore. She was at bottom in her struggle with physical illness and her fragile, non-functioning body. Charles was actually at the end of his rope financially with a failing real estate business in Kansas City, and they had three young children. It was only at that point of complete loss that there was a break in the resistance for Myrtle, who in her great need heard a spiritual message and began to work with it.
When we ask people to come to Unity of Ames, we are asking them to open to the possibility of hearing a spiritual message that they might be able to work with in this, the second half of life….that part where you really look at what is in your consciousness, your container and the task within the task. How do you show up in your life? Do you show up with life giving, life sustaining energy? Or is it energy that sucks the life, the joy from everything? When we are younger, we tend to view things in terms of transactions: what can I do for you, what can you do for me? If it is mutually beneficial, then count me in! We can even cast prayer in terms of a transaction. If God exists, why do bad things happen if I pray to God that they won’t happen? If this bad thing happened, then there is no God!! We can’t yet see that God isn’t part of an equation!
It is when we begin to ask how is a more loving way to be with what has happened, how does the power of faith and love help me move through what has happened in my life that we start shifting what is in our container, our consciousness. We begin to see and embrace the task within the task. We begin to take full responsibility for all that we think, say and do. Then we are ready for spiritual practices to shift from being transactional to transformational. And that is what Jesus intended…for us to be transformed in mind, body and Spirit.
As we have been learning, Jesus taught in parables and the Parable of the Great Dinner that is in the Gospel of Luke has a message for us.
Luke 14: 15-24
The Parable of the Great Dinner
15 One of the dinner guests, on hearing this, said to him, “Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!” 16 Then Jesus said to him, “Someone gave a great dinner and invited many. 17 At the time for the dinner he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come; for everything is ready now.’ 18 But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a piece of land, and I must go out and see it; please accept my regrets.’ 19 Another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to try them out; please accept my regrets.’ 20 Another said, ‘I have just been married, and therefore I cannot come.’ 21 So the slave returned and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and said to his slave, ‘Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ 22 And the slave said, ‘Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.’ 23 Then the master said to the slave, ‘Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled. 24 For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner.’”
What does this say to us? Clearly, Jesus is well aware that those who have suffered, the lame, the poor, the blind are those who are hungry for a greater dimension of life. They are in that place of humility that is open to what is beyond material sustenance; they are open to a greater reality than what they are living. When Jesus says go into the roads and the lanes, he is calling in all the people who are homeless, who have nowhere to turn. Metaphysically, we are all the people in the story: we are the newlywed or land owner or new car owner who is too busy and unaware of a need for something more. And then there is also the broken part of us that causes us to trip and be lame, to be blind and not see a greater good and to be impoverished in our capacity to grasp a greater truth. We are in fact homeless, when rooted only in ourselves. When we awaken to how we are blind, impoverished and immobilized, we will open to a greater reality….the Reality of Spirit that is much more than we can imagine. It is then that we will be “blessed to eat bread in the Kingdom of God.”
It is in that Spirit of Awakening that we invite our friends to come home to that greater Spirit, to come home to the True Self at Unity of Ames.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIgCGkaF-cw
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb