Midweek Faith Lift
June 5, 2019
Let’s Get Started—The Great Discovery
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Among human beings, who knows what pertains to a person except the spirit of the person that is within? Similarly, no one knows what pertains to God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the things freely given us by God. And we speak about them not with words taught by human wisdom, but with words taught by the Spirit, describing spiritual realities in spiritual terms. —1 Corinthians 2:11-13
And so we begin our deep dive into what Butterworth calls his book, Discover the Power Within You: A Guide to the Unexplored Depths Within. This was my dad’s absolute favorite Unity book and Butterworth was his favorite Unity author. He would buy a copy of it for every visitor to his Unity church, ask if they had ever heard of it and then tell them to read it. I think he was a minister at heart! If I had a copy with me in Amsterdam, I would have given it to my B&B host/friend, Jeroen. It is one of the first books I read for my CEP classes, way back in the last millennium, in 1999 and I still love it. We did not get to it in 2018 during our year of Butterworth, so in honor of my dad’s passing, I hope you will bear with me as we embrace it this summer. So dad, this one’s for you!
It was originally written in 1968, but as I have been re-reading it for this series, I deeply appreciate the timelessness and universality of its message of Truth. What is so powerful about Butterworth and Discover the Power Within You is that the focus is turned inward, into your heart, your thoughts, your consciousness. Butterworth makes a point of contrast with traditional Christianity, carefully challenging and highlighting the contrast with our Unity direct focus on the teachings of Jesus rather than the dogmas of Christianity as they developed in the Catholic and Protestant religions. While this contrast continues to be relevant, there is a bigger picture here, of human consciousness that makes his writing so timeless and still powerful in 2019.
How is that so? In our culture, in world culture, what Charles Fillmore called race consciousness, there are two very powerful energies that are gripping people’s minds and hearts: obsession with self, small self or ego and fear. It is self-absorption, not self-reflection and then fear. Politicians in all countries are using fear to polarize us and create false barriers and fan conflicts between people. The more fearful we are, the more they can be the savior, the rescuer, the protector and then we don’t have to look at ourselves.
These constant conflicts are shrinking the space of shared humanity where we are able to meet one another, heart to heart in a place of love and compassion. The Internet has been used to create “belief silos” which have the energy of religious fervor of the middle ages. You are either with us or against us: there is no middle ground. It sounds like the all or nothing thinking of religions during the Reformation and the Middle Ages. It is driven by fear, by demagoguery and sustained by the Internet and those who post false information and propaganda to continue to drive the fear and wedges between human beings. It keeps us from thinking critically and looking within for our spiritual power.
Now add to that social media, Instagrams, Facebook personal page, Twitter and selfies all of which focus so intensely on the small self, or the ego in support of that self-absorption. All of these social media puff up self-importance so much that people are actually falling off cliffs, bridges and scenic places trying to get that perfect “selfie” that will get thousands of “hits” on Instagram or Twitter. Popular culture is obsessed with small “self” so much so that the collective capacity to tolerate discomfort necessary for emotional growth is minimal to nonexistent.
We are conflating true community with pseudo-community as Brene Brown describes it in her recent book, Braving the Wilderness. To stand in both truth and in spiritual “Truth” rather than social media silos and the lure of Instagram “likes” is to choose to be in the wilderness, outside of popular culture acceptance and approval. It is not a comfortable place to be, but living authentically requires that we embrace the wilderness. I would say that it is more urgent than ever that we discover the power within us and begin to live there, in that empowered energy of “Self” once we grasp what that is. This is, after all, where Jesus, hung out; outside of the popular culture. And that is what makes him so compelling and relevant and keeps his true message meaningful and powerful for us today.
Now we all dance at the edge of the cyber-community for sure. I certainly did on our recent trip by posting all kinds of pictures on my Facebook page. And to work an honest program, I checked it every day to see if people were looking at the photos and enjoying them. At one point, I kind of wondered if I should stop, and Rev. Jackie Hawkins, a classmate from seminary and good friend shared that I should keep them coming as she was really enjoying sharing trip through my pictures. OK, the people on FB who were following me are my actual friends, people I know for real, not just “cyber” friends. Whew! I’m not going over the edge to the dark side!!! Not yet, any way!
So what is it we are looking so hard for? In the Prologue, Butterworth shares a Hindu legend, which is a classic. There was a time when all beings knew they were “gods” but they so abused their divinity that Brahma, the chief god , decided to take it away and hide it where they would never find it! Where to hide it?? There were lots of options posed—on the highest mountain, the deepest ocean and so on. But none seemed right. Then Brahma said “Here is what we will do with man’s divinity. We will hide it deep down in man himself, for he will never think to look for it there.” And we continue to look for our Divinity, our true power, everywhere but where it actually rests.
As Butterworth notes, what is so compelling about Jesus is that as a human being, he was completely connected to his true Divine nature and lived from that place all the time. His message to us repeatedly is that we, too, are Divine and we can learn to live from our true Divine nature. Our challenge is to look within, and discover what is there: our true Divine nature. Even as we look without and learn about the Universe and our world, we must come to some awareness of the energy of Divine Mind that sustains and is the Universe. Ultimately, we look within to study Divine Mind in order as Tennyson said:
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These alone lead life to sovereign power.
That is quite a different path than self-absorption, self-promotion and fear. And it is not easy! As Butterworth so correctly states, it is simple, but not easy.
What is it that we are really trying to do here in this self-surrender process? In the simplest possible way, we are trying to let God love us; to hear the true voice of God in our hearts and to trust that it is our God-Self that we are hearing. If we begin to grasp what it means that God loves us, and we begin to allow God-love to filter through all our defenses….our if, ands and but statements, then we will truly discover the power within us: our own Divinity. This Great Discovery was made by Jesus. His mission was to awaken all of us to our capacity to experience this same Great Discovery, as Butterworth calls it.
In his meditation blog for Sunday, May 26, 2019, Richard Rohr describes it like this:
What kind of God would only push from without and never draw from within? Yet this is precisely the one-sided God that many Christians were offered and that much of the world has now rejected. God unfolds our personhood from within through a constant increase in freedom—even freedom to fail. Love cannot happen in any other way. This is why Paul shouts in Galatians, “For freedom Christ has set us free!” (5:1).
God loves you by becoming you, taking your side in the inner dialogue of self-accusation and defense. God loves you by turning your mistakes into grace, by constantly giving you back to yourself in a larger shape. God stands with you, not against you, whenever you are tempted to shame or self-hatred. If your authority figures resorted to threat and punishment, it can be hard to feel or trust this inner give and take. Remember, the only thing that separates you from God is the thought that you are separate from God!
It is this realization of the intimacy of God in your life, in my life, that shifts us out of our “small, ego driven self-absorption” into a consciousness of Divine co-creation in all of life. Realizing God’s love for us happens differently for each of us, but that is the invitation of Jesus. He had discovered his Divinity, which created an opening, a window through which humans can view the “vast and beautiful panorama of the spiritual dimension of life.” Jesus invites us to look through the window with him, as Butterworth says on page 10 of Discover the Power:
…..(He is inviting us) to view the infinite reality of things from the perspective He had found. His finger is pointing out through the window, not at Himself. “Don’t look at me, he is saying look to the Spirit as I am looking to the Spirit.”…realize that you have this same potential within you. What I have done, you can do. I have created the window—let us look through it together. Never forget this window, for “it is your inlet and outlet to all there is in God.”
Human history tells us that instead of looking through the window, we put a lot of stained glass in those windows, making them the object of our love, rather than a window into the God-Love that we are and an outlet to express that love. It is time for that to shift in race consciousness. God loves us. It may take a lifetime for this to sink in, for us to get it, as it did for someone we love and respect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwuAntPHGVM
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb