"Life is God’s gift to the world through humanity. This is why all life matters."
Photo by Pamela Gray
Pamela Gray: In these days of intensification when so many feel this world is rapidly moving out of control in horrendous ways, there is a constant. We gather like this to remember. The grace of God is with us. This is the constant that has always been and always will be present: God’s grace.
Continue reading…"The root of the word 'accord' means heart. To be of one accord together is to be of one heart."
Jack Jenkins: Welcome, everyone, to Brenda’s and my home here in British Columbia, and welcome to my music studio. This is a sanctuary, so take your shoes off.
I’m not here to entertain you. I’m not here to be critiqued. I am inviting you to share with me today a different way of listening to music. I ask you to help me compose a piece I’m going to improvise. The purpose of what we’re doing is to provide a setting for something else. I will be improvising over a piece of music that Maryliz Smith composed. It is on one of her CDs and it’s appropriately entitled, “The Beautiful One.” The purpose for our gathering this morning is to entertain the Beloved.
Please participate with me in what is to now unfold. (Jack performed on his cello. Listen to the “The Beautiful One.”)
Continue reading…"Planet Earth is alive. It has Presence and that Presence has a body, a mind, and a feeling nature with all of the associated energies and substance."
Chris Jorgensen: Greetings to everyone on this Easter morning. It is a delight for me to be a guest speaker with my friend John Gray on this celebratory day. Easter is a time of renewal and ascension.
We are living in a time of transition, moving from one state of awareness and experience into another state. Many individuals see the changes in their lives as making progress. This idea shows itself in different arenas. In school, one is making progress as you move from grade to grade towards graduation. There are times in a social sense that a person is making progress if they move to a better neighborhood and a different class of people. Something similar can be said of economics, science and technology. Even in the spiritual arena, people who undertake various workshops and seminars for self-improvement, tend to think of their spiritual training as making progress—I am becoming a better person!
Continue reading…“Among friends with a high degree of heart purity, the more we interact, the more we see one another’s true nature, true light, true colors, we are awed by the magnificence we encounter... Blessed are the pure in heart for they really do see God in the beauty all around, yes, but mostly in one another.”
Greetings to everybody. Wherever we are, it’s here—and it is good to be here!
I’ll begin today with a biblical verse well known to many: “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” [Matthew. 5:8] Ever since these words were spoken by Jesus, remembered, and later translated from Aramaic to Greek to English and eventually memorialized in the Bible, how many millions of earnest people have wondered about what they mean and prayed to know how it’s done? I don’t know about you, but I don’t hear of many people walking around claiming they see God, the figurehead of religious belief. The usual idea is that whoever, whatever God is, is unknowable until possibly after we’re dead. To me this simply means there may be very few living people with pure hearts.
Continue reading…"Everything we are aware of is in our own consciousness, right? There may be objective reality, but how do we know it? The nature and quality of our consciousness determines how the world looks to us... 'We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.'"
Courtesy of David Barnes
Today is the first Sunday of 2020. May this be a year of clear vision.
Light seeds germinate in the heart and then are recognized by the mind. Aha! An idea, an inspiration is born. Many people like to take credit for their intuitive insights and good ideas, as though creativity originates in the human mind. However, one of the brighter minds of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, is said to have said, “When the solution is simple God is answering.” That may have been his way of acknowledging that something transcendent is at work in the process of creativity; I don’t know, and Albert isn’t around to ask. We’ll have to ask ourselves.
Continue reading…"Lift up your heads... and the king of glory shall come in."
California poppies near the home of the author
There is a great amount of revered poetry in the literature of human cultures and languages the world around. Poetry is defined in my dictionary as “writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm.” That definition is longer than some poems! I think of a poem as imagery and meaning expressed through spare, carefully chosen words which touch the heart. I admire the work of anyone, past or present, skilled in this language art. We might think, for examples, of famed poets such as Shakespeare and Rumi, Homer and Milton, Poe, Walt Whitman, Lao Tzu, Maya Angelou, Robert Frost, and Pablo Neruda, and their profound, insightful, and lasting inspirational works. To me, however, nothing new or old surpasses the poetry found in the King James Version of the Bible.
Continue reading…"It’s not that we shouldn't care [about the world], but that we should care so much that we live and act in ways that allow something altogether different to appear."
We’ve all had many teachers in our lives. There were the professional teachers in our formal school years, and many, many more people who may not have been teachers per se, but from whom we’ve learned many things. And of course, we are taught a great deal through our own observations and experiences in life and from books and other media.
Continue reading…"Today is Mother’s Day in many parts of the world. We let our understanding of that expand. Isn’t every day Mother’s Day?"
Joyce Krantz: It is a joy to share this hour with John and Pamela on a day that is set aside in the U.S. and several other countries, to celebrate and honor mothers. With so many hearts open on this occasion, I thought it would be useful to focus on what honoring our mother means and why this desire is so fundamental to our being.
continue reading…"One of you is the Messiah. This was told to members of a failing monastery and sparked them to enliven their character, with life-giving results."
You may be familiar with the story, The Rabbi’s Gift. It’s a fable said to be of unknown origin. I was reminded of it recently and looked it up. The version I’m about to read is a synopsis drawn from the writings of M. Scott Peck:
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