This Sunday I will be preaching at the church my family and I attend. I have done this a few times and feel honored to have the opportunity to speak to a large group about the things of my heart and my heart's walk with God. I have entitled my talk, "You are Loved."
A few weeks ago, I attended a service at a different church where the minister mentioned that all minister really only have one, or maybe two, messages, which they give over and over in different ways. This resonated with me, and I immediately asked myself: what is your message?
The message I feel most strongly has been given to me by Spirit is just this: you are loved. It is the message I have learned and re-learned, received and been challenged, by my entire life. It is also the message I feel most profoundly in contact with as a teacher. I have so many minor and occasional major travails in my own life, trials I pass through without as much grace as I wish, and daily struggles that I do not handle with the ministerial perfect love and calm I dream I might continuously possess! But when I go inside and really look at myself, I find one area in which God has truly trained and taught me, where I have slowly year by year gained insight and ability, and that is this: you are loved.
Several months ago, I went through an experience I had never encountered before, and came up against some actions by others that some people would label "evil." Certainly they were intended for harm and a great deal of anger, misunderstanding and resentment came my way, striking close to my heart. I processed these events on many levels, constantly seeking a higher way of viewing the situation (and constantly finding lower ways too!), and got through it all right. However, many weeks later, I still felt a residual sense of being somehow deserving of the hatred and unkindness that I was shown.
One night, just as I was going to bed, I had the realization that I was struggling, as I have in the past, with a sense of being unloved. The people who showered me with anger really didn't love me, and it threw me back, just the littlest bit, into a place of doubt and lingering unworthiness. As though God were speaking directly to me, I got this message: "You need to have a deeper experience of God's love for you, not an intellectual understanding, but a felt event."
I keep meditating on this idea. It is possible, particularly for people like me who do a great deal of reading and teaching, to get concepts mentally, to be able to speak them and read them. To know them through and through, in the world's great scriptures and in the best popular motivational speakers. But all of us must continually seek out, invite, and respond to the lived reality of mental knowledge. Love, after all, is not simply a nice thought, and the truth that each of us is a precious, perfect, whole, and complete child of God is not only a healing idea, but an experience that can bring us to a greater sense of knowing our value and belovedness.
When we know that, we are with God.
I will be sharing more of these thoughts and stories on Sunday. Leave a comment if you would like information about the service!
Rev. Sam Wilde
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Friday, April 13, 2012
An Easter Argument
While my husband and I drove to church for the Easter morning service, we had an enlightening argument. He wasn't particularly looking forward to the morning's festivities and explained to me how much he doesn't like Easter. I, on the other hand, had already been to an earlier service and couldn't wait for the next one.
"Easter is the most difficult Christian holiday," he told me. "The story is completely unbelievable and yet you're asked to accept it--required to accept it. And when have you ever seen a person rise from the dead?"
"Easter is the most accessible, most translatable, most encompassing of the Christian holidays," I told him. "It is the best, truest, most liberating story of all."
So we were at an impasse, not that I didn't see his point. The simple and literal Easter story, that Jesus, a man who lived 2012 years ago, was killed and three days later came back to life, does require a rather magnificent leap of faith. (Although many have been willing to make it.) But what is the heart of the message? What is the meaning behind a death and a resurrection?
To show that ultimately life triumphs over death, love over hate/fear, and goodness over evil. Nothing, no thing, no person, no power, no group of people, no event, no torture, no trials, no cruelty, can ever be the victor against Divinity, God's presence with us, Emmanuel.
This is the essence to me of the story. We also see it played out in the great resurrection of the season, in Spring's profusion and vigor. Of course this is no accident as Easter was originally a pagan holiday. But the fundamental belief at the core of Easter is one at the core of every great religious tradition and this is it: there is only one power, all present, all knowing, all powerful, that is Love or God or Good.
Most people, including those in spiritual and religious traditions, have a hard time with this concept. They believe in evil, in the devil, in overwhelming bad, or they may doubt that good and love are equal to the negative forces in the world. They point out countless examples to prove this point, from the Holocaust to hurricanes to the nightly news. And I don't mean to say that these things aren't facts. I mean to say that they aren't true powers.
Before you write me off as crazy, let me explain. Can you remember the last time you felt angry? Felt hatred? Sadness? Fear? Did those feelings arise from feelings of power? When you felt them, did you feel powerful? After you felt them, did you feel powerful?
I can see this in my children, in my friends, and, of course, in my self. I have never heard a person say, "I hate that woman so much. Hating her feels awesome. I'm filled with strength and power when I hate her. " We dip into the negative emotions because we feel afraid, vulnerable, or profoundly powerless. Is a child who goes into a school and shoots his friend actually powerful? Or is he an example of the most broken, empty, powerless person of all?
For me, the radical, joyous, life transforming message of Easter resides in the fundamental truth that there is ONE power and that power is all good. Did Jesus die and rise again? We can't know for certain. But whether he did or did not, the end result has been the same, hasn't it? Because of the countless people throughout history who have believed an unbelievable thing, this crazy story has been kept alive, and for whatever ill it has brought, it has also brought good. We have to separate the power of the message, a redemptive missive of Love, from the structure of religion, the culture of our own religious pasts, the wounds of religion in our life--how it has hurt us, let us down, left us unfulfilled, and so on--and choose to believe in ideas that will increase the presence, reality and potency of good in our own lives and in the life of the world. Isn't that what we want when we bemoan the existence of evil? Put your eyes on the Sun, even on a cloudy day, and remember where true strength resides. It is not a matter of one great power, and one lesser power. There is one power and then there is the absence of power.
This is the understanding that filled me with joy that morning, and every morning, though the day be gray. We all of us have to rely, at least sometimes, on truths we cannot immediately see, especially when our faith is the very thing that brings us joy and gives us hope. How do we know it is real? Because once we believe in it, we have it! And it is real within us and therefore our very real contribution to the world.
Rev. Sam Wilde
"Easter is the most difficult Christian holiday," he told me. "The story is completely unbelievable and yet you're asked to accept it--required to accept it. And when have you ever seen a person rise from the dead?"
"Easter is the most accessible, most translatable, most encompassing of the Christian holidays," I told him. "It is the best, truest, most liberating story of all."
So we were at an impasse, not that I didn't see his point. The simple and literal Easter story, that Jesus, a man who lived 2012 years ago, was killed and three days later came back to life, does require a rather magnificent leap of faith. (Although many have been willing to make it.) But what is the heart of the message? What is the meaning behind a death and a resurrection?
To show that ultimately life triumphs over death, love over hate/fear, and goodness over evil. Nothing, no thing, no person, no power, no group of people, no event, no torture, no trials, no cruelty, can ever be the victor against Divinity, God's presence with us, Emmanuel.
This is the essence to me of the story. We also see it played out in the great resurrection of the season, in Spring's profusion and vigor. Of course this is no accident as Easter was originally a pagan holiday. But the fundamental belief at the core of Easter is one at the core of every great religious tradition and this is it: there is only one power, all present, all knowing, all powerful, that is Love or God or Good.
Most people, including those in spiritual and religious traditions, have a hard time with this concept. They believe in evil, in the devil, in overwhelming bad, or they may doubt that good and love are equal to the negative forces in the world. They point out countless examples to prove this point, from the Holocaust to hurricanes to the nightly news. And I don't mean to say that these things aren't facts. I mean to say that they aren't true powers.
Before you write me off as crazy, let me explain. Can you remember the last time you felt angry? Felt hatred? Sadness? Fear? Did those feelings arise from feelings of power? When you felt them, did you feel powerful? After you felt them, did you feel powerful?
I can see this in my children, in my friends, and, of course, in my self. I have never heard a person say, "I hate that woman so much. Hating her feels awesome. I'm filled with strength and power when I hate her. " We dip into the negative emotions because we feel afraid, vulnerable, or profoundly powerless. Is a child who goes into a school and shoots his friend actually powerful? Or is he an example of the most broken, empty, powerless person of all?
For me, the radical, joyous, life transforming message of Easter resides in the fundamental truth that there is ONE power and that power is all good. Did Jesus die and rise again? We can't know for certain. But whether he did or did not, the end result has been the same, hasn't it? Because of the countless people throughout history who have believed an unbelievable thing, this crazy story has been kept alive, and for whatever ill it has brought, it has also brought good. We have to separate the power of the message, a redemptive missive of Love, from the structure of religion, the culture of our own religious pasts, the wounds of religion in our life--how it has hurt us, let us down, left us unfulfilled, and so on--and choose to believe in ideas that will increase the presence, reality and potency of good in our own lives and in the life of the world. Isn't that what we want when we bemoan the existence of evil? Put your eyes on the Sun, even on a cloudy day, and remember where true strength resides. It is not a matter of one great power, and one lesser power. There is one power and then there is the absence of power.
This is the understanding that filled me with joy that morning, and every morning, though the day be gray. We all of us have to rely, at least sometimes, on truths we cannot immediately see, especially when our faith is the very thing that brings us joy and gives us hope. How do we know it is real? Because once we believe in it, we have it! And it is real within us and therefore our very real contribution to the world.
Rev. Sam Wilde
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