Mother God, Father God, God of all creation, show us the way
to you. Lead us onward and inward to
experiences with you that will change who we are as we change the world. Let us celebrate your presence within and all
around us. Amen.
Many of you
know that before moving to Florida, I worked for 25 years in the NY State Child
Welfare system in various positions. My
longest position was as a Director of Staff Development for a fairly large
county Department of Social Services.
One of my tasks there was to arrange for “expert” speakers to come in
and give trainings to our child welfare staff.
One such expert arrived one day to give a talk on Reactive Attachment
Disorder or RAD. Now, in its simplest
terms, a diagnosis of RAD implies that in one of many ways, the child or infant
shows difficulty in forming attachments to caregivers. There are numerous causes, but most
practitioners point to interrupted or incomplete attachment to original or
primal caregivers. RAD shows itself
throughout childhood and adolescence and is a source of great pain for child
and caregiver alike. Now this particular
speaker was using an onion as an example—because of its layers, the onion gets
used a lot as a metaphor. However, this
time it seemed different. He kept
metaphorically shedding each layer until he suddenly clapped his hands and
said, “See, in a RAD child you are left with absolutely nothing, no core, no
center, no nothing.” This hit me hard,
really hard, as all the Child Welfare workers were nodding their heads in
agreement. As a spiritual journeyer, I
knew that this was horribly and completely untrue. Yes, some brains appear to be hardwired for
pathology, but I knew that my belief in God as Spirit, as Being, as Light
itself could not and should not be reconciled with what this “expert” was
saying. From then on, I redoubled my
efforts in the curricula that I authored to make sure that, even in the hard,
cold world of child welfare a shining spark of goodness and light was found in
each and every child.
This, of
course, forced me to look at how I experienced my own inner divine and sacred
place deep within my spirit; sometimes hidden by layers of pain—both present
and past—and, oftentimes, lost in the busyness and craziness of my days. This search, began some 40 years ago, has
been the focus of my own spiritual journey ever since. As you know, I am an avid reader and so I
read. I read about the child within, the
yogi within, the animal within, and my all-time favorite, the warrior
within. I loved the book called Awakening the Warrior Within by Dawn
Callan. I read it several times and
shared it with whomever I could get to read it, too. The preference for warrior
showed up in my yoga practice as well. The
pose I found more of myself in than any other was Warrior II. Virabahadra
(veer-ah-bah-DRAHS-anna)
or Warrior II is named for a fierce warrior, an incarnation of Shiva,
described as having a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, and a thousand feet,
wielding a thousand clubs, and wearing a tiger's skin. Aha—now that’s what I’m talking about! What began to become clear for me was that I
needed a strong woman warrior in my life at a time when I needed to stand up
for my own life and live my own truth.
In that moment in my life, my divine spark was that warrior within; at
least, that is how I experienced it.
At other
times I have experienced the deep sense of the inner divine as utter peace in a
time of grieving or unadulterated joy after a time of depression. In other words, there is no one way to experience
the Inner Sacred—no one way that is the right way or even the best way. God created each and every one of us with
that Inner Sacred which is waiting on us to go deep enough into our spiritual
lives to experience the Sacred within us in whatever way works the best for each
individual. Comparing experiences is utterly
useless in spiritual formation. Sharing
experiences can be a method of mutual support and validation. God as “Sacred within” manifests in ways as
diverse as we are diverse.
If the God
inside us is the same God as the God of creation, of nature, of space, what
does this tell us, first, about God; and, secondly, what does it tell us about,
well, us? We’ll look at what it tells us
about God first. We use a lot of “Omni”
words to describe God—omnipotent, omniscient, omni-present, omni-everything—no
seriously, I made that last one up. We
say in these words that God is all- powerful, all-knowing and always
present. Yet, somehow, these words tend
to cause us to look up, and out, and all around for God’s presence. We are rarely encouraged to look inward for
the Sacred itself. It appears that
many of us are afraid to experience God as living and breathing life into us
from the inside. I think it may go back
to the Adam and Eve myth where God is pictured anthropomorphically as a man of
god-like proportions kneeling down in the mud to shape first, a man, and then,
a woman. If I am Adam and I wake up and
find a man kneeling over me, much like we do when we give CPR, I’m naturally
going to think that God is life-giving, yes; but inside me, no. It’s like we slept through the part where God
is already present in our very bodies, breathing life into us, and awakening
the God-self implanted deep in our hearts and souls. Does this description of God inside you
surprise you? Though it is not meant to
be scary, it certainly can cause discomfort when we are changing how we look at
God and ourselves in relation to God—a paradigm shift, if you will.
There is
more. God inside us also means that God
is, indeed, genderless, formless, and cannot be claimed by one group, or one
tradition alone. It means that when a
Zen monk says “Namaste” to acknowledge the Sacred within the one he has
greeted; it is the same Sacred that we meet when we say “may God bless you” or
“Shalom” or “peace”. This means that we
already have a basis for celebrating diversity of religious expressions,
histories, myths, and traditions. For
all these things are the efforts of humans to “get something down for future
generations” or to record their particular tradition for their children and
their children’s children. Discord
happens, and can only happen, when one or more groups claim that their
tradition is the one blessed by God.
When we begin our discussion about God with the knowledge that God—the
same God—is found in all of us, it makes no sense at all to spend time arguing
over who has the exclusive on God.
So, what
does this paradigm shift—this change in our thoughts about God—say to us about
us? First, and very importantly, it says
that we can stop looking for God “outside” of us. We do not need to ask God to come into our
hearts, God is already there. It says
that language about God “accepting” us is really about God loving and caring
for our own personal expression of the Sacred.
Indeed, how could the Sacred refuse to accept itself—the Sacred in
us. Once we allow ourselves to experience
Divine Love deep inside the layers that we and life have placed upon it in our
hearts, the sacredness of all creation, including you, and you, and you, and me
becomes second nature for us all. It
also tells us about the nature of “right relationship” with God. It tells us that our relationship with God
must include more than asking for help in times of difficulty, asking for
Divine Guidance when the way seems dark, and singing praise for a God who
abides somewhere other than everywhere.
Our right relationship with God then, includes the unlayering of our
hearts and spirits so that we can experience the Divine living and being inside
of us. It says that if we don’t love and
care for ourselves, this body created to house God’s spirit here on this side
of reality, then we cannot love and appreciate the Divine in ourselves and
others. It also explains why it seems so
easy for people to injure and kill others and desecrate the rest of creation
when we do not acknowledge, respect and honor the Sacred in everyone and
everything. Understanding that God IS in
everything and IS everything gives us much instruction in our yearning for
right relationship with God. And, we
will go on from here.
I am going to close the sermon with a
poem from Esther Yff-Prins. I invite you
to close your eyes, listen, and experience the Divine in you.
Open
Slowly, the descent begins,
moving down,
down
into the
corridors of my heart.
Tenderly gently,
consent unbars the door
of a hidden chamber.
Now I touch the
breath of my soul;
taste the depth of
my longing;
hear the echoing
silence within.
Now I encounter
the welcome
of the Divine,
pulsating, poignant,
irresistible.
Awed by the
language of God
at the center of my being,
I linger, embraced
in wordless benediction,
sheltered in the Sacred.
(Pause) Amen and amen.
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