Abundance

Reverend Jacki’s blog title is a challenge to us to live with a paradox: a rich life is chaotic, seeming to be pieced together into a collage. We hope the diverse parts form a collage that is meaningful to us. At the same time, she refers to an “undivided life.” We recognize the sacred nature of each aspect of life. We are challenged to examine our illusions of divisions between people, places, ideas, preferences, time, and space.

As we approached Easter, I faced my own challenge. There weren’t enough eggs in my basket for my taste. The “reasons” were many: slow-paying clients, a lengthy illness just at the time I left my job hoping to reinvigorate my private law practice, and a recent decision to accept some worthy cases on contingency (delaying my payment until the conclusion of the case).

The truth inside me knew what was happening: I was following Jesus through a perceived desert, pretending I didn’t know how easily water turns into wine. Yet, I persisted in digging around through the plastic Easter grass in my basket, digging for the really good candy—frustrated it wasn’t there. I vacillated between grudgingly sucking on my off-brand chocolates and folding my arms, stubbornly waiting for the peanut-butter filled egg.

Spirit, knowing me better than I know myself, knew it was time for THE SPIRITUAL TRUTH BIG GUN. I needed a good dose of Capital-T Truth, the kind that leaves me in awe of god and the universe.

Where better to hide truth than in a recycled Wal-Mart shopping bag?

This is exactly what my mother did on my visit home last weekend.

“We found some old birthday cards and stuck them in here,” Mom commented nonchalantly.

I groaned a little—I am not a big keeper of cards and have enough challenges with clutter without 39-year-old missives on my desk.

I thought of the cards late one night during the week. David (my partner) and I were watching In Her Shoes, a movie that features a reunion between a grandmother and granddaughters after they find lost birthday cards. I went to the kitchen and got the bag.

The cards were not casual greeting cards. They were cards from my second birthday. Since I was adopted, this was the first birthday I had spent with my family. Money fell from card after card, along with love pouring across the decades.

There were also cards from later years, with half-dollars, silver dollars, and so on carefully included with each.

An overwhelming amount of the money was from my Grandpa. Grandpa encouraged me to pursue a formal education, loved me through all I did, and has stayed with me since his death when I was 15. The sense of loss I felt when he made his transition has followed me through life. Despite knowing that his energy is alive and that his life unfolded perfectly, I have felt a pain at not having him with me through this life.

One especially precious missive is a rare sample of my Grandpa’s own handwriting on plain note paper tucked in with a small bill in a bill protector.

“To Kelli, with love, from Papaw.”

Here we are again, weaving this part of the collage into this undivided life:

“I have all I need. I have all the love of the universe and all the abundance of the universe, right here, right now. Nothing is hidden under the Easter grass, and nothing good has been kept out of my basket. It is all mine, right here, right now.”

Taking Action for Abundance (Guest Post by Kelli Dudley)

I'm thrilled to be learning and working with Kelli Dudley, who shares a second phenomenal reflection on financial health below. Together, we're leading a seminar called "Financial Wellness: Tips for Abundance Actions" on May 9 from 9am-1:30pm. Click here for event information.

-- Jacki


Taking Action for Abundance by Kelli Dudley

In my last post, I mentioned that debt may not be all bad. If you have debt, you incurred it buying something you needed at the time. The debt enabled you to reflect some god-quality you were seeking at that time—maybe a good meal, maybe a place to live.

Even if the choice you made at that time is not how you would choose now, you were nurtured by the meal you chose or kept warm in your home. You made the best choice you could at the time, even if you were mistaken, and your ability to obtain credit helped you get what you needed at the time. Your debts represent something you received in the past, and you do not have to live in regret thinking about debt. Instead, think about how to move forward knowing better, knowing you can receive without saying, “Charge it.”

We know god (or spirit or universe) is good all the time. God’s love is not waiting for you to make perfect financial choices. God was with you at the time of your mistaken choice and is waiting to help you make better choices. The knowledge of perfect choices to ensure your financial health is within you: the force within you knows everything that needs to be known, everything that has been known, and everything you need to know. This wisdom is instantly accessible to you. It is sometimes expressed by New Thought folk as the ability to “download” wisdom. It could also be expressed as god giving you what you need, an answered prayer.

Therefore, the first action I am going to recommend for you to grow toward financial health is non-action.

The next time you “need” an item, ask yourself: “What do I want?” Keep repeating the question until you come to a god quality, something that is not limited by the material item in your mind.

Example:

* I need a large SUV; it will cost about $40,000.00.

What do I need?
* I need safety, I need to be able to haul kids/equipment/dogs.

What do I need?
* I need to feel confident and competent.

Your desire for confidence and competence is being expressed as a longing for a SUV.
Will the SUV accomplish this goal?

SUVs are not safer than other vehicles; in fact, they encourage aggressive driving, engender a false sense of confidence (four-wheel drive helps power through snow; it does not help navigate ice), and create greater havoc when involved in an accident than do smaller cars.

Therefore, the SUV cannot give you safety. Safety is within you, a gift of your source, your god, the divine dwelling within you.

You do not need an SUV to be competent. Dogs, equipment, and kids can be successfully hauled in hatchbacks that appear to be tiny, in station wagons, or in old, used vans that sell used for under $3,000.00. At least two of these (dogs and kids) require love far more than they require a fancy vehicle. Fortunately, you can give love regardless of your credit score.

Try the above exercise for some item you want right now. Identify the god quality you seek, and challenge yourself to think of at least one other way you can experience that god quality in your life.

The Soul of Success (Chopra/Williamson Event)

Since spirit is the domain of awareness which is infinite it is not subject to compromise or recession.

The economic recession offers us a unique opportunity to understand the difference between money and wealth. Money is a symbol that expresses how we value ourselves and others and also represents society's values at a particular time and place in history. Wealth on the other hand is a state of consciousness that represents generosity of spirit that translates into material abundance.


THE SOUL OF SUCCESS

In this course, Deepak Chopra & Marianne Williamson will take you through an in-depth understanding of consciousness as a field of infinite possibilities, infinite creativity, infinite energy & infinite abundance.


Using a combination of techniques involving silent brain storming, mind – mapping and finding creative opportunities in perceived problems, Deepak will take you through an updated experience of the spiritual laws that create success in all its forms – material abundance, the progressive realization of worthy goals, the ability to have love and compassion, the ability to harness the infinite organizing power of intention, and the ability to always be connected to the source of all creation.

Marianne will guide you in the realization of your career as a spiritual journey, viewing your path to success as an initiation into your higher Self. She will teach you how to tap into the law of "divine compensation" -- the power of love to compensate for any limitations in the material world. Through devotion, prayer, forgiveness and compassion for self and others, we will activate our miraculous power to turn limited probabilities into unlimited possibilities.

The workshop will be intellectually stimulating and spiritually uplifting, grounded in both meta-physics and science, and will teach participants to reinvent themselves and their businesses and reactivate the spirit of success.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Palm Sunday: Two Days Early in Iowa (marriage equality decision)

Today the Iowa Supreme Court UNANIMOUSLY held that the ban on marriage for same-sex couples violates the Iowa Constitution.

Equality Illinois salutes the Court's courage in doing its duty to secure the equal protection of law.

Equality Illinois congratulates our friends at Lambda Legal for their astoundiing victory in the Iowa Supreme Court today.

What Happened to Jesus?

I got the following thought-provoking Easter reflection from Tikkun. (Tikkun: to heal, repair and transform the world). Living Well Ministries is an affiliate member of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, a project of the Tikkun community.

-- Jacki

[Tikkun Editor's note. The following article provides one possible understanding of the Resurrection celebrated by Christians on Easter--celebrated by Christians this year on April 12. Tikkun welcomes your submission of letters or articles providing alternative interpretations of this or other aspects of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, atheistic or scientistic theologies. This article appeared in Tikkun March/April 2008.]

What Happened to Jesus?by Walter Wink

Considering the weight the early church attached to the resurrection, it is curious that, subsequent to the empty-tomb stories, no two resurrection accounts in the four Gospels are alike. All of these narratives seem to be very late additions to the tradition. They answer a host of questions raised by the gospel of the resurrection. At the core of all these accounts is the simple testimony: we experienced Jesus as alive.

A later generation that did not witness a living Jesus needed more; for them the resurrection narratives answered that need. But what had those early disciples experienced? What does it mean to say that they experienced Jesus alive? The resurrection appearances did not, after all, take place in the temple before thousands of worshipers, but in the privacy of homes or cemeteries. They did not occur before religious authorities, but to the disciples hiding from those authorities. The resurrection was not a worldwide historic event that could have been filmed, but a privileged revelation reserved for the few.Nevertheless, something "objective" did happen to God, to Jesus, and to the disciples. What happened was every bit as real as any other event, only it was not historically observable. It was an event in the history of the psyche. The ascension was the entry of Jesus into the archetypal realm. Though skeptics might interpret what the disciples experienced as a mass hallucination, the experience itself cannot be denied.
This is what may have happened: the very image of God was altered by the sheer force of Jesus being. God would never be the same. Jesus had indelibly imprinted the divine; God had everlastingly entered the human. In Jesus God took on humanity, furthering the evolution revealed in Ezekiel's vision of Yahweh on the throne in "the likeness, as it were, of a human form" (Ezek. 1:26). Jesus, it seemed to his followers, had infiltrated Godhead.
The ascension marks, on the divine side, the entry of Jesus into the son-of-the-man archetype; from then on Jesus' followers would experience God through the filter of Jesus. Incarnation means that not only is Jesus like God, but that God is now like Jesus. It is a prejudice of modern thought that events happen only in the outer world. What Christians regard as the most significant event in human history happened, according go to the Gospels, in the psychic realm, and it altered external history irrevocably. Ascension was an "objective" event, if you will, but it took place in the imaginal realm, at the substratum of human existence, where the most fundamental changes in consciousness take place.

Something also happened to the disciples. They experienced the most essential aspect of Jesus as remaining with them after his death. They had seen him heal, preach, and cast out demons, but had localized these powers in him. Though the powers had always been in them as well, while Jesus was alive they tended to project these latent, God-given powers onto him. They had only known those powers in him. So it was natural, after his resurrection, to interpret the unleashing of those powers in themselves, as if Jesus himself had taken residence in their hearts. And it was true: the God at the center of their beings was now indistinguishable from the Jesus who had entered the Godhead. Jesus, in many of the post-Easter son-of-the-man sayings, seems to speak of the Human Being (the "son of man") as other than himself. Was Jesus stepping aside, as he seems to do in the Gospels, to let the Human Being become the inner entelechy (the regulating and directing force) of their souls?

The disciples also saw that the spirit that had worked within Jesus continued to work in and through them. In their preaching they extended his critique of domination. They continued his life by advancing his mission. They persisted in proclaiming the domination-free order of God inaugurated by Jesus.The ascension was a "fact" on the imaginal plane, not just an assertion of faith. It irreversibly altered the nature of the disciples' consciousness. They would never again be able to think of God apart from Jesus. They sensed themselves accompanied by Jesus (Luke 24:13-35). They found in themselves a New Being that they had hitherto only experienced in Jesus. They knew themselves endowed with a spirit-power they had known only occasionally, such as when Jesus had sent them out to perform healings (Mark:7-13). In their struggles with the powers that be, they knew that whatever their doubts, losses, or sufferings, the final victory was God's, because Jesus had conquered death and the fear of death and led them out of captivity.

Jesus the man, the sage, the itinerant teacher, the prophet, even the lowly Human Being, while unique and profound, was not able to turn the world upside down. His attempt to do so was a decided failure. Rather, it was his ascension, his metamorphosis into the archetype of humanness that did so for his disciples. The Human Being constituted a remaking of the values that had undergirded the domination system for some 3,000 years before Jesus. The critique of domination continued to build on the Exodus and the prophets of Israel, to be sure. But Jesus' ascension to the right hand of the Power of God was a supernova in the archetypal sky. As the image of the truly Human One, Jesus became an exemplar of the utmost possibilities for living.

Could the son-of-the-man material have been lore that grew up to induce visions of the Human Being? Could it have been a way to activate altered states of consciousness based on meditation on the ascended Human Being enthroned upon the heart? It was not enough simply to know about the mystical path. One needed to take it. And the paths were remarkably alike.

The ascension was real. Something happened to God, to Jesus, and to the disciples. I am not suggesting that the ascension is non-historical, but rather that the historical is the wrong category for understanding ascension. The ascension is not a historical fact to be believed, but an imaginal experience to be undergone. It is not at datum of public record, but divine transformative power overcoming the powers of death. The religious task for us today is not to cling to dogma but to seek a personal experience of the living God in whatever mode is meaningful.

Walter Wink is professor emeritus of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City and author of 16 books. He is best known for his trilogy on the "Powers" and his fascinating interpretation of Jesus' teachings on nonviolence.
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