June 18, 2006

Martin Luther King, Jr., in being asked to publish some of his sermons, wrote in the preface to his book, “. . . a sermon is directed toward the listening ear rather than the reading eye. . . I offer these discourses in the hope that a message may come to life for readers of the printed words.” This is my hope for you, dear reader.
—Rev. Linda

June 18, 2006

MORE THAN ENOUGH:
RICH LIKE VELVET

What a great month we’re having here at The Maine Beacon with our theme More Than Enough! We started our Principles of Financial Freedom class on Thursday with 10 students enrolled. And I can’t wait for our 2nd Annual Gathering next Sunday and Infinite Possibilities. It’s really going to be fun. And we have 8 people graduating from 3 different classes.

There’ll be a short business meeting that will be informative for those of you who are wanting to know just how our Center works. And of course we’ll be voting on a new Core Council member, Eric Olander.

After that will be a cookout, and then we’re going to play some cooperative games where everybody wins. Then we’ll end with a closing ceremony. So I do hope you’re planning to come and bring your family and friends.

Well, Father’s Day is the perfect time for our message this morning, Rich Like Velvet. In celebration of Father's Day, I share with you the "Song of the Father" from The Voice Celestial by Ernest and Fenwicke Holmes.

May the Source of your true essence and your inviolate union in and as the One be deepened with these words, and I honor the father, the provider, in everyone.

That reminds me of a story Rev. Rainbow Johnson tells about her niece, Jayne, who was the Human Resources Director at a large hotel. Several years ago, a gala birthday party was being given for the actor George Burns for his 90th birthday. Jayne went into the kitchen to make sure that everything was running smoothly, and there was George Burns, waiting to be introduced.

He looked at Jayne and smiled and said, "Hello, darlin'."

She smiled back at him and said, "Hi, God!"

He laughed as he went out the kitchen door into the main ballroom, calling back to her, "I'm not really God!"

“But with all due respect, Mr. Burns, yes, you are and yes, you were when you were alive. Just because you wore sneakers and a baseball cap when you played God in the movie Oh God! didn't make you any less God than someone who wears a minister's robe or sackcloth and ashes. There’s only one life, and that life is God, and that life is our life now.

“So, if you want to know what God looks like, look at everyone you see today, but most of all look in the mirror at yourself and when you make eye contact, smile and say, "Hi, God!" (from Science of Mind magazine)

Beauty, which is God, is in the eye of the beholder, the thoughts of the beholder. And Sue really made that point in her reading this morning from The Velveteen Rabbit. We’ve been talking about prosperity this month, and this morning I want to focus on abundance in a way that is so powerful it absolutely opens up the flow for our good, which is God, to show up in our lives.

Now notice I didn’t say opens the flow to come to us. Because prosperity actually flows out from us. Did you get that? Prosperity flows out from us, not to us. It’s generated from within us, not from outside of us. To experience prosperity, we have to BE prosperity.

How are we to BE prosperity? The first thing we have to do is to understand God in a very different way than most of us have been taught. H. Emilie Cady, the New Thought pioneer and author said, “God is not a being with qualities or attributes, but . . . is the good itself coming into expression as life, love, power, wisdom.”

So you see, as Eric Butterworth says, “God is not loving, God is the allness of love. God is not wise, God is the allness of wisdom. God is not a dispenser of divine substance, God is the allness of ever-present substance in which we live, move, and have being. And this is the subtle but vitally important key on which the entire structure of spiritual economics rests.” (Spiritual Economics, p. 14)

God doesn’t do it to us. We ARE the activity of God. We are God acting, God in action. What we must come to understand and move beyond believing to knowing is that the substance of God, the Source of God, our Good, is everywhere all the time. We can’t store it away somewhere, and we can’t lose it. It’s Consciousness. It’s ideas. Substance is Spirit. It is pure energy. And it’s movement, it’s flow.

Eric Butterworth says, “It could be said that when you realize your relationship to the dynamic Universe, you are forever in a field where you can drill for oil and bring in a gusher every time.” (p. 19)

You see, the only real treasure is “what we think and feel, how we visualize our relationship with things.” When we’re aware of our abundance of God-substance, of Consciousness, then we can feel rich no matter what the checkbook says. We have to feel abundant first, be abundance, then the flow cannot be stopped.

I was telling the Principles of Financial Freedom class the other night that being abundant isn’t about things, it’s about freedom. And I was reminded of a time when I was working at a big accounting firm in Denver. And there was a gal whose dream was to have a white mink coat. So her husband bought her a white mink coat for Christmas. And she wore it in to work one day. It was a beautiful coat. But the whole time she was at work, she was completely obsessed with the coat, afraid someone might steel it. It definitely did not give her a sense of freedom.

We need to be very clear about what we really want. Will it bring us freedom? What we always want, if we can be honest enough with ourselves to get deep enough to see it, is a greater experience of some spiritual quality like freedom or love or wholeness or beauty. So what we come to realize is that we already have those things within us. They’re in our perception, the way we see it, our thinking.

It’s the circle I’ve talked about recently: how our thoughts and feelings produce actions which cause us to have experiences which we perceive in certain ways that cause us to form beliefs. Those beliefs dictate our thoughts and feelings, and on and on we go repeating the same old patterns.

But we can change the pattern by changing the thinking. And one of the most powerful ways of making that change is combining feeling with thinking. It’s the feeling of what we’re thinking that causes the action, the movement of the energy.
Just like Boy was the one who made Rabbit real, you are the one who has to make your thoughts real, powerful, with your feelings. I love it when Eric Butterworth says, “The Universe owes you a living!” Now he’s “not saying that the world owes you a living. Actually, the world owes you nothing. You are a creative expression of the Universe, with the responsibility to let your light shine. Thus you owe the world a life. But in all the many ways in which you apply yourself in the world, the Universe owes you complete support.” (p. 23)

In Tomorrow’s God, Neale Donald Walshe writes of the 10 illusions of humans. See if any of these sound familiar.

Can you imagine what your life would be like if you really didn’t believe you needed anything? If you absolutely knew you couldn’t fail? If you truly understood your unity with all? If you had no judgements whatsoever? If you always knew there was enough of everything? If you never felt less-than? Or never felt that you don’t know enough?

And imagine what the world would be like if everyone really got it! Our whole economic system would change. Our whole idea of wealth would shift from trying to generate profit to generating wealth, from trying to get more possessions and power to simply having access to everything and happiness.

Several years ago my daughter accepted a job with Nike at their headquarters in Oregon. She hadn’t been out of college very long, and she was still paying back her school loans, and she was living on a very limited budget. During this time she would often call me, back here in Maine, or wherever we happened to be, and I would encourage her to start seeing abundance everywhere she went. When she was out running, to notice the infinite number of blades of grass, the flowers, the leaves on the trees, to be in wonder at the opulence of the earth as much as she possibly could. I also encouraged her to start attending a Science of Mind center, which she did. She enrolled in the SOM I class and started to apply the principles she was learning.
When she began, she was renting a room in a low-income building, eating a lot of peanut butter. By the end of the class she had purchased and was furnishing a beautifully spacious 2-bedroom condo. That’s how her changed thinking, from lack and limitation to abundance and freedom, showed up.

So one of the ways we can BE prosperity is to begin to see and feel the abundance and richness of life everywhere we go, everywhere we are. Tell yourself, I’m rich like a hot fudge sundae. I’m rich like a magnificent sunset. I’m rich like a thick, velvet curtain. I’m rich like holding a newborn baby. I’m rich like a brocade silk dress. I’m rich like a piece of pecan pie. I’m rich like the fur of a mink.

Do whatever you need to do to make yourself feel the richness of life. I want to close by sharing with you something I used to do when Bill and I had the cottages on Swan Lake. Early in the morning as the sun was rising over the mountain across the lake, I would sit on the porch swing overlooking the water and see God in everything. It brought me to such a place of gratitude for everything. And I would sing my gratitude in a song.

(Sing) I love you, God, as the mountain. I love you, God, as the sunrise. I love you, God, as the clouds. I love you, God, as the sky. I love you, God, as the water. I love you, God, as the eagle. I love you, God, as the waves. I love you, God, as the loon.
And so as we go into our spiritual mind treatment this morning, I’d like to invite you to join me in this chant, and as you sing, add your own words, whatever comes to your mind to feel gratitude for. And just allow yourself to feel that richness of life within you.

I love you, God, as this Center. I love you, God, as the music. I love you, God, as the sunshine. I love you, God, as the birds. I love you, God, as each person. I love you, God, as my life. I love you, God, as my body. I love you, God, as my life.
Truly our lives are rich like velvet.