Lent Season

Take Up Your Bed & Walk

Lent is a time of seeking personal transformation.  Easter is a celebration of that transformation.  The story told in John 5:1-15 about the man healed at the Pool of Bethesda represents far more than a simple physical healing.  This story demonstrates a transformation in consciousness which then manifests as a physical healing.

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Praying Our Way to Wholeness

"To Live Until We Die"  --Kubler-Ross

God is the Source of all Being, all substance and an unfolding universe of infinite possibilities.    Learning to express more  of our true nature, our God self, leads us out of limiting thought patterns and into an understanding Faith in God as our Father.  When challenges arise in our lives, we are better able to seek underlying meaning in what is happening and to grow through those events.

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Transformational Living

Forgiveness: Part II

I’ve just finished reading “The Shock of Conscience” by Rob Baker in Parabola Magazine in the issue on Forgiveness. He begins his essay by noting that we seldom equate Broadway musicals such as Les Miserables with “serious ideas of a spiritual nature. The musical glossed over the inner struggles of Valjean and Javert in spite of several powerful songs. Baker wrote:

“The miserable ones are not so much the starving masses or the politically oppressed as they are the spiritually bankrupt, those individuals who cannot forgive others or themselves.”

Both men came from impoverished backgrounds, Valjean serving 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread and Javert becoming a “self-appointed prosecutor of the Law”. Valjean, the thief, is saved and redeemed through the power of loving forgiveness. Javert, the policeman, is driven to extremes of vengeance because of his complete inability to forgive.

Valjean sought to transform his life in the midst of social and political chaos, learning from and growing through his suffering. Javert, driven by hatred and the turmoil of an inner rage, denied even the possibility of hope and redemption. Valjean ‘won’ through acts of compassion for and surrender to Javert.

“…the real revolution remains an inner struggle for clarity and wholeness…an acceptance of his suffering and something higher that has come to rule his life.”

Is it possible that Valjean and Javert are the opposite sides of the same coin? Is it possible that our inner conflict comes not from the world around us, but from the unforgiven/unforgivable within us? We teach, preach and practice forgiveness of others, but have we learned to forgive ourselves as well?

Rev. Claudia Naylor

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A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

The Discovery of Inner Space

The sense of balance and perfect peace which comes with finding one's center is pure joy. Eckhart Tolle quotes the phrase This, too, will pass to point the way through adversity and unanticipated changes. My Mother's preferred version was And it came to pass. The key, here, is in not getting hooked into roller coaster emotions, but maintaining a sense of perspective. In A New Earth, Tolle wrote:

Once you see and accept the transcience

of all things and the inevitability of change,

you can enjoy the pleasures of the world while they last

without fear of loss or anxiety about the future.

He went on to say that it is through detachment that we gain a higher point of view which allows us to see and experience the wholeness of life as a journey rather than as a specific event. Last Sunday I talked about making choices without expecting or demanding the cooperation of others. If I choose to arrive at work early and get organized for opening, co-workers may choose to let me do all of it. I can get angry and self-righteous at being "used". Or I can acknowledge that my choice is just that--my choice.

Tolle defines nonresistance, nonjudgment and nonattachment as the path of true freedom and enlightenment. And in a helter skelter world, it is also the path of peace, a life focused on the journey rather than the destination.

Rev. Claudia Naylor

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Jesus Christ Heals

Healing Through Praise and Thanksgiving

Living with an attitude of gratitude consciousness is essential to fulfilling our purpose on Earth as the sons and daughters of God. We co-create the world we believe in by seeing it to fulfillment, not by dent of hard labor and suffering. And we know that it is so much easier to give praise and thanksgiving for that which we have already demonstrated in our lives.

Yet it is by praising the good which we desire in our lives which "releases the pent up energies of Spirit within man" according to Charles Fillmore in Jesus Christ Heals. God does not withhold our good from us, but awaits the seeker's understanding to reveal that which is. Our healing, our wholeness is not external to we ourselves, but intrinsic to our true nature.

Instead of a heaven after death,
the new Christianity teaches a kingdom of
the heavens existing now as a righteous state of mind.
It teaches that man makes his heaven here and now
by the formative power of his thought.

Every story in the Bible is about more than the simple facts of the story. In the story of the loaves and the fishes in Matthew 14:13, Jesus gives thanks for what is already evident (the 5 loaves and 2 fish) and blesses the potential for that which is needed. The miracle isn't an event frozen in time, but the teaching and the demonstration of the riches of the Father as our instant, constant and abundant supply.

When it dawns upon man that he has
within him the primal spiritual spark of God,
the living Word or Logos,
and that through the Word he is (linked) with the
original Mind, he has the key to infinite soul unfoldment.

Nothing is impossible with God! When I begin first by praising and giving thanks for all the good I feel and see all around me, my soul leaps up with joy and I begin calling forth all the good I desire!

Rev. Claudia Naylor

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Jesus Christ Heals

"Producing Results"

Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, co-founders of Unity, demonstrated the healing power of faith in God through transformative thinking. Believing in and affirming that "I am a child of God and therefore do not inherit sickness!" allowed Charles and Myrtle to overcome their own health challenges and lay the foundation for a world-wide prayer ministry.

Charles Fillmore wrote in Jesus Christ Heals that healing must follow the inner realization of our own true nature.

"I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly."
Jn. 10:10

When we recognize it and open our
consciousness to it, it comes flowing into mind
and body with its mighty quickening, healing power,
and they are renewed and transformed.

If I truly believe that the perfect life of God dwells in me, then I ought to demonstrate perfect health in mind and body. Yet, I do not. Last Friday I had meals on wheels to deliver and a long list of new mothers and their infants to visit at Southern Regional. When I got up that morning, my left knee was giving me fits and I informed it that I didn't have time for pain. For the next three hours, "it" was a non-issue. But the minute I finished the last visit, the pain came charging back!

Now, clearly, my mind was fully capable of setting aside pain and the limping it would trigger for three hours but then allow it to return without a conscious decision to do so. Even though it really hurt, I had to laugh at myself for "playing" such a stupid game with mind and body. The glimmer of belief begins in the mind, but must be irrevocably linked to inner faith and conviction before the outer demonstration of wholeness can manifest.

Rev. Claudia Naylor

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Jesus Christ Heals

"Be Thou Made Whole"

Modern medicine 'creates' miracle upon miracle, yet all too often it feels as if our lives are overrun by disease, dis-ease and discomfort. The disease of the moment seems to be 'swine flu' because of the current media frenzy. Is it just me, or do you find yourself wondering why we find ourselves suffering from, if not dying from, diseases our grandparents never even heard of or never worried about if they had?

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