The "F-Word"

Sunday, March 9, 2014

          If you do any texting you’re probably aware of the way phrases are shortened. We have LOL for laugh out loud; IMHO for in my humble opinion; K for OK (the letters O and K are apparently too long to type); TTFN for ta-ta for now. And then there’s this one: WTF!

          I got to use this phrase just a few days ago. I was speaking with Unity Worldwide Ministries inquiring about the process for signing up just to come to the business meeting.

          “Well, the business meeting is part of the Annual Convention, so signing up for the convention includes the business meeting.” ($450.00)

          “I understand that but I only want to come for the business meeting, not the convention. My intention is to drive into town, spend a night, attend the meeting and drive home.”

          “OK, in that case we have a smaller convention package that includes admittance to the Assessment Discussion and the Annual Meeting. That’s $200.00”

          A little surprised and a lot frustrated, I politely ended the call and said to myself WTF!

          A few years ago, maybe two or three minutes before I was to begin a wedding ceremony, one of the members of the wedding party got right in my face and started shouting at me.

Caught unawares by this, I took a minute after the encounter to sit down and I thought, WTF!         

Have you ever had that experience where you go to anger over something, or you get blasted unexpectedly by someone and you say to yourself, WTF!

Yeah, that’s right, I use the F-word. I’ll come right out and say it. I don’t just abbreviate it; I actually say it, “Work That Forgiveness!”

(What, you thought it was something else?)

The fundamental tactic that’s taught in A Course in Miracles as the path to peace is forgiveness.

Jesus, in LUKE 5:17-26, there is the story of “Jesus healing the paralytic.” In the story, the friends of the man take him to see Jesus, and the crowd is too packed into the building where Jesus is speaking. There is no more room. So these friends do what any loyal set of friends would do; the carry the man onto the roof, take the roof apart – make a hole in the roof, and lower the man into the building to Jesus.

Imagine it as if it were happening right now. You’re in this room and it’s filled to capacity, and by capacity I mean like a big city subway car at rush hour, so many people squeezed in you can barely catch your breath. Then, all of a sudden the ceiling starts to fall down upon us because a handful of friends really, really wanted their paralyzed friend to be in here.

There’s a metaphor for the kind of intensity we need to have in our willingness to be exposed to, experience, the truth. In other words we will do whatever it takes; we’ll be vigilant to get to where we need to be for healing.

So what does Jesus do?  Make a big scene of it? (What I’m going for here is a Hollywood style tent revival kind of thing) No! Luke 5:20 reads, “When he saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven you.”

Simple and straight to the point (and because of the faith present), “…friend, your sins are forgiven you.”

Doubts and objections are raised by the Scribes and the Pharisee’s, the authoritative guardians of the word as they thought of themselves.

Have you ever had a glimpse of the truth only to be shouted down by the seeming authoritative voice inside that says, “You can’t do that?”

The concept of authority is important in this story.  Let’s read the rest of it: “Then the scribes and the Pharisees began to question, “Who is this who is speaking blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” ²² When Jesus perceived their questionings, he answered them, “Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? ²³ Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’? ²⁴ But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the one who was paralyzed—“I say to you, stand up and take your bed and go to your home.” ²⁵ Immediately he stood up before them, took what he had been lying on, and went to his home, glorifying God.”

Do you think that only God can forgive what we traditionally have thought of as sin?

Take another look.

Jesus uses the F-word where you’re concerned. He says that you have the authority to forgive… on earth. Right here, right now, on earth; not in some distant time or place, not when you’re “good enough,” and certainly not in heaven; the idea of sin doesn’t exist in heaven, so neither does forgiveness. You have the authority to forgive right here right now.

Have you ever said, “I just can’t forgive him (or her)?”  Well, yes you can, Jesus just said so.

Forgiveness is a powerful healer. Before I tell you another story consider this: Charles Fillmore (co-founder of Unity) in his wisdom made this very powerful statement, “It is through forgiveness that true spiritual healing is accomplished. Forgiveness removes the errors of the mind and… harmony results in consonance with divine law.”

I would say the errors of the mind that forgiveness removes is the idea that someone else, or yourself, is somehow “less than” as a person.

This week I received a pamphlet in the mail titled, “The Freedom of Forgiveness.” In it is a story written by Tom Baker, a former Catholic priest.

Baker writes that he and his father were very different. He a vocal believer, his dad a vocal atheist. Baker an optimist, dad a pessimist.

There was tension between them that turned to ice once Tom was ordained a Catholic priest. At that point they barely spoke.

About a year into his priesthood Tom’s father began to attend church sporadically, always sitting up front.  He writes that he would see his father nod his head in agreement when Tom said something positive about God.

“As a priest you get to know people as they are,” Baker writes, “You visit them when they’re sick, you hear their confessions, you listen to their prayers, you know their secrets. The effect this had on me was to open my heart to the struggle we all have being human – and there was my father, another struggling human. My dad started to be a person in my mind rather than a disappointment.”

Soon afterwards Baker’s parents announce to him that they are going to become Catholics. “I was shocked and asked my father if he had started believing in God. And he laughed and said, "Heavens no, I haven’t started believing in God! I believe in you…”"

“…I heard his respect and warmth and trust…At that moment I chose that he be a person to me…”

“Most of my life I was a person and he was a role that he was playing in a way not to my liking. When he said he believed in me it broke open my heart and I let him be a person.”

This is forgiveness.

 “Forgiveness is not for other people, it is for ourselves so we can get well and heal.” (Max Lucado)

Forgiveness is an act of radical self-interest.

If you have a struggle with another person, or yourself, please always remember that you have the authority to forgive. You have the authority to see another person as a person and thus begin your healing and wellness.

One of the things forgiveness can do is make you feel better. So if you have a struggle with another person or yourself, drop an F-Bomb. Shower them, and yourself, with the healing power of forgiveness.

Lobsters, Butterflies, and Cake

          Last week I ended by talking about oysters. This week I’ll begin with lobsters.

          Lobsters are said to be protected by the shell that a full-grown man could stand on while the lobster is in the water, and not harm it.

But this shell that protects the lobster also confines the lobster. The lobster cannot grow past the size of its stationery and protective shell.

In order for the lobster to grow, it must shed its protection which means it willingly becomes vulnerable. Underneath the shell, there is just a thin, pink, membrane skin, the consistency of wet, tissue paper; the lobster is vulnerable.

So, the lobster has a choice to stay protected and forever remain the same, or to be willing to risk everything to grow. Most of the time, the lobster will choose growth – even if it is risky, and causes his life to be shaky for a period of time.

We, too, must choose growth, spiritual growth. Spiritual growth can happen when we choose to view life from a higher perspective; a perspective higher than a judgmental and critical mind.

Some of us grew up in the Fifties. We remember those black and white shows on the little 6 inch screen. Those shows seemed very simple, sweet, and idyllic. No matter what was going on, it all happened quickly and within half an hour, there was a happy ending.

Many of us got conditioned to think life was really supposed to be, like “Ozzie and Harriet,” or “Leave It to Beaver.”  Possibly we thought life was supposed to be really easy and that we would never have any real conflicts come into our lives.

I believe that one of the reasons why Christianity or any religious approach is appealing. It appeals because it promises to make life easier; it promises that God is good, and it promises there can be an ease in our lives.

But challenging things keep taking place in our lives, often we can't quite figure out whether it is happening to us because we fail to understand God,
or perhaps we are being taught a lesson, or maybe we are misapplying God's ideas somehow; and we ask what am I doing wrong? Or we affirm, “I must be doing something wrong.

When we say that, “I must be doing something wrong,” we affirm incompleteness; but remember what I said last week, “We are whole people living in a whole universe.” We are whole people who make errors and errors can be corrected.

It takes a little bit of being tested, a lot of contemplation, seeking, a lot of prayer, a lot of guidance, and asking around in church, a lot of going out into the world and serving people—to help us understand that we are not misapplying the biblical principles, that things actually are just perfect the way they are. Puzzling, isn’t it? I’ll un-puzzle that for you in a moment.

To help understand this process, imagine what a caterpillar might feel like if it were crawling across a Persian rug. From its point of view crawling across that rug, it must encounter a lot of strange things
before its eyes. It probably would make no sense with colors changing right and left. It would just seem like a mish-mash of colors and feelings, just like life sometimes appears to us.

But one day, when that caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it can fly over that very same rug, and it will see something else. It will be able to see
the patterns of color in that rug and it will all make sense. It will see that there really was a design to the mish-mash. That design of the so called mish-mash is based upon the outworking of “The Law of Life (or we could call it biblical principles)” which we might define this way: The spirit of God working through our consciousness = the experience of our life.

So that un-puzzles why things are perfect just the way they are: the spirit of God working through our consciousness equals the experience of our life.

It’s not that we misapplied the law; the law is dependable and only works one way. There is however one variable there - your consciousness - and you can choose what you want to hold in your consciousness again and again, and again and again, as often as needed.

Here’s an article I read online.

“Have a bite of flour.

Yuck!

A little baking soda, then?

Blech!

How about a raw egg?

Ick!

A spoonful of cooking oil?

Nasty!

Maybe a little sugar? A nip of vanilla? A bit of chocolate?

Yeah, those sound good … but all by themselves?

The individual ingredients aren’t very appetizing, yet when they are mixed together and cooked in a hot oven, they come together to form a beautiful and mouth-watering cake.

The individual ingredients of life often aren’t very appetizing, either.

Yet mixed together throughout a lifetime and cooked through love, they form a rich and lovely life.”

There are really only two ways to respond to our experience of life, with love or with fear. When we respond with love, whatever is touched by that love begins/continues to heal.  When we respond with fear, yes we do deepen the pain and struggle… however, there is something much more important to realize; when we respond with fear we are really deeply calling out for love.

Our job is not to set things aright, that’s (God’s job) the job of unconditional love. Our job is to see things aright; in other words, that our experience of ourselves and others is either an extension of love or a call for love.

Seeing things aright is a vital step in allowing love to do its healing work.

I have given you three metaphors for a higher vision this morning. It is so important to have a spiritual vision for our life and to have that higher point of view, and to look at our life with some perspective to see the underlying design or pattern, like the butterfly; to look at our lives and see that the ingredients of our life may be un-tasty at any given moment but combined together with an awareness of the Presence of unconditional love (God) and the extension of that love into everything we express, feel, and think (to the best of our understanding) heals what needs healing; to look at your life and to put down your defenses, be vulnerable so those old constricting ideas can be healed, enlarged, enlightened by love.

It becomes very important how we respond to life in the moment.

Contemplate this. Contemplate your life, just the way it is. Everything is an extension of love or a call for love.

All the yucky ingredients, all the dizzying mish-mash of feelings, all the tender vulnerabilities you are willing to uncover  are your opportunities to bathe them in love and heal your life.

And you can do it!