"we pray for blessings,
we pray for peace,
comfort for family,
protection while we sleep.
we pray for healing, for prosperity,
and we pray for your mighty hand
to ease our suffering;
and all the while You hear
each spoken need,
yet love us way too much
to give us lesser things..."
Laura Story's incredible song, "Blessings" still fractures every splinter of ego-preservation. And this live performance is one I cannot listen to - without having the last linch pin of all pride removed.
Here goes: I am so tired of feeling like a spiritual failure. There, I said it. There was time when I would have been afraid that if I posted a statement like that, I would have signed my own "death" warrant as a spiritual healer. I have since learned that this is not only not the case, it is actually the opposite of what is true.
There are a few things that have, over the last few decades, become supremely clear to me:
1) when judging one's relationship with God -- according to the model propounded by a prosperity gospel culture -- Jesus, Mary Baker Eddy, Gandhi, Mandela - and almost every spiritual luminary that I admire -- is a failure.
Jesus didn't heal Judas of his betrayal, Mary Baker Eddy didn't "heal" the lawsuits filed against her by her son and closest confidants; Gandhi wasn't able to stop the violence perpetrated against his people, and Mandela didn't escape from prison.
2) Measuring one's spiritual growth by human accomplishments, achievements, and the accrual of possessions is, at best, a false model. It takes only the most cursory reading of the gospels to discover that "things" are not indicators of God's love for us. Otherwise, Jesus just didn't cut it -- no home, no camel, few possessions.
3) The spiritual can only be seen and experienced spiritually. It is one thing to know the spiritual nature of "home," it is quite another to equate that knowing with bricks, mortar, mortgages, and deeds. I keep coming back to "I have a body, I am not my body." And in kind, "I have a house, my sense of home is not validated by a house."
Having once lived in a small spiritual community -- where everyone thought they knew what was absolutely and unequivocally true for everyone else -- I discovered that although spiritual cultures grow out of a common love for a fundamental Truth -- they often resort to judging one another to give a false sense of structure and order to their community.
What seems to have occurred, throughout history, is that cultures do what egos - individual or collective -- always do. They form hierarchies in order the sort their "members" into bad, good, better, best. And in order to do that, they have to decide what practices and measures will be used to assign individual placement within those hierarchies.
Within "spiritual" cultures, most of these measuring indices are based on judging the words and behaviors of "others" in ways that that can be quickly sorted by one's compliance to culturally determined policies and rules. Instead of temperance, we rely on abstinence. Abstinence is easy. Abstinence allows us to make a black or white assessment based on what we see -- or assume. We can look at someone and quickly determine if they are practicing abstinence. In contrast, temperance is almost impossible to judge from the outside. It is a practice that relies on self-knowledge and self-control. It is contingent on one's relationship to an inner moral compass. Only the person his/herself truly knows when they are being temperate in their consumption of chocolate -- vs. gluttonous or abstinent.
For example: Imagine that your model is temperance. And the behavior in question is drinking coffee. You walk into a restaurant and see a member of your community sitting in front of a cup of coffee. You might even see them pick up that cup and take a sip. Where abstinence is the model, you can immediately judge that person's compliance to the cultural "rules." But where temperance is the model, you have no idea whether it is their first or fifteenth cup of coffee. You can only trust that there is divine sovereignty governing their every choice. You greet them, smile, and turn to your own practice of what is right - for you!
It is relevant here to note, that in her definition of the word "Moral." on page 115 of Science and Health with Key the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy lists these qualities of thought, word, and action:
"Humanity, honesty, affection,
faith, hope, compassion,
meekness, temperance."
But cultures resist accepting these qualities as the true standard of free moral agency. Primarily because they cannot be measured from the outside -- only from within the sanctuary of one's relationship with the divine. Not having an easy measuring stick for where someone fits, is frustrating to cultures that thrive on hierarchies of behavior to determine place and power, achievement or failure. How do you know if you are better than someone else, if you can't decide how good (or bad) they are. Cultures feed on comparisons.
Now let's take it a little further -- with an experience I had some years ago.
Being in the public practice of spiritual healing is humble work. Our daughters were navigating the twists and turns of a community -- one that truly believed it had established its standards - for judging one another - on Jesus' teachings.
An opportunity to participate in an activity was presented to the girls. But it was one that was costly. The girls were concerned that the expense was more than our modest family budget could absorb. We prayed about how to proceed. When they were asked if they would be participating, they said, "probably not, this might be too much for our family." The person in charge of the activity said -- without hesitation: "Then your parents might want to pray more diligently about how to demonstrate the supply necessary for you to go."
There was no recognition that our daughters had prayed, and that they had been given the humility and grace to say "no," to the invitation, and that they were bringing remarkable courage to the moment. There was little appreciation that this was an opportunity for "growth in grace' -- one that far-outweighed the activity in question. There was no acknowledgment that our family was demonstrating abundance -- in how we shared our resources and lived simply -- a lifestyle that honored our highest reading of scripture.
What if, as Laura sings, our blessings come as tears -- not peals of laughter. What if our healing comes in the form of a deeper peace, rather than the "fixing" of a human situation that we have deemed as a spiritual failure. What if, what society measures as a failure is actually the highest achievement in Christ -- the opportunity for growth in humility, patience, meekness, charity, forgiveness.
I am reminded of another statement that Mary Baker Eddy makes in Science and Health:
"Our disappointments and ceaseless woes,
turn us like tired children to the arms of divine Love,
then we begin to learn life in divine Science."
What if, our disappointments and ceaseless woes are not an indication of our failure to understand the Science of Being, but are actually the starting point for learning deeper lessons of spiritual consciousness -- the impartial and universal law of Love.
I refuse to let a false measure of what constitutes life in divine Science, make me feel like a failure any more. I demonstrate my love for God, by my love for God -- not in any other way. I demonstrate my understanding of Life through my moment-by-moment trust in the eternality of consciousness, not by more human days spent in this particular chapter of my eternal story.
I refuse to let the measuring stick of a culture - any culture - tell me anything about the strength of my relationship with God. This human experience is just a laboratory. It is not my "home." And at the end of any day spent in this laboratory, I return to my "home" -- my consciousness of Love. It is here that I am loved and nurtured - impartially and universally. This is where the only true measure of my worth is found in the eyes of my first Love -- my Father-Mother God. Here I am enough. And that is enough for me.
offered with Love,
Kate
