May 29, 2009

Sexual Orientation and the Pursuit of Happiness

These values are enshrined in our Declaration of Independence as inalienable rights of every American.

Generation after generation, people have fought to get rid of the "....except for"s: except for blacks, except for women, etc. Today, we challenge the latest prejudice to raise its ugly head and seek to repudiate the fundamental American dedication to freedom and equality for all. The idea that there should be God-given life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness "except for gays" is unworthy of our national character.

Posted:05/09

May 07, 2009

Mother's Day Proclamation

The "Mother's Day Proclamation" by Julia Ward Howe was one of the early calls to celebrate Mother's Day in the United States. Written in 1870, Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation protested the carnage of the American Civil War and offered a passionate demand for disarmament and peace.
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by Julia Ward Howe, 1870

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

Posted:05/09

April 27, 2009

Pray Away the Swine Flu

Dear God,
Please take away the swine flu.
Amen

According to Martin Luther King, Jr. there is a power in us more powerful than the power of bullets.

King knew that that power was the power of the Spirit. Call it a religious power, a spiritual power, the power of consciousness or whatever - it has to do with the power of the mind, joined with the power of a Divine Creator.

So don't be fooled when it comes to this conversation about the swine flu. This flu wasn't created on the level of the body, because no disease is. It was created on the level of the mind, and it is there that we will root it out at the causal level.

Posted:04/09

March 30, 2009

Refueling Detroit.

For six years, I was the spiritual leader of a big church in Warren, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. I lived in Detroit for a total of ten years; I feel I got to know the place.

Of the thousands of people who attended the church, and others I got to know while living in Detroit, most worked in some capacity, directly or indirectly, for the automobile companies. It's basically a one-industry town, as everyone knows.

My main impression of Detroit was of trapped light. Just beneath the surface - and it was a hard surface, no mistake about it - was the spirit of ingenuity and creativity that characterizes the best of America everywhere. But a corporate aristocracy runs that place, not only financially but socially. Their attachment to an old-paradigm capitalist bottom line of short-term economic gain for corporate shareholders no matter what, has kept the rank and file workers under an iron thumb for years But that doesn't mean the rank and file has been happy.

Posted:03/09

March 26, 2009

From A COURSE IN MIRACLES

Doing my lesson from A COURSE IN MIRACLES today, I came across my favorite paragraph in all the material:

"Simply do this: Be still, and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God."

--- from Lesson 189, "I feel the Love of God within me now."

Here the Course calls us, as does Zen Buddhism, to radically empty the mind of all it thinks it knows, in order to learn the only things worth knowing. According to ACIM, enlightenment is not a learning, but an unlearning. We have to unlearn the thinking of the world (ego), in order to learn the ways of love (Spirit).

M

Posted:03/09