October 4, 2012

• Asking questions of denial or discovery

• Candidates for election

• God provides strength to prevail

The Lord who is your Spirit Center, your Light, your Life, your Nourishment, your Counsel and Comfort is with each of you at all times. You wish to see God, and you may see that loving presence clearly, not through the eyes but through love, through the heart, you might say.

The power, the loving presence that is God, permeates every element, every particle of what it means to experience human life. God’s presence is with you through your concerns about health, about peace, about people, politics, power. God is with you in all relationships, and we mean all relationships. There is no encounter that you experience at whatever level that is engaged in while in absence of God. That simply does not happen.

You are given life by God. You live with God. You engage with God. You transition with God. You live by spirit alone with God. All That Is is with God, and All That Is exists because there is a God. Too often you look for tangible evidence of the Spirit Center, of God’s loving presence, as proof that God exists.

There are of course many naysayers who sincerely believe that God is a concept rather than a reality, but God is a reality. You may deny the existence of spirit. You may deny the existence of a soul. You may deny the existence of pure love. You may make many denials, but such denials do not change what is. Rather they give evidence to a kind of a spiritual blindness or a desire not to see for fear of what it may reveal.

If you feel you have much to hide, the last thing you would wish for is Light. That fear or that desire to hide can be very conscious, but it also can be hidden from your own view. Human beings, after all, do not have full understanding of who they are. Yours is a process of becoming clear, a process of learning about self, and thereby a process of learning about others. But human life still remains a process. For some, that process is characterized by denial—denial of who they are, denial of who others truly are. For other individuals, there is less denial, and their lives are guided by a wish for self-discovery, not of one’s importance but of one’s relationship with what is surrounding and encompassing one.

The questions you ask are questions of discovery. They’re not questions of denial. The more you discover, the more you understand the extent of what you do not know. One who is fully unknowing may be blissfully happy. Another who has great insight may be plagued by great doubt and fear and anger. Discovery in itself does not bring joy. Discovery in itself does not bring peace. Discovery itself does not lead directly to love. But discovery does lead to more understanding, and it is by encountering that understanding that you move toward love, that you move toward peace. That understanding begins with inquiry, and you inquire about the nature of suffering, the importance of politics, the details of a relationship.

Our experience of your lives can best be described by looking out onto the ocean. You see the waves, you see the currents, you are aware in part of what resides beneath the surface, but you are not seeing each detail of what every molecule of water is encountering. Those individual encounters are part of the collective relationship that all molecules have to one another and to the wind, the planets, the sun, the moon.

Our view then is a view of the ocean. We see the currents. We see the wind. We see the tides. We know each moment that the tide moves in and pulls away and moves in again. We see human life as the sea. All that is contained within the sea belongs to the sea. The sea has its rhythm. The sea has a kind of design in which seas respond in like ways to similar situations. When there is a change in temperature in one ocean, the response is very similar to a change in temperature in another ocean.

We therefore have a view of human life, its behaviors, its tendencies, its trends, its characteristics, and we also understand that the way human life evolves is not unlike the way life evolves elsewhere in different forms. The sea behaves according to its surroundings because that is what seas do. Human beings behave according to their surroundings because that is what human beings do, that is part of what it means to be human.

Issues of politics may differ in details, but political momentum is political momentum, whether it is in your country or in another land. Politics behaves as it does because that is what politics is. That is what politics has always been and will be. The presence of military is important to some societies but is unimportant to others. The function of the military does not vary in significant ways from one timeframe or locale to another. Certainly there are various specific details that make for some difference. The military behaves as it does because that is what the military is.

Where does this all lead? The sea changes, the currents, the tides are such that we can observe an evolution that leads toward calmer waters, but in reaching the shore, even the mightiest seas make a transition of sorts. Large waves become smaller waves, become ripples, and eventually are still and are absorbed, and their nutrients reach deeply.

All citizens in your nation have their own concerns—concerns about their own well-being, concerns about local well-being, national, international well-being, the well- being taking many different forms: economic, political, military, philosophical, spiritual, emotional, social well-being. The desire for well-being and the desire to find what seems to be the best route are common to all.

As you approach this time of change—the possibility of new leadership, the continuation of current leadership—each individual must find which candidates resonate with their definition of stability, of well-being, of balance. As each group may seek different forms of well-being, the answer to the question of who matches its concept most closely will be varied. You cannot lose respect for those whose opinions you do not share, for those opinions are based on what appears to others to be firm grounds, just as your own opinions seem to be based on what is reasonable. You are deserving of the respect of others just as they are deserving of your respect. No leader will come forward to govern in a way that eliminates all that is necessary to uplift and uphold. All candidates have their own flavors. All candidates provide alternatives. All candidates have their own personal objectives which may or may not be visible to others, for each candidate is human, filled with what blesses your lives and what provides pain in your lives. Candidates do not live apart from those surrounding them.

Your concerns are well-founded because you care, because you feel a commitment to doing what according to your reality is for the best of all. There will be bumps in the road. There will be moments when you perhaps doubt your own fulfillment of objectives that you feel are meritorious. Regardless of the outcome, the progression of human dignity, the progression of human life will continue. The tide will come in and nourish the land. There may be times when the tide pulls away, but the tide always returns, and nourishment always takes place.

There will always be agony. There will always be frustrations. There will always be pain. But there will always also be moments when you feel your desires for what you believe to be the best are being fulfilled.

No leader will be all evil or all good. All leaders have both light and darkness, positive and negative energy. You cannot expect leaders to bring to their responsibilities a wholly selfless, nonjudgmental approach to their responsibilities. You may hold yourselves to be very moral, very ethical, very honest, very caring, but each of you also has within elements that are not at the level of all that you would hope for in others. This is not to condemn you but to assure you that all human beings share these characteristics.

Your lives are filled with these seeming inconsistencies between what is positive and what is destructive. Health is both positive and destructive. Living—just the act of living—is both positive and destructive. You grow and mature and you gain greater understanding, but you become aware of destructive elements in your own lives—health issues, relationships, emotional issues.

Your lives are no different from one another. They may have varying characteristics but are essentially not different. There are those whose lives are plagued by continuous challenges, and there are those whose lives appear to be less challenged. For some spirits, there is the capacity for enormous endurance. For other spirits, such endurance is less developed. But all human beings are given all that is needed to prevail over what transpires in their lives.

By “prevailing” we do not necessarily mean full recovery, perfect health, emotional balance, financial security. Prevailing means to grow. Prevailing means to be somehow greater, stronger, deeper, more sensitive, more loving than before. As we have said so often, you are given human life to experience human life, but we can also say you are given life to prevail. Regardless of what you face from day to day, have faith that God provides you strength to prevail, strength to evolve, the strength to grow however that growth may be measured.

As human beings you can choose to grow or you can choose to stay in one place. That is a choice all human beings can make. You can give up and feel totally defeated, or you can be challenged and determined to overcome, to prevail on some level. No human being prevails on all levels, but every human being can be seen to prevail somewhere, in some form.

The evolving of spirit does take place constantly, just as the evolving of societies, of nations constantly takes place. A nation that seems bent on the destruction of others or its own destruction can still prevail in ways that are measured by other yardsticks.

Society is not coming to an end. Your nation is not coming to its end. Your nation is not being brought to its knees regardless of the outcome of elections. There are always a series of detours that must be taken. In one result, you have one set of detours. In another result, another set of detours. But the objective that you ultimately seek will be reached.

Allow yourselves the luxury of seeing how you relate to these important issues, and have faith in your own judgment of where to go, what to do, how to get there, but also a respect for the beliefs of others whose paths seem so remote from your current journey.

God is with each of you. God is with your nation. God is with all people. God is with all nations. God is with all societies. You can know this to be true, and you can live your lives with that certain knowledge.

You are blessed in that view. You are blessed in your searching. You are blessed in the quest.

Amen.