September 13, 2007

• Seek not perfection but receptivity

• Being faithful to the great truths

God speaks and God listens.

God responds.

God loves.

God comforts.

God is, always. These are the great truths that all human beings must ultimately come to believe and to hold fast within.

You are not asked to be perfect, but rather you are asked to seek. You are asked to listen and to observe and to feel and to respond. No component of that challenge is ever perfect, but a response must in the end be exercised.

There is too much emphasis in human form on perfection—perfection of personality, perfection of behavior, perfection of response, perfection of ability, perfection as lovers, perfection as friends, perfection as supporters, perfection as providers. You cannot expect to achieve such perfection, not because it is not possible in some fields, but rather because it cannot be measured in any absolute ability to achieve. What does it mean to be perfect in love? What does it mean to be perfect in anything? What does it mean to be perfect in spirit? What does it mean to be perfect in your careers as human beings, as doers, as creators? There is no definition that is unchanging.

To seek perfection is to seek failure. To seek perfection is to assure imperfection. To devote your efforts to defining what you feel to be an appropriate “perfect” is to miss the opportunity to discover that perhaps what you seek as perfect is flawed, and that perhaps the potential that is of value is what you should be seeking. Each of you must remove the desire for perfection and replace that desire with a commitment to being receptive. The human life that can be measured as successful is perhaps best defined in its ability to be receptive.

Your lives may be enormously successful, yet you’ve invented nothing, you’ve perfected nothing. You may have accomplished nothing in the eyes of others, yet nevertheless your life is a gift, a gift to others, a gift to humankind, a gift to the progress of the spirit, your own spirit, the collective spirit of all.

So often we urge you to be open, and so often you pray for that openness. When you pray for relief of suffering, it is not so much the relief. It is the receptiveness to the reality that God is a part of what you experience, and that your experience is part of an important process of the spirit. A successful life is a life of receptivity, of receptivity to what is around you, to who is around you, a receptivity to the potential for giving, the potential for loving, the potential for affirmation. You are asked essentially to become more aware of the potential that belongs to your own path of spiritual development. This potential is not a promise of one hundred percent achievement. It is a pointer, it is a kind of compass that helps direct your way.

Every being is blessed with potential—those who are disturbed deeply, those who are relatively free from the demons that seem on the surface to derail the train of spiritual growth. There is no human being without potential. There is no criminal. There is no one who has been created without potential. The potential you are given differs from individual to individual. No one has a greater value of potential than another. For some, it may be scientific or artistic or social benefit. For others, it is a potential of thought that leads to a greater understanding of life’s meaning. For others, it is the potential to express love. A young child has the potential of expressing love to another. It is not always realized, but the potential is there. Even to smile is a valued potential because that smile brings warmth to another. That smile can express far more than words. If an individual has no capacity to speak or hear or to see and yet offers a smile, there is a communication that takes place that is utterly profound. It is a gift as big as the potential.

You are challenged in your lives to find ways of discovering your own potential, to find ways of reaching beyond your own individual concerns, looking beyond the edge of your own path to discover the beauty that exists alongside your journey. No human journey exists in the total absence of sustenance. The sustenance can be others. The sustenance can be nature, a beautiful sky, a sunrise, a sunset, scenery which warms the heart and inspires the soul. There are many scenes along the side of your current path. The journey that you take is not sufficient when all you see is the pavement that lies before you. The journey is enhanced, and is part of the character of which we have spoken, by what lies to the side.

How often have you taken a trip and found yourself making a detour or taking a wrong turn and discovering something about yourself or someone else or nature that was more enriching than remaining on the chosen road? Don’t ignore the beauty that lies around you. In seeing that beauty and acknowledging it—the beauty of the person who joins you, the beauty of the glance of someone in the distance—allow that beauty to be taken within. It is in such instances that your journey is enriched and enhanced and given meaning.

Yes, the destination is important. You want to know more about God, but you will learn about God, not just from the details of your own path, but in the diversions and excursions that occur along the journey. You are asked always to be faithful. Think of this term carefully. Faithful…full of faith. If you are full of faith, there is less opportunity for pain, for self-doubt, for worry and anxiety. There is simply no space. You are full of faith. You are not asked to be knowledge-full. You are asked to be faith-full. Faith does not imply full knowledge, for it is then no longer faith. Faith is a belief in what you cannot concretely identify, and yet rely upon. You believe and yet you do not know. You know of your belief and you may be confident of what you have faith in, but it is nevertheless something less than absolute and unchangeable.

You are asked ultimately to live your life full of faith. We assure you, having faith in a Spirit Center that guides your life, that is the direction and goal of your life, is a faith well placed and will never let you down. You have times, of course, when you are less full of faith and that is a part of being human. But what you have faith in as it relates to your perception of God will never be disappointing. Allow those moments when your faith is weak, and embrace those moments when your faith is strong. Nevertheless, in those moments in between, find ways of filling yourself with faith in God, with faith in us.

Fill yourself with faith in others. It does not mean that others will bring you no harm, no pain, but filling yourself with faith in others is filling yourself with a conviction that there is a validity in all others. There is validity to their path. When they stray from that path, when those detours create struggle and pain and death in others, you cannot defend what creates pain but you must have faith that that individual is also on a spiritual journey and that spirit will, in the end, become as much a part of God as all other individuals become a part of God. There is total equality. All is different individual to individual, but all is essentially equal in spirit.

It gives us a sense of pain to observe the suffering of many, but we have faith that that suffering will be a part of the journey that does end in complete love. It is part of the journey. When you are discouraged, there is no joy in that discouragement. We are not in some way affirmed by that discouragement, but what we see is potential. What we see is the possibility of your becoming something greater than you are. Being faithful, therefore, requires a constant acceptance of God being, of God existing, of God loving, of God directing.

Be faithful every day. Begin your day full of faith. Begin your day lovingly. Welcome the potential of each day. Accept that you are imperfect and that the perfection you seek that day will not be achieved, and that is okay. It is in the striving, the seeking, that the day is won. It is not in accomplishing. Remove, therefore, the expectations that draw you toward your perception of perfection and substitute for that the faith and the value of your efforts, the value of your being alive, the value of your encounter with what the day offers. Beginning the day in receptive perspective assures that in the end of the day you can reflect and realize that you were held in God’s hand, you were led across the gaps, you were presented with challenges that are important for you. All that you deal with belongs to the pattern of human life, the pattern whose details are not determined and declared by God, but whose character is.

What is it that God wishes of each of you? To be faithful, to be loving. There is no simpler truth, there is no more difficult goal to seek and to devote your lives to…faith and love, faithfulness and loving. As you become more faithful, your lives will become a manifestation of faith, just as in directing your lives to becoming loving, your lives move towards being love. Living your lives in God’s light requires only faith and only love. There is no demand for perfection. There is no need to compare. If you are faithful and loving, there is no room for competition.

Be what it is you are. Relish the potential that is a part of your own life. Accept the potential of all human beings, and be faithful in the growth of love and the human condition generated through the Spiritual Center that guides and protects you all.

Rest in faith. Rest in love.

Amen.