May 14, 2012

• Love and light are interchangeable

• Individuals are identified by color of their lights

• Spiritual light compared to candles

• No judgment on one type of loving relationship over another

[Note: Message received shortly after President Barack Obama stated his support of gay marriage.]

God is the light. God is the nourishment. God is the sustainer. God is the source of all that is truly good, all that is truly loving, all that reaches and embraces and enfolds, uplifts and comforts.

So often we refer to the Spirit Center as light or love. Both concepts are in fact interchangeable. If you ask what light is, our answer to you is love. Pure light is pure love. If you ask “what is love,” the answer is light. What is pure love? It is pure light. If we look at light carefully, we recognize that light is bright, it is brilliant, filled with warmth. The color of white is the totality of all colors; darkness—the absence of all colors. When we say that God is light and we refer to the purity of that light, we’re saying God is a combination of all colors.

Since light is love, love is also the combination of all colors. It means that love does not discriminate. Love is all-inclusive. Love contains everything. Love is everything. Light contains all colors. Light contains everything. Light is everything. Light and love, love and light require the presence, the acceptance, the inclusion of all.

So often you are asked to be all-loving, to become loving, to be nonjudgmental, but what does this mean? The answer is simple and yet difficult. The simple answer is that love includes All That Is. If you are to become fully loving, then you must become fully inclusive of all that is created, all human beings—whatever their personal direction, whatever their personal path may be. Loving all means containing, embracing, accepting all. If you wish to live a life reflective of the reality of God, you must live a life that embraces all.

There is no single group of people who are outside of your embrace. You do not embrace humankind selectively. You embrace humankind. You don’t merely embrace human beings, but you include All That Exists.

Everything that you experience belongs to that experience. There is no stone along your path that does not belong there. There is no challenge to health that does not belong there. No human being lives a life without difficulty. No human being lives a life void of friendships. The friendships that we speak of may be few in number but are strong in faith.

All that you experience belongs to that experience. If it were not to be so, do you think God would permit it? God is all-powerful, but that does not mean that God eradicates all stones along the path. Human life is filled with such stones, but human life is also filled with all that nourishes.

You are asked to embrace those challenges. Some challenges are relational between individuals, between groups of individuals, between communities, between nations, between religions, between philosophies, but all this serves a purpose. When you become aware of these challenges, you ultimately must accept their belonging. If you have a neighbor who creates much difficulty for you, you can choose to ignore that person, or you can choose to find a way of embracing that challenge. The person who is the thorn in the side is of no less value than you.

To live a life that is loving means you must find grounds for such loving—some grounds, something that you can look to directly and see a common bond that unites you. You have one color, one type of energy. Your neighbor has another color, another type of energy, but when you combine all of these energies, all of these colors, what we see is a pure light. It is not green or blue. There is nothing that dominates the light. It is a great purity.

Each of you, as you know, has different lights. That is how we identify you. We don’t see you as male or female, young, old, tall, short, thin, large. We identify you by your light, by the color of your light. That color changes as your spirit energy changes, but each of you has a light, and as you join your lights together, then you create the purity which is at the center of spirit.

The question arose about “bringing down the light.” It is a metaphor, but there is great wisdom, for when you gather the light, you are gathering one another. You are gathering the bond that joins you, which when combined is the pure light. When you encourage the light to be brought, you are encouraging each light.

If you are in a large room and everyone in the room has a candle, and you invite each to bring a candle to the front, the brilliance of that combined light is overwhelming. The warmth of that light is strong and powerful and affirming. If someone were to observe what is happening from outside through a window, that individual would see an intense brilliance but a brilliance made up of countless individual candles. That brilliance cannot be created from one candle. It is only the result of combining all.

That is what we ask of you, of each of you. You must bring the light to yourselves. You must take your own lights and bring them to others. You must do what you can to combine the spiritual presence of each. That is the light that we see. That is a strength that comes also from the practice of corporate worship, a corporate turning toward God. It is the strength of praying together. It is not the prayer that is so important when you gather but rather that you gather. If you pray, if you sing, if you cry together, you are together. You are bringing the light together. You are sharing. You are becoming in your many, in reality, one.

In society, you must learn the power of inclusion and a complete rejection of exclusion, for there is no “someone else” and “me.” There is only “we”—inclusive we, all of us. That is what exists. There are many single candles, but they really are part of the totality of pure light. When you see evidence of a rejection of the “we” and a separation into what is “other” and what is “me,” you are blocking the very intention that God has for human beings, that being the acknowledgment of “we”—the acknowledgment of group, the acknowledgment of equality, the acknowledgment of nonjudgment, the acknowledgment of an embrace.

How is it that in some cultures when strangers are introduced, they embrace, they kiss, and yet they have no understanding of one another, and then there are people who know one another and construct their relationship through the building of a barrier that separates them one from another? How is it that as one often hears, “familiarity breeds contempt,” that is absolutely impossible, for if you get to know another truly, you recognize what joins you together, and that becomes the dominant light—the light of equality, the light of love, the light of being loving.

Light, therefore, represents All That Is. When you allow light to illuminate your path, you are inviting and accepting All That Is to be encountered on your path. There is no rejection. Consequently, as all belongs, there is no need for fear. Do you experience fear? Of course, but you experience fear because you are in the process of becoming loving. As that process unfolds and develops, the fear subsides.

Can you experience pain and yet be loving? Of course, but you do not surround yourselves with a cloak of fear. As your faith, as your love, as your embrace of life expands, there continues to be a decrease in what can be allowed as fear. Ideally a life of perfect loving embrace knows nothing of fear, for all that occurs is considered to belong to the experience of human life.

You live and therefore you must accept what life is. Life is temporal. Human life as you know it always is extinguished as is a candle, but the candle’s mission is not to dwell on its own demise, but rather to flourish in its purpose of warmth and illumination. A life that is warm and loving is a successful life. Life is not measured in length of time, but rather in the light that it reflects and the light that it absorbs. The light that is absorbed is the nourishment for the reflection that comes.

Your lives have meaning because of your light. Your lives have meaning because of your willingness to reach out, to accept, to embrace, to be loving. All life in human form is described in this way. For those who don’t learn to be loving, there are other opportunities, for no life is fully lost. There is something that is gained from each individual who experiences the world as a human being. There are those human beings who interact with the world with great clarity, with great presence, but there are also those whose clarity is less developed and whose clarity is less noticeable, and both lives, both characteristics, have a place at the table. Both types of lives have a candle. It makes no difference what color that candle is. The light is the light, and combined with all others it’s bright and pure and warm and affirming and loving.

When we talk of the Creator, the Spirit Center of All That Exists, we speak of a combination of all light. We speak of the inclusion of each candle. There is no candle that is insignificant. There is no light that is less important. Each light contributes as each light can contribute. There is no judgment of one light versus another.

Therefore there is no judgment of one human being over another. There is no judgment of one type of loving relationship over another. All relationships that are loving affirm that light.

What do you do when you’re constantly surrounded by those who deny the presence of that light? You have to accept and embrace those who hold views of denial, for they are on their paths as you are on yours. Your path is no better or closer to God than theirs. Each individual, each soul has its own journey. One path leads in one direction; one path leads in another. There is nothing gained by devoting your energies to putting down the light of another. Whatever light it is you observe is the light that is to be observed. Allow that observation into your own experience as a loving presence, and find ways of affirming the value of that light, even when it is a different color than your own.

If all candles were the same color, there would be no purity to the light. They would all be of a single hue, and that would not be accepted and recognized as the purity that is sought. Therefore, embrace those colors that are different. Embrace those lives that are characterized in far different ways from your own perceptions, and realize that all lights are part of the purity that is God’s light.

Bring down the light. Bring all the lights to the front—those to the side, those above, those behind, those below. Bring them together, not just acknowledge that they are there, but bring them together and you will each experience the purity that is God’s love, the purity of light that is the center of all creation.

You are blessed in the light. You are the light. Your presence is essential to the purity of God’s light. Be comforted, be warmed, be guided by the glimpses you have of that intense celestial, spiritual, personal, godly light always.

Amen.