October 30, 1996

• Dealing with family patterns

• Continuity of life and lifetimes

• Difference between faith and hope

• Relinquish sense of urgency

God welcomes each of you into the assembled collection of spiritual lights. You are all lights. Each of you burns brightly. At times, the lights are intense, filled with love and compassion and presence. At other times, those lights are fearful, filled with concerns, doubts and anxieties, but that is okay, for you are living the lives you’ve been given fully.

Each of you has much to contribute to life. You have that presence, you have an energy committed to the exercising of your faith. Your faith is indeed based on a vision— knowledge based, you may say—but it is the faith that provides courage and a concept of what human life can hold. Lives of faith recognize the importance of the human condition, whether that condition is filled with joy or despair.

There is great value to all that is experienced. Indeed, there is value to pain, discouragement. You grow through your frustrations and angers as well as your celebrations. There is no emotional experience that does not in itself provide the potential for growth. Even hatred and acts of disrespect toward others contain the potential for growth. For one who is disrespectful of another, there is always the possibility for renewal. This renewal may come about in the current life experience or in another. Much depends on the individual. Be that as it may, it is good to recognize that all that you experience carries with it the potential for greater faith—yes, faith based on knowledge, not the blind faith of which you spoke earlier.

Exercising faith is much like experiencing life as it was presented to you at an earlier time. You exercise your faith based on your past knowledge and current knowledge and awareness. You experience life based to a large extent on your own prior human experiences—some in this life, some, perhaps, in an earlier life.

Earlier you spoke of the impact of parents on your lives. It is true that one frequently parents as one has been parented, but the cycle never remains completely unbroken, for each of you has the responsibility of carving out your own perspective of parenting. The challenges you face are different, far different from the challenges of an earlier generation. It is not to say they are more difficult now, merely different. But one tends to repeat what one has learned from past experience.

There are those who suffer in an abusive relationship who go on to become the abuser. Logic would dictate that if one has been abused, one would never become an abuser. But experience indicates otherwise. We are, more than we acknowledge, the product of our past, both conscious and subconscious, both of this life and of a previous existence.

Your lives are governed much by your spiritual development. Individuals who have reached high spiritual levels of sensitivity in their growth cannot but be sensitive individuals. One who has learned little about sensitivity and retains much of what was learned about aggression has few options outside that of being aggressive. Modeling is indeed important. Your lives are shaped by the models that you have experienced. It is not to say that you are stuck in a kind of continuity begun in another generation. That is not really true, for each has the power of choice. The individual who is not presently strong enough to exercise that choice repeats history. Those who do have the strength to become compassionate individuals are the ones who change the direction of society, who change the direction of their families from what was expected. Each of you can recall moments in your childhood when events occurred that were totally repelled by you, either emotionally or physically. That reaction remains with you today in some form or another.

You were not born on a given date identified as your birthday. You began this portion of your total life on a particular birth date, but your lives have continued for long stretches of time prior to your birth date. You are therefore a product of your past, as you have heard so often, but you are also responsible for your present and your future. How you respond depends on the view that you have achieved. It is a matter of how you are aware of your spiritual selves, of what it means to be loving and compassionate, of what it means to be free. Your expressions of love are an acknowledgment of that freedom, that compassion, that ability to love. That freedom provides the framework for your exercising of faith with knowledge.

Your relationships with parents do affect your relationships with children, but they also affect your relationships with others in general. If your understanding of self was to be self-sufficient and strong and self-respected, then that is the way you continue. If your experience was otherwise, then you are drawn in that direction in the future. As you evolve, it is important to recognize the impact that each of you can have on your own lives: your ability to take charge, your ability to initiate, your ability to reject—reject what you consider to be negative. All is not a centrally determined pattern that you fall into.

Your growth in this life has much to do with the initiative and responsibility that you exercise. That initiative is shaped by the vision of which we have spoken. That initiative is given character by your faith as it relates to that vision. Faith is essential to your growth for this reason. It is the result of vision, and it provides the impetus for action. Hope does not carry with it the implication of action; faith does. If you have faith, you can willfully respond in a direction with the conviction that that is an appropriate response. If you have hope, you are also filled with doubts, with uncertainty. Being surrounded by such uncertainty, you cannot act with conviction.

One who lives by hope rather than by faith lives as a victim lives. One hopes that life will present itself in a certain direction, but at the time one is also subject to whatever happens. One is never controlling what is happening. One living in faith is never a victim, for knowledge, vision does not belong to a victim. One becomes a victim when one has no vision, when one has no knowledge. One is without a sense of direction. This is a passive kind of living. It may be characterized with hope, but it is still essentially passive.

Our belief is that when you exercise faith, you are living an active life. You are committed to making a difference. You are committed toward the well-being of another or the well-being of the group or community. You are committed to the potential that you have to make a difference. Such is a life of faith. Your faith is what provides the foundation for all of life. It is not something to be taken lightly, but nurtured, burnished, polished, given attention, given time, given patience. Then faith has a chance to grow and strengthen.

A life of faith is a goal-oriented life, but a life that is also oriented toward the advancement of everyone. A life of faith is a life centered on a recognition of the real presence of God. It is not a life of deadlines, for deadlines can lead to disillusion. If you set a goal of worth but you place over that goal a perception of time by which the goal must be met, you are not leading a life of faith. There is no sense of time in a completely faithful life. What is important is important. It makes no difference when that goal is achieved, only that the goal be achieved.

Each of you must learn to relinquish your sense of urgency and be committed to doing what’s right. Urgency does not belong to that. It doesn’t mean that we feel that there is no value in trying to move forward quickly, but that such an issue of time often clouds a sense of what the true goal is. If you work for peace and pray for peace, what is important is the achievement of peace. Peace is no less a goal if it takes a hundred years to achieve than if it takes one year to achieve. It is only important that the movement be directed toward that peace. For many, of course, when there is no peace at hand, there is much suffering, whereas if peace were immediate, the suffering would be reduced. So it is understandable that there is interest in time, but that interest –fixation, by many—on time, reduces the clarity of vision, the actual goal…namely peace.

If you overlay time in your vision of a goal, and your sense of time and the achievement of that goal are far different, you can become bitter and impatient. Such emotions reduce the effectiveness of the prayers you make for peace or for any goal. View the goal, then have faith in the ability to bring that goal to a reality. Whether it happens quickly or it only occurs and is achieved after great lengths of time should not be a concern. If your goal is to expand your compassion toward others, what’s important is the compassion, not that it be achieved next week, next year, or ten years from now. It is important only that you move toward the goal of compassion, recognizing that you can no longer be impatient. Keep your eyes on that goal, whatever it is, and recognize the rightness of your pursuit. Allow yourselves the human freedom of temporary setbacks as well as great successes, for that is a part of the journey, that is a part of the search.

We pray for your abilities to become more independent, more creative, more willing to take risks when you see the connection between those risks and the goals that you seek. Recognize the effects of the past upon your present. Acknowledge those influences that are positive as well as those about which you are not pleased, and then go about the business of formulating what you perceive to be an appropriate next step. If that means rejection of the past, then you must reject it. If it means embracing the past, then bring it within you fully, making it a part of who you are.

Look for ways of recognizing goals, goals that affirm God’s presence. Allow yourselves the opportunity of living in faith, which means a life of action and control—not dominance, but control. Reject the life of victimhood. Reject the life that is centered merely on hopes. Cast an eye around you and you will see the great light which belongs to God. You will see the path. You will see the best way of getting where it is you choose to go. Have faith in your ability to achieve those goals, for the goals that you seek are indeed a part of the abilities that you possess.

Your experience of living is vital. It has purpose, it relishes in outreach and results in your own spiritual growth and the enhancement of the spiritual lives of everyone. You are blessed in that life, you are blessed in this company of souls who work together to promote love and peace, compassion, and all other activities that affirm the value of God’s creation.

Amen.