March 15, 2011

[A devastating 9.0 earthquake and tsunami hit Japan on March 11, 2011]

• What “being in the Light” means

• The timing of death

• Bodily death compared to molting

• All that is created eventually becomes the Creator

• Prayer is what you are, not what you do

• The earth, along with everything else, is evolving

You are in the Light—you who gather together, you who are beyond this group, you who are living in fear, uncertainty, anger, you who feel somehow forgotten, you who rejoice, you who give thanks—all are in God’s Light. What does it mean to be in the Light? We refer to this often, but it is not a concept that is fully grasped by all.

Being in the Light does not mean all is well in the world, all is good, all is peaceful, all is loving. Being in the Light means being illuminated by the loving spiritual presence of the Creator. When you experience sadness caused by any event or loss, you are in a position of being attended to by the loving presence of even one other human being. We spoke of comfort. Being in the Light means you are able, you are vulnerable enough to be comforted. If you are in the Light, there are other human beings who reach out to you, literally or figuratively, through prayer, through actions, through simply thinking of you.

Being in the Light means not being in the darkness, the emptiness. Being in the Light means not being forgotten. Being in the Light means your spirit finds nourishment in the experience of Love. It does not mean the absence of pain. It does not mean the absence of loss or fear or anxiety.

All human beings are in the Light. When you recognize this, you acknowledge that you are never lost. You are never forgotten. Your lives are never pointless. Your lives are never “wrong,” as you might wish to define them. You are in the Light, not only in your need, but in your total lack of awareness of God. You are in the Light when you feel you have veered off some chosen path. You can’t hide from that Light. There is no place you can go that is in full darkness, for darkness implies no energy. All life has energy, and therefore all life has Light.

When human life ceases, it is not an extinguishing of that Light, but rather a transformation, a converting of one form of energy to another. The question was raised about the timing by which human life stops. No human being is given life with an expectation that a certain goal must be met. There is no specific certain goal. There is only process.

The certain goal of God is becoming completely and unequivocally Love. That is what God is, and that is what all spirit becomes. But human life is not about becoming Love. Human life is part of a process of becoming loving. There is no threshold one must cross to move from being loving to being Love. It is an evolution. It is a gradual transformation. You do not live life to reach a specific degree of lovingness, after which you transition to our life. The transition of all human beings is not governed by a kind of logic. It is not something that is specifically measurable.

When precisely did each of you become an adult? You cannot answer that, and yet you can say when you observe others that some seem more mature than others, but you cannot say in any specific terms that someone is now mature, for what does it mean to be mature? Can you be an adult chronologically and yet possess the wonder of a child? If you can, when does that adulthood begin? How do you define adulthood? How do you define maturity? You are speaking of process, of evolution, the process of becoming, the condition of evolving, transforming.

It is helpful to consider human life and the transition to our plane of life as similar to your transition from childhood to adulthood. You recognize when one is a child, you recognize when one is an adult, but you don’t recognize when that change takes place.

Human life is really a part of a greater transformation. Just as some seem to mature earlier than others, some make the transition to our life-form earlier than others. You see this as a condition of life versus death. We don’t see that. We don’t see you alive one moment and having died at another moment. We see all human beings in a process of transformation.

When there are events such as you are keenly aware of—earthquakes, fires, floods, events with enormous loss of life—you wonder what is the significance? What is the reason why this should happen? What determines who continues in human form, who continues as spiritual lives?

There is no answer that is understood by humans because it is impossible to fully comprehend continuation of spirit. When an animal molts and casts off one kind of covering for another, some animals of the same species will molt completely before another, but that animal is the same entity, the same animal. You can understand that continuity. The human body is a kind of molting layer. Eventually it becomes meaningless, and what continues is what is being housed by the body. So there is no discontinuation of that which is essential, just as the animal discards its outer layer and in the process reveals something new, something beautiful, something changed.

Your work as human beings is not measured by some degree of accomplishment or achievement. No individual is faultless. There is no specific yardstick for anyone. When you feel those nudges to make a decision, you can be assured that in the greater scope of what is real and what is essential, what is permanent, that no one makes a decision that is eternally wrong. You may make decisions that are consonant with your current style of life, or you may make decisions that are dissonant with such accompanying life. But whether or not such actions are consonant or dissonant, they all lead in the right direction.

When you pray for guidance, you’re opening yourselves to those nudges. You’re opening yourselves to many possibilities. Choosing one set of actions means that you will not choose other options, and that is okay.

Much of human life can be relegated to varying degrees of guilt. Such guilt serves to restrict and not to enable. Guilt is human response to regret in rejecting another option. But when you fully embrace the reality that everyone is becoming loving, then you can be assured that whatever direction your path seems to be taking, you will still be moving where you must.

When you pray for guidance, you’re merely allowing yourselves to be nudged. You are not trying to find the one and only route to get from point A to point B.

You are created by God, and because of that simple reality, you will become God. You are not created by God because you may become lost. All that is created is good ultimately. All that is created eventually becomes the Creator. That is an unalterable truth. You become what you become. Your path is your path. If you make detours from that path, you still arrive at the destination of being Love.

When you pray, it is not necessary to form those prayers into words, for prayer has no words. If you choose to use words because they give the process of prayer validity, then by all means employ them. If you pray and feel there is no need to transfer that state of spirit into words, don’t use words. Prayer is a state of the spirit. Prayer is a condition of the soul. It is that state, it is that condition, that facilitates the growth of the spirit, the growth of the soul. Prayer is the nourishment. It is not a process—it is a condition. Prayer ultimately is what you are. It is not what you do.

You can indeed be prayerful just by being. You can be prayerful by surrounding another with loving thoughts. You can be prayerful in your sleep. You can be prayerful in your expression of anguish. Even acknowledging a pain that you feel is a way of being prayerful, for in the acknowledgment of that pain, you’re acknowledging God’s response. When you recognize pain and do not ask for God’s response, the response is there anyway.

So human life, as a process of evolving, is the condition of prayer. The process of life is the condition of prayer. Merely by being alive you are in the Light. Being in the Light, you can never be fully unaware of its existence. You may feel consumed by darkness, surrounded by darkness, but you also know somehow, in some way, there is Light. That acknowledgment of the existence of Light, even when it is difficult to see, is an experience of prayer.

To your recollection, the earth seems so much more chaotic now, and yet the earth is also in the process of becoming. It is in a process of change. It has always been in a process of change, just as from the moment of your conception you have been in a process of change. You don’t recall that earliest moment of development, but it was nevertheless reality. You’re not aware of the changes that have occurred on earth beyond the most recent past, as you identify it, and yet the earth in its creation became an entity because of prior changes, prior evolutions. It is not in some way devolving into greater chaos than ever before.

You are given life-form on an entity that is itself evolving. You and the earth, you and the solar system, you and your particular universe are all in a process of evolution, a process of becoming—becoming something that appears different from what is its present. You as individuals are becoming something that is different from what you see. The earth, the solar system, your universe also share in that evolution. There is nothing that has been created that is immune to change. On the contrary, everything that has been created has been created as part of a change.

You are more aware of change around you than in previous generations. You are more aware of change than civilizations further back than your own awareness of their existence. In order to find peace and balance in your lives and in your experience of the world around you, you must accept that those changes—whether human life to spirit life, whether one form of geologic activity to another—are part of what it means to be in the Light, part of what it means to be created. Accept your place in creation. Accept your place as part of all that changes, and be confident of all as being in the Light.

You are blessed by the Light. We are blessed by the Light. That illumination is permanent, for it is illumination of Love. Be still in your acknowledgment of Love.

Amen.