[U]nderstanding teaches us that there can never come a time when we shall stop progressing; that age is an illusion, that limitation is a mistake, that unhappiness is ignorance. This understanding will rob man of his loneliness and give him a sense of security which knows no fear, a peace without which no life can be happy, a poise which is founded on this peace, and a power which is the result of the union of peace with poise.
--Dr. Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind
Greetings, my dear Heartlighters,
First an excerpt from the opening passages of Richard Bach’s Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
And he said unto them, “If a man told God that he wanted most of all to help the suffering world, no matter the price to himself, and God answered and told him what he must do, should the man do as he is told?”
“Of course, Master!” cried the many. “It should be pleasure for him to suffer the tortures of hell itself, should God ask for it!”
“No matter what those tortures, nor how difficult the task?”
“It’s an honor to be hanged, glory to be nailed to a tree and burned, if so be that God has asked,” said they.
“And what would you do,” the Master said unto the multitude, “if God spoke directly to your face and said, ‘I COMMAND THAT YOU BE HAPPY IN THE WORLD, AS LONG AS YOU LIVE.’ What would you do then?”
And the multitude was silent, not a voice, not a sound was heard upon the hillsides, across the valleys where they stood. And the Master said unto the silence, “In the path of our happiness shall we find the learning for which we have chosen this lifetime. So it is that I have learned this day, and choose to leave you now to walk your own path, as you please.”
In these few paragraphs from a quite extraordinary book, we who are on the path of spiritual evolution recognize a profound truth… well, several really. We know that we have already received our life’s mandate, and that it comes from the Divine Presence within us. Our mandate is joyfulness. We know that there is no special virtue in suffering; in fact, it is our ability to view even the most painful of life’s circumstances from a spiritual perspective (thus skipping the suffering) that is a virtue.
When we recognize that we are meant to be happy, we are able to return to joy…return to love…even after we are hurt, wounded, even devastated, by things over which we have no control. Yes, we must walk our paths, “as we please,” because it is we who are in charge of that path. There is nothing outside of us that determines our destinies or our choices; to believe otherwise is one of the illusions that we must abandon as we evolve into the full-fledged heroes and heroines of our own life stories.
This Sunday, Rev. Linda will be our teacher, and will be sharing with us her thoughts on the illusions we encounter in our lives. I trust we will leave our Sunday Gathering with precisely what we need to know as we move with purposeful joy through our continuing human adventure.
Love is alive, and love is all there is,
Rev. Lauren
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