LENT TO EASTER AND BEYOND
Charles Fillmore, who with his wife Myrtle, founded the prayer and healing movement we call Unity wrote in his introduction to Lenten practices in his book, Keep a True Lent, "The desire to excell is in all men. It is the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, which ever urges us on through earth toward heaven. It should be encouraged and cultivated in the right direction."
Our community has been engaged in Lenten studies and practices in order to not just cultivate but to participate with the Holy Spirit in building a deeper relationship and dependency on God. Our Sunday Lenten lessons are part of an ongoing series of studies
to reawaken each of us to the grace of God and to the power of using our common difficulties, pain, and suffering as entry points for God into our living experiences to heal our woundedness and indeed move us to a higher level of consciousness,"through earth toward heaven".
We are using Keep a True Lent for individual daily studies and our Sunday lessons are based on some truths found in a book by Wayne Muller called Legacy of the Heart which is about healing children who have suffered deprivation, abuse and family pain. While this book is a powerful one for healing the residual pain of childhood suffering, we have found that
it is also an excellent reminder that the difficulties we all experience in our daily lives can be gifts to us if we let them become entry places for God to heal and restore us.
As Muller says, "your life is not a problem to be solved, but a gift to be opened." Pain, loss, suffering, disease, death,difficulties, betrayals come to and affect all of us. As Teilhard de Chardin once wrote, "there are tears in things". There are indeed, tears in the human experience. However, the great gift of life that indwells each of us is greater, more powerful and stronger than any circumstance or situation that any of us may encounter in earth experience. And God, the life and the great Giver of life, uses every difficulty, pain, loss and suffering as a place to enter into our experience as the spiritual antidote to all.
Here are our Lenten explorations:
February 10: Doorway of the Spirit--"Pain or Forgiveness"
February 17: Doorway of the Spirit--"Fear or Faith"
February 24: Doorway of the Spirit--"Obligations or Loving Kindness
March 2: Doorway of the Spirit: "Obligations or Loving Kindness"
March 9: Doorway of the Spirit: " Scarcity of Abundance"
March 16: Palm Sunday--- "Down These Same Mean Streets". We look at the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and gain spiritual insight into our own behavior, both new and repetitive. How did the donkey get home? Where did all the cheerleaders go? What is next? We know. And we are planning ahead.
March 23: Easter Sunday: " Resurrection Now". Celebrate Easter with us at our last service on del Curto Road. After almost 50 years we are moving. Join us to greet past ministers, for prayer, for remembering, for celebration. Food, Gifts, Music, and New Life.
March 30: "Life after Easter" We are celebrating our first Sunday as guests of Holy Cross Lutheran Church from whom we are renting space until our new church home is finished. Join us at a new time and enjoy a meal with us after our first church service in new place. Changes, changes, and great life after Easter.
April Schedule:
We are continuing our series of lessons called Doorway of the Spirit until May. Join us as we continue to examine the issues of human experience as doorways or entry points for the activity of God to co-create conditions of spiritual growth and good not only for each one of us but every one with whom we come in contact. Adversity creates a tension point through which an opposite power of good, GOD, can enter and change our experience and the experience of our world for the better. We are growing together.
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April 6: Doorway of the Spirit-- "Sitting up Mud, Grandiosity or Humility". Which allows
God speedy entry? Need a little ego paring. This lesson will do it for you.
April 13: Doorway of the Spirit--"Hearing From Others" Some of our leaders take the speaker's stand to bring us into unity and cohesive prayer and joint spiritual work during this interval time of building. If you are a member, an attender, or interested in how we are managing this period of waiting and growth, come. And remember waiting is growing time, too.
April 20: Doorway of the Spirit--"Busyness or Stillness" in today's world, there is so much noise that it is increasingly difficult to hear each other much less, the still small voice that would speak, guide and pronounce its love for us. The choice is ours. We can dilute our spiritual energy with much busyness and activity or we can be quiet and discover our strength and the abundant possibilities of our own being.
Busyness is an entry point for God to expand the fertility of spirit throughout our experience with the practice of "being still and knowing" It.
April 27: Doorway of the Spirit--"Disappointment or Nonattachment" Detachment is a tool of spirit. For many of us disappointment and regret or a major part of our human experience. Most of us have not learned to pay attention to what we are attached or simply cannot learn to detach from that which comes from unrealistic expectations. Letting God and Letting go is the key.