Skyearth Letters

Flying to Vermont in the middle of September for a week's vacation and writing down my thoughts for the next day's church service signaled a return to the place I came from. About three weeks before my trip, I had been thinking about putting together a service of some sort and getting June and Marilyn there and having some fun, but I couldn't figure out where such an event could held or what evening. Then, a week before I was to take off, Marilyn e-mailed me and said that the pastor of my former church heard I was going to be town the 19th and she was going to a workshop, and would I be interested in doing the church service? Ha! Sure, I said, when I called her, but be sure to warn people that I'm coming.

I conjured all week about what I would do, music I would share, poems I would include, and on Saturday, while waiting to get on the plane, I started writing my message to the folks who would come. By the time I got off the express plane in Burlington, it was done.

Here's what I said that Sunday:

"I do not want your worship," God said, reported Neale Donald Walsch in "Conversations with God." What a radical notion! The Creator does not want our worship. All the centuries that humans have been worshipping, praising God - a waste of breath, a colossal waste of energy.

What might have been different if, instead, we - collectively - had spent all that energy expressing heart-felt gratitude? Gratitude for the pure pleasure of having life!

We will never know what could have been if that radical notion had flourished. But we could - we could indeed - choose to change our concept of the God - the Universal Spirit - the Creator - from this day forward.

How could we have suffered millennia of presumably God-inspired, fearful behavior? Because somebody or bodies back there chose to do so themselves. Then they chose to relate their stories and codify them in what are now called Scripture.

If you need someone to tell you how you should be relating to the Creator, then perhaps you have chosen that path out of fear. How can we equate that base of fear with our other idea of God, which has also been bandied about for millennia...that God is love?

Ever stop and think that the two do not correlate? And yet, look at how that dichotomy plays out in our culture. Abuse victims fear - and love - their abusers. Ever stop and think how clearly that echoes what religionists have been teaching for centuries?

Abuse victims fear - and love - their abusers. Do not question any longer why an abused partner stays in an abusive relationship. The idea of punishment is thoroughly ingrained in the culture. We can turn to any media and hear rants about how we are going to hell if we don't repent and get saved...presumably by Jesus Christ.

Why would God have created hell? And why would God have created suffering? I suggest that we put the blame not on the Creator but right where it truly belongs..on our own humanity. I believe in my heart that the entity that has this universe and others swirling in the black night of space would not create the Hell devised by Biblical writers. I've been feeling for years that hell is a creation of the thinking of humanity.

The something that I feel a part of - Creation - is based in love, not hate - nor a reputed "born in sinfulness." I believe that the sickest thing that humans did to each other was to conjure up the idea of sin - that we're born in it - that we die in it unless we have been shriven or otherwise saved from it. We could not have engineered a more soul-deadening construct.

I offer you the idea that we are souls seeking physical bodies in order to experience ourselves. A different idea than the one so often promoted - that we are physical bodies seeking to grow our souls. Consider this: Our souls choose to come to this sphere, choose to break away from The Wonder of the Universe that is All That Is and inhabit a physical body.

Why? Well, here's a thought. All That Is is so far outside of our puny, conceptual capability that we cannot imagine it. But it has imagined us. In order for it to know its wonder though, it needs to experience what is not wonderful. That is our job. To be the experiencers. To live lives that, seemingly slowly, grow in remembering the wonder of All That Is. When we have remembered, then we may choose to return again to help others.

I read recently that the Dalai Lama is considered one such soul, more so than merely the reincarnation of a previous Dalai Lama. I could believe that. And perhaps that is why China invaded Tibet. For if Tibet had not been so desecrated, who can say that the Dalai Lama would have become so open and openhearted to the West? Without his kindly chortling joy in the world, our collective loss would be unfathomable.

But there are many places where joy in not present. And, you may ask, why is there suffering in the world?

As the Denver Post headline recently said, "Fort Worth asks why." And last April - "Columbine asks why." There is implicit in that question the notion that God must be doing this to us. How many times have you heard the phrase "it is God's will" offered as the reason, or for heart's ease, for an awful sickness or untimely death or natural catastrophe?

I suggest that it is a waste of time to ask why. It is certainly a waste of time to accept something as God's will. Why on earth would a Creator busy itself with orchestrating shootings, disease, earthquakes? To test us? Ah, only a fear-filled god might do that. One who needs that worship I talked about at the beginning. A tyrannical monarch with no heart. A lesser god. A god created by fear-filled creatures, as we became millennia ago as we lost touch with the earth and the spirits inherent in it.

I offer you this. We, us, all of us, each of us have thoughts that create a larger collective consciousness. Imagine our thoughts as energy - shooting out, pinging in other directions as thoughts cross. Merging, submerging, coalescing.

Somewhere deep within us is an element of our own tendency toward violence. A collective violence that seemed to spread over the earth 3000 to 4000 years ago. A human-to-human violence. A human-to-other-living creature violence. Would you say that it exists, though, in babies, when they are newly born? I don't believe so. But it can rapidly appear in a few years.

That collective consciousness impinges in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And, if you're with me so far, consider that souls return to take up an earthly existence having made some choices - of family, of place - all to learn something new about their selves, to experience a facet that they haven't remembered yet.

One could consider that the effect of our collective consciousness is modulated by the place in its journey that a soul has reached. The child who tortures and kills small animals seems to have not remembered very much in its soul's journey. When he becomes a serial killer, is it his lesson or ours?

Angry men seem to be constantly making news, and angry women are increasingly becoming part of the same picture. One of the by-products of women reaching toward an equal place with men in a still-male-oriented business world is that women were required to fit into that masculine mode if they wished to succeed.

The collective consciousness, while fitting the acceptance of equality between women and men into itself, was not ready to fit the feminine quality of nurture into the corporate spaces, except in the traditional places...you know what those are.

Think about this: we could, collectively, eliminate hunger around the world by changing our collective consciousness that it is okay to lock up food and make it inaccessible to the portion of the earth's population that doesn't have the money or the goods to barter for it. [By the way, have you visited The Hunger Site today and made a donation?]

We could stop our burgeoning population by changing our collective consciousness that the earth will provide endlessly and, if the earth dies, the chemists will provide. Know this: at 6 billion people on this planet (the last billion added in just 13 years!!) and an exponential decrease in the length of time it takes population to double - are you ready for more than 11 billion people in 50 years? The earth's natural resources are not doubling. And if everyone on earth lived as consumptively as Americans do, we would need 6 planets...now! If anything is a clear call for reducing consumption and reusing what we have - that piece of data is it.

Let's turn to a more positive note: "I am" are the two most powerful words in the world. Now, say "I am ......" Stop. What did you just say? Did you say a positive feeling word or a negative feeling word?

Why is an "I am" statement so powerful? It is a statement of being. It is a reality that you have implicit belief and deep faith in. As you think, so shall it be. It does not matter if the reality you currently experience does not yet match the reality you speak forth, but your statement has to come out of your deepest being. It is not something you say just in case it might work. The thought-word-deed construct suggests that doing things that enable the "I am" statement to be true would assist in its coming true.

The last thought that I offer is this: We have free will. Many religious texts seem to contradict this statement even as other religious texts emphatically state it as truth. I choose to believe it is truth. What is inherent in free will is the option of choice. And here is a radical statement:

If what you are doing and being does not serve you, does not lead you to a clearer and grander vision of yourself - your soul's self - then choose again. There is nothing locking you into that place but yourself.

Wait a minute, you say. I am in a situation that I can't just get out of. I can't change even though I am unhappy. I suggest this: truly think about the perceived causes of your unhappiness and either choose to change away from the causes or choose to change your emotive reaction to them. There could very well be nuggets of pleasure that you've been burying under the lava of unhappiness.

Be clear with yourself - sweep the miasma away and choose the grandest vision of who you are to become. When you act on that choice, you open the way for the others around you to make choices, also. Choose the wonder and the delight and the love of All That Is - the Universal Spirit - whatever name you choose to call that which is often called God.