Virtue development, honesty, part one. Honest people sleep well.

Once one has achieved the virtue of faith, they have chosen what matters in their life, honesty comes next. To what extent is a person true to themselves?

Honesty, does not depend solely on what a person says. In A Course In Miracles, it is taught that honesty actually means consistency. “There is nothing you say that contradicts what you think or do; no thought opposes any other thought; no act belies your word; no word lacks agreement with another.” M.4.11:4-6 Does a person say what they do and do what they say?

Corollary ideas to honesty are genuineness, sincerity, authenticity. Deep honesty requires that a person knows themselves. Being honest with oneself is one of the greatest blessings of life. If nothing else, an honest person sleeps well.

Daily Reflections, Day Seventy One, Living faithfully does not guarantee success.

Day Seventy One

Living faithfully does not guarantee success.

“That the miracle may have effects on your brothers that you may not recognize is not your concern. The miracle will always bless you. Miracles you are not asked to perform have not lost their value. They are still expressions of your own state of grace, but the action aspect of the miracle should be controlled by me because I am aware of the whole plan. The impersonal nature of miracle-mindedness ensures your grace, but only I am in a position to know where they can be bestowed.” ACIM. T-1.111.8:1-5

We never know where our intentions of Love may land or the effects they may have. Mother Teresa said one time that she and her sisters of Charity were called to be faithful not successful. She would leave success in God’s hands.

It is hard to give up attachment to results. We want to feel that we are in control, that we have power and influence, that your actions and work count for something. The joke is, “If you want to hear God laugh, tell God your plans.”

Unconditional Love, the Grace that is referred to above, is a free gift, no strings attached. Jesus is telling us in this passage that our only job is to Love and we need to leave the rest to HIm. He knows the plan He tells us, we don’t.

To love without attachment to results seems almost super human; it certainly is not the way of the ego. To love without attachment is the way of the spirit which is called amazing grace.

Today, love unconditionally with no strings attached. You are no longer giving something to get something. You are simply giving and turning the results over to your Higher Power. You are intent on living your life faithfully and not necessarily what the world would see as successfully. Living your life faithfully will always bring a grace of its own, a grace we often don’t see,  no matter what.

Climate justice - The false and comforting myth of recycling.

Virtue development, faith, part six - getting home depends on the path we choose.

After the dark night of the soul when we are consumed with our seeming loss of faith and being forsaken by that in which we have put our faith, we finally let go of our whole ego world and become One with that from which we separated ourself. We finally experience peace and bliss. It is in the emptying of our ego self that we are able to experience our transcendent Self which is One with everything..

Few people achieve this. Even Jesus says in Matthew 27:46 as He is being crucified, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus is talking about his bodily self. For after this cry of anguish, his spirit is resurrected when he says in Luke 23:46, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

And so, our ego self seems forsaken, but our Spirit is eternal and triumphs in Love. This is the bottom line in faith: do you believe things turn out alright in the end and are completed as they should or do you believe things will be destroyed and go to hell? The way of the ego frightens us with hell, and the Spirit promises us glory. The virtue of faith is exemplified by which path we choose. 

Climate justice - Speaking up, organizing, voting, boycotting, taking systemic action

But it also isn’t necessary for Westerners to adopt the lifestyle of the global poor. Seventy percent of the energy produced by the planet, it’s estimated, is lost as waste heat. If the average American were confined by the carbon footprint of her European counterpart, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by more than half. If the world’s richest 10 percent were limited to that same footprint, global emissions would fall by a third. And why shouldn’t they be? Almost as a prophylactic against climate guilt, as the news from science has grown bleaker, Western liberals have comforted themselves by contorting their own consumption patterns into performances of moral or environmental purity—less beef, more Teslas, fewer transatlantic flights. But the climate calculus is such that individual lifestyle choices do not add up to much, unless they are scaled by politics. America’s rump climate party aside, that scaling should not be impossible, once we understand the stakes. In fact, the stakes mean, it must not be.

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (pp. 33-34). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

Turning off the lights in an empty room, recycling, setting your air conditioning to 76 degrees, collecting rain water in barrels to water your garden, giving up your Big Macs are good ideas but pissing in the ocean, farting in a huricane. The real answer to adequately addressing carbon emissions and climate warming are poltical and Americans elected a President and a Republical congress who are climate change deniers and pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Accords and brashly promote coal jobs and fossil fuel drilling.

If people spent their time and effort in organizing, voting, boycotting, and demonstrating and gettng climate justice and responsible people into policy making positions, real change could occur but alas Americans don't vote in large numbers, they are politically illiterate when it comes to most policies, they blindly vote the party line, and they believe the misinformation and propaganda which corporate media wants them to believe in spirte of the facts.

Unitarian Univeralists, we would like to believe, are more informed and principle based. They covenant together to affirm and promote the respect for the interdependent web, and for justice, equity, and compassion in human relations, but then you got to wonder whether their voting and advocacy efforts would back up their lip service? UUs are "nice" people, but not known for their toughness, their moral convictions. They have a reputation for standing for nothing and having a faith, poorly defined, and easily dismissed.

Could UUs be the yeast in the dough, the salt of the earth, the spark plug for a societal transformation from fossil fuels to renewable energy? Only if they get serious about applying their principles in their poltical lives. Hopefully, they will step up and start making a difference.

Daily Reflections, Day Seventy, What is the way to the Kingdom?

Day Seventy

What is the way to the Kingdom?

“‘No man cometh unto the Father but by me’ does not mean that I am in any way separate or different from you except in time, and time does not really exist. The statement is more meaningful in terms of a vertical rather than a horizontal axis. You stand below me and I stand below God. In the process of ‘rising up,’ I am higher because without me the distance between God and man would be too great for you to encompass. I bridge the difference as an elder brother to you on the one hand, and as a Son of God on the other. My devotion to my brothers has placed me in charge of the Sonship, which I render complete because I share it.” ACIM.T-1.II.4:1-6

There are many paths to the Oneness with God: Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Earth Centered religions, Humanism, Philosophy, Psychology, etc. Jesus tells us that He is the same as us. The only difference is that He is enlightened, what some faith traditions name an “enlightened master” and as such is a guide, an older brother, whose teachings and example we can use as a bridge to shed our egos and achieve Oneness with the Ground of Being.

We can learn a lot from Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tse, Osho, and many prophetic witnesses to the realm of the Spirit which is our first and last home.

Most of us struggle to remember that Oneness from which we separated ourselves and emerged into this illusionary world of the ego. It is a world of hell we have entered when we left the Kingdom. Jesus and the enlightened masters teach us about our true home and how to return there.

When Jesus says that no person returns to the Father except as He has done, He is not meaning that He is the only way, but that the way, giving up the world of the ego and choosing the way of the Spirit, Love, is the only way.

Separation will not get us there, but joining and becoming One with the Body of Christ is a possible path which Jesus has taught us if only we will learn and practice the lesson.

Today, I will reflect on Jesus’ statement that the way to the Kingdom is to “love as I have loved,” and will ask, when I am called on to make a decision which will be several times today, “What would love have me do?” WWLD

Religious literacy - American ignorance - Six sources of UU living tradition.

A few years ago I was standing around the photocopier in Boston University’s Department of Religion when a visiting professor from Austria offered a passing observation about American undergraduates. They are very religious, he told me, but they know next to nothing about religion. Thanks to compulsory religious education (which in Austria begins in elementary schools), European students can name the twelve apostles and the Seven Deadly Sins, but they wouldn’t be caught dead going to church or synagogue themselves. American students are just the opposite. Here faith without understanding is the standard; here religious ignorance is bliss.

Prothero, Stephen. Religious Literacy (p. 1). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Stephen Prothero is his book Relgious Literacy observes how ignorant Americans are of religion. I have found this to be true especially of Christians in the U.S. and every more true of Unitarian Univeralists.

UUs state that they draw their "living tradtion" from many sources and commonly name six. If most UUs were asked what those six sources are they couldn't tell you and if they could name a few they couldn't tell you much about any of them.

That there is a clear weakness in religious literacy among UUs in general seems clear. Today, a new feature is being initiated on UU A Way Of Life which will deal with the religious literacy problem in Unitarian Univeralism and in the country. A good place to begin our study is to name the six sources of the living tradtion of Unitarian Univeralism. How many can you name?

Find the answer in the first comment.