Good news for 08/03/20 - Jon Batiste chats with John Lewis about love in action

Barbershop Shop stories with Jon Batiste and Congressman John Lewis back in November, 2016.




Congressman John Lewis spent a lifetime "preaching" by living a life affirming and promoting the Unitarian Universalist second principle of justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. He is wonderful role model getting into "good trouble" with grace, compassion, and humor.

Spiritual Book Discussion - The Spiritual Child - Parenting is the emodiment of God's love in the world

Parenting is the embodiment of God’s love in the world

In the first decade of life, the child advances through a process of integrating his or her spiritual “knowing” with other developing capabilities, including cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development, all of which are shaped by interactions with parents, family, peers, and community. Without support and lacking encouragement to keep developing that part of himself, the child’s spiritual attunement erodes and becomes “disaggregated” in the crush of a narrowly material culture.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (pp. 3-4). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Children are born with innocence and then socially conditioned to think certain things, feel certain things, and behave in certain ways. An interesting question is “what does this social conditioning consist of? What are the beliefs, opinions, values, and practices which the child is subjected to?”

Parents are very attentive to material things as they should be because they sustain physical life. Then they are attentive to social and psychological things because they contribute to harmony and peace and enjoyment. Parents are very attentive to whatever they consider “success.” In the United States we are a success driven culture not only for the child’s well being but for the parent’s ego and satisfaction.

Many children are exploited consciously and unconsciously by parents and other family members for their own benefit. In such situations the spiritual well being of the child is overlooked. The child is experienced as a means to an end, not an end itself. Love is conditional and not unconditional. Children become spiritually stunted and damaged.

This spiritual harm and damage is done both by sins of commission and sins of omission. It is not only what is done to the child, but what is not done that contributes to spiritual failure to thrive.

Unitarian Universalists covenant together to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. This begins at conception and birth and continues throughout the life cycle. We often think life begins at birth but it doesn’t. It begins in the twinkle or lack thereof in the parents’ eyes. Was the child wanted or unwanted or a surprise? Perhaps the first milestone of a child’s spiritual life is in the fact of whether the child was wanted. Was the parent cooperating with the creative power of the universe to bring a new being into the world or just the necessary machinery for the production of a human being.

The responsibility for fertility resides in the person engaging in the procreative act and this is where the spiritual journey of the person begins.

Unitarian Universalists also covenant together to affirm and promote justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. This principle applies to child bearing and raising as one of  the first sentences a child can say stringing words together in a sentence is “It’s not fair!”

There is nothing that forces an adult to grow up faster than becoming a parent. The adult’s own spiritual orientation becomes the basis for the child’s spiritual development. Is the child wanted? Is the child loved unconditionally? Is the parent the embodiment of God’s love in the world?

Join the spiritual book discussion group

Subscribe to our group

A Course In Miracles Workbook Lesson #2 - I give all the things I see the meaning it has for me

Lesson #2 - I have given everything I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place) all the meaning it has for me.

Flip Wilson, the comedian, when he did his Geraldine routine, would have Geraldine say in a saucy way, all dressed up in sexy attire, "What you see, honey, is what you get."

I like to add two words "think" and "you."  "What you think you see is what you get."

Some people are pessimists and some people are optimists. Some people like themselves and the world they are living in and some people don't like themselves and don't like the world they are living in. This exercise helps us understand that we give meaning to everything we see. Sometimes that meaning is shared with others and sometimes that meaning is egocentric.

This exercise is an extension of the concept that our reality is socially constructed. Even our language which we use to name things is a social construction. Without language we can't even think.

Unitarian Universalists covenant together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Truth and meaning is often sought for in the world of social constructions which may or may not be normative. UUs pride themselves on being heretics and searching for truth and meaning beyond the normative consensus. But whether the social construction is normative or nonnormative, it still, most likely, will be the product of social construction. These exercises are training our minds to question the path of the ego so we will be able to embark on the path of the soul.

Good news for 08/02/20 - Blessing boxes in Cleveland may start a trend across the nation

Blessing boxes put up in Cleveland neighborhoods. Are there any in yours?

For more click here.

Unitarian Universalists covenant together to affirm and promote justice, equity, and compassion in our human relations.

A Course In Miracles workbook Lesson #1 - Nothing I see means anything

Today we are starting a year long journey through the workbook of A Course In Miracles.

This is not a journey for the faint of heart. It will take patience and persistence.

The journey will introduce the journier to a whole new metaphysics - a whole new way of thinking about their life.

It will require that the journier give up their usually way of thinking about their perceptions of things in the world of the ego. It will require that we examine our projections, our interpretations, our beliefs, our intentions, and our behavior. This is not small requirement.

It helps on the journey to have an attitude of curiosity, bravery, and humor.

We will relate the workbook lessons to the theology and principles of Unitarian Universalism as appropriate and relevant.

You can follow along in the workbook section of A Course In Miracles.

Welcome fellow traveler.

Lesson # 1 Nothing I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place) means anything.

Look at things and say this for a minute or two.

In everyday language, everything you see is bull shit. We make stuff up. We have expectations, requirements, generalizations formed from past experience and so our experience of the world is what the philosophers and psychologists call "constructed reality."

The first way we construct reality is by naming things. The second way is by telling stories about those things we named so that the names have meaning. What we wind up with is what Holden Caulfield called in J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher In The Rye, the "big lie."

In the introduction to the workbook exercises it says you don't have to believe the lesson, you don't have to like it, you have to agree with it, just do it. It takes a while to train the mind to think in new ways about the world we experience.

As the bumper sticker says, "Don't believe everything you think."

In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. All too often we search in the world of the ego and don't find. The Course says one of the tricks of the ego is to encourage us to search and don't find. We don't find because we are searching in the wrong place.

Good news for 08/01/20 - The Obamas helped America be its better self.

This video brought me to tears of joy and delight.

 

Instead of putting children in cages, and blocking DACA by the Trumpists, the Obamas loved children and wanted the best for them. This is a good example of the UU first principle of affirming and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person starting with children.

Explaining things to kids - Keeping that faith when "Haters gonna hate us."

Keeping the faith

THE DAY AFTER THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, MY FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD son left a message in the shower. With his little brother’s foam alphabet letters, he spelled out, “Haters gonna hate us.” 

It was the “us” that transformed the popular catchphrase into something troubling. I knew that the rhetoric of this election cycle had affected my children, but here it was spelled out so clearly. My son felt the vitriol towards Muslims directed at him.

 Over the course of the week, my daughter would ask if we were going to be banned from the country, pleading after my every reassurance, “But how do you know?” My five-year-old son asked if Trump would break our family. When I answered that as president, Trump would learn to be nice, he ran to share this news with his older siblings, his little feet light with relief.

How Do I Explain This to My Kids? . The New Press. Kindle Edition.

This mother’s hope that “Trump would learn to be nice” hasn’t happened over 3 ½ years. If anything Trump and the Trumpists have gotten worse. New words have entered our everyday discourse like “doubling down” and “tripling down.”

With children taken from their parents in the thousands, and unmarked soldiers in the streets beating and kidnapping protesters, what is a parent to say to their children about what their federal government has become?

The fourteen year old boy who wrote “Haters gonna hate us” after Trump’s election has turned out to have made an accurate prediction.

John Lewis knew the haters very well and stood up to them with courage, love, and determination to advocate for change. John Lewis has encouraged us, in his deathbed letter and throughout his life,  to continue to work for justice and the creation of the beloved community. The beloved community is described in our UU sixth principle as a world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.

What is a parent to say to children about “haters gonna hate us?” A good parent should validate their children’s perceptions and say, “Yes they are. They elected Donald Trump to be their leader in their hating, and we will stand up to them and tell them they are wrong, We have every much a right to be here as they do, and we will do what we can to change their hating and the things their hate makes them do.”

A good parent tells their children, “We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person and we will continue to do so even when the majority of people in this country don’t. But we do have friends who believe as we do and they will stand with us to change the way things are done in this country and in our community. Haters are gonna hate us but we don’t hate them back. We try to understand their fears and insist that things are gonna be okay. What we have to do, children, is keep the faith and act on it.

“We need to take care of ourselves, of one another, and try to deal with their hate with understanding, courage, resistance, and love to help make the world a better place. Remember that while the haters gonna hate us, the lovers gonna love us, and we love you a whole bunch.”

Okay?