Question of the day

What are your best hopes?

Second week of advent - Monday

We live in a culture that tells us that external things will make us happy. We are to acquire more, travel more, look for people to love us and yet after the initial novelty wears off we are tired, exhausted, enervated and think there must be something else we have missed that will make us happy because after the anticipation we are not as happy as it was promised we would be.

Those who have studied the effects of smartphones and social media tell us about a new disorder which is making us more depressed and anxious. This disorder's acronym is FOMO which stands for "fear of missing out." There is a fear that there could be something more, something else which will do the trick giving us the peace and joy we deeply desire.

The true spirit of Christmas, remembering the divine presence incarnated in the world, points us in directly the opposite direction as society. The Christmas spirit is to be found within not without. Christmas is a time of peace, reflection, and tuning into a transcendent frequency which hums within us all year around but which we are usually too distracted and stressed to notice. Christmas which comes at the height of the darkness of winter is a time of rest and reflection.

A blessed Christmas season requires time and leisure for rest and recharging our batteries. We can't give what we don't have, we can't share what we are lacking ourselves.

Advent is a time to rest, to reflect, to look within to the divine presence which indwells all year long and which we hardly take the time to notice. Advent is about noticing.

What do you think of the idea that happiness is not so much getting what you want as giving what you have to share?

Question of the day

What are the factors that contribute to the U.S. being a society where more people with serious psychiatric illnesses are in prisons than in psychiatric facilities? What kind of a society have we created? What are our deeper held values? What matters most to Americans?

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UUs don't believe in victimhood

Sometimes we all love to play the victim. Some of us more of the time that others. For some it is their default position in life. When people habitually play the victim the ego has conquered their lives and made their lives a hell.

As a child of God none of us are victims except in our own minds. Our victimhood is a figment of our ego's imagination. Victimhood is not are true state. It is written in A Course In Miracles, "Teach no one he has hurt you, for if you do, you teach yourself that what is not of God has power over you. The causeless cannot be." T-14.III.8:2-3

Rather than victimhood, we can call upon the Holy Spirit for guidance in helping us achieve an awareness of our true invulnerability as spiritual creatures inhabiting, temporarily, bodies that get caught up in drama of attack and suffering on the ego plane but which is not real in the spiritual realm.

People who have achieved an intermediate level of spiritual maturity know that they are never victims except in their own insane mistaken beliefs.

For today rise above the baloney and hurt, and return evil with love knowing that the evil is not real and its only power to hurt you spiritually and psychologically is the power you give to it.

Unitarian Universalists covenant together to affirm and promote justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. This affirmation and promotion involves the belief that people are so much more than the trauma they have been victimized by. There is a fine line between compassion and pity. Pity is condescending, patronizing, demeaning, and disrespectful whereas compassion is respectful and empowering in perceiving the inviolability of the divine spark within each one of us.

Second week of advent - Sunday

God comes to find us but we are rarely home. We are either in the past or in the future. We rarely enjoy the present, what A Course In Miracles calls the "Holy Instant."

God comes looking for us, but we aren't home, and we go looking for God and God is not in the past of the future only in the present. God has no time. God is outside of time. Time has no meaning for God. Today is a gift. That's why we call it the present.

At this time of advent we refocus and remember the divine within us and among us. It fills us with peace and joy. This remembering and the consequent peace and joy is the gift of the season. Share it.

Question of the day

Osho said, "Jesus said, "God is love." I say, "Love is God."' What do you think of this idea? Is God far away up in the sky requiring priests and rabbis as an intermediary or is God in your own heart of which you are a part?