In this Eastertime we celebrate the coming of the Beloved through a man we speak of as Jesus. We celebrate his victory, a victory known in the face of the world as it is, a world that is characterized by failure in so many ways. And certainly he faced that in his life. He also faced betrayal born out of ignorance, but betrayal nonetheless—and he faced the experience of denial by his friends and the world at large. We can imagine that denial by the world at large was not as hard to take as denial by his friends. And yet, in the face of all that, what we celebrate is the victory of his Unconditional Love. Certainly that is how we would have to characterize it through this man, because in the face of all those things that for a lesser person would have been, very early on, a cause for something other than this, Love came forth.
And so we celebrate that. But more than celebrating the story of it, we celebrate the significance of that victory, not as something that is somehow automatically conveyed to us because we read the story and subscribe to a particular belief about it, but because we accept the same significance for ourselves. He created a precedent of victory and inspiration. But as our friend Julia Butterfly Hill says, inspiration to do what? For any inspiration to become meaningful to us, we have to act on it. His precedent of victory has meaning for us when we embrace it for ourselves.
So we celebrate not a story of a one-time event, but a universal reality. There was something unique about this man, as there is about all of us. We might even say that there was something special about him. But not something apart from what is available to anyone actually. He lived something universal that is true of all people and in fact all Creation.
So what is it we celebrate on Easter? There was a spirit of love in this man. But what is spirit, after all? I think we use the word in at least two ways. We think of spirit as something that radiates or emanates, like an energy. Perhaps we think of the Holy Spirit that way. We also use the word to mean some kind of being. In other words, we attribute selfhood to that word spirit.
So on this day, we celebrate that someone, that reality of Being that is in all people and actually in all things, from the atom to the sun to a human being. At the heart of the earth there is something more than energy and something more than matter. To live in a world solely of energy and matter is to live in a soulless world, a world without significance or meaning, a world without heart.
So, more than anything, I celebrate on this day the nature of Being itself. That nature is characterized by something we call love. Love has many guises, many shapes, and many expressions. But on this day I think of the Highest Love that is the inmost nature of all Being and of all people and of all Creation, that we have a chance to know for ourselves. And I think of the nature of that love, the nature of Being itself, which is all-powerful, not only through some great God someplace who is omnipotent. A friend told me yesterday that God is not only omnipotent and omnipresent but omni-available. That reality is present, available for us to know in experience, ultimately not as something we only aspire to or are inspired by, but a reality that is the highest reality of our Being. And when that is touched for real, we feel the urge which activates us and becomes all-powerful in our experience. We become all-powerful, not in the usual human terms but in bringing the all-powerful nature of the Highest Love into the world.
There could be many doubters, deniers and betrayers, and a lot of ignorance in the world. To them I say, Watch this space. Watch what happens when a person or when a collective of people begin to know the Highest Love, that inmost reality of Being, as the reality of who they are and begin to give it expression on an unconditional basis. On that basis we are unleashing a mighty force into human culture. Human culture, as it is, is in a state of pain and suffering due to a psychic break in the consciousness of humanity. That is the only way I know how to account for what we see happening around us and what we sense and know of our own human experience. That psychic break is healing. We are unleashing the omni-available power of that healing in our own experience.
The usual approach to the pain of that psychic break is to medicate it, to indulge in some kind of addictive pattern or some attempt to pretend it is not there, and to entertain oneself or stay busy so that you don’t have to face the pain. It seems like a good strategy, except it doesn’t work. Because the psychic break cannot be healed if it is not faced. As we are willing to experience the pain of it, we are compelled to let the cause of that pain heal. We open ourselves to the healing, knowing how much it hurts to live in an unhealed condition.
But if you can hide the hurt of that condition from yourself enough, you do not have the incentive to do something about it. If you face it, you are immediately compelled to look for the healing of it and to expose the disconnected part of oneself to the spiritual medicine that makes it whole.
Ultimately, all spiritual medicine is a form of the Highest Love. There is always a form of love that has the power to heal the psychic break as it presents itself. So expose your pain to that love.
The Highest Love has so many dimensions to its expression and there are so many dimensions of the human experience, like a rainbow. The white light is the Highest Love, and there are all the other colors of the rainbow, which are the dimensions of spiritual medicine that bring healing to the psychic break in all the dimensions of our human experience. Of course, it takes laying open what has been hurt to that color of the rainbow that heals it. It is a simple process, but it takes facing what hurts.
The first principle of homeopathy is Like cures like. This means that a practitioner administers a remedy that mimics the disease but which is incapable of infecting the patient. Instead, it evokes a healing response.
For the sake of facing the pain in the human experience in a homeopathic way, I want to cite two examples of the psychic break in the news. This is not for the purpose of arguing the politics of it, or to put down the people involved, but to face the denial and betrayal and the ignorance of the human culture we take part in that is suffering from a psychic break. It could be useful for us to feel the pain of it enough to invigorate the response to be healthy at every level of our being—to be whole. So here are the two examples.
On February 14th, 17 people lost their lives in the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Instead of withdrawing and becoming overcome by the trauma and loss, the students used that experience to bring the power of healing to the world.
There has been general applause and honoring of the students’ courage. And then there have been those who have ridiculed these young people who suffered the experience of watching classmates and teachers be shot to death, fearing for their own lives.
A former senator said this:
How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that.
Hearing that, you wonder, What kind of ignorance could be behind such a statement? This person is motivated by some kind of terrible irrationality. And knowing that the man was a senator and now a commentator on a popular news channel, he must have, at least, a reasonably intelligent intellect. So that wasn’t the problem. There was a deeper problem showing itself.
As they say in the press, He walked it back—he apologized and took back his words.
Another commentator mocked one of the students for being rejected by four colleges to which he had applied. He had the courage not to withdraw from the public scene, but to list the commentator’s sponsors on Twitter and ask people to call for those sponsors to withdraw their sponsorship. Again the commentator walked it back and apologized.
There is the story of the boiling frog. They say that if you put a frog in boiling water it will jump out, but if you put it in cold water and slowly turn up the heat it won’t jump out, because there is no point at which it realizes what is happening. That portrays how we become acclimated to the psychic break. Events such as the two I mentioned in the news ought to allow us to receive a homeopathic of what causes the pain, and motivate us to say No more, and to feel how our very soul is crying out for healing. And by healing, I simply mean rejoining with love. I mean that we have the opportunity to expose what is hurt to the flow of love that is relevant to that wound, so that love pours through in the natural flow of living.
In the story of Palm Sunday, Jesus came into Jerusalem on an ass. He was greeted by people with palm fronds, saying, Hosanna: Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord. There was an acknowledgment of him that set what he was doing in a political context. Clearly, that public acknowledgment increased the danger he was already facing from the Roman and Jewish authorities.
Jesus was chastised for allowing the acknowledgment of him. His response?
I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.
The stones are crying out all the time anyway. The stones are constantly activated by the Highest Love. All of Creation is. That is how it is for us when we are willing to expose all levels of our human flesh to the activating power of the Highest Love. All levels of our human flesh cry out for that love with longing, with joy as it is embraced, and with welcome relief as the flow of love is reestablished.
Today I celebrate the fertility of the human soul. We are like the soil in the fields where I live at Sunrise Ranch that responds to the sun and the rain by sending forth shoots and grass. When the Highest Love shines upon the human soul, and we let it in, there is a fertility that responds and brings forth increased life.
And just like these fields where I live, the more we participate in this process—the more we allow ourselves to be activated by love—the more fertility there is in our human experience, and the more we have available to respond in each cycle of activation. Every time we allow ourselves to be activated spiritually, there is more there, just like every time you exercise there is more muscle tone for the next cycle of exercise. Spiritually, every time you are activated there is more fertility generated, and so more that can respond, and therefore more power that can come through the human capacity.
We are building that fertility individually. We are building it together, so that in the seasons of spiritual activation there is more and more of the Highest Love that can come through, so that we ourselves, as an individual and then as a collective of people, may be a living embodiment of spiritual activation in the world. The Highest Love then shines through our flesh at every level—physically, mentally, and emotionally—activating healing in human culture. There is more of the reality of Being that is present in the world.
As far as I am concerned, this process starts with me and it starts with us. I trust you take the same attitude with respect to yourself and to what you share with all others who are in this field of awakening awareness.
In this poem, I celebrate the spirit of victory on this Easter Day and in the cycle of this year:
The Goodness of the Year
The earth lays herself bare
to the warm, springtime sun,
waiting for the berries and potatoes
to be planted soon
as April gives up her frost to May and June,
and the cows are restless in the pasture,
eager for the prairie grasses to grow once more.
Today, the human world begins to bustle
with the expectancy of the season,
and the young man and his love
feed the sheep and the lambs
with the kindness that new love brings.
I can feel the goodness of the year;
the promise of fresh lettuce,
new-mown hay
and new friends appearing.
I see rays of late afternoon light
on tawny faces
after a good day of honest work,
and joyous smiles
as the harvest
is brought to the barn.
There are circles of love around
warm contented fires,
and dances under the summer moon,
for the Beloved has come to us,
and all is well.
I feel the goodness of the year,
and all that it brings.