Good to be in the spirit of that music together. The performance and then the music itself, from Sibelius’s Finlandia, speaks of spiritual depth and intimacy, speaks of coming into a place of the holiness of life and knowing that oneself and entering that place together, knowing it together, being in a place of power in the middle of a world of all kinds of adversity and challenge, and all kinds of mixed vibrations. And to be harsh about it on a Sunday morning, there are all kinds of corruption of the spiritual nature of humankind. Nothing less than that when you see it for what it is.
And in the face of all that, we answer the call here this morning, today, to come into the holy place within ourselves, the place of the heart that connects with what is above and brings the power of what is above into our human experience at all levels.
While there is a magic to it, there is also a process that requires our participation to consciously open to that flow, to let it in and let it out, like breathing. There is something to be breathed in from above. That is the root meaning of the word inspiration, having to do with breath. There is something to be breathed in from above and something to be breathed out into the world in which we live, to our own human experience and everything that is happening in it. We have the opportunity to enter the experience of inspiration and live there.
I was recalling a verse from Isaiah. Isaiah was a prophet of old. Some of what he said wound up in The Messiah. He lived in Jerusalem in the southern kingdom after the division of the kingdoms, but before the people of the southern kingdom were hauled off into Babylon. It is Isaiah 65:24.
And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.
These are words from the mouth of God, the Creator. And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear. It says something about the very nature of the Creator—not of a fictional religious figure, but the nature of the Reality.
Sometimes it does not seem like that to us as human beings. It might seem like nobody is listening, and nobody is witnessing what is happening in our life. We are stranded on our odyssey, as the current movie portrays—the odyssey of life with no one caring. And yet we have a very different reality portrayed by these words. So, if that is the reality, why is it that we as human beings are not aware of it?
I want to suggest to you that this experience is reciprocal in nature. It is reciprocal or it does not exist for us. So even though it is true that the Creator is omniscient—sees all—it is not our experience if there is not reciprocity in the matter. And what is that reciprocity? So, put the shoe on the other foot, in the voice of the human being. And it shall come to pass before he calls, I will answer. Before he calls, I will answer.
It is interesting wording in the verse, and interesting to put it in the reciprocal. What does it imply? Before he calls, I will answer. It implies a state of readiness, a state of being prepared for life, a state of saying yes before you are asked by life to do something. So that when the direction of life becomes conscious, and you become aware of what life is asking of you, you can say, I already said yes, I am here.
Before he calls, I will answer. That is our readiness for life. What do they say? Ready, willing, and able. There is a state of consciousness and a state of spiritual power that has to be pre-existent for us to know a deep Attunement with the power of the Creator and the power of Creation that is looking to move through us.
We cannot be hanging out in our human nature, waiting to be awakened, waiting for life to disturb us, make something obvious, and then answer. I do not know how much good the answer does at that point, because the real answer that is needed is before we are asked.
It is in the readiness. It is in the state of consciousness and the state of spiritual power that we know and then share with others without any outer reason to be prepared, or even knowing what you are prepared for.
Before he calls, I will answer. When that is the actual experience, there is the part that goes both ways, the reciprocity of it. We come to know and understand that we have been heard. Someone is listening. That we are in a conversation of Creation, a conversation with the Creator back and forth, and then with our fellow creator beings on earth, our fellow human beings who know this state.
This is about our yes to life. Of course, there is the flip side of that, which is our no. Have you ever met anyone who walks in the world with a no out in front of them? Before anyone asks, they have already said no. It is an attitude of no, an attitude of I will not. That person never has the opportunity to find out what would happen if they said yes, because their no precedes them.
There is a short story by Herman Melville. I saw a video of it as a boy and then looked it up somewhere later in life. Bartleby, the Scrivener. Bartleby is a clerk in an office at a time when they did not have typewriters and certainly not computers. It is a law office, and he has to write things down. That is what a scrivener does.
And so, at some point, the no arises in Bartleby so that the owner of the business asks him to do something, and Bartleby’s reply is, I would prefer not to. That is his no. And thus it continues.
Every time he is asked to do something, his answer is I would prefer not to. Bartleby’s response of no ultimately leads to his death, because that is where it goes when someone says no to life.
It is a somewhat comical, though tragic allegory for the human condition. When faced with the opportunities that life brings, and the creative power of the world that rests in the Creator, humanity says, I would prefer not to. There is a no. Before he calls, I will answer and it is going to be no.
What happens is that eventually we do not get asked. Or we just become unaware of the ask. Whereas if there is a yes to life, a yes to the Creator, and as we have been speaking of it, a yes to fulfilling the mission for which we came unequivocally, that yes is heard, and the powers of Creation are available to us. They have an opportunity to come through us and land. And in that act of service to the Creator and to the Creation, we know we are seen and heard. We are not a lost, alone human being.
We are part of the Creator, engaging in the process of Creation, with the Creation. We have the delight and the pleasure of that experience and the honor of being seen and known for who we are. And that has the added benefit that we get to know who we are. We get to know ourselves and understand ourselves because we are being ourselves.
We are here to fulfill our mission. As I was speaking of last week, there is the positive achievement part of that. And then there is the wission part, which I described as the feminine face of our mission, without which the mission is of little value.
Yes, we are here to achieve something, to manifest something in the world and be of service to the Most High. We are also here to know the Great Mother, to honor the Great Mother, and to receive from the Great Mother the reality of the heavenly home, to be brought into earthly experience, our own in particular, and in the world in which we live. And here, too, there is reciprocity. Before we are asked, we answer.
We know that we are seen and known by the Great Mother. We are not ever alone. No matter what happens in the world in which we live—which can be a tough world, and in the practical reality of it, we can be left on our own. Regardless of all that, there is a Presence that surrounds us, that sees and knows us, and that comes through us to create the home in which we live.
Then God’s home is present in the world in which we live, because that is the home in which we ourselves live. We have said yes to that home—to receiving it, to being in it, and to bringing it into the world, and to bringing it to the people that we are with.
We each have that power within us. Remarkable, is it not? What a power that we have to bring to another person—the power to bring the heavenly home to them, to remind them that that home is present, always available to be known.
In the context of that heavenly home known on earth, there can be the power of Creation, the power of the Creator at work in that home and through that home, to achieve what it is here to achieve. And there are all the individual tasks that come to us, all the projects and creative endeavors in our life. Those are all opportunities for something joyful and purposeful and important. And yet, ultimately, the achievement transcends the physical form and relates to the spiritual power known and manifested in the collective heaven. In the heaven we know personally, the heaven we know together, and in the thunder and lightning that we bring to illuminate the world, to wake the world, to bring a reorientation upward to what is higher than the human experience and, of course, there is something higher than the human experience.
Look out at the world and all that is happening. I rather doubt that any of us thinks there is nothing higher than that. No, there is a higher reality, a higher intelligence and a higher power than all that for humankind to be reoriented in and so, to be inspired by that reality. We are here to bring an opportunity for that reorientation to the world through all that we know and do.
Jane (Anetrini) made reference to Christianity. Some of you know that I recently read a book called Paul and Jesus by James D. Tabor. It is a startling book because it portrays how there was a lineage of fulfilling mission, the mission for all humanity. It was initiated through Abraham some four thousand years ago and continued on to the birth of Jesus, even though there were various ways that it tended to get derailed. But nonetheless, the lineage of it, the strength of it was still present. And Jesus was born into the world to continue that teaching, that purpose and mission, that fulfillment. And he brought the knowledge of it and taught it.
It was, as I was saying, a teaching of heavenly will brought to earth. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. And he was true to that lineage without break, as far as he was concerned, back to Abraham. It was intact through him, no matter what had happened up to that point. It was a true lineage at its core, despite all the divergences that happened along the way, a lineage of our primal spirituality.
I am not here to disparage anyone spiritual practice, or to denigrate in any way what people worship. Nonetheless, for anyone who does find a deep Attunement with Jesus of Nazareth and what he taught, but does not accept much of what is presented through much of present-day Christianity, we are entitled to have an intellectually honest look at what happened. And so is anyone else who cares about world culture and its evolution.
Paul came along and claimed to have seen Jesus in heaven on the road to Damascus in the invisible. He claimed to have subsequent such visitations and then claimed that those were so real and so significant that what came up through the lineage did not matter, and could be discarded. He reported it this way:
For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.
Galatians 1:12
What the disciples had come to know through their teaching from Jesus did not matter. That got turned aside. Jesus’s own teachings when he was alive on earth were not very important because Paul had received this direct connection in a dream and he sold that. He created an otherworldly religion centered on a cosmic, divine savior whose death and resurrection offer spiritual immortality independent of the Jewish Law, and that was not what Jesus taught. And it became the basis for Christianity. Maybe that is a little overstated, but not much.
Why focus on such a thing? It is because in so many ways that defines the world in which we live. Christianity is the world’s largest religion, and in so many ways, a religion of “it cannot be fulfilled on earth.” You have to wait until you die and see Jesus up in heaven.
And even for people who are not Christian, Paul’s teaching has so affected the human psyche and human culture that, in many cases, people turn away from any kind of spirituality because what I described is inauthentic to them. So this whole distortion gives a bad name to Christianity, certainly—and to spirituality in general.
We are here to know better, to be true in our carrying forward the lineage, accepting the lineage now, the lineage of fulfilling mission, the lineage of saying yes to the Creator and being here for the Creator before the Creator asks, saying yes to letting Thy will be done in this earth before there is anything specific that comes up.
Before you call, I answer. You have my yes.
I am here for you as you. I am your Emissary of Divine Light.