I haven’t yet figured out how to post pictures or sound on here or I’d post David’s drawing as well as a sermon I gave on Mother’s Day several years ago. The Divine Feminine is important…no, it’s essential…to our spiritual growth. In negating the voice of women, men have also muted the feminine within them…and this creates an imbalance. Suppression of the feminine leaves us with only part of the equation. We need the balance. We’ve created feminine archetypes that are impotent except for childbearing and servitude and if a woman chooses to step out and exercise her gifts, she has to rely on the male archetype within her.

We need strong women…spiritually strong women…to raise strong sons and daughters. This will enable men to approach the spiritual on a deeper level. The masculine tends to lead with the intellect. Men need to be able to go beyond that. With out the feminine fully developed they struggle. Women need to be urged out of the role of servant and second class citizen. They need to be encouraged to develop ALL of their gifts. How many women know that God has told them to exercise these gifts only to have men tell them it’s not allowed…that if they were to venture out, they would be disobeying God? By silencing the women the men have denied a crucial part of themselves.

We all need to find our voices…the men as well as the women. Men…encourage your wives and your daughters. You’ll free yourselves. Women…stand tall and become all you can be. The sky is the limit. You don’t have to stay in a mold that men have said you must fit. In the Spirit we are equal. It’s time we lived it.

The presence I encounter is very real. It envelopes me…it comforts me. I find it most often in “The Silence”, but I’m aware that its always with me. I ask it for nothing …and I lack for nothing. I’m reluctant to call it God because the word God conjures up things in which I no longer believe. I like Goldsmith’s term “Infinite Invisible” or Andrew Greeley’s “Something Else Altogether”….I’ll probably stick to “the presence” for now. The presence and I are not wholly One yet…(we are, but have not yet manifest in my reality as one, yet)…our relationship is one of warmth, love, comfort, ease. This presence covers me in love…gives me wisdom when I need it. I welcome it’s company. Eventually we will manifest as One…and I will become complete. Until then I will cherish our visits…our time in the silence. This is what the Divine is to me…today’s version, at least.

The first class I took in the new church was “The Power of Decision” based on a book by the same name written by Raymond Charles Barker. I started to learn how the subconscious worked. Then I discovered Thomas Troward. In one of his books he poses the question “What is the natural state of a human being?” I almost answered “I’m a sinner saved by grace” until I realized that the natural state of a human being is that he is made in the image and likeness of God and that everything God is…man is. No, man isn’t God, but has all the same qualities as God. A cup of seawater isn’t the ocean, but tested in a lab they will show that they have the same qualities. That was a biggie. I studied for five years…I became a practitioner…now mind you, being a Religious Scientist doesn’t mean you’re not a Christian. You can be a Christian or not…it’s the Science of Mind…originally based on the teachings of Jesus. I began ministerial studies and I left with a year to go. I had learned what I needed and it was time to put what I had learned into practice.

Along the way, I had become aware of a 20th century mystic named Joel Goldsmith. I had bought one of his books and it was waaaay over my head. I was in a resale shop one afternoon and there were two of his books,,,25 cents apiece…I couldn’t leave them there. They were on meditation…about going to God in contemplation of a question, ultimately going into the silence asking nothing…just with “your grace is sufficient…speak Lord, your servant hears.” Now, this was a huge one for me. I used to argue with Jesus about “Seek first the Kingdom of God and all these things shall follow…” I’d tell him I didn’t have the time to wait for things to manifest…the rent was due, I needed this, I wanted that, blah, blah, blah. But I followed Goldsmith’s instructions and it was wonderful…until I went backwards and took practitioner training, which is all about getting stuff. About six or seven years ago, after I left Religious Science, I got really serious about the Goldsmith material. And I flourished spiritually. In the midst of a lot of chaos…a body that hasn’t healed from a bad fall…not being able to work…losing my beautiful big apartment…I feel more content than I ever have in 71 years. The God that I have grown to know is different from anything I ever thought that God would be….gentle…all encompasing…ever present. A presence…not quite a feeling, but a knowing, a loving, a caring…indescribable, but that’s no surprise, because who can describe the infinite? He comes to me in the song of a bird…the purr of a cat…in wonderful music…in laughter, in company, in solitude. I can’t explain. All I know is that GOD IS and I AM.

I still wanted a spiritual experience…they all came from God, I thought. I read tarot, I did astrology charts, I did other things which I now know were voodoo. Still no spiritual experience. Don’t know what I expected, but I knew I’d know it if I had it…little did I know. I think I was looking for a burning bush or a Damascus road experience and I eventually found some deep experiences…I’m glad I didn’t stop there.

In my late thirties, I had just gotten out of a bad long-term relationship…nothing was going right. I was in my car and I simply called out “God Help!” A week or so later, through a bizarre set of circumstances that I still can’t explain, a trip to the store to buy cleaning supplies found me two cities away in a Christian coffee-house where someone I knew was ministering. Life changed radically, from that moment on. I met the God of the bible…the legalistic one. I met the God of reaping and sowing…Jehovah…or as the faith preachers call Him…the God you make a deal with… everything was cause and effect…obedience. I also encountered healing first hand. I’d had systemic lupus for twenty-six years. I was healed and I began to exhibit healing gifts. Jehovah Rapha was well-known to me. I also learned about demons and the devil and hell and the Jesus of the sinners prayer.

From the beginning, I always questioned…who was Jesus? Who was he really? I was attracted to the mystics. I read Augustine and then found Merton…I found Rumi and hid the books…I inhaled scripture…I learned…but it was always through the lens of the old line Pentecostal church coupled with the faith message. I had the gospel according to Brother Hagin, Brother Copeland, Mike Murdock, Fred Price, with a little Marilyn Hickey thrown in. The healing was working fine for me…the prosperity wasn’t doing so well. I could pray a zillion dollars into your life but it seldom worked for me. Of course, the problem had to be with me. God wanted me to be rich…it was I who couldn’t receive it.

As a small child, I believed in the God my mother, my aunts, and my grandmother told me about. This was the God who made heaven and earth, who lived waaay up in the sky in heaven and also in all Catholic churches and in the wafer the priest raised at mass (I wasn’t old enough for communion yet). I had to be good or He wouldn’t like me…particularly if I was disobedient. We didn’t pray to Him…at least not most of the time. We prayed to our guardian angel(who reported directly to God), to the Blessed Mother…and to Jesus, particularly at Christmas when we went to the crèche and asked Baby Jesus for anything we wanted.

When I was six, I was sent to instructions for first communion…I didn’t go to Catholic school. God changed a bit and became really scary. We learned about hell and about purgatory. We learned almost straight up that, although we had nothing to do with it, going to anything but a Catholic school was a sin and our parents would be sent to hell for sending us elsewhere. Great stuff to be telling six-year olds. I learned that there were mortal sins and venial sins and that if you died with a mortal sin on your soul, you went straight to hell. I believed in this God until I was about fourteen. Along the way I learned that God had a system. There were indulgences that could counteract sin. Say certain prayers, do certain things, and you had favor with God. Again, God was seldom the person prayed to. Instead we prayed to the Blessed Mother and the saints for intercession. Strange, this God, looking back, but very real while you’re living it. Die while wearing a brown scapula and you go straight to heaven. Go to mass and communion on nine first Fridays or nine first Saturdays and heaven was yours. Pray to St. Jude for the impossible, St.Thomas Aquinis for school. St. Theresa sent you a rose when she answered your prayer. All of this was shmooshed together under the category of God.

When I was a teenager, I began to question…big time…and big time I learned to keep my mouth shut. I asked a priest, a former Army chaplain, a question during a catechism class…whoops…his face got red…he began to sputter… until he boomed BECAUSE THE HOLY ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH SAYS SO!!! That ended my questions …for then, at least. I didn’t go to college until I was twenty-one. One of the reasons was that I didn’t want to go to a Catholic college. This was pre-vatican II. My parents were dead set against me going to a Protestant school that would endanger my faith and besides, at some of them, part of commencement was held inside Protestant churches which were forbidden territory to Catholics. So I was twenty-one and still had questions I wanted answered. The Catholic chaplain at the university was known as the “Jazz Priest”. He had a syndicated column and was known world-wide. Suffice to say, I heard a lot of Brubeck and Ella and got no answers. And so it went. I drifted into intellectual agnosticism and stayed there for many years.

So… what are the facts?

The proposed mosque is not a mosque. It’s a community center which will have a place for prayer. The main thrust will be a culinary school and a gym. It will be open to ALL New Yorkers, not just the Muslim community. It’s the Muslim equivalent of the YMCA. Of course there will be a place for prayer. Muslims pray five times a day. If the facility is going to be staffed by Muslims, they must be accommodated. So now, the location. This particular group has been in that neighborhood for years…long before 9/11. And if you want to get technical, the lower East Side has been home to Muslim groups as far back as the late 19th century when there was a section known as “Little Syria”. As for it being at ground zero?  It’s several blocks away and can’t be seen from ground zero.

The Imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, who I heard described this week as one of the most evil men in the world, is an American and a Sufi. Right now he’s on a goodwill tour in the east FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT! If there is anyone in the country who can promote goodwill between the Islamic countries and the U.S. it’s this man. To oppose him is to do the terrorists jobs for them. Sufis are Islamic mystics. Their lives are based on peace and love. Read Rumi’s poetry…read Kahlil Gibran…that’s how Sufis think.

The Christian Right is acting disgracefully both as Christians and Americans. The hatred is appalling. The disrespect for the constitution, which guarantees religious freedom, is totally un-American. What has happened to the Republican party? Yes, there were ideological differences between republicans and democrats. The republicans were led by the upper crust while the democrats were the working class…but they worked together for the good of the country once the election was over. There were no hate spewing leaders…particularly against fellow Americans. All of this dissent is just adding fuel to the fire for the terrorist groups. We need to stand together as one nation under God…whatever you choose to call that God…and even if you don’t believe in a God, we are still one nation. After the votes are counted, we have a country to run, not one to sabotage because we didn’t win. The “make-sure- Obama-fails ” crew is an outrage. And most of them say they are Christians. The bible says to pray for elected officials and that doesn’t mean to pray that they die…it means to pray that they are given Divine wisdom to carry out their task. This whole controversy about the mosque that isn’t a mosque is reflective of the current Republican mindset…and the current Republican mindset dishonors the generations that went before us.

At the end of the day, the whole mosque issue is none of our business…it’s between the Imam, his board, and the New York city council.

So what’s wrong with that prayer? Nothing, if you’re a ceremonial magician! You may as well draw a circle on the floor, draw a pentacle in the circle, burn some incense, and address a god or goddess of your choice. Wiccans wouldn’t even pray that prayer, and yet you look down on them. So, what’s wrong with the prayer? Everything, if you’re a Christian. Yes, I know you were taught in a big evangelization seminar to pray that people be made miserable until they got saved. I also know that several people with big healing ministries will pray that someone get sick if they ever touch the cigarette, drink, or drug they’re being delivered of. All the prosperity ministries will pray for a certain amount of money by a certain date. It doesn’t make it right and it doesn’t mean that God our Father, the Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, will hear or answer that prayer. What do you mean? The prayer is addressed to God. Yep… GOD WHO?

Prayer can reach two places…the occult region of the mind or the Spirit. Since God is Spirit, He can only be reached through the Spirit. In the Spirit there are no banks, Walmarts, or car dealerships. There are only the qualities of God. God will give you the Power to get wealth…the wisdom to deal with your life…the power to heal. He doesn’t rain hundred-dollar bills down from heaven. The promise is: if you seek the kingdom of God first and foremost in your life all the material things will be taken care of…and your motive needs to be pure. If you are seeking the kingdom of God only to have your needs taken care of, you’re off. Seek the Kingdom of God to fellowship with God…to hear the still small voice…to know that He is God…and all these things will be taken care of. Jesus told us that to pray for “stuff” was to put ourselves on the same level as the pagans.

When we pray for stuff, we are praying to some entity that rules the occult region of the mind. No matter whether we have addressed the prayer to the Most High God or not, it will only reach the head honcho of the occult. We have spent years praying to something other than God. Shocking, isn’t it? If something is clear, heartfelt and owned, the unconscious will manifest it

The prayers for other people…the intercessions…are totally off the wall. We were given free will…suppose Joe and Mabel don’t want to be Christians? They have a right not to get saved. God won’t violate their free will. Who are you to do it? As far as praying that they be made miserable…isn’t that manipulation? God doesn’t manipulate. At least, any self-respecting witch would know enough not to pray that prayer. They know it can and will come back on them at least three times. Even if salvation IS God’s will for all people, He doesn’t force it on them. To pray that someone get sick if they stumble in the process of giving up a substance is cursing them…plain and simple. The subconscious mind doesn’t know that you mean you want them to get nauseous…it takes you literally. It will make them sick. Do you want to see them delivered from the cigarettes or do you want them dead from cancer or a heart attack? The way we pray…the way we talk…the way we think are all crucial. Forget what you learned at the prayer seminar and do a study on New Testament prayer. Better still, just put these few things into action and in subsequent days we’ll refine the mechanics of prayer and what they will yield.

Let’s take Jesus at His word and seek the Kingdom of God as our top priority. For today, let’s take a few minutes, get quiet before God, and say” I’m here, Lord. I’m listening for your voice. Thats all I want, to hear you and know you. Your Grace is sufficient for me.” As we do this we’ll see a different quality in our relationship with God. In the days to come, we’ll deal with things like how to quiet our minds…how to deal with material needs…what intercessary prayer is about. Get quiet…enjoy His company! Shalom.

The woman was smart. She didn’t hang her head in shame and look at the evil in the eyes of her accusers. She turned her head to hear what Jesus had to say. Although he’s not portrayed there, we who know the story know that he was there…these accusers had brought her to him. Somehow she knew that he was her salvation. He who could see the evil in their eyes…the lust in their hearts. He called it…if YOU be without sin, cast the first stone. Of course, they scattered, and Jesus forgave her.

How many times have we been judgmental of someone? How often have we been ready to stone someone or whatever the 21st century equivalent is? Rather than look at someone elses fault, look at your own. Jesus was the only one of that bunch qualified to stone her. He forgave her. Remember that.