Earth-Centered Spirituality Group

Sunday Sermon Archives

(A meditation offered to the Concord Unitarian Universalist Church on January 28, 2007 by Sara D., during a service presented by the Earth Centered Spirituality Group. Read the rest of the service)

I was taught how to meditate many years ago in a course called "Psychic Skills" by a marvelous human being named Wilma Wake. If any of you were a member of the Concord Energy Circle in the 1980s you will probably remember her, perhaps by another name.

When Wilma taught, she began by asking us to think of ourselves as many individual wells sunk into the same groundwater, rather than the fully free standing beings we thought we were. And I believe that is true.

I continued to meditate because I found that if I did, my life was more successful. It seemed to run more harmoniously with the world around me.

One thing that has been changed profoundly by my meditative practice is the way I relate to insects. When a Daddy Long Legs falls into the water in the bathtub today, I scoop it up carefully in my fingers and deposit it on the stack of towels in the corner so it can dry off, unfurl its legs, and get back to going where it had intended to go. I am sharing my computor desk right now with one of those small new wedge shaped bugs that feeds on spruce buds. When it makes its appearance below the screen, solemnly regarding me with its little black eyes, I find myself silently reassuring it that as soon as the weather warms up I will put it back outside. Rather than striking out at bugs, I now find myself,to my own amazement, delighting in their personalities, their insouciance, their unquestioning conviction that what they are about is of compelling importance. And the bugs respond by clinging to me trustingly while I transport them to safety or to the outdoors.

I have always wondered about the state of oneness with the whole that is described by the mystics. So when I prepare to go into the meditative state. I bring that question with me. And once in a while, that universal, beneficent intelligence that I contact in the silence grants me some small piece of helpful information. Fifteen years ago, meditating by a mountain brook two hours deep into Connecticut's Sleeping Giant Park, I was given to understand that my place in the whole was analogous to that of a cell in the human body----that like the human body, the whole is a single, unified entity composed of uncountable numbers of individual cells, some living as separate entities with independent life cycles within it, but all equal, all necessary, and all working in concert to produce a greater living whole.

Around Solstice this year, a second, and profoundly exciting piece of the answer appeared in my meditation, again on the banks of a mountain brook, this time the one that runs behind my dwelling in Hopkinton. By now I knew in my bones that I and every person, tree, blade of grass or stone sitting in the earth I encountered was an equal partner in the composition of that thing we call the whole. But I was asked to understand as well that everything I could see or conceive of-----the brook, the trees, the water, the stones of the earth, the animals moving in the forest and the automobiles running by 100 yards away on the road, all my allies and friends and all those people that I categorize in my mind as opponents and enemies------everything was me.

I was asked to understand myself not only as a cell in a great collaboration, but also, and simultaneously, as the great whole encompassing all cells. And this is a mind shifting insight. For if it is actually all us, If every being and object we encounter is literally ourselves, that requires a radical change of perception and behavior.

So in our meditation today, let us experiment. If you wish, take this question into the silence with you. What it would mean to our care of our earth and each other if we understood that everything we saw was literally ourselves?
And when the silence is over and you open your eyes, see if you can, if just for a few moments, perceive everything your eyes light upon as yourself. And take note of what that does to your way of relating.

Take a few deep breaths........Empty you mind of thought,......Use this time of quiet we are accorded in this peaceful, sunny sanctuary to come to perfect
rest in the sacred space of the God-Goddess, the Goddess-God.