Worship

In Islam it is believed that through intention (niyyah) every act may become an act of worship. And that without pure intention, no act, however exalted or ‘holy’ can qualify as worship.

To me, when our intention is based in Love*, we worship with every breath.

Real love in our hearts sensitises us to those around us.

Love is a living thing, a giving thing. It is not something that resides quietly in the corner of our hearts.

Love is creative by nature. It leads to actions.

Love leads us to take risks with our heart; it leads us to face our personal fears in order to give a gift we value more.

Put simply, love leads us to serve. Whether it is to feed the hungry one beside us on the bus from our own lunch bag, or to lead a revolution against poverty globally, love ignites passion and creativity in us and causes us to want to share what we have in ways that will benefit more than just ourselves.

It seems I have heard so often that love takes sacrifice. Yet the beautiful truth I perceive is that when love truly lives in our hearts, we do not feel sacrifice in our service. We only willingly embrace an opportunity give a gift of love. The love in our intentions gives us sustenance and joy.

When we act in true service, we also worship.

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Where there is love and faith, we hold the knowledge that God is Love and that we serve Him even as we serve another. 

I may worship Him, not just by loving Him and receiving His Love for myself, but by honouring His Love for all things and persons.

What a dream, to let Gods Love permeate my life to such an extent that I could honour Him, and serve others, in every breath and act.

Intention and longing must be my first steps to achieve this goal.

In this I know my need for God. If I am to love all things just as He does, I need Him to teach me love.

I am meek in my need.

Yet how beautiful that my desire to love would lead me to find worship and my desire for worship leads me again to my need to learn love.

God, help me to know the true nature of love, in its creativity, its vigour and hope.

Let me have a humble heart so that love may lead me thoughtlessly and joyfully to serve my brothers and sisters.

I pray for the development of my soul so that you may receive my worship, even through the routine acts of my day-to-day life.

* A Love in harmony with Divine Love

Late Change to Today's Programme

Hi everyone, Just to let you know that Karaoke is cancelled tonight.

We are instead having the presentation & discussion (planned for last Wednesday) for those interested in service to the world in the areas of Housing, Environment, Design and Construction.

This presentation will start at 6pm in the Wondai Memorial Hall, Corner of Scott & Mackenzie St, Wondai.

I think it should make for an interesting discussion. Look forward to seeing you there if you are interested.

If you know of anyone who would be interested but without ready access to internet, I'd be most grateful if you felt the desire to let them know.

I'll be back later with more reflections on love,

Have a super day whatever you are doing,

Mary

Love Overcomes Evil

Love is the most powerful force in the Universe.

What an awesome sentence. Somewhere inside of me a light comes on and an in-built radar sounds ‘TRUTH’, as I utter these words.

The problem is that too often I still live my life as if it were not true.

In my heart I still feel that evil has the power to crush out truth and love.

I look around and see people in poverty, I see dictators crushing nations, and rebels killing back. I see injustice, I see pain, I see questions with seemingly bad answers.

My fear tells me that love cannot overcome all the pain and hate and dark out there.

Yet when I look at my own life the only thing in the past four years that has ministered to and inspired this hurt and angry soul has been love. Love has melted all my angry defences, mellowed me into a person that is now more focussed on service than angry man-made justice.

The truth is that for all my lifelong outrage at injustice and desire to change the world, I achieved so little because I wanted to force hate and inequity into righteousness. I wanted to shout them down, and rise up for the meek – but I wanted to do all this in ways that were not humble.

I wanted to fight fire with burning embers of my own. Instead of meeting injustice with the cool, calm waters of love and compassion, I added the heat of my anger to the furnace and the fire raged on. 

photo credit

Fear can make us believe that unless we protect ourselves and our loved ones we will be crushed irrevocably. Anger helps us avoid our fears and I believe that one of our worst downfalls is the inner belief that this anger is righteous.

At first it takes faith to discard our anger and to trust that love can overcome evil. But soon we will feel it work in our lives.

The blessed truth is that love stand firmer and longer than indignant rage. In fact, where rage burns out, leaving only ashes of cynicism and disillusionment, love stands forever.

Love is not weak or silent. Love speaks in a clear, unwavering voice, which does not compromise or placate to ills or errors.

Love is not passive or puny. Love acts in ways that uphold the Truth of God and make manifest His Love for each of his children.

It is the absence of fear in love, which makes love act impartially, championing only that which is good, and true, each and every time. Love does not honour one creed or gender or race above another. It does not hold onto grudges or seek vengeance. Love’s justice is faithful and exact. It comes from a heart that is humble and desires only that which will bring more love to everyone.

When we have the courage and desire to love rather than to punish, protect or react we not only stay closer to our Father, but we show mercy and grace to those around us.

And how powerful is the experience of mercy and grace? If you have felt such things from the heart of your Maker you will know how quickly it crumbles our rock hard places into sand.

This God-Grace and Mercy takes hold of sand-crumbled hearts and works on them endlessly until He Builds in us pearls of wisdom, strength and grace of our own. 

So then, what more powerful to offer than our smaller gifts – of our own mercy and forgiveness?

I believe that the experience of love is what we all crave. God made us that way.

And this experience, of love, has the most power to open us to truth, which enables us to live in freedom.

The only thing lacking for love to extinguish evil on this planet is for each of us to use our will in harmony with it. And this will mean no longer worshiping a god of my own creation – the ‘fear god’ – but trusting instead the Almighty power of Love.

Love can overcome evil, friends. It only takes us to be willing to live it, to trust it, to embody it.

When no-one trusts love or stands up for it, only fear has power. But fear is a paltry influence when faced with the life-force of love.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.

Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today I'm asking myself , what do I believe in? Love or fear?

Do you ever doubt the ultimate power of love over evil?

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Somehow this clip fits (smile) I guess it appeals to my bizarre sense of humour...

Obit for Love

In December of 2008 I met AJ in passing. He was at my parents’ home to give an informal talk and we hardly spoke a few words to each other. I didn’t really listen to much of his talk and after he left I didn’t give any of it much conscious thought but our meeting sparked some deeper process in me - an awakening of a deep spiritual longing that, in my desperate, decades-long, quest to numb my pain, I had also kept anesthetized.

A week after he left our home, I bought my first official journal. One morning I got up and opened it. This was the first entry I wrote. 

There is a feeling of disillusionment inside of me – the world is full of damaged souls – causing hurt and pain. Cynical and harsh no-one is prepared to believe in anything true and beautiful, these things must surely be trodden on, tainted and weak. The power of love seems lost – a fools belief in the face of hatred and hardship.

I mourn the loss of Love, the death of beauty and hope.

I have shut it down, closed it off, left it outside in the cold to suffer and struggle.

Love – I’m sorry I left you – abandoned you.

Can I welcome you back in? Am I strong enough to support you? To believe in you in such dark, dark days? Can truth and beauty really touch all of the ugliness?

Or are we destined to carry on without you? To leave you to suffer and starve – as we carry on using vices and strife to grapple with life?

Should we become hard with a bitter taste in our mouth – striking out in anger, taking power in order to survive?

And as we struggle and fight to take our place in the world – in our corner that we have claimed – tell me who will warm that corner that we huddle in? As we shiver together – our families, our clans, our gangs – in the tiny spaces we have taken with iron fists and fear – then will we miss you?

Will we remember Love left outside in the cold and damp?

Love – we will miss her then and say SHE has forsaken US. Why doesn’t she come? We will miss her warmth and beauty and wonder why she left us – how could she be so cruel?

And so you see the world will end – tiny groups of tortured souls, huddling in darkened corners, feeding off fears and victim hood.

No-one will remember Love.

She will die and so will we all. We will descend into eternal blackness – screaming with pain, dried up with sorrow, skin tight on our bones, our teeth sharpened by years of bitter struggle and anger.

And it will all have been for nothing.

Simply we aren’t strong enough to stand for Love. WE have left HER – forsaken HER. We have seen her as weakness – to be avoided and laughed upon as a silly child’s thing, a trick of the light, pathetic and simple, to be scorned and left to die alone.

Am I the only one who remembers Love? Me, who has shut her out and treated her so unkindly. Do I have the courage to open the door? – For I know she waits just outside, cold and alone and crying for all of the madness she sees.

In fact I want to go to her outside – and cry. I see what she mourns. The crazy fucked-up world so lost that it believes it is ‘found’. All of the humanity so arrogant to think it can ‘go it alone’ without Love. Humankind, that to exist amidst the madness, has itself gone insane.

I want to grieve with Love, to join her outside and cry an ocean of regret and disillusionment.

We can sit by the door,

on the step,

in the wind and rain

and feel forsaken together.

For the only alternative is to ask her in – to give her tea in the sitting room and be willing to stand for her, to ask her to warm my heart, to ask for strength to face the insanity, to heal the pain and then to be regarded as insane myself.

I don’t feel strong enough – to face the darkness –

Will Love be there to take my hand? Can I trust her? Will she forgive me for leaving her, laughing at her? Can she really warm the shady corners of the world – where vultures circle and victims hold themselves together in packs ready to fight threats and murder?

How can the world change?

I want to sit with Love on the cold front step and mourn the death of Love.

In the past four years I've learned that in order to open to love again I have to be brave enough to feel all of the sharp and painful parts inside of me that are hurt and disillusioned about life, relationships and the world that we live in.  

So this week on the blog is a journey of reflection on love. 

One of my biggest fears is still opening to and trusting love again. There is a huge dam of grief inside that the healing warmth of love threatens to burst open. So I'm writing on a mission - to foster courage and trust in this process.

Join me if you desire. 

If you write a blog and want to share your reflections on love in response to each post, link your url in the comments section. Or if you just want to share reflections in the comments, you are most welcome here friend.

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Arvarna mentioned this song to me a long time ago. Its so haunting and beautiful. Sometimes I hunger for love, other times my heart trembles at the thought, this song always moves me.

A Sleep Of Prisoners

By Christopher Fry

Dark and cold we may be, but this

Is no winter now. The frozen misery

Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;

The thunder is the thunder of the floes,

The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.

Thank God our time is now when wrong

Comes up to face us everywhere,

Never to leave us till we take

The longest stride of soul we ever took.

Affairs are now soul size.

The enterprise

Is exploration into God.

Where are you making for? It takes

So many thousand years to wake,

But will you wake for pity's sake!

Thank-you Alwyn for sending this poem. 

'The longest stride of soul we ever took'.. how long this stride into self-awareness, integrity and love can seem.. but what relief I feel that 'affairs are now soul size'.. before this I truly was asleep, denial can hold us prisoner no doubt...

Mary

Book Group is Moving This Week!

We’re in Kyabra this week and staying a little longer than anticipated. That means we’ll be moving our book group to Wednesday, 11th of April @ 1pm in the Woolshed, Kyabra Station. 

If you’d like to participate long distance, please send your chapter responses to me via email by 9 am on Wednesday morning. 

I think this is a great opportunity for our brothers and sisters in NSW to feel more involved in the study. I find each of your contributions adds unique colour and flavour to the discussion (I love it!). So our session in Kyabra will only add wonderful spice to the series. 

I hope you will also value the opportunity to hear from a different group once the session is posted to youtube. 

This weeks session, discussing Chapter 4, will be available (thanks to Lena & Igor) on the youtube channel to watch before our next meeting, which is still scheduled for Wednesday, 18th April, followed by Karaoke. 

Our longer stay in Kyabra also means a postponement of the planned presentation for those wishing to be of service in the areas of Development, Environment and Construction. I will amend the static pages on the blog now so that the Book Group Info and Divine Truth Events pages reflect the relevant changes from today. 

For those in the Kyabra region, we would love to welcome you at book group. 

Here are the prerequisites: 

- You have read chapters 1 – 4 of ‘Through the Mists’ 

- You have completed the weekly study questions for all four chapters 

- You have watched the four youtube clips of previous sessions 

All of the past book group clips are now on youtube. Igor has kindly pasted the exact links in the comments section of the Book Group Page. 

I’ll also place the youtube playlist as a shortcut under the sidebar titled ‘Internet Love’. 

This Sunday, its one year since we had our final interview with David Millikan here at Kyabra. What a year it has been. Much has changed and still more to process, yet I'm grateful for some beautiful constants that have been with me on this journey - God and His Immense Love and Tenderest Care, my soulmate - his continual, humbling love and truth, my guides, and the many great people who have shown their courage to desire truth and love in the face of ridicule.

I love it here at Kyabra. I treasure the opportunity to share time with our wonderful friends. We'll be doing some mediumship nights in the woolshed over the next week - check out the Events page for more details.

Have a great weekend,

Mary

Live From the Heart: Gods Way of Love Cooking Show

Truly an honour and an inspiration to know people who wish to serve and share from the heart.

I love you guys, well done.

The School of Pythagoras

By Geoffrey Whitehead

Long ago in a far off land a school had been established. This school was known far and wide as “The School of Pythagoras”. It was situated right in the middle of a fairly large village called “Pythagoras Hill”. The school was a little bit different from most because majority of the boys and girls who attended the school were over 40 years of age. The students could not leave the school because no high school would accept students with such a poor understanding of maths.

Now this was really quite strange because all of the students of Pythagoras Hill State School thought that maths was their best subject. They thought they had maths all sown up. In fact they believed that now that they had enrolled at The School of Pythagoras, maths would no longer be a matter of concern. You see, this school followed the text called “The Great Mathematician Pythagoras”. The school believed that as far as maths goes this text could not be beaten. The book was held in so high regard that no other text was allowed to be used and any students caught reading other texts would be expelled immediately.

The book was primarily about Pythagoras and his theories of mathematics. It was not written by Pythagoras himself but by some of his followers. Unfortunately as well as containing mathematical laws which are still held as being fundamental mathematical principles today, it also contained some misinterpretations of theories, some theories which were incorrect, and some theories made up by the writers themselves which were right off the track completely. They apparently thought that they knew Pythagoras well enough to include their own theories alongside of those of Pythagoras.

The writers of the text were so astounded by the mathematical discoveries of Pythagoras and his supernatural ability to calculate the seemingly incalculable that only they believed him to be “God’s Only Real Mathematician” and no one else could possibly attain the same standard of mathematical ability, therefore it would be useless to try.

Many men, before and after Pythagoras have tried to reach such mathematical excellence but all have failed. Therefore, according to the writers of the text it is only natural to assume that Pythagoras must have been a special man sent to Earth specifically for the purpose of giving his entire life to maths so that man no longer should have to worry about working out difficult maths problems.

And so it was, Pythagoras had become a sort of maths “Saviour” to all of his followers.

They students of Pythagoras Hill State School from time to time would be asked to recite certain passages from their maths text book like –

“No one gets into high school except by Pythagoras and whosoever believeth in him should no longer have to persist with maths to be accepted into high school.”

And

“There is no other name given in Heaven or on Earth whereby man shall be saved from having to do high level maths.”

The students believed these quotes to be of ultimate truth but none of the students had ever left year seven – so no one ever really knew for sure. The education system simply made the students at Pythagoras Hill State School repeat year seven all the time and hoped that one day they would realise the truth and leave the school with the aim of furthering their knowledge of maths. Their maths was so bad they didn’t even realise they were repeating year seven all the time.

From time to time teachers of maths from higher spheres of learning would be saddened by the unusual set of circumstances and would enrol at the school as staff to try and somehow encourage the brighter students to go on and study more maths. They were often very much appreciated because their learning was sometimes obviously in advance. Sooner or later they would be discovered speaking of that which was contrary to the school text and naturally they would be asked to leave the school. The school would then pray for the teacher to accept Pythagoras as Creator of all Maths and come to know that with Him no more maths is necessary.

They say that somewhere in another mathematical sphere the great Pythagoras is still doing maths and teaching others, but every time he hears of the growing numbers of the school of Pythagoras he cries a silent tear and wonders how the maths he taught so long ago got so mixed up.

He wonders if the students of Pythagoras Hill State School will ever realise that it is their divine purpose to one day all be mathematicians like Pythagoras...

G. WHITEHEAD
Circa 1985

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As a sort of bizarre P.S. and to close this post with something even more contentious...

I bow out at around 3.10 mins in terms of supporting the meaning but I thought it was worth posting to see how you all feel about this passionate person with a passionate message.

Oh, and just to be super, duper clear I do not hate religion. Our vision would be to simply to bring more Love (and therefore Truth) to every organisation and religion on the planet. Hating will never be as strong as loving, and love never excludes anyone from its gifts or promise.


With love for your weekend,

Mary