"An Evolutionary Heart"
Sermon Preached By Reverend Sophia Ducey
August 30th, 2009
James 2:1-17
“Enlightened Activism” by Andrew Cohen
Whatever Spirit needs of me, I will be, I will be, I will be. Allow me to be a vessel for Spirit, to speak the Truth that is meant to be spoken by me this day.
For the past 3 weeks we have focused on cultivating an internal awareness of the Heart - in community, inviting Wisdom into our hearts, and feeling at home in the Heart of God. This week we will explore a balance of our inner worlds – our consciousness, and our outer worlds – our behavior, and find ways that we can become the "first fruits" of God's creation - harvesting good in the world through our consciousness and our actions.
As we heard in our reading from James today, we can have faith and consider ourselves to be religious or spiritual people, but if we do not give of our hearts freely, our religiousness or spirituality is for not. We can choose to give generously of ourselves, to serve the planet and all its inhabitants, creating greater good for all. This is LIVING our faith, this is living from an evolutionary heart.
Evolutionary Heart
What is an evolutionary heart? In our early phases of evolution, each one of us focused on our own individual hearts – what is it we need to feel secure, safe, and at home. As we evolve, we widen our circle of awareness and attune ourselves to the needs and the hearts of our tribe – our family, our peer group, our close community. As we come to feel safe and feel connected to the hearts of our tribe, we may choose to widen the circle even more – opening up to connecting with and serving the hearts of those in the broader community, and even those around the planet, human and non-human, and Mother Earth herself.
This is where higher evolution happens. We no longer can merely serve our own needs and the needs of those closest to us. We are called to serve the greater good. Our circle of awareness and care expands as we evolve. This is living our faith – knowing our interconnectedness with all life, and extending our hearts and our actions to those in need. The “me” and “us” that used to exist in our consciousness seems to be too little to hold the expansiveness of our hearts. We want to serve “all of us” – including the planet, and the cosmos.
Recently I read a mediation by Howard Thurman that said this:
God is a work enlarging the boundaries of my heart…God is making room for compassion: the awareness that where my life beings is where your life begins; the awareness that the sensitiveness to your needs cannot be separated from the sensitiveness to my needs; the awareness that the joys of my heart are never mine alone – nor are my sorrows. God is at work enlarging the boundaries of my heart.
We must move from our heads to our hearts. The head is where we experience pity and shame. The heart is where we feel compassion, the catalyst for action for others. As we allow God to expand the boundaries of our hearts, we open up to serve the divine in our daily lives.
Matthew Fox, in his new book “The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine,” (which he will be lecturing on this Tuesday here at Canadian Memorial), quotes Thomas Berry and speaks to the Great Work we must be about as spiritual warriors. This Work has chosen us, “to move industrial civilization from its present devastating influence on the Earth to a more benign mode of presence.” The Work is to be done in the inner realms of our consciousness, and it also calls us to be willing to fight the outer battles of the vulnerable and disenfranchised in our societies and upon our planet.
As we as a culture moved up the evolutionary spiral, we left behind many of the archetypes of healthy living, healthy community, and healthy relationship with other humans and our planet. Technological and scientific advances expanded our minds and shut down many hearts. We must go back and reclaim our hearts. In doing so, we honour and include the aspects of ourselves and previous levels of consciousness and cultures that served, and reintroduce them into our consciousness and our actions. Only when we are able to activate a healthy version of the archetypes of Green Man, hunter-gatherers, spiritual warrior, Father Sky and others, are we able to fully embrace the call of the Divine to serve others by living our faith.
For decades, many have been on a developmental path that focuses on personal growth. We pray, we meditate, yet at times do not engage in the world to activate change from this new consciousness that we have embraced. We do not participate in the conscious evolution of our planet.
Conscious Evolution
According to Barbara Marx Hubbard, Conscious Evolution is a new worldview that is now emerging rapidly and garnering worldwide interest and support. Conscious Evolution affirms that humans have the potential of being co-creators with Spirit, if we choose to take responsibility for our own evolution and the evolution of our planet. This worldview has progressed from Einstein through noted scientists and philosophers who are now building frameworks for every aspect of life.
Bela H. Banathy, author of Guided Evolution of Society, defines Conscious Evolution as:
"A process by which we can individually and collectively take responsibility for our future. Conscious Evolution enables us, if we take responsibility for it, to use our creative power to guide our own lives and the evolution of the systems and the communities in which we live and work. It is a process by which individuals and groups, families, organizations, and societies can envision and create images of what should be, and bring those images to life by design."
Barbara Marx Hubbard believes, “The promise of Conscious Evolution is nothing less than the emergence of a universal humanity capable of co-evolution with nature and co-creation with Spirit.” This takes a shift in consciousness as well as inspired action to bring it about.
We live in an unprecedented time in the evolutionary history our planet. We have, through scientific and technological advances, gained powers great enough to destroy our world, or to co-create a vastly better future for all Earth life. We are called to take responsibility for our partnership with the Divine. We can no longer choose to pray and meditate so that we alone feel better or feel connected to our version of God. Our prayers and meditations take on new meaning, new purpose, within the framework of conscious evolution. We perform our spiritual practices on behalf of all beings, and on behalf of our beautiful planet itself, and the cosmos in which it resides. Self responsibility is no longer the little “s” self – but the Self that is inclusive of all.
We are on the verge of the possibility of a worldwide culture of compassionate, spiritually awakened humanity, capable of transcending the limits of our past human existence and moving toward a higher state of being: “Cosmic consciousness, species immortality and universal life,” in the words of astrophysicist Eric Chaisson.
This sounds grand and extraordinary, yet, is simple if we choose each day to live in conscious partnership with the Divine, allowing Spirit to guide our every thought, our every action, the actions of our hearts.
Hearers and Doers
As we are reminded by the author of the book of James:
“Those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act -- they will be blessed in their doing.”
What is this perfect law, the law of liberty, that we must “do” and not just hear? I believe it is about owning and living our divinity. Living each day remembering that we are divine emanations of Spirit, on the planet to co-create the kin-dom of heaven on Earth. We are infused with the Christ presence, and our thoughts and actions are those of Wisdom, making herself known in human-kind. As we cultivate our awareness of this law, we become powerful participants in this dance of life. Our actions become an extension of divine creation, positively affecting the evolution of all. We make a difference in each moment we remember and live within this law of liberty, this law of co-creating with Spirit.
In a simple way, I was reminded of this yesterday as I wandered the grocery aisle looking for laundry and dishwasher soap. Am I just a hearer of the word – that our Earth needs more care? What is my part in choosing sustainable products that do not hurt the environment? Do I pay $4.49 or $11.99 for soap, ignoring the ultimate ramifications this has on the planet? How much difference does my extra $7.50 make? I know that we make big and little decisions each day, to recycle and reuse or toss and ignore. How wide do I draw my circle of awareness and care? How do I balance my checkbook and my integrity? Such decisions come each day, as our consciousness is stretched to higher elevations, as we contemplate our role in the care and feeding of ourselves, and of all of God’s creations.
As we heard earlier from Enlightened Activism by Andrew Cohen:
"The change that we seek for in the world around us, we have to generate at the core of our own being… Only in awakening to a higher level of consciousness can we create the spiritually enlightened context for a new kind of activism."
Synergy of Inner and Outer Lives
Our "inner lives" matter as much as our “outer lives.” Real transformation and activism can't be measured by our outward practices alone. It must be measured by the changes of the human heart.
In biblical cultures, what was core in the body was the heart, and what was core to the makeup of the person was the values that a person held and demonstrated by his/her actions. The heart, then, was considered the seat of the most important human values.
As we open up our consciousness, we open our hearts to love. Deep love and reverence for all. In our human relationships, we release the anger and fear that holds us in bondage. We find new ways to communicate with each other, ways that honour our differences and build upon our commonalities. We allow the Holy Spirit of our Being to express through us more fully, and achieve an aspect of Christ Consciousness that helps us to know, that our works are of divine origin, it is the Father that does these works through me. As we humbly allow ourselves to be used by Spirit to bring about more good in our lives, for ourselves and for all beings, we become the conscious co-creators of the evolution of our planet and all its inhabitants.
How in our individual work, and the works in which we participate through Canadian Memorial, are we contributing to ensuring that the weak and vulnerable are connected, protected and cared for? Do we break the trend set by the increasingly confrontational media and bring compassion and deep listening instead of anger and unhealthy aggression? Are we actively DOERS of the Word, and not just Hearers? And how well do we reflect the abundant generosity of God in all areas of your lives?
These questions can be part of our daily practice. Each morning, we can make, asking the question,
“How might I be a vessel today by Spirit, to be a beneficial presence to co-create the kin-dom of heaven on Earth?