Welcome to Spirit Expressing with Rev. Ed Townley

(If you're looking for Rev. Ed's most current blog post, click here. )
(I pasted the wrong link into the email.)

Charles Fillmore, co-founder of the Unity movement, is reported to have said that if he and Myrtle Fillmore, his wife and co-founder, hadn’t settled on ‘Unity’ as the name for their work, his second choice would have been to call it ‘Change.’ I think every new day, every new stage, in our spiritual process makes clear how accurate – if intimidating! – that second name would have been.

Spirit Expressing is a name that sprang fully formed out of meditation in the spring of 1991. I’ve never questioned it, nor been tempted to tinker with it or run consumer tests to see if it could be improved upon. It’s simply the name I’ve been given for my personal ministry, and I’ve carried it with me ever since, through three different churches and times between. Spirit Expressing has expressed differently from place to place – sometimes from day to day – as my sense of just what it means has shifted, grown, expanded, contracted.

I’ve been thinking recently that, if I had to come up with an alternate name, it would be Context. Not exactly a sizzling attention-getter, I know. But it’s a word that describes what seems to be happening in our Monday night Higher Ground gatherings and our web energies, and I think it's urgently needed in the world today.

Change is definitely upon us, in absolutely every aspect of this human experience. It’s been unfolding for years, of course; but until now it’s been fairly easy to ignore, or at least minimize, its insistent drumbeat.

I live near a flight path into Love Field, and it’s amazing how easy it becomes not to even hear the sound of aircraft flying in and out. It just becomes an unnoticed part of the background noise of life. The call to change has been like that in our lives, I think. It’s definitely been there, but after awhile we no longer really notice it. Now, however, it’s as if the planes are landing, not on distant runways, but on the street in front of us – and taxiing up to the window where we sit.

Change can no longer be ignored, or assimilated into the familiar rhythms of life. The need for change is landing in front of us wherever we go, and it demands our attention in the moment.

It’s all good. Let’s all affirm that together: It’s all good! It’s also noisy, disruptive, confusing and scary as hell. Literally. So the question becomes, what do we need in order to deal with all this…um… good that is suddenly intruding into our lives? I don’t think we need more information about change; the days of understanding it and/or trying to either prevent it altogether or control its pace are behind us.

What we do need, I think, is context. We need to approach the change that is suddenly before us in the context of the universal spiritual principles that define and describe who we are and what we’re here to accomplish. Without that context the change we’re experiencing feels like sheer insanity. And, conversely, we need to approach our spiritual principles in the context of what’s happening to us, and through us, and around us. Without that context spiritual understanding becomes abstract and theoretical – pretty and reassuring, maybe, but of no practical use.

The idea of context may itself seem abstract, but I don’t think it is. It’s not about separating ourselves from the process of change so we can describe it from a safe distance. It’s really, I think, about aggressively claiming the point of contact where change impacts our lives, and our lives impact the process of change.

And it does, indeed, work in both directions. Our understanding of spiritual principle helps us relate to the ‘realities’ of a changing world. And, at the same time, those ‘realities’ help us to more fully embrace our spiritual principles.

This feels significant to me. And it feels simple. We can wear ourselves out trying to heal or dissolve every disruption caused by the flow of change in the world today. We may accomplish something here or there, but we will deplete our energies and fairly quickly burn ourselves out. Or we can be a point of context at which the dramas of the day meet eternal spiritual principle and we can easily recognize the choices that will move us through the process more efficiently.  We still take action, we still do what we can to help, but from a larger context and a deeper awareness.

I listen daily to Morning Edition on National Public Radio. Their coverage of our high dramas can be overwhelming, but they at least try to maintain a sense of context from time to time. This morning Ari Shapiro interviewed Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestinian philosopher and president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, about the situation in Gaza. He asked whether, after so many years of conflict and tragedy, with positions hardening on both sides, peace was any longer even a possibility. The philosopher spoke gently but firmly. “Peace is as far or as near as we – the people on both sides – wish it to be,” he said. “Peace can just happen in 24 hours – just as war can happen, also within the space of 24 hours. The only future that’s out there is the future that we – the people on both sides – choose to make for ourselves.” (Listen to the whole interview.)

That’s context. It doesn’t deny the problem, or minimize the challenge. But it also doesn’t lose sight of the spiritual truth that is greater than any problem, stronger than any challenge.

OK but – as one of our youngest attendees asked me very directly last Monday night – how do you do it? I think Doc Childre’s De-Stress Kit for Changing Times is a great place to start. That’s why we’ll be discussing it for the next three Higher Ground gatherings. The material’s free, a gift from Doc to a world that needs it. You can download it by clicking here. It offers simple, practical guidelines for experiencing drama and change in a larger context.

In HeartMath terms, it’s all about shifting our focus to the energy and perspective we find in our hearts. Drama, fear, anger – these are energies of the brain. They’re important energies; they have a lot to offer. (It’s all good, remember?) But we need a larger context to absorb them and transform them into powerful, creative choices that will move us forward. That context lives within us, and we can access it easily and instantly whenever we choose. We began that process with a ‘heart lock-in’ last Monday, and we’ll continue to explore other simple, practical tools each week.

Doc’s first suggestion in the De-Stress Kit is to “communicate and interact with others.”

“It is known,” he writes, “that the collective cooperation of a group can increase intuitive guidance and effective solutions for the problems at hand.” That’s what we hope to accomplish together in our Higher Ground Mondays, and through the energy of this website. I’m glad you’re a part of it.

Does this make sense? Does the idea of context speak to you? If so, how can Spirit Expressing help? Inquiring minds – no, inquiring hearts – want to know