Eric Butterworth Unity Podcast #8
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I’m often asked if we do not at some time have services of communion or holy communion at the Unity Center. It would be so easy and perhaps in a way it is prevalent to have the kind of response to this question that comes out of an attitude of superiority by kind of rolling one’s eyes and saying, “Oh, we’re above all that in truth. We don’t deal with symbology or ritual in our metaphysical approach.” Actually, to insist that we use no ritual or symbology is to fail to understand the whole basis of communication. Language is a symbol and the language of metaphysics with its affirmations and treatments and its definitions for God and mind and consciousness is colorfully symbolic.
Someone once said the danger of iconoclasm is that one may unconsciously become a worshiper of his own hammer. The truth student quite often makes a ritual out of his position against religious ritual. Certainly a truth student working with his affirmations may not be too different if we’re honest to look objectively from the Catholic with his rosary or the whirling of the dervishes or the chanting of the Buddhist, just in terms of the outer appearance. Now, it’s true that religions sometimes become so immersed in symbolism that the symbols and the ritual overshadows the meanings that in the beginning they were intended to represent, for a symbol is like a sign post. It’s supposed to direct one’s thought or attention somewhere.
In the frequent use of symbols and of ritual, there’s a tendency to forget that the sign is pointing to somewhere and just kind of worship the pointer, worship the sign, and most that we have in religious ritual and symbology has this kind of an origin. A man is created in the image of God. This is one of the most beautiful ideals of the scriptures. So, in a sense, man is a symbol of God. Jesus said, “He that hath seen me have seen the father.” He wasn’t talking to himself as a special representation of God but wherever you see a person, you see that which God hath wrought. You see God in manifestation.
So when we understand this, then even a sound ritual is symbolic action, so man’s acts and dealings with other people are his most important ritual. In that sense, all life should be sacred. We should practice the presence of God not just at times and in certain needs, but all the time and on all occasions. One’s religion should not be only for observance on Sunday or special holy days. It should be active every day, every hour, every minute. The problem with religious ritual and symbolic worship is that it is normally done at special times in special places by special agents in special ways and only for special people.
Many folks are conditioned to what I would call the communion syndrome, which becomes so much a part of religious practice, which calls for taking communion, which means usually engaging in an exercise that puts the emphasis on the celebration of the ritual rather than the celebration of the God potential in the person. Now, someone might object at this point by way of sort of feedback or argument, but after all, our Lord commanded that we observe communion in remembrance of him. In other words, there is an insistence that we get into the scriptural authority, so let’s look at it.
Certainly I am aware that the tradition of holy communion, the mass, the Eucharist is deeply embedded in the consciousness of the religious seeker, and this kind of thinking is not easily changed, and I must say that I have no intention during this hour today to debunk the tradition or to dissuade anyone from following it. I’m full aware of the fact that in a group such as this, there are people in many different levels of consciousness with many different backgrounds. I am absolutely certain that there are some of you who are very much involved in a religious tradition where the communion is a fundamental practice. They have no intent whatever to even consider the possibility of giving it up.
There are some of you who perhaps have at one time been involved in that kind of a religious experience and have dropped away from it and therefore possibly we can provide some way for you to deal with some of your own guilt relative to your background and this type of giving up. There are some of you who perhaps belong or are part of an entirely different religious tradition where communion is not even considered, and there are some of you who probably, in terms of your own background that brought you to this place are agnostic and even atheist. That’s the kind of peculiar and unique sort of community of consciousness that comes together in a meeting such as this.
I would simply like to begin with the idea that the communion service, no matter how it is partaken of and in what particular variation within the Christian tradition, is a beautiful symbology and it can be experienced in a beautifully sincere, meaningful way. Certainly it can, as all traditions and symbolisms can, it can be observed out of holy habit, out of a sense of obligation, even out of a sense of fear, in which case it becomes self pretense and self delusion.
I’m a student of metaphysics, and so by nature I’m inclined to search for inner meanings and to try to get a transcendent view of things, so I have two recourses in dealing with this idea of the holy communion. First of all, I can work out a metaphysical interpretation of the rite, carefully replacing symbols of outward form with word forms and affirmations, and thus I can evolve and develop and present a regular service of spiritual communion on a more transcendent level, just substituting some truth words as the substance to partake of through affirmations and so forth, and it must be said that there are many teachers in the whole general field of truth or metaphysics or unity or religious science or whatever who do this very thing, and who have spiritual communion as a part of their regular practice.
The second recourse, which I find available to me, is to eliminate the ritual altogether as being for me irrelevant, sometimes even misleading, but to try to understand in consciousness that which the ritual may have been intended to be a sign post for. In other words, to be very sure I’m not worshiping the sign post and even to decide, “Maybe I don’t need the sign post but let me look at that which the sign post is pointing toward. If it is important, then let me get on with it and be a part of it.” This, I guess I should say, has been my choice.
There’s a tendency among people involved in the Christian tradition to believe that communion or holy communion or the Eucharist or the mass or whatever is a Christian tradition on which theologians and churches agree. Anyone who really thinks that’s true has certainly been locked into a narrow approach to Christianity, because there’s a wide spectrum of belief on what communion is, what substances should be used. Whether the wine should be mixed or diluted or whether it should be simply grape juice or whether the bread should be leavened or unleavened and who is authorized to administer the communion and to whom it can be administered and how often it should be administered and where it should me administered, et cetera.
So I say because there is such a wide latitude of opinion, then there must be room for another opinion. The opinion as to its validity in the first place, or even whether Jesus ever even intended to establish an institution for perpetual observance when he ate the Passover with his disciples, for you see there is one point that one rarely ever comes across within the family of Christianity, and in just a general consideration of religious tradition, how conveniently it is overlooked that Jesus and his disciples were Jews and were good Jews, all reared in the synagogue, trained in the traditions and the observances of Judaism.
This is conveniently overlooked and understandably so, but it’s important when we try to understand the evolution of this idea of holy communion, because first of all Jesus clearly states that he has no intention of breaking away from his religious past which was Judaism, to found a new religion. In other words, he had no intent of establishing Christianity. It has come about as a result of the followers who wanted to get into the kind of consciousness that Jesus was dealing with. He said, “I came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it,” and though we give all sorts of religious and metaphysical interpretations of what he was talking about, in the scripture, the word “law” is the torah and it’s important that we know that.
The ancient Jewish scriptures. His whole idea was not to break them down, debunk them, destroy them, but to give new relevance to them, to the whole tradition, to put religion into the present tense, or as the teachers and the preachers of the past had been involved in looking back to the day of Abraham, the day of Jacob, the day of Isaac, the day of Joseph, et cetera and the day of Moses, he was saying, “All these things back there are true but there are truths that are relevant to you. Ye have heard it said of old but I say unto you,” and in every case he was dealing with the now, bringing religion into the present tense for a present experience.
... Supper of Jesus on which the holy communion is based was simply, and it’s important that we see this, Jesus as the master of the household of his disciples having a satyr with his spiritual family. Now, some would be very shocked at that, but you look carefully at the scriptures and objectively and open mindedly and you may discover for the first time some things that you’d never realized. In the 26th chapter of Matthew we read, 27th verse, “Now, the first day of the feast of unleavened bread, the disciples came to Jesus saying, ‘Where wilt thou that we prepareth for thee to eat the Passover?’”
Then followed the decision as to where and how and they had their Passover feast in the upper room. So on that occasion that has been widely pictured by so many artists, especially the classic work of Leonardo da Vinci, we see Jesus doing what every master of a family in Jerusalem was doing at that very time with his own family, Jesus doing it with his spiritual family. He was simply having Passover.
Now, the authority for the right of communion or the Eucharist is based on the gospel account of Jesus having this Passover with the disciples. So we go to the gospels and we search them and we find that the reference to this upper room experience is found in all four of the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, so it’s obvious there’s a unanimous feeling that they were there. In Matthew is the account of Jesus giving bread and wine. No intimation at all that it is to be forever after commemorated. In Mark, the same words. Still no indication that is to be remembered perpetually. John talks about many, many things that happened that evening. He records minutely the conversations and the dissertations of Jesus that happened at the time. He makes no mention of the communion feast or the Passover feast at all. It seemed to be, to him, irrelevant to what was going on.
So it was only Luke who adds the statement involved in this experience of sharing the bread and the wine, “This do in remembrance of me,” and on those words basically hangs the whole tradition of holy communion. It’s rather interesting. Not in the sense of trying to debunk it but just looking literally at the scriptures as much as we have a record. Two of the gospel writers, Matthew and John, were of the 12 disciples, so these two were the only one of the four that were actually present on that occasion, and it’s interesting that neither one, Matthew or John, gives the slightest intimation of any compelling reason to perpetually observe the feast.
Mark simply expresses some thoughts that he has heard and he does it carefully and his facts are clear but he makes no reference to any perpetual observance, but it is only Luke that seems to have heard the words. I’m not saying they weren’t expressed, but he’s given special insight into them. “This do in remembrance of me.” Now, so we’re saying that this, then, is looking back at the official records as far as there are any records. Nonetheless, we’ll go ahead and take that ideas a very important concept expressed by Jesus as if it were generally agreed to, which it’s really not.
Jesus, always the teacher, took advantage of the occasion, of their Passover, to say to the disciples, in effect, “Now you’re all good Jews and you will continue to keep the Passover and you look at it in your own consciousness and you could say of someone, ‘Well, now, you’re a Christian and you will always keep Christmas regardless because even if you get away from the traditions of Christmas, somehow it becomes a part of your nature and you do it.’” So he’s saying, “You will always keep the Passover, so as long as you’re going to keep the Passover anyway, do it in remembrance of me.”
Immediately then we must realize that he’s not talking about in remembrance of the man, Jesus. This was a very humble man who always turned attention away from himself. When somebody came to him and said, “Good master,” he said, “Why callest thou me good? None is good, save God.” He said that “the words I speak are not my words but the words of him who sent me.” The “me” he’s talking about is the body of the embodiment of truths which he expresses, which outline the new age consciousness, the new awareness that he was trying to bring into the lives of people. So when you keep this Passover feast, and remember it was a Passover feast. It was not a holy communion at that time. He was saying, “Do it in remembrance of this higher spiritual vision which we’ve shared together and which I’ve tried to present to you. Do it in remembrance of the divine self within you that is being released.”
So then he outlined a simple metaphysical symbology and this was not strange. Jesus always seemed to look at the minutest details of life and to take every occasion to give a lesson, a metaphysical symbology. Behold a sower. He’s out there on the field with his disciples on the hillside and he’s talking to them, teaching them, and off in the distance, here, here comes a sower out sowing his field, so he says, “Behold, a sower went forth to sow,” and he uses that as an illustration of giving them an insight into truth.
So he’s saying, “Here you have the bread and the wine,” and so he’s giving this insight and referring to the bread as his body and the wine as his blood, but, again, we want to remember that he did not, at this time, institute, the word that is so often given, institute the Lord’s supper as something special. He did not say, “Now let’s start a new tradition and we’ll get bread and we’ll get wine.” This is exactly the materials, the essences, the substance that were used in the Passover. The bread and the wine were the customer food when the master of the feast would break the bread and bless it and pass around a communion chalice of wine. Not one thing was added for this Lord’s supper.
Actually, the symbol of the bread as his flesh and the wine as his blood he’d used before, because it was a beautiful teaching symbol. When he talked to the people of Capernaum as recorded in the sixth chapter of John, “Except ye eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you,” and these are words that are quite often caught up in the tradition of holy communion. When people complained on that occasion that they didn’t understand, he added that he was not intending to literally suggest eating his flesh but he was referring to the need to live by the words of truth that he had expressed. To get into the consciousness and assimilate the words and get into the flow of life.
On that same occasion he closed his discourse with a statement, “The flesh profiteth nothing. The words I speak to you, they are spirit and they are life,” so immediately turning attention away from any sort of literal use of this symbology.” So Jesus was saying to the disciples in effect, “While the Passover celebrates the deliverance of the Israelites from the bondage in Egypt, you are living now, today. Celebrate this new experience in remembrance of your own release from human consciousness and your freedom to evolve into the divine creatures that you are. Then it becomes a meaningful experience.”
Now, it’s important, I think, in defense of those who keep the holy communion experience, that Jesus doesn’t tell the disciples to stop observing the Passover. It was a Jewish tradition and as Jews, they would be free to keep it and certainly should keep it if this is where their consciousness was, nor did he make any change basically in the manner of keeping it. Certainly, Paul, whose words are used as the authority of so much Christian tradition makes no mention of any change. As a matter of fact, Paul says something that if it were accepted literally as so many of his things are accepted, it would take the ground out from under the mass in the communion as a church ritual, because Paul says that the supper, talking about the Lord’s supper, as the way he referred to it, which is the basis for communion, should not be eaten in congregations.
For those who feel that the scriptural authority stands behind holy communion, certainly conveniently overlook Paul’s emphatic word when he says, and I quote, “When you come together in one place, this is not to eat the Lord’s supper. Have ye not houses to eat and drink in? In other words, he is saying something that any Jew would recognize. He’s saying you should have your satyr at home. Now, again, this is Paul, whose words have been used as the basis and as the authority for so much of the tradition. Now, I know that many of you, as a result of your background in Christianity and certainly in Judaism, have been conditioned to accept an idea that is usually referred to as atonement. This is a word that is universally applied.
To the Christian is the idea of the vicarious atonement, which is one of the doctrines of Christianity that causes the open minded Jewish person to kind of separate from the flow for a moment because he can’t quite accept this, and this idea of the vicarious atonement, I might say parenthetically and purely expressing my own feeling, is what I sometimes call the hideous dogma of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb whose blood was shed for all to take away the sins of the world.
This is a tradition that has come out of theological evolution throughout all time, but you see, even this was built on the old Jewish concept of atonement in which sins can only be remitted by sacrifice and those of you who are scholars of the Old Testament or have even waded through the thee’s and thou’s of the Old Testament are well aware that in the early times, the sacrifice of atonement was a blood sacrifice, and sometimes the temples ran with streams of blood pouring from the altar because that was the way it was done in those days in some of the prophets of the Old Testament, trying to get a new awareness and bogged down by the terrible odor and so forth and the sounds of dying rams in the temple, complained about this and tried to bring a new consciousness into it that of course traditions die very slowly.
Much of this was a pagan superstition that antedates even Judaism and Christianity and was originally a sacrifice of human flesh. Many of you, perhaps, would be shocked at that, but if you go back and read the story of Abraham and how he went up onto the mountain and expressed his complete willingness to sacrifice his own son on the altar, this reflects that this was at that time at least still a prevalent tradition, which gradually faded away as other traditions took their place or at least were modified.
Now, Jesus, in his insight, and this was not in any way debunking all the old thing, but it was giving a new metaphysical awareness of it ... Jesus knew that you can’t offend God, that there’s no need to appease God and there was no need then and there’s no need now for any one to lay down his life to save all other people as far as changing God’s mind is concerned. God knows nothing of sin. A sin is a perversion in our own consciousness, a concealment of our inherent God self, a frustration of our own God potentiality. You don’t offend the principle of mathematics when you make a mistake in addition and if all mankind were making mistakes in addition, it wouldn’t offend mathematical principle. You who make the mistake will suffer by the mistake, by their sins. By their fruits you shall know them.
In other words, as long as you make the mistake, you’re going to be caught up in the effects of the mistake, but the principle isn’t offended and at any time if you stop making the mistake and get back into the experience and the consciousness, or as we say, the flow of spiritual principle or mathematical principle, then the problem’s over and the difficulty is resolved. When you realize the mistake or to use a beautiful Old Testament term, when you pass over the mistake ... It’s where the word “Passover” comes, then you experience at-one-ment, which is a more spiritual interpretation of the word “atonement.” The only absolution for sin is the realization of at-one-ment with God.
Sin is a frustration of the divine potential. The concealment of the inherent good, and when you become aware of your oneness and break down that separation, then there is an at-one-ment and a complete healing. Communion, as truly all prayer or meditation, is intended basically to be an experience of at-one-ment. Not to get God’s attention, not to barter with God, not to atone for our sins, but to bring us back into an awareness of oneness. The word “atonement” is often used and I think that this is misleading, because it implies making something up to God. It implies saying, “God is hurt, God is angry, God is holding this against you, so you’ve got to do something to make his feelings right towards you.”
Well, my feeling is, and I think this is squared as you look carefully at the teaching of Jesus, that if you’re going to wait to change God’s attitude toward you, you’re gonna wait a long time, because as I often say in the shocking sense, God’s mind is made up, because it is absolute. You cannot in any way cause the principle of mathematics to change its inexorable function just because you’d like to somehow make up for making mistakes in arithmetic. Stop making new mistakes. Get out of the sense of limitation and let the process work.
In a way, this is what religion should be and what it was always in the beginning intended to be. The word “religion” comes from the root “religio” which literally means “to bind together.” That’s all. Not to go through all sorts of magic and emotions and all sorts of symbolic worship practices, but to bind together, and all of these things originally were intended as sign posts to help to bring the person into an awareness of oneness. How easily we get tramped in ritual and symbology for its own sake, forgetting that the original purpose was to break down separation and to help the person to expand his awareness, not to cause God to change his awareness, but to help the person to expand his awareness and to get the sense, the feeling, the belief, the conviction of wholeness or common union, communion.
Paul says, “For he is our peace who has made both one and has broken down the middle wall of partition.” When we lose our sense of oneness, it is as though a wall is built between ourselves and the infinite, and between ourselves and people. We become alienated. We become lost. This is the story of Jesus’ beautiful story telling [inaudible 00:29:38] the prodigal son. Out in the far country, lost his sense of oneness, and therefore comes to know want in every are and every experience. Communication is broken. The flow is blocked. We become fearful and indecisive and lonely and frustrated. We know bitterness and envy and jealousy and all the many, many ramifications of this negative experience until the wall is pulled down, or to use Jesus’ symbology in the parable of the prodigal son, until we come to ourself and decide to arise and go onto the father, to get into the awareness of wholeness, common union, or communion.
So, the true communion, and if we want to carry the other tradition along with us, the true insight in the Passover is an experience of sharing, where we dissolve the barriers, and fundamental I think in this is the truth that God hasn’t gone anywhere. You know, we sometimes feel, “Oh where, oh where is God? How long, how long before I can become aware of God? Oh that I might find him. Where is God?” God hasn’t gone anywhere and he never will.
You may remember the story of a man in his wife who were riding along in the car. She’s sitting way over by the door and he’s driving the car and getting as close to the door on the other side as he can. The wife, she goes along very quietly and suddenly she looks ahead and sees a car in front with a couple of lovers and they’re snuggled so close together that you can hardly tell it’s two people. So she says, “Just look at that. How we’ve grown apart. We used to sit like that,” and the husband blurted out, “I haven’t moved.”
It’s a ridiculous story but it’s a very important insight because, you see, most persons in their approach to religion have a feeling that worship and the practice of any kind of ritualistic tradition is to get God’s ear. He’s busy somewhere else. He’s mad at me. I must appease him. I must somehow solicit his aid. I must somehow try to get his will working for me. God hasn’t gone anywhere. He is that which he always has been, the omnipresent, omniactive force at the heart and root of all the universe, which is expressing itself where you are, as you, and remains now as it always has been, world without end, the divine potential within you.
There’s no way, shape or form, regardless of what religion you are, what practice you involve yourself in, there’s no way that you can change that. I love that thought of Teilhard de Chardin, that Catholic priest paleontologist whose insights have been so great in the modern time, coming out of one who began through the whole process of tradition and made his way through to a whole new insight of a new age, and he says in his book, “The Divine Milieu,” “We come to a point where there is no place to bow down and worship him, not even within ourselves,” because there’s nothing to worship. There’s nothing to bow down to. There’s nothing to reach for. There’s no one to reach. This doesn’t mean there’s no God, but it means that God is all and I am an expression of that all, you see? So God hasn’t changed. He hasn’t gone anywhere.
So, the communion, the ritual, the symbology, whatever it is, it should be carefully understood, is not or should not be intended to do anything to God or to change his will or to bring him closer to us, but it should basically be a means, simple or profound, of helping us to wake up, to remember who we are, and to experience ourselves in the depths of ourselves, where there is always and can never be anything else but oneness, wholeness, common union. So, the outer practice of communion is to awaken to the insight of the reality of common union. It’s not that maybe some day I will be one with God, and this sense of communion is not “God is there and I’m here and maybe we can talk together in the way in which we think of communion,” but it’s communion in terms of realizing as Jesus puts it, “I and the father are one.”
Not two. Not two people who understand one another, but one. “I and the father are one.” God is the very reality of me, and I am expressing that in various levels of consciousness. So, you see, the important thing is that when you understand this, that our practice is to enter into the awareness of oneness. It is a sharing consciousness. It’s a feeling of wholeness in God, in the fullness of our innate nature, leading to a projection of oneness with all people. When we understand this, then we see that there is no way that we can have a true service or experience of communion or common union by simply going into a place and doing some things and walking out and say, “Well, I’ve done that. Now I’ve got to face the cold, hard world.”
If we really have an experience of communion or common union, there is an awakening of wholeness within ourself which includes and encompasses our relationship with people. You see, that’s why Jesus says, “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, mind and strength and love thy neighbor as thyself.” It’s all [inaudible 00:35:55]. He says, “If you think you love God and do not love your neighbor, you delude yourself. If you think you can commune with God and really have that sense of common union and not at the same time become aware of the activity of God expressing in you and around you and in and through all of your relationships with people in the whole world in which you live, then you delude yourself.”
It’s not something taken out of the context of life’s experience but it is expanding the awareness of life’s experience at its deepest level, knowing that in truth, we are one. I’m one with you. You’re one with me. In a human sense, we feel alienation. We have fears, we have prejudices, and so we act at the surface of our life, but when we get into the consciousness of communion or common union, the deeper we go into ourself, the deeper and the more meaningful becomes the realization that I am one with all persons and all persons are one with me. So, it is a natural corollary or the other side of the coin that out of an experience of communion, whether it be done through ritual or symbology or just through prayer and meditation, should come the sense of holding hands, the feeling of oneness with people, you see.
Now, this is very important, I think, to realize that every time you pray or experience a meditation, you’re having a communion or at least this is what it’s all about. Not going through some kind of motions that is attracting the attention of God, but you’re letting go of your barriers. “Enter into the inner chamber and close the door,” Jesus says, “and the father who seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” Get the sense of oneness. Just let it all go and feel yourself merge into and feel the allness merge into you, this beautiful sense of oneness, of wholeness. Your common union with God.
The realization that you best break down walls of separation. You partake of the flesh, the Christ body, which is the new consciousness of life, and of the blood or the wine, which is a new vitality and enthusiasm for the quest, and then you can take the words that are a part of this symbology. Take, eat, this is my body, drink, this is my blood, and experience that beautiful awareness of a divine process taking place within you and around you.
Now, it’s interesting, I think, that this simple, non-legalistic, non-ritualistic concept of communion is found in all cultures, in all religions, clear back to the beginning of recorded history. For instance, in ancient China, in the texts of Taoism, there’s a very interesting reference. It says, “Heaven and earth and I were produced together and all things and I are one.” Not to be separate from his primal source constitutes what we call heavenly man. Not to be separate from the essential nature thereof constitutes what we call spirit-like man. Not to be separate from its real truth constitutes what we call perfect man, and the whole purpose of prayer, meditation or communion in a spontaneous feeling sense or in a ritualistic sense is that which is pointing toward that, a realization of not to be separate, the sense of oneness, which leads the way to wholeness, the spirit-like man, the perfect man.
So in your consciousness of sharing, symbolizing the breaking down of separation, it’s so important, I think, that following through any kind of experience of communion or of inner spiritual sharing that we get involved in an outer sharing. This is why from the beginning of all kind of religious experience, there was engendered into the worship practice the idea of giving, the idea that has deteriorated into such things as the collection and the offering and the basket is passed and you perfunctorily put your gift in and so forth. Coming out of this idea of the sharingness of your consciousness, a natural, spontaneous feeling, but not just a sharing of substance but a sharing of love.
This is why it’s so important back into the early expression of religions, especially in the Christian religion but all religions have felt this. There was a sharingness that is a part of even the ritual itself that was a matter of holding hands, feeling close together. The whole idea of a community of experience, a community of worship, meaning a common unity when people come together and experience oneness with God and oneness with each other. The horizontal and the vertical process, but now, for just a moment, I would like you to get still.
I want you do just remember those words from the book of Revelation, because they’re so significant in trying to understand this true meaning of communion. Remember in Revelation it is as if the voice of the infinite, not a person or God, but a transcendent realization which is in you and expressing through you and as you, saying to you in a way that perhaps it is the allness of you speaking to the eachness of you, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and open, open this door, I will come into him and will sup with him and he with me.”
Remember when in the parable of the prodigal son, the son eventually comes home? You remember, there is oneness. The father and the son is the depth of the person. The prodigal is the superficial, outward human self, and when there is a merging together, there is this statement expressed by the father, expressed in this sense by the spirit within, saying, “Let us eat and drink and be merry, for my son, who is dead, is alive again.” So there is always that within us that is a bubbling forth of joyous awareness, celebration when finally we wake up from the slumber of human consciousness and accept ourselves as we really are in spirit.
So just remember now, that God is in constant communion with you. As Fillmore used to say, “There is a place within you where there’s a church service going on all the time.” There’s a constant communion service going on in the altar of human conscious, spiritual consciousness, so let’s just, for a moment, enter in, close the door and experience it. Nothing we have to do. It’s to let be done. Let the divine flow, pour itself into and through you, to support you, to bless you, to enrich you, to bring peace to your aching heart, to bring substance to your human needs, to bring life to your physical form. Accept it, rejoice in it, know your oneness with it. We give thanks for this. Amen.
