Category: service

Thinking It Through

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I had a call this evening with a prayer partner. I admitted how I felt after this morning’s Sunday Service. Sunday evenings are not an ideal for me to ponder my life. Holliwell wrote about “singing praises in the face of adversity.” Tonight that idea challenged me. The lead post for the next newsletter needed to be done, and it was mine to do. The topic on my heart is problematic.

Leona, Abbie and the Orchestra were completely fabulous, as always, and I gave an acceptable talk. 41 adults were present today. A mentor of mine reminds me that I shouldn’t pay any attention to Sunday attendance numbers. I give the talk that I have received guidance on, and prepared, and it is enough. The number of people who attend has nothing to do with me. And yet, I wonder.

Late Saturday, a minister from back east had asked for prayer treatment from the larger ministers’ email group for their Center. She asked us to know for their Center that a higher level of engagement, and support (in all ways), arose in participants of their Center. They had a town hall after services on Sunday in which the local Center leadership team agreed to explore the possibility of ‘doing church’ a new way, because it had become clear the old way wasn’t working for them. I feel fortunate to be part of a larger organization that supports each other, and their communities in this way, and one willing to consider alternative ways of being. I wrote, asking if they had any specifics yet. “No, not yet”, was her reply.

Last Friday night, at our Board planning meeting, Mariann asked the Board members to ponder what community meant to them, what they need from this spiritual community, and what they were willing to do in support of that community’s existence. We will revisit the question during this week’s Board of Trustees meeting. I am grateful we have leadership willing to discuss hard questions.

We have our annual meeting coming up in less than three weeks. This is the Board’s report to the congregation about what we have collectively accomplished this past year, and what our leadership team envisions for the year ahead. When I look back at what we’ve done, I’m amazed and delighted. Common hour thinking would say we have had miracle on top of miracle. We know it as the Law of Mind in Action. We also experienced timing that no one could have dreamed up (again, Mind in Action) … in the space of just a few months — the sale of the raw land on 22nd Street at a very good price, being displaced out of 4200 E River Road with 25 days’ notice and having 911 S Craycroft suddenly materialize move-in-ready, us being able to occupy it almost two months before we even formally qualified for a loan, and get a mortgage on the property that is 1/3 less than what we previously paid in rent. You can’t make a story that good up, and yet we did it, without so much as a ruffled feather, and no co-signer or guarantor required. A rather important factor in us being able to get the mortgage was three years of consistent positive cash flow.

Why were we able to have three years of positive cash flow? It wasn’t due to increases in attendance or contributions. Our attendance is has diminished over the last 2½ years. The bulk of our donations come from less than 20% of our contributors each month, and always has. To those of you who have kept us whole, thank you. To those of you who have managed to do very good work with what we have, thank you. Your Board and I refused to spend money we didn’t have. That tenacious point-of-view served us well to get us into our education center which can serve as a home base for us, and we can use it to create a real physical, tangible presence for Science of Mind in Tucson, if we choose. We haven’t had a visible location (with a sign!) since the Board of the old Religious Science Church on Mountain Avenue sold the building out from under the congregation to give the retiring minister a pension. (Our bylaws have been changed so that something like that cannot occur now.) I also wonder if our frugality has hampered us, by limiting our thought processes. I don’t think so, but I don’t actually know.

In case you are interested, this chart tracks attendance and contributions to CSLT from January 2017 to present. The upper (blue) line represents contributions/person-Sunday, and the lower (pink) line tracks attendance. The straight grey line that runs through each of the squiggly lines represents the trendline, or average track, the line has. Averaged contributions per person continue to increase slightly and averaged attendance had dropped from around 80 to around 50. It is not unusual for a congregation to have 40-50% of their attendees leave when a minister retires, or leaves. Perhaps that’s all this is.

This philosophy that I talk about and work at using all the time, and that we claim is true for us (when we remember to stay in our right minds) tells us that the cause of any event or experience must be invisible. Everything we can see, touch, taste or experience is an effect, a consequence, and … readily changeable. Our deeply-held, conscious and unconscious, beliefs are what really create our world. Raymond Holliwell (from Chapter 1 of Working With The Law) wrote, “A fatalistic belief is contagious, and when humanity submits to its influence, believing that the circumstances around them are stronger than the power within them, they are defeated before the race is run.”

I admit that I struggle with the idea that CSLT wants to be a real and vital force for good in Tucson. Maybe it’s my unbelief. I don’t know. I do know I bite my tongue when I hear someone say we aren’t growing or thriving because… (fill in the blank with your favorite way we aren’t “doing it right”). Every iota of that is an effect, an experience, something that comes as an after-thought, and not a cause.

When we remember that each of us has our own (mental) hands on the “steering wheel” of the most powerful creative and causative force known to humanity, our own thoughts, I just take a breath, and focus on what I can do, and get back to working on myself, because that’s what’s mine to do.

My request is that you think through what CSLT means to you, why you participate, or choose not to, and be clear and congruent within yourself. Know that your thoughts matter, make them work for you, and for the good of all.

–Rev Janis Farmer

Update on the Move to 911 S. Craycroft Rd

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We have completed our move from 4200 E. River Rd into our new Office and Education Center at 911 S Craycroft. There are so many people who helped with our move, and so many more who volunteered to help, but for a variety of reasons were not able to participate in the experience itself. I don’t want to start naming names, but I don’t want to leave out anyone who helped. There were dozens of people who helped in various ways. I also want to thank those who contributed financially to our move.

I especially want to thank those who came out to move the irregular items and unsealed boxes, artwork and fragile items that we moved before the hired help came on Saturday the 22nd to move file cabinets, book cases, lawn furniture, tables, desks and boxes of books.

I want to thank those who uninstalled the bookshelves at 4200, and those who re-installed them at 911, those who took apart desks, and those who patched the drywall where we had taken things down. I want to thank those who hauled off the extra trash when the trashcans were full. I want to thank those who boxed up the kitchen, and those who figured out how to make best use of our new breakroom and snack area. I want to thank those who packed the boxes of books, and those who unpacked them. I want to thank the clean-up crew at both locations. I want to thank everyone who hauled items to other non-profits in town for re-distribution of items that we no longer needed, wanted or had a place for.

We aren’t completely settled yet at 911, but we have continued all the normal Center operations, both administration and education, as we continue settling in to our new space. There are always kinks to be worked out, and we are handling them as they come up, one step at a time.

–Dick Laird

Getting Excited about Our Upcoming Youth Program!

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FREE TO BE ME – Expressing the Love Within and Make Today Great. Keep reading to see the themes for weeks 1 & 2 of the curriculum for our Youth program that will roll out this fall.

The Spiritual Truth for Expressing the Love Within is “Love”. Love is one way to prove the Law of Circulation. It is in the giving of it, that it is returned abundantly. The easiest love to circulate is the kind of love that God is – the unconditional kind.

The Spiritual Truth for Make Today Great is “Enthusiasm”. Enthusiasm means “Filled with The Divine”. It is being filled with Spirit. And isn’t that the truth of what and who we are, Spirit incarnate? Enthusiasm is contagious. It is God’s way of encouraging us to put our attention on the good all around us.

“All people are individual expressions of the one God. Our consciousness creates our own reality. The goal of life is freedom from all discord of any kind and this goal is sure to be attained by all” is the Science of Mind Declaration of Principles that is the overarching theme for the month.

What a blessing – to be guided by these loving words, and to be allowed to share them with children from preschool – grade 5. The activities include reading, singing, charades, Duck-Duck-Goose and arts and crafts.

Don’t we all wish we’d learned the Science of Mind when we were children? What a gift for us to be able to share the Science of Mind philosophy with kids. And what a gift to be able to welcome families with children.

The requirements be a teacher are:
• You must have completed the Foundations class
• You must pass a background check
• You must pass a fingerprint check
• Be available to teach 2 Sundays per month and to attend a once monthly Team meeting.

To provide continuity for the children (and their parents), each person will volunteer 2 weeks in a row, serving one week as the helper and a second week as the teacher. For 4 teachers, the rotation will be 1-2, 2-3, 3-4, 4-1. For 5 Sunday months, we’ll ask for a trained volunteer to serve that extra Sunday.

Curricula are available for Preschool through grade 5. We will start our Youth Program with 4 teachers and 2 subs. Our goal is to have 6 children attending by Christmas and to be conducting 2 sessions – preschool – Grade 1 and Grades 2-5. The teachers will be supplied with the curricula for the classes, the supplies for the arts and crafts projects as well as the books to read aloud and music to play. There will be monthly team meetings to receive curriculum, supplies and to review how the classes are progressing.

Banners at the top of the curriculums illustrate the expanding change in focus as the children attend the classes.

Preschool – One Life, As Me
Kinder-Gr 1 – One Life, As Me, Creates
Grades 2&3 – One Life, As Me, Creates, Celebrates
Grades 4&5 – One Life, As Me, Creates, Celebrates, One Life

As our Center grows, I am excited to be involved in offering resources to families with children and I am also pleased for the opportunity to teach these loving words. Reading the curriculum is soothing and I believe helping to support and teaching these lessons will address each teacher’s inner child, allowing us to receive as much, or even more, support from the classes as the students.

If you are interested in participating in our Youth Program, please call me at (520) 270-1279.

— Marya Wheeler

Making The World A Better Place

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No matter what our emotional storm, or what our objective situation, may be, there is always a something hidden in the inner being that has never been violated.  We may stumble, but always there is that Eternal Voice, forever whispering within our ear, that thing which causes the eternal quest, that thing which forever sings and sings.
— Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind, 33.3

I recently had the joy of reconnecting with my stepson, Mitch, who is the Prosecuting District Attorney of the big island of Hawaii.  We had not seen one another for many years, and I was curious if the nature of his job had changed him into a more negative-thinking man.  I was relieved to find him the same Mitch Roth, smart, funny, and optimistic.  He shared with me some of the policies and procedures he has put in place to help the people of his county.  His philosophy is, “If there is a problem, look behind it to see what is causing it. Create the solution there; do not rely on punishment to fix every situation.”

Several years ago there was a serious crime problem in the parking lots of popular tourist attractions in Hawaii.  Young people found opportunities to break into cars and steal valuables when they spotted tourists heading for hiking trails to view waterfalls, lava tubes, or rain forests. Mitch met with a group of older Hawaiian women who were weavers, creating beautiful birds, animals, baskets, and other items to sell to the eager tourists.  Mitch asked them to do their weaving in the parking lots where they could also they could monitor the tourists’ cars.  When the tourists returned, the women would warmly greet them and display their work. The grateful tourists thanked them, purchasing many of the items they had for sell.  Understandably, crime in those parking lots plummeted.

Noting an increase in juvenile delinquency in school-age students, Mitch visited a school that seemed to be a risk epicenter.  He asked the school’s administration to hang a picture of each student in the school.  He then asked the entire staff, teachers, janitors, support staff, and administrators, to put a star on the picture of any student with whom they had a positive connection, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant.  Many of the students had many stars on their pictures; some had a few; and some had no stars at all.  Not surprisingly, the children without positive connections were the ones who had been most challenging.The staff made a huge effort to connect with the seemingly troubled students, and to no one’s surprise, the incidents of crime went down dramatically. Mitch told me, ”Those kids got no positive feedback anywhere in their lives.  When they started getting positive attention, they behaved in a more positive way.”

In May 2018, Kilauea Volcano erupted, burying villages, towns, farms, and roads with lava.  Mitch formed an interfaith group to aid the over 1700 evacuees on the island.  The group consists of a Jewish Rabbi, an Episcopalian Priest, a conservative Protestant minister, a Buddhist monk, a Muslim Imam, and Mitch.  They provided over 60,000 hot meals following the earliest days of the eruption, created a daycare for the displaced children, and helped create carpools to get people back and forth to work.  They provided necessities, including laundry facilities, for the people who had lost everything.  After the eruption crisis was over, the group decided to stay connected.  They meet monthly and to their surprise and delight, they have come to realize how similar their worldviews, and belief systems, are.  Instead of spreading discord from their differences, they have created cohesiveness through their discovery of how much they desire the same good.  What an example for the rest of us.

–Pat Masters

Helping Ourselves by Helping Others

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…let us begin to accept today more good than we experienced yesterday, and to know that we shall reap a harvest of fulfilled desires.
      Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind 39.5)

A recent article in Psychology Today listed the many benefits of altruism. According to the article, acting with altruism can do more than make us feel good about ourselves mentally; it can actually release endorphins which give us a “helpers’ high.” These endorphins also enhance our immune systems, making
us physically healthier.

Also discussed were the emotional or psychological benefits of helping others. These included feelings of gratitude for what one has compared to those being helped, distraction from one’s own problems, and reduction in feelings of stress about one’s own life.

Mariann Moery and I were in PineTop last weekend. I made arrangements to meet Karen, a friend whom I had not seen for a year. When I first saw her, I noticed that she had lost a great deal of weight (60 pounds), was sporting a new haircut, and appeared to be happier than I had ever seen her. As we were waiting for our dinner, she began telling us about the new love in her life.

A year ago, she began volunteering at an organization called Walking Down Ranch that provides housing for homeless veterans in the White Mountain communities of PineTop, Lakeside, and ShowLow. Although it is difficult to say exactly how many homeless veterans are trying to eke out an existence there, the best guess is 200-plus.

Seeing a old lodge with 18 empty cabins in the community of Lakeside, the founding members of Walking Down Ranch made an agreement with the East Mesa Fire Fighters to rent the empty lodge for $1.00 a year. Volunteers went in and repaired each of the cabins, making each of them habitable for the individual veterans, and in some cases, for veterans and their families.

In addition to the 18 cabins, there are two additional buildings that are used as offices for the organization, and a thrift store, which provides income to help defray the cost of the repairs and utilities. They have a computer lab, a food pantry, a laundry room, and an exercise facility. While these facilities are not state of the art, they are functional and being put to good use.

While Mariann and I toured the facility Saturday morning, we saw a hair stylist providing free haircuts to the veterans. We saw veterans who were helping by washing windows, accepting and organizing donations, and providing information to visitors.

Because Karen believes in the organization to which she gives so much of her time and talent, her life is richly enhanced. She is passionate about the work they are doing, because she sees a need, a solution in which “everyone wins” and happy, healthy results.

If you are looking for a way to enrich your own life, think of an organization about which you have interest, gratitude, or passion. Is there a place where you can get engaged there? If nothing immediately catches your imagination, CSLT is primarily a volunteer run organization too. In our own community, we seek lively and enthusiastic individuals to help with Hospitality, Compassionate Hearts, Altared States, Hosts, and Ushers and Greeters. The time commitment to participate on one of our service teams is about once a month. Serving our community is a fabulous way to meet new friends, to serve in a very real way, and to enhance our community and you individually. As Rev. Janis would say, “We invite you to come play with us.” Each of us receives benefit individually from the shared experience and our community prospers.

–Pat Masters

Sacred Service

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It was Dick Laird’s turn to write the Board Member’s blogpost. Since he tends to be a man of very few words and a whole lot of valuable and valued engagement, he didn’t mind too much that I wrote it instead.

Something Dick recognized early on was that regular participation in the life of his Center or spiritual community was an important spiritual practice for him. It’s not something one might do if they needed to be recognized, honored or ‘show off’ in the spotlight, but it provides useful and necessary services to the community as a whole and to individual members of the congregation and it, metaphorically, ‘keeps the wheels on the bus’. Plus, there’s the added benefit of supporting and engaging with something valued.

One of the traditional paths of enlightenment in the yogic tradition is the path of service. This is called karma yoga. According to the Yoga Journal Online (citation at the end of this note), ‘being aware that all of our present efforts become a way to consciously create a future that frees us from being bound by negativity and selfishness. Karma is the path of self-transcending action. We practice karma yoga whenever we perform our work and live our lives in a selfless fashion and as a way to serve others. Volunteering to serve meals in a soup kitchen or signing up for a stint with the Peace Corps or Habitat for Humanity are prime examples of selfless service associated with the karma yoga path.’

Of course, this path of sacred service is not limited to participating at your Spiritual Center. Many of our congregants volunteer outside our Center for other non-profit groups and organizations, including public schools, hospitals, food banks, homeless shelters, and soup kitchens and in their own neighborhoods…

The path of sacred service also gives shy or introverted people an avenue to get involved and participate, and meet new people and feel connected to something larger than themselves, or their own human experience. Personally, I know of several individuals on the Hospitality Team, which seems like a hugely gregarious and extroverted bunch, who joined because it gave them a chance to get involved in a way that gave them some relatively simple, straight-forward tasks, once every couple months, and gave them a chance to be around people, feel useful, and not feel trapped or overwhelmed by the level of interaction. It also gave them access to a small group of people that they could work alongside of for a while and see if they might want to engage a little more socially. The same could easily be said about those who have worked behind the scenes, and behind the tables, to bring the Book Tables to Sunday Services, and those who provide assistance to the administrative functions of our Center.

So, look inside yourself and see if you have the appropriate amount of social engagement that suits your temperament and desires, and, if you find you would like a little more involvement in life and the idea of volunteerism works for you, reach out and touch a hand. There’s more than enough (joy, delight and potential connection) to go around.

https://www.yogajournal.com/practice/the-branches-of-yoga

–Rev Janis Farmer

Steps On The Journey

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One of my all-time favorite Zen-based lessons goes as follows.  Two monks must travel together from their monastery to a distant place which involves crossing a fast-running river.  Upon arriving at the river, they discover a woman standing on the banks unable to cross on her own.  One monk simply picks her up and carries her across, depositing her on the other side.  All go their separate ways.  That evening, when their rule of silence is released – the second monk attacks the first for “touching that woman.”  The first monk replies – “I only carried her across the river, you’ve carried her all day.”

Oh my. How much time is spent carrying (if not nurturing) events, exchanges, actions that have no need to be remembered, much less retained, as emotional traumas?  I know that I do it way too often.  And, I know as well, that not only is it not good for me, it is truly bad for me.

Retaining, remembering, and hoarding those emotional upsets prevents me from being present to the actual Truth of Now.  The actual being aware and awake to my life as it is.  And let’s not even visit what neuroscientists say about how much easier it is for us to go to those bad, unhappy, defensive places.  Even without our practicing and reinforcing the choosing of unhappy.  We can of course blame those Neanderthal ancestors for constantly being concerned with food, fight, flight, sleep, and then leaving those emotions as primary in the genetic memory pool.  But, I digress.

One of my preventative measures is to write every morning.  It started a year ago as an “assignment” I gave myself from Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way.  It has become a must-do practice that allows me to discover, and frequently release, events both old and current that have lodged themselves in my state of being. Astounding how some long-ago (seeming) rejection feeds a current self-doubt. How a goal not met in the past, defines how freely, and how high, I let myself aim today.

For me, letting the pen go across the page has produced descriptions of sh*t that I thought I had long ago forgotten let alone released.  So why retrieve those memories?

Because I’ve learned I have a decades long habit of saying – this doesn’t matter, just let it go – when it really does matter. Or I go to — I won’t think about it – or worse yet I stuff it into a dark storage space and never let myself feel the Truth.  Every time I hide something, I add a layer to the walls blocking my growth, preventing my learning what I need to know, and I keep myself from being aware and present to the different choices I can make now.

Every time I do acknowledge something, historical or current, that hampers my focus on what’s happening now, I recognize that acknowledgement as the first step to releasing it.  Every time that release happens, I open space in my being to allow choosing the good.  I create the space to grow the opportunities – the options – to become more.

Our thought does not go out to influence persons or things. What it does is readjust our own consciousness, our own thinking, to include a larger and a more harmonious field of action. We learn that when we get our own consciousness straightened out, things in our external world adjust themselves to meet our new and better inward awareness.”      Ernest Holmes, Living the Science of Mind 204.3

We can only be in charge of ourselves, but we can be in charge if/when we choose to be so.   Peace.

by Mariann Moery

When Push Comes to Shove

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Driving to the office on the Memorial Day Monday, aware that most people were taking the day off and enjoying themselves, I noticed I was thinking about the phrase, “When Push Comes to Shove” and I wondered that that phrase meant, and why it had come to mind.  Apparently, I was feeling ‘put-upon’, squeezed or constrained in some way, and I pondered what had brought that feeling on, and what I could do about it.  I started making lists to see what I could figure out what I might be feeling ‘bound up’ about.

1. The home study groups on Spiritual Economics complete this week, and have been pleasingly successful.  Participants have enjoyed digging into the material and learning, and also getting to know their home-study-group-buddies more deeply.  So that’s a joyous success, so that’s not it.  Two different centers have asked if they can use the curriculum that I had compiled.  One of the juicy bits from the fifth class that really caught my attention was the idea that living from a giving mentality (not expecting to get, so it’s not fostering codependency or martyrdom) makes more space for more good to show up.  I’m thrilled to share it, so that’s not it.

2. The planning for the next class, How To Change Your Life, is coming along well.  I’m enjoying working with one of my favorite ministers, Dr Linda McNamar from Laguna Woods CA, creating a juicy curriculum. And I’m getting to introduce her to the zoom videoconferencing platform, which is a double bonus.  So that’s not it.

3. The sign-up sheets are out for Visioning, which starts June 9th.  We had a good half-dozen folks say they were interested in taking it this summer and available on Tuesdays.  And I’ve thought about a new way to introduce the topic, that may make it more accessible to people who haven’t been able to ‘get’ it before. So that’s not it.

4. I’m really jazzed about the June theme of Imagination.  Carla has found some excellent quotes for us to use for our Spiritual Thoughts and has written some dynamite affirmations, and the Music Team is out-doing themselves with our own volunteer vocalists.  So that’s not it.

5. Barbara and the leasing agents are digging in and removing potential obstacles around a possible interim location that Alana found for us.  So far, so good.  So that’s not it.

6. Gail from my Spiritual Economics group volunteered to come help out for a few hours in the office on Mondays to reduce my administrative workload.  That’s awesome, and very welcome help.  So that’s not it.

7. I’m in the middle of working on a quilt, and haven’t finished painting my house.  Painting had begun to feel like drudgery, so I realized I’d be better off taking a break from painting and do something fun. Then I can go back and finish the painting with renewed interest and enthusiasm.  And if I finish two quilts before I feel like painting some more, who cares?  So that’s not it.

Coming up with nothing, but feeling much better after having made the list, I decided to ask Google.

This is what I found.  It’s a colloquialism that probably originated in black America.  It was first formally recorded by Thomas De Witt Talmage in 1873, in the United Methodist Free Churches’ Magazine: “The proposed improvement is about to fail, when Push comes up behind it and gives it a shove, and Pull goes in front and lays into the traces; lo! the enterprise advances, the goal reached!”

So, the original intention of the phrase seems to be something that wants to be created, and it just needs a little impetus or ‘shove’ to make it happen.  I especially love the phrase that isn’t part of the idiom, “Pull goes in front and lays the traces (track) … the enterprise advances.  The Goal is reached”.

Perhaps just examining possible areas of concern allows me to reframe my thoughts, not as troubles, but as things in gestation, in process, and just waiting for “Pull to show up and lay the track”?   It’s a little bit like setting intention and then waiting to take delivery from Divine Mind/Spirit/The Universe when the product is ready.  I’m so very good with that.

I love this philosophy… how it shows up and helps me make sense of my life.

— Rev Janis Farmer

Life Lessons

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My personal aphorism goes like this: The road to perdition is based on incorrect assumptions.

My most recent experience of that personal truth happened one night around 10 o’clock as I was on my way home from a meeting in downtown Tucson.

I stopped at my local gas station to fill up and saw an older man – obviously homeless. He was dirty, long tangled hair and scraggly beard. He was push/pulling a roller chair holding the plastic bags of his belongings.

He started across the station drive and honestly my first thought, was oh no – I don’t really want to deal with this tonight. And, I looked away.

When I looked back he had fallen and with extreme difficulty, was trying to get back on his feet.

Before I could do anything – enter two young men: baseball caps on backwards, dressed for shenanigans with the 12-pack on the pick-up seat, etc. etc. They went over, gently picked him up, talking quietly to ease him. They asked if they could take his stuff off the seat of the roller-chair so he could sit. They made sure he knew where his stuff was at all times. Then while one of them moved him toward the office, the other went in to have the manager call for assistance. Then the three of them got him settled and the manager stayed with him while waiting for help.

The guys, after saying good-bye and reassuring him other help was coming, got in their well-traveled pick-up and went on their way.

I just sat there and watched the great goodness happen. A great goodness that I was not a part of.

I had assumed the homeless man was going to ask me for something. I also assumed the two guys parked over to the side with their 12-pack were other than what they truly were: actual good Samaritans.

My lessons from that night were downright painful to accept, but amazingly good for my soul.

…God makes no mistakes. All mistakes rest in the experience of man. “There is no sin, but a mistake, and no punishment but a consequence.” We must declare that no mistakes have been made, none are being made, and none are going to be made. If mistakes have been made we must neutralize their effect by the direct declaration that they no longer have power over us.

~ Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind 612.6

It certainly felt like I made mistake. Yet, the homeless man was in better physical hands with the two guys then any attempt I might have made to help him.

BUT, did I miss a chance to live/love the whole experience of knowing that we are all one in Spirit? Oh, you bet.

Am I working deeper and trying harder to master that lesson? That’s an even bigger you bet.

Travel well on your path and mind the lessons as they appear.

— Mariann Moery

Connections

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I drove home a new way on Sunday after services and noticed the bright blue sign of a Napa Auto Parts Store. It was the first one I actually remember seeing in Tucson. Part of me doubted that it could possibly be the only one, so I googled it to see how many there are in town. One. There’s only one. Huh.

The reason it caught my eye, I think, is because my mom worked in one for nearly a decade while my brother attended the lower grades of public school. She was of the generation who fiercely believed that moms needed to be home when their kids got home from school, so she wanted a part-time job where she could do that. I never could figure out how my mom worked in an auto parts store, since her interest in car parts was negligible.   Honestly, it was non-existent.

As I pondered this, driving across town, what came to me was an awareness of what her expertise actually was. She was the undeniably, unstoppably, irreplaceably queen of customer service. People mattered to her. After my brother was old enough to drive himself home from football practice, my mom got a job working full-time at the photo lab on the airbase near where they lived. She served as the film librarian; her primary job was to interact with the customers and make sure they got exactly the service or the product they needed. People would stop by her desk all the time for hugs, and to take a piece of candy out of the candy dish on the corner of her desk that was always full. She kept that job for the next 40+ years and was still happily working when she became terminally ill; she could not imagine not being there to take care of ‘her people’.

I retired from my technical career at 52. She and I would often talk about how odd it was that her daughter retired before she did. I kept telling her that it was really obvious to me when it was time for me to stop working (at that job) and that she would know when it was time, and to retire any sooner would be silly. That seemed to satisfy her, mostly. There were times that she wished she could be a retired grandma and do the craft activities, the outings, or the book studies, with the old, retired ladies. When it got right down to it, she didn’t believe that she would feel as vital and alive if she didn’t have to answer to an alarm clock 5 days a week. So she kept doing what she loved – connecting with people.

There’s something about pleasant human interactions that adds brightness and liveliness to our days. Social scientists say we need a certain number of hugs each day to be emotionally healthy – four at a minimum. When I was working on last Wednesday night’s class on Mysticism, I was reminded that the need to connect with others is a basic human survival need. On Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it ranks just slightly above the need to feel safe, and just below the need to feel respected or esteemed.

“People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.” — James Baldwin

When I first saw this quote by James Baldwin, I thought of it as a negative commentary, but the more that I pondered the lifestyle that my mom chose, this idea remained quite valid and uplifting. She was the undisputed queen of making people feel important, no matter who, and no matter what. Even on Sundays and with the youth ministry at church, she was the first of the women to be given a plaque that read, “Mother of Our Youth”. I always thought the plaque was a little disconcerting, but it recognized the identity she had created for herself, and how she wanted to be seen in her world.

It seems I picked up just a smidge of that connecting mindset myself. I’m OK with that.

— Rev Janis

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