The “Sankofa” is a metaphorical symbol used by the Akan people of Ghana, generally depicted as a bird with its head turned backward taking an egg from its back. It expresses the importance of reaching back to knowledge gained in the past and bringing it into the present in order to make positive progress. (Source: sankofa.org)

I first heard this word, sankofa, during the online Ministers’ Gathering that happened earlier this week. The speaker this particular day was Dr Shakti Butler, President and Founder of World Trust Educational Services (world-trust.org), who spoke to the 180+ CSL ministers gathered online.

What could this knowledge be that we might want to reach ‘back’ and remember so that we can make positive progress, or create positive change?

One thing we may have learned as children, or we may have had to re-parent ourselves later in life to learn — We are made of Love, for Love, as Love and by Love. To say it another way, Love is what we are. Love is our Essential Nature, or our True Self. Love is God, or the Divine Nature expressing as each of us.

How would our world be different if everyone remembered their divine inheritance as a being of Love? How would our world be different if each of us remembered it within ourselves, and treated ourselves, and others, that way? It would be a different world, wouldn’t it?

In one of the readings we used in the Daily Morning Practice this week, Ernest Holmes wrote on p 274 of 365 Science of Mind: I open my whole consciousness to the realization that all the power and presence there is surrounds me in an eternal embrace, that the Spirit forever imparts Its own Life to me, forever flows through me into happiness, success, and well-being.

In this week’s reading of Barbara Marx Hubbard’s Emergence, she wrote about what it could be like when we recognize that we are more than the self-aware, survival-oriented human that has kept us alive up until this point and become the newly ‘birthed’ (really remembered, re-member, or put back together) co-creative human who is inspired by spirit to express and embody divine intent. What is that divine intent? To return to being the Love that we are, experience that within ourselves and share that with all.

Barbara Marx Hubbard has written some affirmations for us to ponder and perhaps adopt:

I am no longer separated from the source of creation.
I am one with the essence that pervades the whole universe.
I am an expression of the process of creation of God.
I am the Beloved I have sought since time immemorial.
I am the presence and process of the divine within me.
I am the voice I hear. I am the guide I follow. I am a co-creator of new worlds.
I think, write, and act as this presence in the world.
I am a young Universal Human. I may forget momentarily who I really am, but I will never go back the whole way. As a baby can never return to the womb, I can never go back to my separated state. I am humble. I have universes to understand, infinite things to learn, but I am born.

How would our world change if each one of us remembered we were made of, and for, experiencing and expressing Divine Love? What kinds of positive change could we enact as Love?

–Rev Janis