This Sunday we are celebrating Memorial Day weekend when we honor the lives that were given in the supreme sacrifice in the protection of our wonderful freedom as a nation of free and sovereign people. We are blessed by this act of devotion and loyalty to our independence.
At the same time, we are grieving over the acts of violence that have occurred in our schools, cities, and homes in the last few years. There is an answer to this rampage of violence our nation is experiencing: change the conversation that is occurring on our media, TV programming, video games, schools, and movies and entertainment.
Begin by ceasing the visual carnage that is prevalent in our daily TV programs. Continue by changing the violence and revenge that is displayed in the video games that are absorbing our young minds. Consider the damage to young minds that are trained in the ideas of separation, anger and conflict.
We know on the spiritual side of things, that the words, images, and thoughts generated by these violent things are contractive and decaying in nature and produce events and outcomes that mirror these thoughts. We then scratch our heads and wonder what happened? It is our culture and its current outlook on life that is generating these outcomes. We have lost our positive, loving, harmonious, center and rewired it to the violent paradigms that are showing up in material form in our world. Where are the ideas of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Dali Lama and Christ Jesus?
This Sunday we are choosing to bring in words and thoughts of expansion, growth, and love producing energies. These are the energies found in the Lord’s Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Buddhist Loving Kindness Blessing, and the 91st Psalm. There are many other sacred writings that bring in the energies of harmony, love, peace, and compassion. However, these four prayers are familiar to many people in our present culture and form a foundation for radiating the expansive energies of love into the Universe when spoken out loud with feeling.
These are the prayers that make a difference. Prayers that provide positive energies that counter the constrictive energies of violence, hate, revenge and separation. Listening to a minister, priest, rabbi, or holy person pray, speak consoling and healing words is important, however, the words that we speak out loud are the words that create the energies that fill up the ethers of the Universe with love.
Join with us this Sunday as our Prayer Chaplains lead us in speaking and praying the words in these prayers out loud, as we remember that we live in a harmonious, loving environment of peace and joy because we have created it through our own declarations of peace and joy.
I love you,
Rev. Robert