Find Hope in Acceptance and Truth
by Rev. Cory Coberforward
John 12:44-47
Then Jesus cried out, “Whoever believes in me does not believe in me only, but in the one who sent me. The one who looks at me is seeing the one who sent me. I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness. If anyone hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge that person. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world.”
Isaiah 9:6-7
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called Wonderful Counselor,
Mighty God,
Everlasting Father,
Prince of Peace.
Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end.
He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness
from that time on and forever.
The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.
Read the written message below with music videos
It can often feel like we’re hitting our heads against a wall when it comes to our spiritual growth. We strive to invite more of God’s light into our lives and yet it can seem like we go nowhere, that we’re not making any progress. A key cause of this feeling of stagnation may be in our inability to truly allow God’s light to shine throughout our inner environment. We expect God’s light to immediately transform our feelings and our thinking without us having to see ourselves and, even more importantly, accept what we find inside.
The Christmas story tells us that “a light was born in great darkness.” And whether we deeply believe and resonate with this original Christmas story or not, the metaphor and parable is a profound one. It wasn’t that the light of God was unwilling to see the darkness, no, the story tells us that it is the darkness that is unwilling to see and unwilling to be exposed in the light. But this is actually the hope of the Lord’s Advent within us this holiday season, that we might finally allow our inner lives to fully enter the light.
You see, whether we fight how we think and feel, or just ride along with it, it is not often that we just allow the illuminating love of the Divine to shine on our minds with acceptance and nonattachment. To do this, all we have to do is come to notice how we are feeling in any given moment and come to love and accept that that is how we feel and that it is passing. This means to neither reject our feelings nor ride them, but to accept how they are naturally arising and fading in the light of God we call consciousness. The Lord isn’t afraid of seeing our darkness in the light, but we are the ones often afraid of allowing our own inner lives to enter God’s light of love and compassion.
To start healing, we have to find hope in God’s light and allow God’s deeper Advent into our living and direct God’s light towards our impulses, our feelings, and our thinking. Coming to allow the darkness of our feelings to start being seen in the light is like allowing the Christ child to become more Advent in our lives because we are finally allowing our inner Divine child to share how they have been feeling. A feeling that we think is arising because our friend said this or that is often tied to situations going all the way back to our childhood. And so, allowing ourselves to feel fully what is arising in the moment and accepting those feelings with love and compassion will finally allow that inner child to have its day in the sun, which sometimes means bawling its eyes out.
I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid only certain feelings from me were accepted by the adults around me. Other feelings were said to be wrong and needed to disappear. Often, there was no room for my feelings as I felt I had to manage situations to keep out of trouble. And on the flip side, some of my negative feelings became more prevalent because of the stories I started to tell myself often about myself.
We all tend to fear allowing our feelings arise because we’ve been conditioned to not accept how we feel. We’ve been told that we need to hide and banish our feelings. But what we will find as we allow the Lord’s Advent light to shine onto our negative sensations is that once they get their say they stop needing to come up again and again throughout our day. What we think is an anger or anxiety problem suddenly becomes more of a one-and-done. In the end, we see that we have been rocked back and forth by our darker feelings entirely because we haven’t accepted them as they arise in the light of consciousness, but now we can find hope in relying on the light of the Lord.
The other reason we continue to be rocked by our minds is because we haven’t allowed the Lord’s light to cut through the darkness of our thoughts, which often cloud our inner landscape. Thoughts are different than feelings in that our negative thoughts are the false stories and judgments that we tell ourselves, often again and again. Like our feelings, we must come to see when our darker thoughts arise, but whereas our negative feelings will start to diminish once we shine love on them, our negative thoughts must be swept away with a sword of truth and understanding. One reason our feelings may continue to turn negative is because we tend to listen to the darker ideas that arise in our heads, even when the root of those feelings has nothing to do with what we’re thinking about. Again, instead, we must see these negative thoughts arise and replace them with greater truths.
For example, “I don’t like her,” can be replaced with, “I am one with Divine Love for all life,” or “she is also one with the Great I Am,” which are greater truths. “We are going to fail,” can be corrected with something like, “We are already infinitely fulfilled in the Lord.” And false thoughts such as, “I’m a loser, I’m never good enough,” are better replaced with, “No, that’s not true. I am one with the Infinite I am. I am one with Goddess. The Lord. The Christ known by many names.” In fact, any time our inner landscape feels constricted, oppressed, or stifled we can be sure that there are false thoughts at the root of those sensations. And so, in this way our ultimate hope for spiritual healing centres in our God-given ability to shine the light of God’s love and truth on our inner landscape, which can often become easier and easier the more we do the work.
As Christ showed us, there are two modalities that we must embrace to find inner healing. We must bring love and acceptance to our feelings so that they can finally get their day in the sun, and we must “bring a sword,” as it’s said Christ came to do, cutting through the false thoughts and ideas that keep us trapped in darkness.
Often, I’ve wondered why it is said that Christ didn’t come to bring peace but came to bring a sword, but today we can see that as we cut through our false thoughts which keep us trapped in darkness, then we can more fully see the hope, love, peace, and joy that are our underlying natures. These are some of the big truths that we should remind ourselves of when our minds run rampant, coming to accept our feelings that arise with these thoughts as we also cut through the falsity often behind them.
The Lord had no need to “bring” these Advent themes to us because they are our fundamental state, the Light of God is already within us, indeed, it is what we use to start to heal. We have but to release our negative feelings through love and acceptance, and slice through the cobwebs of our habitual, negative, false thoughts, and then we can see that the Advent of the Divine Child was one with our very own Advent into this world. And, as we shine light on our inner state, we start to have hope not just for ourselves through the ease in which this light heals us, but also for our world which very much needs to cut through its violent and divisive thoughts and come to lovingly accept and release all the pent-up pain that no one has wanted to see.
Blessings,
Cory