Message from Our Minister Reverend Mary White
Good Day and Blessings!
“There is no you and me, or us and them, only a cosmic awareness that we are one with the universe.”
Do you notice that the older we get, the more we come to understand the interconnection with all that exists in this world?
There is a mental shift that takes place throughout the various stages of life until we come to the point of identifying that we exist in a single reality.
There is no you and me, or us and them, only a cosmic awareness that we are one with the universe.
Imagine, if we all came to this realization what a worldly impact this would have. Organizations and societies would evolve to embrace inclusion for all.
Until we identify with all that is, we remain captive within the self.
With Love,
Rev. Mary White
Love Poems to God III-16 from Rilke's Book of Hours
We are not poor. We are just without riches, we who have no will, no world: marked with the marks of the latest anxiety, disfigured, stripped of leaves.
Around us swirls the dust of the cities, the garbage clings to us.
We are shunned as if contaminated, thrown away like broken pots, like bones, like last year’s calendar.
And yet if our Earth needed to she could weave us together like roses and make of us a garland.
For each being is cleaner than washed stones and endlessly yours, and like an animal who knows already in its first blind moments its need for one thing only — to let ourselves be poor like that — as we truly are.
Reading Excerpt by Jack Kornfield
Excerpt from “The Art of Forgiveness, Loving Kindness, and Peace” by Jack Kornfield
Love does not grandstand. Like water, it is humble and unstoppable. Love does not try to fix the whole world. It is enough to plant seeds of kindness and justice everywhere we can.
“I never look at the masses as my responsibility. I look at the individual. I can only love one person at a time. I can only feed one person at a time. Just one, just one … So you begin — I begin.
I picked up one person — maybe if I didn’t pick up that one person, I wouldn’t have picked up forty-two thousand. The whole work is only a drop in the ocean. But if I didn’t put that drop in, the ocean would be one drop less. Same thing for you, same thing in your family, same thing in the community where you live. Just begin … one, one, one.”
~ Mother Teresa
PRUC Online Worship Service
Please join us this Sunday, August 15th
Volunteer Opportunity with Canadian Red Cross
PRAYER
Spirit of Gentleness
You have laid before us examples of compassion and loving-kindness. Give us the passion of those ancestors who welcomed, as family, the less privileged. May we identify through the lens of individuals who give unconditionally and may we continue to plant seeds of kindness and justice. Help us to recognize that “riches” are a human concept, and the “real riches” are those gifts given freely to all by the Creator. We pray in the name of the One who gave His all.
Amen
Powell River United Church, 6932 Crofton Street, Powell River, BC, V8A 5H4, Canada