In our gospel today, Thomas recognizes The Risen One by touching His wounds. Its not majestic light or profound wisdom that awakens Thomas. For Thomas, the wound is the very doorway to knowing Christ.

Every human soul, each one of us is also a Thomas. For in our time, we are called to know the living Christ, not merely believe. And like Thomas, we too cannot know the Christ in us, the Christ in others unless we touch the wound. However, even though every human being is wounded, not everyone’s wounds reveal The Risen One. If the wounds we carry are infected and closed up, full of resentment, bitterness and anger toward the world, then Christ remains un-raised in us. But if our wound is the very thing that has cracked us open to the light, so that from our wound peace, tenderness and love ray out to human beings, then Christ comes alive in us.

Dear friends, this is why the Risen Christ always appears in the gospels and in our lives with wounds and with peace. For The Christ in us in not how wise, light-filled or free from pain we are. The Christ in us appears when peace-filled love, streaming through our brokenness, touches the hearts of others.

This contemplation by Rev. Evans was inspired by John 20

On Holy Saturday, everything outside was covered in ice. The branches had become flutes of glass. And the rays of light that glistened through the ice, quickly melted the crystal garden.

And yet, throughout Holy Week we have heard in our passiontide epistle not of rays of light, but of a ray of grief. That in a ‘grave of hope, a ray of grief penetrates our gaze’.

At Holy Saturday, the transition from the cross to the resurrection, we can ask what is it that leads us to new life? What is it that allows resurrection to find us?

Like the sun melting the ice outside with its rays, the human soul must allow the light of the cross to melt us- the light of the cross to inspire us to let go. For the ray of grief that is meant to enter our gaze is the knowledge that we must let go of that which is of the old self, that we must let go of that in us that no longer serves the higher. We must be willing to die if the new is to be born. And this is a grief because we have grown to love our worn out selves. This dying is also grief because its hard to let things go that we have carried so long.

Dear friends, it is only hope and the knowledge that we must die that will lead us to Easter. May our hearts truly hear Him who speaks to all human beings preparing for resurrection: O man, from a grave of hope, a ray of grief penetrates your gaze.

This contemplation by Rev. Evans was inspired by our Passiontide Liturgy.

Old forces and new forces, old worlds and new worlds coexist. They are present at the same time and complement each other. They overlap each other. But the transition from something old into something new is frequently hard and does not necessarily come naturally. The more radically different old and new are from each other, the harder it gets.

It is hard for us to let go of things we have grown accustomed and attached to. It is hard to embrace
new ideas and new ways of thinking, new places and new people, different ways of living. And
sometimes it is hard to change just one tiny little habit…

When Christ enters into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday the Gospel tells us a curious story. Christ is riding on a donkey – but according to the words of the Gospel he is also riding on the donkey’s foal. Thus, in a picture, we are told how he bridges two different states of being – one old, one new.

In Christ is present that mysterious element that is able to lift up the old and transform it, resurrect it, into something entirely new. He is the living transition. He is the creative process that takes us unto a higher plane of existence.

We welcome Christ into our soul and he will walk with us, steadfastly, through old and new, through
death and life and, just as the black colour of Passiontide turns into Easter-Red, through the transitions in our lives and in our beings.

This contemplation by Rev. Contreras was inspired by Palm Sunday.

It is said that love is blind. Many of us have experienced this; a love that is so enthralled with someone, so head over heals with someone or something that we don’t notice the shadows, the red flags, the weaknesses of our beloved. The bliss and pleasure of falling in love makes us blind.

And yet there is a deeper kind of love, a love that is not blind, a love that is not limited to pleasure but can hold pain.

For in our gospel today (John 8 the woman who committed adultery), the one who is Love shows it to us. Christ’s love sees fully the accussed woman. He sees fully her shadows and sins but does not judge or dismiss her. His love also sees fully her becoming, her potential true humanity. Christ shows us a love that accepts and feels the pain of each others failings and weaknesses, while at the same time always holds each heart in its highest light.

And this love can live in us…

By practicing bearing with each others painful weaknesses without blame or condemnation, by practicing remembering the highest in each one of our brothers and sisters no matter how irritating they are.

This is Love. 

This contemplation by Rev. Evans was inspired by John 8

The human being has so much power today, more than at any time in history. We have the power to organize almost our whole lives through a screen in the palm of our hand. We have the power to make 500 people fly through the air in a metal machine. We have more military power of destruction than ever before.

And yet, at the same time, even with all this power, human hearts have never been more anxious and empty. Anti-anxiety pills have become the norm and are the most profitable and growing drug today. The paradox for the human heart in our time is that the more outwardly powerful, in control and dominant we become, the more empty, anxious and fearful is our heart.

What if our obsession with power is really the longing for an outdated all-powerful tyrant God? What if the anxiety and fear that lives in our hearts is there because we keep trying to find our identity in control and power, when the source of our true being lives in a vulnerable powerlessness God of love?

For in Christ, God has let go of His power and become powerless, even unto the death on the cross. The challenging spiritual secret of today is that God is not all powerful anymore; he has given that up to be all loving, all sacrificing. And through practicing letting go of our own quest for power, our own need for control, we come closer to our divinity, closer to the source of our true being. For our truest humanity only awakens in Christ, in vulnerable powerless love toward all.

Dear Friends, God is not out there, pulling strings, aloof and in control. And to worship that fraudulent tyrant of a god is to unknowingly fill your cup with anxiety. For the true God is here with us in all that we do, walking with us, suffering what we suffer, overjoyed when we freely love one another. He has let go of His power so He can experience what it means to be human, so that He can, not dominate the world, but love the world.
This contemplation by Rev. Evans was inspired by John 19 and the God of Love.

Yesterday, to my surprise, an aloe-vera plant showed me how to practice being human! He just sits there rooted in his pot, on my counter, in my kitchen. And in the midst of his rootedness, all his branches reaching toward the window- his green arms striving toward the light. Even though he never leaves his pot, never leaves my kitchen, He is always reaching to the sun.

Like the plant, every human spirit is designed to reach- we are actually made to reach-out to the spiritual sun through all that we do. We are not actually meant to touch the Son, or be the Son, for we would not be able to bear His heat and light. Like the plant, every human spirit is also called to practice accepting the pot and the room and the window that we have been given, always turning to The light from where and what we are.

Dear friends, inner peace is the art and practice of imitating an aloe-vera plant near a window on a bright afternoon- letting go of our desire that our pots should be different, that our windows are not big enough, and learning to love the reaching- in all that we do- always reaching for the warm healing Christ-Light of the world.

A great Saint once said, “ I saw the devil’s snares set like traps all over the earth, and I groaned and said, “What can pass through them, what is it that can protect us?” And I heard a holy voice softly saying, “Humility, Humility.”

It is astounding to think that our greatest armour against all the dangers that we face, our greatest protection against all of the darkness of this world, against all the hate and fear and anger and egotism that would snare our hearts at every turn, is not swords or guns, it is not armies or bank accounts, it is not even esoteric knowledge, or clairvoyant capacities; our greatest weapon against the  the adversary is humility, simply humility.

For within each one of us there is a humble heart. This humble one in us is able to let go of blame, and send warmth to those who cause pain. The humble one in us knows that we actually cannot attain humility, but can only let go of our obsession with self and serve what is being asked in this moment. And the humble one is not the one in us who wants to win, to defeat our adversary, but humility actively lets go of winning altogether, knowing that powerlessness is the very doorway to Him.

For Christ’s Love is our protection, and humility brings Him close.

Our children are not our own. They come from The Spirit through us, not from us. Our children choose us because we give them what they need for their journey, both wound and medicine. Children are gifts for the world, and their destinies shine into the darkness like starlight- light that shapes us parents too just as it shapes them. And even though we say ‘my children’, we would do well to remember that they do not belong to us.

And just as our children are not our own, our lives too do not belong to us. For we live because God gives us life, our efforts only ever take hold of what has already been given. Our various bodies are on loan, on loan from the angels and from the earth. Our destinies are tapestries woven by the hierarchies. Even our our core, our spirit itself, is a gift from the Elohim.

And yet, so often we forget. So often we forget what has been given. We forget because we fall into the illusion that it is only my will, only my thoughts that create reality. We forget because of how challenging it is to feel gratitude for all that we have. We forget that our life is a gift because we get so caught up in darkness that we don’t remember look up at our star.

Dear friends, at Epiphany we are called to remember The Star of Grace– to remember that our lives and our children and our destinies are meant to be exactly the way they are, for they are gifts given by the wisest of givers.
This contemplation by Rev. Evans was inspired by his children.

Outside nature has wilted away. With few exceptions all the flowers have gone, leaves have fallen. Nature stands before us barren, brown and seemingly lifeless. Life has gone to sleep underground and inside the seeds and is now waiting for the blanket of snow. And yet, beneath the sleep of nature, behind the shortening days and the growing darkness, forces of life and light are at work, moving toward a new birth of the light, moving toward a resurrection of all life in spring.

It is no coincidence that it is this time of the year – when everything seems asleep, even dead – that we wait for a spiritual light to be born. When we look at a spiritual seed that is laid into the earth to overcome death.

Advent invites us to wake up to another realm of the world. Fall has been a busy time for most of us and we are often focused intensely on our material lives and on what is going on in the outside world. We are awake in this outside world but in another realm we are deeply asleep. Then Advent arrives and with it a growing realization that the spiritual forces that lead us to Christmas are speaking to our inner being. They want to lead us inside. We are urged to wake up to an inner light that wants to be born.

Advent is a time of awakening, of realizing that our existence in the outside material world is a form of sleep. And we are encouraged to wake up to a light-filled reality in the spirit – as Paul expressed it in his letter to the Ephesians nearly 2000 years ago:

“Awake, you who are sleeping,
Arise from the dead,
The Christ shall be your light,”

This contemplation by Rev. Contreras was inspired by Advent

Listening to the CBC the other day, there was an interview with a person, a member of the band performing at the Bataclan stage in Paris during the terrorist attacks. He said how in the midst of the massacre, a lot more people died then could have. He said that the reason so many more died was not because of the killers but because so many were throwing themselves in front of their friends, sacrificing themselves in love for their friends, rather than running in fear.

Within every human soul, within every human spirit there lives this power to overcome fear with love. And even though most of what we hear on the news is all the about the killing, and the fear, this story shows us that in the midst of the darkness we can find a hidden light of love overcoming fear. And today like no other, we are called to develop deep trust and faith in this hidden love, in this hidden courage that is actually the most powerful thing on earth. For no bombs, no guns, no government, no terrorist can overpower the human spirits capacity to love.

And yet, to become aware of this love working in the world, working in ourselves, is not easy, it is not natural, it is not automatic, for our egotism fights it at every turn. This is why strengthening the capacity in us that can see this love, this Christ in us and in others is and will be a struggle.

But if we can begin, for example, to see sacrificial love shining through the horror at the concert in Paris, if we can begin to see the power of Christ in and through the destructive forces of this world, then we become the seeing souls of our gospel today (Luke 21: 25-36), who stand upright before the Son of Man.

And practicing this is Advent, this is HIS new coming!

May we continue to have the courage to behold the light in the darkness!

This contemplation by Rev. Evans is inspired by Advent and the coming of Christ in the Etheric.