Unity Connections

This Sunday we will be considering the spiritual practice of gratitude. Gratitude is one of those concepts that gets tossed around a lot, making it is easy to take it for granted, or dismiss it all together. I can honestly say that I have not always understood or fully appreciated the practice of gratitude. Instead I have sometimes heard myself think, ‘yeah, but it could be better’ when I have tried to be grateful for certain aspects of my life. After some work, I came to realize how my gratitude practice had been thwarted by some of my other practices! Namely my tendency to compare myself to others and my inability to face and feel my own fear and grief. It turns out that our resistance to our fear and sadness doesn’t just protect us from the those feelings. It also dampens the fullness of our experiences of joy and gratitude. It is also easy to think of gratitude as an over-used platitude, misused to minimize the challenges we experience in life, and the pain that accompanies them...

  This Sunday, we will consider our spiritual power of release or elimination, as one of the twelve spiritual powers, or abilities, taught by Unity Co-Founder Charles Fillmore and presented in the book Divine  Audacity by Rev. Linda Martella-Whitsett.   The power of elimination, or release is represented  by the disciple Thaddeus and is located in the abdominal region near the elimination organs .   As you might imagine, this is always a lively lesson to teach to our youth, but all kidding aside, the physical capacity of elimination is crucial to a healthy functioning system. This is true of the body and the mind.   On a tangible level, we use this capacity to clear out the old, unused or outgrown items in our homes and storage spaces. This is also the capacity at work in the process of giving and receiving. As we give, so shall we receive – not because you  are directly rewarded for what you give, but because you are participating in the flow...

  This Sunday we will pick up where we left off with our discussion of the book, Divine Audacity: Dare to Be the Light of the World by Rev. Linda Martella- Whitsett.    The book explores Unity’s Twelve Powers – based on the metaphysical interpretation of the twelve disciples of Jesus by Unity Co-Founder Charles Fillmore. “Fillmore approached the Bible as a spiritual story about our evolution from personal or finite being to divine or infinite being. Each character in the Bible represents an aspect of our own evolving being. He concluded that each of Jesus’ disciples embodied a characteristic- a principle, a power that well served Jesus’ mission”  (Martella-Whitsett,  Divine Audacity,  pg.25). That mission was to be the light of the world. We are learning that to be our mission as we recognize our own capacity of Christ Consciousness that is inherent in our own Divine Identity. The work of the twelve powers is to support the fullest expression of that ...