This is the transcript of a talk given at Center for Spiritual Living Prescott on September 3, 2023 by Rev. Tracey Harrick.
You can also experience this talk by watching the video or listening to it on our podcast, Love Spoken Here.
Good morning. How's CSL Prescott today? I'm so divinely happy to be here. It is a good morning to God's good day to be here with you. And that song…just I started crying. I'm like, oh, my God, that’s OK, first of all, is there any? Nothing left to say. You guys did such an amazing job. The song Jackson, thank you so much. He is a divine gift and I haven't been here very much, but I definitely know he is a gift and we will treasure him as such. And you could call me on that if we have a disagreement. But I really really really want you to know that I am so happy and I want to raise our vibration a little bit. So we're going to do 3 amens. And a you are welcome here. So we are going to do it on 3 –123. Amen. Amen. Amen. You are welcome here.
All right, we got that energy going. So today we are talking about love. So this is the perfect song. And and what better topic in our philosophy than love? But first I do have a joke. We must start with humor because it is ah… I think it's God's best quality is humor. So shortly after tying the knot, a young married couple started arguing over who should make the coffee. Being a good Christian woman, the wife went to the scriptures for her answer. She said that the Bible specifically stated that men should be the ones who make the coffee. Puzzled, the husband asked her where in the Bible does it say that? Very confidently, the wife opened her Bible and said it says right here in Hebrews. Luckily we don't drink coffee, so Bill doesn't have to worry about that task. He does everything else: Babysitting, vacuuming, laundry. He does all of that. So we, we are, we are very, very grateful for him in our household.
So I love you so much. Love Yourself is fulfilling the universe's greatest idea. Yeah. So the topic of love is so interesting to me. I wore my pink. I have my purple hair. I have my little heart on because I love love. I love looking into the eyes of another person and seeing that true divine essence, I've made it my practice that when I go to a store that I say “thank you love” and some people just kind of look at me like I'm a little off. But I love it. And you know, the teenagers respond to it more than you know, the ones that are working at fast food or Starbucks and I love saying it. My teacher used to say that he would go anywhere he went and he would say that. And he said it's not an ego kind of love. It's a I love you to the love that you are, that is me, that is you. And this is what I love about finding that love within ourselves. You know, we are limited physical beings separate from everything in a world with few spiritual ideas, right? So this is the false idea. This isn't love, right? I follow this wonderful being. Her name is Asha Nana Nana Swami. And she asks that question. I got a little wrong, so I'm gonna correct myself. We are not that. I did try to course correct, but we are not that. She asks as we look for the love that we are the question that we can ask is “are we limited physical beings separate from everything else in the world with few limited spiritual ideas? Or are we basically here to take care of our ego driven ideas?” No, we can affirm that we are the divine love, the essence, all that is, that God is, love, light, beauty, power, that we are all of that. And that as we live our lives, releasing the false and limited idea of the ego, the love, the essence of who we are, comes to the surface and we move then with the flow. As the song said. Right? That when we are… when we ask this question to discover or inquire into our true nature, the mind, the little mind, that little critter that lives in our head that likes to tell us stories about ourselves that we know is not true. We must find a firm foundation to stand on, to express that divinity that we are, and this, when we inquire into this, when we start to look for the love that we are, we then begin to fall in love with ourselves. And then this presents a magnetic field that draws unto you all that you are. And it can't be wrong because can we all agree that you're conscious? Can everybody here agree that we are conscious? Yes, OK. And if we are conscious, then we have beingness and if we have beingness, we have choice and the choice is to look outside of our limited story. Now stories are interesting because we do live on a planet where lots of things happen. We've been exposed and experienced a lot of things in our lives that sometimes are very joyous and sometimes get us down, they get us stuck. But the great news is if you come up with an idea of something that happened to you 20 years ago, can we all agree you're not experiencing that now, that that thing is not happening right now? Maybe the idea of it is running through your mind and so these things become seated in our consciousness. So in our philosophy we love to teach you how to express your divine being beyond your limited self, beyond the story in the mind. And that as we grow and deepen in consciousness who we truly are comes to the surface and who we used to believe ourselves to be, our limited selves, becomes aligned to the will of your higher self.
We have to be like… I read this morning on the way here by Sonya Croquette that we have to look at our mind and it's a good idea to look at it as an untrained dog. And she invited us to name our dog. And so she said, how do you name your dog? You look at your personalities, tendencies, are you, do you have a tendency to judge? And we can all be honest that we all have tendencies, we can also be honest, that we're looking to overcome them because you're sitting here and you can't be attracted to a church like this unless you are looking to have that divine knowingness, a direct experience with the beloved. My personal motto these days is this philosophy: takes you from believing to knowing. Knowing you are love, knowing you are God, knowing that you express the divine and the only thing that gets in the way with that is your barking dog. And if you're a cat person she says if you're a cat person, then maybe you really think yourself a little extra special, but you can name your cat. So on the way up, I was taking this little test to see, you know, how if I was a sixth sense kind of person and and that I was thinking and seeing and believing beyond my 5 senses. And I scored medium, medium, but I wrote down my personality traits, the ones that I don't particularly like to show off too often and my dog's name is Mad Max. And on the other side of that, she said you should look at your divine self, your beauty, your joy, your love, your spirit and name it and come up with a beautiful name for it so you have Mad Max and Cosmic Love. These are my two things that I have named. So as I traverse this book I write it on every page who's showing up when you're reading something you don't agree with? Mad Max. Because Mad Max likes to challenge. She needs you to prove it. She doesn't follow willingly, but they have served her great. They have served Tracey great in her traversing this planet in the difficult situations, but what I get to tell Mad Max now is heel, whoa, slow down, it's OK because we are giving, are surrendering ourselves to the higher will, to the will of God. And that surrender isn't the surrender of ego, the surrender that we're taught from our religious teachings, you know, and it is more of a willingness to give yourself to something that is greater than your mind. And we have a tendency to make an enemy out of the ego. But you know the ego, the barking dog, has served us great. So what we really need to do is to get it in line a little bit to calm it down and to use it to our advantage to progress on the path of love. We need it. We drive, we work, we speak, we have fun, we go to parties. So we really need this mind to be cultivated. We need it to ask questions. We need it to inquire until the inquiry takes us deep enough into our experience, that the 6th sense or the higher intuition reigns supreme.
And as a congregation of love, light, beauty, and joy, as we each take that journey, and we will take that journey and we will need a bigger church. I promise, Tom, we will need a bigger church. And we will become magnetic in nature. You will become magnetic. The things that we toiled about will no longer be problematic for us. You will go with the flow and you will see that everything you need is attracted to you and I wanted to be able to stand on this stage and take this role as your senior minister and prove to you that it’s true. I am stepping away from my job. I am stepping into this October 1st and I am trusting that all that is needed. I am stepping on faith and I could not really stand here in all good conscience and tell you to do something that I wasn't willing to do. So I am doing it and we are going for a ride of our lives. We are going to have some fun, right? We are going to have some fun. But I really want you... my deepest desire is for you to fall in love with yourself, to be your own validation, and in order to do that, we need to be committed to the work, we need to be committed to the love. We need to be committed to yourself. You need to take this journey. Ernest Holmes says. I'm going to revert to what Ernest Holmes says. Ernest Holmes says that “this transformation will be felt by those around you, your essence, your energy will be a catalyst for others to take note and to discover God in them, that you will be the catalyst for them to discover God in them, as them, through them. You will be the liberating presence. You will be the love that shines bright. Your light will not be dimmed. The mind may come and go as your stories have come and go, but the love that you are can never leave. There is no circumstance on this planet that can cut you off from your source. No job, no person, no experience can cut you off from the divine Infinite Intelligence. Love is your nature”
And when we believe this, when we move into knowing this, when we have the direct experience of it, then you can truly look into your neighbors eye and say I love you. In spite of everything and anything that they might be going through and we're just going to turn and say I love you to your neighbor. I saw you. You inspired me. I love you. I love you. We are saying this from the heart. We are taking the journey from the mind to the heart. I love you. I just really want you to know that the experience of love, it is so divinely perfect that the truth of today is knowing your God self. That the unchanging, ever present existing infinite can never be affected by any experience that you have. I will stand on that. And it can prove itself to you time and time again. The first proof is that you're here. The second proof is that you're conscious. The third proof is that you're breathing, and the forth is that we have had many teachers, like Christ himself, on this planet that have traversed these experiences and God, you know, one of the things that I was reading when I prepared for this talk was that Jesus, when he talked about sin and sin, is a very interesting word. We don't use it a lot in our philosophy, but sin really means ignorance. Sin means that we are giving our attention to the story and turning our light of awareness away from love. We are turning our light towards love and we are going to live and stand on that platform and when the mind comes in, that barking dog shows up, you're going to go visit a cat person. And that cat person and that dog person can argue and in the meditative background you will be able to stand in that beautiful space of meditation on a continual basis while the world traverses itself, knowing that the ever flowing love of the universe has got your back. And we are here to remind each other of that. This transformation, is going to be felt again by those around you when we liberate ourselves to love, we liberate the whole. That is what love truly is. Taking accountability for yourself, your own divine connection, your own magnetism, and expressing that at the highest level possible, and calming the barking dog. So with that, I'll take you into this mantra that we’ll close with today.”I know that my experience justifies complete acceptance that I am divinely loved, that this is my truth today and every day.” This is what Ernest Holmes tells us. And I want you to repeat it with me today.” I know that my experience justifies complete acceptance that I am divinely loved. This is my truth today and every day today.”
Much love.
Thank you, Reverend Tracy. Let's take some of those concepts into prayer. Things that I know, great spirit. Is that in your divine wisdom, that wisdom resides in all of us, helps us to understand that we are indeed as much of the source as the source itself. And that it is in truly loving ourselves, knowing ourselves allowing ourselves to be the full expression of all that is all that was, and all that will be in the future. Allow us to take and hold our birthright as being part of that incredible phenomenal goodness that some of us call God, but by any name we know definitively that we can be grateful and we can be thankful for each eye opening experience that is brought to us, that we are willing to receive. I know this to be the truth about all that we are. I know this to be the truth about all that we as a center will become under the divine leadership that has been presented to us. I truly believe that at some point there had to have been an angel, like in the the Old Testament Bible, that whispered in Reverend Tracey’s ear here is where you shall be. Here is your flock and here's who you shall lead. As she takes in divinely gives us this message of oneness, of love. I know these things to be true because they are the law and in knowing that I take and I call it good and I call it very good, and I release it into the universe. Knowing that it is already done. And so it is.