This is the transcript of a talk given at Center for Spiritual Living Prescott on September 10, 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.
Hello, good morning. Good morning into our virtual land. I want to say we would love to have your presence here so we can love you up. I am an at home person and I like the comfort of my home, but there is nothing like being here in person to be loved on, loved up and your energy makes this building vibrate so we want you to come see us whenever you can. And… but until then, we love you and welcome to everyone. And I, Hazel, was saying, I don't think I need to do a talk because you just did it. You did our talk. Yes, there, time to go. That was absolutely beautiful. And so and I was so honored that your voice is just a gift that I do not have– to sing. I could talk, though I could talk.
So, good, good morning. Prescott, it's so. I'm so happy to be here. I missed you. I am in transition and things are moving along and and just so you know, your leadership has got this and everything's going well. And I am so happy. And I can't wait to just jump in, but until then I have a little talk for you and the title of our talk today is Love on the Spectrum. So I had this… I met this lady once when I was working at Wells Fargo and she said one day you're going to be, she told me she was a psychic, by the way, but anyway she came, she was one of my customers and she said one day you're going to be on a platform somewhere. And I just see a crystal ball. And this memory just absolutely popped into my mind. And I thought, and she goes, and you're gonna be doing the very thing that God created you to do. You'll be love on the spectrum at the highest end, and I was like, well, that's such, that's so nice. OK, I gotta go back to work now. And when Hazel sent me the talk title, I'm like, where is that crystal? You know that I got at Mile High. I got this at Mile High on my very first day there, and I had it hanging in the window for a long time, and it broke. And then I tried to give my friend Fish... I'm like, can you fix this for me? She's like, no, you can fix it yourself, so into the drawer it went. You know, and then I tried to enlist my husband. Can you fix this for me? He's Nope, but I could take you to Michael's. So we went to Michaels and then I found all of my old crystal jewelry and created this and look at the all the differences. These are all the spectrums of love. I like feathers and they're all different: angel, stars, and they all refract light. And you can't really see it up here but when this is shining and the light is shining through it, my, my grandson Luke he likes to do this so he's like Nana, more. He’s saying that he could see many, right? So from the one, many come.
You are a refraction of love on the spectrum, a beautiful beam of light. We're all many colors, many different things that we do, many ways that God expresses himself. So I wanted to share this with you and we'll hang it here as a representation of all of our differences but our core sameness, which is our beloved right, the greater reality, God, and I'll hand that off to you. OK. Perfect. But I do have a joke. All right, a Sunday school teacher asked for little children as they were on the way to church “why is it necessary to be quiet in church?” One bright little girl replied “because everyone's sleeping.” But you know I am kind of loud, so I don't know if you'll
go to sleep during mine, but if you do, neighbor, give him a quick nudge. You wake him up, tell him they're missing something good.
So love on the spectrum, you know everything in the universe is a unique, individualized expression of the one thing and is the cause of all things. This is what our founder Ernest Holmes says. And it really is true. I mean, we all have lives. We're all busy. We're all doing things and love comes to us in so many ways. And then the one thing though, as we start to traverse the path of spirituality, the one thing, the cause thing, the IT thing, the isness I like to call it, starts to move and have its way within us. It starts to express through our words, through our actions, through our deeds, and then everything becomes holy to me. I was telling Julie that every song to me is a, is a, I can find a love song to God in every song. It's just a Metallica... anything. I just can hear this because you start to hear the voice of God and how it speaks to that particular musician and that musician is giving you a note from his heart. And God has given you a note and that's what we are here for, is to tap into that note. The note of your soul to sing your song. The purposefully and the way God, the light, love, divine beauty, whatever you want to call the greater reality. He, it, she, whatever it is, is who you truly are. Audra Shante says this about the spiritual path. “What you are is already what you really are. There is no approaching it. There is no becoming it. There is no getting ready for what you've all for. There is no getting ready for what you've always already been.”
So strictly speaking, there is no path to it. If there was any path at all, it is the destruction of every idea you have ever had about yourself. This is a broad spectrum because when we deny ourselves love and we deny others love, we usually go into self-destructive mode. And if you've ever seen anything with the absence of love, light, water, you know what? One time when I was at church and I was a practitioner and I came home and and I have these little moments, these little insights, awarenesses, these little things that happen that remind me, Oh yes, there you are. You are never far from me, ever. Never far from me, always close. And there was this little plant on my patio and it was wilted and dying. And I thought, Oh my gosh, this water it, it needs water. I should go get my husband. He should water it. But I stood and stared at this plant and the question that came to me was what is it missing? Not just water, but what is it missing? When we feel alone, when we feel that there is no one there for us, when we feel like everything's going wrong, we have a tendency to forget that we are a bright beam of this one thing and our life kind of covers all of that up. And so as I was sitting and having this moment with this plant, I thought, oh, that's how I feel sometimes I can be a lower end of the spectrum, depressed, you know, feeling alone, kind of a victim. And I realized, oh, just like that plant needs water to survive and thrive and grow and flourish, so does my heart. My heart needs that, your heart needs that, and we also need to give it because we live in a reciprocal universe. What we give out, we get back. And I recently heard this gentleman I don't know, people call him Brashar. I don't know. I watch all kinds of things. Honestly. I am just so fascinated with the way that God expresses through multiplicity and he was saying, he was talking about money and he goes I wish you people on your planet would stop saying spending. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. He goes spending means you're giving it away, it can never come back. But reciprocal means you're giving with the expectation it's coming back. So yesterday, while we were shopping and I wanted to buy something, I told Bill I'm reciprocally buying this. It didn't make a difference. He still didn't think I should buy it, but the universe, the universe, supported me because when I got to my mom's house she handed me $20. And I was like well, look at that. OK. See, that's all you gotta do is convince me something's true, and I'll do it until you tell me something else is true. And this is the surrender and the light heartedness and the humor of the universe. That’s love. It is a broad spectrum. It was really hard to write this talk because I was looking through a lot of references and I thought to myself, well, you know, I called my daughter and asked her what she thought the spectrum of love was and she sent me an Alan Watts quote. I'm like, what do you know about Alan Watts? And it was a beautiful quote. And so then I kind of posed it to some of my friends and everybody had a different idea about love on the spectrum. Some people talked about agape love and how that's the highest form. Some people talked about the love of a mother and a child, how we love our furry friends, our plants, how we love our neighbors, how we give and receive feedback can be a form of love. And one thing is for sure - that everybody had a different idea, which made this talk kind of hard, but then I remembered God knows what each one in this room, in the world and all the people we meet, God, the universal love, the greater reality, knows. And there is something that happens when we tune in and listen. So to me, the highest form of love is listening. Listening with our heart, not with our mind. Listening with the intention of being and understanding what the other person may need and seeing past that sense of agitation that can sometimes arise. I'm telling you, I told you last week Mad Max lives in my house, you know, and Cosmic Crystal…she wants everything to be lovely and fun every day. But you know things happen – we have marriages, we have children, we live on a planet and it's hurling itself through space at some, I don't know, scientific equation that I do not know, but with the thing that makes this most amazing is that you are here. That is love, that you are here and the highest form of love is accepting, right where you are. Right now, with what's going on in your life, no matter what it is, and surrendering to that higher self. And honestly, I begin to contemplate a lower self, higher self. It's all self. But what we have to do in the beginning, as our minds start to learn to give itself to this greater reality, we see things dualistically – higher, lower, you know far apart, close together, opposites. So this with love is really the similar right, we have broad spectrum of love, broad spectrum of ideas. And whatever your idea about love is, it's the right idea. Love is learning to trust yourself. Love is to know thyself. I also heard this character, Berhaw, he said, every night when you go to bed, if you say to yourself, waking up and going to sleep, “I am who I am and that is enough” your life will change because you are turning into an energetic vibration. And he said, like channel 10, if you're on two and you want to get to 10, you can't stay on two.
So we have to use these things to the entunement of the universe to change our vibration, which you know we do talk a lot in our philosophy about vibration and our energetic self, and so you know I find these fascinating. So I'm like what can it hurt? I mean, if I'm in pain, what the heck? Try it right and see. It's not going to hurt anything. So I have been doing that all week. And I have to tell you I have a little pep in my step and and the baby, who normally prefers Bill, liked me this week. I was like that's evidence enough, except when I went in this morning I was like “good morning we have to get up early to go to Prescott now.” And I was like, OK, fine grandpa. So you know, so we are rays of light. We are bands of energy, each in our own unique vibration. And our goal is to express at the highest vibration possible and some days that's just really hard. Some days life happens. We get sick. Our granddaughters don't, you know, my granddaughter, she's… she's somewhere and some days you think about them and I realize I have to be at my best when she finally comes home. I have to be at my best when I get that phone call, I have to be at my best to remind her who she is each and every moment. I have to be at my best for my love, my husband. It’s harder some days than most, but he knows I like to kid, so don't we? We're good, we're good. But I do like to tell a good joke or two. You know we have these things, we lose jobs, we get jobs, we get married, we get divorced, our children go away, they come back. I mean, our economy. A lot of children are moving back. Right. I was at my mom's house yesterday and I was like, I'm not moving back, God, so you better get this right. Nope, it happened. But you know, we go through these things and on the Spectrum of Love is acceptance. When you accept yourself wholly for who you are, you accept others. The differences start to drop away because you are the creator of your life. We say this a lot, right? That you are the director of your life. You bend your own reality. And the other thing this character said was if you want to win the lottery, stop saying that I wish I had the winning numbers. Stop saying. Hey, I'm going to get the winning numbers and walk around like you have them. I didn't win the lottery, but I'm going to try that too.
So these are all spectrums, all different ways that people see the world. They all have different teachers and different ways of moving and being and having their light and love in the world. And at our Center in our philosophy, we accept that that is OK. We say that we welcome everyone here, no matter who you are, what you do, what you believe, how you live. This is love on a broad spectrum. That when you walk through these doors, there's someone there to greet you, that when you hear a song that Jackson's playing, you hear his heart. When you hear our singer sing, God touches you in a way that you never thought possible. This is love on a broad spectrum. Love comes in varying degrees, and one thing is for certain. You can't destroy it, but sometimes we sure try. This is the quote my daughter sent me. “You can't destroy or withhold this energy of love. And when you won't love or you won't let love out, it emerges any way in the form of self destruction. The alternative to love, in other words, is self destruction because you won't take the risk of loving yourself properly. You will be compelled instead to destroy yourself.” I don't know about you, but I've lived that life. I've experienced not being OK with me. I have, I've worked in thinking for 30 years and when I had a practitioner at West Valley Center for Spiritual living, he's like, I cannot believe you're in banking for 30 years, that is so not what you're supposed to be doing. And I got no. but it paid the bills. It paid the bills and I climbed my way to the top. And when I say climbed, climbed, also lost it, lost it all, lost the house, lost everything and you move into this mode of self destruction, the opposite of love.
But one light came one day and it presented itself as the book Science of Mind textbook, and I started to read it, and I lived in Colorado, and my husband lived in Arizona, and he would come, and I would read it to him. And I thought, oh, this is why God wanted me to have this book so I could read it to my husband. And we would drive through the mountains and read it. And then one day I was sitting at my desk and somebody came in and said, oh, what's that book you're reading? And I that that I gave it to him because I was so excited. I'm like this is an amazing book. I've never heard these things before and. And so she's like, oh, I think that church is like, right around the corner but it looks like a spaceship. You might want to take a friend with you. I really don't know. And you know I want… I just ate away at me. You know how you get those signs and they just eat away at you like you can't get rid of the thought. It just..it keeps coming. Or I don't even know if it's a thought. But a feeling and it just, it just keeps, oh, it just gets a hold of you. So one Wednesday I told my boss I'm going to go see if this church up here needs any accounts. And so I walk into the bookstore and I meet my beloved Carol, who became my surrogate mother and helped me through so many things in my life those days while I was in Colorado, and this is how I found my way and it wasn't that I was looking. I was done with, I was done with church. I was done with church. So this person that came to my office, you're like, you know, you, you should go. You might, you might find something there. And I was like, oh no, I don't. I'm done with church and she's like but I don't think it's a church because it looks like a spaceship. And I thought OK, let's see, I'm kind of weird. Let's go check it out and so we went and I met Carol and I went my first Sunday and I was supposed to meet some people there I had met online. I had met some people and none of them showed up. And so I'm standing here like, oh, my gosh. And I see these people walking around with purple stools and anything that made me feel important, that's what I wanted to do. So I was sitting in the chair. Doctor Teal gave this beautiful message, tears I'd never heard anyone talk about me that way before that. I was a beautiful being, that I had so much to offer because I was feeling very, very low, and it made me feel amazing. And so I just sat, after service, I sat, just soaked it all in. And I said to God, please just let me know I'm in the right place. I cannot do one more thing. I can't do one more thing, this one more, that one more. I just need to know this is where I am supposed to be.
And at some point in my escapades of finding and traversing all of these spectrums of life, I did Sci seminars. Has anyone ever heard of Sci seminars? OK. Yeah. OK. So I went and tried to climb the mountain in. No, no. But I'll show you the pictures one day of the look of fear standing on the mountain trying to lean over to find myself. But the person who taught that class six years prior, when I walked out of church was standing at the back of the church and I said Paul, and he said yeah, do I know you? And I'm like, probably not. But you're never going to guess. And he totally loved the story. And it was so familiar to see this face that I had remembered. And he had the purple stole on and I said, who are those people walking around with purple stoles and he goes, oh, those are practitioners. And I was like, oh, I want to know more about that. And so he took me over to the Community Center, sat me down, and I met practitioners. And that day forward, that's all I wanted to do was become a practitioner. And that's part of the road that led me to here. But this is what I'm saying, is that like this love this, this agape love. It comes in so many ways and you cannot destroy it. You cannot be absent from it. You are it. You know our mind divides, it creates you and me. But love doesn’t. We need the you and me for the polar opposites, for the spectrum of life. We need to see our differences so we can grow. We need to have people that we trust tell us things that we sometimes need to understand about ourselves. But we do also have to live authentically, that the highest form on the spectrum of love is living an authentic life.
The first time I did my talk, it was on my birthday. I don't know four years ago and I was done talking and I just stood there and cried and everybody was like, you did a great job and I go no, I've never felt in my life ever the feeling of doing something that this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Have you ever experienced that when you did something and you're in the flow and you're like, Man, this is amazing. And I just knew from that moment on and but in came that little Mad Max mind, you know like blah blah blah. Blah blah blah all the way home. But it doesn't matter ‘cause I'm here. I'm here. I made it. I'm with you and you can have that as well. We can have that as a community, as a group. We can build it energetically. Kevin Costner says if you build it, they'll come. And I did promise Tom we’d need a bigger church. We're going to need a bigger church. So this is what I believe about life, about love, about today, about you: That you are the most holy one. I was told that you are the light of God. Whatever you want to call it, you are the light of the universe. The light of the greater reality, and that you really do create. And if you spend some time with us, or if you've been coming here a long time and you have a great life, well, you should be prepared because it's going to get better. And if it's not going so well, It will get better. All it needs is you. It needs your participation and if you, as long as you're willing to participate with us, you are going to grow. And we need to move from a mindset of fixed to a mindset of growth and be open to all that is new and all that is God. And we are going to do that together and we are going to have fun. I don't know about you, I'm having fun right now. I hope you are too. So what we should really begin to do is expand those lights. The bands of energy, each unique. Its goal is the highest vibration possible that exploring this of our infinite within ourselves. We're going to put those old stories down and we're going to let the full light of the beloved shine through us. We are going to be the brightest color in the prism and we are going to shine bright and oh, I said, going to. No, you are shining bright, right? We're going to amp that wattage up so that if you're… I'm purple, can you tell I love purple? I'm going to be the brightest shade of purple. I'm no artist. I'm going to find it, and that is the shade that I am going to shine from my prism and I am going to be proud of it. I have lived a life where I wasn't proud of myself, I was a bit self-destructive and the infinite love of the universe saw fit to show me a way because I got to a point where I was willing to do it.
And I know that we can do it together. And so how do we increase this love in our lives? Meditation is the most dynamic way to experience this greater love as well as solitude, introspection and time in nature. I mean, you live in Prescott. OK. When I go out my backyard to have a little green. I like the sunrise, but they built houses behind my yard, so all of my views are gone. But I was like, OK God, just make the sun higher so I could see it, and so the other day when I woke up it came out and there were all these rays of light peeking through. Those are my favorite skies, you know, where the rays are just bursting forth. It just kind of reminds you of something. And it's like, OK, so if you can focus on those houses and that they're blocking your view or you can look higher and see the truth. Right. That's what we're doing here. So, we need to slow down. We need to sit in the stillness, pay attention to the answers that are pointing the way to divine fulfillment on the broad spectrum of the experiences that we call life. And again, when you get up, I want you to make a commitment to yourself, find a mantra. This one has worked for me. I challenge you to use it as well, to say this, kind of like Popeye. “I am who I am”. Right. “I am who I am. And that is enough.” Can you say that with me today? ”I am who I am. And that is enough. I am who I am and that is enough. I am who I am and that is enough.” And that is the truth of you.
And I would just like to tell you that this talk serves as a prayer. It's a prayer in itself, and I just invoke that spirit into your life knowing that that is the truth of who you are.