Spiritual Liberation

Growing up in a small Baptist church, I was bored on a regular basis during church, and especially during the sermon. Sermons typically went on forever and there was very little of practical value contained in them, especially the longer ones which were usually exercises in ego-mania by the self-absorbed preacher who was delivering them. How many countless minutes and hours did I spend waiting, waiting, doing anything to take my mind off the ridiculous rhetoric and mind-numbing interpretations of the Bible or other social commentary.

This boredom and disgust caused me to avoid church for most of my adult life. While I did spend some time in United Methodism raising my family there, sermons were still rarely thought -provoking beyond an occasional shallow reminder that perhaps we were not living as well as we could. Most of my life I avoided the church and found spiritual enlightenment through the study of philosophy and science.

I have to admit that today I heard the best "sermon" that I have ever heard. It was given by Karen Epps, who is the Senior Minister at Unity Church of Dallas. Her lectures recently have been based on the book, Spiritual Liberation by Michael Beckwith. The talk was stuffed full of profound insights, inspiritional statements, connections with other religious traditions and challenging, cerebral metaphysics that definitely raised my consciousness.

"Intention to attention to intention" was one of the core concepts. Basically, we need to live with intention. We need to do things for a reason and purpose. What is our purpose? In order to know that, we have to intend to give attention to living with intention. The foundation of realizing this as reality is meditation. We can't over-meditate. Meditation allows us to go to the inner place where we find the source of our spiritual power and puts us in tune with the Universal Mind so that it is expressed through us as an authentic self-expression within the constructs of time and space that we live.

She also tied together the components of Unity and Religious Science from ancient Hindu and Buddhist focus on the God within, transported through Western classical philosophical frameworks, extended by scientific and 19th/early 20th century transcendentalist and spiritual thought, and connected with the true thread of Christ-conscious thought in the Gospels. This metaphysical package has been refined throughout the 20th century to become the foundation for a practical and effective and realistic expression of Christianity for the 21st century.