This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
Awakened by Anger. Guided by Love – Rev. John Adams
DESCRIPTION
With Love guiding the way, we experience clarity and compassion in the face of unrest. Join us this Sunday as we reimagine worry and anger as thresholds to awakening and choosing peace as the blessing we bring.
SUMMARY
This transcript summarizes a discussion on addressing anger and worry through spiritual practices and a balanced perspective. Key points include:
– Exploring anger fueled by fear vs. anger fueled by love, and how the latter can lead to positive transformation.
– Reframing political divides as “preservationists” and “innovators” to foster more compassion and balance.
– Emphasizing the power of choice, inner wisdom, and spiritual principles to guide one’s response to challenging situations.
– Encouraging a consciousness of love, harmony, and the belief that our thoughts can manifest positive change.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. John Adams:
My goodness gracious. It’s so beautiful. I don’t think I’m on though, am I? Can you hear me? No. Can anybody hear me? Is anybody there? Where’s my Where is my talk? It went away. Come back there. It’s How are you? Hello. My online friends. Thank you for letting me speak today. We’re going to talk about worry and anger today as part of this theme that we’re looking at this week. And before we get started in that, I want us to do a little centering so that we’re coming at it from a more spiritual place. So just want to invite you to close your eyes or soften your gaze or whatever feels right for you. And if you’re watching the recording or online, please join us. Let the distractions go, and just for a moment be in this place of peace. And the invitation is just to imagine yourself on vacation. You’re on vacation, you don’t have any deadlines, there’s no one to answer to. You’re in this safe, serene, beautiful place, and you’re just in this beautiful experience of perfect, perfect serenity.
So whenever you’re ready, you can come back into the room. Open your eyes. So this is going to age me. I know. But back in 1987, I went to a march on Washington that was organized by L-G-B-T-Q-A organizers to bring awareness to some of the issues that were top of mind for us at the time. And it was also at that march that they laid out the AIDS quilt on the mall in front of the Capitol building. And it was this incredible experience of, and if you don’t know, the AIDS quilt were panels that were created by families and friends for individuals who had passed from the AIDS pandemic during the AIDS pandemic. And so we were all there gathered, recognizing and celebrating friends that we had lost. And we were with people who were actually at that time living with or trying to live with AIDS and HIV and trying to pull forward an agenda. And the agenda was very full. They were really calling for civil rights to end discrimination against L-G-B-T-Q-A. It was a repeal of all the sodomy laws, increased funding for AIDS education, research and patient care, prevention of discrimination in areas of family diversity, custody adoption and foster care, reproductive freedom, end of sexual discrimination, end of racial and ethnic discrimination and more.
And it was a very powerful experience. Holly near singing her beautiful anthems and we’re all just really riled up. There was a lot of energy and a lot of anger in the community because of all these ingredients. And at some point, I don’t remember how, but the word got passed that we were going to march the treasury building. So we did. There were a bunch of us and we went to the treasury building and it was to protest or to sit in and do a sit-in protest of economic disparities from marriage. We wanted gay marriage, gay families being recognized. And so we went and just had a very peaceful sit-in blocking the entrance and so forth. And along come the big giant black trucks, the SWAT vehicles showed up and these, I guess they were police, got out in their full riot gear, their full regalia with the helmets and the shields and the pepper spray and the Billy clubs and the guns and the rifles and all of it.
And all of it was there to frighten us. All of that was there to intimidate us so it would disperse. The crowd we’re all kind of like, what’s going to happen? And they made a big show of putting on latex gloves because of course you couldn’t touch a gay person. You might get aids. So this was all part of the psychology of intimidation and fear. And somewhere in the back of the crowd, as I was sitting, someone in the back of the crowd, someone started chanting, your shoes don’t match your gloves. Your shoes don’t match your gloves.
That’s true, true story. And it just diffused the energy. It just changed all of it. And we moved out of that experience and the crowd eventually dispersed and the police went their way. And nothing bad happened, but we did get coverage. We did make our point. And of course, 2015, finally they passed the marriage laws for L-G-B-T-Q-A people to get married. This is an example of, and a call of how anger called us to action, but how love led the way and guided our behavior, guided the choices that we made. We were creating a bigger idea for ourselves.
I mean, nobody wanted to hurt anybody and nobody got hurt. So that was a beautiful thing. And it was all in really asking and demanding that our country at that time, and certainly maybe even those could argue today, were following the precepts that were laid out in our Declaration of Independence that every one of us is entitled to find, pursue, and have a life of liberty and happiness. So this is what I’m describing is probably safe to say it’s it’s a more liberal perspective, a more progressive perspective. I want to also honor the conservative point of view. So there’s balance. And one of the big issues with the conservative point of view right now is immigration. And I was trying to imagine what is going through the minds of someone who is very concerned about immigration. And I imagine that they’re thinking to themselves or saying to themselves things like things are not the same anymore. They’re ruining what was, there’s all this fear of being left behind, of being left out of opportunities that might’ve come my way that are no longer coming my way because they’re going to this other person, this sense of unfairness, like they’re leapfrogging ahead after I had to do all this work to get to where I am. These kinds of stories are brewing and causing a lot of anger to erupt.
And it brings us back to these outmoded ideas, these outmoded ways of being. And in our spiritual practice, what we have to do, and I have to be honest with you, when I hear this kind of rhetoric, when I hear these kinds of ideas, I get very riled up because I feel like the stories aren’t real. They’re just made up. It’s this one way to think about it is worry. We start to worry about, oh, well this could happen and that could happen and this could happen. And worry to me is like future pulling. We do that here in Cityside. We’ll future pull like a bright and beautiful new future, but it’s future pulling and negativity, it’s future pulling. And what if this happened and then this would happen and then that would happen. And it’s this catastrophizing in the way that worry can really captivate our imaginations and kind of keep us locked in.
I know that in our spiritual teaching, what we’re asked to do is to release that anger, to step away from it and hold a deeper, more spiritual perspective. That can be really hard to do. I know that a lot of things are happening in the world right now that may be anger inducing. I have experienced that quite a bit. And it can be really, it can be really self-perpetuating, not only by ourselves and our own kind of thought processes, but the media and everyone out there doing a lot of talk, whether it’s on social media or on cable news or what have you. There always seems to be a lot of fuel added to this anger. So stepping back from it seems like a challenging thing. And I got an idea. This is just one suggestion. I’m sure that as we go through the month, there’ll be a lot of ideas that come forward in addressing fear and anger and so forth.
This is one idea that I came across, and it’s by this guy named Dr. Roy Casagranda. And Dr. Roy is just an amazing guy. He’s a political scientist and a historian, and he’s on YouTube and all over the place. And he’s a wonderful, wonderful speaker. And he has this way of taking these very complex sociopolitical events throughout history and deciphering propaganda and fiction from fact so we can get to the factual things of what actually went down and these complex things that are going on in a very understandable way. And one of the things that he suggested particularly about things going on in the United States right now is to hold it in a way that I think really helps us step back from that anger, that place of, I sound like a pirate.
And what he suggested is that we stop thinking about them as liberal and conservative or progressive and whatever you want to call the other side. We come up with lots of descriptors and names and adjectives, some of them a little volatile, so I don’t want to get into all that. But what he suggested that we do is that we recognize and think of them as preservationists and innovators and already preservationists and innovators already. I’m already calmer. I’m already like, okay, okay, preservationists are people that want to keep things the same in our current climate. I think they not only want to keep things the same, they want to take things back to 1953. And I’m not trying to ding them for that. I think that’s true. I think they really do want that sort of ideal, that sort of social structure, very set gender roles, very set ways of being in the world, and they want to lock us in there.
And there’s actually nothing completely wrong with that except that a lot of us don’t fit that structure. We don’t see ourselves in it and it doesn’t work for us. On the other hand, the innovators are always looking for new answers to these problems. Like there’s social issues and community issues. How do we find something that’s new? How do we break new ground? How do we break out of what wasn’t working into something new? And the downside to the innovators is that they can be a little too forward looking and not really considering learning the lessons from the past. They can be a little too much breaking with tradition, which can feel destabilizing. And it’s always new, always new, always new, can feel a little like, wait a minute, give me a chance to catch my breath. And the preservationists are, as I said, they’re kind of locking us in and they aren’t open to or available to all these new answers.
And we are human beings that are always evolving in our consciousness and our way of being. And so if we don’t embrace new ways of doing things, we’re going to find ourselves really stymied. So you may be able to tell right away that what we really need is a balance. We actually need both. And what’s nice about looking at it as preservationists and innovators is we don’t make them enemies. We take out the talk of being against and how characterizing each side as sort of villainous in their own way. And we just allow it to understand that I can respect that. This idea of preservationists, I can understand the idea of sustaining tradition. I can understand the idea of holding onto what is familiar and ways of being. I can also really embrace and respect innovators who are looking for new answers to some of these problems, to break new ground, to find new ways of being and to welcome in and embrace new ways of identifying ourselves, the non-binary and other social issues that we can just embrace and hold dear. So we need both.
It’s interesting, there is an example of this in the world. We always need a mental equivalent. Well, we don’t always, but I think it helps in our teaching. We talk about mental equivalence, which is this idea of a picture, an image, an idea that we can hold onto that really symbolizes, represents and articulates that answered prayer, that answered place that we want to go to. And the answer here is there was a world happiness survey. There is a world happiness survey and the one from 2024. And wouldn’t you want to be on that committee to do the World Happiness survey? I think that would be a very fun job. I would love to have that job. The World Happiness Survey found that Finland was the happiest country in the world for the seventh year in a row. I know. Isn’t that cool? And the reasons why is because they have very low corruption.
They have strong education, strong healthcare, this beautiful work-life balance, connection to nature, generous, generous social safety nets, high levels of personal freedom. This is a place where they do provide healthcare for all where they do take care of each other and they aren’t beating each other up over. You’re a socialist, you’re this, you’re that. And with a lot of name calling and vilification, they are able to have both their preservationists and their innovators and they have this balance and they have this form of government where if the preservationists come in and they’re starting to get a little too wacky and things start to get out of balance, they vote in a bunch of innovators. And when the innovators get too progressive and too crazy, they vote in some preservationists and they keep finding this balance. And I think it’s so incredible that we have this actual real life example of how we can hold this consciousness for our country and the way that we are together in community. Yes. And it’s just an extraordinary experience to have this in our lives.
I like the idea of this that Dr. Roy gave us because I feel like it allows us to take that step back from anger. It gives us that space to find compassion, to stop the attacks and just be in peace with one another. And when we see that one side is dominant over the other, and I think that’s what we’re seeing right now in real time in our country, what’s happening right now. So we see what I will call the preservationists are large and in charge. And not only are they large and in charge, they are really suppressing, prosecuting, demeaning and vilifying the innovative voice so much so that it’s not being heard. And when that happens, when one side gets to be so dominant and so empowered in that way, it starts to get ultra radical. And isn’t that what we’re seeing? We’re seeing this radicalness showing up. The same would happen with the innovators, by the way. If the innovators were left unchecked, we would move into a very radical experience as well. And so the balance really helps all of us not only find our own balance within that, but keep things really moving forward in a harmonious way.
It reminds me of a story. So this is to me about what I’m talking about is anger fueled by love versus anger, fueled by fear. Anger fueled by fear is a lot of this worry, this future pulling of things that don’t really feel real, but the story is so compelling. We can’t let it go. It’s just fear inducing and it becomes self perpetuating. We keep going round and round and round in circles on it. Anger fueled by love is an anger that invites us to wake up to a new kind of way of being. A story that I thought of that I thought was really interesting, you’ll have to forgive me, but it’s a Jesus story and Jesus myth or man, whatever you believe, there’s a story about Jesus who Jesus and the money changers. So Jesus arrives in Jerusalem and goes to the temple and it’s the center of Jewish religious life.
And in the temple there are merchants and money changers that have set up stalls and the money changes were there to convert Roman coins, which were in the image of the emperor and considered impure into special ting. Shekels used to pay the temple tax and there were also animal sellers that were providing birds and sheep, whatever, for animal sacrifices. And in these dealings, there was a lot of grift. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of, Hey Connie, I’m going to give you this, and you’re trying to always put one over on them. And Jesus comes in and flips these tables. It’s very unusual, not a violent character in our stories. It just flips these tables and there’s a lot of teaching around this, but what I get from this story isn’t that he was worried about them corrupting the temple or the church because it can’t be corrupted.
It’s good, it’s God, it’s love. It’s not going to ever be corrupted. What I think he was doing in his anger was trying to wake these people up to say, you’re spending all your time on this petty little crap of these little deals and these dealings and this. You think you’re getting something here while ignoring the entire universe of love, light, good prosperity, abundance that is already available to you. It’s like wake up. He’s trying to wake these people up, not punish them, not hurt them. And to me, that is what anger fueled by love is about it’s abouts. Hey, come on. There is a better way to be here.
We always get the choice. We always get to choose. Are we going to choose anger fueled by fear? Are we going to choose anger fueled by love? And what are we going to do with that anger? Once we experience it, we get to choose that. It doesn’t always feel like it because anger can be pretty compelling. It feels I’m angry and we can get into a sense of fairness. We can get into a sense of justice. What’s just, I need justice. I have a sense, and this is just my opinion. I feel like what we understand justice to be at this level of consciousness that we’re at is really egoic. It’s really about where we’re at in our human experience. I actually think justice is a very different thing that lives in spirituality, and I don’t think we’ve quite gotten there yet. So the invitation is to let it go, to step back from it and to be in that love, peace, harmony, consciousness and to choose that instead, in our reading that Connie read so beautifully, we understand that that’s the power of our prayer is we get to choose.
We get to understand and see and get that broader perspective, and we have that inner still small voice that helps guide and share with us. There is a, I’m going to read something from the Science of Mind by Ernest Holmes. Isn’t this beautiful? This was a gift from the wonderful Reverend Amy Daniels when I graduated from school, which is just the most incredible gift. Yes, I am spoiled rotten, absolutely no question about it. And in it on this is the definitive edition on page 1 43. If you’re following along about what, two thirds of the way down, there’s a little italicized sentence that says, choosing thought. And earnest writes, we cannot live a choiceless life every day, every moment, every second. There is a choice. If it were not so we would not be individuals. What this suggests to me, and earnest is always someone you have to read into a little bit, but in the world of form, we look out, we see trees and so forth. There’s this collective expression of this good that’s called nature. Nature is always expressing itself. We talked about trees and animals and insects and rocks and mountains and all those good things. They do not have choice, not in the same way that we do. Like a tree will be planted and it can’t just decide, oh, I’m going to move to Ohio today.
An animal will follow its instincts, will follow that learned pattern of behavior that it was born with and born into and follow that over and over again. A tiger isn’t going to go, well, I think I’m going to go visit Hawaii, and I think Hawaii sounds good. They don’t get that kind of choice. That’s not available to them. It is available to us and to me, because that’s true. That choice is our God self. It’s that part of us that is our God truth expressing through us. And so when we activate it and we act on it, we are activating that God self within us, and we can move out of anger and allow that anger to guide us into an experience of love, compassion, empathy. Just thinking about innovators and preservationists already, I can have much more compassion and empathy for the preservationists. I understand that.
I think I would skew more towards the innovator on that dyad, but I understand and appreciate and celebrate the preservationists. And I know that there are people who are more preservationists. They don’t want things to change or change dramatically. We have them here in our community. We want the community to stay the same, everything to be stable and the same. Yes, of course. And yet we also need to invite in the new. And so we need to have love and compassion and peace and grace for both. And how can we be awakened by anger and guided by love? How do we hear that answer to the call for love? There are some things that I know about you that I wanted to share. I know that you are never alone.
I know that you are never judged, not really, not in spirit, not in God, not in truth. You cannot do life wrong. You can lean on spiritual help. You have this inner knowing that always knows the right action to take the right thing, to say the right way through any situation. And you have the power to choose. And I want to affirm this with you. I’m going to invite you to say these with me. I think they’re going to come up on the screen. We’re going to switch it around to I am statements. So I invite you to say these with me. I am never alone. I am never judged. I cannot do life wrong. I can lean on spiritual help. I have this inner knowing that always knows the right action, the right thing to say, the right way through any situation, I have the power to choose. And so it’s, let’s take this into prayer. Let’s take this into prayer.
Just taking a breath, just recognizing this brilliant, brilliant power that we get. We get to choose. We get the freedom of that. We get this God truth that is within us. We get ways of looking at what’s going on in the world right now as anger inducing as it may be to take just a tiny step back. I don’t have a problem with anger. I think anger is great. I don’t have any problem with that. We can take a step back from it and allow love to come into our hearts and just see it through that perspective. So just recognizing that, that love, that light, that joy, that God, that source, whatever your word or phrase is everywhere. And when it’s in and through, all that is, it’s in and through me. It’s in and through this community. It’s in and through each and every single individual here and now, it is blessing each and every single person.
And knowing this from this place, just knowing that as we hold into this consciousness of a bigger idea for ourselves, a bigger idea for our community, a bigger idea for our country that we can hold, that we know that our principle tells us, our spiritual principle tells us that thoughts held in mind are being made manifest right here, right now. So we know this and we have our mental equivalent. We know that it’s possible because it already exists in the world. So we know that this is not a pipe dream. This is not a fantasy. This is not something far and distant. This is present here and now. And so we lean into that knowing. We lean into that understanding. We lean into that awakening, awakened in any way, but awakened by anger, for sure. And we lean into our guidance, our inner guidance, our inner knowing that inner intuition, that inner God to be guided by love, to take the right action, to step out and be a voice in the world, to have these thoughts that we hold in mind, being expressed in the most beautiful, harmonic, beneficial, benevolent way.
And I know for each and every single person that as they hold this consciousness, that they themselves are truly blessed, that areas of life that seem stuck or unstuck, that everything is working out in the right and perfect way. I just know that this is so, I just experienced it over and over again. And so I know this truth and I’m so grateful for it. So grateful for the blessings of this consciousness. So grateful for this collective. This collective right here, right now, holding the high watch, holding this higher consciousness, holding this ideal of this beautiful country, this beautiful society, this beautiful community that lives together in harmony and support and joy. Just so grateful for all of it. I release it now into the actual law knowing that it is done. It is. And so it is.