This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
Communal Uncertainty – Rev. Linda Jackson
DESCRIPTION
As a community, what doubts or uncertainties do we have, whether out in the open or hidden? This week we look at using our doubts to engage with wonder and curiosity as we continue to build webs of love and respect — both within Cityside and in the wider CSL community.
SUMMARY
Rev. Linda Jackson continues a May theme of “Divine Doubt,” using the 1980s song “We Are the World” and its call to collective action as a frame for exploring how uncertainty can become a sacred invitation rather than a problem to solve. Drawing on Richard Rohr’s “Falling Upward,” she contrasts the “first half of life” identity-building with a “second half” in which our containers crack, personas fall apart, and we learn to live from not knowing, embracing obstacles as the path itself. She weaves prior community teachings—inviting self-doubt as curiosity, debuting our doubting selves, and carrying doubt together—into a larger arc from personal inner work to collective outer action.
Rev. Linda emphasizes that doubt is not the opposite of faith but its engine, echoing a Zen saying, “Big doubt, big enlightenment…no doubt, no enlightenment,” and asserting that certainty, not doubt, is faith’s true opposite. She highlights shadow work and personas—the constructed selves that manage how we are seen—and shares her own “residentially fluid” housing journey as an example of building from within uncertainty, releasing “shoulds,” and discovering outcomes better than anything her managing, performing self could have planned. She notes how external judgments only wound when they echo our inner shadow, and how letting go of appearances allows us to receive abundance and live more freely outside expected containers.
Extending from the personal to the communal, she describes a world in liminal space—political, social, institutional—where the old is not gone and the new not yet visible, and cites Rohr’s view that humans are “hardwired for transcendence,” driven toward greater union, inclusion, and the capacity to forgive others for being other. She connects this to Centers for Spiritual Living’s emphasis on “collaboration over competition” and to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s idea that “everything that rises must converge,” suggesting that as individuals and communities rise, they inevitably move toward each other and “fall upward” together.
Practically, Rev. Linda turns to nonviolent communication teacher Oren Jay Sofer’s distinction between intention as a way of being and goals as desired outcomes, illustrating with a story of a journalist who refuses to let another’s rudeness determine his own behavior. She invites listeners to ground their communication in clear, value-based intentions, using wonder and curiosity as antidotes to judgment and as active, chosen postures that allow us to show up for one another without waiting for political clarity or institutional stability.
She closes with a guided practice inviting awareness of bodily sensations, emotions, thoughts, and the personas and shadows that may be “running the show,” asking what it would look like to release them and take one step from within the not knowing. Affirming Ernest Holmes’ teaching of a power within greater than any outer uncertainty, she frames this inner work as the foundation for coming together “as one,” echoing the refrain “We are the world” and affirming that “we are the ones” called to create the world we want to be through love, inclusion, and collective courage in the face of doubt.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Linda Jackson:
Good morning. Thank you, Paige and Max. We’re so blessed with talent. Even our subs are amazing. I guess I should say hello. Hello in the room and online I’m Reverend Linda. I use she/her pronouns and I am continuing our may theme Divine Doubt, but that song, right? And I know I’m aging myself, but what can I say? Everyone here probably already knows, right? That song was from the mid ’80s and it was created during a global crisis. And they raised, let’s see, over 60 million for African famine relief at that time, which is pretty phenomenal. It still ranks as the eighth best selling single of all time, which I found surprising to hear. So if you don’t know the song, go check it out. It’s that group of 40 plus major music stars and how they ever orchestrated that. I’m going to be talking a little bit about persona later and I would imagine all those personalities in that room must have been interesting.
But what the world was asking of us then, it is asking of us again now, maybe still, right? To take collective action to come together within the uncertainty and we’re being invited to come together with love as the animating force. Uncertainty is not abstract. We feel it in our bodies. We see it in the news. We hear about it at the dinner table.
We’re living inside a collective time of not knowing. And the question isn’t how to make it stop. The question is who do we choose to be inside of it? We’ve been using the Richard Rohr book and we have it here if you’re interested in getting a copy. Falling upward, a spirituality for the two halves of life. And he describes the first half of life as the building, developing our identity, developing our certainty, a sense of who we are and what the world means to us. We build our container and what he calls the second half begins when that container cracks open, when it falls apart. All those identities that we thought we had created don’t make sense and we have to live from that uncertainty. And I just want to acknowledge it’s not always young people and old people. I’m sure some of us know some elders who have gone to the end of their life in their certainty with their personality and their views, right?
And some people have that awakening or that opening at a much younger point.
I guess since I was talking about how old that song was, I was feeling a little sensitive about age. So earlier this month, Rainbow invited us to let self-doubt be a pull to curiosity rather than something to hide or fix and to trust that the container that we’ve built is ready to hold something larger. So when things fall apart, we can handle it. And Amy invited us to debut our doubting selves, again, not hiding it and trusting that who we really are underneath those personas is enough. Underneath the performative self, we are enough. If we are willing to live inside of the problem, it will transform and we will be transformed by it.
And then Daryl invited us to carry our doubt together, reminding us that questioning is a sacred lineage and that we don’t have to resolve our doubt or be in agreement with one another before we show up for each other. And today we’re asking, how do we move from here in our collective uncertainty? So you already know a lot of this, right? I find that a lot of the books and a lot of the themes, we’re talking about a lot of the same things we just say in different ways, which I think is beautiful because some of us hear things better certain ways, right? But you’ve heard from previous talks and messages that everything is happening for our awakening. You’ve heard it’s either love or pointing us back to love, God, or pointing us back to God. And just last month in our Mark Nipo book, he said, “What’s in the way is the way.” So what if this moment of uncertainty is a sacred invitation?
Roar is saying that the falling that feels like failure is actually the path and that we’re falling upward. So then doubt is not a detour. It is the road. It is the path. We don’t have to overcome obstacles. We embrace them as essential parts of our path. So the arc this month has been the personal inner journey to the personal outer and then the collective inner journey to now the collective outer journey and not just how we feel about doubt together, but what we actually do with it in the world. And Dana shared in the reading from Falling Upward, Richard Roar describes the arrival of the second half of life wisdom as a kind of homecoming, not a return to what we knew before, but a new integration, a new way of embodying everything we’ve been through.
Roar says, “If we know anything at this stage, we know that we are all in this together and that we are all equally naked underneath our clothes. When we are young, we define ourselves by differentiating ourselves. Now we look for the things that we share in common. We find happiness in a likeness, which has become much more obvious to us now and we do not need to dwell on the differences between people or exaggerate the problems. Creating dramas has become boring. Can we get this memo out there? I mean, right? Exaggerating problems and creating dramas. Do we have any of that going on around us? All right. Well, communities like individuals can live in the first half of life indefinitely. We can stay there defending the container, protecting certainty, managing appearances, or we can choose to fall upward.
So these ideas, falling upward, embracing obstacles as part of the path, Nipo is what’s in the way is the way. This wisdom is universal. It’s not of a specific tradition. It’s not unique to our new thought teachings. It’s not unique to Richard Roar’s mystical Christian tradition. I had a meeting, a practitioner session actually with my mentor, Reverend Kathy Hernson. She reminded me of the Zen saying. Big doubt, big enlightenment, small doubt, small enlightenment, no doubt, no enlightenment. And I love that. Doubt isn’t a lack of faith. It’s the measure of how deeply we’re willing to question, to grow and to break through.
Doubt is not the opposite of faith. Every tradition that has wrestled with inquiries of the divine has found the opposite to be true that certainty is the opposite of faith. Doubt is what keeps faith alive and growing. When we think we already know something, there’s no room for growth. So being in doubt, being in the question is where we grow. And Roar talks about personas, the self we construct to manage how we’re seen. And this shadow work has been some of the most profound work that I have done in my life. I believe that when we do a lot of spiritual work without psychological growth work, we can bypass. And if we focus only on our psychological growth and don’t do our spiritual work, we have the empty longing to remember that God within.
And wasn’t planning on it, but Rob Wozniak, one of our practitioners, is doing a shadow workshop in July. So if you’re interested in more learning more about shadow work, I encourage you to check that out. And this idea of personas, he talks about personas as the self that we construct to manage how we’re seen. And for me, that voice sounds like I need to do a good job. It needs to look good. That’s the persona. Competent together and underneath it, the shadow, the part that I don’t really want to look at and I really don’t want you to look at.
That’s the part that feels like I won’t be loved if I’m not doing it right. And we all have our own version of this, right? But many of you have heard me share my residentially fluid journey. So I won’t repeat the whole story, but I’ll share enough to complete the thought that I have about it. Two years ago, my son and I purchased a three unit building and we started a renovation. I put everything I owned into a storage unit and we had a strategy to get another building, but at that moment I didn’t even know where I was going to live. There was no plan that would have satisfied that persona. There was no good response to what will people think, no way to make it look good, but building from within uncertainty means letting go of shoulds, letting go of the shoulds about how life is supposed to look and that was big doubt.
So it required great faith and the determination to not turn back. How many times do we start going on something and they’re like, “Ooh, it’s a little too scary. I’m going to recoil.” And what I could not have orchestrated, what I could not have planned on my own landed me exactly where I needed to be.
Some of you heard me talk about where I’m staying. I could not have dreamed this up. The outcome is better than anything I could have come up on my own with that performing, planning, managing self. But I had to get past the shadow part who questioned, “You’re not pulling your own weight or this doesn’t look right. Maybe you should have thought about this when you were younger.” And at one point I had a family member that said something that sounded exactly like my shadow speaking to me out loud. I’m going to use a non-binary pronoun in case they listen to the talk later.
They said, “Didn’t you realize this was going to be an inconvenience to other people? Didn’t you realize how hard this was going to be? ” Here’s the thing. It only lands hard because I’m holding the same judgment myself. Someone’s voice of judgment out here only has power when the inner voice here is in agreement with it. That’s the shadow and the persona doing its work, protecting the image, managing the appearance. I couldn’t fully accept abundance, receive the gift of where I landed until I let all of that go. Until I was willing to be seen as someone who didn’t have it all together, until I trusted that I would still be loved.
And I will tell you what, five years ago I couldn’t have done it. And I’m not saying, look how great I am. I’m saying I’m in it and I’m saying it’s uncomfortable. It can be scary, but it’s also the most freeing thing I have ever experienced. Letting go of the social constructs and the judgment that comes when you live outside the expected container, it’s freeing. If I had waited for certainty, we wouldn’t be getting ready to buy our second building right now. It’s happening not despite the not knowing but through the not knowing. Ror says shadow work is almost another name for falling upward. When we do our inner work, we impact the collective and as we were saying, we are swimming in communal uncertainty, political, social, the fraying of institutions, the loss of shared narrative and people are exhausted.
They’re in what Roar calls liminal space. The old world’s not quite gone and the new world’s not quite visible yet. He says that mature religions and even some scientists say that we are hardwired for transcendence, hardwired for union with ourselves and everyone else, everything else, that we are wired to transcend to fall upward. He says, “We are driven, kicking and screaming toward ever higher levels of union and ability to include, to forgive others for being other.” And he quotes Shardon, “Everything that rises must converge.” So this movement toward each other, toward inclusion, towards something larger, it isn’t optional. It’s hardwired. It’s happening whether we cooperate with it or resist it.
I took the steps with uncertainty rather than waiting for it to resolve. I definitely had uncertainty and if I hadn’t stepped out in that uncertainty, I’d still be sitting in my own old place wondering how I was going to make a change I had to let go of the shoulds, let go of the idea of what my family, friends and community would think. And while it was scary to move through the uncertainty, while it is scary to move through uncertainty, it is worth the freedom. We’re collectively being called to do the same. Roy would say we don’t have a choice. We’re wired for this. We’re being pulled whether we like it or not toward greater union, greater inclusion, greater capacity to hold each other, to fall upward, as he says. And at the CSL Centers for Spiritual Living, our parent organization at their convention last month, a theme of collaboration over competition caught my interest as a way to shape how our communities relate to one another and to extend this into other faith communities, into neighborhoods, into the wider world.
As Sharden put it, everything that rises must converge. As we each do our inner work, as communities do their work, as we rise, we move toward each other. We fall upward together.
So in addition to our shadow work, what does it look like practically daily to show up inside of communal uncertainty without letting the uncertainty determine how we relate, how we behave, without letting someone else’s fear or anger run us. Orang J. Sopher is one of my nonviolent communication teachers and he was speaking about intention. He says intention is the single most important aspect of communication. And he shared a story. He said it was a famous story of a journalist, but he couldn’t remember the journalist’s name. So the journalist in New York walking with a friend and he goes to a hotdog stand to get a hotdog outside of the building where he works. He’s with his friend and he’s being very polite and courteous to the person at the hotdog stand and the person at the hotdog stand is gruff. We might even say rude and still the columnist was just very kind.
He was grateful, thankful, and when they walk away, his friend asked, “Is he always that rude to you? ” And he says, “Yeah.” And he says, “And are you always that nice to him?” And he said, “Yeah.” And he’s like, “Why don’t you go out of your way to be nice to somebody who’s so rude to you? ” And he said, “Because I don’t want his behavior to determine how I behave.
I don’t want his attitude to influence how I’m being. I think this is a big idea. It seems so simple, but I think it’s really powerful. Do we want to let other people’s choices and behavior determine how we respond or do we move from within our own values?” And he says our intentions are based on our values and he says intention is about how we show up, about how we’re being inside. He discerns between intention and a desired outcome because a lot of times you’ll hear people say, “Well, I have the intention to do this. ” And he says, “No, that’s a goal. Intention is a way of being. Intention is the motivation or what he calls the heart quality behind our words and our behavior.” And the reason it’s so important in communication is because a lot of our communication is nonverbal. And so when we’re really related to our intention, our facial expression, our gesture, our tone of voice, the energy we’re coming from is influenced by our intention and this influences the direction of our conversations.
So if we can show up with a clear, helpful intention, it can change the whole orientation of the conversation.
And we do practice this on the second Wednesdays of the month if you want to know more. So Roar invites wonder and curiosity. The story of the columnist is what wonder and curiosity look like in practice, not passive, not naive, active, intentional and chosen. We have to make the choice. The calmness that the intention that the guy’s rude behavior wasn’t going to determine how he showed up and that’s the invitation of this moment personally and collectively. We don’t have to wait for the world to settle before we decide who we are inside of it. We move into wonder when we stop demanding that life look a certain way and curiosity is the antidote to judgment of self, each other, the uncertain future. So we choose the spiritual posture of wonder and curiosity.
So collectively, we can’t wait for political clarity. We can’t wait for institutional stability or agreement on all the big questions. We can’t wait before we show up for each other and the world. The not knowing is what calls us together like my residentially fluid life. The uncertainty opens up possibility for something better than we could have planned. So I’m going to take us into a little practice and after the practice, I will take us into our closing prayer. So I invite you to get yourself comfortable in your seat, center however you normally consider yourself getting centered. I like to take a couple of deep inhalations and exhalations to anchor myself in my body, feel the seat supporting you, perhaps using the breath and the weight of your body to anchor you, bring yourself into present awareness and just see if you can notice maybe asking yourself the question, “What do I notice in my body?
What sensations are there? Letting go of judgment, just developing awareness.
What do I notice in my emotions? And what do I notice in my thoughts? Just becoming the witness of yourself, settling in and asking. Is there a persona? Is there a personality trait? The self that you constructed to manage how you’re seen? Is there a persona protecting you? A way of being, a voice that judges self and others and maybe underneath that, the shadow, the part you may not want to look at, the part you may not want others to see. And just consider where in your life is your shadow running the show, waiting for certainty, holding back, managing how you’re perceived, perhaps preventing the gift that’s trying to land and asking yourself, what would it look like to let that go?
What would it look like to take one step from within the not knowing? What happens if you choose wonder, letting go of life looking a certain way? What happens if you choose curiosity, letting go of judgment of self, of each other, of the uncertain future, leaning into the discomfort, being curious what’s there for you? Big doubt equals big enlightenment. Ernest Holmes reminds us we have a power within us that is greater than anything we shall ever contact in the outer so we can be sure that while the uncertainty out there is real, the power inside is greater and we have the power to come together, to come together as one. We are the people. We are the world.
Paige Kizer :
We are the children. We are the one’s who make a brighter day so let’s start giving. There’s a choice we’re making. We saving our own lives. It’s true. We make a better day just you and me.
Rev. Linda Jackson:
So I acknowledge there is one power and presence, the power and presence that I call God, call it love. You can call it by any name you choose. There is no word that can contain it. It is the infinite nature of life. It is the full potential and I am an individual expression of it. Each one of us here online, everyone on this planet, everything on this planet, an individual expression of the one. We are the conduits for its expression. So we are all that it is. We are the intelligence. We are the love. We are the freedom. We are the possibility. And from that place of knowing the truth of who we are, I affirm that we are opening ourselves to this high idea that we are releasing any fear, any persona, any shadow, that we simply allow that to inform us what our work is to do so that we can be the full expression that we are here to be, that we can truly come together in love, that we can work together to be the world we want to be It’s not someone out there.
It is us. We are the ones. So I just affirm that any need for certainty dissolves now all fear of judgment released now. I affirm that we are each held and loved exactly as we are, that we have everything we need to take the next step within the not knowing. As we rise individually and collectively, we converge. We come together in greater power, in greater good, in greater love.
And I’m grateful. I’m grateful for each one’s yes to being here. I’m grateful for the practice. I’m grateful for the work we do. I am grateful for the truth that there is this power for good operating through each of us and I’m grateful for the fulfillment of this prayer. I let it go into the law that always says yes. And if there is anything in this that resonates with you, I invite you to join me in saying together, and so it is. Thank you.