If Your Peace Depends on Conditions, It isn’t Peace – Rev. Darrell Jones
This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
DESCRIPTION
Peace isn’t what happens—it’s what you practice. Join us this week as we boldly step into the radical notion that if we are waiting for circumstances to change in our life before we experience peace, we are setting ourselves up for guaranteed disappointment. Deep sustainable peace begins within us from choice and practice, external peace is transient and sure to break at some point. Let’s place our attention on deep sustainable peace!
SUMMARY
This talk explores the concept of peace and how it is not contingent on external conditions, but rather an internal practice. The key points are:
– Peace is a matter of choice and practice, not external factors. If one’s peace depends on conditions, it is not true peace.
– The speaker shares a personal story about finding peace through an internal focus rather than trying to change external circumstances.
– The speaker introduces the idea of being a “child of peace” and “being of light” as an affirmation to cultivate inner peace.
– Spiritual power comes from aligning with inner principles, not from external efforts or willpower.
– Moments of crisis or hardship provide opportunities to choose between being a “minion of darkness” or a “child of light” by practicing peace.
– Divine love, which is free from selfishness and partiality, is the ultimate goal that human loves can lead to.
– The key spiritual principles to realize through constant practice are recognizing a higher power, realizing oneness, and affirming truth.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Darrell Jones:
That was amazing and I just gave them that song to learn. Was it Wednesday? I don’t know. Put your hands together for these amazing musicians and what they do and then welcome maybe a golf clap, like one clap for the conspiracy that’s happening right now. The world conspired to bring you this day, this experience in this community into answer all of the prayers of your heart. Did you realize that’s what’s happening today? Thanks for that. Now, I’m sure there’s probably an image in your mind of what that is supposed to look like, right? Oh, when life gets there, then everything will be, but life is being right now and is giving you the perfect opportunity.
Thanks life. Okay, more on that. So howdy folks. Online, I have a request. I’m going to ask you to not multitask, but I’m going to ask you to multitask for one moment. Someone in your circle’s heart is hurting. Send them a link right now and say, listen to this. Have them come to service wherever they are on the planet and maybe their soul will find some peace today. Day. My talk title, if your peace depends on conditions, it isn’t peace. It’s kind of jarring ish. Yeah, I wanted to give that spiritual kind of smack on the face. I feel like that is what life has been like for me a little bit lately. Anyone else experiencing a smack in the face other than the cold that hits you in the face when you go out the door here in Chicago in the morning.
Life is giving us a perfect, perfect opportunity as always to experience the fullness and the richness of life. Last week, Reverend Amy talked so beautifully about the peace within and the message today continues upon that The message today is still focusing on the same book. The way of peace and to summarize at least the sections that I am focusing on today is that the way of peace, there is no way of peace other than the peace of way that you are on called your life. That’s it. You’re here. Nothing else needs to happen. You have lots of dreams and ideas to shift. You want things to happen, but they are happening right now. They’re coming to fruition. So peace. Who desires greater peace in their life? What is it that you need for peace to happen?
I can see everyone’s eyes are searching like, well, if this happened, if your peace depends on conditions, it isn’t peace, it’s just conditions. As Reverend Judy said, the little blurb of the intro is that peace isn’t what happens. It’s what you practice. It’s how you live. And today we’re going to boldly step into a radical notion that if we are waiting for circumstances in our life to change before we experience peace, then we’re basically setting ourselves up for failure. We’re setting ourselves up for disappointment and I love, I can see some grimaces on people’s faces already. I’m not trying to make anything right or wrong in your life, but I want to push you to the edge of your understanding of your life and your purpose today. I continue to realize over and over and over again in my personal experience and all of the folks that I sit with in one-on-one coaching or in any sort of group experience, that those who are willing to be bold and courageous and step to the edge of their experience and go, what is happening here? And then also go, what is happening here? Find some liberation and empowerment to really move in a powerful way in their life.
Deep, sustainable peace begins from choice and practice. External peace does exist. Don’t get me wrong, when there is no fighting happening, that is a state of peace. But here’s what I’ve learned about humans. We don’t stay the same and we like to think that there isn’t enough of anything anywhere. So we fight all the time for everything. One of those things is peace. If we keep looking outside of ourselves for that peace and putting the condition on the external world, we’re only going to show up more and more disappointed as we go through life. Some of you may or may not know me in terms of some of the work that I do. I’m always looking for what are the practices? What’s the practical way that we can show up and embrace spirituality, whatever that may mean to you. Less of a dogma. Let’s of, this is what you should think and there’s some person up there, out there over there who’s judging what we do.
The only person who judges everything that you do is you. You’re the God within you that judges if you will. So let’s get in relationship to that. And I’m always looking for frameworks. What is a framework that can help us step into our spiritual practice and spiritual living practically? And one of the many that I’ve played with in my soul gym is what I like to call the four Ps. Now I’ve been exploring this year, peace, purpose, passion and persistence. So peace is the fundamental thing. It lands really well with what we’re talking about this month here at Cityside. Think about that for a moment. If there isn’t some level of peace, and if peace is nothing more than being present with yourself, if you’re not present, you’re not connected to your purpose, you’re connected to something in the past or the future, your purpose can only be found in the present.
And then passion to be really excited about what’s happening in your life right now. You can’t be what if about what may happen and you can’t be, oh, should have would’ve could about what did or didn’t happen. You got to be here. So you have to have some level of peace for what is. Then you get connected to your purpose. Passion kind of ensues and follows. And then persistence, being as persistent as you can be to stay in the practice of coming back to peace. Then everything else unfolds. Our first reading that was offered, I’m going to come back to it, the difference between a person, and by the way I tweaked this is my man was writing in the turn of the century. So everything is very he. Now I identify with the pronouns he him, but I know that to have that in a reading sometimes it’s kind of like, who is he talking about?
So I did a little neutralizing, if you will, but then there’s one passage where there’s so many he’s and HIMSS and his, I just left them and you can switch ’em in your mind. All right. The difference between a person there, it said a person, he a person of weakness and one of power lies not in the strength of the personal will, but in the focus of consciousness, which represents their states of knowledge. I love this because for most of my life I’ve been trying to let my personal will be the thing that really gets me where I need to go. Anyone struggling with that? If I can just work a little harder, if I can just stop doing that a little bit more, if I can just push, just will it into being anyone. Yeah. So I love this idea. It’s like personal will. Yes, we have choice, but it’s not about how hard can we push. It’s about what are we holding in our mind.
That’s the real change agent. But then after much searching and suffering, which is kind of what we’re all doing, living our life, sacrificing the light of an eternal principle, dawns upon the soul, a divine calm, ensues of joy, unspeakable, glading, the heart who wants some joy unspeakable so much that it’s not, you’re going to have to tell everyone about it. So it’s speakable joy. I want to share with you a little bit of a personal story. Story in terms of peace not being found in conditions. Now, I dance sometimes literally definitely my mind, but not so much physically. There’s this witching hour for me between three and 5:00 AM and it’s a beautiful time and it can be a hard time. The bottom line is, is that usually I have to get up and go to the bathroom sometimes. So I take care of that and I come back and then my mind is thinking about everything, everything and anything. And this week I had a lot kind of going on and I found myself awake around three 30 and I could not fall back asleep. I could not rest. My mind was racing so much. So my thoughts kicked into gear. My physical heart started racing. It was literally beating faster and the anxiety started to kick in. And the what ing and the worrying and the doubting started to happen.
And it took me, I don’t know, maybe two hours maybe before I finally kind of fell back into a space of peace. But I had an awareness. There was nothing that was going to happen at 3:00 AM out in the world that was going to make me feel any better. There was no phone call to make. There was no email to send. Even though I was probably thinking about five things I wanted to say to people in an email, it was not the thing that was going to bring me peace. I needed to bring my attention fully inward to myself. And I have a little practice that I do. I kind of go through and bless my internal organs. I really thank my spleen and I thank my kidneys and I thank my liver and I thank my pancreas. All of the elimination things like, well, there’s something here that needs to be eliminated from me, so I’m just going to bless those elimination channels. I bless my stomach, I bless my intestines and everything, and it just gets me grounded back in my body as opposed to being up in the thoughts of my head.
But that is where peace was found for me. There was nothing outside of me, nothing that was going to change, that was going to make me feel any better. A day or so later woke up again, three 30, and this time I got a little bit of a message, and it’s something that I want you to repeat to me. It’s almost like a refrain of chorus. So repeat after me. I’m a child of peace. I’m a child of peace. I’m a being of light. I’m a being of light. I bring peace no matter what. I bring peace no matter what. Again, I’m a child of peace. I’m a child of peace. I’m a being of light. I’m being of light. I bring peace no matter what. I bring peace no matter what. So this was this kind of download for me. This was an affirmation that I started saying to myself a specific way at that time in the morning, reminding myself, I’m a child now. I’m 52 years old, so I’m not chronologically a child, but I am born of peace. That is one of the principles that we hold in this teaching, that we are born of something that is peace, that is love, that is creativity, that is possibility, that is freedom. And so to remind ourselves of that, that I’m a child of this very thing, I’m a child of peace. I’m a being of light, that peace is within me and it beams out.
And then to challenge ourselves, I bring peace no matter what. If your peace depends upon conditions, I don’t think it’s peace, at least not sustainable peace. So we come to the two chapters that I had were chapter three and chapter four. The first one was titled The Acquirement of Spiritual Power. And one of the other quotes, this is I believe slide three. Yes, A person commences to develop power when checking their impulses and selfish inclinations, they fall back upon the higher and calmer consciousness within them and begins to study themself upon a principle. The realization of unchanging principle in consciousness is that once the source and the secret of the highest power, so again, the principle here is that power is not outside of us. It’s when we come into that principle of truth within us. This is how we acquire power. And in this world where we are power hoarders, where our governments, where our businesses, where all of our communities, someone’s hoarding power because we say they have the power.
I’m helpless. I can’t do anything, or we’re trying to hoard the power ourselves because we think someone’s going to take it from us in this world of power hoarding to realize that there is no power to acquire outside of you. Now, those of you who are sociologists, obviously we live in a social society where there is a transfer of power. I get that, but I’m talking about a spiritual power that we can bring into our human experience that is not contingent upon anything in anyone outside of us, other than us coming into relationship with the principle that we are a child of peace. We are being of light. We bring peace no matter what. Say that again with me. I’m a child of peace. I’m child of peace. I’m a being of light. I’m a being of, I bring peace no matter what. I bring peace no matter what.
And then here’s the really cool thing that I love about James Allen. He’s said to be one of the kind of grandparents of modern day self-help movements. So in this next section of the reading, it says, it is in the hour of crisis. In the hour of crisis, which decides who are the minions of darkness, kind of intense language, but still it is in the hour of crisis, which decides who are the minions of darkness and who are the children of light. It is the epic of threatening disaster ruin in persecution which divides the sheep from the goats and reveals to the reverential gaze of succeeding ages the men and women, the people of power. So what I take from this is that it’s actually when the proverbial crap is hitting the fan, that’s a good thing. It’s really a good thing. We may not like it, it may not feel good, but these are the moments where we really get to test ourselves. No one’s testing us. We get to test ourselves and go, am I a minion of darkness or am I a child of light? What am I going to bring into this? Am I going to bring some peace into this situation?
Now, does that mean that you don’t? I was in a board meeting. I’m not one who cusses a lot. If you know my wife, she loves the F-bomb drops it all the time, and I like the word. But I was in a board meeting this week, got some information that I in my ego was not happy about, and I was dropping F-bombs all over the place and I needed to release whatever the angst was that was in me because it brought me to the opportunity to realize am I going to be a minion of darkness right here in the midst of this information or am I going to be a child of light? And I chose to be a child of light, a child of light who had to throw a little bit of a temper tantrum for five minutes, but then I came back.
This is why I practice meditation. Meditation to me is not getting somewhere. A lot of people are like, oh, I can’t wait to get into that space. The practice of meditation to me is training to return because I don’t know about you. My mind is running in 9 million different directions all the time. So when I’m in meditation and it takes off, it gives me that opportunity to go, hold on. Do I want to be a min of darkness? No, I’m going to choose to be a child of light. Lemme come on back and sit here for a moment. So it’s in those moments of crisis, even as hard as they may be. Is anyone experiencing any crisis or hardship in their life right now? I don’t want to diminish it. We are always experiencing some hardship, but you have a choice, not so much. I’m saying, is this the right or wrong thing to do? But you have a choice to bring peace. Peace is what we practice.
There’s a great quote from Rumi, and this has really been anchoring me In this month, if everything around you seems dark, look again, you may be the light I if everything around you seems dark, look again, you may be the light. Think about that for a moment. You’re like, oh my gosh, I can’t see any light. Where is it? Where is it? You are the beam that’s helping you look your inquiries, the very light that is needed in that moment. I’m a child of peace. I’m a child of peace. I’m a being of light. I’m a being of light. I bring peace no matter what. I bring peace no matter what. So in the chapter four, the title of that section is the realization of selfless love and the quote is much longer, but I just have a short portion here. Divine love is distinguished from human loves in this supremely important particular, it is free from partiality.
I’m going to read that again. No one talks like this anymore, but it’s good language. Divine love is distinguished from human loves in this supremely important particular, it is free from partiality, and it goes on in the book to say, human loves clinging to a particular object to the exclusion of all else. And when that object is removed, great and deep is the result of suffering to the one who loves anyone ever been in a breakup before holding on tight. Why’d they leave? I can’t stand ’em. Get out of my face. All this angst, divine love embraces the whole universe and without clinging to any part, yet contains within itself the whole and he who comes to it by gradually purifying and broadening and human loves, until all the selfish and impure elements are burnt off of them, cease from suffering. It is because human loves are narrow and confined and mingled with selfishness that they cause suffering.
No suffering can result from that love which is so absolutely pure that it seeks nothing for itself. Nevertheless, there’s some hope. Human loves are absolutely necessary as steps toward the divine, and no soul is prepared to partake in divine love until it has become capable of the deepest and most intense human love. It is only bypass passing through human loves and human sufferings. That divine love is reached and realized. There’s nothing wrong with your life, all the loves that you have or that you don’t have. It’s good because it’s an opportunity for you to practice the divine love. We are in the space of mastering as much of the human loves as we can to go across that threshold to our divinity.
There was anyone on Substack read Substack articles, one of the many platforms. There’s a woman, Margaret, raised Dempsey that I have really enjoyed some of her sharing, and in one of her articles she said, this week, we expect our spiritual path to explain the chaos or offer refuge from it. Anybody. That’s why we’re here, right? What the hell is going on in the world? Let me get to some teaching, something that’s going to help me make sense of it. We expect clarity. Should we turn the other cheek? Forgive, withdraw, build protective boundaries. Our spiritual practice can provide comfort and growth, but it can also become something else entirely. When we start over analyzing every thought and emotion, we forget that peace, not spiritual perfection is the gauge of our progress. The peace that you experience is the gauge of your process, not an understanding.
The article is a larger thing where she basically says, when our spirituality becomes one of the many stresses in our life, when our spirituality becomes actually the anxiety trigger, which I watch people do all the time, because we’re trying to figure out is this right or wrong? Is this good or bad? Am I right or wrong? Is that good or bad? That’s not a state of peace. What could happen right now to bring a greater space of peace? Could it be a breath? Could it be saying, I’m a child of peace, I’m a being of light.
Our last slide today, there is no way to the requirement of spiritual power except by the inward illumination and enlightenment, which is the realization of spiritual principles, and those principles can only be realized by constant practice, an application, bam. It’s on you, boo. You got to do this. No one else can do it for you. Nothing outside of you is going to make this happen. And one of the things I love about science of mind in particular is the spiritual mind treatment. He talks here about the principles can only be realized by constant practice and application. Well, what are the principles, right? You’ve got to be wondering, what are these principles that I must know? What are these principles that I must practice? Well, here they are. If you’ve ever studied religious science or science of mind or been to unity or any of the new thought traditions that do affirmative prayer within it are the principles.
The first one is you got to recognize that there is something greater than you. There is a power and presence that is and complete, that is loving, that is light, that is abundant. So recognizing that there’s a power within and around your life and then to unify with it, you are not separate from it. This is a principle of this teaching. You are one with all that is because if you believe that you are separate, you’re going to be suffering. Sometimes we suffer because we think, oh my God, I am a part of that. I’m a part of this country. Oh my God, I’m a part of that group. Oh my God. Yes, you are. We are one. But then there’s this principle that we have the power within us to speak out loud or quietly in our hearts to declare, to realize a truth greater than the condition we see.
This is the fundamental practice of affirmation and prayer and treatment. We can say a word or words we can declare with conviction. I am a child of peace. I’m a being of light. I bring peace no matter what, so the world can kick and scream and do all that it wants to. What if everyone for one day said it’s peace day, and everyone woke up and said this affirmation, and no matter what happened, no matter what was said on the news, no matter what politician was wapping its head around, you said, they said, we said, I’m a being of peace. I’m a child of peace. I’m a being of light no matter what. Today I bring peace.
That would be a very, very powerful, powerful practice of letting go of condition and bringing the peace from within. I want to close with a prayer of peace that many of you may have heard because there’s an interesting way that these words can serve us. Now, if you do research online, there’s all sorts of back and forth. Did St. Francis of Assisi actually say these words? And a lot of people say no. It actually didn’t show up until the early part of the, I think the 1910s in terms of written documentation. And Assisi was alive a lot, lot, lot, lot, lot before that. But regardless, these words are just perfect for this conversation. Take a deep breath in hands to your heart.
The very turn of these words, do not say anything other than let me be the peace that I bring into the world. Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred. Let me sow love where there is injury. Pardon doubt. May I bring faith where there is despair? May I bring hope where there is darkness, may I bring light where there is sadness? May I bring joy? Oh, creative life grant me. Not so much that I may seek to be consoled, but to be the consoler, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love for it is in the giving that we receive. It is in the pardoning that we are pardoned. It is in the dying that we are born to eternal life.
It’s in the letting go of the external that we step into the eternal peace. So right here and right now, whatever it is in our lives that may seem like an obstacle, that may seem like a challenge, that may seem like a hardship, that may seem like a manifestation of darkness. What I affirm and know is that we are all children of peace and beings of light. And no matter what today, just worry about today. May we bring the light, may we bring the peace. May we bring the love and the forgiveness and the understanding that is needed in the moment. Not to fix anyone, not to fix anything, but to be in relationship with what is. And it is in the relating. It is in the connection. It is in this space that transformation actually does happen.
I’m so grateful to be in this group, to be in this conspiracy of peace today, that we have all conspired to come together and agree to step forward from this moment and practice peace. One breath at a time, one moment at a time. May it go before us. May it stand beside us, and may we all be empowered as a result, and so it is. Amen. One last time, repeat after me. I’m a child of peace. I’m a child of peace. I’m a being of light. I’m a being of light no matter what. I bring peace. And so it is.