Maybe What’s Good Gets Better – Rev. John Adams
This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
DESCRIPTION
Within each of us is the infinite capacity to express good and to experience this ever-expanding Love in our lives. Yet, in our human experience, we may encounter challenges, pain, and suffering. This Sunday, we will explore how to reconcile our very real human experience with the unshakable spiritual Truth of our wholeness and perfection.
SUMMARY
In this talk, Rev. John Adams discusses the transformative power of suffering and how it can lead to spiritual growth and awakening. He highlights different spiritual perspectives on suffering, including the idea that it can be a catalyst for compassion, inner strength, and realignment with one’s divine truth. Rev. John emphasizes that while suffering is not good in itself, it can be used by spirit to lift us up and guide us towards greater love and understanding. He encourages the audience to choose to uplift themselves and others during times of difficulty, and to hold the belief that “what’s good gets better” and “what’s bad gets gone.” The summary focuses on key points about the spiritual significance of suffering and the power of choosing love and transformation over staying stuck in pain.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. John Adams:
Good morning. Good. Thank you everybody for being here. I’m always so grateful for the opportunity to speak and grateful to Reverend Amy for giving me that opportunity and have a conversation with you. That song that Paige and Greg just did for you is from the movie Norma Ray. I dunno if any of you remember that movie. It’s an oldie and also I looked it up, won the Academy Award as best song, and Norma Ray is about a community that is feeling the weight of oppression, the weight of suffering, and lifting itself up out of that experience. And it’s led by this one woman who claims her power, finds her power and expresses it. It’s a really powerful movie if you’ve never seen it. It’s really great, and the reason why I wanted to land with this song is because of that lyric. Maybe what’s good gets better because that idea of that maybe that in that maybe there is, that’s where the magic happens. That’s where the miracle lives. We step into that maybe and we allow for something, some possibility to come in, some greater good to come in. It’s an invitation to allow spirit to move through us that may takes us out of whatever this experience is that is no longer serving us and allows us to envision and project out and hold and hire a bigger idea for ourselves.
Just imagining as we do that, what kind of world we would live in, what kind of life experience we would have, and the thing about this that I really like is that we are energetic beings. We are vibrations of energy, and so as we hold this bigger idea for ourselves and we say yes to it, that’s our affirmation. We say, yes, this is the higher idea I have for myself. Then we bring that energy, that vibration into every space that we move into and we’re affecting everybody around us. We’re affecting each and every single person. By lifting that energy up, by holding that higher vibration, we are helping lift up and inviting others to lift their energy up too.
This is this wonderful wondrous philosophy and we are continually invited into it and in that lovely, beautiful high level vision, what can bring us up there? There’s many different ways that carry us up, that inspire us up that are catalysts to bring us up and in the human experience, a lot of times what pulls us up there is an experience of suffering, many words for it, but suffering’s, the word that I landed on, this suffering experience seems to be something that comes up in the human path, and in fact, so much so that pretty much every spiritual teaching has a take on it. Every spiritual path addresses suffering in a different way. Here is a quick summary of some of the different paths and the way that they approach suffering. I’m not going to read them all. You can take a picture or read through it as you will, but it’s just an example to see how this experience is informed in and through all the various different paths. In the new thought path, which is at the bottom, it says that suffering is a signal to shift our consciousness to realign with our divine truth. This is our call to evolve. This is our evolution in our spirit is calling us forward, is calling us upward. It’s calling us into a greater expression of who and what we are. I would say that it doesn’t have to be this way, but often for some reason in our human experience, it ends up being this way.
We are finding our way in and through this experience and finding our way back out of it again, as I said, as a catalyst to lift us up and we capture this experience as we’re moving through it, we capture it in different ways. We capture this experience of realignment through different perspectives. One of the perspectives is awakening and awareness, so we have this painful experience of suffering can jolt us out of this autopilot living that we can fall into. It exposes where we’re clinging and resisting. That resistance is where a lot of the pain can come from that clinging, it can invite us into a deeper state of self-awareness of self-examination, and it sort of sheds the things that in reality don’t really matter and we start to illuminate the things that really, really do matter. We breaking illusions, it often strips away the false stories we tell ourselves about control, about permanence, about our identity, and pushes us towards truth.
In many mystical traditions, this is called the dark night of the soul. Sound familiar, right? We’ve all heard of that, where the ego’s illusions dissolve so that the soul can awaken to this deeper reality, and I like the word reality because I think my experience with this, my experience in my spiritual journey is understanding that it is a reality. It’s very, very real and for me, very visceral. It can also show up as compassion and connection. What ignites compassion in us, absolutely having that sense, that pain ourselves. When we see it in others, we are immediately empathetic. We are immediately feeling a connection and a drawing too, and our compassion is illuminated. It show up as inner strength and transformation struggle, suffering can build spiritual resilience. We find that we are resilient and we develop that resilient muscle. It brings us into a place of humility just kind of, okay, let me just be with this right now.
Right? In some practices they call it karma, right? It’s where difficulties are opportunities to burn away past conditioning so that we are really clearing that which we’re holding onto that doesn’t really serve us any longer. There’s redirection and purpose. Suffering can act like a cosmic redirection nudging us towards other paths, to other relationships, to other ways of being that we might not have considered otherwise, right? Those experiences that seem to take something away, perhaps open a pathway to something new, transcendence of the personal self, this is where ultimately suffering can point us towards the realization of our deepest essence of who we really are. We may have thought, well, I’m this, I’m my job or I’m my relationship or I’m whatever, I’m a reverend. But when we have these experiences, it can sort of strip away all of that to our real essence, which is as I’ve always said, and I will always say, we are unconditional love in human form. We are love in form. Having these human experiences and transcending them, putting this a little more simply suffering is not good in and of itself, but there is a many spiritual paths, including ours would see it as a way of cracking ourselves open the pain of suffering. Another way to say it is it’s a summons. We’re being summoned to climb out of what was into a new level of understanding, a spiritual awakening into greater love.
It’s funny because I was thinking about this as I was preparing this talk and when we are following the themes from CSL and the themes from CSL come with notes and in the notes it talks about this idea of suffering and I’m sitting with it. I’m going, God, this sounds like such a paradox that suffering would lead us into a deeper sense of spirituality, a deeper experience of divine love that is always within us and always wanting to express in greater ways. It sounds to me like a cruel teacher eliciting from us pain and suffering in order to find a deeper sense of love, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I don’t believe that love creates suffering or that love creates challenges or obstacles to overcome no matter how informative they are. I do think, however, and I have for a long time that we live in a universe where those experiences can be used by spirit to lift us up, can be transmuted by spirit, to not just be an experience of pain, but to be an experience of launching of us into a greater understanding, a greater way of being.
We have free will and I think a lot of suffering to me is person to person suffering. There are other kinds of suffering of course, but I think so much of it is about what we do to each other when we have either in a position of power or we have some kind of say over things. There’s so much of what I’m seeing in the world of suffering caused person to person. There was just another, sadly another shooting in Minneapolis this week, very tragic, makes me heartbroken and I wasn’t even there and I’m suffering from it.
These sufferings are caused by someone saying, I am going to go and behave this way. And I think for us, we look at that and we come to it from a spiritual place of saying, how can I bring more love into this situation? How can I help this person who seems to have been broken so much to bring them back into their wholeness? I think that if we can imagine that we can get to that place where we’ve completely eliminated person to person suffering any kind of, I’m going to get even or you’re not showing up the way I want you to show up, so I’m going to get really angry and lash out at you. If we can get rid of all of that, imagine what the world would look like. Imagine that. Not only does it not happen, it’s just never a thought.
We just never even consider it. It’s not in our playbook to ever behave that way. How much time and money we would have. I think about how many laws we’ve, and the systems of laws that we’ve created that are all around policing people’s behaviors. Imagine all that’s gone all the time and money. We would have to address some of the other kinds of things like hurricanes and illnesses and things like that. I mean, it would be an amazing situation where we would be able to survive those kinds of experiences without suffering them, and I think this is possible. I think this vision is possible. What I also think that in suffering, we have two phases of suffering and there’s probably more than two phases, but I’m thinking very simply about two major phases of suffering. One phase is it’s just happening. We’re in it. We have that experience, whatever it is, there’s many examples of ways that suffering come to us.
I thought of this funny story, I should tell you, I guess I will tell you this story. I wasn’t sure I was going to, but I will. Years ago I was doing some, I had a part-time job, second job working, doing bookkeeping for a flower shop up in Glenco, Illinois, and Glenco is, if you don’t know, is a very beautiful small townish kind of feel, very affluent community, very well off, and this woman came in one day to get her Gerber daisies and she would come in every week to get Gerber’s and she would always come and she’s, I’m here Froma daisies. And for some reason we were out that day. They were sold out very early on and she got very upset. I think she was hosting something at her home and she didn’t have her gerbers to put out, and this was for her tremendous suffering.
It was a tremendous loss and I know it’s kind of funny to think about that really that’s your loss, but we don’t know where people are at. We don’t know what that really meant to her. For all I know, she was hosting something for her family and that this was one of the most important occasions of her life. Who knows why that was so tragic for her. It doesn’t matter. The scale doesn’t matter and it’s not for us to judge. She was in the experience of it. The experience of this is what’s happening right now, and we go through, we kind of process it and we find our resilience with it. We find our way to hold it and to be with it and work our way through it. And then there’s the second phase and the second phase of suffering I think is choosing.
We choose to be in the suffering. We choose to stay there. We choose to be in that realm of consciousness of, to me, it’s happening to me and we can stay there as long as we want to, but the invitation is always presencing itself to lift ourselves up and out of that. That space of choosing is choosing to stay in the pain of it, but we can also step into the maybe, maybe what’s good gets better. Maybe there’s something, there’s a bigger idea for me here. Maybe there’s something else for me to experience here, and I think if we could get to that place both individually and collectively, if we could find that, I dunno, what would it be? Spiritual courage of saying we’re no longer going to not only hold that idea, but we’re going to hold a bigger idea for everybody. I think we would see some radical shifts in the world in which we live catching up with my notes, so the answer is really simple. We choose to be upleveled, the choice to be made here we are called to release the need for reciprocity. This thing happened to me and so I’ve got to get back at the world for what happened to me. We let that go, we soften that.
We allow that reciprocity to go from being anchor and fear to love and creativity. We walk in grace and give it freely, give it freely without bitterness or attachment. Just give it. We just love, right? We’re not looking for, it’s getting something back. We’re just sharing it out. This is what it looks like when we’re up leveled. The other thing about the maybe that I really like is that we sit in this maybe something good, maybe what’s good gets better. It’s not forcing anything. We’re not trying to make something happen. We’re in the wonder of it. We’re in the openness of it. We’re allowing it. There’s something really beautiful about that and defenseless about that to just sit in that place. When I first came into spirituality, and I think a lot of people do this, I was kind of looking for answers, but I was also kind of, if I’m to be honest, looking for a little bit of magic, a little bit of magic in my life, that magical spiritual thing that happens, that thing that just sort of spun that miracle, that just sort of shows up out of the blue.
And in our philosophy, I think about some of the other, the other paths, and I think one of the reasons we’re attracted to some of those other paths is because they do contain mystery. They do contain an element of, Ooh, magic. If I do this chant and I sing this song and we have the incense and we hold each other’s hands, something magical will come forward. And in our philosophy, we’re a science of mind. We’re a science of mind. It seems to not invite in the magic, but I do think that in that maybe something good gets better. That in there is the magic, that magic of choosing. Remember last time I spoke, I was talking about choosing. When we choose to say I am even in the midst of this pain, even in the midst of this suffering, even in this place right here, right now, I’m still calling forward and recognizing that there is love, there is good and that I am one with it. And this is such a transformational, this is such a magical thing that we do.
I think we do heal. I think we do find grace. I think our consciousness does get expanded. I think our capacity to love gets expanded, our capacity to empathize gets expanded. Miracles happen. The incurable is cured. The changeless situations changes, the pain stops, the love grows. And the reason I believe that, and I know that is because I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it happen for me and I have seen it happen for others. There was a woman who paneled with me when we were doing our oral panel. She was part of the group who had been diagnosed with incurable cancer that was to take her life and a little more than a year later, she’s saving for her panels completely cured and cancer free. It should have never happened according to medical people, it should have never happened. I’ve seen it happen. These things can come through. What is your path? I don’t know. Your path is your path. We celebrate that love that is leading us on this path that is calling us to that higher place of being that is calling us into those experiences that we create. Remember, we live in a world of cause and effect. We are creating these experiences, whether they’re suffering experiences or uplifting experiences, we’re the ones that are creating it.
There is a wonderful quote by Ernest Holmes that I found from an article that Jim Locker had put out recently. He writes some of the most beautiful articles and he always includes various quotes. And this one was an Ernest Holmes quote that I hadn’t seen before and I thought it was really good and really appropriate for today. And Ernest writes, the latent divinity within us stirs our imagination, and because of its insistent demands impels and compels our growth. It is back of every invention. It proclaims itself through every creative endeavor. It has produced sages and saints and saviors and will when permitted create a new world in which war, poverty, sickness, and famine will have disappeared when permitted. We choose. We grant that permission with the power of our thoughts, the power of our intention, the power of our choosing.
Maybe what’s good gets better and maybe what’s bad gets gone, goes into the nothingness from which it came. I think this is a powerful idea and we could talk for quite a long time about how it shows up and why it shows up and where it comes from. The thing that I know for you today, and I want you to know that I know this for each of you because I know some of you are sitting here suffering or a situation or a set of circumstances that are not really what you want. What I know for you is that there is this light that is yours. There is this love that is yours, and I know that it is transformative and I know that it is real. I know sometimes it doesn’t feel like it, particularly when you’re in pain, it can feel like it’s really far away.
That’s why we have each other so that we can call it back. We call it back and presence it right here, right now. I know that for each of you and for each of you online line, I have another quote. What I’d like to do is have you just kind of close your eyes or soften your gaze and just take this in. I’ll have Ben leave the slide up so you can take a picture of it after we’re complete, but I just wanted you to take in these words. It’s a beautiful quote by Maria Popov Papova, and it’s not only is it a beautiful quote about the spiritual path, but I also found it to be kind of a great definition of what it means to be a spiritual practitioner. And we have some phenomenal spiritual practitioners here at Cityside. And what Maria wrote is, the longer I live, the more deeply I learned that love, whether we call it friendship or family or romance, is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light, gentle work, steadfast work life saving work. In those moments when life shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back in our best moments, we are that person for one another.
We lift each other up, we love each other up, we hold each other up even in those dark nights of the soul. And we know for each other that what’s good gets better and what’s bad gets gone. And that is truth capital T. So we’re going to take this into prayer because you’re already in your prayerful positions anyway, and just breathing it in, breathing it in, breathing it in. When people walk into this space, they tell me they feel this beautiful energy. So just allow this energy to wash over you, wash through you. And just recognizing this energy is really that love that I speak of, that unconditional love that is always present, that is forever and always lifting us up that is calling us to this higher state of being. This.
And I know that I am one with it as I know each person here listening to this talk is one with it. So from this place, I just know I speak a word of gratitude for those experiences that have called me, that summoned me, summoned all of us to this higher vibration, this higher level of consciousness. I just know that each and every single person is walking their walk on their journey and they walk it hand in hand with spirit. That spirit is walking them home to this centered place of love. I know that in a moment of pain, in a moment of unrest, this can feel like just words that are spoken. I have felt that I have been there, I have been on my knees praying, trying to find any sense of this love in reality, in my life experience. And what I can tell you friends is that it has come forward, it has shown up, it does show up it this love is, it’s everywhere.
When it’s eternal, it’s ever expressing. And it’s yours. It’s mine right here, right now. And so I know with the power of this transformation that any pain, any suffering is resolving itself. I know that all situations that are wanting to be shifted and changed and uplifted or shifting and changing, I know that each and every single person is finding their wholeness, finding their abundance, finding their love, their light. I’m so grateful. So grateful for the powerful, powerful presence of spirit. And if you all of this so grateful for the reality of this love that is ever holding us dearly, in peace, in love, and in joy, I’m just so grateful for all of this. I release it now into the actual law knowing that it is absolutely done as this. And even better confirming it by together simply saying. And so it’s, thank you Reverend John. We’re going to now stand together and sing Simple it.