This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
Realization: I Affirm This To Be So – Rev. Gina Alicea
DESCRIPTION
Having recognized the One Presence and remembered our unity with it, prayer now asks something bold of us: to speak, in the present tense, the very quality we are calling forth — not as a wish for tomorrow, but as a truth for today. This week, we practice the art of affirmative, declarative language.
The summary and transcription were auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
SUMMARY
This talk, delivered by Rev. Gina Alicea at Cityside Center for Spiritual Living, focuses on step three of a five-step prayer framework: realizing the truth and speaking it from conviction . The talk builds on prior sermons in the series, in which Rev. Linda addressed step one, recognizing God as a creative life force, and Rev. Aimee addressed step two, the truth of the divine spirit living within each person.
Drawing from Ernest Holmes’ “This Thing Called You,” Rev. Gina emphasizes that each person is one with the creative genius of the universe, and that the mind serves as an outlet through which universal intelligence seeks fulfillment. She explains that universal law operates automatically and always affirms whatever is held in thought and belief, meaning that fear-based or lack-based thinking manifests unwanted outcomes, while faith-filled, conviction-backed prayer draws desired results into reality.
Rev. Gina illustrates these principles through personal stories, including a vision board session that led to a trip to Tanzania, a visioning session with Rev. Darrell that led her to an artist loft home in Hyde Park, and the creation of a photography exhibit with her husband that explored faith journeys and human unity. She underscores that receptivity to divine ideas, combined with genuine feeling and belief, is what propels manifestation.
The talk concludes with a guided prayer and breathing meditation, affirming that each person’s gifts and visions are already present in the infinite mind and available to be realized.
TRANSCRIPTION
Rev. Gina Alicea :
That was gorgeous. Thank you, Paige. I love her voice. I just love it. So fun to be here. When I first stepped into Centers for Spiritual Living, hello to everybody online, 2004. And Reverend Darrell was the very first person I met. And he welcomed me into, and we were meeting in Transitions Bookstore Annex. I don’t even know if that exists anymore, but it was really a magical moment to find a community that is so welcoming and loving and to see it continue because there’s some people in the room that were there at the beginning. So yes, really nice to see everyone here. Thank you for inviting me here, Amy, to speak today on one of the favorite parts of prayer. Step three.
Oh, there’s a little bit of echo. There we go. I’m just going to recap from where we started at the beginning of the month. So Reverend Linda opened us this month with step one, recognizing that prayer is recognizing the power and presence of God as this creative life force, right? There’s this creative energy in the universe, yes? And then Reverend Amy came along and spoke about step two, the creative spirit that is living and breathing in you, right? It is the truth of who you are. So essentially the first two steps talks about who and what God is and who you are. And you’re created in this image and likeness of God, the love, the truth, the beauty, the joy, that is those God essences, those qualities that are living in you is the truth of who you are, right? It’s that living spirit. It’s that juiciness inside of you.
One of the favorite quotes from Ernest Holmes, there’s from this book called This Thing Called You. If you haven’t picked it up, it’s a real skinny little book, but it’s juicy. It’s got a lot of really good stuff in it. And on the first couple pages, on page three and four, there’s two paragraphs that I want to read to you. It is called You Are One with the Creative Genius. And this has to do with those first two steps. You are one with that creative genius. So it goes like this.
You belong to the universe in which you live. You are one with the creative genius back of this vast array of ceaseless motion, this original flow of life. You are as much a part of it as the sun, the earth, and the air. There is something in you telling you this, like a voice echoing from the mountaintop of inward vision, like the light whose origin knows no human has ever seen, like an impulse welling up from the invisible source. You are one with this. Your soul belongs to the universe. Your mind is an outlet through which the creative intelligence of the universe seeks fulfillment.
This is your starting point for investigating the meaning of those impulses, those longings, those desires which accompany you through life. You may accept that that source through which they come is real, this omnipresent source. Yes. You may accept that the universe is filled with divine and infinite presence, perhaps the infinite of yourself, not the infinite of your limited little tilt, but the infinite of the divine self is who you must be. There must be a pattern of yourself in the invisible.That’s such good stuff. Sometimes Ernest, in the science of mind book can get really heady and so hard to really. You got to chew on that stuff for a while. But in the little books, like the little prayer book that we’re on this month or this thing called you, which is even smaller, there’s some juicy stuff in there. So pick it up if you haven’t seen it.
So let’s unpack step three. So step three, realizing the truth and speaking it from conviction. Those that know me know that I’m pretty enthusiastic, so that conviction part is like the easy part, but I am an art teacher, so I get excited about stuff. So we’ll start with slide one.
In this slide. Yep, there it is. Good. The universe is a spiritual system. Now this comes out of the book on page 25. If you haven’t picked up the book, I’ll just give you some parts here. It’s law are those of intelligence, right? So we got to believe in this universal intelligence, right? That’s the law that’s operating. We approach it through the mind, which enables us to know, will and act. Prayer and faith and belief. There’s three parts, prayer, faith and belief are closely related mental attitudes. So there’s this law that’s operating in the universe, just like gravity, it’s automatic. There’s a universal law that’s manifesting automatically. It always says yes.
It’s like planting a seed in the soil and the rain in the sun and then you get this plant, right? Seed grows automatically. Yes? So when we have this divine idea and we declare it to the universe, it’s like planting that idea in the infinite field of the universe so that it can manifest in our lives, right? But it’s a little tricky because the law always says yes. So if you say I can’t and I don’t have enough or I’m not good enough or I don’t have enough money or whatever it is, the universal law is going to say yeah, yes. And it’ll show up that way. And I’ve experienced that for quite a few decades of dating. Until now. Until now, right? Because in previous thought consciousness, I was like, oh no, I had these whole issues with worthiness. When you have that consciousness and you bring that to the universe like, oh, I don’t have, I don’t have, I don’t have.
Then that’s what’s going to show up, like someone that didn’t treat me well, right? But when I change the thought to loving myself and loving who I am and being out there, being exactly who I am as love, as joy, as enthusiasm, as the person that I truly am, then I attract that goodness into my life. Yes? I have a beautiful partner now. But fear is like that negative energy. It’s like praying for something that you don’t want. So those fear-based thoughts, when the universe says yes, then it’s like manifesting something that you don’t want. So you got to be really, really conscious about what you’re praying for and how that energy that’s behind it. Belief is really important. So slide two, let’s take a look at how this happens. So when we use our creative imagination in strong faith, it creates for us out of that one substance, whatever we have formed in thought.
We all have creative imagination. All of us have creative imagination. I know this to be true because I’ve taught thousands of students. I’ve been teaching for 31 years, thousands of students. And I have students that come into my art room and they’re like, “I can’t create art. I can’t, I can’t.” Listen, I know that everybody can create. And so I stand in that consciousness before my students with that thought, knowing that it is possible. I’ve seen hundreds of students change from I can’t to I can. I even have a poster at the top of my classroom that says, “You never know what you can do until you try.” So it’s this change of think, change your thinking, as Ernest Holmes said, change your thinking, change your life. Yes? So we’re creating our life from our own perceptions. We are mighty manifestors. We are. Our thoughts, our words, our deeds.
It’s more than just a thought. We fully believe when we fully have that energy behind it, that feeling energy, it’s going to create into our lives. Reverend Ike used to say, “The feeling gets the blessing.” It’s that juiciness. It’s that feeling behind it. So slide three, now we’re on page 28. This is part of our reading earlier from 27 and 28. So page 28, it says, “It’s done to you as you believe.” So the universe exists by its own self-pronouncement, by its own affirmation. It only knows I am. The I am that I am. I am is that energy that’s running through that creative energy. It knows nothing else. Therefore, whatever prayer in faith touches reality, prayer are right, prayers according to whatever is the truth, then prayer must be answered. But what are these truths?
It’s the attributes of God, truths that are the attributes of God. Now, if you haven’t taken foundations, we get into this, we name some of these attributes, love, joy, peace, abundance, these juicy things in life that are just, they fill you up. They are never ending. They are always available. When you speak from the I am of your being, you’re connecting to the divine, I am, I am that. From that connection with spirit that only knows how to manifest itself in the world as love, as truth, as goodness, those are all God qualities that Amy mentioned last week, right? If you don’t believe that spirit is expressing through you, how is it going to manifest if you’re not one with the I am that I am? It’s that those first steps are so important, right? Either you’re one with the omnipresence and you’re this open channel for it to come through you and out into the world or there’s something that’s going to block it, right?
So if you’re having a hard time imagining, like I did for a couple decades, imagining receiving something wonderful, just meet with a practitioner. I had moments like that in the last couple decades. There are lots of spiritual practices that we can try. You can engage in prayer, which we were talking about this month. You can journal, you can meditate, you can create a vision board. You can meet with a practitioner and doing a visioning session to name a few. I remember back when we were in. There was a school that we. Agazi. Yes, Agassi School. We met in Agassi and I had a vision board session on a Saturday with Tanya and Gina Harris. And we did these vision boards and I remember just ripping through National Geographics and I was just ripping out pages that I liked. I was like, “Oh, that’s pretty. That’s pretty.
Oh, that’s cool.” And I cut it all up and made this vision board. And one of the pictures was the safari in Africa. I’m like, “Oh, the hell would I like to do that?” The next day at Bodhi, the very next day, the community was giving out a tithe check to an organization called Global Alliance for Africa, and the woman got up there and talked about how they do an arts camp in Africa. I’m like, “I want to go to that.” Right after the service, I went up and I talked to her. I said, “I’m going to go to that.” Had no idea how that was going to manifest. I didn’t know how I was going to come up with five, $6,000 to go on this trip that summer, but the vision was there. Literally, within two months time, the money appeared, literally wrote letters and people donated and there I was off to Rusha Tanzania.
So visioning is really powerful to hold it in your mind’s eye. There’s another example where I got the job at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools on the south side, but I was living in Albany Park and the commute from the north side to the south side was a bear. That was tough, especially in the winter. And so by the spring of my first year, I decided I had to move and I put my house on the market and sold my house. I went to Arisha Tanzania again in 2008 and put everything in storage and was living out of the suitcase and I had put a bid on a condo in the south side and the bid fell through a couple times. They couldn’t come to the closing table, so I couldn’t move. And here I was like, “Okay, school’s going to start. It’s August.
School’s going to start. I don’t have a place to live in Hyde Park. What am I going to do? I sold my place on the north side. What’s happening?” I called Daryl, Reverend Daryl, and I sat down and did visioning. And in that visioning, you’re asking the divine, “What is your highest and best for your life?” And you open yourself up in this meditation to receive a divine idea. Darryl was asking, “What does it look like? What does it feel like? What do you see?” I saw a home that had lots of windows and it had an art studio and it was a very open space. Literally three days later, I’m walking around campus on the south side and I pick up a Hyde Park Herald and in there it says, “Own an artist loft home for less than the price of a condo in Hyde Park.” I’m like, “What?” I’m like, “Okay, thank you the universe.” And immediately called the realtor and went to see it, and three weeks later I closed on that thing.
I was just like, “Oh my goodness.” It’s amazing when you’re open to receive a divine idea and it comes to you and you get energized and juiced up about it and that energy is behind it and you believe that you can receive it. You believe that belief is right in there. The feeling and excitement about the vision draws it to you. It’s like knocking over that first domino and then everything starts to fall into place, right? It’s just an incredibly powerful energy. Slide four. Okay. The effective mental treatment. Now we’re on page 37. I’m moving into how prayer is propelled. So the effective mental treatment of prayer is propelled by a consciousness of love and the realization that the creative spirit is always at work, always at work. Now the practitioner doesn’t have to feel like they have to force this to work. It’s the nature of the creative power and presence.
It’s the nature to create as itself and through us as we do declarative prayer, positive, affirmative, declarative words in prayer. Where are we out of time? Good. Oh, I got time for one more story. I was tracking my time here. I didn’t want to go over. All right, so here’s another story.
When I first saw Daniel’s work, my beautiful husband, he’s a photographer and he has photographed over 500 people in 30 countries on their faith journeys and these spiritual journeys. When I first saw that work, I saw the photographs and I though, oh, divine idea just popped right in. Ooh. I’m like, oh, this is really, really great if I made an exhibit out of this. I want to make an exhibit out of this. This is cool stuff. So here comes the divine idea, just comes right in there. We had just first started dating, so I didn’t want to bring it up yet. So I waited a few months. Then when he came to visit Chicago, I was like, “So there’s this gallery that I want you to see,” and took him in to see the gallery and I’m like, “So I got this idea.” I just walked him through my vision of how I want to put the artwork on the wall and create these questions on the wall and move the audience through these stories of faith journeys and then bring them to this ultimate question of how can we create more unity amongst humanity because that was the divine idea back of it all.
It took a few conversations, but we did create that exhibit and took about six months of working on it and it opened in the following January and it was well received. But again, it’s all about being open to receive that idea. You get those aha moments or those ideas. It could be walking by the lakefront. It could be biking with a friend. It could be you’re just sitting in meditation or you’re out to brunch or for me, I’m going to see an art exhibit and I’m like, “Ooh, that’s cool stuff. I want to see that.” There’s these ideas that come to you, something that gives you joy, something that just lights you up. I follow it like it’s my muse, right? To follow those divine ideas that the universe is giving you, that’s what we bring into prayer in that step of realization, right? Who and what God is, I am one with that.
Here’s the juiciness of life, realization. This is what I see happening now, right here, right now. I see this exhibit. I see this happening. You just hold that vision in your mind’s eye, right? So we’re going to go into some practice because prayer is a practice. For those of us that are practitioners and ministers, it’s a daily practice. Every morning I get up in the morning and before, I remember when Reverend Mark Anthony was teaching us about this, it’s like God first. Before you pick up the phone and you see the news and you pull your mind away from the presence, you go to God first. You go to the presence, the omnipresence, to the truth of life first, go within first and get quiet. And in that meditative space, start the prayer of recognizing who and what God is and who you are, that you are one with it and then speak what it is that’s on your heart, what is your desire, what’s your joy, what’s your passion, what’s your truth, right?
So we are going to go into prayer and then I’ll invite you to participate with practitioners. So let’s just take a dive in. We’ll put our feet on the floor and we’ll just take a moment to breathe. The lovely way for diving in is to just be present to our breath. So we’re just breathing in and I like to breathe from my crown chakra at the top of my head and breathe that breath down the back of my head, down the spine, all the way down and visualize that breath going down into the earth and getting my feet grounded into the earth with little roots going into the ground. I’m just visualizing that breath coming in from the top of my head, filling up the belly, fill the belly up and feel that belly rise with air and then letting it release and exhale it all out.
And again, filling up with the breath of life and grounding all the way down to the toes, feeling those little roots growing through the toes into the earth, breathing in, knowing that right here and right now as I breathe in this breath of God, I am breathing in the breath of life. I am breathing in the breath of truth. I am breathing in this breath that is always creating. It is creating my very life. It is creating your very life. It is creating each and every one of us here. It is the breath of life that is breathing through us and creating all of life.
It is the love, it is the joy, it is the power, it is the presence. It is manifesting as our very lives. I know that we are created in this image and likeness of love, of joy, of creativity. It is the truth of who we are. It’s living in us. It’s that juiciness that gives us those divine ideas. It is creating through us. So from this place of oneness with God, I say a word of blessing on each and every one of us that we are tapped in to this creative presence, that that which we desire, that which we are wanting to manifest in our lives, that the gifts and talents that have been given to us are oozing through us and out into the universe and coming back to us tenfold. That which we are looking for is looking for us, that which we are giving, we are receiving, that which is coming through us is that joy of creation.
That which we are seeking is seeking us. There is an avenue forward for our talents and our gifts and our divine ideas to come into fruition in the world, in a place, in a space that is the perfect timing and the perfect place to come to fruition for it to be seen, to be felt, to be heard, to be experienced. There is so much joy in creating. We open ourselves up in this moment. We hold those visions in our mind’s eye of what we are creating. We know that these truths are self-evident, that they are already happening. They’re already existing in the infinite mind. They are already available to us now.
There is nothing and no place that God is not. God is creating through in and as all things, including your heart’s desire. It is manifesting here and now as we speak these words, we hold this as truth. It brings a smile to our face. We feel it. The juiciness of life just feels so good to hold those visions. I say yes to this. I say yes to this. The law says yes to this. The universe says yes to this. We release these prayers into the actions of the law that always says yes. And we say, “Thank you, God. Thank you, God. Thank you, God. Thank you, universe. Thank you. Life first energy that is moving through all of this and manifesting all of this right here and right now with great joy, I say thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” And so it is.
Now I invite you to stay in that consciousness as we ask the practitioners to find their places around the room. I ask that you hold your vision in your mind and if you would like a practitioner to pray with you in a very short one minute miracle, feel free to get up and move to the practitioner. I’ll leave slide five on the screen, knowing that there must be a recognition that the power of the word operating as truth and reality of being can do all things.