This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
Shift From Seeking To Beholding – Rev. Darrell Jones
DESCRIPTION
How much of our praying is actually asking for things to change, rather than asking to see differently? Join us to discover the reversal at the heart of Goldsmith’s teaching — that harmonious living is not produced by managing circumstances, but develops as a natural byproduct of spiritual consciousness.
The summary and transcription were auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
SUMMARY
Rev. Darrell Jones opened with a reflection on Rascal Flatts’ “Bless the Broken Road,” using it to explore themes of life’s meandering journey and how broken roads lead us to where we need to be. He shared his personal practice of giving to the Cityside community, explaining that his contributions ensure the spiritual home remains available for himself and others.
This month’s focus was on consciousness expansion through Joel Goldsmith’s “The Practice of the Presence,” emphasizing that spiritual growth comes not from changing circumstances but from increasing awareness of what already is—specifically, the divine consciousness that permeates all existence. Jones cited Goldsmith’s teaching that “the secret of harmonious living is the development of spiritual consciousness,” where fear and anxiety dissolve into fulfillment.
The sermon addressed the root of human suffering as the belief in separation—the idea that we are incomplete or need something external to be whole. Jones presented multiple scriptural traditions demonstrating God’s omnipresence: the Bhagavad Gita’s “God is all that is”, the Qur’an’s declaration that “wherever you might turn, there is the face of Allah”, Deuteronomy’s affirmation that “the Lord, he is God in heaven above and upon the earth beneath”, and the Tao Te Ching’s teaching that “the great Dao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right”.
The core invitation was to shift from seeking God to beholding God—from looking outward for divine presence to recognizing it as the inherent truth of one’s own being. Jones adapted the “social discipline window” into a “God relational window,” explaining that authentic spirituality involves doing *with* God rather than waiting *for* God, being controlled *by* God, or being neglected *by* God. He concluded with a communal declaration: “Behold, here is God”—a recognition that each moment contains a unique, unrepeatable expression of the divine.
TRANSCRIPTION
Rev. Darrell Jones:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, city side. Since that was a country song, I’m going to say, how are y’all doing? Does anyone know that song by Rascal Flats? Saying that many, many a time at wedding receptions. God bless the broken road that led me straight to you. Kind of a romantic, sweet thing thinking about the history of our lives that meander, go left and right, up and down. Sometimes it seems like there’s no road, but then you find your way to someone. And someone may feel like, well, I don’t have connection to that because I don’t have a partner in my life. This month in my personal ministry, Soljib, we’ve been exploring this idea of loneliness, this feeling of separation, this feeling of isolation.
Don’t want to break stuff. And one of the things that I know to be true, without a doubt, is that we are oftentimes alone physically, but we are always with something. And I believe that the broken road of our lives are not to take us down some dark path, but they are always taking us to where we exactly should be in the moment. I’m so grateful that your broken road, whatever that may be, brought you here today. For those of you who are on the road of the internet, good morning to you all. As always, an invitation not to multitask, but to let yourself be present to today’s word. I am so excited. Okay, wait, before I do that, Reverend Amy didn’t ask me to testify, but I felt called in meditation this morning to tell you why I give to this community. I’m not here every Sunday.
I can’t be here every Sunday, but I want it to always be here. I want it to always be here so I can show up for it. I know that it’s a beacon and it’s a necessary and needed thing, not only in the world, but in particular in Chicago. So when I give to Cityside, I’m ensuring in some way, shape or form that it will remain. So take that for what it’s worth. I hope that feeds your heart. So this month, the focus is expansion of consciousness.
Now, consciousness is an interesting word. Can you expand consciousness? Consciousness just is. God just is. Spirit just is. But what we’re going to explore today in this idea of the shift of seeking to beholding is that it’s not about expanding and making more of anything, but it’s increasing our awareness of what is. So we increase our awareness of the consciousness of the divine. We don’t create harmonious living by changing the circumstances in our life. Now, it may feel better sometimes if you’re wearing a size of pants that are comfortable as opposed to too small. That’s a good circumstance. I put on some pants the other day and I was like, “Whoa, these need to leave my closet. I don’t know why they’re still in here.” That is a circumstance that does not make me feel good. However, I can still put them on and have a relationship with that discomfort.
It is not the circumstances of our life that we manage that make things different. It is our consciousness, our awareness that we manage. And this month, we’re exploring this through the ideas and the words of Joel Goldsmith. This is one of the cornerstone. If there were literally five books that I could only have in my library, this would be one of them. Practice the presence. Practicing the presence was something that shifted my relationship with what God is, but most importantly, it shifted my relationship with life and most importantly with myself. So if you’ve been looking for some inspiration, join us this month. Get the book. It’s very, very small, but size doesn’t matter in this case. It is packed full with depth.
So practice the presence. The title of the book says it all, practicing the presence. It doesn’t say that the presence is over here. It doesn’t say that the presence is this one particular person or that the presence only exists in the temple or some sacred holy place. It invites the reader to practice the presence wherever you find yourself, whether at work, whether at home, in solitude or in community. Practicing the presence is the way to know the divine. We aren’t practicing to get ready for some magical day down the road. We aren’t practicing for some later performance where we get judged by a jury to see if we get into this place called heaven.
Rather, we practice the presence of the living spirit right where we are because the living spirit is all that is. We practice being in the presence of spirit because that is all that there is. Now, Jason, I’m going to give you a lot to think about today, so get ready. Our first slide in our first reading, thank you Donna, for sharing that with us. The secret of harmonious living is the development of spiritual consciousness. In that consciousness, fear and anxiety disappear and life becomes meaningful with fulfillment as its keynote. Most of our fear, our anxiety, our anger, our sadness, depression, frustration, it all stems from the idea of separation.
I’ll see you all next week. This idea that we aren’t enough, that we need to be someone else other than who we are, or that we need someone else in our life other than who’s here to complete us as if you are so complete. You are so perfect just as you are. There is no… The song one, I used this in a retreat a few weeks ago with another community and it says seven billion. In terms of the growth of the planet, it’s now over eight billion. And that song was just written in the past decade.
I don’t know if anyone trips out on this. I’ve been embracing more and more the mystic that is within me. Do you get, do you get it? There is no one else on the planet like you and there never will be. That is amazing and we need that. You don’t need another me. We don’t need another anyone else. We need you to be you to make this place a better place, a better world. But this idea that we aren’t enough or that our life isn’t enough or that we can’t handle life as it is, this is what separates us from ourself. Do you get that? We disconnect from this thing. This is the only place where we can actually know God. This is the only life that you are going to live, but yet we tell ourselves there’s something else that we need to do, be, have, or become in order to experience it.
You got it all. You literally have all the biology, the chemistry, the mentality, the spirituality that you need to be you.
So what are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? So what? Your road is broken. My road is, there’s shrapnel all over the back history of my road, but thank God it brought me to this point of remembering this truth. I want you to understand this. To believe that you are separate, it is a consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t look a certain way. Consciousness is just a mindset. It’s a belief system. It’s an idea. It’s a mind. It’s an expression. This is a consciousness, but it’s not based in a spiritual consciousness. This is a consciousness of humanity, of duality, of separation, right and wrong, good and evil. No judgment, just calling it out for what it is.
And he says that the secret to harmonious living is the development of a spiritual consciousness. That’s why we’re here. That’s the secret, but it’s not a secret. People have been talking about this for millennia. The antidote to our human consciousness, not that it needs to have to be extracted, not that it needs to be crushed or killed or put away, but something that allows us to have a partnership with this default tendency to be human. The last time I woke up, I keep defaulting to being a human every single day. For the past 53 years, I wake up, I’m like, “Yep, human again. Here I am.” But with that, I bring this developed and developing spiritual consciousness. If we could have our second slide, the antidote, the answer, the balance to this, he says, “Take spiritual scriptural passages which embody spiritual principles and live with them.” I’m going to emphasize the word with because we’re coming to that at the end.
“Hold them up as a banner in the presence of any and every form of discord until such time as these principles become automatic.
“The principles become automatic. He didn’t say until the circumstances change. This is dwelling in the secret place of the most high, living, moving and having our being continuously in the consciousness of God, not just for a few minutes while reading a book or listening to a lecture, but every day, minute and second. So what scripture is he talking about? Is there a single scripture that should be read? And this is where we get into a problem in our humanity because we say that there’s only one thing happening, but we think there’s a singular expression of it.
So I’m going to give you multiple expressions, multiple scriptures, because things only resonate with certain people. Anyone ever read the Bhagavagita before?This comes from a statement of Krishna. If you’re not familiar with this, this is a part of one of the scriptural holy texts found in Hinduism which means God is all that is. Maybe Hinduism doesn’t get you going, doesn’t get your blood pumping. Let’s go to Islam, to the Quran. And to Allah belongs the east and the west, so wherever you might turn, there is the face of Allah. And in case the word Allah pushes anyone’s buttons, this has nothing to do with Islam. It is simply a word for God, is the Arabic word for God. And to God belongs the east and the west, so wherever you might turn, there is the face of God. God is all that there is. I’m looking, wait, West.
I’m looking east. “What’s up God? What’s going on? I’m going to look to the south. “What’s up God? What’s going on? Everywhere. It goes on in the Quran to say,” He is the first and the last, the antecedent and the intimate, and he is of all things knowing.
“One more. “And we are closer to him.” And I found this interesting, there’s interpretations as things go through different languages and we are closer to God than God’s jugular vein. I first read this long time ago thinking that God is closer to me than mine. We are closer to God than his own or its own jugular vein. That’s damn close. If that doesn’t work for you, let’s go to Judaism in Deuteronomy. “Know therefore this day and consider it in thine heart that the Lord, he is God in heaven above and upon the earth beneath.” There is no one else.
Are you getting it folks? In case you haven’t, I got a couple more for you. In Isaiah, because we need to hear this, people say the third time’s a charm. No, we need to hear things seven plus times today. Take that into the idea of your spiritual practice. You don’t do it once. You don’t do it twice. You don’t do it three times. What does it say in terms of forgiveness? 70 times. That’s a lot. That was before we had the internet that that was written. The attention span of the individual at that time. Think about your attention span now. 70 times seven, maybe we should times that by another 700. Just keep on saying it. So I’m going to keep saying it. Here we go. Isaiah, I am the Lord and there is no other. Besides me, there is no God. I form the light and create darkness.
I make peace and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things. Now, I could go on a total sidebar here, but we don’t have time for it because people are always like, how can God make evil things happen? God doesn’t make evil things happen. God created the life and the earth and we choose how to be with it. The evil arises from us and our idea of what? Separation. It all comes back to that.
For those who grew up in the Christian tradition and it may resound with you a little bit more, we go to what’s considered the New Testament in Christianity, Acts, a letter from Paul to the Athenians saying, “For in him we live and move and have our being.” Has anyone ever heard that? Everyone ever said that before? In God, we live, we move, hey, and we have our beingness. In one Corinthians, God may be all in all. Mic drop. My personal favorite, what sounds and reverberates with me is I love nature. So I find myself drawn to Taoism. If you know the word Tao, it means the nature of life. I like to think of it as the nature of God. And in the 34th chapter of the Tao, it says, “The great Dao,” we could say the great God, “flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right.” The 10,000 things depend upon it.
It holds nothing back. Holds nothing back.
If we feel like lack or limitation is in our life, if we were to stop before doing anything from that space of lack and limitation and remember or read this word out loud from the Tao, is anyone experiencing what feels like lack or limitation in their life right now? I am. I’m going to put my hand up. Lack or limitation means that I am separate from something that I think I need or want to get. The great God flows everywhere though, and it withholds itself from nothing. That just makes me take a deeper breath. It gives me some space. So this is what Joel Goldsmith is talking about. When he says, “Take scriptural passages which embody spiritual principles and live with them.” He doesn’t say memorize them so you can spew them off. I can’t memorize all those things, but I take the ones that resonate with me and as I face life as it is, I live with those words and just create that space in my heart to breathe so I can be with that situation, whether it’s something I like, something I don’t like, something I understand, something I don’t understand.
It gives me space to be with it.
Or we could take the words from Acts. Which one was I going to take here? Yes. So if we’re trying to figure out what should I do? Is this right or wrong? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? We take these words for in him we live, move and have our being. That takes us out of that duality. Is this right or wrong? Is this good or bad? We live and move and have our being in God. So can we move into relationship with whatever we don’t understand or know to be right or wrong, knowing that we are developing our consciousness, our awareness that God is in the midst of whatever it is that’s happening?
If we could have our third slide, Goldsmith goes on to say, “When our attention has shifted from the outer to the inner, we can take the next step taught by every great master, seek me within. Seek, knock, if necessary, plead, but always within.” The reason we turn within, the reason we practice anything and everything on the spiritual journey that brings our attention away from the world of form is not to deny the form, to negate it, to make it insignificant or meaningless. Our form, our bodies, our body of affairs are so significant and meaningful. However, we can quickly lose sight that our life is not meaningful because of the things and the people that are in it. Our life is simply meaningful because it is part of the allness of God. That’s it. You were born, bam, meaning, significance, that’s all that was required.
But we place it on something outside of us and think because they’re here, because it is there, because my bank account looks this way, because I have this body, because I don’t have this body. We put everything out on the external form. And I’m not saying don’t pay attention to that, but recognize that your meaning and significance is. God is. Bring that meaning to what’s there. But we forget, we get tricked. I don’t think I’ve ever used this word before, but I wrote it down. We get hoodwinked. We get convinced. We get marketed to. Come on now. We get marketed to, and we get told stories everywhere in the outer water form that our good, our greatness dwells somewhere else other than where we are. And we get sucked away from the inherent goodness of God that we were born all into.
This is happening second after second after second after second after second after second after second. I need to get this. I need to get that. I love that thing and I hate that thing at the same time. It’s such a great service, but we don’t have a good relationship with it. We must have a spiritual consciousness with everything. So when our attention gets shifted away from some of the shiny BS out there, the neon glitz and glam, and we practice the presence right here where we are, this is why we go on retreats. This is why I come here on Sunday. This is why I pray. This is why I read books. This is why I get and give spiritual coaching. This is why we vision. This is why we journal. This is why we meditate. This is why we treat. We stop seeking and behold, it’s such a new word that I’m going to bring into my life.
We behold the presence in the moment we are in however we can.
Goldsmith goes on to say, if we could have the next slide, “Through the letter of truth, we learn to stop that aimless searching for God, that fruitless praying to a far off God for something, that senseless wishing and hoping that some form of worship will be sufficiently pleasing to God to influence God in our behalf.” And we come into a recognition not only that there is a God, but that God is the inner self of our own being, a God not separate and apart from us to be worshiped from far off, but actually a God closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet.
This phrase, the letter of truth, Goldsmith uses it a lot and I’ve heard it used in other things and I just did a little bit of research around it. And one of the best ways that kind of spoke to my heart was found out of Judaism. So the Hebrew, the word for truth is Emet. And nerd out with me for a minute. You ready? Okay. So Emet uses the first Alef, the middle, mem, and the final word of the alphabet Tav. This structure signifies that truth, the word truth is total, complete and spans from the beginning to the end of the alphabet with no gaps. To metaphysically think about that, the truth that God is all that there is, it spans from the beginning to the end of time with no gaps. I hear people say, “Well, God, where is God today? God is not here.” No, there’s no condition that makes God more present other than the fact that you are breathing.
The span of God, the letter of truth is from the beginning to the end, but I don’t know where the end is. It’s beyond my life. So it has to be in the totality of this existence. Nothing makes this truer than our acceptance and practice. Nothing. That is why Goldsmith says, “Practice the presence.” Are you willing to accept that today? In your personal experience, in the experience of the entire planet, are you willing to take responsibility that the only thing happening is God? That’s your responsibility to own no one else’s. Are you willing to accept that challenge? You can’t put it on me. You can’t put it on Reverend Amy. You can’t put it on any other clergy. You can’t put it on any religion. You can’t put it on any government. You can’t put it on any partner, spouse, friend, child, auntie cousin, Cece, whomever.
It is your responsibility to say right here where I stand and everything that I see is the divine making itself known. I may not understand it, but I’m going to take ownership on trying to figure it out. I’m going to practice the presence and say that right here, right now, God is. If you are willing, you have claimed and owned the powerful practice of beholding instead of seeking. Beholding instead of seeking for God. You have committed your life to behold God, period, regardless of circumstance. I’ve got one more nerd moment before we pray. Could I have the final slide, please? Is anyone familiar with the social discipline window?
So this makes me want to just shake for a minute. Okay. This is where I’m giving you a lot to think about, bro. The social discipline window, I am renaming the God relational window. I love a framework. It just helps things move along. So in the world of restorative practices and restorative justice, the social discipline window is something that is invited to be looked into. I’ve been doing a lot of this work in the educational space. And if you think about our relationship with our children in a classroom, there are teachers that do too, right? So on the left side here, there’s a lot of control and limits. This can come across as authoritarian and stigmatizing, shaming.
An adult says to a child, “You need to do this this way. Do it right. Do it now. If you don’t, you are bad.” Then there’s this other side where there’s a lot of support and very permissive. You’ve probably had those teachers. I had a lot of them growing up and they did not help me at all, right? They’re like, “Oh, you’ll read it one day.” I always tell the story of I was in honors English and I didn’t read the book that I was supposed to do a report on. I didn’t turn in a report and I still got the highest grade you could get in the class. And my mother and father had a meeting with the teacher and she said, “Oh, I know he’ll read it.” I still haven’t read beyond chapter six. You know what book it was? The Grapes of Wrath.
There’s a lot of chapters. Not when you’re 14.
That book was boring when I was 14. There was no way I was going to read it. Anyway, she was very, very permissive. She’s like, “Oh yeah.” And I would actually say she was probably in a not space. She really didn’t care. She was very passive. However, this idea of doing with something, to be with the word of God, to be with scriptural passage, this is restorative. We’re not separate. We’re doing with life. And it goes both ways, not just us with God, but to believe this about God with us, God is here to do something with us, not to us, not for us or neglect us, but to be a divine partner.
This is a model. If you think about it for a minute, if you are experiencing friction in your life, if you are experiencing loneliness or isolation, anger, frustration, sadness, disappointment, I guarantee you are not in the red zone. You are probably in the life is happening to me, or I’m just disengaged and God’s not doing anything, or you’re waiting for God to do something for you as opposed to doing something with God. The relational window for God, the perfect hot sweet spot is to be with God and to say, “God, be with me. I don’t know what to do here, but I know God may be all in all, so show, reveal, open me up.” When we accept and live our life with God, as we shift away from seeking God somewhere, it restores us to the truth that we are God and God is with us.
And we can declare it. Behold, here is God. Take a deep breath in. As you exhale, hands to your heart.
What I recognize and what I behold in this moment is right here is the unique expression of the divine at 11:22 on October 4th, 2026, that has never happened and will never, ever happen again. You in this room with these people, with this breath, with this word, with the thoughts in your mind, with the conditions of the world, behold that the divine, God, spirit, light, wisdom, intelligence, health, wholeness, peace, perfection, forgiveness, compassion, and more, it’s right here. It is seeking to emerge through you. And I’m so grateful. I’m so grateful for this emergence. I’m so grateful to behold the divine, the living spirit as my life and your life now, as the life of this community known as Cityside, as this planet known as Earth, as this country known as the United States of America, as this city known as Chicago. All of it, I behold the divine.
And any idea that may pull me away, any seduction into the idea that I’m separate from this good, that I cannot behold the divine. I know there’s something greater than that. It is my responsibility and choice to behold, to turn to some letter of truth. The great God flows everywhere and withholds nothing. So may we embrace, may we see, may we witness, may we behold the divine as our living, not just today, but heretofore. Deep breath in, and so it is.