This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
What We Believe About Wholeness – Rev. Aimee Daniels
DESCRIPTION
To embody the idea that all humanity is divinity and that we are one global family, we have to recognize the wholeness inherent in all people. When we leave anyone out of this equation, when we deny someone’s wholeness, we deny God. What would it mean to really believe we are all one global family and that we are each unique and divine?
SUMMARY
This talk explores the paradox of human wholeness: that we are simultaneously unique, unrepeatable expressions of the divine and inseparably part of a larger unified whole or “global family.” Drawing on Prentice Hemphill’s story of embodying Harriet Tubman to claim a new inner power, the speaker emphasizes that healing and transformation begin in vision and imagination, especially when we refuse to let inherited narratives about race, gender, class, or belonging limit what we believe is possible for ourselves and others. Integrating teachings from Ernest Holmes, Joel Goldsmith, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr., Desmond Tutu, and examples such as Nelson Mandela’s relationship with his prison guard, the message frames healing as the revelation of an always-present spiritual identity and shared humanity rather than the creation of something new. The talk culminates in a guided contemplative practice inviting participants to identify someone they struggle to see in their wholeness, affirm that this person is already “whole, perfect and complete,” extend love and forgiveness, and claim healing in the relationship, as a concrete way of living toward a vision of a world that works for everyone.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Aimee Daniels:
We are so fortunate to have our music team, aren’t we? Give him a little more love. I almost asked him to sing We Are the World. Remember We Are The World, but then I’m like, okay, you’re getting a little bit out there Amy. Okay, bear with me here a second. My computer needs just a little reboot here. Sometimes technology challenges happen. Has that ever happened to you at home? They just do what they want to do sometimes. Okay, let’s see. Okay. This is not working. Let’s try it again. Wing it. Wing it? You have a lot more confidence in me than I have in myself on winging it. I may wing it. Okay, let’s try this again.
We’re holding it on. You’re holding it for me. We’ll see if it decides to come back. So I’ll try to do this from memory. So we’re talking about wholeness today and this month we’ve been working with Prentice Hemphill’s book and she has a very, or actually they, excuse me. I just found out that even though she’s referred to as she, she actually goes by they. They go by they. And she has a pretty compelling story about her own life. And she was raised in an area when she was young. Her experience of school was that she, in her early school life, she was very accepted by her teacher and she would go to school and her teacher, she aprentice is black and their teacher was black also. And she would go to school and they felt very supportive. I’m sorry, I’m a little thrown off by the tech thing.
And then they went to a new school and they started to have a different experience. They didn’t experience the teacher as welcoming, even though the teacher was also black. And they felt it was a primarily white class and they felt very much like they didn’t belong there. And so they were given an assignment and the assignment was to do a talk and dress up as a historic individual from the United States. So they went into class and George Washington was there. A lot of the usual suspects, Abraham Lincoln, that you would expect.
But what happened was they decided to be… I’m totally having a brain cramp, you guys. I’m sorry about that. She decided to be… Okay, you know what? I’m going to pivot. We know. I’m going to pivot. Mine isn’t working probably. Could you bring me the thing? Thanks. Sorry, everybody. You’re rooting for me? Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. It’s funny how you can just have a brain cramp. Okay, let’s see. Let’s see if this works. Okay. Can we say praise God? Okay. Let’s start over again. Can we just do a reboot? Okay. So our question, our contemplative question today is what would it mean to really believe we’re all one global family and that we are each unique and divine at the same time? And that statement can feel like a contradiction. It actually contains a paradox. It contains two things that are true at the same time.
Not one truth, but true truths. One global family and then at the same time, each of us is unique and divine. So there’s an old Hasidic teaching that helps us to anchor this idea. And there was a teacher named Reb Simcha Bunim and he used to tell his students to carry two pieces of paper with them. And on one of them, in each pocket, on one of them, there was a line from the Talmud that said, “For my sake, the world was created.” And on the other one, a line from Genesis, what Abraham said before God, “I am but dust and ashes.” And the idea was not to pick a pocket. It was to reach into the pocket that was needed in each moment. So if you’re feeling small, if you’re feeling shamed, if you’re feeling like you don’t belong, you reach for the paper that says, “For my sake, the world was created.” You’re not an afterthought.
You are unrepeatable. You’re necessary. Who you bring to the world is important and different and unique than everybody else. But when you’re too focused on yourself, when you’re focused on your own importance, then you want to reach in the other pocket. I’m but dust and ashes. Because none of us are the center of anything or of everything and we belong to something larger than ourselves. And that’s the whole paradox. Unique and divine at the same time. Dust and world creating. So our question this morning actually asks us to carry both pieces of paper, not as a nice idea, but as a lived practice. Okay. Now I’m going back to the story that I totally blew before. It helps to have notes, everybody. So Prentice Hemphill says, “Without new visions, we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down.” So the story I started to tell, let’s rewind, was that she decided that she was going to be Harriet Tubman.
Why I couldn’t think of that name in the moment? I don’t know, but anyone of a certain age understands having a brain cramp. Maybe it happens to everyone. So they come into the room, they stand up in front of the room as Harriet Tubman and they say, “I freed people under your noses.” And the room was very quiet and it was almost an awkward silence. But what Prentice says is in that moment, standing there as Harriet Tubman, they found a new power within themselves and they realized that they were bigger than the story that had been given to them and they were bigger than the experience that they’ve been having. And so their insight was this, healing and transformation begin in the realm of vision and imagination. If you know anything about Harriet Tubman, she was a badass and she had a vision. She had a vision that people were going to be freed long before that was reality.
And so this became Hemphill’s inspiration. So believing we’re a global family and yet each of us unique and divine at the same time, it’s an active vision. It’s actually the global heart vision which CSL holds our community which we’re part of, a world that works for everyone. And it has to be imagined to be called in and we need to live toward it. And in our lingo, we need to know the truth about its possibility before it happens. We need to hold that in mind. Prentice Hempel also says we’re born into other people’s visions for ourselves and the world. None of us start with a blank canvas. Think about that. We’re all born into families, maybe the place we lived with that have a certain way of being and believing that have who counts, who doesn’t count, what’s good, what’s bad, all of that. And in Prentice’s case, it was their race.
It could be our gender. It could be anything else. It could be like we’re not cool enough or we’re not with the in group or our economic situation. We have lots of things in our lives that can really limit what we believe is possible. I know I was thinking for myself that where I grew up, I grew up in Bensonville, which is just west of O’Hare.
Pretty middle class, people didn’t have a ton of money or anything like that. And I think about what I though was possible for me when I was growing up. I did get to go to college, but I didn’t inhabit that like I could be anything. It was like I’m going to go to college and then I’m going to get a job. And what I’m trying to say is I didn’t have any vision. I didn’t have any vision. I had no idea. No one was talking to me about my strengths or anything like that. And I think life, as it does for all of us, if we’re open, we can become open to new possibilities or we have new experiences that show us like, oh, something else is possible. And I think I’m going to be honest, I think I had an inferiority complex until I got into this teaching.
And I think a lot of us have that because we’re told don’t be too big for our britches or anything like that. I had this friend and my mother was like, “That person’s a dreamer. What’s wrong with being a dreamer? What’s wrong with thinking something else is possible?” Nothing. And that’s why I really appreciate Prentice Hemphill because their role modeling, they didn’t let their life experience limit what was possible for them. And so we want to hold possibility and a bigger vision, not just for ourselves. Our wholeness does begin with us by the way. Do you ever struggle to see yourself in your own wholeness? I don’t know about anybody else, but sometimes what’s going on in my head, I’m like, “What the heck is that? Where did that come from? Why do I think that about myself?” So first we need to hold ourselves in our own wholeness and we can do that in our spiritual practice.
But then we want to make sure we’re not leaving anyone else out of the equation.
We want to hold a higher possibility for those around us also. We want to see them in their wholeness and not put a label on what’s possible for them. And that really requires us to be open. I don’t know about anyone else, but I grew up in a family and around people who were like, “Well, this person is this and that person is that. ” Why do we have to label people? It’s what we’re taught. It’s how we know we’re okay maybe. I don’t know why we do it, but we don’t want to deny someone else’s wholeness because then we’re not recognizing the divinity with them. And wholeness is not an exception. So let’s get grounded spiritually now. Let’s talk about earnest homes. I want to break down a little bit what Rob read to you. Each of us is part of a unified whole.
We are one with all others and also with a dimension of wholeness. I love that, that Ernest Holmes is saying God is a dimension of wholeness. The divine, whatever your word is, spirit is a dimension of wholeness. And we can never be separated from one another nor can we be separated from the whole. So lack or limitation of any kind is the result of a restricting belief we’ve accepted and does not reflect our true true nature. So we accepted that belief about ourselves. Someone else can hold a belief about you doesn’t mean you have to accept it. Have you ever had that experience where someone else has it? It doesn’t mean you have to accept it.
And sorry about that. When I pulled up my computer, I forgot to turn off this. We had a tree fall in our neighbor’s yard. He was just texting me. Sorry about that. They’re always falling down somewhere. Anyway, so lack or limitation of any kind is the result of a restricted belief. So the great good that is our true reality arises when we focus on the transcendent and the true and we recognize our unity with it. How do we do that? We do that through our spiritual practice. We do that by slowing down. We do that by remembering the truth about our own divinity that we partake of that which created us. And the truth is we don’t realize that in our humanness, right? If we try to double down and say, I’m going to know my wholeness and my humanness, something will happen to throw you off.
But we connect to the divine through our practice. So healing, seeing the wholeness in ourselves, seeing the wholeness in others, that goes beyond the world of form. And that higher part of ourselves that knows, if you slow down enough, you get an intuition. That higher part of ourselves, which knows that we connect to ourselves when we do our practice the place that we know that wholeness from. It’s not our human experience. We know the wholeness from our practice. And spiritually, wholeness is always true. So Ernest Holmes said healing is the discovery of the divinity within. Healing is the discovery of the divinity within. So let’s go with the metaphysics for a moment. So Ernest Holmes, who gave us the language to this community a hundred years ago, it’s been a hundred years since he wrote Science of Mine. He didn’t plan to start a church, but he taught us that each of us is an individualized center in the on consciousness of God.
We’re not a fragment. We’re not a copy. We’re just it. And we’re also unique within it and we’re not separate from the whole that it expresses. So a good analogy for this is a wave. So a single wave is unique. It’s got its own shape. It’s got its own motion. It’s unrepeatable. It may not ever have that form again.
And at the same time, there’s nothing in that wave that isn’t the ocean. And it doesn’t have to choose between being itself and being the ocean. It’s both at the same time. And that’s a big thing to get our head around for ourselves. We’re individualized, but we are that same spirit, that energy that is a part of everything. And that’s home’s answer to our paradox. It’s the same teaching as this two slips of paper. It’s really pointing to the same thing. We’re one family, but we’re not identical. We’re different. And life individualizes itself as each of us. So let’s talk about how we practice this. For me, Joel Goldsmith is one of the great new thought teachers. And he said, “What we do is to bring light to their spiritual identity.” And what he’s referring to there is what we do when we pray for others.
This is also true when you pray for yourself. You’re bringing light to your spiritual identity. And he taught that praying for another person doesn’t create or improve them. It reveals what’s always been true of them. And that’s the same thing when you’re praying for yourself. It reveals what’s always been true of you. And sometimes it seems to have disappeared, right? But it’s always been true of you. It’s never not true of you. So in the infinite way, which is what he called his teaching, healing is revealing. Healing is revealing.
And he was really clear also about where this gets tested. It’s not in the things or in the people that are easy in our life. It’s in the things are the people that are hard for us. And I think about Nelson Mandela. He spent years in prison on Robin Island and his guard was in Africans, that’s how you say it, named Christo Brand. And Christo Brand was 19 years old when he became a guard at the prison where Nelson Mandela was. And he was raised to see Nelson Mandela as an enemy of the state. That was the belief that they were living in at that time. And over the years, he began to do small kindnesses for Nelson Mandela. He would sneak bread in for him. He would let Nelson Mandela hold his baby when his wife visited. They were not supposed to allow them to do that.
And over time, they developed a kind of a quiet code between them of really like collaboration, if you want to think about it that way. And he said that when Mandela died, it was like he lost his father because they had such a special relationship, even though they were different. A guard that was trained to see him as an enemy and Mandela who probably also saw him as an enemy. And I share that because neither of them stopped being who they were.
Nelson was still a prisoner. The guard was still a guard. They were on opposite sides of this brutal system that they were part of at that time with apartheid. But the wholeness underneath it became recognized because they saw each other. And that’s what goldsmith means by revealing rather than creating. The wholeness didn’t wait for the system to change first. It was already present between the two of them. And I want you to think in your own life about anyone that you struggle to see in their wholeness. And I have a personal story about this. It’s something that happened recently. It’s someone in my family that I was estranged from. And I don’t know why. A lot of my family has started to move back here. It’s like all of a sudden we have more people again. We had almost no one for a while. And so we were having a gathering and I though, well, this person should be at the gathering.
It’s not right that they not be there because we’re estranged. So I thought, I’m just going to send a text.
They either come or they don’t come, but at least then I feel I’ve done the right thing. So I sent a text and I almost immediately heard from the person and long story short, they ended up coming. And they’ve had a very difficult past 18 months and I’m not going to get into any of the story about it, but I want to say I put them out of my heart. I’m just going to be honest. I did it. I put them out of my heart because I was hurt. And then it’s really so easy to make up stories about people when they’re not around and you’re not experiencing them, isn’t it? And so the person had really struggled. And I’ll be honest, it was so upsetting to me. I cried all the way home just to see what they had gone through. And I though, well, what do I do here?
Probably my tendency would be to hero them, to be honest, to not let them go through what they’re going through. But the truth is there’s nothing that I could actually do other than to see them in their wholeness. And I’ve been asking everybody for prayer about that. But I’m just sharing that because this is not just a distant idea that we can’t practice. It’s something that we can practice seeing the people around us in their wholeness. And maybe you have someone you’ve put out of your heart or maybe there’s someone you just don’t like. It doesn’t mean they have to be in your life, but you don’t have to other them. You can choose to see them in their wholeness, do your prayer work if they trigger you. I mean, we all have people who trigger us, right? Yeah. We all have people who trigger us because we’re called to see people in their wholeness to see with the eyes of the divine, the eyes of our higher self, not our human self who’s going to come up with every story we can make up, but our higher self, which doesn’t have a story other than to know that this person is inherently worthy and whatever they’re going through isn’t the truth of them.
And that’s true for us too. If any of you are going through anything, that’s not the truth of you either. You’re inherently whole. And we remember this through our practice.
So when I was prepping, I realized I talk about the same people a lot. And I think it’s because to me, these are some of the way showers of our lifetime. And I’m referring to Howard Thurman Desmond two to Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. It doesn’t escape my awareness that they’re all people, all of them are black. And the reason that I think that they speak to me is because they were in unimaginable situations, but they brought a spiritual solution. They did their work to raise above it. So I’m going to, I apologize if I talk about them too much. There are other people like this. Tiknat Han is one. I think the Dalai Lama is one. But people who have really encountered challenging things but brought it into their spiritual practice. So Howard Thurman teaches all men belong to each other and he who shuts himself away diminishes himself.
And Thurman was a philosopher. He spent his whole life and a religious person also searching across every tradition, every division for what he called common ground. And what he said that was, was not sameness, but the place beneath our differences where we’re already joined. So that’s spiritual truth. MLK said caught that we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. So he said this a little more plainly, what affects one affects all whether we see it or not. And in South Africa, Desmond Tutu gave this same truth a name. He called it Ubuntu. My humanity is bound up in yours for we can only be human together. And he sat in rooms with people who had been on the opposite side and killed and tortured people from his side and said, we must hear each other out and we must see each other in our wholeness or we can never move forward as a country.
So to me, they’re powerful examples to me of what we’re all called to and that’s why I speak of them.
So what would it mean to believe we’re really part of a global family? What would it mean to you to believe that? That each of us is unique and divine at the same time. It would mean that we hold the paradox. We have both slips of paper in our hand at the same time. And it would mean practicing what’s harder, the harder gaze, especially when it costs us something. Letting go of being right. Whatever it is, like really doing our work to say like, what causes me to view someone else not in their wholeness or from a place of separation? What in me is that, that I need to do my work on?
And it would mean that we would have to believe and trust the vision that it is possible for there to be a world that works for everyone and to continue to work toward that and to believe that the world will catch up. Our human self can’t believe that. Let’s just be honest about it. It’s hard for our human self to believe that in the spite of the evidence, but our spiritual self knows that what we really all are is eternal, right? And that we all partake. The earnest homestead of the name and nature of God. We all partake of that. We’re individualized parts of it, but we partake of that. So I want to take this into practice now just for a few minutes and I want you to settle into your seat and let your hands rest open if that’s comfortable. Just get yourself into a place where your body is physically comfortable.
And let’s all take a couple breaths together, just breathing in and breathing out and breathing in and breathing out. One more time. Just breathing in and breathing out.
Just let your energy settle in your body. And I just invite you to bring to mind one person in your life that you’d like to have a shift with or that you’d like to see in their wholeness that you don’t right now. And don’t pick an easy one, pick a challenging one. It’s also okay if that person’s you by the Anyway. And don’t try to fix them in your mind. Just see that person as if you’re seeing them for the very first time past whatever’s on the surface. Just see the soul or the spirit, the essence at the center of their being.
Just see that beneath whatever’s happening in the world of the form is the same wholeness we’ve been talking about all morning. There isn’t anything that you need to give them. They are already part of this wholeness. They already partake of the nature of spirit. Their wholeness existed before we all walked into the room together this morning. So see if you can simply recognize it. If you can simply see them in their wholeness, se the divine within them as if it is a face that you recognize. And I just invite you to just join me in knowing their wholeness. Right where they are, wholeness already exists.
They are one with this love, this grace, this goodness of spirit. And you can say it in your mind’s eye if you want. You can say the person’s name and say to yourself, I know that you are already whole, perfect and complete. In fact, I’m going to ask you to do it out loud with me. You can say their name or not, doesn’t matter. But say their name. I know. Say it with me. I know that you are already whole, perfect and complete. Let’s do it one more time with a little more conviction. I know that you are already whole, perfect and complete.
So send the healing energy of love to this person. See it as a light going out from you, from your spirit, out from your heart, out into the world, surrounding you and sending this light energy of love to that person. And know for them that in spite of any circumstances in the world of form, that they are one with the divine presence and power of spirit. That presence which is never an absence. That presence which is always there, whether we are aware of it or not. They are already whole, healed and healthy. And if you need to release anything yourself to know this truth for them, I invite you to just speak these words in your mind. I love you and I forgive you. Speak those words in your mind. I love you and I forgive you. And you can also say those words to yourself if you need to love and forgive yourself.
And say in your mind, I release any grievance or belief I have against you. I release any grievance or belief I have against you. I free you. I free myself. And I know and claim healing in our relationship now. Say it to yourself. I know and claim healing in our relationship now. We know that as we speak an intention, a word of prayer, that it shifts things. It shifts things. It shifts the energy. So in this moment, I just know that there’s only one life and that life is whole. And that life is every person in this room and every person that we’ve been holding in mind.
I recognize this wholeness in myself, unrepeatable and never separate from the whole. And I know that that is true of all of us. I recognize it in the strangers that we meet, the neighbors that we have, the ones we’ve held in mind just now, the ones I find hard to love. We’re all individualized centers of spirit. And I just know for each and every one of us that we have a deep and profound realization of that in our lives. Whatever has been brought forth for healing today, I know that spirit is moving right now and I know that that spirit is creating change for us and for the people we hold in mind. I just declare that all of us go out into the world in more openness, that we are more open to others, people who bug us, people who are different from us.
I just know that we choose to see them in their wholeness and we choose to see ourselves in our wholeness. And I know for all of us that we are transformed. And as we hold this intention of healing for the world, I know the world shifts. So I say yes to this knowing it is done and together we say, and so it is.