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On Faith John Wingfield |
Don’t hide love,
faith and goodnessOne day I was walking along Kapiolani Park and beheld a wonderful ritual. A mother and three children were playing hide-and-go-seek.
Mommy was sitting on the west side of a knoll populated by some trees with her hands cupped over her eyes, "no peeking."
One of the children was about 20 feet behind her, standing behind a tree that was about 6 inches in diameter. Another child was crouching behind the curvature of the knoll, on its north side. And the third child was doing hand stands in the grass about 20 feet in front of Mommy.
As I walked on by I thought of how that wonderful game we played in childhood is so much how we live our lives.
We play hide-and-go-seek with God, with our own good, with our health, with our love, with our peace. We hide our divinity deep within us (or we hide from it) and we forget the true essence of our happiness and well being. We close our eyes to the true purpose and sacred nature of every child of God each time we get caught up in being right or judging others, finding fault, condemning; in short, every time we say or do anything that separates us from one another.
How easily we forget, how often we forget. And we go about seeking our good, our happiness and our love out there in others, in the workplace, in the world, behind this tree and that knoll, when all along it has been held in a treasure chest within us.
It is there, it is here within us to find and give expression in our lives. Then it is up to us to express the sacred nature within us as love, faith, understanding, compassion, creativity and all kinds of goodness, joy, generosity and fun.
Someone asked me to explain the difference between the soul and the spirit. I want to share this answer with you because it applies to our life games of hide-and-go-seek.
Our soul is our individualized consciousness that holds the memory of our lives, past and present.
This is the identity of consciousness that grows and evolves from lifetime to lifetime and eventually can develop into a self-realized being. Our souls have memories and sometimes when we see one another we remember that we have been together before, the deja vu effect.
The soul remembers. The soul changes. In each lifetime the soul has certain lessons to learn and opportunities to grow.
The spirit within is the divine essence of life, of God that is the true life force individualized in us. It animates and lights us up.
Spirit within us does not necessarily have individualized consciousness. It is more like the light in every atom of our bodies and every other body, sentient and non-sentient. Our bodies change, our personalities change, our spirit does not change.
It is the Spirit of the Living God within us. It is God as the moving force individualized in us, the breath of life that gives rise to the creative intelligence and life. It is the source and substance of our intelligence, love, compassion, joy and well-being.
The soul can be wounded, and many carry their wounds for a long, long time through life. But it is the spirit, the holy and sacred power within us that can heal that wound. It is the Absolute Love of God that heals.
Persian mystic Rumi called it "Light." He wrote:
"In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art."
So, at the end of the day, when we used to love to play hide-and-go seek, as kids on those summer nights in my hometown, my soul would hide its eyes so spirit could go hide, and then the soul would get up and go in search of its spirit. This is the search for God. And when we find it we shout with joy, "Ali, Ali ox in free!"
Just so, when our soul finds the spirit within us, which is so close, yet sometimes seems light years away, then we find true freedom and happiness.
John Wingfield is the pastor of Unity Church of Hawaii.
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