Spiritual Sunshine

There was once a sage with the heart of God, who spoke to people across boundaries of religion and culture – his name was Christ. Jesus said that “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and also that, “I am able to do nothing of myself.” How do we reconcile these statements from Christ? Those that in one way equate him to God, in unity with Divinity known by many names, and others that denote his...

Easter is quite the celebratory and important time for those who celebrate it, yet some say that certain aspects of the Easter holiday were stolen from “pagans,” but what is paganism and what does it mean to steal a holiday? Traditions have borrowed from each other since time immemorial, and humans tend to celebrate at certain times of the year – often for good reason! Perhaps, the historically Ch...

We tend to think that we know what to do, what’s best, in any given situation – but what if I said that the mind that thinks it knows best and has so many opinions is diametrically opposed to your sense of peace and what many call the will of the Universe, or God’s will? When we have a sense of understanding it is a moment of relative peace and quietude, an appreciation for how things already are....

We often hear Jesus’ words, “Do this and you will live,” and take it as a future promise. But like many sages across traditions, he was speaking actively – that we can truly live today if we love our neighbours and love Divinity with everything we have. How do we love both God (or whatever you want to call the Creator Spirit) with everything, as well as love our neighbours? Sometimes it takes quit...

The are many traditions that encourage fasting as a form of spiritual practice, from the fasting rituals of Islam’s Ramadan to Yom Kippur within Judaism. Christianity has a funny one, in a way, in that within the fasting traditions of Lent, Christians are often encouraged to “choose” a fast instead of primarily fasting from food. Perhaps this has its roots in the various forms of temptation that C...

I can’t help but think it would be amazing if my dog did all the things that I told her to: “Ghost, sit and rest. Ghost, turn around. Ghost, do a backflip! Ghost, take yourself safely on a walk for the next 15 minutes.” Although, it sounds like it might be a bummer for her! But this is exactly what Christ and many wise sages indicate that they do in regard to God. Jesus said, “the Son can do nothi...

The sages are largely consistent with the assertion that we are love itself and so is God. Indeed, they describe how a separation between the love that we are and the love that God is doesn’t exist, although we may often feel or believe this way. Our tendency to get invested in our sense of having a limited form, a limited story, a limited way of thinking and observing of “outside things” keeps us...

Many of the awakened sages speak of coming into a naturalness of life as they uncover the Divinity at their core. They say that their behaviour starts being dictated by their greater self, the Universe, God, and no longer by the earthly reactions to pressure and conditioning that their old self, their ego, used to exhibit. This coming into the naturalness of life is often expressed as coming into...

There’s something about the holidays that speaks “joy.” Whatever we celebrate and for whatever reason, when it’s with family and friends (with treats and music) we can’t help but find some level of joy – at least, most of the time! In fact, it’s when we find a sense of oneness, setting aside our personal issues, as well as our political differences, historical arguments, and reactive judgments, th...

We each have different ideas about love. I think about loved ones, like my wife, when I think about love. I think about friends and my family. In these thoughts there’s a sense of unity with these other beings which I think is indistinguishable from love itself. This is perhaps why we can treat those we love not always so lovingly, because we treat ourselves not quite so lovingly. Why is that? Som...

The story of the first communion with Jesus and his disciples celebrating their Jewish Passover is essentially the story of the Lord telling us to remember him when we eat. Eating is something we do daily, but we can also define communion more narrowly, saying that communion only happens in community or at a church, with only bread and wine, etc., but I think broadening our idea of communion can b...

When we are close enough to someone that we feel a deep bond, we often call that love. When we feel a type of growing unity or a falling of barriers between ourselves and another, we often call that “falling in love.” We more fully appreciate someone’s beauty, and we find that we want to do more and more for them. The sages tell us that this love that we are feeling is in fact our fundamental natu...

The thing that helps us the most in any given moment may surprise us. How are we to know what may help? And what does that even mean? Ultimately, we’re all fundamentally looking for happiness. Whatever our goals, whatever our desires, at the root level these things are what we believe will help us to find some kind of happiness, or whatever’s closest to it in our experience. Unfortunately, our ide...

We as individuals would have nothing if it weren’t for many others. Without animals, insects, other people, the universe, God(dess), we would not be here. The reality of this is presented in every moment, whether through the road we drive on or the salad (pollinated by insects) that we’re eating! Of course, even our very body is an endless expression of this. We have much to be thankful for. And y...

Pets ground us in a way that we often underappreciate. What we call a pet, an animal or insect living in our home, is often a living embodiment of nature – something we miss in ourselves. Through our inculturation and indoctrination, our thoughts tend to wear well-worn paths, and much of our living and thinking becomes somewhat mechanicalistic (even if we don’t think so). To our mechanized mind, t...

Up until the James Webb telescope came online recently, most of us science-oriented people were pretty sure that the universe started about 14 billion years ago with the “Big Bang.” Now that we can see further out and further back into the universe, not only is our idea of the age of the universe scrapped (it’s clearly much older!), but we have to go back to the drawing board about how the univers...

Matthew 7:21-27 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ “There...

Enjoy this meditation to open to peace and joy.

I entirely relate to worrying about money. With debt, current obligations, and future ambitions, it can seem inescapable. That’s what makes Christ’s open and interreligious teachings so poignant for us, in a way he’s striking at a source of a lot of our frustrations, personal and interpersonal. Like the teachings of the Buddha, Krishna, and others, many of Christ’s teachings do this: strike at the...

Christ’s words about never making oaths or promises can be a bit unsettling. We should never make a promise? What about promises already made? That’s why I think it’s no accident that he couches these statements between telling men of the time that they shouldn’t divorce their wives, and a missive on staying non-violent. He wasn’t trying to encourage us to “do whatever we want,” but instead, to le...

Anger can sometimes be a natural, healthy reaction to something, just as fear, happiness, and other feelings can be. But when the tie of anger binds our hearts (often, without us knowing it), by our returning to it again and again – stoking the flames and identifying with the feeling toward any one situation, we don’t allow ourselves the peace of our inner transcend-essence and the natural joy tha...

A meditation on your inner light, the light of consciousness shining from Divinity.

“You are the light of the world.” These empowering words were spoken by Christ, not as an elitist view of his “Christian” followers, but as a description of the very nature of each of our spirits – especially when we allow ourselves to shine. Like the Buddha, Krishna, and the voices of God across the ages, Christ seemed to have made it his mission to point to the Great I Am inherent within each of...

On Father’s Day we celebrate our fathers and fatherly figures, celebrating how Divinity shines through the diverse expressions of masculinity and fatherhood, just as it shines through femininity and motherhood in infinite ways as the source of these qualities (as well as gender-neutral expressions). Indeed, the Christian Bible often describes how Christ used “Father” to denote God when speaking wi...