Upper Room Liturgy - September 10, 2017

Deb Trees and David DeBonis led the Upper Room Community's Eucharistic liturgy with the theme: By loving each other and ourselves as God has loved us and we can bring healing to each other. 

This is Deb's Homily Starter based on the readings below:

A week and a half ago, Louise Hay crossed over. She was over 90 years old, and a pioneer in what she called “mirror work”. This was only one of many gifts and accomplishments in her life.

Mirror work is the act of looking into your own eyes and saying wonderful things to you, including “I love you”. As anyone knows who has tried it from our particular group of human cultures, this can seem almost false.

The simple act is difficult to do in a culture steeped in original sin.

Jesus knew that. The more we watch Jesus walking in his ministry, the more we see the psychic washing away of hate, even of self. We can experience the presence of love at our core. Whether we call it hate, sin, or dysfunction, it is not the truth.

And as Jesus has told us and we all know in our hearts: “The truth, Love, will set you free!”

What did you hear? What will you do?  What will it cost you??            

First Reading

So, I can see there is a wound-a painful event-well, a number of events, say hundreds of events-that could not be processed. Healing was not available, so the hurt was repressed in my body, and my body-mind created an armor to shield all these tucked away aches. The shield gets built to protect from this raw pain. This is sometimes called ego, and is the source of all the repression, resistance, and avoidance. It’s on the firing line all the time, but it’s really just a protective mechanism but a protection you don’t really need. My shield around this huge rage sounds like this: “I hate you, I hate this, I hate everyone.”

When I was a child and a lot of violence was going down, I used to scream “I hate you.” My system made these thoughts to armor from the excruciating pain tucked away in my little body. I had a violent history, lots of memory of trauma and crazy events. So, my amazing system created an enemy, an enemy to save me from pain that could not be processed.  My system set up: “I hate these people; I hate them so much.” That’s the core story from the pain, from the residual wounds. That is the sound of the armor that was set up to protect me from the wound.

And I can bow to that shield and I can profoundly bow to the pain; I can bring immense compassion and love to all of this. And eventually, it’s that love and compassion that will crack the armor and begin to heal and transform the pain.

These are the inspired words of Kiran from her book Tools for Sanity.

Second Reading

Owe no debt to anyone-except the debt that binds us to love one another. If you love your neighbor, you have fulfilled the Law. The commandments-no committing adultery, no killing, no stealing, no coveting, and all of the others- are all summed up in this one: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love never wrongs anyone-hence love is the fulfillment of the Law.

These are the inspirited words from Romans 13: 8-10 and this community responds by saying AMEN.