The Global Conversation

Tag: catholic

  • The ONE

    When I was young and in Catholic school I had a teacher state many times over that the Bible tells us the world will end when we all are of ‘ONE’ mind. She usually stated this after some kind of squabble or upset, and then she would add, so I guess the world is not ending today. As a child I pondered those words often.

    How could it ever be that all of humankind be of ONE mind? We are all so different, I used to think. But lately I have gained a new perspective on the subject. You see, to this day I still ponder those words. I have been on an inward journey for many years to get as close to the source of creation as humanly possible. God is the term I use. This quest has brought me many surprises along with inner peace and joy.

    Meditation has changed my perception of who we are as a race. Because of my own life experience, I know firsthand that there is a difference between knowledge and experience. We can gain knowledge through education, but it is our individual experience that gives us full understanding. We do not know what we don’t know until we finally do know and understand.

    Here is some insight I have gained. There is only ONE mind. The Divine Mind, or the Divine Matrix, as some say. Think of each human as a single cell of a one body. Each cell (human person) is part of the whole body, and each human cell is here to experience different pieces of the life puzzle to gain and fully understand all the possibilities. Imagine a baby growing in a mother’s womb. So many various organs growing at the same time until the brain functions take over and all organs are connected and begin to function as one human body. Each cell is unique and whole but all cells are connected by the ONE body. The cells function individually yet at the same time are functioning as ONE. Once all cells become aware of the ONENESS, the baby is ready to leave the womb.

    Mankind has grown to the point where many people now realize we are all connected. Our subconscious minds are one and the same. We are at a point where we have the knowledge and experience to move forward as One Being, we only need the awareness to realize we are all God because there is nothing that exists that is outside of God. We are ready to be born as One Being. The time has come to help each other. We have the understanding now and the strong need to help the weak cells. If one person suffers, the rest of us cannot live in peace. We can only evolve together as One Being, One mind, One body. United, we survive.

    Live Happy! Happiness comes from being who you are and showing your true colors. Your light is needed to guide the others. We are in this together, and only together will our planet, our world move on. We are the ONE.

    Terri(Terri Lynn is an expert at choosing happiness and using the Divine navigation system which she shares in her first book Journey to my Soul.  Currently, Terri is Sales Manager at Otto’s BMW in West Chester, Pa. where she motivates and coaches the sales team. Her intention is to share with others the importance of putting happiness first. She shares her thoughts on her website – Terri Lynn’s Happy Talk.  Terri resides in Newtown Square, Pa.)

    (If you would like to contribute an article you have authored to the Guest Column, please submit it to our Managing Editor, Lisa McCormack, for possible publication in this space. Not all submissions can be published, due to the number of submissions and sometimes because of other content considerations, but all are encouraged. Send submissions to Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com. Please label the topic: “Guest Column.”)

  • Want to experience God’s love?
    Give up pizza and chocolate

    I never really fully understood the purpose of “giving up” something for Lent.  As a child, growing up in the Catholic religion, I just simply did it because I was told I was supposed to do it, never really grasping the intent of this long-held ritual.  However, I guess in some way, from the perspective of a child, I approached it as a personal challenge just to see if I could do it, but always wondering why God would want me to give up pizza or chocolate, which were my two favorite “things” as a young child; and, therefore, the two things that I must forgo during Lent.  Because, as we all know, in order to truly be in God’s favor, you must give up something that you love, some object or experience that would cause you to suffer in the absence of that particular thing.  And as a very small child, pizza and chocolate had grown to be my “loves” in the universe of my short and tender years.

    Fast-forward now 40 years later, while I understand the history behind the Lenten season, I still remain unclear as to the purpose of giving up “something you love” in the 40 days that fall between Ash Wednesday and Easter…or at ANY time.  At this point in my life, it has become abundantly clear to me that I experience more joy, more peace, and more of a knowing Who I Really Am when I align myself with that which is serving me and to change what is not.  Why would God desire, or actually command, me to remove experiences from my life that bring me joy?  Must the path to God be traveled on a road of suffering?  Why have we imagined a God who manipulates love in such a way?

    Lent is not the only example of how we, as a society, have bought into an idea of forgoing and suffering as a path to The Creator.  There are Yogis who live in the Himalayan Mountains who devote their existence to a life of renunciation, abandoning material comforts and even food in their pursuit of spiritual enlightenment.  It is commonly known that Catholic priests refrain from not only sex, but they resist even entering into a romantic relationship with another based on a belief that it will allow them to better serve and please God.  People who observe the Jewish and Seventh Day Adventist faiths abstain from eating pork and shellfish because of beliefs they hold about what God wants. Those who belong to the Jehovah Witness faith will not celebrate birthdays, nor will they even receive a blood transfusion in medical emergencies, because of beliefs they hold about what God wants.  Many women in the Pentecostal faith will not cut their hair because of beliefs they hold about what God wants….just to name a few.

    Now, an idea that I could more readily embrace would be engaging in 40 days of placing intention on the things that foster our ability to realize and actually experience our Highest Selves and our ever-present connection with God.  I can remember no time in my life where the deprivation of something I love has led to an experience of knowing God.  I can, however, recite numerous occasions where allowing the things I love to flow into my life abundantly most certainly and vividly created a deeper understanding and knowing of Who I Am and what my relationship with God is.

    This idea of suffering has long been misunderstood and misused as a way to “win” or “earn” God’s love.  We are pained to see the visible suffering in the world around us, but we are quick to voluntarily suffer in an effort to seek approval and acceptance from the one source of unconditional love that we actually have.  Why do so few embrace an idea that we do not have to do anything to receive God’s love?  Is that thought too frightening?  Is that concept too easy?  Is that idea too risky?  Would we place that expectation on our own children in order that they may experience our love?

    After all, we are making it all up here, aren’t we?

    Why are we making it up in a way that feels so hard?

    (Lisa McCormack is the Managing Editor & Administrator of The Global Conversation.  She is also a member of the Spiritual Helper team at www.ChangingChange.net, a website offering emotional and spiritual support. To connect with Lisa, please e-mail her at Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com.)

  • Are we bigger than our bodies?

    Pope Benedict XVI said, no, we are not in his annual Christmas message to the world, one of his most important speeches of the year, where he once again proclaimed that same-sex marriage is destroying “the essence of humanity.”

    “People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being,” he said at the Vatican. “They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.”

    He further went on to say, “When freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God.”

    Could it be, as Pope Benedict suggests, that life truly is a shallow existence of “what you get is what you get”?

    What would the Pope tell a child born a hermaphrodite, a condition in which someone is born with both female and male sex organs – a body given to him by God, by the way? Too bad? You deserve no one? Or perhaps the contrary: “Lucky you, you can have a relationship with whoever you want”?

    And what about the Pope himself who has been “defined” by God as a male, given a penis, and yet chooses not to fall in line with that “identity” and chooses not to express romantic love to a female and chooses not to enter into intimate relationships? According to his own definition, is he not “denying” his own “nature” that God intended for him to share in intimacy with a woman and to reproduce? Is he not participating in his own freedom and creativity in an effort to self-define who he is and what he believes about why he is here?

    Aren’t we ALL doing that very same thing?

    Why are we being told to feel bound to our physicality when it comes to S-E-X, but celebrated when we demonstrate our capacity for greatness beyond our bodies in other ways?

    My friend, Mark, whose body is partially paralyzed and riddled with unrelenting pain – again, the body given to him by God — climbed 108 floors of the Sears Tower in Chicago…and plans to do it again this year. I imagine it would be quite difficult to find anyone who would say Mark has “stripped himself of his dignity” by creating a new definition of himself that expanded far beyond his physicality.

    But again, I get it. We are talking about the unspeakable, the shameful, the only-talked-about-in-a-whisper topic of S-E-X.

    However, the Pope’s declaration of “Gay marriage, like abortion and euthanasia, is a threat to world peace” appears to be falling upon deaf ears as the Constitutional Court in largely Roman Catholic Spain upheld the law legalizing gay marriage last month, the British government announced it will introduce a bill next year legalizing gay marriage, and in France, President Francois Hollande has said he would enact his “Marriage for Everyone” plan within a year of taking office last May.

    These are the visionaries, the writers of our New Cultural Story, the mold-shatterers and rule-breakers who do not believe in a God that makes mistakes. They are not buying into the twisted idea that God would create something so extraordinary and then make it wrong.

    What these New Cultural Story global authors do believe in is Love. They do not believe same-sex marriage is destroying the essence of humanity, but rather that it IS the essence of humanity. They believe that love transcends everything and is denied to no one, that Love that has no rules and is certainly not reserved for only a select few to be experienced in a select way, and that the biggest continuing threat to world peace is not found, as Pope Benedict suggested, within the loving union of a same-sex partnership, but rather in a belief system that embraces and promotes a vengeful and judgmental God.

    (Lisa McCormack is the Managing Editor & Administrator of The Global Conversation. She is also a member of the Spiritual Helper team atwww.ChangingChange.net, a website offering emotional and spiritual support. To connect with Lisa, please e-mail her at Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com.)

  • Polio, Sex, and a Priest

    At first glance, seeing the words “polio,” “sex,” and “priest” together in a sentence suggests the beginning of what promises to be a dreadfully distasteful joke.  But I am here to tell you that the most-recent film I had the truest pleasure of viewing, The Sessions, while it is brimming with playful humor and wit, is no joke.

    This daring movie, which takes place in 1988, is based on the true life story of Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes), a man who spends his nights entombed in an iron lung and moves through his days being wheeled around on a gurney by one of his caretakers, all as a result of contracting polio at the tender age of seven years old, a debilitating disease which eventually left him unable to use all but three muscles in his body:  one muscle in his right foot, one muscle in his neck, and one muscle in his jaw.  Thanks to the efforts of a loving and devoted family, who chose to care for Mark at home instead of institutionalizing their beloved polio-stricken son, Mark soared past the grim 18-month life-expectancy statistics at the time and lived to be 49 years old.

    Mark’s spirit far surpassed the limitations of his frail body, earning him a graduate degree from UC Berkeley and a successful career as a celebrated poet and respected journalist, yet his Soul and his Body and his Mind yearned for the one thing that life had not given him:  an intimate sexual experience with a woman.  Even though Mark’s disease had weakened his muscles to the point where he had very little, if any, mobility or muscle coordination, he was still able to experience sensation in his twisted and fragile body, and he longed for the sensual touch of a woman, the passion of a physical connection, and the sensation of an orgasm that wasn’t simply a random, unprovoked, meaningless occurrence.

    Through his research into sexuality and the disabled, Mark was introduced to the idea of hiring a sexual surrogate to assist him with his first sexual experience.  Contemplating and internally struggling with the decision of whether or not to pursue this unusual path, a choice that would run counter to his Catholic upbringing, Mark sought the counsel of Fr. Brendan (William H. Macy), a priest in his church, who suddenly and unexpectedly found himself invited to take a closer look at his own truth, to question his own beliefs, and to consider the possibility of changing his own perspective.  While this emotionally tortured and physically paralyzed man lay vulnerably before him, asking if God would be upset if he had sex outside of marriage, Fr. Brendan offers to him, “In my heart, I feel like he will give you a free pass on this one.  Go for it.”

    Mark goes on to hire Cheryl Cohen Greene (Helen Hunt) as a sex therapist with whom he would share his first experience of sexual intercourse over a span of six sessions.   Their unconventional relationship transitions from a matter-of-fact sexual experience into one of mutual tenderness and self-realization.  This is not a movie about sex.  This is a movie about Love.  This is a movie about the journey of the Soul.  This is a movie about, as Conversations with God teaches us, understanding that your Truth comes from within, and that when you change the source of your Truth, you allow yourself to experience life in an entirely different way…in the way that it was meant to be.

    This film is raw and explicit, humorous and heart-breaking, inspiring and emotionally shocking, gutsy and tender.  If ever there was a movie that demonstrates that our lives are not about us, The Sessions would be it.  If ever there was a movie that reflected the infinite possibilities held within each and every one of us, it would be this one.

    This movie is currently showing in theaters around the world.  Save an evening to see a wonderful film that you will be grateful you brought into your life.

    (Lisa McCormack is the Managing Editor & Administrator of The Global Conversation.  She is also a member of the Spiritual Helper team at www.ChangingChange.net, a website offering emotional and spiritual support. To connect with Lisa, please e-mail her at Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com.)

    (If there is a book, movie, music CD, etc. that you would like to recommend to our worldwide audience, please submit it to our Managing Editor, Lisa McCormack, for possible publication in this space. Not all submissions can be published, due to the number of submissions and sometimes because of other content considerations, but all are encouraged. Send submissions to Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com. Please label the topic: “Review”)

  • France proposes banning words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ as part of gay marriage legalization

    Thank you, France, for demonstrating that, YES, our world IS evolving and moving towards a more loving and accepting society, breaking through the intolerant barriers of an Old Cultural Story which dictates in what form love is to be experienced and expressed and moving into a New Cultural Story where couples of all genders are free to experience and enjoy the rights and privileges afforded to ALL loving relationships.

    According to a recent article in The Telegraph, “France is set to ban the words “mother” and “father” from all official documents under new plans to legalize gay marriage,” giving equal adoption rights to homosexual and heterosexual couples.

    Justice Minister Christiane Taubira told France’s Catholic newspaper, La Croix, “Who is to say that a heterosexual couple will bring up a child better than a homosexual couple, that they will guarantee the best conditions for the child’s development?”

    As expected, this proposed law is being met with vehement resistance by members of the Catholic Church.  “Gay marriage would herald a complete breakdown in society,” Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, the head of the French Catholic Church, told Christian’s RFC radio last week.  He is further quoted as saying, “This could have innumerable consequences. Afterward they will want to create couples with three or four members. And after that, perhaps one day the taboo of incest will fall.”

    Wow, is the suggestion really being made that the legalized union of two loving same-sex mutually consenting adults is one step shy of a parent engaging in sexual relations with their own child or brother or aunt?    And perhaps I’m confused, but isn’t it heterosexuals who have been historically, and still are even to this day, entering into multiple-partner relationships?  What does THAT type of irrational conjecture have to do with a same-sex partnership being afforded the opportunity to be a legally and socially recognized union?

    And just WHEN and HOW did God’s glorious gift of sex become a tool to be used to judge, control, manipulate, bring shame upon, and condemn?  Do we honestly imagine a God who created the possibility of deeply felt love to exist between two souls – whether that is a man and a man, a woman and a man, or a woman and a woman – only to then be judged and punished for simply being who they are?  What is it that we are actually afraid of here? 

    I applaud this bold step forward the country of France is proposing, a step that embraces the forward movement of The New Spirituality and celebrates everyone’s ability to enter freely and fully into a legally recognized union that supports at an equal level the depth of their love and the holy union of their souls.