Loving What's Real

Learning To Love What’s Real with Josh Reeves was the Sunday message at Mile Hi Church on 2/7/2021. Ideals are great—our ideal self, our ideal relationships, our ideal career, our ideal life—but, if not careful, our ideals can keep us from loving what is real. Loving what is, is the key to growing an ideal life. This talk ends with a spiritual practice.

Music by: Kent Rautenstraus

Transcript

So good to be with you this morning.

Our message today,

Imaginary friends learning to love what's real.

And I begin by inviting you to look back to your earliest years,

To ask yourself if you remember having any imaginary friends.

Perhaps they weren't invisible.

Perhaps like me,

They were personalities scribed to dolls or to action figures or to stuffed animals.

Or I remember having imaginary friends in my backyard and we were certain that we could build a replica of Disneyland there.

That the clothesline could easily become the skyway and that if we kept digging long enough,

We could build Pirates of the Caribbean.

And the budget never quite came through for that,

But the vision was clear.

And most people tend to believe that we let go of our imaginary friends as children as we come to engage and understand more of the real world.

But I'd like to argue today that what really happens is they just evolve.

And that our imaginary friends often become most likely idealizations of so-called perfect people,

The perfect parents,

The perfect friends,

The perfect self,

The perfect boyfriend or girlfriend.

And these idealizations are wonderful in how they help us to aspire,

Set goals and know what we want in life.

But I want to share today that they can also be incredibly dangerous.

That there can be consequences to carry on with these imaginary friends in our lives in the way that they can keep us from loving the people we care about the most with real,

Genuine love.

Because when we compare people to who we think they should be,

We sometimes miss out on the gifts of who they are.

Frederick Nietzsche put it this way.

He says,

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

And when I first read that,

It struck me,

Because I'd have to admit that one of my greatest regrets in life is missing out on loving my life as it is,

Because I've become so caught up in idealizations of what I think it should be.

Or in missing out on loving the people all around me,

Instead loving what's not real about them.

This probably began with my parents when I was about nine or 10 years old.

I began seeing other kids' parents and began forming these ideas in my head of what the ideal parents were and comparing my parents to it.

You know,

This started off simply,

The ideal parents would let me stay up as long as I want.

They'd let me rent any video I wanted from the video store.

They'd let me have whatever I want for dinner.

And as I grew a little older,

It became more intricate.

My parents would always be calm and never fly off the handle.

That's how an ideal parent would be.

An ideal parent would intuitively know how I feel,

No matter how much I claim that it's impossible for them to understand me.

And I'm ashamed to admit it,

But in my teenage years,

I judged my parents.

I started missing out on who they were because I was so focused on who they were not.

And it wasn't until I was in young adulthood,

And I hear this is true for a lot of people,

That I was able to take some time to separate my parents from the role of mom and dad and begin to see them as real,

Actual human beings.

And it wasn't until I did this that I could learn to admire them for the dysfunctional families that they grew up in,

For the hardships that they faced that led to their idiosyncrasies,

And ultimately not just to admire them,

But to adore them for their ability to choose to have me as a son and to raise me the best I could.

Isn't that a wonderful moment when we can say to ourselves,

I don't want the perfect parents,

I'm glad I had these ones.

Thomas Merton in his No Man is an Island speaks these famous words.

He says,

The beginning of this love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.

The resolution not to twist them to fit our own image,

If in loving them we do not love what they are,

But only their potential likeness to ourselves,

Then we do not love them,

We only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

This level of imaginary friends,

This level of idealizations,

It's not just in our personal relationships.

It extends into the public sphere.

It extends into our religions.

It even extends to our understanding and relationship with God.

One of my biggest problems with the so-called cancel culture isn't criticizing public figures,

How important it is to do that.

It's this idea of putting people up so high on a pedestal that we expect them to be perfect,

And that when they make a mistake,

We sometimes take that out of the context of the whole of their life,

Sometimes damning them in the process.

Abraham Lincoln said something insensitive,

Let's tear down a statue.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Wasn't faithful to his wife.

Martin,

You're out of the dream.

J.

K.

Rowling says something controversial and insensitive,

Let's burn the Harry Potter books.

We can go so far expecting other people to be perfect that when they make a mistake,

We judge them as opposed to learn from them.

That's what I've learned most about my heroes is in studying their flaws,

Their mistakes,

And perhaps we make a mistake ourselves when we elevate too high.

Those people who generally give a message that you can be just like me,

To follow along.

This is so true,

I believe,

As well,

With the great spiritual teachers in which the great religions are formed,

Buddha and Jesus,

These figures who didn't teach I'm perfect,

Elevate me,

I'm infallible,

But they actually said,

Hey,

You're just like I am,

You can go do what I'm doing.

The philosopher Alan Watts once commented that he believed the greatest mistake Christianity ever made was making Jesus the boss's son.

Not because it was unfair to elevate Jesus,

But that it gave so many of us the excuse to never have to be like him,

To not have to practice his teachings,

To not have to practice that strong forgiveness and that compassionate love.

This idealization can come to our relationship with God as well.

An atheist might say God is the greatest imaginary friend that there is.

And I would agree with that atheist to the degree that we may only spend time trying to make God in our own image and likeness.

If we're only trying to build our God like a build-a-bear workshop,

We're missing out on the heart of our relationship with spirit,

Which is to open up,

To learn to be what it's like to live in the image and likeness of God,

To open our hearts,

To open our lives.

Meister Eckhart,

The great Catholic teacher,

Said that the greatest step in life is leaving God for God.

What he means by that,

I think,

Is that sometimes our images and our judgments about the divine can actually keep us from the divine that's calling us to live,

To grow,

To expand in greater ways.

Or as Richard Bach once invited us to do,

He said to imagine life perfect and serene,

And remember this,

That God has imagined it even greater than you can.

That to me is living at one with spirit,

Is living in that greater and grander imagination.

Of course,

We apply this imaginary friend concept,

This idealization,

To ourselves as well.

So many of us striving to reach an ideal self,

Loving that self that isn't,

That we forget to love the self that we are.

We forget the divine truth that is only by loving ourselves as we are,

And our lives as it is,

That we nurture the seeds of those ideals so that they can grow in our lives.

Some people listening to this talk that are long-time science-of-minders might say,

Aren't I supposed to have ideals?

Isn't that how the science of mind works,

To think about my highest,

Grandest idea of what my relationships and what the world can be,

And to hold to those while the creative medium works to bring it about in manifestation?

And my answer is yes and no.

Yes,

It's so good to know what we want.

Yes,

It's so good to aspire.

Yes,

It's so good and strong to have great boundaries for what we can accept and will not accept in our lives.

But we should also remember that the law of love teaches us that it is only when we accept ourselves as we are and our lives as they are that we can find that creative love that really nurtures that creative soil that helps build that life to our imagination and even grander.

And so that idealization of self that I was speaking to,

It can cause us to so distance ourselves from what we really are,

So accord ourselves with this false image of what perfection is that we miss out on what's best about us.

One of my favorite novels of all time is William Goldman's The Princess Bride.

He also wrote the script for the incredible movie,

And if you're a movie lover and have never seen The Princess Bride,

See it immediately.

And if you love books,

This is one of the funniest,

Most inspiring books that I've ever read.

And if you know the movie,

You know that Princess Buttercup is the most beautiful of all beings.

But in the book,

Goldman tells us about the princess before,

Adela,

Who was exactly perfect,

And her story goes as such.

One day,

One of her suitors,

She had 104 of them,

Exclaimed that without question,

Adela must be the most ideal item yet spawned.

Adela,

Flattered,

Began to ponder on the truth of the statement,

That night alone in her room,

She examined herself pore by pore in the mirror.

It took her until close to dawn to finish her inspection,

But by that time,

It was clear to her that the young man had been quite correct in his assessment.

She was,

Through no real fault of her own,

Perfect.

Not a part of me could stand in proving how lucky I am to be perfect and rich and sought after and sensitive and young and young.

The mist was rising around her as Adela began to think,

Well,

Of course,

I'll always be sensitive and I'll always be rich,

But I don't quite see how I'm going to manage to always be young.

And when I'm not young,

How am I going to stay perfect?

And if I'm not perfect,

Well,

What else is there?

There was no question that she was not quite as happy as she had been.

She had begun to fret.

The first worry lines appeared within a fortnight,

The first wrinkles within a month,

And before the year was out,

Creases abound.

She married soon thereafter the selfsame man who accused her of sublimity and gave him merry hell for many years.

Fred Rogers,

Mr.

Rogers,

Said the greatest illusion that each of us needs to give up is of ourselves as a perfect person.

And when we can release and let go of those imaginary friends of who we think we're supposed to be and accept ourselves as who we are,

Realizing that our ideals are not something to aspire to outside of us,

But they're seeds within us to nurture with compassion and self-acceptance,

That's when we go to live our true life.

There's no greater disappointment in life than to live trying to achieve your ideals and to make them so in your life than to look back and realize they were there all the time and that you missed them.

The place in my life where I've most struggled with idealizations is in romantic relationships.

So many times early in my life,

That ideal partner ruined some of my relationships because I was always comparing the other person to who I thought my ideal should be.

And when a mistake was made or it wasn't quite met,

Immediately I'd say,

Imposter,

Or begin to use it as an escape or an exit from the intimacy of the relationship.

Now,

I'm so grateful that I met my wife,

Who just happens to be perfect,

And I'm where I'm at in relationships today,

But I certainly missed out on getting to really know some great people.

I really missed out on creating a foundation for some real,

Wonderful friendships.

See,

For me,

There are two types of romantic relationships.

The first I would call the grow-down relationship.

The grow-down relationship is defined by what in Greek is called eros,

Or romantic love,

New love,

Ideal love.

And that's when one person meets another person,

And they immediately think that they might be their ideal,

And they start to try and be the ideal for that other person,

And they get together and they keep going until the truth comes out,

That they're not as perfect as they presented themselves to be.

And that's when the growing down begins.

This first half of the grow-down relationship is probably defined in every romantic comedy I've ever seen.

Girl meets guy or girl is resistant to love,

And then eventually divine forces come to bring them together.

They have a passionate moment.

They have fallen in love.

They've met their ideal,

And the credits start to roll,

And we are left to believe what?

That they live happily ever after.

Have you ever asked yourself why romantic comedies don't have sequels?

They begin to grow down,

But luckily there's another type of romantic relationship that I would call the grow-up relationship.

This is based upon what Plato called philia,

The aspect of love,

Of compassion,

Of familiarity,

Of familial love.

And a lot of grow-down relationships are saved by this type of love where you start to grow up,

But in general,

The grow-up relationship happens when you meet someone and you attach no ideal to them at all because you have no expectations of them but to be who they are.

You get to know each other.

You connect.

You're often chasing each other's ideals,

And then all of a sudden after hanging out for so long,

You say,

Oh,

Shoot,

I'm in love.

That's the best kind of love,

By the way.

Now,

I wasn't fully truthful.

There is one romantic comedy that applies and identifies all the aspects of the grow-up relationship.

Do you know what it is?

You can shout it at your TV screen.

I'm listening.

It's When Harry Met Sally.

Harry meets Sally.

They take a road trip together.

Many years pass by.

They're often chasing their idea of the grow-down relationship with other people,

And they get to know each other,

And all of a sudden they do have that moment of,

Oh,

Shoot,

I'm in love,

Or I'll have what she's having.

And they fall in love,

And we get this beautiful piece of what love can really be,

That right balance of eros,

Of newness,

Of romantic love,

But also that familiarity of mutual respect and of understanding.

A few people have asked me,

Josh,

How did you know?

When was the moment that you knew you were going to propose to your wife?

And I know exactly what the moment was.

My wife and I,

My partner at the time,

We'd been together for a few years,

And we were struggling a little bit.

We were fighting at the time,

And I was at my church in Seal Beach with our board president there,

Yvonne,

And she asked me,

Because she was always looking after us,

She said,

Josh,

How is you and April's relationship going?

And I kind of looked at her and I said,

You know,

It's going okay,

But it's hard work sometimes.

You know,

And I was saying that in my old pattern of the false belief that just because there was trouble or a challenge in a relationship,

That it somehow meant it wasn't ideal,

That it somehow meant that it wasn't right for me,

And so I set it with some toes sticking out of the door of the relationship.

And Yvonne looked at me and she said sternly,

Because that's how Yvonne talks,

She said,

Josh,

I've been married for over 50 years.

It's still hard work sometimes.

And in that moment,

I don't know how I'd missed it before,

It just clicked.

It was the understanding that what we were really arguing about the struggle wasn't about anything that was wrong with either one of us,

It was about the need and the desire to take the relationship to that next level,

To honor it with those titles of husband and wife that says this isn't supposed to be perfect.

It's about loving and growing together.

That too is the most wonderful moment in our romantic relationships when we can stop and say,

I don't want my ideal,

I want him.

I don't want my ideal,

I want her.

And that may sound crude,

But this is what I mean by that statement.

For me,

There's no such thing as the perfect partner,

But there is such thing as a perfect love that we can cultivate towards our partner.

There is no such thing as a perfect relationship,

But there is such thing as a perfect love that we can cultivate for our relationships.

There's no such thing as a perfect person,

But there is such thing as that perfect love that you can develop for yourself and practice and it will change your life forever.

There's no such thing as a perfect life,

But there is such thing as that perfect life of love that is available to each of us to nurture,

Uplift,

And transform our lives through the power of our minds and the power of our hearts and the power of our whole being.

And so just in closing today,

I want to share three ways to love what's real,

To set forth that creative principle in your life that only comes forth by being willing to love what is right here and right now.

And the first is to love the one you're with.

Love the ones you're with.

For as it has been written,

If you cannot be with the one you love,

You love the one you're with.

I think it says that in the Proverbs,

But maybe it's Crosby,

Stills,

And Nash,

Right?

There's something so powerful,

Even if you're seeking to call forth new relationships in your life,

Of not withholding your love,

Waiting for the so-called right person to show up,

But of taking that love creatively and giving it with good boundaries,

But with consciousness,

With compassion,

With clarity,

And with joy.

If you can learn to love those who are around you with that perfect love,

What I believe wholeheartedly is not only will it nurture those relationships to grow,

But it will help attract you to and attract to you those relationships that are in alignment with your heart's ideals,

With your heart's vision.

Next,

Love your life as it is.

Love your life as it is.

Know what you want.

Know what you're seeking.

Understand that your life may be missing something.

I totally get it.

Yet realize and remember that creative power to love in this moment.

And as Corita Kent once said,

When you love the moment,

This love carries you beyond all boundaries.

We begin to connect and explore,

And we learn that living a life of love is not living in judgment about the idealizations that may or may not exist in our lives.

It's the development and realization of compassion that we can practice towards ourselves and others.

And that leads me to the final point that I want to share with you today,

Which is to love yourself as you are.

Love yourself as you are.

Sometimes I have to stop and ask myself,

How would my life be different if I always loved myself as I was?

And what I realize is what I feel I maybe have always been lacking isn't because of a lack of its possibility.

It's the lack of willingness to love myself into that.

And it's only when I've learned to really love myself that I've given myself the environment to demonstrate that which I'm seeking in my everyday life.

And so one gift that you can give yourself this month of February we wanted to share with everyone as part of our evolved communication initiative this year is at different times in this year,

We're going to offer complementary practitioner sessions.

These are prayer practitioners.

These are spiritual coaches.

And this month of February,

If you're willing to see one of them on the topic of relationships,

Of improving your relationships,

There's a list of practitioners that you can contact on our MileHighChurch.

Org page.

Go to prayer and care center,

And you'll see that list.

And give yourself the gift of an online session.

For February,

They need to be online.

But you can connect.

And this is someone who's going to spend 45 minutes to an hour with you listening,

Helping you to clarify what you want.

They don't give you advice.

And lifting you up in affirmative prayer to realize your vision of relationships.

Love yourself by giving yourself that gift.

And lastly today,

And perhaps most importantly as we close,

See if you can't begin holding people not to who you think they should be,

But learning to accept them as they are.

Stop holding people and withholding your love based upon who you think others should be,

And start accepting who they are and loving who they are.

And so I'm going to do this for myself right now.

And I invite you,

If you choose,

To do it too.

I'm going to close my eyes.

And I'm going to visualize my parents.

And you may visualize a parental figure.

It doesn't matter if your parents have passed on.

Relationships never end.

I'm going to call them forth.

And I'm going to say to them,

I let go of my attachment to who I think you should be.

And I accept you as you are.

I love you as you are.

I'm going to call forth my children.

And you can call forth your kids,

Someone you mentor or have high hopes for in your life.

And I'm going to say to them,

I release my attachment to who I think you should be.

And I accept you as you are.

I love you as you are.

And now I'm going to call my partner to mind.

And you can call a partner,

An ex-partner,

The imagination of your future partner to mind.

And I'm going to say to her,

I release my attachment to who I think you should be.

And I accept you as you are.

I love you as you are.

And now I'm going to call myself to mind.

And I invite you to call yourself there too,

To visualize yourself and to say,

I release my attachment to who I think you should be.

And I accept you as you are.

I love you.

I love you as you are.

And lastly,

Call an image of the divine forth for you.

Allow whatever shows up to show up as I'm allowing what will show up for me.

And say,

I release my attachment to what I think you should be.

And I accept you as you are.

I love you as you are.

As I do this practice,

I feel any defenses around the heart begin to crumble and to fade so that I can live with a greater sense of intimacy with those I love,

Those I will love,

And that divine presence of life itself.

And so speaking a word of affirmative prayer,

What I know and declare for each of us who decide to be a part of this prayer today is a real love,

A true love,

Not lost in imaginations or fantasies that are unpragmatic or unrealistic,

But in the suit,

In the soil,

In the grist of the mill,

In the patience,

And even in the hurt feelings or the uncertainty that there is a divine and real love that is the most powerful love that there is.

And as I accept it for myself,

As I choose courageously to practice it towards others,

Even those who tick me off,

Even those I may feel separated or I've separated myself from,

I know that this divine love brings together and creates healing of body,

Of soul,

Of mind,

Of connections,

Of memories,

Of understandings,

And of future idealizations.

I know that there is a divine good right where I am,

Right as I am.

It is right where each of us is.

There is no greater power.

There is no greater love.

And we only need choose to say yes to it and to use it with clarity,

Conviction,

And the consciousness of the heart,

Freeing us from past judgments and allowing us to step into what the great is,

The great spirit has imagined for all of us to be and to become.

And so it is.

Reviews

I've really enjoyed all your talks (I only found you recently). This is how church should be!!
Has anyone ever told you that you sound like Stuart McLean, he's a Canadian story teller on the cbc. The first time I heard you, you sounded so familiar! 😄💚🌟

Thank touch for the insight 😊 I needed this today. 🙏

Beautiful gift this morning. 🙏🏼 A wonderful teaching. I feel happier and deeper love from your lesson. ❤️

Wow that was amazing, just what I was needing to hear this morning!
Thank you 🙏

Wow. Just wow, Rev. Josh. Amazing talk I will be listening to over and over again. And sharing. Thank you!