The Three Spirits

Josh Reeves shares his holiday message, The Three Spirits. The holiday season, more so than any other time, brings the Spirit of the past, present, and what is yet to come, together. When we reject any of the lessons they teach, we can repeat many of the same mistakes. But when we embrace and fully realize their lessons, we have a real and true experience of eternity.

Transcript

So it's usually around this time of year that we start to hear all the talk about the war on Christmas,

Right?

And I think sometimes we forget about the covertness of Christmas itself,

That Christmas itself is in so many ways designed and has evolved to be a war against impoverishment,

To be a war against those who would not see the dignity of other people,

To be a war for charity,

For love,

For goodness,

And for giving.

And I know we trace Christmas back to the birth of Christ over 2,

000 years ago,

Representing and recognizing that that light born then can be born in our hearts today.

But it only takes walking through your neighborhood to see that Christmas has many other symbols that express that same light.

The lights on people's houses,

The trees inside,

The reindeers with red noses,

All of these to me are expressions of that very same light to remind us of the good in the world,

To remind us of a divine spirit,

To remind us to take on that good cheer,

That miracle of life which again is giving of itself all the time.

Brother Lawrence called it practicing the presence of God.

How do we practice the presence of God?

By taking those qualities of charity,

Of goodwill,

And love,

And making them known on earth.

And two important historical movements take place that have shaped Christmas as we know it today.

The first happens in the early 1800s in a young United States of America,

A young country still trying to find its myth and its story.

And in the state of New York,

There were many immigrants from the Netherlands and the Dutch there.

They brought some slight traditions about a gentleman named St.

Nicholas,

The patron saint of children.

And authors like Washington Irving and Clement Clark Moore,

Who wrote An Evening with St.

Nicholas,

As we like to call it,

Towards the night before Christmas,

Began to give birth to our modern understanding of Santa Claus.

There are many growing retailers in the area who hired amazing artists who began to give us the depiction of St.

Nicholas or Santa Claus,

Learning as well that if you want a successful holiday,

Build it around the children,

Right?

So it was a commercial success for them as well.

The second historical movement happens in the 1840s when Charles Dickens publishes in England A Christmas Carol,

The Odyssey of Scrooge,

Something that we can all be sometimes in how he's visited by three spirits and has a spiritual transformation to realize the meaning of Christmas.

Dickens saw in the England of the day a kind of irrational materialism,

A selfishness,

A grumpiness,

A lack of acknowledgment of the spirit.

And Christmas existed then,

But not in the way that it does now.

And before you know it,

It became popularized with the adults and,

Again,

The children who were caught up in the story.

And so it brought back into England traditions of the Christmas tree,

Of Christmas carols,

Of lights,

And so forth.

And you take those two movements and you very much have,

With the birth of Christ,

Of course,

Christmas as we know it today.

Isn't it pretty cool?

Pretty powerful stuff that we get to celebrate.

Yay,

Christmas.

Yay.

And Scrooge's Odyssey begins when he has contact with his ex-partner,

The ghost of Jacob Marley,

Played brilliantly by Goofy in my favorite version of a Christmas carol,

Mickey's Christmas carol.

You can see Scrooge is hanging out with us on the podium there today.

And it's very interesting.

Initially,

Marley doesn't even realize why Scrooge can see him.

There's a mystery involved.

And Marley says,

How it is that I appear before you in a shape that you can see,

I may not tell.

I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day.

I am here tonight to warn you that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate,

A chance and hope of my procuring,

Ebenezer.

You will be haunted by three spirits.

And notice he doesn't use the word ghost.

He uses the word spirit.

Why?

Because Scrooge lacks spirit.

He lacks an awareness of that internal life,

The givingness of the miracle of life to all,

The Christmas spirit.

And there are many different definitions for this word spirit.

Even in our Science of Mind community,

We use the word spirit as a word for God.

Sometimes when we use that word God,

It gives the sense of God being a person or just an individual.

So we like to say spirit.

The spirit is the presence of God in,

Through,

And all around us.

I am one with the living spirit.

You want to say that with me?

I am one with the living spirit.

So the spirit touches us in that way.

And then there's spirit as an animating principle,

Where you see someone who has great team spirit or you go to Fiddlesticks Pub and have some spirits,

Whatever it may be.

There's that type of spirit that something gives us that can be other things than just the divine.

And then there's the spirit that represents a ghost.

I was visited by my grandmother's spirit.

And spiritualism and mediumship was something that was very much rising during the time of Dickens.

I remember early in my ministry,

I was doing a book study,

And there was a lovely woman who had lost her mother a few years past.

She said,

If I could wish for anything,

It would be to hear the voice of my mother one more time.

And a tear got in my eye,

And there was another person in the group that wasn't so compassionate,

And she blurted out,

My mother's been dead 15 years and she still won't leave me alone.

It's all perspective.

But I think for Dickens,

By using this word spirit,

He's not just meaning ghosts.

He's meaning the spirit and the presence of the divine coming to visit and work in Scrooge's heart.

And Scrooge is visited by these spirits and he experiences an enlightenment on Christmas morning and he declares,

I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year.

I will live in the past,

The present,

And the future.

The spirits of all three shall strive within me.

I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.

And so there's the fantastical nature of being visited by ghosts.

There's something very pragmatic here.

How many of us will be visited by the spirit of the past this Christmas time?

The spirit of memory.

The spirit of soul.

For some of us,

Perhaps the spirit of regret or grief.

The spirit of the eternal.

How many of us will be visited by the spirit of the present?

The spirit of possibility.

The spirit of the blessing of life.

And how many of us will be visited by the spirit of the future?

The spirit of the unknown or better yet,

The spirit of hope.

The faith that there is a light that never dwindles,

That will be with us wherever we go.

I would argue that all of us will be visited by these spirits this year.

And it's up to us to decide if we're going to hear the lessons that they teach because when we fully bring them into balance,

We live in wholeness.

That's what makes Dixon's work such a spiritual and religious work to me because it actually gives us divine direction on how to live.

Many of us will embrace the spirit of the past when it visits us this year.

But some of us will resist it.

And what happens when you resist the spirit?

It haunts you.

Some of us are resisting the spirit of the past because we're grieving a loved one that's no longer with us.

Totally understandable.

Some of us are resisting the spirit of the past because we feel the best of days are behind us and not before us and ahead of us.

Some of us are resisting the spirit of the past just like Scrooge because we can remember a time when we embodied love and happiness and well-being but maybe slowly allowed it to chip away to where we only got attached to our own survival and our own grumpy materialism.

We get lost in that spirit trying to find our way.

But when we accept the lesson of the past,

We see that memory isn't just a reminder of what is no longer.

It's something that contains the spirit of something eternal,

Something vital,

Something miraculous that keeps us connected at that soul level with what has been in an incredible way.

I love how the great Viktor Frankl said it.

He said,

The transitoriness of life cannot destroy its meaning because nothing from the past is irretrievably lost.

Hear that.

Nothing from the past is irretrievably lost.

Everything is irrevocably stored.

It is in the past that things are rescued and preserved from transitoriness.

Whatever we have done or created,

Whatever we have learned and experienced,

All of this we have delivered into the past.

There is no one and nothing that can undo it.

What do you miss this year?

I miss my grandparents.

I miss going into their mobile home that they somehow filled with presents and had my family there.

Nancy and Bob were their names.

We would all come and there would be all this wonderful food.

I would eat all the relish tray,

The olives and the gherkins,

And get too full before dinner and all of that.

I just miss that so much.

It makes me kind of sad until I remember that we have tools that,

Yes,

We can't put our loved one who has passed right in front of us.

We can't hold their hands.

We can't bring a time past back to the present,

But the spirit of it.

I can still eat gherkins and olives on Christmas.

I can do what my grandparents did and give love to children through presents.

I can take a moment of stillness.

I can leave that empty chair and honor it with reverence.

We have that ability to recall the spirit of the past in a way that makes it present again.

I think that's the beautiful lesson that the spirit of the past teaches us,

That it's not something in foregone history.

It's something,

The best of it,

The spirit of it,

Is always with us.

And yes,

It can be sad,

And yes,

There can be grief,

But there can also be a great amount of wonder and grace in remembering and celebrating those connections.

It can help us practice forgiveness.

Sometimes when there's an incomplete experience in my past,

I feel like these experiences are holding my spirit hostage,

Right?

I have to free them by allowing what I am to learn and what I am to know now to be here today,

Because the truth is,

In my past,

I probably didn't appreciate it as much as I should have.

But now I have that opportunity with the gift of soulful memory to receive the gifts that the spirit of the past has to offer.

The spirit of the present is always giving to us as well,

And even though we're creatures of the present moment,

A lot of us defend against it.

The spirit of the present is the spirit of never-ending joy.

It's the spirit of the givingness of life.

It is the spirit of creativity,

The creative now.

And yet sometimes we resist that spirit.

And what happens when we resist the spirit?

It haunts us.

Some of us perhaps aren't happy with who we are today.

Maybe some of us don't feel there's enough money in our bank account to let ourselves be happy.

Maybe there's a family rift or a rift somewhere in the world,

This damn COVID,

That just puts us in a crummy mood and has us defend against that heart of what the spirit of the present moment has to teach us.

And I understand it.

I get it.

But you have the right to celebrate the miracle of life that is in you.

You have a right to be happy.

You have the right to well-being.

And when we accept that gift of the present,

It can begin to transform our lives.

It can begin to fill us with that magic that we've rejected.

You know,

There's nothing more sad than people on Christmas who don't believe in Santa Claus,

Right?

And we're a Santa-believing church,

Aren't we?

Yeah,

We're not a Santa-worshipping church,

That'd be a little weird,

Right?

But we believe in that magic and there's something about asking ourselves,

Not does something exist in the sense of can we measure it with the senses,

But what does it mean?

What does it mean to create an opening in our home to receive Santa Claus or the gifts of Christmas?

What does it mean to put out those milk and cookies or whatever it is to create that ritual and preparing for the gift of the season?

What does it mean to prepare that space to receive and then open those gifts representing that eternal light within us all?

Sometimes when we get grumpy,

We get so materialistic,

So rational that we begin to dismiss anything that's enchanting.

This is a serious topic and there was actually a book written several years ago by a philosopher named Eric Kaplan called Does Santa Exist?

It's this argument of the person who's the sincere rationalist,

Not that we shouldn't bring a critical mind and discernment to things going around us,

But the consequences of that.

He shares how the rationalist might put it,

If you don't want to be a chump,

You can follow a life of practical rationality.

You won't have creativity or eroticism or faith or passion or be able to give or receive forgiveness or be committed to anything larger than yourself or be spontaneous or wholehearted or ever feel fully alive,

But at least you won't be a chump.

I'm willing to be a little bit of a chump to receive those gifts that come to us physically but also metaphorically through all the gifts of the season.

The spirit of the present in Dickens' A Christmas Carol is the most powerful of beings.

He's very tall and he has green robes and he carries a torch around with him and in his robe he carries two children,

Ignorance and want,

Which are not the children of the spirit but the children of humanity.

He seeks to protect them,

The purpose of the spirit to remove ignorance,

To remove want,

And he walks around with this cool torch and here's just an example of a scene.

The sight of these poor revelers appeared to interest the spirit very much,

For he stood with Scrooge beside him in a baker's doorway and taking off the covers as their bearers passed sprinkled incense on their dinners from his torch and it was a very uncommon kind of torch for once or twice when there were angry words between some dinner carriers who had jostled each other,

He shed a few drops of water on them from it and their good humor was restored directly for they said it was a shame to quarrel upon Christmas Day and so it was.

God love it.

So it was.

Maybe we all need a torch for family dinners this year,

Right,

At Christmas time.

But that's that magic of the present moment.

Most of us live in the present moment but we don't always experience it and that's the joy of all the rituals of the season to help us plant ourselves in this eternal now and express that creative life.

It may not show up in some miraculous gift but maybe in a conversation,

Maybe just in a moment of appreciation,

Maybe in an opportunity to help someone else.

One of my favorite congregants here at Mile High Church is Kathy Hobbes.

How many people here know Kathy Hobbes?

Incredible person.

I have an angel coin in here that she likes to give out.

If you've ever received an angel coin,

Eden's Angels,

Kathy was known to pass them out here and she used to own an antique corporation and one of my favorite things about Kathy is she provides Christmas gifts for all the people who participate in putting together the candlelight service.

And being from California and feeling disconnected from home,

I just want to thank Kathy so much because these gifts were something that allowed my family here to build a new tradition to put them out and display and so just so grateful for her.

And I heard a wonderful story about Kathy.

She doesn't get here very often because she's just about to turn 102 years old.

Yeah,

Incredible.

And she's still honoring that miracle of life.

So she was at her retirement community and there was an assistant there that was working with her and he seemed kind of down and so she asked him how it's going and he just shared that he was really unhappy.

He was really unhappy.

And Kathy decided to ask him,

Well,

What would make you happy?

Notice the wisdom in that question.

It wasn't tell me more about why you're unhappy.

It's what would make you happy?

And the young man shared that it would be to go to medical school and he didn't know how he was ever going to find the means and the ways to enter into medical school.

And Kathy shared with him the great proverb,

He who hesitates is already lost.

And there's something about this conversation and Kathy's wisdom that inspired this young man and he began to just get into school.

Let the means show themselves and now he's succeeding in medical school.

Isn't that wonderful?

Yeah.

And you know how when someone says something to you or you read something and say,

Oh,

I don't want to forget that.

I should get that tattooed.

Well,

That's what this guy did.

Check that out.

Isn't that cool?

So it helps us remember and we love you,

Kathy.

Thank you for all that you do for our Marlin High community and all you do to represent the spirit of life.

But those opportunities,

They're there for you.

They're there for me.

They're there in all of those opportunities when we're willing to grasp that lesson of the present,

That life is a miracle.

Even in the long days,

Even in the struggles,

Even in the depression or the sadness,

There's a miracle of life always available.

It is the very gift of who we are.

And when we express it,

We don't just share the gift.

We are the gift.

We become it in so many different ways.

Many of us experience the spirit of the future as the unknown.

It's scary.

It's creepy.

What's going to happen?

But for me,

It's wonderful when we can receive the spirit of the future as a sense of hope,

The recognition that no matter what takes place in our lives,

There's a divine light that's always with us.

And it's important to recognize that Dickens refers to the spirit,

Not as the spirit of the future,

But it's the spirit of what's yet to come.

And so when Scrooge encounters the spirit,

He begins to experience what will happen if he continues to express his same behavior,

Right?

He's at his own funeral and no one's there.

He perceives the death of Christ as tiny Tim,

And he begins to want to change his fate.

And it's a reminder that the spirit of the future isn't the spirit of possibility.

That's the present one right here.

And when we can choose today how we're going to be,

How we're going to show up,

It lets loose a creative energy that brings forth those possibilities to become our future.

I love how Patrick Cavanaugh,

The poet,

Put it.

He said,

To be dead is to stop believing in the masterpieces we will begin tomorrow.

You know,

What is that masterpiece that you can begin today?

Not in broad visions of what it should look like,

But just in how you show up,

Because that's how the gift of the present is given.

I also love what the great theologian Howard Thurman said on the meaning of Christmas.

He said,

It is the rainbow arched over the roof of the sky when the clouds are heavy with foreboding.

It is the cry of life and the newborn babe when forced from its mother's nest,

It claims its right to live.

It is the brooding presence of the eternal spirit making crooked paths straight,

Rough places smooth,

Tired hearts refreshed,

Dead hopes stirred with the newness of life.

It is the promise of tomorrow at the close of every day,

The movement of life and defiance of death and the assurance that love is sturdier than hate,

That right is more confident than wrong,

That good is more permanent than evil.

What do the spirits have to teach you this holiday season?

What does the spirit of the past have to teach you?

For me,

It's to remember and honor my ancestors.

It's to recognize their spirit with me just as much now as it was in the past and to honor them with reverence and with aliveness.

What is the lesson the spirit of the present is teaching you this year?

For me,

It is again that that miracle of life is always giving of itself,

But I can only experience it if I'm willing to include myself as an expression of it and share the gifts of that miracle.

What is the spirit of the future teaching you?

For mine is not to necessarily trust the unknown,

But to approach each and every day knowing that the possibilities of my future rest in my very choices and actions in this moment.

Some people say and they may wonder,

You know,

Was Scrooge,

Was he just good on Christmas and then went back to being Scrooge the next day?

That's what happens to a lot of us,

But we're told because he receives those lessons,

The lesson of the past,

The lesson of the present,

The lesson of the future,

That it creates kind of a balance in his heart.

Scrooge was better than his word.

He did it all and infinitely more and to Tiny Tim who did not die,

He was a second father.

He became as good a friend and as good a master and as good a man as the good old city knew or any other good old city,

Town or borough in the good old world.

When he was laughed at for being so kind,

His own heart laughed and that was quite enough for him.

We have that ability to take these lessons and to co-create our lives with a divine power.

Not only is a great miracle to know that this present exists,

But to practice it and to do the work.

So may your past bless you with divine soulful memory,

With wisdom and sprinkles of the eternal.

May the present bless you with the fullness of appreciation,

The gratitude of the whole of your life right here and right now.

And may the future bless you with the seeds of your heart that you are called to plant today to co-create your tomorrow with divine love and divine spirit.