I cannot move forward without stillness. I cannot speak truth without silence. I cannot meet another authentically until I have authentically entered myself alone.
[00:00:01] Welcome, this is Josh Reeves with Mile High Church in Lakewood, Colorado. Thank you for tuning in to our podcast today. For more information about our church, please visit our website, milehighchurch.org. Thanks to each of you for being you. Whole people living whole lives. Does that sound true about you? Yeah, we're all doing the best we can. So to begin the sermon
[00:00:30] today, I'm going to invite you to play a little game with me. You up for it? Okay, I'm going to share a quote and you're going to tell me if it comes from a realized spiritual teacher or from a modern day car commercial. Okay? Quote one, your reputation is in the hands of others. That's what the reputation is. You can't control that. The only thing you can control is your
[00:01:00] character. Okay? This is from Dr. Wayne Dyer. Okay? Next. Quote two, you used to wonder what the future would hold. Now you're living in it. That's from Wavefront Motors. Quote three, sometimes you got
[00:01:25] to go back to actually move forward. And I don't mean going back to reminisce or chase ghosts. I mean, going back to see where you came from, where you've been, how you got here and see where you're going. I know there are those that say you can't go back. Yes, you can. You just have to look in the right place. That's Matthew McConaughey in a Lincoln town car commercial. I would have given it a draw,
[00:01:52] but it would have given it away. All right. Next quote. Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without. Out. Okay. That's the Buddha. He may have sold cars back then if they had them, but all right. Next one. If your dreams are keeping you awake and you take your chance, it's not fame that drives you,
[00:02:16] but that one moment in a single target, no matter how far it is to reach car, you have a hint in there. So that's from Porsche. Okay. One last bonus question. We move an idea up the ladder of greater believing, by taking it to the core of ourselves and actually becoming it. Okay. That's Dr. Roger Thiel. This life is joy. Our love to Roger and Erica. It's this morning. I'm not saying today that you can't get
[00:02:45] wisdom from a car commercial. What I am saying is no matter how profound the truth, the intention in which it is delivered matters. The intention matters if someone is trying to share something with you to help you on your spiritual journey versus sell you a car. In our belief system here, we're open at the
[00:03:11] top. It's one of the things I love about this philosophy most. We don't discriminate against wisdom. Bring it on. And yet discernment becomes even more important in our faith because there's what you say and no matter how true it may be, it's not always as important as how you say it. Are you saying it with compassion or without compassion? Are you saying it to inspire or to
[00:03:36] manipulate, to lift someone else up or to lift yourself up? This context matters and it can change the efficacy of the truth. Shinru Suzuki, great Buddhist teacher, gave a lecture one day and afterwards he heard someone using something he said in a patronizing way towards someone else. And he said, that is not so. And the person looked to the Roshi and said, you just said it an hour ago.
[00:04:06] When I said it, it was true. When you say it, it is false. Don't try that one with your spouse. Real truth, no matter what the words are, is something we earn through living our life fully,
[00:04:29] through dedicating ourselves to enriching our own consciousness. There is a Buddhist story about a young Zen priest who graduates from learning at a monastery and his teacher receives him. And he said, everything that you have learned is wonderful for preaching material, but unless you meditate every
[00:04:51] day, remember your light of truth will go out. That's how important the truth is for each one of us. Not that we just know it intellectually, but that we embody it in consciousness. I don't want an artificial spirituality that's made up of platitudes, slogans. I want my spirituality earned,
[00:05:17] embodied, applicable to every part of my life. Jesus in the gospel shares the parable of the maidens in the bridegroom. They're looking for a husband and he's coming sometime that night and they all go out with lamps, but each has a different level of oil. And Jesus shares those who do not have enough oil don't get to meet the bridegroom. It's only those that do. And it's a parable about consciousness,
[00:05:46] about inner knowing. Are we keeping our own inner light nurtured, valued, so that we can face this world which sometimes seems to use truth to teach you something about its opposite. Anyone here questioning the reality that's out there?
[00:06:08] For me, there's only one real response to the mistruths, the seeming division, the separations that we see out there. And it's simple, but it's profound. And it has to do with solitude, a genuine solitude. Let go of the world and all of its noise and get back to the quietude within your
[00:06:35] own being. In the end, that's the only place where you're going to be able to decide what is true. And in my life, in the end, it's the only thing that tells me of truth, that whispers to me of the sacred. It is in solitude that I nurture my true becoming. It is in solitude that I remember who I
[00:07:01] am. It is in solitude that I set the creative process for the highest and best good in my life into motion. Man, it's good to be alone, isn't it? And yet the solitude that I speak of, a solitude for today, doesn't require that you be alone. All it means is that from time to time, just from time
[00:07:27] to time, take the time to prioritize your inner life over your exterior reality. Take some time to honor the validity of your inner world versus getting lost in the superficial one. Take some time to realize that within you is already anything that you may seek outside of you. And that the key
[00:07:56] to the spiritual game of life is learning to live from that realization. And when you do, the exterior begins to accord with the interior. There is this cosmos within you. I know for some of us, sometimes I look in the mirror and I say, I'm a whole perfect, complete mess right now. There's so much layered, so much seeming fragmentation, but it's not the truth of who you are. Henry Nouwen referred to solitude as the furnace of transformation.
[00:08:26] Solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born, the place where the emergence of the new man and the new woman occurs. Too many of us are lost in the world in a state of isolation. Lost in a world filled with souls,
[00:08:53] filled with more information than you would ever want, filled with lots of entertainment and fighting and divisiveness, but it's all isolation. It's all loneliness. It is only when we rediscover the solitude within ourselves, that we can reemerge in this world with the knowledge that that stuff out there is not the truth of who I am. There is an inner knowing. There is an inner being. And not
[00:09:22] only do each of us need it, but this world needs it as well to be grounded in who we are, even if things may appear like they're falling apart. A few pieces of advice for embracing solitude for today.
[00:09:41] The first one I'm calling FOMO, or fear of missing oneness, or a genuine concern for missing oneness. FOMO stands out there in the world for fear of missing out. Anyone here, practitioners of FOMO? I can
[00:10:03] fall into it for sure. It comes for me from the belief that being alone is bad. Being alone is bad. Goes back to childhood for me. Josh, go to your room. Take a time out. Today I pay $25 for either to go to my room and have a time out. But when I was a kid, it was like being sent to prison. To be alone meant
[00:10:30] to be in trouble. It also meant to experience a kind of rejection. Sometimes to be alone meant the other kids didn't want to play with me. My brother and sister didn't want to play with me. I'm all alone. I began to build this isolated sense of unworthiness. As I moved into teenage years, I had older siblings. And anyone who has older siblings know they get to do stuff that you don't
[00:10:57] get to do. And so you think, man, I'm going to really do it up when I get their age. Got myself into a little bit of trouble too. So that FOMO, that fear of missing out, comes from, for me, a deep misunderstanding of what it means to be alone. That fear of missing oneness is about recognizing that we have this incredible cosmos within us, this incredible soul. That to be alone
[00:11:26] is to discover who you are. It's interesting for as much as I associate being alone with being in trouble or rejected when I was little. It's also how I discovered who I was. In beautiful, joyous solitude. Can you remember the things that you loved doing by yourself as a child? Art, imagination. It's incredible. Growing up with my religion as rock and roll, I remember being inducted by the
[00:11:55] great songs of the 1960s. The Beach Boys in my room, the drifters up on the roof, Otis Redding sitting on the dock of a bay. All these songs about the power, the wisdom, the revelation that can come from being on one's own. Fear of missing oneness is about returning to that aspect. And as an adult,
[00:12:21] that oneness I've returned to and discovered as a child, it's still the same. The soul that I was when I was nine is the soul that I am now at 46. It's always there. It's always familiar. But when I don't take the time for it, I lose congruence in my life. I forget about it. I become, as best as I can
[00:12:45] be a genuine fake out there in the world and forget who I truly am. We can return to that oneness over and over. And when it happens, we connect with a creative power that can inform us, enlighten us, inspire us. Ernest Holmes put it this way, The world we live in is all that it appears to be, but it is also much more. There is the unseen cause,
[00:13:15] the intelligence or purpose in and through all things. When we have come to accept this idea that there is an unseen yet ultimate reality back of us in our world, that this reality is intelligent and conscious, that our mind or consciousness emanates from it, and as a result must partake of its nature, then we see that limitless, unrealized potentialities lie before us. Those limitations we confront in the
[00:13:43] exterior world, when we move to our inner world, we make space for the possibilities. We have to get beyond the consciousness that's associated with that stuff out there to find the consciousness that's really needed for ourselves. I also encourage us today to move from alone to all one, to move away from the context that
[00:14:12] alone might mean isolation, to being all one or solitude, or as a congregant said last service, solitude. I want to challenge you today to both consider and practice that the most creative act you can take for your life is to commit an hour a week to solitude. Just an hour a week is all that has to be. You can even
[00:14:39] spread it out. I believe there is nothing that could be more impactful on your healing, on your prosperity, on your creativity, on your self-understanding, than spending time in solitude. That's how much we believe here in this
[00:15:00] wisdom within you. If you can just take some time to hang out with yourself, to quiet down, to listen, and just be. We release ourselves from that trap of thinking that the exterior world can somehow provide us the love we're looking for, the fulfillment we're looking for, the stuff that we think is going to make us feel
[00:15:27] better. The greatest truth is when we realize and allow it to be not discovered, but revealed as already there within ourselves. And then when we start living from it, that's when we set the creative medium into motion to bring forth the byproduct of that healing in relationships, that prosperity, that right
[00:15:49] understanding. Isolation is the opposite of solitude. However, they're both very creative. When I'm in isolation, I've taken this social self that I've been pretending to be, and I think that he's real, and I try to disconnect him from the whole world. It's a very lonely place. And it's a very creative place. I've created and participated in some very unhealthy relationships
[00:16:17] from this place, not knowing the truth of who I am. I've gotten lost in a sense of feeling fraudulent, not enough, not worthy. I've got myself thinking that somehow drugs or alcohol or social media or whatever it is, bad movies are somehow going to soothe this part of myself that I've isolated.
[00:16:45] Isolation is a place of self-rejection. We can be in a crowd of thousands and be in a place of isolation. Solitude is a place of self-acceptance. It's a place not of escaping the world, but of mindfulness in the midst of the world. It's opening up to the creativity that is within us to come forth. I don't know about you, but I no longer want to create a darn thing in my life from isolation.
[00:17:12] I only want to create from that place of solitude. Healthy relationships that are founded in a knowing of who I am. An everyday way of working that's founded in a sense of calling, purpose, motivation, passion. A place of living from a place of wholeness that allows me to see myself as healed already as
[00:17:39] I am, even though I may be going through a process of healing in my life. That's the power of the all one versus the isolation that we can allow ourselves to get trapped in from time to time. Lastly, practice solitude in community. Practice solitude in community. You can start with your most intimate relationships. I love that Rainer Maria Rilke, he said that the purpose of marriage is to
[00:18:08] protect the other person's solitude. He shared, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings, infinite distances continue to exist. A wonderful living side by side can grow up if they succeed in loving the distance between them, which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky. Again, solitude is just prioritizing our inner life before
[00:18:35] the exterior one. So it can be really good to be alone together, both prioritizing our inner life and then connecting in the exterior one. It takes a lot of the fragmentation away. We can go on a hike with a friend and not say a word. We can be in a community like this one and sing surely the presence together
[00:18:58] and then all retreat into our own inner cosmos with a certain amount of joy that what we're experiencing is the same thing as the person to our left and right. We can experience an incredible oneness by sharing in solitude together. I have a great friend, part of Mile High Church here for many years. His name is Randy Ferguson. I'm going to invite him up here right now. Come on up here, Randy. And Randy practiced
[00:19:26] solitude in community by walking the Camino Trail. And he's, as you'll see, he shares it so much better than I would sharing a story about him. But Randy, would you share a little bit about your experience on the Camino? Again, you're incredible Mile High. You're the founder of the LCA Project, Love, Courage, and Achievement, and a close friend who's had a great impact on me in my life as well. Thank you for
[00:19:51] sharing, Randy. Thank you. Good morning. I feel so honored, so humbled, blessed to be here. Have you ever had that feeling that God was trying to tell you something and you couldn't quite discern it? You know, there's a message on the way, but what's God really trying to tell me? Well, I had
[00:20:17] an experience on the Camino that just opened that up. Early in 2024, I got a call from my sister, who I absolutely love and respect. And she said, Randy, have you ever heard of the Camino de Santiago? I said, no. And she said, well, it's this pilgrimage. And it starts in southern France,
[00:20:42] goes over the Pyrenees Mountains, and then west across Spain. It's 500 miles, and it's a thousand years old. People have been walking this and praying, and I think you should do it. I said, okay. She said, I got a friend who's done it several times, and I want you to call her. And so I did. And she just shared all this wonderful information, but in the middle of the conversation,
[00:21:09] she said something that just got to me. And she said, Randy, if you do this, you will not come back the same person. What an understatement. So I was just so taken with it. I didn't put it on my bucket list. I just call the airlines.
[00:21:36] And I went there and started on this track. And all I had to do every day was to wake up, eat, put on my backpack, walk, and pray. Sounds like a good book title, doesn't it? But that's what I did, day after day after day. And what surprised me was that it took about a week
[00:22:04] and a half for my mind to settle down. We don't know how frantic our mind is to handling the stuff that's around us. But after a week, a week or a week and a half of just walking in this state of divine walking meditation, things got quiet. This beautiful place of solitude in nature.
[00:22:35] And something started to open up. As I was walking with fellow pilgrims from all over the world, a common conversation that would come up, they'd say, Randy, I'm amazed. I'm so happy on this trail. And all I have is what's in my backpack. It's amazing how we are conditioned to have to have so much stuff. But that's not who we are.
[00:23:04] But most of the time, I was walking by myself. And as I was praying, as I was yearning to connect, I had this experience where it wasn't so much that I was walking down the trail, as it was that the trail was being brought to me. And I had this experience
[00:23:32] where every blade of grass, every tree, every rock, every cloud was yelling at me, Randy, Randy, this is God, listen up. And I'm going, yes, sir. He says, I'm crazy about you.
[00:23:51] I adore you. I've got your back. I always have. I always will for all time. Beyond all time, do I love you. And that just hit me. If it had happened for five minutes, it would have changed my
[00:24:12] life. But it happened over and over and over again for weeks. By the time I got to the cathedral in Santiago, the end of the Camino, it was like I'd won my own Super Bowl. You know, it was like, I didn't know I could do this, and here I am. And it was just so rich. It was just waves and waves,
[00:24:40] tsunamis of love. And it changed everything. So what I know now is that God, by whatever name, is real. It's more real than the physical universe. And its nature is love, as is ours.
[00:25:06] What I know to be true is that that message did not come just for Randy Ferguson. No way. It's for all of us. You right there. You are adored. And it's in that place of solitude,
[00:25:28] in that place of quiet, where a greater truth comes forward. At least that's how I experienced it. And so I'm so grateful for Mile High. I love this place. Because not everybody is able to walk 500 miles. You don't have to walk 500 miles. It's right here. So thank you.
[00:25:57] Thank you. Stay up here with me while we pray. Will you do? It's a great secret sauce for improving the sermon. So just knowing that we don't need a Camino for that path to find us. It's not only
[00:26:23] right outside the door. It's just right there waiting for us inside our heart. As we embrace the quietude, we can allow our mind to know that it doesn't have to fix any problem. It can stop now. It's not protecting us as much as we may think. And as we move within to that beautiful quietude,
[00:26:48] that solitude, that place of all one, we simply allow the truth to reveal itself as natural as the beautiful sunrise or crisp fall air. We don't discover it. It reveals itself. Always there, always in that deep knowing. Knowing this solitude for ourselves, we extend it to all of our loved
[00:27:16] ones. We can know that even in the tangled up necklace of pearls that is the society and world around us, that there is part of us always untouched. Not for us to escape the world, but for us to be inspired in so that we can bring it into this world as a presence for transformation, healing, wholeness, and change for ourselves, for our loved ones, for our community, for our country, for our world.
[00:27:43] We know and affirm these truths, the beautiful silence, the glorious quiet, the stillness of being that sings in the heart of each of us who listen. And so it is. Thanks for listening to the Mile High Church podcast. This podcast is made possible by the
[00:28:09] generous contributions from listeners like you. To make a donation, please visit milehighchurch.org.