Love and Hate with Michelle Medrano

[00:00:01] This is Josh Reeves and you're listening to the Mile Hi Church Podcast. Tuesdays in September, I'm beginning our Beyond Limits class. It's in person here at Mile Hi. You can find some online classes as well on our website. It's all about the fundamentals of our teaching and I'm so excited to bring the big ideas of science of mind and spirit to this class as we create community, exploration, and talk about what's most meaningful in life together.

[00:00:28] Oh, thank you. Thank you. That is a very special, very special song to me and I'm so grateful that Laura was willing to sing it. I actually requested it of her and she doesn't have to sing the things I asked her to sing but I'm really grateful that she did because this song is a Melissa Etheridge song, our girl, Melissa, and a beautiful, beautiful part of her Fearless

[00:00:55] Love album which has all sorts of inspirational songs, I think, for the world that we're living in today and this song really speaks to me. I love to use music as a way to uplift myself and to remind myself of the truth of this universe and I think it's a powerful invitation for us all. We like to think that there's one world but there are as many worlds as there are us.

[00:01:20] Each one of us lives in our own world, has our own ideas and our own perceptions and our own sense of what's so and our world is being experienced and expressed through us and we're sharing it together collectively and there's some really powerful things that this song brings out and my message today

[00:01:43] is called Love and Hate, Two Sides of the Same Coin because of one line in this song. She says in the song only, she says, come on, show me who you're loving, then show me just who you hate and I will show you all

[00:02:03] your angels that guard your heaven's gate. To me, these words say to us that the world we're building of these very powerful things that we call love and hate are forming and fashioning the world that we're creating and we know this to be true in this beautiful teaching of science of mind and spirit where we

[00:02:31] share and talk a lot about the world that we're co-creating and it matters in your world and my world in our collective experience who and what we're loving and who and what we're hating because those things, those strong experiences are building a reality and I've noticed, I don't know, maybe you've noticed too,

[00:02:58] that humanity sometimes has a huge challenge in our levels of hatred of each other, in the ways that we behave towards each other that come out of what we might call hate or spite or resentment or anger or frustration or misunderstanding or arrogance. There's a lot of

[00:03:22] words that we could use that fall into this category and in this song she's saying, hey, these things are angels that are guarding your heaven's gate. You and I cannot experience the kingdom of heaven to the degree that we continue to indulge ourselves in these experiences, in these ideas or these ideals. And so we get to challenge ourselves today because I've noticed that coming from those negative places

[00:03:51] never works for me. It never gets me what I really want. But we persist in behaving in that way, in many ways. And it's, it could be argued, you'll have to feel into this for yourself, it could be argued that it's been made worse than ever by a couple of really key things. Social media allows us all to write anything we want, to post anything we want without ever verifying if there's any truth to it

[00:04:21] whatsoever. But as long as it matches my worldview, I feel empowered to post it or say it. But we don't know for sure sometimes. We get to check ourselves. Is what I'm posting, can I prove that it's true? Is it true? And what will it do and what impact will it have on the people who are reading it? And do I think about that? And the 24-hour news cycle where we're

[00:04:49] given little small bites and bits of what's happening in the world or what someone said, we never quite know is it being taken out of context or not, but it feeds and fuels a worldview. And so we're prone to fall for it and believe that what we're hearing is the absolute truth without ever testing it,

[00:05:12] without ever finding out if what I'm hearing is true or what I'm seeing is true. So we can easily, in this day and age, fall into the trap of hatred, fall into the trap of make wrong, of criticism, of negativity, because we're being shown things that might support that worldview. And I ask us to

[00:05:36] consider today as we take a look at these sides of the coin, what kind of life or world do I really want to build? And more importantly, I invite each one of us to ask ourselves, what am I doing or who am I being to create that world? Because some of us with the best intentions, some of us right here in this

[00:06:01] place would say, I want a world filled with love and peace and joy. And then we will post the most negative dang, dang thing on social media you've ever seen. Are we in alignment with who and what we say we want to experience? Because it matters. It makes a difference. We are building our own life individually

[00:06:30] and collectively by these ways that we behave. I think that we need a new strategy to deal with this coin. And I call it the same, the two faces of the same coin, because hate and love are powerful builders of a world. One can destroy and destroy powerfully, magnificently, and one can build magnificently. And it becomes then a

[00:06:58] question of which of these approaches am I using in my life? So to help us create some context for this, I have for us today a pop quiz. Take a deep breath for those of us who have test anxiety. You don't have to fill anything out. You don't have to turn anything in. You don't even have to tell me or anyone in this room what your answer to my pop quiz might be. But here is the pop quiz. The question, it's a multiple choice

[00:07:28] question. To really move towards healing, peace, love, oneness in our individual and collective world, should we, A, judge, make wrong, criticize, hate others, hate the system, hate the social constructs,

[00:07:51] hate other faiths, hate the government, or hate each other? A, should we only focus on the good and ignore anything that is negative, bad, or perceived to be negative? Or C, look at that which appears to be

[00:08:18] negative, bad, or challenging? And see through it to the capital T truth of it. Think about that for just a minute, which answer you might pick. There was some giggling on answer A, and that makes some sense, because in my mind, answer A is what many of us have been attempting to do, and it's not working.

[00:08:44] It's not working. It never will work. It never has worked throughout humanity. Creating and recreating and building a world of peace and love and healing and joy through hatred and criticism and make wrong and all that, it's just not going to work. It's never going to work. So the question then becomes, how do I stop indulging myself in those energies? How do I stop myself from falling into

[00:09:14] the trap of that from actually thinking that it makes a difference? And I get it, because those feelings, those behaviors, those thoughts, those ideas, they feel like they have some oomph, and they have some power. And then if I could just have them strong enough, I could make people hear and see the truth of the errors of their way. If I could just post the right thing, it would show everyone to stop going down

[00:09:43] that path. It doesn't work. It just doesn't work. And my favorite quote about unforgiveness has been mostly attributed to Carolyn Mays, and she talks about how resentment is like eating poison and hoping the other person will die, right? And so I would say to us today that that behavior on that side of the

[00:10:11] coin that falls into the hateful, critical, um, anger make wrong is like taking poison and hoping the other person will die. It is toxic, destructive. It creates dis-ease. For humanity to continue to indulge

[00:10:34] ourselves in thinking this is how we create a world of peace and love and joy, it means we are only going to get more and more ill. And when I say ill, I mean physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, intellectually ill, because a world that's based on that and built on that is like building a reality

[00:11:03] on sand. The sand will eventually fall away and that world will collapse into the nothingness that it is represented by energetically. It won't work. And in my experience and opinion, no great spiritual teacher has ever used that strategy to really create change. Some of the best strategies that have to do with

[00:11:28] nonviolence came, I think, from Jesus of Nazareth, who, who, yes, wasn't happy with the government of the times, but didn't use criticism and little digs to try to change it. No. What did he use? Um, he used love. He challenged his people to even love the government, to even love the people that, that they thought were

[00:11:49] not behaving well. He challenged his followers to love their enemies, to love, to love, to love, to find their way into love versus hate. The great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. taught in civil rights work that we are not going on attack. We are not going to attack people to change things. We're not going to go

[00:12:17] on the, the offensive and hurt or harm anyone with our words or our actions in order to make change. We're going to stand in love. And yes, we are going to stand for our rights from a place of love. These teachers and many others, I could go on and on, but I only have so much time,

[00:12:40] have taught us and shown us there is a way beyond hatred and vitriol and, and anger and, and words that harm or hurt to make meaningful and powerful changes in our world. And it all sets upon the individual heart who's willing to say enough. And I ask today with great love and respect of each one of

[00:13:10] us in the room and those of you watching online, enough of the hate, please. Let us stop. Let us stop. We have more power than we think is another thing that, that is sung in that song. We make a difference. We just came back a number of us. I see many of you in the room, uh, from a cruise together for the, uh, the solar eclipse that occurred in, in Iceland. And there were 57 of us on a ship, I think of about

[00:13:40] a thousand or 1200. And it was really interesting to me because there were times when we weren't all together. Of course, we didn't follow each other around every second of the, of the cruise, but many times Ken and I would sit down with someone and we'd start talking and we'd say, oh yeah, we're with the mile high group. And there were people from all over the world on this cruise. And every single time they'd say, oh, I've met those people. Those are really nice people.

[00:14:06] They're really loving people. Yes. Really sweet, kind people. That was what they would tell us over and over again, every time. And it was so impactful to go, you know, here we are 57 people on this ship and we're making an impact. We are having an impact just being who we are and having fun and being loving

[00:14:29] and kind and sweet to people from all over the world. We have more power than we think. Is that you, Bridget? Hi, Bridget. We have more power than we think. And I think this is true in our daily lives. Our choice to stand for the highest, for love and peace, it makes a huge difference.

[00:14:53] To stand for respect and love and light. To certainly stand for what we believe, but to do so from a place of preference and a place of centeredness absolutely makes a difference. So in my mind, A won't be the solution. Now B is close. B is forged out of the spiritual notion

[00:15:20] that all we need to do is think of God and be in alignment with God and be in love all the time and then we can change the world. The challenge with B, though, is that it's a challenge that some spiritual teachers who I would call absolutists bring forth to us that many can practice. Not all of us can, though. In this being human experience, we are tempted to say,

[00:15:48] all you got to do is focus on love. And it's all good. And it's all just being forged out of consciousness and everything's right. And that gets us the label of being the happy, happy joy church. It also can be the stuff that toxic positivity is made out of. Because most of us, if we're rigorously honest with ourselves, like the 12-step asks us to do, we're not really there.

[00:16:18] We're just using that strategy to kind of help us feel more positive, but with a lot of things, we're not really there. I call that like if you have a pile of manure and you put whipped cream on it. And then you try to say, look at how pretty that is. But it still smells bad. That's what we try to do sometimes. And it doesn't work for us because underneath, we've not transmuted the manure. We

[00:16:48] haven't really done anything to shift or to change what's going on in our own consciousness. And so we're using a strategy to meet the demands and the challenges of the day that is not authentic to who we really are. And it's not what we really believe. And we're really just not getting there. It can be the example I've used many times is like if someone is in an accident, falls, or is in a car

[00:17:14] accident, and they're sitting here before me on the floor and they're hurt and they're bleeding. And I come up to them and I just say, it's all good. Or worse, so how did you create that? What consciousness did you have to create this accident? I'm doing nothing to stop the bleeding. I'm doing nothing to help them, but I'm challenging them inappropriately in their moment of pain and

[00:17:41] suffering. Right? It's not very loving or kind. And it's not really the truth that's going to change them or change the situation. What changes them or the situation is for me to join them in, oh my gosh, let me help you. Let me help you get the help you need. Let me help you stop the bleeding. Let me help you fix the pain. Let me be with you in this moment. And we humans have to have the courage to be with

[00:18:06] each other in our most challenging moments. Not to try to put a band-aid on it and try to make it all look fine and be positive. That's not necessarily what's going to help. What's going to help, I think, as you might have imagined already, is option C. It's the greatest thing that this teaching offers us. It offers us the opportunity to say, I am so spiritually courageous that I look right at what's

[00:18:35] going on in the world, in my life, in my body, in my relationships, in the conversations I'm having, and I see them for what they are. And I'm with them. I stand in the fullness of every part of this being human. And I see through the mirage of what appears to be the challenge, the negativity,

[00:18:59] the person I don't agree with, to the truth of who they are, to the truth of love and light, and recognize that there is only love. And to get to that, I may have to walk myself through some steps of creating inner peace about what I'm seeing and sensing. I may have to have some loving

[00:19:22] boundaries. I may have to stand up for what I believe from love. Not from anger and make wrong and violence, but from love and say what I believe to be true. I may have to walk through some challenging moments in my life. And behind and in and with it all, I choose to see the love that's

[00:19:48] always there no matter what. I choose to see the power that's always there. Because I'm always a co-creator. And I choose to co-create from love and light. And that requires me to have faith. To have faith when I can't even see the forest for the trees. To have faith when I can't see how this is going to work out. But I'm going to stand with it, and I'm going to get support,

[00:20:17] and I'm going to affirm that I have the abilities, that I have the wisdom, that I have the love, that I have the light to walk through any challenge, and I'm going to get help if I need it. And this is one of the most profound things we have to do as human beings. We experienced it on our cruise recently. For those of you might not know, part of the whole impetus for the cruise, this two years of planning,

[00:20:45] was to be in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the total eclipse of the sun. And beforehand, we talked about how when the sun disappears as the moon passes over it, modern human beings do not panic and go crazy thinking the world is ending. Because we have science, and we know now that's what goes on. But think about humans for whom this happened many, many, many moons ago, who had no clue. Suddenly,

[00:21:11] in the middle of the day, it's as dark as night, and it doesn't make any sense. And there's a different feeling in the air for sure. But on this particular day, during this particular cruise that we planned two years for, it was extremely cloudy and rainy in Reykjavik, Iceland. And a number of people were hither and yon, and a number of us gathered on one of the top decks of the ship. And it was our group,

[00:21:37] and probably a few hundred other people. And some of us were cloud busting. We were like sending energy to try and get the clouds apart. I do this with love. But please part. And it wasn't working. Although there was one moment, one moment when the clouds just sort of parted, and you could see the moon was covering the sun, and we all went, oh! And then the clouds came right back and covered the

[00:22:07] whole thing up. We sat out there in the rain together, and we had faith. And we could not see the eclipse. Never saw it again. But we experienced it. We felt it. It was a change in the energy. And it was a change in the level of light. It got darker than it had gotten dark at nights there,

[00:22:34] because we were so far north, the sun hardly ever really set this time of year. But during that minute or so, it was completely dark. And there was a vibrational experience. And I think we all left saying we experienced the eclipse, even though we couldn't see it. Never saw it. And I'm suggesting and

[00:23:00] saying to us today that even though you can't see it, sometimes it's really hard to see with the things going on in the world. That love, that light, it's always there. It doesn't go away. We have access to it. We can tap into it. We can feel into it. And we can use it to guide ourselves

[00:23:23] forward in making choices about how we speak and what we say and how we act and what we do and how we live and how we support each other from love if we choose to. But it requires us to be willing to give up that other stuff. And when we are unable to give up that other stuff, to do the holy sacred work, to say, what is it about this that means I'm unable at this moment to give up the

[00:23:52] hatred or the vitriol or the anger that I'm allowing to keep me separate from that situation or that person? Could I send love to someone I don't agree with? Could I pray for them to make powerful decisions of love and light? Could I pray for our connection? And if I can't, I can always get help

[00:24:20] and support. That's one of the things that I love about this teaching is Ernest Holmes, the founder of this teaching, knew that we humans would fall into the inability to see clearly at times. So what did he create before he ever thought of creating ministers, practitioners, practitioner prayer partners, those people who wear those purple stalls who we've been honoring all month, people who, for

[00:24:50] whom my life has been deeply and profoundly impacted, people for whom I can go to and sit before them and say, I cannot stand what's happening over there. And they love me and help me and sit with me. And they never say, oh, well, get over it, rub some dirt on it, get on with it. They help me find my center.

[00:25:16] They help me find my way back. They help me see it differently. They help me heal my own consciousness. And sometimes that healing looks like I need to go have a conversation with someone, or I need to go make a decision about something, or I need to do something that is meaningful for me. It's not like we're some pacifist people who just sit around and let life happen. No, but how we do what we do,

[00:25:44] how we speak and use our words, it matters. We are co-creating a world together. So I thank our practitioners and all of the practitioners who've supported anyone in this community and in our world to shift and change and deepen into the power of love. And after our

[00:26:11] service, you can come forward and have one of them pray for you. And right now I'm going to ask any of them who are in the room to please stand so we can celebrate and acknowledge their presence in our community. Look at them. Beautiful beings of light. Thank you. Thank you, practitioners. You may stay standing while we do the ending of our service, which is to pray together. It's an invitation

[00:26:40] to step into light and love. On our cruise, we did meditations and practitioner and minister Bradley Wentker shared some beautiful words from one of my favorite teachers, Raymond Charles Barker. And I'm going to share those with you today. I thank Bradley for letting me have them. I am one with all life,

[00:27:01] love and truth there is, for I am one with God. I'm one with every person for in each is the image and likeness of perfect life. I take full spiritual control of my mind and emotions. And I refuse to be disturbed by person or situation. No resentment can find acceptance in my consciousness. I have

[00:27:26] spiritual understanding of all whom I know. I behold in them the love of God, which blesses and benefits me. The actions and words of another person have no power nor authority within me. I am at peace with myself and others. I am the only thinker in my world and I guard my emotions night and day to maintain

[00:27:49] my freedom from others. The only relationship I can have with any person is one of love, understanding and peace. I am a free and uncluttered expression of God. I am a free and uncluttered expression of God. Therefore, today I express and affirm and proclaim that we walk forward from this place with clarity about

[00:28:17] our ability to build and co-create a world of peace and healing and love, of our part in it. I declare and accept that we are clearer than ever before about letting go of that which no longer serves and being this uncluttered expression of God, letting go and healing and smoothing out those places where we have

[00:28:39] been tempted into disconnect. That we ourselves allow ourselves to find the true power of the love that God is as us as we walk forward in co-creating our world and that our world is formed and fashioned out of love and light.

[00:29:02] Each one of us building a world within our own consciousness, in our own bodies, in our own life, in our families, in our workplaces, in our communities and culture and on our planet that we affirm and accept is that of love. That we take our rightful place today and every day in this reality that we are co-creating together, accepting and affirming

[00:29:28] that we are changing the world in a positive and powerful fashion every time we make this choice to do this holy work, to love, to be loved, to live in love, to live in truth. I accept and affirm that this is who and what we are and I give thanks for it right here and right now. As I release this word into the action of the law

[00:29:55] in faith and trust and wholeness, I know that it is done as it has been spoken and I simply let it be. And so it is. Amen. Thanks for listening to the Mile High Church podcast. This podcast is made possible by the generous contributions from listeners like you. To make a donation, please visit milehighchurch.org.