The Sunlit Way: September 2022

A Publication of Unity Chapel of Light

Sunday Morning Service 10 AM

September 4: Rev. Rose Houston
September 11: Kathy Baker
September 18: Barbara Bellamy
September 25: Bruce Price

Hello 👋🏽

As you are aware in October two Board Members will be leaving, I am one of the two. There will be three wonderful people calling each of you to fill those positions. I urge you to say yes 👍🏽. You will be joined by four others and each of you will undoubtedly know at least six other members in the Congregation to which you are close... I like to call it 6 Degrees of Connection—in which our UNITY FAMILY becomes stronger. We become cohesive in our love and respect for each other. I have received that call 3 times and have accepted it 3 times...twice when there was no Minister...why...because I knew my why.

I was raised Christian Methodist Episcopal, that is my foundation; when I was in my 20's I was introduced to a woman that believed in Christ so powerfully that she was able to heal and purify her own body. Her husband being intrigued, watched her every move and put everything about her to paper...together they bore a child that became an architect and built a Center surrounded by her teachings and healing letters and people from all over the world sought this TRUTH. In my 40's I stood at the desks from which they wrote. In my 50's I became Catholic because my Granddaughters attended the Catholic schools...Catholicism is my Religion...UNITY IS my way of life...Myrtle Filmore is my Mother Mary with skin and Charles Filmore embodied The Christ-Mind to bring her actions to life.

In my lifetime I have walked hand in hand in The Rose Garden with James Dillet Freeman...and into The Prayer Tower...this is my why...My theme song while at the Village was "Here I Am Lord"! Every time I walked into the building the pianist would play and sing it...I urge each and every one of you to read "Mother of UNITY and be ready when the phone rings to commit to "Your Why" and say: "Here I am Lord"...use me....

~Ulius Benson
Member at Large

Taking a Leap of Faith

The month of September always reminds me of starting new projects and moving forward in our development. I suppose it's conditioning from our childhood when we started back to school right after Labor Day. Most of us moved forward one grade ahead. It was, in a unique way, the beginning of a new adventure; the mark of being successful and upgraded.

This September I suggest we begin working on a spiritual upgrade. How do we do this? We start by adopting the Visionary Position.
The Bible tells us in In Proverbs 29:18, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” This is true for our personal life, too. If we do not have a vision for our lives, something wonderful and magical dies within us. Having a personal vision means having a passion for something. Living our lives with our vision always at the forefront lets that passion empower our lives. Understandably, it can be distressing when it seems impossible to act to realize our dream or vision.

What if, due to financial circumstances or other obligations, our goal is relegated to a future time, and our current situation doesn’t look anything like our vision? What if, for example, we want to be an actor but find ourselves having to wait tables to pay the rent? Or perhaps we are in a job we’ve disliked for many years, and we hate it more than ever, but we are just a few years away from retirement benefits? How is it possible to live our true passion when our current reality is flat?

According to Alan Cohen, we have several choices:
1. Quit, pull up stakes, take a leap of faith, and dive headlong into our ideal scenario.
This action may feel a little scary or even insane, but some who do this succeed gloriously and consider their leap the best move of their life. Others do not ultimately live the vision they set out for but create a lifestyle more rewarding than the one they left. Others return to a position like their original one. Yet no matter how their journey unfolds, all are richer for the faith and courage they mobilized to follow their dream.

Personally, I’ve only made one real and complete leap of faith. In 1991 Verizon offered 3000 Management people a buyout if they were hired before December 15th, and had at least 30 year service. I made the cut. My starting date was December 11th and I had at least 30 years’ service. I took a leap of faith and without a second thought I signed the papers. it was scary. It meant taking a huge pay cut. I had no idea if I could make it, or what I was going to do. My son was still in college. I jumped in with both feet. It felt right. In my heart I knew I had to be free. The interesting part of this story is that years later, I found a letter to God I had written at a retreat at Unity village in1981. I asked God to let me retire by the time I was 55, and I promised I would lead a life of prayer. God honored my prayer and answered it in a spectacular way that I could never have imagined on my own. Ultimately, I became the director of the Telephone Prayer Ministry at Silent Unity.

2. Act as if your vision is already real, no matter what current circumstances indicate.
Rev. Frank Richelieu had a dream to start a church, but he had no building, no congregants, and no money. All he had was inspiration and lots of it. So, he found a public phone booth and printed business cards listing that telephone number as the church office. Then he set office hours and conducted business and counseling from the phone booth. Eventually, Dr. Richelieu built up a congregation, obtained a building, and established one of the largest and most successful churches of Religious Science in the nation.

“Only those who see the invisible can do the impossible.”
3. Make changes in your current situation that bring it more into harmony with your vision.
A schoolteacher named Lou was bored and frustrated teaching high school English. So, he developed a new course called “Humanities” in which he encouraged students to talk about their feelings, connect with each other from the heart, and take steps toward their dreams. The class became so popular that Lou ended up teaching the course full time, and the school hired another teacher to replicate it! Lou developed rewarding relationships with his students that bore blessings far beyond the classroom, and he fulfilled his true function as a teacher of life.

If you can’t change a thing about your job, you can bring desired qualities of your vision into your current situation. If you want to be a motivational speaker, you don’t need to stand on a stage to turn people on. One man who motivated others was a hotel concierge known as “Baltimore Buddy.” Buddy could make anyone feel good. He would bring cookies and glasses of wine to tired businesspeople waiting in the hotel check-in line; wow, did they light up at his personal touch! Buddy found creative ways to serve as he made the best use of his knack to serve people right where he was.

4. Do what you have to do in the meantime and keep your vision so alive in your mind and heart that it sustains you spiritually.
When you choose something to be important in your life, everything else you do exists in service to that goal. So as an aspiring musician you sell shoes for now, but you consider your shoe store job a vehicle to purchase your dream guitar. Then you think, feel, speak, and practice your music as much as you can when you are not selling shoes. To you, music is life and shoe sales is a detail. The quality of your life depends less on what you are doing with your body, and more on what you are doing with your spirit. Keep your soul nourished, and everything else will fall into place...

To master our mission, we must pay more attention to where we’re going than where we are or where we have been. The axiom could be, “Sustain your vision, and your vision will sustain you.” We must not let our dreams die because of a lack of vision. We can’t worry about the how it will happen. We just keep focusing on what we want to accomplish and act and feel “as if” we are already there. and This is the key! we must implement the feeeeeeeling part of the process.
Find a partner and experience the magic of feeling your way to manifesting the vision in your life.
Become a Dream Weaver, and as Eleanor Roosevelt noted, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

With Love and Blessings,
Rev Rose

Celebration of Life Service for

George Powell

Next Collection, Sunday, September 4th

Good Neighbors Tallmadge is requesting:

Cereal
Peanut Butter & Jelly
Canned Meat

Scheduled Field Trips:
Please use the sign up sheet in the fellowship hall or see June Dockus.

Friday, August 26th - Portage County Fair in Randolph
(free for seniors) Meet at 10:00 AM at the church.

Saturday, September 10th - Nature Realm
Pack a lunch. Meet at 10:30 in church parking lot.

Saturday, October 1st - Holden Arboretum
Meet at 9:00 AM in church parking lot.

Prayer Shawl Ministry

Do you knit or crochet? Please consider using your talent to wrap others in love. A prayer shawl is a handmade shawl created for the purpose of bringing comfort to someone who is going through a difficult time physically, emotionally or spiritually. When making the shawl, the crafter is intentional with their work, infusing their creation with prayer. They are then blessed before they are gifted.

If you are interested in donating shawls or would like to request a shawl for someone in the community you can contact:

Prayer Shawl Ministry Chair: Linda Christian
rainbowgardens@neo.rr.com

Prayer Shawl Ministry Co-Chair: Ulius Benson
uliusbenson@aol.com

HUM
From New and Selected Poems Vol 2

Mary Oliver
(1935 - 2019)

What is this dark hum among the roses?
The bees have gone simple, sipping,
that's all. What did you expect? Sophistication?
They're small creatures and they are
filling their bodies with sweetness, how could they not
moan in happiness? The little
worker bee lives, I have read, about three weeks.
Is that long? Long enough, I suppose, to understand
that life is a blessing. I have found them — haven't you? —
stopped in the very cups of the flowers, their wings
a little tattered — so much flying about, to the hive,
then out into the world, then back, and perhaps dancing,
should the task be to be a scout-sweet, dancing bee.
I think there isn't anything in this world I don't
admire. If there is, I don't know what it is. I
haven't met it yet. Nor expect to. The bee is small,
and since I wear glasses, so I can see the traffic and
read books, I have to
take them off and bend close to study and
understand what is happening. It's not hard, it's in fact
as instructive as anything I have ever studied. Plus, too,
it's love almost too fierce to endure, the bee
nuzzling like that into the blouse
of the rose. And the fragrance, and the honey, and of course
the sun, the purely pure sun, shining, all the while, over
all of us.

Mary Oliver was born and raised in Maple Hills Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. She would retreat from a difficult home to the nearby woods, where she would build huts of sticks and grass and write poems. She attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, but did not receive a degree from either institution. As a young poet, Oliver was deeply influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay and briefly lived in Millay’s home, helping Norma Millay organize her sister’s papers. Oliver is notoriously reticent about her private life, but it was during this period that she met her long-time partner, Molly Malone Cook. The couple moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the surrounding Cape Cod landscape has had a marked influence on Oliver’s work. Known for its clear and poignant observations and evocative use of the natural world, Oliver’s poetry is firmly rooted in place and the Romantic nature tradition. Her work received early critical attention; American Primitive (1983), her fifth book, won the Pulitzer Prize. According to Bruce Bennetin the New York Times Book Review, American Primitive, “insists on the primacy of the physical.” Bennet commended Oliver’s “distinctive voice and vision” and asserted that the “collection contains a number of powerful, substantial works.” Holly Prado of the Los Angeles Times Book Review also applauded Oliver’s original voice, writing that American Primitive “touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity.”

Dream Work (1986) continues Oliver’s search to “understand both the wonder and pain of nature” according to Prado in a later review for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Ostriker considered Oliver “among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey.” For Ostriker, Dream Work is ultimately a volume in which Oliver moves “from the natural world and its desires, the ‘heaven of appetite’ ... into the world of historical and personal suffering. ... She confronts as well, steadily,” Ostriker continued, “what she cannot change.”

The transition from engaging the natural world to engaging more personal realms was also evident in New and Selected Poems (1992), which won the National Book Award. The volume contains poems from eight of Oliver’s previous volumes as well as previously unpublished, newer work. Susan Salter Reynolds, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, noticed that Oliver’s earliest poems were almost always oriented toward nature, but they seldom examined the self and were almost never personal. In contrast, Oliver appeared constantly in her later works. But as Reynolds noted “this self-consciousness is a rich and graceful addition.” Just as the contributor for Publishers Weekly called particular attention to the pervasive tone of amazement with regard to things seen in Oliver’s work, Reynolds found Oliver’s writings to have a “Blake-eyed revelatory quality.” Oliver summed up her desire for amazement in her poem “When Death Comes” from New and Selected Poems: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”

Oliver continued her celebration of the natural world in her next collections, including Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004), New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004), and Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (2010). Critics have compared Oliver to other great American lyric poets and celebrators of nature, including Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Walt Whitman. “Oliver’s poetry,” wrote Poetry magazine contributor Richard Tillinghast in a review of White Pine (1994) “floats above and around the schools and controversies of contemporary American poetry. Her familiarity with the natural world has an uncomplicated, nineteenth-century feeling.”

A prolific writer of both poetry and prose, Oliver routinely published a new book every year or two. Her main themes continue to be the intersection between the human and the natural world, as well as the limits of human consciousness and language in articulating such a meeting. Jeanette McNew in Contemporary Literature described “Oliver’s visionary goal,” as “constructing a subjectivity that does not depend on separation from a world of objects. Instead, she respectfully conferred subjecthood on nature, thereby modeling a kind of identity that does not depend on opposition for definition. … At its most intense, her poetry aims to peer beneath the constructions of culture and reason that burden us with an alienated consciousness to celebrate the primitive, mystical visions that reveal ‘a mossy darkness – / a dream that would never breathe air / and was hinged to your wildest joy / like a shadow.’” Her last books included A Thousand Mornings (2012), Dog Songs (2013), Blue Horses (2014), Felicity (2015), Upstream: Selected Essays (2016), and Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (2017).

Mary Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. In addition to such major awards as the Pulitzer and National Book Award, Oliver received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She also won the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award.

Oliver lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Hobe Sound, Florida, until her death in early 2019. She was 83.

~Bio from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-oliver

Unity Chapel of Light Ministry Groups:

There's Something for Everyone...Get Involved!

Sunday:
Monthly: 1st Sunday, Prayer Circle meeting at 11:30 AM
Monthly: 1st Sunday Peanut Butter & Cereal for Tallmadge Good Neighbors
Monthly: 2nd Sunday, Helping Hearts meeting at 11:30 AM
Monthly: 4th Sunday, Senior Lamplighters at 11:30 AM
Monthly: Last Sunday, Lunches for St. Bernard's after service

Wednesday:
Monthly: 1st Wednesday's, Sisters In Spirit 6:30 PM

Thursday:
Weekly: Thursdays, CODA meeting at 7:30 PM
Bi-Monthly: 1st & 3rd Thursdays, Three Principles meeting at 7:30 PM

You can find the latest prayer service here:
https://www.unity.org/en/article/monthly-unity-prayer-services

After board approval, ministry teams and individuals may submit a written article by email or sent as a word document to nicole@unitychapeloflight.org by the 15th of the month for publication in the next edition of the Sunlit Way.

Sunday Morning Service 10:00 AM

Contact Information
Nicole Niewoehner - nicole@unitychapeloflight.org

Office Hours:
Monday 9 am - 4 pm
Wednesday & Thursday by appointment
Closed: Tuesday, Friday & Saturday

Why Not Be Rich? by Martha Giudici