A Time to Claim Our Power

I've posted a few of the downloads that have come to me during the amidah portion of Friday night services at Ner Shalom in this blog.

Here are the most recent two: one on Friday night, October 23, and the next on Saturday, October 24, during an astoundingly exuberant, powerful service in which Sher, 65 year-old woman and Sharlya, her youthful mother, became b'nai mitzvot via zoom. Sher reclaimed the place she had thought she could never have in the religion into which she was born, having always felt excluded from the patriarchal norms that shaped her youthful view of Judaism.

It's not a coincidence that the content of the weekend's messages pouring through my heart and mind were about claiming our power.

And maybe it's not a coincidence that this encouragement to insist on doing so came close to today's news of our newest Supreme Court Justice's appointment, sealing, at least for a long while, our highest court's probable leaning towards the suppression of women's freedoms and rights.

Friday, October 23, 2020

As the service started, I felt the familiar tingling in my crown and recorded these words rushing in: And the angel said, “I am here with you all the time. You don’t ever have to invite me or ask for my help. All you have to do is open your awareness to my Being and you will feel and know my presence and guidance.”

And like clockwork, later in the service, as our extended silent prayer began, I received what I have been calling the Amidah gift:

In the depths of your supposed unknowing is the path lit clear as day, the sound of acknowledged accomplishment ringing all around you.

You have been trained to doubt yourself – yourselves – and to thereby delay attaining the freedom that is your birthright.

Cast aside those cautions like fluff and bothersome insects! As you hesitate taking the place and walking the path you created yourself to take and walk and own with resounding footsteps, the longer the world suffers from your absence.

You may show up but until you cease your avoidance of claiming your full ability as a being divine in your ability to bless, forgive, and nourish, you are not present.

Modesty has no place in the healing of the world. Truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, is necessary.

You are here to build and to witness. To reflect and cast forth the Divine blueprint alive in you.

Saturday morning, after an achingly beautiful hour or so of soaring music, personal revelations by both mother and daughter about what walking -- and walking together -- through this ancient gate meant to them, once more, my mind received the gift of the amidah:

In all the available space and time there is nothing not available to you. “Available” implies limits, and to and of the Infinite there are no limits.

That Which is All Creation is whole and always in motion, unencompassable and yet the All is accessible to every part of Creation, none of Which are separate from Creation.

We who whisper these comings and goings in your perception are one small breath of All Breath and yet, and even we speak for the All. We see from the ripples of your wondering that to limited perception, to human, one small part cannot possibly express for the All and yet We tell you it is so.

Do not, do not ever, place the perception of a limit, any limit, on your – or anyone’s – ability to hold all of Creation in the heart or the mind. The holding will seem fractured and partial because of the physical apparatus but the wholeness will enter your being and you will flow in the Eternal sea, your true place in all Being.

So there are the words of encouragement and challenge from a viewpoint higher than and removed from human fear, and my words are these: attempts to exclude and limit are antithetical to who we really are in our most complete versions of ourselves, and human-imposed limits will not last.