“Transformational Presence is a way of showing up to life that inspires the best from the people and circumstances around you”

— Alan Seale

“Now, more than ever, we must show up with our best selves, we must become (or continue to be) part of the healing, rather than adding to the hurt. … Everything truly depends on our digging beneath the layers of our small, fearful selves, to the bigness that each and every one of us has inside. Everything depends on our resolve to stay in love.”
Julia Fehrenbacher

“Every minute of every hour of every day, you are making the world just as you are making yourself and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.”
Rebecca Solnit

We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys.”
May Sarton

Sacred Text

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”
John 13:34

Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.
John 4:20-21

And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.
John 4:20-21

And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
Micah 6:8

This world is radiant with beauty. This world is also capable of bone-chilling brutality and the small, corrosive daily cruelties that salt our days with sorrow. For a sensitive person to live with the duality, to keep the light aflame without turning away from the darkness that needs illumination, may be the most difficult thing in life — and the most rewarding.

Sarton offers a cure for this deadly indifference — a cure that honeys this twenty-first-century soul with its poignancy and its potency:

I am more and more convinced that in the life of civilizations as in the lives of individuals too much matter that cannot be digested, too much experience that has not been imagined and probed and understood, ends in total rejection of everything — ends in anomie. The structures break down and there is nothing to “hold onto.” It is understandable that at such times religious fanatics arise and the fundamentalists rise up in fury. Hatred rather than love dominates. How does one handle it? The greatest danger, as I see it in myself, is the danger of withdrawal into private worlds. We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with money or affluence — nature, the arts, human love. Maybe that is why the pandas in the London Zoo brought me back to poetry for the first time in two years.

Story

My family lives a few doors down from a lady called Alice who, since we moved in three years ago, has appeared a bit stand-offish. She seems quite well-to-do and let’s just say I thought she might not be well-disposed to refugees.
For that reason, when my 12-year-old daughter Eva said she’d like to ask our neighbours if they had any coats they’d donate to Care4Calais, I said of course, but just be careful with Alice. If she says no, maybe don’t push the point. Eva is quite passionate on the subject, and I didn’t her, or indeed Alice, to get hurt.
About an hour after setting out, Eva came back with a big armful of coats.
“Where they are from?” I asked
“All from Alice,” she said. “Did you know her mum and dad were refugees?”
It turns out my supposedly stand-offish neighbour’s parents came over from Austria in the 1930s. Her father worked as a doctor here, her mother as a teacher. Alice, retired now, spent her working life as a translator. She was delighted to help, and donated some coats that had belonged to her late husband.
So like I said, between them, an outspoken, open-hearted kid and an older lady have taught me something: Don’t ever underestimate the role that refugees have played in this country’s history, or assume that we know what other people’s feelings are. Making us mistrust each other is all part of how this rotten government’s propaganda works. Don’t fall for it like I did.

Poem: Transformation by Deborah Ann Belka

We must be willing, to give to God our heart before any transformation or morphing can take part.
If we’re to undergo, a complete radical change our thoughts and our ways God will have to rearrange.
To become a new creation, isn’t something up to us but by the power of God as in Him, we learn to trust.
If we are not to be, to the world conformed we must allow our lives in Jesus, to be transformed.
A renewing of our minds, is a part of the progress we must put on the new man and the old one suppress.
We must be willing, to make holy living official lest to the world we’ll appear … shallow and superficial!

Meditation — 365: Science of Mind, A Year of Daily Wisdom from Ernest Holmes

I know there is but One Mind, which is the mind of God, in which all people live and move and have their being.
I know there is a divine pattern for humanity and within this pattern there is infinite harmony and peace, cooperation, unity and mutual helpfulness.
I know that the mind of humankind, being one with the mind of God, shall discover the method, the way and the means best fitted to permit the flow of Divine Love between individuals and nations.
Thus harmony, peace, cooperation, unity and mutual helpfulness are experienced by all.
I know there will be a free interchange of ideas, of cultures, of spiritual concepts, of ethics, of educational systems and scientific discoveries — for all good belongs to all alike.
I know that because Divine Mind has created us all, we are bound together in one infinite and perfect unity.
I know that all people and all nations will remain individual but unified for the common purpose of promoting peace, happiness, harmony and prosperity.
I know that deep within each person the Divine Pattern of perfect peace is already implanted.
I now declare that in each person and in leaders of thought everywhere this Divine Pattern moves into action and form, to the end that all nations and all people will live together in peace, harmony and prosperity forever.
And so it is.

Today I walk in the light of God's Love. Today I am guided and my guidance is multiplied. I know exactly what to do, exactly how to do it. There is an inspiration within me that governs every act, every thought, in certainty, with conviction and peace.
— Excerpted from entry for December 25, 365: Science of Mind, A Year of Daily Wisdom from Ernest Holmes

Rumination

Do you think I know what I’m doing? That for one breath or a half of breath that I belong to myself?
Rumi

Benediction

Mother Father God
As the dawn breaks on a new year, let us give thanks for all we hold dear: our health, our family and our friends.
Let us release our grudges, our anger and our pains, for these are nothing but binding chains. Let us live each day in the most loving ways, the God-conscious way. Let us serve all who are in need, regardless of race, colour or creed.
Let us keep God of our own understanding in our hearts and to chant God's name each day. Let us lead the world from darkness to light, from falsehood to truth and from wrong to right.
Let us remember that we are all one, embracing all, discriminating against none.
May our year be filled with peace, prosperity and love.
May your blessings shower upon us and bestow upon each of us a bright, healthy and peaceful new year.  - Rev. Marcy Sheremetta Adapted by Dr Ing

A world that needs our transformational presence.