2002-02-24-Loyalty and Love

Session

Opening

An encounter between David and Sandy led the group into a discussion of the courtesy of love. A very dear friend of Sandy’s had died this past week. When she reported this, David’s response was “Well, good, he’s gone on to…” And he did not finish, because Sandy’s reaction to this was severe, ending with her walking out of the house. When she returned, David immediately apologized, expressing his remorse for causing her so much pain. As it turned out, he thought the friend who had died was an older man, perhaps in his seventies like David. I caught some of the conversation on tape, beginning at the point where Sandy is telling David who this man was, and why he was so important to her.

Sandy : ….and it was not long after that he began coming to my house for English lessons. So he’s been coming to my house every week for the last seven years.

David : Really? Wonderful.

Dialogue

Sandy : And he saw me through that whole horror with Palmer, in fact he began stopping by my house more than once a week, just to make sure I was ok. Over the years, I suspect he’s taught me a lot more than I have him about respect, courtesy, deep, old fashioned, Costa Rican courtesy, consideration for others. He is one of those people who goes around spreading love around. That’s what he does for a living. He was a teacher. At the funeral on Thursday, there were a number of his students, all now gray heads. He taught at a little school in Las Palmas, between Tierras Morenas and Los Angeles, you can’t even get there by car. A one room schoolhouse, an elementary school. All of these people, at the gravesite, were reciting some of their early Catholic prayers that he had taught them when they were first graders. It was a very moving moment.

He was a musician, played the guitar. And he was a poet who wrote songs. He was known all over Guanacaste, and Costa Rica, for his songs. He was on radio.

David : This man? I can’t see him in my mind.

Susie : Was this the man who played at Tab’s going away party?

Sandy : Yes.

Susie to David : You’ll remember him now, he sang at Tab’s going away party years ago down at Ecces.

David : Oh yes. That man!

Susie : I remember him. I remember the twinkle in his eyes.

Sandy : He was a jokester, too. When I was first separated from Palmer, we would go off on these excursions. He would pick me up in his little car and take me off into the wilderness and stop at some house with an outdoor kitchen with a wood fire burning in it, and we would sit there and the wife, who was probably the mother of one of his students or something, you know, and she would cook up a meal for us and we would sit around and talk. It was a place out of, say, one hundred years ago. Every place he went, people smiled. He was a great philosopher, too.

David : I’m glad I treated him well (at Sandy’s wedding).

Sandy : (laughing out loud) Yes, I’m glad you did, too.

David : I probably picked up his vibrations.

Sandy : Yes, you probably did. He was a very special human being.

David : I talked to all of the people that day. I wanted them to feel at home.

Sandy : Yes, everyone was so very happy to be here. He taught me so much about consideration of others, just observing his treatment of other people.

David : It has to do with the etiquette of love, doesn’t it? The question we raised last week.

Sandy : Yes. The courtesy of love, exactly. (sigh) So, he fell off a roof. He was trimming a mango tree, and a branch whipped around and hit him.

David : Oh dear. He shouldn’t be up at that age. I’m, doing the same thing. I’m 73 and I’m up on this roof, and I shouldn’t be doing it. It’s insane. But I do it. We still feel young.

Sandy : Yes, well, he was 62.

Susie : 62! That’s young. I thought you said he was 67.

David : Well, I don’t feel good about his going now. But that was in the feeling of what the next realm is that…

Sandy : I know. And I said to Susie, Thank God for my faith that there is a next realm, and that Francisco, who always asked questions about faith and religion, now he has the answers. He used to play at the masses at church down in Canas. He would play the guitar for the mass. He was a very religious person. But he was always questing, searching, asking. So I feel a little better knowing that now he’s got all the answers. He was also an alcoholic, and hadn’t had a drink for thirty years.

Oliver : No more pain. What they said after your mother died. Does he have a wife?

Sandy : Yes. She was at the wedding in that long brown dress.

Oliver : I think I met them. They were sitting on the bench and enjoying the flowers.

David : Yes, I was thinking about the number of your Tico friends at the wedding. They come into this place and have an appreciation for it, not because of any ostentatious wealth around here, because there isn’t, but because of the Costa Rican wealth that is here, they can appreciate their own land and what can be done putting things the land.

Sandy : Yes, they enjoyed being here very much.

Susie : What was your definition of old fashioned Costa Rican courtesy.

David : Oh, I loved your description of that, Sandy. She said it, it’s the courtesy and respect toward others, it’s a Godly trait. It’s love.

Sandy : As Americans we think of it as an old fashioned way of being. It’s a very traditional country kind of kindliness.

Susie : I remember what I was first taught about being in Costa Rica. No matter who you are talking to, the gas station man, the man in the grocery store, you needed to first create courtesy…it is their protocol…the courtesy of asking about the family, what’s happening, before you go on to business.

Sandy : Yes, you relate first, business second.

Oliver : I remember this from growing up in the old country. People were relating, sometimes I called it clumsy as a young boy, but now I know better, it was a wonderful, loving courtesy of respecting the other and acknowledging the other.

David : I’m wondering if this is universal to what is called third world, or developing countries. On Maui they called it talking story. You always talked story first.

Oliver : I am reminded that we had an assignment for today to talk about the courtesy of love. Maybe we are in the middle of it.

Sandy : Yes, I think we are. For me it involves at least a temporary putting of the other person before yourself. In the sense of trying to listen, trying to find out where the other person is, trying to hear their feelings, trying to absorb them in a way, before you get to your own agenda and expression of your needs. It’s really listening, hearing them, listening between the lines. It is much more common here.

Susie : It has an element of patience to it. I’m thinking of all the patience we’ve learned here, because everything goes so slowly. And how speeded up it is in the States, not a lot of time for the courtesies. Quick, quick messages, back and forth, the faster the better. Like love, courtesy has gotten a bad reputation, hypocritical, doesn’t mean anything.

Sandy : A time waster.

Susie : The courtesy of love as involving patience, respect, where love is leading.

David : It’s a quality of attention. The teachers used that early on, as to how we attend to one another. For example, the quality of attention I gave to Francisco was probably the courtesy of love. I felt that way toward everyone that day, even L. (laughter)

Sandy : Yes, a quality of attention with no intention other than to hear the other person, give them space to express themselves, to relate to you. In other words you aren’t setting up the rules first, you are waiting for the pattern to evolve, you are not pushing your own agenda. You are just there, present and paying attention.

Oliver : This reminds me of Jesus who did this with everybody. He would be stop working, even for children. One person who taught this to me was Franklin Daniels. Franklin would invite me to his shop, and every time I would go there, no matter if he was welding, or running one of his machines, he would stop. Stop working. And ask me about my family, and what was going on. And he did not do that just for me, but for every person who came in.

Sandy : One day Franklin accused me of being in a rush. (laughter) My dad was constantly putting little nicks and dents in his car. Franklin is a pastor, you know. And I think he has a doctorate in Philosophy, too. But he is an extraordinary human being, and I would go dashing there to get my dad’s car fixed. And he would ask me, Sandy where are you going? And I’m running. And he would go, Don’t you have the time?

Oliver : Now he is not working in the shop. He has a full time job at the church.

Sandy : Yes, I went on Christmas Eve. His message had to do with “no room in the inn,” so we make room in our hearts.

David : Yes, that is something Franklin would say. I met him through you, Oliver, then learned he had taken courses at the same seminary I had attended. I felt the tenderness of his heart. We went to the service when his church first opened, and they acknowledged us.

Sandy : Yes, he and Francisco were very alike in that way.

David : I think one of the qualities of the courtesy of love is transparency. (discussion ensued re past difficulties and their resolution) I also remember something in the Urantia book that said that fairness is the first step in love. That impressed me, because I grew up in a home of ten children. How do parents treat ten children fairly, with all those different needs? I perceived that if they did not treat me fairly, that would create some doubt about their love.

Susie : Yes, I could see my father trying to treat all four of us fairly, which to him also meant equally. And he tried. I often thought he failed miserably, (laughter) and there were some pretty bizarre results. But I honored him for trying. Still, it is true, when I perceived him treating me unfairly, it created doubt in the love.

Sandy : That happened in our family, too, of course. Fairness in love, it seems to me, if it was consistently applied, you would have no doubt.

Susie : Legion once said something to the effect that a lot of our family difficulties, a lot of our confusion, is because we have love linked up with other functions. Like war! (laughter) I’m going to kill you in the name of love. Shut up kid, this hurts me more than you! I’m doing this for your own good!

Oliver : Yes, we all have expectations of someone else, and then accuse them of not loving you if they don’t do what you want. That’s not love. I don’t have a comparison to make, because I was an only child.

David : You still are! (laughter)

Sandy : Attend, David. Attend. Attend. (laughter)

David : Excuse me for interrupting.

Oliver : It has come to me that God loves each and every being in all of the universes equally. It is something that I begin to understand what it means. The repercussions of that is that I need to love everybody equally also. That is the real tough for me. Because there are people you jive with, and you love them. And then there are those you don’t jive with so well, and those you don’t jive with at all. And the job is still to love them.

David : That’s an ideal. The teachers have recently cautioned us to pay attention to the fact that our love is conditional. We have to accept that even as we strive for the ideal.

Oliver : It’s a striving.

Susie : A striving and yearning.

David : Legion even went further than that when he addressed Sandy’s nervousness before her wedding. One of the things he said was that you will eventually reach a state in which you love everybody the way you love your partner. That blew me away.

Sandy : I think of fairness as being justice, also. To do justice to another person is not to judge him. We are usually so quick to pass judgment on other people, and that doesn’t fall into the courtesy of love.

Susie : This is where their phrase, “the humility of respect for love.” Having the humility of respect for the love that I know is in that person, even if I don’t feel it in this conditional world, that love, God’s love, is in that person, too. And I need to have respect for that.

David : I’ve worked with that one, too. I’ve felt very challenged by that, the idea of projecting on other people, these strangers we see on the street in San Jose, ugly, dirty, strange, and to be able to see the spirit of god in them is a very challenging and demanding thing for me. I try to practice it when I am in the city. But to pick up on what you were saying, Sandy, about judging. Another word is discrimination. There is a connection between discrimination and wisdom. Being able to discriminate things; the difference between good and evil, for instance. We can’t avoid being discriminating. Remember? In one of the earliest lessons the teachers spoke of walking in the peaceful, beautiful jungle, but you stay alert because there are snakes there. We do live on a planet where there is a great deal of disorder. There are some people whose behavior may seem hateful, iniquitous.

Sandy : It is not for me to judge a Hitler, it is up to God to judge. So many difficulties, it is helpful to let God handle it. I don’t’ need to go around actively hating others. Give it up to God.

Oliver : That is what we’ve been taught over and over, any person you are having difficulty with, immediately put them in the heart room, put your fears in the heart room, or in the stillness, which is actually the same thing. Surrender it to God and let Him handle it. It is the intention that matters, that we want to do good. It is not possible to resolve all problems, if any at all, and therefore God can, He turns negative into positive. And that is why we surrender to him. And it works for me. When I think about it. The problem is remembering to think to do it. The emotions come first, and then I think about it. But the intervals between the emotional reaction and putting things in the heart room are getting smaller.

Susie : That’s why they are teaching the discipline of love. It is a discipline to love.

David : There is also the element of mercy here. The sons of God, Christ Michael is spoken of as having the ministry of mercy, which is extending mercy toward those who have gone in the wrong direction, a caring attitude toward people who have messed up. There is mercy in the nature of existence in the form of this help.

Susie : “And so you rest in the patience of the Mother’s embrace, and you take the hand of mercy extended by beloved Michael through the pain of discouragement, and you are restored to the bed of faith and the blanket of love.” (last Sunday’s transcript)

Group Stillness Practice : We created the Heart Room.

Sandy : I want to thank you for the gift of Francisco’s life. May his lessons always abide in my heart.

Alana : Yes, this is Alana.

Sandy : Welcome, dear one. (tears)

David : Welcome.

Lesson

Alana : Thank you. Your friend has surrendered his earth life with the same grace of God’s love that was so familiar to you in him. He is greeted with abundant love. As you learn to remember that love without the human sense of loss, you will come to know, as your gratitude has expressed, the fullness of his life, his love, is with you, now and always. The flow of love goes on beyond him as an individual human being on earth. Having received his love, having come to know his love as always present, you will experience remembrance of his love as a kind of knowing that radiates from you, and stepping away from your grief, relinquishing the habit of knowing his love because he was with you on your physical plane, you will begin to give that love away so that he may live forever, living and breathing in your heart, on your plane of existence, and then in the hearts of others.

Still, my beloved, I embrace your tears, for you have been going through the transformation of love unique to the loss of life. (Sandy’s mother died two months ago, and another friend as well.) Several times now, you have “lost” a loved one, to find them once again, not lost, but in the heart room of love that resides within you.

Fear not your rage. Fear no shame for tears. We are grateful for the love you have expressed through your emotions, by allowing your emotions to be seen and trusting them to your friends. We are grateful that when fear and doubt would send you away, you chose instead to turn again toward the love that even in fear and doubt is always there, the love that is the heart room, your heart room, the heart room of your friends who gather now with you at your table of surrender to the humility of respect and the faith in God’s love for you, placed in each of you, to be shared together. If two or more are gathered…in the communion of love, the common yearning shared…Father, Mother, Michael…I shall be there.

Learn the lessons of loyalty-love. You may climb tall mountains, breathe in rarefied air, but as you are accustomed to saying, the prize is worth it, the struggle pays off. The struggle reveals the joy in the pain.

Dialogue

Sandy : Alana, I am very grateful for your love and for your words of comfort. I think my human losses would be so much more difficult to bear if I hadn’t leaned so much about faith in the last years. So I am deeply grateful for your lessons.

Alana : Thank you.

David : I would like to ask a question at this time, if it is permissible.

Legion : Yes, certainly. This is Legion.

David : Welcome, Legion. The first time I heard the term loyalty-love was in the Urantia book. It always described the relationship between Jesus and the twelve as loyalty-love. Both of those qualities are distinct and understandable, but the combination…the feeling I get is…that love is something to be loyal to…that is what you are loyal to…those you love, the values you love, etc. Can you help me to clarify that concept of loyalty love.

Legion : May I give you words of comfort as well. There is loyalty to love, as an ideal. I speak of loyalty love as the love that is learned by being loyal to love that is given and received. I speak of the loyalty that is learned as you stay faithful to the path of learning to love in the presence of fear and doubt, and dissimulation. Loyalty love has a depth of patience and understanding beyond the transitory dreams of prince charming, or even the magical Cinderella. Loyalty love is learning accrued from welcoming all change with love. And learning accrued from the practice and discipline of opening your hearts and minds, surrendering your will to God’s will of love, that you may curb your tongues with love, infuse your minds and imaginations with love. Loyalty love has the characteristics of what you call wisdom; sorting through the confusion and, as you say, going straight to the heart of the matter. Loyalty love is forgiving: for giving love away, for receiving the gift of another’s pain as a form of love given up for correction. Loyalty love will always see the need for mutual correction, therefore it is always respectful and greets every circumstance with humility.

David : May I ask, please Legion, if all…you said something about the nature of love, that correction is mutual correction, in other words correction on both sides. Is this always the case with correction?

Legion : Thank you. As now, your question of love raises the correction of affirmation. You and I have engaged in an act of love and mutual correction. It is an error to see correction as the teacher taking the red pencil to the submitted document. Rather, the correcting time, the purest and deepest meaning of correction in this time is a co-operative experience, always mutual. Love pours down by me and through me into you, and you are rested, bathed in the light, filled to overflowing. Then you give it away, and it flows from you and through you to another. Mutually given. Mutually received. Truly “heaven on earth,” the communion of love, like the heart room, a community effort, a mutual choice to love, and to manifest love with greater fidelity as you walk the path, loyal to the lessons of love, loyal to the learning, widening the path and illuminating wherever you go. Thank you.

David : Thank you.

Legion : Has this been a useful discussion? Is there anything anyone would say more?

David : in the story I’ve been writing about the Master, what I understood about the concept of loyalty love that got me going on this story. What I saw was that it was the love the twelve had for the Master, and the love the Master had for the twelve, that allowed them to go through the sort of things they had to go through at the end. It was very clear to me on the basis of the record in the Urantia Book that these twelve had very few clues about the kingdom. As a matter of fact, they were fighting at Jesus’ last supper. I’ve been attracted to that concept of loyalty love, Legion, and I was just wanting to see if I could get some more guides. I’ve been very open to what you had to say and I look forward to reading it in script form.

Legion : They were being very human. There is no shame.

Oliver : Legion, I have a more practical request for an act of loyalty to love. I would like to know if you have been looking in on our sister, Neena, and how she is doing.

David : Wonderful.

Irivina : This is Irivina.

David : Welcome.

Irivina : Have faith in my love for her. Your little chickadee still dances on light bird feet of the spirit of love and forgiveness that is so fully painted on the walls of her heart in her unique form and pattern.

Sandy : Irivina, I don’t know if we can do this. But if it is possible, can you let her know how much we love her and miss her.

Irivina : I bring her now into your heart room with the grace of God’s will. Blow your love upon her. Yes, she has been struck through with clarity of your love.

Sandy : Thank you.

Irivina : Have no fear, no doubt, she has been snagged by the spirit of love, and feels even now in her absence, loyalty to each one of you. We will not let that minnow go too far away, yes?

David : Thank you for your beautiful watch care over our loved one, Irivina. I love you.

Alana : She has left with a spirit of mutual gratitude. This is Alana, once again, to say, I love you. As well, to say thank you for your serious consideration of our assignment to you.

Sandy : Alana, do you have anything to add, or does Legion have anything to clarify, regarding our conversation?

Alana : Hakim will return.

Sandy : Thank you.

Alana : Thank you. And so, create the heart room, once again, joining your hands. Allowing the rivers of love to flow through your vessels, your human lives, manifestations of love. Thank you.

Tar –al-Hakim : This is Hakim.

David : Welcome.

Closing

Hakim : So, where there is love, patience is the accelerator. This lesson you are learning so well, opens the opportunities for you to receive my observations. She (the t/r) has yet to give her complete permission, and this, my beloved friends, contributes to the lesson. I welcome your invitations, do not cease asking for my love to come through in the form of wisdom in words from her mouth. As you open, so you will receive. It is the courtesy of love that waits for complete permission to speak.

Sandy : We welcome your love and we welcome your observations, Hakim.

Hakim : Thank you. Enjoy your week. I will be with you again. Thank you.

David : Thank you.

Oliver : Thank you, Tar-al-hakim.

Hakim : Express your love. Bring joy with you everywhere you go. Leave a smile, or a giggle, if you will, to be remembered. Thank you.

T/R : I wish I could sing, I am hearing such music.

Sandy : Do you think that is Devina?

T/R : No, I think it follows Hakim. Maybe he was a dancing monk. (laughter)

David : Maybe it is joy bells. I was thinking of that song when he said his last words. “Joy bells, joy bells, ringing in your heart. Keep the Savior here below, with you every where you go, and you shall keep the joy bells ringing in your heart.” We sang that in Sunday school.