Love Yourself First

By Rev. Soni Cantrell-Smith

This month's theme is about passion and purpose. … Passion feels like an inside job, while purpose seems to live outside of yourself, something you search for. Maybe purpose is more like Dolly Parton's perspective: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” Or maybe George Bernard Shaw's quote speaks to you: “Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

This month, I invite you to stop searching for a purpose to fulfill your life. That's right. Stop thinking and overthinking why you are here and start living your life. Invite your soul to consider the idea that you may never know why you are here.

You can think about it this way: Everything you've done in life right up to the moment you are reading this has been the result of your choices and actions. You've had great disappointments, amazing accomplishments and beautiful moments. I'm sure you've created memories that will last a lifetime.

Life is about living — trying new things and making mistakes, growing and learning. And it's loving every moment for what it is and nothing more. It is all about loving yourself. Your best efforts will lead to your best moments and the greatest love you will ever find: you.

Celebrate U.N. International

Day of Peace

On Thursday, September 21, 2023, join CSL's Global Heart of Peace Initiative for a day of prayer and meditation to honor the United Nations International Day of Peace. This year's theme is Actions for Peace: Our Ambition for the #GlobalGoals. It is a call to action that recognizes our individual and collective responsibility to foster peace.

The inscription on the Peace Bell, which is rung at U.N. headquarters on this day, says, “Long live absolute world peace.” The point of Peace Day is to promote steps we can each take toward that lofty goal. This is done largely through peace education efforts, and CSL has a part to play in those

If your community plans to develop a program for International Day of Peace, please share it on CSL's Facebook page. You can find "Peace on Demand" recordings for inspiration here.

On the Road of Endless Evolution

By Ernest Holmes

Most people are afraid, you know, to admit that there might be something that happens that they do not understand, for fear people will think they're strange. Well, we're all strange. We're just different kinds of strange people and don't ever look for or hope to find any human who is perfectly sane. … Don't look for any human being who is completely perfect, objectively or subjectively. The Bible says, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven who is within you is perfect.”

We are all on the road of an endless evolution. And the end of one round of evolution marks the beginning of another, and on and on, ad infinitum. “Ever as the spiral grew, he left the past year's dwelling for the new” (“The Chambered Nautilus” by Oliver Wendell Holmes). But we are leaving the old house every moment of time. We never jump into the same river twice. We can never do two things alike twice. “Behold, I make all things new.” …

Therefore, we must put together the many ideas and their meanings and discover what [James Russell] Lowell called “that thread of the all-sustaining beauty which runs through all and dost all unite.” The common denominator of the universal archetype and prototype individualized in each one of us, universalized in itself, which is both God and people, in my estimation, at the same time.

I happen to believe that this Presence accompanies us through life and that we feel it. And I am not at all sure — now this is just between us, and I don’t want you to tell anybody I said this, not until after this talk, surely — I am not sure but the God to which or whom we often pray is our objective and subjective response, to which we feel, which is the transcendent immanence, but is not what we think it is. Would that seem strange? It doesn't seem strange to me.

— Excerpted from the August Science of Mind magazine and from the new book “Ernest Holmes at Asilomar: Lectures and Classes from the 1950,” as presented by Holmes on June 11, 1957.