• Editor’s note: “Spiritual leaders answer” is a weekly column inviting Kaua‘i’s religious and spiritual leaders to share their doctrine’s perspective on a suggested subject. Every Friday a topic is printed inviting a response. Submissions are edited for content and
• Editor’s note: “Spiritual leaders answer” is a weekly column inviting Kaua‘i’s religious and spiritual leaders to share their doctrine’s perspective on a suggested subject. Every Friday a topic is printed inviting a response. Submissions are edited for content and length. Due to space limitations, submitting a piece does not guarantee publication. The topic of creation will continue next week due to the number of submissions. Thoughts or suggestions for future topics are always welcome. Next week the suggested topic is confidence. The topic at the end of the column is for the following week.
Wendy Winegar
Christian Science
The founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, wrote, “God gives you His spiritual ideas, and in turn, they give you daily supplies.” Those spiritual ideas not only provided my friend, Kathy Chicoine, a Christian Science practitioner from North Carolina, what was needed at tax time, but also brought about a change of heart that blesses her each year.
Tax time is a great time to remember in our prayers that man, as God’s perfect creation, is fully supplied with everything he needs. Kathy proved this.
One tax season, she and her husband owed $5,000 more than they had expected. While praying for an answer, she remembered a story where Jesus told Peter to get tax money from a fish’s mouth (Matt. 17:24–27). This helped her see that our provision isn’t limited, but that provision is spiritual, and God is its source.
A statement from Paul the apostle helped her see how we can appreciate equality and balance in all things: “I mean not that other men be eased, and ye be burdened: But by an equality, that now at this time your abundance may be a supply for their want, that their abundance also may be a supply for your want: That there may be equality” (II Cor. 8:13, 14). This insight is relevant today. She saw that their family business offered products and services that had value, and “by an equality” there would be a desire for them.
Within hours, an order over $5,000 came in. But the check would arrive after the tax bill was due. So she continued to pray with great gratitude for this unexpected provision, affirming what is true about God’s nature as it relates to us as His children. God knows order. In fact, one definition of “economy” is “the divine plan.” If God’s plan is based on divine principle, another name for God, then this principle is expressing order, which is never delayed or stalled.
Later, the customer called to ask if the work could start sooner and if he could expedite payment. This was evidence of the divine action or Christ, providing for us, in His perfect creation, meeting all human needs.
Lama Tashi Dundrup
Kaua‘i Tibetan Buddhist
Dharma Center
According to “The Torch of Certainty,” a seventh-century teacher named Atisha this primordial principle, creation, is very simple. Everything is mind or consciousness. This state is inside and outside of the human condition. Its inside aspect is awareness. Outside it is the natural world or universe which is boundless and is fabricated by five elements, which are like one’s mother who created us. They are earth, water, fire, air and space. These five elements make up our body and all existing phenomena. We call this nature. Inside we have natural mind. This mind is not distorted by emotional egotistical tendencies. These two, nature and natural mind cannot be separated, they are primordial and have no beginning, middle or end. Therefore creation has no beginning, middle or end. With this realization one becomes a Buddha of boundless light and altruistic compassion.
Only humans can accomplish this state of mind and there is nothing more than this. You then understand that everything and everyone is interconnected and no “thing” or no “one” is self created. Therefore, there can be no concept of an ego or soul. You become totally healed on all levels: Physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. This is the realization of non-separation. Loving kindness and compassion for self, others and the environment, merges the relative and ultimate states of mind as a unity.
Topic for two
weeks from today
• Will you speak to us on fatigue?
• Spiritual leaders are invited to e-mail responses of three to five paragraphs to pwoolway@kauaipubco.com.
• Deadline each week is 5 p.m. Tuesday.
