Openings

February‘s theme is Openings. This month we celebrate Black History month, offering a powerful book study group, reading #1 New York Times Bestseller, Stamped, and a transformational 4-week workshop, learning and activating the Orishas!

Have you begun to see the red hearts, boxed candy, pink balloons, and red roses in the grocery stores, as I have? Valentine’s Day is always a good time to take inventory of our Heart, the innate purity of our Heart. A personal inventory requires tremendous willingness and availability and….Openness. When we’re Open, we’re willing to expose, at least a little bit, the parts of us that are calling for more love, more forgiveness, compassion, understanding and generosity to the Light of our awareness. Once the matters of the Heart are honestly and vulnerably brought out into the Open, consciously, we stand at the Crossroads. With choice. Fear or Love? Victim or Blessing? And this is power. Openings are power.

When we intend the quality of Opening, even to be willing to be willing to Open, to an Eternal Power, a Divine Intelligence, a Presence of Grace, Beauty, Wisdom and Complete Unconditional Love, for ourselves and for another, our Soul is then given permission to lead. Our gut, heart and frontal lobe may then become energetically available for intuitions, insights, and Revelations, and we see the Presence of Love and hear the Voice of Love and feel the Power of Love…we’re available for transformation.

In Love and Light,

Rev. Victoria

Destiny
Here we are at the beginning again. There is something about the start of the new year that contains a purified energy of infinite potential. It is an intentionality from our heart of our personal vision, our goals and our deepest desires. The good news is that we are created out of the substance and form of the Love Intelligence governing the universe.

This Love Intelligence, this Power and Presence that is the only power and presence placed all of its magic genius, creativity, bounty, beauty, love and wholeness in us as It created us so that It could express Itself through each of us. These are not just words, but a mandate for us to fulfill. It is the destiny of the rose to fully bloom and release all of its fragrance and beauty. It is the destiny of your soul to fully evolve, awaken, express and give all that you are, which is a perfect Divine Blueprint of Unconditional Love.

This month of January 2021, let us anchor this truth and set each other free.

In Love and Light,

Rev. Victoria

COMPLETE

This month, we celebrate the fulfillment of Love and the promise of Truth with our theme, Complete. This word is both an adjective and a verb and its root means, “full, to fulfill.” In New-Thought-Ageless-Wisdom teachings, we often hear, “God is Whole, Perfect & Complete.” God is in Its fullness everywhere, at all time and space, beyond time and space. There is no wanting, no deficiency in God. This is the Truth Principle that is, regardless of how we feel or what we experience.

The sun is always shining in its full radiance, regardless of cloud cover, time of day or season. This is the season that humanity in Earth’s Northern Hemisphere has celebrated the realignment of our perspective in the cosmos with the Sun’s rays, on our Winter’s Solstice, December 21, 2020. Until then, our nights were longer and darker, but the promise of Truth, the Complete nature of our Sun is revealed to us, yet again. It had never changed. We can turn to this Truth amidst any suffering and this very act of alignment brings forth demonstration.

It is December of 2020 and many folks are experiencing lonely feelings, grief, food lines, job loss, housing loss, political turmoil, injustice, and the like. Personally, I have never had to work so hard at this inner practice, of turning within to the Completeness of God amidst such intense collective and personal pain and fear, in all my life. How grateful I am, that I am not practicing this alone, but surrounded by a Beloved Community, the Agape East Spiritual Center. We are complete, together. During this Holy Season of Light, may you be wrapped in the Radiance, Peace and Abundance of God.

In Love and Light,

Rev. Victoria

IMAGINAL KNOWING

I am writing this monthly theme letter weeks before November of 2020 begins. This is the ninth month that we have navigated a pandemic, spotlighting a longstanding, underlying infection of social and racial injustice and violence. Is this presidential election going to be the onset of labor pains, the birth, or the marker for the conception point? It seems like a pivotal moment in our nation’s history, and no matter the result, divisiveness and passions have been exposed.

We can never underestimate the grace, glory, and mystery of what appears like confusion, pain, or suffering. There is always the Presence of God and the Nature of God at work in all, through all, as all. This is Truth Principle. God is Omnipresent, Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omniactive as Absolute Love, Absolute Wholeness, Absolute Life. The Eternal Nature of Life, Love and Illumination is always in back of any outer conditions. Out of the dark mud comes the beautiful lotus. Out of the liquefied caterpillar comes the flight of the butterfly. Out of the pain of labor comes birth.

Our theme, Imaginal Knowing, is how things in our unconscious come into our conscious awareness. It happens on the right side of the brain, free of language, rational thinking, concepts, logic, and measurement. Imaginal Knowing is a right brain activity, the stuff of dreams, intuition, fantasies, symbols. Imaginal Knowing is not subject to conditions, time, and space. There are no hard lines in Imaginal Knowing. It is a wisdom and understanding that the conception becomes the labor, the labor becomes the birth, the birth becomes consciousness individualized, on and on. Suffering becomes wisdom and wisdom decreases the ignorance of Knowing Who and What we really are, the Presence of Love.

I believe it was Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s experience of Imaginal Knowing when he said, “I have a Dream.” Steeped in his true nature of Christ Love, he caught the height of a mighty vision for humanity during a time when the steps to get there, the process was obscured and seemingly impossible. Imaginal Knowing can be challenging to lean into when the environment, circumstances, and phenomena are painful or overwhelming. But his surrendered life was lived in the Name of Love, making his dream vivid enough to articulate and share.

Spiritual leaders, which we all are, are the midwives of these moments. Now it is our turn to surrender to Christ Love and make vivid our Imaginal Knowing of a Grace that opens the heart of every man, woman, and child.

In Love and Light,

Rev. Victoria

HARVEST

October is here. Our theme is Harvest. For me, this word brings feelings of bounty and plenty, supply and generosity, qualities each living being deserves to experience.

The Principle says that what we sow, we shall reap and we are always reaping the harvest of the vibrational quality in our hearts. The seeker’s heart is one committed to unity and compassion, creating a world that truly does work for everyone – a world of generosity, sustainability, justice and equality.

As seekers and students on the Path of awakening consciousness, we must embody the Principle in what a Harvest is and hone our abilities, now more than ever, to see past the out-picturing of personal problems, pandemics and politics, to what is being birthed. This is the sowing. It’s the understanding that our calling forth the new society lived in Love, Balance and Peace already IS. God IS.

So, this month at Agape East we shall hunker down on our understanding of Consciousness made manifest and celebrate the Harvest of Justice, Wholeness, Generosity and Love.

In Love and Light,

Rev. Victoria

Harmony

This September we celebrate Harmony as our monthly theme. This word means so much! In its Greek origin, it means joint, agreement, concordance.

Everything in the cosmos is working for the Highest Good. All is unfolding in a Higher Order of perfect expression. These are Truths that we can choose to stand in, regardless of appearances. We can trust this because Harmony is the fundamental nature of the Universe and so evident in how flowers turn to fruit, how wounds heal and how the planet rotates on its axis while orbiting our sun. That is Harmony.

Everything is energy and vibration, and Harmony is the symmetry, consistency and beauty that connects it all. May we walk in this Peaceful connectedness in all we do this month.

In Love and Light,

Rev. Victoria

Love and Law

The heat of August is upon us. It feels like a fire. It feels to me like this fire has been burning for a long, long time. The heat of transformation does that. Maybe the fire is a virus. Maybe the fire is racial, social, economic and political injustice. Maybe the fire is the various personal challenges that we each have amidst it all. We’re all burning up or burning down in some way. Sometimes it just hurts and sometimes it feels like the phoenix, rising among the ashes only to burn again. How to relieve suffering? How to touch the transcendent nature of the Christ Mind? These questions are what I thirst to know. And so this month we will explore Love and Law.

The Law of Cause-and-Effect, the Law of Correspondence, the Law of Mind, and the Law of Attraction tell us that our Word (conscious or unconscious thought and feeling) becomes Law, and Law always and eternally manifests. Ernest Holmes tells us, “Every living soul is a law unto itself but for most, this is unconscious.” It is in understanding this principle that lifts us out of victimized states of mind and emotion into states of intentional co-creation, where we take our self, our habitual thinking, our patterns of behavior, our own sense of discipline into our own hands to re-create a new life in each new moment. It may not be easy but it is simple and ours to do. We are not on our own in our mandate either.

The Good News, the God-Spell, the Gospel of the great master teacher Jesus the Christ tells us that Love transcends the Law of Cause and Effect. In the moment that we turn to Love Source, to the Christ Mind, we have come under a greater Law of Grace. This Grace transcends time, space, matter, statistics, duality and karma. Love is our true nature and calls us to action as forgiveness, going through the eye of the needle. Forgiveness is the key.

When we realize and remember the Truth of our Being, our Christ Nature, that untouchable Light within that cannot be hurt, limited, diagnosed, ignored or abandoned, then in that moment we are lifted into a lucidity from all that kept us in the illusion of separation from our Creative Source, God, Divine Mother, Primal Force. From this I AM Presence of Self, we look out upon the world and forgive. We forgive ourselves foremost, and we forgive all others for forgetting that we are One in Love and only Love.
This is the Healing Field that our species is Called to activate now, into Law. We are not alone. We stand on the shoulders of great souls whose Love has shown us the way.

In Love and Light,

Rev. Victoria

Liminality

Whenever we stand at a threshold of transformation, be it a rite of passage or a life milestone or a life change, we experience liminality. When the caterpillar begins to die, creates the cocoon and liquefies, it is in liminality until it takes its first flight. I remember once taking an airplane flight for 24 hours to India. I took off from Los Angeles and crossed over the Pacific Ocean, going back in time. When I landed, it was two days in the future, however. It was a completely liminal experience. It is neither here nor there, a place of limbo, suspension of identity, time and space. We know that the old world, our old self, has come to an end but the new self, the new world, has not been reborn or initiated.

I remember another liminal time when I had completed years and years of ministerial training, my thesis, my oral panels and my final exam. I was no longer the same Victoria. The whole entire experience had completely changed me to my core, but I wasn’t a graduated initiated minister yet. There was a period of time before I had been given the charge and taken my vows, and I remember being confused and frightened. I was certain that I could not carry through with any of it and live the life of a minister. I remember sharing this with my teacher days before the ceremony and his saying, “It’s too late. It’s already done.”

I am having this same sense of liminality again. The origin of the word is the Latin root meaning “a threshold.” I feel that our planet, our collective human consciousness, our nation is standing at the threshold. Sometimes I hear myself asking, “Can we make this quantum leap of inclusiveness, compassion and giving in our human collective consciousness? Will we make the necessary strides of legislation and love that are being called forth to dismantle the systemic racism that this country was built upon? Will the pain, fear, suffering and death of this pandemic be the mulch that enriches our soul to live fully, forgive fully, love unconditionally and grow?”

As we stand at the threshold both individually and collectively let us look back at the past. Look at all the fears, the pain, all the mistakes, all the joys and triumphs and bless it all and let it go. We don’t know what the future holds. We don’t know what is trying to come forth, but we know that we can’t turn back and undo all that has shaped us to this moment. We must stand at this threshold, stand in this liminal space and know that God is Good and God is Love. Love will always have the final say. The Holy Spirit uses everything for good. It’s already done. We can step through the threshold now.

In Love and Light,

Rev. Victoria