Doctor Siani’s course on metaphysics continued my spiritual journey which was restarted when I requested ordination and became a member of the Universal Life Church , September 3, 2007. Little did I know that requesting ordination so that I could continue performing weddings following separation from my previous denomination, would lead to a radical shift in my spiritual views. This course confirmed me in the idea that there are many paths to God. Our experience of the divine is shared with the rest of humanity, but our paths are very different, based on our training and the society in which we live.
My journey began around the age of twelve when I questioned the teachings of the fundamentalist church community that I was raised in. Although I had no theological training aside from my indoctrination, it appeared to me that the God of my community was too small. For the next twenty years, I read books on various world religions and attended a variety of churches looking for truth. I even practiced Buddhism for a couple of years, though my fundamentalist training brought me back to a somewhat more orthodox path.
In 1978 I received what I perceived to be a call to ministry which I followed, returning to California for ministerial training. I developed a neo-orthodox theology and served in parish ministry for about eight years, before moving into social services and education. I continued to study and clearly, my theology moved steadily into the liberal Christian arena. I didn’t perceive the radical change in my thinking until I took a class at the Universal Life Church Seminary on comparative religions and discovered that I most closely followed the beliefs of the Universalist Unitarian Church , which is so liberal that it is really beyond main stream and liberal Christianity. At that point, I realized that the ideas of Bishop Hensley and my seminary classes were having a profound influence on me.
This course which was based on A Course in Miracles, opened me up to the understanding that we have three minds; the conscious or lower mind where we create our world view and separate ourselves from the divine, the unconscious mind which connects us to the divine but also follows directions from the conscious, and the higher mind which could be described as the mind of God and exists in eternity. With this awareness, the cliche “let go and let God” gained new meaning. When we open ourselves up to the leadership of God through prayer and meditation, we can actually change the attitudes of the conscious mind which is controlled by the ego, and this opens us up to miraculous changes and opportunities. When we stop projecting the ego’s negative ideas on others and open ourselves to the leadership of the Holy Spirit, false ideas of right and wrong, good and evil disappear. We come to see that we are truly one, which is becoming much more than a church motto to me.
For the first time in my life, the teachings of all the world’s religions are harmonized, not in theology but in an experience of the divine. We are all children of God, which I now accept as a metaphysical reality. Our separation from each other is simply a lie of the ego. We are one with each other, one with God, and for the first time in my life, I have a concept of what it is to be one with the universe.
Rev. Richard Alan Helmerson
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The Universal Life Church is a comprehensive online seminary where we have classes in Christianity, Wicca, Paganism, two courses in Metaphysics and much more. I have been a proud member of the ULC for many years and the Seminary since its inception.
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