Are you contagious?

Are you contagious? My mother used to tell me that if I wasn’t careful, I’d catch a cold…’catch’ a cold. Now I know people don’t ‘catch’ colds, that the germs are there all the time and something activates them. In similar fashion we’re all, as Linda McNamar said, “God-infected beings, carriers of divinity. [The ‘germs’ of] peace, joy and creativity are already within us waiting to be activated. We are contagious with God.” Unfortunately, we are also contagious with the ego, with the germs of fear, hate, anger, doom and gloom. We are always contagious, its our choice as to what we ‘catch’ and what we infect others with.

When we actively set the intention to praise and bless the conditions in our lives and the people around us, we become infectious with God, spreaders of goodwill. Wayne Teasdale, a Catholic lay monk who opened himself to Hindu traditions, quoted by Daniel Shoer Roth in the Miami Herald, said living this way is truly the point of all religions. “The Hindu, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the Jew, the Jain, the Sikh, the Christian and [even] the agnostic all belong to the same planetary environment….It is essential for the future for all the traditions to recognize this underling unity.” No matter the narrow theological distinctions, bottom line, we are all in the same boat, either contagious with God in service to the planet and humankind or with the ego.

“When we honor God and look to His guidance, it will lead to ideas that already exist [like the germs] for solving every problem we face no matter how entrenched,” Colleen Douglass said in the Christian Science Monitor. To me, ‘His guidance,’ does not mean only the bible, or recognized theological dogma and it’s certainly not ‘His,’ not masculine. To me, guidance is the still small voice within, what the Course calls the Holy Spirit and manifests as a combination of compassion, connection, inclusivity, oneness, joy, peace, harmony and clarity - all or nothing. If I have clarity and certainty without compassion and joy, it’s not guidance, it’s the ego.

Douglass goes on to say, “Our job is to acknowledge that we stand in the presence of this supreme Being and make sure our view of divine Principle is big enough. In other words, to take off any limitations we might impose on God….” Such as Her form, will, word, rules, etc. “When we do, we’ll naturally lift thought above the specific problem to take stock of solutions we might not have previously considered. God’s action is to harmonize, order, govern, and maintain, according to His own [and often mysterious to us from our ego dominated perspectives] law, the law of good. All elements are already in place [like the germs] to solve every problem. We must simply listen for them.”