All our programs start out teaching students to read another person’s energy. The beauty is in its simplicity: when we bring energy to consciousness, a person’s spirit can shift, and a spontaneous healing often occurs. Students read in our graduate programs, but they begin to use a variety of healing techniques as well. By the time they get to Ministers, they are drawing upon a wide variety of tools for reading and healing themselves and others. But no matter the level of learning, it all begins with an intent to heal.
A minister, according to Dictionary.com, “attend to the needs of someone”. While our ministers’ students are seeking licensure so they can serve the community by presiding over weddings, funerals, baptisms and other ceremonies and celebrations, the ultimate intent of the class is for candidates to continue clearing their energy and come more fully into trusting themselves as spiritual leaders. And again, it begins with an intent to serve and often, to offer healing to others.
Some of the adjectives that describe ministering are tend, care for, look after, nurse, treat, help, assist, doctor, and many others. The bottom line is there’s an intent to heal!
We all do it. There are many ways we minister to each other. If you are a parent, you minister. If you have pets, or elderly parents or a garden, you are a minister – where do you have other forms of life in your world that might need your service? I have a coffee shop I go to and there’s a single plant there that gets neglected. It’s in a hanging pot that leaks so it can only be watered in little sips, before it starts dribbling onto an electrical outlet below it that has some plastic taped over the top. Every time I go there, I give it a couple of sips. The place is understaffed, and the employees are ever-changing and not particularly interested, so that’s something I do because it makes me feel good. It’s a small thing but it connects me to my inclination to be of help.
Somewhere recently I saw a reference to a woman whose philosophy is, tend first to the living things. How is your partner doing? Your children? Your chickens or your dog or your house plants? Not least, how are you? I love that idea, how are the living things doing? Once we have tended to them, then we worry about the broken taillight, the laundry, the paperwork and cleaning the house.
I had a long conversation with my daughter about ministering last week; she associates it with religion and tends to dismiss anything that has a ‘church’ reference. I can understand that; many of us have experienced how religious programming from this and other lifetimes interferes with our neutrality when it comes to owning and sharing our spirituality and our knowingness. Often, we are not aware of this programming.
I reminded my daughter that ministering is older than religion; it’s really the result of our natural instinct as human beings to be in community, to love each other, to reach out and give something of ourselves to another who might be depleted or struggling to get in touch with their own resources. True ministering doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with religion, rather the religions have sprung up out of that desire to serve each other. It’s who we are as a species.
I reminded her that when she becomes overwhelmed at school and her dear friend says, come over and I’ll make you a cup of tea – that’s a beautiful, very simple example of ministering. Recently her roommate caught a cold, and my daughter told me she made soup and supplied her roommate with supplements as she recovered, and how much joy she derived from that. That’s ministering, I told her. It has nothing to do with religion, it has nothing to do with a church. But there’s a desire to heal and so we care for each other.
She commented on how good that feels! I reminded her, you’re not just ministering to someone else, you’re giving to yourself.
What comes first, is love. We were born seeking love and connection; it is our natural state and it’s love that brings us together in the spirit of tending, of taking care. That instinct sometimes gets buried in the minutiae of being human: filling out paperwork, trying to please other people, meeting expectations and fulfilling things we have learned are important to many of the people around us, whether we agree or not, if we stopped to give it some thought.
So even though we graduate a special class of licensed ministers once a year, we are all ministers at our core. If you take classes or workshops at the Center, whether you are fully conscious of it or not, you are ministering to yourself as a spirit, maybe in a way you’ve never done before. Every class, every meditation, every reading, you are giving to the self, healing the self. It is time set aside just for you and your evolution as a spirit, so you can go out into the world with more awareness and more clarity and heal and minister as you are called. Sometimes that just means tending to yourself – but in doing so you tend to the world! As we heal, we give others permission to do the same.
Our Clairvoyant graduates are ordained ministers; they earn the title of Reverend. Our Ministers Graduates are licensed ministers, gaining certification that allows them to perform various ceremonies in many states. But at heart we’re all ministers, whether we would call ourselves that or not! We all, at some point, have been called to minister in some way and in turn each of us is learning that in doing so, we also nurture and give to the Self. This fact reminds me of a favorite poem:
Small Kindnesses
By Danusha LamérisI’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
Happy Winter, and many blessings to you all!
Katie
Rt. Rev. Katie Heldman is the Co-Director of Psychic Horizons Center, and wrote this article for the January 22, 2024 eNews.
