Harriet Tubman:

Icon of Love, Faith and Courage

Imagine for a moment that you are Harriet Tubman. You escape your slaveholders, reach a free state, claim your own freedom and then risk your life, over and over again, to help others escape slavery.

Imagine being in your 20s, with nothing on your side except faith and inner guidance to chart your way. Where would you summon the courage to help others? Where did she find that courage?

In the February 2021 issue of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine, Rev. Andriette Earl examines these questions. She asks readers to imagine “the strategy, the brilliance and the faith required to make it to freedom and back, time and again, with an ever-increasing bounty on her head.”

Earl writes, “In my heart’s vision, Mother Harriet, as I call her, is an icon of pure love and amazing faith — willing to sacrifice her very life to liberate and save the lives of others. I am awed by her faith, the inner knowing and strength alive in her, and her courage to take all the risks she took.”

Most difficult to imagine, perhaps, is the faith, grit and endless determination that drove Tubman onward, as she led more than 300 enslaved people to freedom. Yet, she could not have accomplished these feats without allies in the abolitionist community.

“Given our current state of affairs,” Earl adds, “I struggle to imagine us truly connecting, trusting and aligning ourselves with each other; relying on those who, although different, are deeply committed to oneness; and who, at great risk, work tirelessly at our side to enact positive change with the consistency of Mother Harriet.”

As Mother Harriet said, “Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars, to change the world.”

Join the Season for Nonviolence

The Season for Nonviolence marks the 64 days between the anniversaries of the deaths of Mohandas Gandhi on January 30 and Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4. It was cofounded by Arun and Sunanda Gandhi and the Leadership Council of The Association for Global New Thought (AGNT) in 1998.

By spending 64 days immersed in issues of nonviolence, we can learn to practice nonviolence one step at a time, one choice at a time, one day at a time. Through our daily nonviolent choices and actions, our noble and courageous spirits rise to move the world in the direction of peace.

The Gandhi Institute offers a 64-day plan for participating in these efforts. The steps may seem small — practicing gratitude or spending time in contemplation or embracing creativity — but taken together, each step leads us on the path to a peaceful world.

Learn more and plan your 64-day commitment to nonviolence here.

The One As the Only

By Ernest Holmes

Back of you, the Infinite searches into manifestation through you, as you, what you are: It is you. We don ’t have to be ashamed of it. You don ’t have to despise your personality, hate your body, think you are “a worm of the dust,” and thereby think you are surrendering to God. This is a denial of God. All we have to say is, “There is nothing in me but God.”

What we surrender to is not a foreign agent, but we acquiesce consciously in a divine host, a celestial visitor, a universal individualization. If it is true that that exists in us and it was put there, not by our will but by the will of God, who are we to deny it?

If it is that way and we have reached a place in evolution where acquiescence and consent alone can reunite our present experience with that which ceased to exist when all compulsory problems of evolution ceased, then we can say, “Long since fire or mist or planet, a crystal or a cell, a saurian and jellyfish, then caves where caveman dwell, then a sense of law and order and a face turned from the clod, some call it evolution, others call it God.”

When that day arrived in prehistoric times, that the evolutionary push had done all that could be done by compulsion, it left only the automatic reactions of the physical body to keep it going to the place of self-discovery. From then until now and forevermore it will be only the conscious cooperation at first between what appears to be the one and the other, and gradually the other as the one, and finally the one as the only.

We are not in it or of it or with it. We are it. If that is true, our future evolution will be only as we perceive that light in the darkness, until the darkness isn ’t there — only as we accept that divine individuation — that there is that within me which is already complete.

— Excerpted from a volume set of 40 essays for 40 days called “Journey Into Life.”