Sex, Scandals And Miracles

Written by Rev. Tony Ponticello Thursday, 20 March 2008 12:00

(On Sunday, March 16, 2008, Rev. Tony Ponticello addressed the congregation at the Community Miracles Center in San Francisco, CA. What follows is a lightly edited transcription of that lecture.)

Last week the Democratic governor of New York State, Eliot Spitzer, got involved in a large sex scandal and a few days later he let go of his office. The sex scandal, I’m sure you all know, involved a prostitution and money laundering ring. That means that it most likely had strong links to organized crime. The name of the prostitution ring was The Emperors' Club, VIP (*1).

It was quite a scandal. It was a good one. It was tawdry. It was great. Governor Spitzer had been paying these very high priced prostitutes for quite some time. By some estimates, over the past year or so, he had paid $80,000 to this prostitution ring. It was actually through following the money that the FBI found out who Eliot Spitzer, or “Client-9”, was. It was these large money transactions that FBI agents were monitoring.

They caught him speaking on wiretap. It was an open and shut case. This scandal was further complicated because for one of the trysts he flew the prostitute down to Washington, DC where he was attending a meeting. When you transport someone across state lines for immoral purposes it becomes a federal crime. There are lots of potential problems going on here.

Sex scandals – of course we’ve had many of them. We’re used to them. The most famous one in recent history – actually it’s ten years old now – was when in 1998 Democratic President Bill Clinton was involved in a sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky who had been a White House intern. They had been having a sexual interaction that had lasted quite a long time and this included sexual acts going on right in the Oval Office.

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The Laugh Of Enlightenment

Written by Rev. Tony Ponticello Sunday, 15 October 2006 12:00

(On Sunday October 1, 2006, Rev. Tony Ponticello addressed the congregation at the Community Miracles Center in San Francisco, CA. What follows is a lightly edited transcription of that talk.)

As some of you know, over the past month or two I’ve been quoting little bits and pieces of something I wrote many years ago for the Internal Revenue Service which was a summary of the thought system of A Course In Miracles (*1). It’s my goal to quote consecutive bits of this as we go along through this year and to talk about them as they relate to whatever seems to be going on in the world. I’m calling this my “Basics” series. This would be number three in the series.

This is what I wrote and told the IRS. Here’s the next phrase that I want to focus on. “Into this reality, where all was one, a false idea came into the mind of the Christ, the idea that the Christ could somehow exist without there being a Creator. This false idea is not a problem, the problem arose when the creation took the idea seriously and forgot to laugh at it. That was the original ‘sin’ or the original ‘mistake.’”

There are a couple of ideas which I think are very important to focus on. First, that a false idea came into the mind of the Christ – all of us. That idea was that somehow that mind, the Christ, could exist without having been created. That’s the error in thinking. That’s the false idea. The second point, however, is that the problem is not that the false idea is there. The problem is that we don’t recognize the idea as something silly and just laugh at it. I think people want to get the idea out of their head but the idea is not the problem. The problem is that we take the idea seriously. We may always get these false ideas. Obviously we were in Reality, in Heaven, and false ideas were coming into our minds. The problem was we took one of those ideas seriously. We didn’t laugh at it.

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Personal Resurrection

Written by Rev. Larry Bedini Saturday, 31 March 2007 16:00

(On Easter Sunday morning, April 8th, 2007, Rev. Larry Bedini stood before the congregation at the Community Miracles Center in San Francisco. What follows is a lightly edited transcription of that lecture.)

Good morning. My talk today is on personal resurrection. I didn’t want to talk about the Easter story because we’ve heard it every Easter and if we don’t know it by now, good Lord, we never will. It’s a wonderful story and of course we all enjoy hearing it from time to time. However, I’ve been thinking about what I really want to say today and that is the idea of personal resurrection. Jesus had his personal resurrection and we should have our personal resurrection. I certainly want mine.

So, I want to talk about what that means to us – what it might mean to us on an individual, personal level, yours and mine. We think of the resurrection more in connection with Jesus rising from the dead, after being crucified and placed in the tomb. Resurrection means, by Webster’s dictionary: “rising from the dead.” But the A Course In Miracles says there is no death. It says there are many forms of death but there is no actual death. We can lay the body aside when we choose to do so but we don’t literally die. We are immortal; we are eternal. God created us that way. So, we cannot die. What God created cannot literally die. We can only move on. We can go back home when we’re ready to. The Course even teaches us that we never really left home and that we never really left God. So, we lay down the body and we move on or into another dream.

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Community Voices 4

Monday, 31 March 2008 12:00

On April 6, 2008 the Community Miracles Center officially celebrated it’s 21st Birthday. On this Sunday five of our active ministers took to the stage and gave short talks. After hearing from these “Community Voices” we had a wonderful potluck celebration. What follows are lightly edited transcriptions of these five presentations.

Rev. Geri Baskind:

Tony had said to me, when he called, “Just talk about what’s going on in your life – how the Course is impacting your life.”

I decided to go to law school. I’m a single parent. I have two kids who have issues that manifest in behavior and I work full time. I thought, “Well this is never going to happen.” But to tell you the truth the whole experience at law school has taught me more about detachment, and more about perception, than I ever thought I would ever learn. I need to be able to not only argue my side, but I have to show that I understand the other side of the argument as well – to be able to do that. But originally I was thinking “I can’t do this.” “I’m never going to be able to do this.” I called my brother who has always – I call him the one I don’t pay – he’s always been really influential for me. I told him, “You know ‘Bro’, I’m just really scared.” He said to me, “You already know how to do that. Do something different.” (laughter) I thought, “Excuse me!” I looked in the Course and it said, “Your recognition that whatever seems to separate you from God is only fear, regardless of the form it takes and quite apart from how the ego wants you to experience it, is therefore the basic ego threat.” (T-11.V.10.1) I said, “Oh! Okay.”

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