This Old House: It Isn’t What It Used to Be

I think I may have sold my house in Virginia.

I can hear some of you saying, “What do you mean you MAY have sold your house back East? Isn’t selling real estate sort of like being pregnant? Either you are or you aren’t!”

Well, when we moved from Oklahoma to Virginia I had to sell my home in Tulsa three different times. The first time the buyer walked away. The second time the buyer was not able to get financing. However, the third time worked like a charm, and the deal went through!

When you put a house on the market, the sign says: FOR SALE. But oftentimes when you sign a contract, the new sign says: SOLD. In reality the new sign should read as follows: CONTRACT PENDING. BUT IN REAL ESTATE, THERE ARE GREAT SLIPS BETWEEN THE CUP AND THE LIP. I guess you can’t fit all that on a sign in your front yard. But it seems to be the truth.

With the above in mind, I read an interesting posting by a dear spiritual writer by the name of Ginger Rue. I actually read this the very day that I electronically signed the contract on the sale of my Virginia house.

Ginger writes that her dad grew up in a beautiful home in a nearby town. “In the 1990s, a decade after both my grandparents were gone, Daddy sold the house, which was a tough but practical decision,” she lamented.

Ginger and her father often drive past the old house, and when they do, they get very nostalgic. One day, she saw a young man cutting the grass in what used to be her grandfather‘s vegetable garden. “I couldn’t help but flag him down and ask about the place while sharing its history,” she said.

“Don’t you love the green-and-white Italian marble fireplace,” she asked the young man?

“Oh, there’s no fireplace anymore,” he replied. “The owner renovated it years ago.”

Ginger said that as she drove away, tears came to her eyes. “How dare anyone desecrate Big Daddy’s house,” she thought.

Her father and Ginger had been toying around with the idea of buying back the big old house. When she told her father what had happened, he responded, “I guess now we don’t have to think about how to get it back. It’s no longer the house we remember.”

What struck home for me in Ginger‘s blog was that I also learned that the potential buyer of my Virginia home was planning to do a ton of renovation work on my old hacienda. I was told that he planned to rip several walls out. Not only that, but this buyer intended to remove our beautiful indoor hot tub/Jacuzzi that is part of the master bedroom suite.

I said to myself, “ I can understand removing a wall or two… but demolishing that beautiful and sacred indoor hot tub/Jacuzzi? What could he possibly be thinking?” I even thought that maybe we should call off the sale and put my house back up on the market until a reasonable buyer comes along.

By the word “reasonable” I meant an individual who would see the spiritual value of a hot tub/Jacuzzi. Om Shanti, Om.

But then what came back to me was some basic Unity metaphysics. We talk about two different realms. First, there is the Relative Realm or the material world. This is the level where there are never ending changes. It is the realm where Italian marble fireplaces and a hot tub/Jacuzzi come and go. It is the world where nothing lasts forever — be it Big Daddy’s house or Virginia homesteads.

Fortunately, the material world is not the end-all-and-be-all. There is the Absolute Realm of Divine Mind and Divine Order. This is the realm of unchanging spiritual principles. Aldous Huxley called this the level of the “perennial philosophy.”

Unity cofounder, Myrtle Fillmore, would often tell her students to “look beyond appearances.” When we do this then, as Jesus suggested, we can “wear the world like loose clothing.” The changes in the Relative Realm do not knock us down for the count.

We start to feel connected to something beyond our shaky egos. We honestly can start to feel the “peace that passes all understanding,” and it is not tied to anything in the outside world.

On the day that I learned about the potential contract on the Virginia house — and all of the changes the potential buyer plans to make — I read some wonderful advice in THE DAILY WORD. The word that day was: ONENESS. And the affirmation was: “I am one with the one.”

THE DAILY WORD was full of great advice: “I know there’s a threshold I can cross. I picture a doorway between scattered thoughts and quiet clarity, and with a breath, I stepped through.

“On the other side, I remember I’m not separate. I’m one with God, with divine presence, with my highest self. Resting in this awareness, something deeper is revealed: I’m not just in the presence. I am one with it… I am one with the great love that blesses all,” the writer of that DAILY WORD reminds us.

So goodbye to an Italian marble fireplace, and goodbye to a hot tub/Jacuzzi. And hello to a consciousness that “looks beyond appearances.”

Many blessings,

Rev. Rick