Hard to Love

The Mystery within...

It is hard to love the hard to love.  It’s hard to:

            Go high when the other goes low.

            Be patient in the face of oppression.

            Respond to violence with loving compassion.

            Be of generous spirit wanting good for the other.

            Not shame, blame, or impose guilt when wronged.

            Be forgiving of self and all others.

The blessings in loving the hard to love:

     I can't go wrong with sheer compassion toward the other, and myself, trusting in its hopeful forbearance.  

     My heart opens to a bigger reality of the Divine Mystery within.

     My ego shrinks and a path opens to self-transformation.  

     The important and unimportant things in life become obvious.

     Advocating for sharing, tolerance and respect become no brainers.

     I can grow as a peacemaker.  

What if the hard to love, and our own faults, are gifts to teach us how to love? 

Unchurched?

The Mystery within...

Unchurched is a word I have been hearing lately used to describe people who are no longer card carrying, dues paying members of a religious sect.  I don’t much like that word used to describe those of us who have left formal religion.  During a discussion between Arthur Zajonc, a physicist and contemplative, and Michael McCullough, a professor of psychology, on Krista Tippet’s On-Being Program, Mind and Morality:  A Dialogue, it was said of people who have left formal religion they have stepped out of the little church of virtues and have stepped into the virtues of the big church.  I really like that analogy. 

I love the big church’s virtues.  Knowing that all of creation, everything and everyone in it, is holy, helps me look for the Divine Mystery everyday.  Knowing that all of creation, everything and everyone in it, is connected, gives me pause to reflect on how my actions affect everything and everyone.  I love the freedom to be curious and to question everything.  I’ve become comfortable with knowing that answers only raise more questions to be explored.  I love the challenge of reflection and looking beyond trouble and hurtfulness.  I love knowing I belong to the big church.               

Other points that touched me in the discussion between Zajonc and McCullough were: we need to allow for differences and to explore them in safety, with respect; morality is our relationship to others and the world; empathy and compassion activates moral progress; there is no good argument for treating people differently; the fact that we can choose to separate ourselves from one another, and live and learn in a monoculture, is absolutely poisonous; education should teach us how we are going to be together as a human community; and we need to use our attention wisely.  

What if the little church of virtues and the virtues of the big church got together?

Courage

God is...

From “God Never Hurries,”  …God’s living word is in our life’s stories—tell them and write them down.

As I watched Robert Reich’s documentary, “Inequality for All,” I was grateful he chose to tell his story of how he came to be an avid advocate for the fair treatment of workers.  As a child, he said he was frequently bullied because of his very small physical stature, the result of a medical condition.  He had a friend who protected him from bullies.  When his friend grew up he continued to defend the oppressed, advocating for fairness and justice in the Civil Rights movement, which led to his murder.  His friend’s death profoundly affected Reich.  He said it gave him the courage to speak out on behalf of fair treatment of others.  He subsequently became a prolific writer, Secretary of Labor under president Clinton, and taught classes at Berkley on wealth and power.  The eye opening statistics Reich shares in his documentary highlights the flattening of workers’ wages beginning in the 1970’s, and the staggering rise in corporate profits and CEO pay.

Bringing forth gifts from oppression is a specialty of this mysterious God of ours.  I am very aware that my economic status was improved with the passage of Civil Rights legislation with its extension of equal employment opportunity to women in the workplace.  That legislation spawned training opportunities that allowed me to compete for jobs that supported my three children and myself after being widowed in 1975.  I eventually came to manage one of Robert Reich’s, then Secretary of Labor, employment programs for economically disadvantaged elderly while working for the U.S. Forest Service, Eastern Region.  I remember a national meeting I attended for the Senior Community Service Employment Program in Washington, D.C. where Reich spoke.  He then held, and still does hold, my deep respect for his heart, compassion and advocacy for the less fortunate.

What if we each told our story?  Would your story change hearts? 

2013's Blogging Gifts

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The following is a look back on thoughts from “What if …God Never Hurries” from April through December’s 2013 blogs:

Share time, talent and treasure; know your and other’s unconditional worth; be kind and tolerant; suspend judgment of self and others; listen; dialogue respectfully; allow everyone a voice; employ reason, cooperation and coordination; find a good coach; be a good coach; learn teamwork; stay in the game.

Nature heals; keep your eye on the big blue ball we live on; live simply and sustainably; everything is connected; strength and order flow from the interdependency of diverse communities; be curious; question; trust your mind, heart and gut; all that lives is holy; equal opportunity and adequate resources for everyone benefits us all; freedom workers everywhere deserve deep gratitude; share what difficulty taught us for the good of all; forgiveness transforms; understand complicity.

Suspend anxiety for things undone and the need to be perfect or right; look around and know all is good; use the written language with power and creativity; combine gentleness and strength; heal one another through laughter and tears; trust what comes, comes because it needs to; celebrate what doesn’t get done--enjoy the present; laugh and smile daily; let go of feeling too responsible; hold the questions with infinite patience; find joy and new ideas in the accomplishment of others; there is always a choice versus the victim role; be not afraid; remember serenity, take sanctuary time (rest, breadth and going within); return to being faithful without incrimination; pray daily, “What do I need to let go of today?  What do I need to embrace?”

Admire cheeky courage; affirm courage with a smile and, “You are very brave;” the voice of God within sings for peace not war, love not hate, and acceptance not rejection of the other and creates deep bonds; befriend both light and darkness—let pain be pain and mystery be mystery; silence feeds abuse; oppression hurts everyone; suffering brings deep meaning to the surface; be present to whatever is; honor pain and let it grow us into more caring people; while sitting with pain, breathing and praying eventually reveals the next step toward growth; pain brings awareness of Compassion dwelling within us--creativity flows from compassion, be part of a healing community; presence equals Presence.

Common people do have common sense; empower one another; work tirelessly for a more just world; we have the freedom to be wrong; humility is a gift from our mistakes; we are all evolving; evolution is about randomness, differences and change; we need good paternal and maternal instincts to help us; asking the right questions is critical when seeking truth; the capacity for reflection transformed us into the human species; we can guide the process of evolution to take us where we want to go; pause and reflect; getting upset is so unproductive; how I react to what I bump into determines my progress or decline; catch someone doing something right and praise him or her; smile more; cooperate in small groups using consensus; every student, regardless of age, needs to have a vote in major decisions affecting them; human nature goes beyond self-interest; the idea that self-interest promotes the common good is profoundly wrong; respect and highlight diversity; search for ways to end global poverty; we each play a role in evolution; ask “What do I need to keep me more balanced?” And above all, trust in the slow work of God.      

What if we are all called, and none of us is worthy, and it is all about forgiveness? 

Looking with Evolutionary Eyes

God is...

I have been looking at events of this past week with an eye toward evolution.  There was my ten-year-old granddaughter’s holiday program where I saw her class on an evolutionary timeline and wondered what positive outcomes and challenges lay ahead of them.  I noted a sprinkling of ethnic diversity in her class and also children differently able both physically and emotionally.  I recalled the NPR program I heard earlier that day that featured Paul Salopek who has embarked on a seven year project to walk around the world on a route that would have been traveled by our pre-agrarian hunter-gatherer ancestors.  Salopek said his slow paced foot travels is giving him a heightened presence to people, their significant problems, and to the landscapes he is encountering.  I wondered if the ease my grandchildren have with electronics, and which allows us all to accomplish so much more in much less time, also contributes to what I see as hurry sickness that leads us to be less present to what matters.  And I let myself get rattled as I was beginning to back out of my parking space at the Post Office, and another driver darted into the parking area, laid on his horn, and then shot past me to make a sharp right into an adjoining parking space.  I thought of David Sloan Wilson’s depiction of the less than social water striders and felt like I had just bumped into one.  And I attended the funeral of a Caucasian family friend, a kind and gentle man whose children intermarried and gave him beautiful grand children mixed with Black heritage, another with Hispanic heritage.  And then there was Nelson Mandela’s death this past week and his beautiful legacy of forgiveness—true liberation, and his deep concern for continuing widespread poverty throughout the world.  Looking with evolutionary eyes has seemed to facilitate reflection and that is a good thing.

We are so very young as a species.  Our hunter-gatherer ancestors began leaving Africa 60,000 years ago.  (The age of our earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old.)  Agriculture began 10,000 years ago and the first cities appeared only 6,000 years ago.  Wilson tells us in his book, “The Neighborhood Project--Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time,” that human nature does go beyond self-interest, and that reason needs to be the basis of our actions.  To that end an interdisciplinary effort to look at how nature regulates, and apply that regulation to economics, became the focus of a conference titled the “Nature of Regulation. “  The conference brought together highly respected individuals from animal behavior, anthropology, business, cognitive psychology, economics, ecology, evolutionary psychology, finance, history, law, neurobiology, peace studies, political science, prevention science, social-insect biology, sociology, and theoretical biology to consider the following:

-       Rethink the theory of human regulatory systems from the ground up.

-       Learn from other biological systems about the nature of regulation.

-       Reach a consensus on what constitutes human nature.

-       Appreciate the importance of environmental mismatch.

-       Take cultural evolution seriously.

What if we all looked with evolutionary eyes that go beyond self-interest; eyes that respect and highlight diversity, and search for ways to end global poverty.  

Who's in Your Neighborhood?

God is...

Using science, technology and evolutionary theory, David Sloan Wilson listens to and reflects on his city of Binghamton, NY. His reflections lead him to ask the right questions and to develop a survey for which he enlisted the help of an enthusiastic school superintendent who is interested in helping children become healthy, productive adults. This allowed Wilson to survey thousands of public school students. He asked them to rate themselves anonymously on a scale of 1 (this doesn’t describe me at all) to 5 (this describes me exactly) with the following statements:

I think it is important to help other people.
I resolve conflicts without anyone getting hurt.
I tell the truth even when it is not easy.
I am helping make my community a better place.
I am trying to help solve social problems.
I am developing respect for other people.
I am sensitive to the needs and feelings of others.
I am serving others in the community.

Wondering if students would honestly describe themselves on the survey, Wilson did a GIS (Geographical Information System) map of the city. He rated such things as Halloween and Christmas decorations and activities; he left ‘lost’ stamped letters lying in neighborhoods seeing which ones were subsequently put in the mail; he took photographs of different neighborhoods and noted garage sales. Social games were played with the school children who took the survey with game titles such as Dictator, Ultimatum and Prisoner’s Dilemma. The web of causation connecting survey results, holiday decorations/activities, lost letters returned, photographs of neighborhoods, and social game results all correlated.

Reflecting back on my own life has led me to know how critical it was to ask the right questions to change the direction of my life, even leaving the church of my birth. Wilson states: “The eternal conflict between benefitting oneself and benefitting one’s group, which suffuses religion and literature, also suffuses the biological world.” But he also notes, “Religious believers aren’t just exhorted to obey the dictates of their faith; they are locked into a system that makes it difficult to do otherwise. In just the same way scientists and scholars are locked into a system that makes it difficult not to seek the truth.” They question.

I shall continue reading “The Neighborhood Project – Using Evolution to Improve My City One Block at a Time.”

What if we all learned the right questions to ask that lead us to become more healthy and productive citizens?

Diaspora

God is...

I came across the word diaspora in March while reading a morning meditation.  I had a general idea of its meaning, but when I looked up its origin and learned it came from the Greek word diaspeirein, to scatter, from dia + speirein to sow, I saw a hopeful metaphor for the many who have left the church of their birth.  What if this current massive scattering of the faithful is God’s way of sowing seeds to an eventual ecumenical end where all people will come to respect another’s beliefs, and eventually embrace and care for each other?

In Barbara Brown Taylor’s memoir, “Leaving Church,” she tells of leaving her position as an Episcopal pastor because her desire to be all things to all people, all the time, left her emotionally, physically and spiritually spent.  She now teaches religious studies at Piedmont College.  From her experience as pastor, Taylor summarized so well what is needed for church today with these words:  We needed a different way of being together before God, shaped more like a circle than a pyramid.  We needed to ditch the sheep paradigm.  We needed to take turns filling in for Jesus, understanding that none of us was equal to the task to which all of us had been called.  We needed to share the power.  And she asked this great question …might it be time for people of good faith to allow that God’s map is vast, with room on it for both a center and an edge?  While the center may be the place where the stories are preserved, the edge is the place where the best of them happen. 

Empowerment is another word for “to share power.”  When we empower one another everyone benefits.  And in the ongoing process of creation, we need new stories to keep God relevant for us.  Who would have thought that trusting in the slow work of God could be so comforting? 

Praise It!

God is...

I heard that Alex Haley, the author of “Roots” once said, “Find the good and praise it.”  His words took me back to a church reform conference I had attended in Detroit.  Years later I briefly summarized the high points of that conference for me in one paragraph in my memoir, God Never Hurries as follows:

…We were asked to presume everyone’s fallibility; accept the premise that we can all be wrong; work for global standards for basic human rights and responsibilities; let justice reign to support economic order; respect all of life; live tolerantly and truthfully with an equal share of rights among men and women; understand holiness as compassion and inclusivity—embracing the marginalized as Jesus did; share our unique piece of wisdom according to our life, and then let it go to blend into a bigger whole; God’s living word is in our life’s stories—tell them and write them down.

That’s quite a to do list.  If you read that paragraph again you might be amazed to see that most tasks can be individually accomplished.  What if we all did our individual part, and where we can’t get the job done ourselves, support those who can.  I trust eventually we would have much to praise.