Transformative Love

Recently I have been writing a lot about the transformative affects of pain and suffering in our lives (see posts like "When Convergence Hits the Fan," "It's Just Perfect," "Spiritual Discipline," and "Undoing the Self"). Maybe it is because I hear so much from people about their suffering and their pains and see (from my outside perspective) the work that it is doing. In any case, it may appear that I have forgotten all about love. Love in fact is the only thing other than our suffering that has the power to transform us.

By transformation what I mean here is that the actual form of our being, and the actual form of our experience is mutated from one manifested form to another, completely different form - literally transformation rewrites out historical context and meaning making. This transition from one form to another often happens so quickly that we cannot notice it from the inside. With pain and suffering, that transition feels like being squished through a seive! But with love, it seems that the previous state or condition just melts away or falls "like scales from our eyes."

In fact I recently told a friend who was having a difficult time that love was the most powerful of all the emotions - that it was far more poweerful than hate. What's more, hate takes energy and stiffening tension, a hardening of every fibre of one's being. But love only requires opening up. I witnessed this once as a mentor of mine stood in front of a man seething with hatred. My friend simply

said, "I can love you stronger than you can hate me!"

Despite that great paragraph in the epilogue of The Scarlet Letter, I do not think that Love and Hate are so much alike. Hate comes from our lack and our distance from the other, resulting in seeing the other as just that: "other." But love is not ours. It flows through us, cleansing and changing us from the inside out. In love, we have a sense that something way bigger than us is working through us. And we are born in love - as a result of live. We are born to love, not to hate - hate has to be taught.

Ending the Madness

"No one's religious anymore. Not anyone with any sense. Religion incites hatred, starts wars, and vilifies anyone who challenges its narrow-minded views." So starts an article in the Huffington Post UK version (by Felicity Morse). But where Ms Morse ended up with her article is not where I would go. So with thanks to her lead, let me turn a different way.

You're right, Felicity, and I hate it! I am sick of the divisiveness created by religions and religious sects. I am embarrassed when someone calls me a Christian and they mean that type of a person who thinks others are soiled, unclean or despicable because they don't say the right words.  Or when the mean some sort of narrow-minded bible-thumping "religious" fanatic that uses verses to their own defense and to the exclusion of others.

I can no longer find a religion that I can claim and yet I love God, and I do my best to follow the teachings of Jesus.  It's just that I do my best to also follow the teachings of the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Zoroaster, and just about every other wise sage that ever graced this planet. And I do not believe that I am special if I believe in the resurrection of Jeshua, the Nazarene, or that I am damned to eternity in hell if I don't.

That type of dualistic thinking is the root of the disease that we now call religions. But that was never the message - not the message of the Nazarene, not the message of the Buddha, not the message of Hillel, not the message anyone who has ever listened for God has ever heard. In fact the message of all sacred texts is one of acceptance and inclusion - not hatred and out-grouping; one of forgiveness and compassion - not revenge and hatred; one of care-taking and respect - not one of dominion and dominance. Where we went wrong and got off that path, I don't know. But I do know that our very survival depends on getting back to it.

It is time for ministers and preachers and spiritual people everywhere to speak out that we are one.  It is time that we link arms and stand squarely in the path of those who would divide and vilify others. It is time we all band together and shout "Enough! No more! No mas muerta!" It is time to work for healing and bridge-building and forgiving. My heart is breaking - we cannot continue the way we are going.

Please - if you read this, pass it on! That's how we can turn this around. It's like Marge Piercy wrote in her wonderful poem, The Low Road:

It goes on one at a time,

it starts when you care

to act, it starts when you do

it again and they said no,

it starts when you say We

and know you who you mean, and each

day you mean one more.

Says Who?

I confess to having avoided the nauseating rhetoric provided by the two exclusive political clubs that run our government and exclude all other points of view.  I am certain to be enlightened by their opinions on what "we" should believe, and of just who might be included or excluded in that "we."  My eldest offspring is an ordained minister and an articulate advocate of justice. Lately she has been receiving a lot of attention for her stand on full inclusion not simply as a right or an option but as a must and necessary element of being a church. Exclusion, she writes, begins when we even start naming those "other" groups we intend to include by their categorical names. You know the deal: "This organization does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, creed..." The very act of naming "them" sets "them" apart from "us." Inclusion has no labels.

But when we include all of us humans within the circle of human experience, something becomes apparent: none of us has the same experience. And what is particularly enlightening about that is that we can begin to learn from others who are not like us in anything other dimension than their humanity. When we focus on the differences and out-group others, this lesson is not available. But when we are all one, our sisters and brothers can teach us from their point of view. They can tell us what it has been like to be inspected and suspected for their entire lives. They can tell us how they had to deeply search their souls and come to their own truths about their sexuality, their spirituality and their burning need to be recognized for the persons that they really are.

In particular, I am taling about people who are labeled as gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender and a whole host of other terms. I am talking about my very normal and dear friends, some of my neighbors, several of my clients and perhaps even family members. All of them are human and normal and living and vital and they are us. But we mus not be so hasty to "include" them as "us" lest we step over their gift as part of the human condition. That is the same kind of racism that wants to make African Americans act like "white people." Inclusion does not mean being the same. Rather it means embracing the differences within the whole of humanity. And here is where we need to shut up and listen. People whose sexuality is gay or lesbian or whatever have had to do something that every minority strand of humanity has had to do. They have had to wake up every morning and ask "if I am not what the majority says is the way to be, then what am I and who am I?"

As a white male member of the domination and dominant class of my society, I never questioned those values. I never doubted what I was. The texts were written by and for others like me. But the howling error that lives in that is that those same texts carried the implicit belief that this should be true for ALL of humanity - men and women, white and black and brown and yellow and tan skinned people - everyone must be like this. And I never had to question that. But anyone who is not part of that dominant culture has and does. These sisters and brothers have a level of introspection I have never attempted. And they lead the way to a deeper more profound understanding of self. I aspire to that level of deep self understanding. It is thoroughly unfair that these brothers and sisters have been forced to "justify" their beingness. No one should have to justify their existence. You are human - that's the ticket to get on board this train. But because society has forced it upon them, they have done what perhaps we all should be forced to do.

So here is a quick list of questions to ponder each morning as you prepare for your day: Are you certain about your sexuality? How do you know? Have you ever tried anything else? If you told your (a) boss, (b) school, (c) church how you really feel as a sexual being would you feel safe there? Would you be accepted? Have you tried finding a church that really accepts you at your deepest level of who you are? When was the first time you felt sexual desires? Was it confusing? What if you were not permitted to marry the person of your choice by you family, your state or your religion, would you move? How would you cope? If you were told that your very being was a sin, how would you justify how and who you are? Lastly, you have no authorization to ask "them" how they answered. They have done the work and they are okay with their answers. Theirs is a level of maturity that you can only hope to achieve. They are the brave leaders we need to hold up as our heroes and heroines and examples. LGBT is not the new cool or in thing to root for! But what I get from my brothers and sisters who are is  a level of awareness of justice matters most of us can only read about.  But to be certain, I am sick to death of all of the positioning around the issue of humanity and human rights.

Vive La Difference

Who are we as humans? What is it that makes us hate others who are not just like us? I remember in my undergraduate years taking a course from the famous social psychologist, Carolyn Sharif. She and her husband Musafer Sharif (forgive me if I have spelled it incorrectly) conducted this great study of teenage boys called the Robber's Cave Study that I think was the foundation for some of the scenes in The Lord of The Flies. The net of the study was that is was regular behavior to define one's own group by the "out-grouping" of another. In other words, we are who we are because we are not "them." And so social scientists since the 50's and the Robber's Cave study had a way of describing what we do to each other. Read that as in "it is normal and regular to do that." Hey that is no news. Humans have killed off the "other" for as long as we have had tribes. But does it make it right or normal? I think not and in fact I am getting sick and tired of reading justifications of outgroupings whether they are based in biblical mistranslations or out of context quotations or hocus pocus bullshit made up by some egocentric narcissist too terrified of his own shadow to step into the light on his own. Well I am tired of it. What is straight or gay or whatever anyway? Who decided that mattered in determining your humanness? When I was a junior in college (that is a loooong time ago) I had a room mate who was gay (still is). And how he explained it to me was asking me if I decided to be 6'3". I said of course not, I just grew that way. Well, he said, I never decided to be gay, I just grew that way. (Thanks Peter, I still love you for all you taught me.) States and churches are falling into sides around same-sex marriages as if it is their right to legislate how tall a person should be to be considered a person. Cut me a break. It is not our decision! It is up to each individual to act on and become all he or she is meant to be irrespective of the local norms and mores of the dominant group. Despite what the Sharifs observed, it is neither right or normal to place a moral judgment on another because he or she is not like you and your group. That kind of clique behavior is as distasteful in adulthood as it was in junior high school, only the adults in question should have outgrown it! It is time we grow up as a society and face the fact that the human experience is not a unified or singular experience. Being human has about six billion different ways of manifesting and each one is as great and beautiful as the next. Thank god you are unique, and that the person next to you is unique and that I am not you. We need to stop bonding about how we are the same and rejoice in and bond around our array of differences. The human experience is a wide rainbow of colors and the boundaries are indistinguishable yet ubiquitous. I don't want to be you and you should not want to be me. So why do people think that someone else should have the same preferences as you and I do. I really don't know when it was that I knew I liked girls, but I do remember that it was after I had my boy experiences. We boys loved each other. We were inseparable and we learned about sex from each other, told tales to each other, gaped at our dad's Playboys together, and we were tighter than anything. Then one day, I noticed that girls smelled different, sounded different and I was uncontrollably attracted. I did not choose that. I just was. My room mate did not choose to stay with his boys, he just did. There is nothing more to it than that. Two of us manifesting two of the six billion ways to be a human. Praise god for that! And for god's sake, cut the crap about making differences wrong. It is what is right about being human - we are all uniquely different. Amen, amen, let it be so.