You Don’t Have to Love Them, Just Love

Tags

compassion, delusions, drama, Fear, hate, humanity, life, Love, Metta Prayer, partisan politics, suffering, unconditional love

A man lamented to an Elder in his Church that try as he might, he could not love his hyper-critical, unloving mother. The Elder told him, “My son, you don’t have to love her, you just have to love.”

That was a freeing thought to me years ago when I was having the same problem with a difficult-to-love mother. I knew I loved her, in the sense I cared about her happiness and well-being. But I was plagued by floods of unloving thoughts about her. Me being, probably, as hyper-critical of her as I believed she was of me, and just about everyone she met.

The Elder’s advise seemed to lift a heavy burden from my shoulders. I didn’t have to love the hyper-critical person, but I could be loving in my words and actions toward her, and gentle with myself for my shortcomings as well. I could love her humanity, her challenges, her struggles, and be compassionate toward her inability to be what I wanted, as well as compassionate toward my own inability to live up to my highest aspirations.

But how do we do that in these hyper-partisan times where so many people and political leaders acting out in ways that are hateful and violent and dangerously unreasonable? With the rise of tyranny and fear-mongering; the assault on truth, plain hard facts and overwhelming evidence? One worries about the fate of our nation and democracy itself, not to mention the fate of the world, plagued by firestorms, hurricanes, floods, with so little effort directed at making the changes needed to halt or even slow this global meltdown.

The world we love is being threatened by those we have come to hate. What is a loving-minded person supposed to do with all these intense, negative feelings and fears?

The answer is: You don’t have to love them. You just have to love.

But what do I “just love,” if not them? How can they be excluded if we’re “just loving” without a particular object to love?

Then I realized something, and it was like a hard, obstinate, ugly dam had been broken and the love I’d been withholding and resisting broke loose. The anger and resentment I’d been nurturing and justifying, and the fear that had been terrorizing me, were swept away.

The thing I realized is that genuine Love—the unconditional, not the personal kind —isn’t an add-on, something we choose or chose not to have. Genuine Love, the big kind with the big L, is the ground of being upon which all of us rest, that supports and sustains us all, the loving and unloving, the good and bad, the tyrant and saint.

We’re all delusional in one way or another. All living our lives on limited information and understanding about the world around us and each other, about what’s right and what’s wrong, about who we are, where we came from, and what our purpose is. Whether we like it or not, we’re going to rub up against each other and each other’s delusions, no matter what we do or how we chose to live. We can’t get out of it. We’re stuck with each other. And while things may get better for us personally, at the same time they are getting worse for others. And new challenges are on the way.

That’s where the compassion of genuine Love flows, from the realization that the one we are prone to hate or fear for their hateful deeds is just delusional, a rube to his own delusions, as we are to ours. Our sympathy, our love, extends to all of us, because we are all suffering, even while not condoning the acts that cause our suffering, and doing what we can to relieve it.

We can “just love” the whole human drama as it has rolled out over the centuries and through our own few days of existence, knowing that it will continue to roll on without us, perhaps forever in the way delusions always seem so real while they last.

But beneath all the drama that is heaving us about like storms at sea, is this deep sympathy, this oceanic peaceful presence of unconditional Love that supports and sustains us all even in the midst of all the turmoil we are experiencing.

Within that maelstrom, we each, like tiny bubbles thrown up and tossed about, clashing with each other, opposing or uniting, go about the business of being separate and apart until the delusion of our bubble of existence dissolves and we know each other as we always have been and always will be, an essential part of the underlying, unifying whole. Part of that tender, exuberant, endlessly creative flow of Love.

To sum it up: Don’t love “them,” just love “Us.”

This Metta (Lovingkindness) Prayer, which can be adapted by anyone to fit any circumstance, helps to bring that loving aspiration into focus:

In gladness and in safety, may all beings be at ease.
Whether they are weak or strong, great or humble, wealthy or needy, omitting none,
The wise or foolish, friend or foe, neighbor or stranger,
Those who have wronged us and those we have wronged,
Those who love us and those who do not,

May all beings be at ease!

May all beings have happiness and cause of happiness.
May all beings remain free from suffering and the cause of suffering.
May all beings remain unseparated from the sacred joy and that is free from sorrow,
May all beings rest in the boundless and all-inclusive equanimity that supports and sustains us all.

Grieving for America, and Getting Past It

Tags

2020 presidential election, America, faith, Fear, grief, inspiration, Mary Oliver, patriotism, poetry, Politics, pride, Starlings in Winter, the United states, USA

Worldphoto.org

I found this quote by Mary Oliver in a recent blog post and it struck a chord.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it

— Mary Oliver, from “Starlings in Winter”

So many of us have been grieving and fearing for our country of late, with the upcoming election and all the uncertainty and chaos it promises.

Feeling so keenly the need to get past this grief and fear I eagerly sought out the full poem to see what wisdom or encouragement Oliver’s “Starlings in Winter” might impart. Not surprisingly, I was not disappointed.

Starlings in Winter

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

What I read in this poem is a metaphor, not so much for what is happening in our country today that makes us grieve, but for what is so resilient and beautiful about who we are as a people, as a nation, and why we will survive even this.

The starlings and the miraculous murmurations they create in flight are a symbol for the principles upon which this nation was founded and our messy history in striving to live up to those principles, to create a more perfect union.

Like the starlings we are “chunky and noisy, but  with stars” in our eyes as well as on the back of our flag.  We created and continue to create this miraculous, exceptional, “notable thing”, this republic, this democracy, these United States. And we did so during the wintry blasts of protest and rebellion against an authority we no longer wished to follow. We did so as acrobats, flying through the uncertainty of the times, “dipping and rising” across time and space, through decades of challenges, “fragmented for a moment” and then reuniting again and again.

Like the poet’s narrator, I “simply cannot imagine how they did it,” our forefathers and foremothers, how “in the freezing wind,” through “the theater of time” they created what we have today, this “silent confirmation” of a miracle,  “this notable thing,” this free-flowing, ever-changing but endurable nation.

Even now, during these challenging times, this “leafless season” of Covid, this “ashy city” of race riots, this chaotic election where our democracy itself appears to be in peril, even now what makes us great is that this “notable thing” we still are, still endures. Still is viable.

“There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed by what is right with America.” –President Bill Clinton

I believe this in my bones, and with all my “heart, pumping hard.” What lifts me past the turmoil of the times, past the grief that seems so prevalent, is the remembrance of and faith in this “this notable thing, this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin over and over again, full of gorgeous life.” Full of purpose and promise.

One man, one administration, one season of cold wintry blasts, one chaotic election— even one devastating defeat—will not defeat us. Will not diminish this “notable” nation that stands out unique in all of history. This “city upon a hill,” as another President called us.

It’s not hope but faith in who and what we are, for all our faults, that moves me past grief, beyond fear.

“There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed by what is right with America.”  We will right this.

“Perfect Love” – All We Need for What Ails Us

Tags

Fear, healing, inspiration, Love, spirituality, transformation

Francisco “Paco” Zúñiga

The highest common denominator for all spiritual practices and religious teachings is Love. Love with a capital L, meaning that which transcends a personal or ego-based sense of love. Love that embraces all and everything. Love that is the ground, or source, of all being.

It’s a “perfect” love, a powerful love, a love that can change lives, and nations, even as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King have shown.

“Perfect Love casts out fear” is from the Bible, but it is one of those highest teachings and practices found across cultural and religious divides.

If these teachings cannot be made practical in our ordinary, flawed, imperfect lives, they are of no use to us. But as a mother who has struggled with an almost debilitating sense of fear at times, an understanding of what this verse means has saved me many times.

Fear is at the heart of all manner of darkness. “All that ails us” is some mutation of this life-crippling, joy-killing, action-paralyzing, energy-sapping, emotion. I have found myself in its grip many times. And the only way I’ve found to peel back the strangling fingers of fear is to let a more perfect sense of Love rise within me.

It is understanding that without Love, I am nothing. That love truly is the ground of my being, the source of all being. That love is what makes life worth living. And that when the time comes to depart from this life, all that will have mattered is how much we have loved; not how much we have fallen at the feet of fear. How much we have given, not how much we have taken; how much we have expressed the best in us, and sought to see the best in each other.

“Perfect Love” means to love others more perfectly. This doesn’t mean to love others in spite of their flaws or failings.

It means to love them unconditionally because we know that they are not their flaws and failings. And to know that so clearly and so fervently, that we can keep that love pure, even while doing whatever we can to help them let go of their own fears, and all the failings that go with those fears.

We are not our fears. We are not our failings. We are not our hate, or greed, or selfishness, or addiction, or anger, or violence. These are all manifestations of our fears. And the only thing worth saving or savoring in each other is what we love, and what expresses that love.

“Love your enemies” is the same as saying you have no enemies, a wise woman once said. For those who would appear as our enemies are those so overcome by their own fears that they have failed to see what they love in another. And if we hate them, we have fallen into the same trap.

Isn’t that what the great moral and inspirational figures of our age have taught us? Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela? That love conquers all, even the most insidious, unjust, hateful systems of government that would try to separate, enslave, and dehumanize us?

We are not our prejudices, we are not the cruel things we say or do, the cruel systems that we create and justify. We can’t condone these things, or ignore them.  We don’t give them a pass.

But we understand that, to some degree, the most hateful and cruel among us, are us, in other circumstances. That there, but for the grace of God, go I.

That even the most loving and kind and wise among us, when governed by fear, rather than love, would be the same.

We have no enemy because we see ourselves in him, and the only way to un-make an enemy is to see his humanity, to see us in them.

That’s how Mandela was able to overcome Apartheid and lead to reconciliation.

That’s how Gandhi was able to face the oppressors and free his county.

That’s how Martin Luther King was able to peacefully resist an oppressive system and usher in the Civil Rights Act.

It’s fear for ourselves, our children, our families, our community, our country, our way of life, that leads to resentment and anger and blame and shame and discouragement or despair. That eventually leads to resignation and indifference and apathy and depression and joylessness.

And it’s learning to love ourselves and each other more perfectly that casts out those fears, and frees us from all its crippling mutations.

“Perfect Love” – a powerful antidote for all that ails us.

I reblogged this as a gentle reminder to myself in time of need. First posted in December 2013 in a slightly altered form.

“Perfect Love” – An Antidote for All that Ails Us

Tags

Fear, Love, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, overcoming fear, Perfect love casts out fear, spirituality

The highest common denominator for all spiritual practices and religious teachings, as I’ve come to understand, is Love. That is, Love with a capital L, meaning that which transcends a personal or ego-based sense of love. Love that embraces all and everything. Love that is the ground, or source, of all being.

It’s a “perfect” love, a powerful love, a love that can change lives, and nations, even as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King have shown.

“Perfect Love casts out fear” is from the Bible, but it is one of those highest teachings and practices found across cultural and religious divides.

If these teachings cannot be made practical in our ordinary, flawed, imperfect lives, they are of no use to us. But as a mother who has struggled with an almost debilitating sense of fear at times, an understanding of what this verse means has saved me many times.

Fear is at the heart of manner of darkness. “All that ails us” is some mutation of this life-crippling, joy-killing, action-paralyzing, energy-sapping, emotion. I have found myself in its grip many times. And the only way I’ve found to peel back the strangling fingers of fear is to let a more perfect sense of Love rise within me.

It is understanding that without Love, I am nothing. That love truly is the ground of my being, the source of all being. That love is what makes life worth living. And that when the time comes to depart from this life, all that will have mattered is how much we have loved; not how much we have fallen at the feet of fear. How much we have given, not how much we have taken; how much we have expressed the best in us, and sought to see the best in each other.

“Perfect Love” means to love others more perfectly. This doesn’t mean to love others in spite of their flaws or failings.

It means to love them unconditionally because we know that they are not their flaws and failings. And to know that so clearly and so fervently, that we can keep that love pure, even while doing whatever we can to help them let go of their own fears, and all the failings that go with those fears.

We are not our fears. We are not our failings. We are not our hate, or greed, or selfishness, or addiction, or anger, or violence. These are all manifestations of our fears. And the only thing worth saving or savoring in each other is what we love, and what expresses that love.

“Love your enemies” is the same as saying you have no enemies, a wise woman once said. For those who would appear as our enemies are those so overcome by their own fears that they have failed to see what they love in another. And if we hate them, we have fallen into the same trap.

Isn’t that what the great moral and inspirational figures of our age have taught us? Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela? That love conquers all, even the most insidious, unjust, hateful systems of government that would try to separate, enslave, and dehumanize us?

We are not our prejudices, we are not the cruel things we say or do, the cruel systems that we create and justify. We can’t condone these things, or ignore them.  We don’t give them a pass.

But we understand that, to some degree, the most hateful and cruel among us, are us, in other circumstances. That there, but for the grace of God, go I.

That even the most loving and kind and wise among us, when governed by fear, rather than love, would be the same.

We have no enemy because we see ourselves in him, and the only way to un-make an enemy is to see his humanity, to see us in them.

That’s how Mandela was able to overcome Apartheid and lead to reconciliation.

That’s how Gandhi was able to face the oppressors and free his county.

That’s how Martin Luther King was able to peacefully resist an oppressive system and usher in the Civil Rights Act.

It’s fear for ourselves, our children, our families, our community, our country, our way of life, that leads to resentment and anger and blame and shame and discouragement or despair. That eventually leads to resignation and indifference and apathy and depression and joylessness.

And it’s learning to love ourselves and each other more perfectly that casts out those fears, and frees us from all its crippling mutations.

“Perfect Love” – a powerful antidote for all that ails us.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, peace and love, to every one of you, and all.