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April 6 - April 19, 2019
All the while, we have it in us to become wise. Wisdom leavens intelligence, and ennobles consciousness, and advances evolution itself.
Religious and spiritual traditions have borne wisdom across time, though in charged cultural spaces they can become parodies of themselves.
We tried to retire mystery in the West in the last few hundred years and enshrined reality’s sharp edges instead—solutions and plans and ideologies;
The discourse of our common life inclines towards despair.
it was possible to have freedom and plenty in the West and craft an empty life; it was possible to “have nothing” in the East and create a life of intimacy and dignity and beauty.
I’ve come to think of virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space. There are superstar virtues that come most readily to mind and can be the work of a day or a lifetime—love, compassion, forgiveness. And there are gentle shifts of mind and habit that make those possible, working patiently through the raw materials of our lives.
I know it is possible to speak about our deepest passions and convictions in a way that opens imaginations rather than shuts them down.
In America, many features of national public life are also better suited to adolescence than to adulthood. We don’t do things adults learn to do, like calm ourselves, and become less narcissistic. Much of politics and media sends us in the opposite, infantilizing direction. We reduce great questions of meaning and morality to “issues” and simplify them to two sides, allowing pundits and partisans to frame them in irreconcilable extremes. But most of us don’t see the world this way, and it’s not the way the world actually works.
But tolerance doesn’t welcome. It allows, endures, indulges. In the medical lexicon, it is about the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment.
Tolerance was a baby step to make pluralism possible, and pluralism, like every ism, holds an illusion of control. It doesn’t ask us to care for the stranger. It doesn’t even invite us to know each other, to be curious, to be open to be moved or surprised by each other.
I’m unmoved when we “celebrate diversity” by putting it up on a pedestal and avoiding its messiness and its depths.
They all remained as distinct and impassioned on their spectrum of belief as ever. And yet the delight, curiosity, and esteem they had acquired for each other’s minds and journeys changed everyone profoundly.
I can disagree with your opinion, it turns out, but I can’t disagree with your experience. And once I have a sense of your experience, you and I are in relationship, acknowledging the complexity in each other’s position, listening less guardedly. The difference in our opinions will probably remain intact, but it no longer defines what is possible between us.
This was my fourth birthday present, this story. In the beginning there was only the holy darkness, the Ein Sof, the source of life. In the course of history, at a moment in time, this world, the world of a thousand thousand things, emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light. And then, perhaps because this is a Jewish story, there was an accident, and the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke. The wholeness of the world, the light of the world, was scattered into a thousand thousand fragments of light. And they fell into all
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Same idea that Rabbi Sacks teaches
We’ve all been trained to be advocates for what we care about. This has its place and its value in civil society, but it can get in the way of the axial move of deciding to care about each other.
In journalism we have a love affair with the “tough” question, which is often an assumption masked as an inquiry and looking for a fight.
It’s hard to transcend a combative question. But it’s hard to resist a generous question.
Love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
There is value in learning to speak together honestly and relate to each other with dignity, without rushing to common ground that would leave all the hard questions hanging.
“the courage to be vulnerable in front of those we passionately disagree with.”
And I have learned that people in the center are not going to be the big change makers. You’ve got to put yourself at the margins and be willing to risk in order to make change.
Hmmmm, to some extent, I would have to disagree haha
Well, language is almost all we have left of action in the modern world. For many of us, at least, action has become what we say: the moral life is lived out in what we say more often than what we do.
Maybe, he says, this is as good as it will get Peaceful bigotry.
Gods and men love maps they draw borders with pens that split lives like an ax.
I am. I think there’s a lot, unfortunately, about suffering in Christian tradition that’s hogwash, if I can use a technical theological term. It’s awfully important to distinguish in life, I think, between true crosses and false crosses. And I know in my growing up as a Christian, I didn’t get much help with that. A cross was a cross was a cross, and if you were suffering, it was supposed to be somehow good. I do not believe that the God who gave me life wants me to live a living death. I believe that the God who gave me life wants me to live life fully and well.
kind of community we need to extend to people who are suffering in this way, which is a community that is neither invasive of the mystery nor evasive of the suffering, but is willing to hold people in a space—a sacred space of relationship—where somehow this person who is on the dark side of the moon can get a little confidence that they can come around to the other side.
Love is something we only master in moments.
The nuclear family is a recent invention and a death blow to love—an unprecedented demand on a couple to be everything to each other, the family a tiny echo chamber: history one layer deep.
Later I discovered that you have to have this sense of faith that what you’re moving toward is already done. It’s already happened.
you have someone attacking you, beating you, spitting on you, you have to think of that person.
You try to appeal to the goodness of every human being and you don’t give up. You never give up on anyone.
“The Civil Rights Movement, above all, was a work of love. Yet even 50 years later, it is rare to find anyone who would use the word love to describe what we did.”
In the early debates around integrating schools, the white segregationists said, “We can’t have integrated schools because black and white children might get to know each other and might marry each other and have babies.” The Civil Rights Movement said, “This is not about marriage.” But the white segregationists were right. You bring people together, they will actually learn to love each other. Some of them will marry and have children. It will actually change the fabric of society. When people worry that having gays in our community will change what marriage really means, actually, they’re
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Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can’t possibly make a difference.
Whatever our part is. Just do one thing. That’s all we have to do. The guilt—or the curse—of the progressive, the liberal, the whatever, is that we think we have to do it all. And then we get overwhelmed.
Oh, no Sister Simone. That’s not it. It’s not about the money.” He said, “It’s that we’re very competitive. And we want to win. And money just happens to be the current measure of winning.” Then I think, well, could we have a measure that’s a little less toxic?
Too often, progressives are really grim. It’s not a very good advertisement: “Come join us. We’re so miserable.”
A capacity to accommodate fragility, he says, is a fundament of vital, evolving systems, whether geological or human. At the right temperatures, geologic faults allow for movement, ductility, flow. Earthquakes happen when weaknesses cannot be expressed. “And communities which are rigid, which do not take into account the weak points of the community—people who are in difficulty—tend to be communities that do not evolve. When they do evolve, it’s generally by a very strong commotion, a revolution.”
The way to set moral change in motion, he says, is not to go for the jugular, or even for dialogue—straight to the things that divide you. Talk about sports. Talk about the weather. Talk about your children. Make a human connection. Change comes about in part, as he describes it, by way of “conversation in the old-fashioned sense”—simple association, habits of coexistence, seeking familiarity around mundane human qualities of who we are.
They are not obvious compatriots, at least at first; they represent different places on the societal spectrum and embody divergent passions and perspectives. But they see the dead end of the polar opposite conflict in which their lives have become enmeshed, and they step out of fear and into care.
“critical yeast.”
they refuse to accept a dualist approach—us against you. They are armed with love and courage, and these things in action are closely connected with creativity: “Reaching out to enemies, embracing complexity, creativity, and risk add up to moral imagination in action. . . . They are artists.” Lovers are
Love as a public good needs yeasty groups of social artists, and it also requires bridge people to stand with, speak for, and protect those whose very identities are threatened by conflict. Sometimes love, in public as in private, means stepping back.
The challenge of standing before open ruptures in civic life is matched, and complicated, by the challenge of standing hospitably before those who offend and harm and drive us crazy in an everyday way.
As creatures, we imagine a homogeneity in other groups that we know not to be there in our own.
You know, love that can even do more than tolerate dissent in difference. That can sit with it, can take it in, can listen to it, can let it stand whole and not necessarily feel the need to engage it argumentatively.
moral imagination begins with universality and ends with particularity.
But my experience is that once you enter into this way of, I would call it companionship, walking with the suffering person who has come into your life and whom you have not rejected, your heart progressively gets educated by them. They teach you a new way of being.
And if we accept being educated by others, to let them explain to us what happens to them, and to let yourself be immersed in their world so that they can get into our world, then you begin to share something very deep.
That fear of the religion of my childhood was about measuring up—about moral perfection, and the eternal cost of falling short. For me now, faith is in interplay with moral imagination, something distinct from moral perfection.
