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there is a place of mystery in our lives where forces that are beyond human desire or will alter circumstances and/or guide and direct us. I call these forces “divine spirit.”
“All other spiritual teachings are in vain if we cannot love. Even the most exalted states and the most exceptional spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if, with our hearts, we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given. What matters is how we live.”
Throughout my graduate school years, as I worked hard to finish my doctorate, striving to maintain a commitment to spiritual life in a world that did not value the spiritual, I returned to these lessons about the primacy of love. The wisdom they convey kept me from hardening my heart. Remaining open to love was crucial to my academic survival.
When we begin to experience the sacred in our everyday lives we bring to mundane tasks a quality of concentration and engagement that lifts the spirit. We recognize divine spirit everywhere.
Our sufferings do not magically end; instead we are able to wisely alchemically recycle them. They become the abundant waste that we use to make new growth possible.
“important and radical changes are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.”
While careers and making money remain important agendas, they never take precedence over valuing and nurturing human life and well-being.
Behaving unethically, with no thought to the consequences of our actions, is a bit like eating tons of junk food. While it may taste good, in the end the body is never really adequately nourished and remains in a constant state of lack and longing. Our souls feel this lack when we act unethically, behaving in ways that diminish our spirits and dehumanize others.
Refusal to stand up for what you believe in weakens individual morality and ethics as well as those of the culture. No wonder then that we are a nation of people, the majority of whom, across race, class, and gender, claim to be religious, claim to believe in the divine power of love, and yet collectively remain unable to embrace a love ethic and allow it to guide behavior, especially if doing so would mean supporting radical change.
If it is true as I have tried to show that love is the only sane and satisfactory response to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.
To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man.” Faith enables us to move past fear. We can collectively regain our faith in the transformative power of love by cultivating courage, the strength to stand up for what we believe in, to be accountable both in word and deed.
“perfect love” that can cast out fear. As we love, fear necessarily leaves. Contrary to the notion that one must work to attain perfection, this outcome does not have to be struggled for—it just happens. It is the gift perfect love offers.
Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.
“Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses, it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one’s soul. This turning is done through one’s own affirmation of one’s worth—an affirmation fueled by the concern of others.” In
Indeed, the message received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge.
Individual women and men who do not see themselves as victims of patriarchal power find it difficult to take seriously the need to challenge and change patriarchal thinking.
Jung’s insight, that if the will to power is paramount love will be lacking,
“They are people who take and hold a generous and neighborly view of self-preservation; they do not believe that they can survive and flourish by the rule of dog eat dog; they do not believe that they can succeed by defeating or destroying or selling or using up everything but themselves. They doubt that good solutions can be produced by violence. They want to preserve the precious things of nature of human culture and pass them on to their children. . . . They see that no commonwealth or community of interest can be defined by greed. . . . They know that work ought to be necessary; it ought
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Learning how to face our fears is one way we embrace love. Our fear may not go away, but it will not stand in the way.
Liberation is “the sure heart’s release”—an understanding of the truth so powerful that there is no turning back from it.
Intense spiritual and emotional lack in our lives is the perfect breeding ground for material greed and overconsumption. In a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess.
“A vision articulates a future that someone deeply wants, and does it so clearly and compellingly that it summons up the energy, agreement, sympathy, political will, creativity, resources, or whatever to make that vision happen.”
The loss of lives at home and abroad had created economic plenty while leaving in its wake devastation and loss. Americans were asked to sacrifice the vision of freedom, love, and justice and put in its place the worship of materialism and money.
The good life was no longer to be found in community and connection, it was to be found in accumulation and the fulfillment of hedonistic, materialistic desire.
Suddenly it was no longer important to bring an ethical dimension to the work life, making money was the goal, and by whatever means. Widespread embrace of corruption undermined any chance that a love ethic would resurface and restore hope.
This lack of ethics was explained away by government officials linking support of big business to further imperialism with national security and dominance globally.
Her ethical values are eroded by the intensity of longing and lack. But she no longer sees herself as living at odds with the consumer culture she lives in; she has become connected, one with the culture of consumption and driven by its demands.
Addicts want release from pain; they are not thinking about love.
“dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love—which is to transform us.”
Concurrently, when it comes to matters of the heart we are encouraged to treat partners as though they were objects we can pick up, use, and then discard and dispose of at will, with the one criteria being whether or not individualistic desires are satisfied.
How many times do we hear someone say “Well, if that person is not satisfying your needs you should get rid of them”? Relationships are treated like Dixie cups. They are the same. They are disposable. If it does not work, drop it, throw it away, get another. Committed bonds (including marriage) cannot last when this is the prevailing logic. And friendships or loving community cannot be valued and sustained.
If the will to accumulate is not already present in the television watcher or the moviegoer, it will be implanted by images that bombard the psyche with the message that consuming with others, not connection, should be our goal.
Inherited wealth and/or substantial material resources are rarely talked about in the mass media because those who receive it do not wish to validate the idea that money received that is not a reward for hard work is beneficial.
Sadly, like so many Americans, she believes that the pursuit and attainment of wealth will compensate for all emotional lack.
The worship of money leads to a hardening of the heart. And it can lead any of us to condone, either actively or passively, the exploitation and dehumanization of ourselves and others.
But no one assumes responsibility for the shift in values that made the peace and love culture turn toward the politics of profit and power. That shift came about because the free love that flourished in utopian communal hippie enclaves, where everyone was young and carefree, did not take root in the daily lives of ordinary working and retired people. Young progressives committed to social justice who had found it easy to maintain radical politics when they were living on the edge, on the outside, did not want to do the hard work of changing and reorganizing our existing system in ways that
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Many of our nation’s citizens are afraid to embrace an ethics of compassion because it threatens their security.
To maintain and satisfy greed, one must support domination. And the world of domination is always a world without love.
While communism has suffered political defeat globally, the politics of communalism continue to matter.
Acts 2: "they had all things in common" - how does the Bible speak to communalism?
When we value the delaying of gratification and take responsibility for our actions, we simplify our emotional universe. Living simply makes loving simple. The choice to live simply necessarily enhances our capacity to love. It is the way we learn to practice compassion, daily affirming our connection to a world community.
Community cannot take root in a divided life. Long before community assumes external shape and form, it must be present as a seed in the undivided self: only as we are in communion with ourselves can we find community with others.
Peck defines community as the coming together of a group of individuals “who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and to ‘delight in each other, and make other’s conditions our own.’”
When we see love as the will to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life is the same.
Had I been evaluating my relationship from a standpoint that emphasized growth rather than duty and obligation, I would have understood that abuse irreparably undermines bonds.
Often, New Age writing on the subject of love makes it seem as though everything will always be wonderful if we are just loving. Realistically, being part of a loving community does not mean we will not face conflicts, betrayals, negative outcomes from positive actions, or bad things happening to good people. Love allows us to confront these negative realities in a manner that is life-affirming and life-enhancing.
“The difficult road is the road of conversion, the conversion from loneliness into solitude. Instead of running away from our loneliness and trying to forget or deny it, we have to protect it and turn it into fruitful solitude. . . . Loneliness is painful; solitude is peaceful. Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community.”
Often, sexist thinking obscures the fact that these women make a choice to serve, that they give from the space of free will and not because of biological destiny. There are plenty of folks who are not interested in serving, who disparage service. When anyone thinks a woman who serves “gives ’cause that’s what mothers or real women do,” they deny her full humanity and thus fail to see the generosity inherent in her acts. There are lots of women who are not interested in service, who even look down on it.
The respect woman demand and uphold in the maternal-child bond is deemed not important in adult bondings if demanding respect from a man interferes with their desire to get and keep a partner.
They flee from love before they feel its grace. Pain may be the threshold they must cross to partake of love’s bliss. Running from the pain, they never know the fullness of love’s pleasure.
We might be living in a world that would be even more alienated and violent if caring women did not do the work of teaching men who have lost touch with themselves how to live again. This labor of love is futile only when the men in question refuse to awaken, refuse growth. At this point it is a gesture of self-love for women to break their commitment and move on.
