Our world does not feel whole.
This is devastating to witness for us all, but particularly devastating to experience for those most closely touched in life-altering ways by the increasingly disturbing and destructive events of 2020.
And yet — we have all needed to see, to recognize, to understand just how broken we are. Because only by acknowledging that will we be able to begin to heal.
There is a spiritual term called chemicalization. It means that Truth and Love bring anything unlike themselves to the surface to be seen and therefore eradicated. This has been happening over and over and over again. Weather catastrophes caused by climate change. School shootings. Mass killings. These are just a few examples. But those of us whose lives aren’t touched by this or that experience often choose to ignore them as “not our problem”.
It’s all our problem, because it’s all our world.
I had a friend once who became addicted to an early anti-anxiety drug after a miscarriage. As it became less and less effective, she took more and more pills. As she took more and more pills, her brain developed more and more receptors to receive the effects it wanted from the pills. As this happened, she became less and less healthy. Eventually she began having seizures. When she realized that this was all caused by the drugs, she decided to stop taking them. Cold turkey
She later shared with me what happened as her body went through massive withdrawals and the increased number of receptors in her brain screamed for the drugs they had been created to receive. What she said was that every toxin came to the surface in every way imaginable. On the one hand this was incredibly painful to experience. On the other, it proved to her just how toxic those drugs had been — and it motivated her to continue until everything left her body.
We can either see this time as a horrible inconvenience to our “normal lives” and keep taking the drugs of distraction and avoidance we all take — creating more and more ways not to have to think about what has been going on all along. Or we can see this time as an opportunity to witness all that is wrong coming to the surface to be seen and eradicated — by Truth and Love.
Truth and Love? Yes, Truth and Love.
Racism is imbedded in the very fabric of our nation. But as more and more people understand the Truth that we are all One, that racism that is inside all of us within the dominant culture is going to surface to be seen. And eradicated as we choose Love instead of fear.
Class divides have existed since the beginning of time — and a piece of New World paper that says all men are created equal was never going to be enough to destroy them. But as more and more of us insist on the Truth that we are all One, the inequities of class that have always existed will surface and can then be destroyed as we choose Love instead of fear.
Religious prejudice has killed tens of millions of people in just this last century. The number may actually be uncountable over time. Many of the people who came to this country and now see themselves as the “truest Americans” are descended from people who came here for religious freedom. I am. And yet we continue to tolerate religious persecution and now turn away those coming her seeking it because, well, “it was different back then”. It was no different. Our beloved President Franklin D. Roosevelt turned away boatloads of Jews feeling the Holocaust in Europe just as the current president turns aways those fleeing religious persecution now. Hate and fear walk hand in hand all the time, but until it become visible to us all, it can’t be destroyed. Until we choose Love instead of fear, it cannot be destroyed.
The world is broken right now. The good news is that none of us can pretend it isn’t. Yes, the good news. Because we cannot heal until we recognize that we need to heal.
Until we are willing to break down the old, we will not see what we have forgotten. We can only be whole when we recognize that we are only Whole in Love.
We cannot create new ways of living until we stop choosing the old ways.
In one form or another, every spiritual teaching tells us this, just as every gardener will tell you that plants grow best where the soil has been disturbed. And every gardener knows that wild things will seed themselves in every “cultivated” garden, no matter how hard we try to prevent it. And just as every human being has seen plants grow up through concrete and asphalt and out of the sides of buildings and drainpipes.
New life cannot be stopped. This is also something Truth and Love are always telling us.
Many of us are watching what is happening in our world — and the utter lack of lovingkindness on the parts of our leaders and fellow human beings — with broken hearts. Maybe our hearts have to break to be able to regrow in Love instead of in the comfort of our old forms of denial.
Mary Oliver wrote a poem about watching a flock after flock of loons die one by one on a beach
I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.
We need to break our hearts open and never close them again to the rest of the world. We need to break our world open and never close it again to the hearts of every single part of creation. We need to invite Truth and Love in and learn to listen to them and never listen again to the fear that surfaces in the forms of hatred, anger, bigotry, or prejudice.
If we are not loving one another — no exceptions — we are all committing hate crimes. The crime of not seeing in Love, as Love, through Love.
When I say living Love is not optional, this is what I mean. Not to love one another IS a hate crime — and it has to stop. In each and every one of us. It has to stop.
We have to live Love. No exceptions.
NO. EXCEPTIONS.