Love's imperatives and opportunities

"We say we love flowers, yet we pluck them.
We say we love trees, yet we cut them down.
And people still wonder why some are afraid
when they are told they are loved...."

-- Unknown

"Love has a hem to her garment
That reaches the very dust.
It sweeps the streets and lanes,
And because it can, it must."

-- Mother Theresa

"Love makes the wildest spirit tame,
and the tamest spirit wild...."

-- Alexis Delp

"The beginning of love is at the end
of resistance....

-- Danielle Light

"The only way to speak the truth is lovingly."

-- Henry David Thoreau

"The first duty of love is to deeply listen...."

-- Paul Tillich

"Listening lovingly is an attitude of the heart,
a genuine desire to truly be with another,
which both naturally attracts and heals."

-- J. Isham

"Love has no desire or need but to express itself,
which quite often happens silently and in tears."

-- Yours Truly

People will often send me long emotional email messages (whether we've ever met or not) filled with deep, often painful feelings and sometimes very troubling thoughts, packaged in their moving and touching life stories. I often don't say very much in response. I don't really have to, and it would cheapen the experience we get to share. If my mission is to love, then the imperatives are crystal clear: don't pluck or cut or stomp ignorantly about, listen deeply and quietly, express love gently and simply, sweep the streets where possible, welcoming another, in their entirety, into it, at no cost. For me in these cases, it means reading deeply, weeping softly when moved to tears, feeling others where they are, caressing their hearts, letting them know I'm here for and with them, nothing more. My "understanding" is not needed, nor is it ever fully possible, other than to recognize myself in the meanderings. We want to be deeply felt, heard, and seen - not analyzed, dissected, diagnosed, and medicated with nonsense. This is all I care to give - the hands, ears, and eyes of my heart that touch, hear, and see another as they are - and I will give it for free, and for me, because it's who I am, and my life cries out for bold, extravagant expression.

Life is not fair, nor was it ever meant to be.

"I do not work to help 'people improve their circumstances' so that they can 'get what they deserve;' I give my life to those who are surrendered to 'God improving their character,' with circumstances as the instruments, so that they 'get what they more deeply desire,' the ability to love life and others, period, regardless of circumstances."

-- Yours Truly

"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can a soul be strengthened, vision cleared, and ultimate success achieved."

-- Helen Keller

"The greatest spirits choose and suffer under the weight of the greatest challenges."

-- Albert Einstein

"The willingness to be in discomfort, to have ego attachments shattered and to stand in the face of fear is, indeed, what creates the depth of our character and quality of our lives. In the center of these challenging circumstances we find our integrity, our ability to be honest, our sense of God's fairness and justice (if not life's), our level of need to control and manipulate our circumstances and environment. We find how and what we are willing to compromise and what we are not. Haven't you known people who are not willing to tolerate an ounce of discomfort? Are those people the kind of folks you would trust on a battlefield? I doubt it. They lack character and spend their lives manipulating others to get their own needs met in order to keep the comfortable status quo. Comfort is their highest priority - not growth - not character. However, neither growth nor character evolve from comfort. After a while of standing in the fire of adversity, you learn that you have the strength of spirit to overcome what life hands you, whatever it is. You learn that there is value in having to stand alone and that your security is not in having company but rather in having clarity. You begin to learn that change is constant and when you find you are still standing after all those things you thought you could not live without have left -- you know you will always endure because of the strength of your own soul. You stop waiting for someone to do it for you and you step forward to do it for yourself. You begin to accept what you used to call your failures as great teachings, lessons you needed to learn in order to go forward more solidly and with fewer mistakes next time. You learn that too much of anything, even the good stuff, is still too much. You learn that not having enough of what your ego needs is actually good for your spirit and not having enough of what your soul needs (even with more than enough other stuff) is tragically bad all around. You learn you are not what your friends or families think of you. You are not your company or your job. You learn that you are not your houses, your cars, your credit ratings, your portfolios, or even the appearance of your own bodies. You have true and lasting worth and value and you are first and foremost, love. You are a great work in process and as Einstein would say, you are 'an incredibly courageous spirit'."
-- Dr. Dina Evan

"Integrity is not about fairness. It is about living in the hands of God. What does that mean? It means that we are open to possibilities that our lives are meant for a higher purpose than our own satisfaction, and that our selfish desire for comfort, recognition, or success is not nearly as important as the sacrifice that will be required of us when we truly answer God's call. Yet even when we can affirm life despite doubts, unfairness, and suffering, and we accept this highest call, we still run into the question -- How did we get the capacity to be so dark, evil, and lost in our interactions with others and the world, and how do we manage to rise above it? Carl Jung called this the encounter with one's 'shadow,' the dark side of one's self. And one of the most profound paradoxes of all of the most popular Bible stories is that those who would be our exemplars of the faith were, at one time, very sinful men and women. Jacob, a swindler, was named Israel. King David murdered Uriah, Bathsheba's husband. Solomon created a system of slavery. Peter denied Jesus three times. Paul was an accomplice in the unjust execution of Stephen. We are not called to be perfect in this life. We are called to sincerely repent and to know that, but for the grace of God, we can do some terrible things in a moment's notice. The answer to the encounter with one's shadow is total humility in recognizing and accepting our darker side, as well as the dark side of others, along with the subsequent inability to be judgmental in the awareness of these things. And without judgmentalism, we can become filled with God's grace. Midlife is a tough time, for when faced with the heavy load of society's view of our 'inevitable decline towards death,' we encounter some tough questions. The answers -- or the responses -- are to be found in getting off our high horse and accepting the fact that our success or recognition or happiness is not what connects us to the grace of God. Instead, we walk with God when we humbly prostrate ourselves before Him, letting go of our petty complaints and competitive games, and the crazy insistence on 'life being on our terms, dammit' (which only ensures our instant and lingering death), fully accepting the guidance of the God who accepts us just as we are and provides everything we will ever need to live forever, starting now."

-- Ron McDonald

Not much more to say here. This is really everything I have to say on the subject, captured in these 5 thoughts. There is no instant pain relief to be had here, folks - only the deep honoring of pain, which brings deep soul relief.

Popularity vs. truthfulness to mission - weighing the voices carefully

"Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world."

-- Thomas Carlyle

"Avoid popularity if you would have peace and live in truth."

-- Abraham Lincoln

"Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved."

-- Margaret Fuller

"Avoid the pursuit of popularity; it has many snares, and no real benefit."
-- William Penn

"Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. What is popular is often dead wrong."

-- Oscar Wilde

"Fame is vapor, popularity an accident, riches take wings. Only one thing endures, and that is character."

-- Horace Greeley

"Popularity is exhausting. The life of the party almost always winds up in a corner with an overcoat over him."

-- William Mizner

"Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest, lawful, or righteous means. But seek the testimony of the few; and number not voices, but weigh them carefully."

-- Immanuel Kant

"Yes, we want to be popular. This is an innate human feeling, and we find many people who spend their entire lives in one form or another seeking popularity -- from the movie stars to the rock stars to the sports figures, politicians, businessmen -- the world is full of people who dedicate their entire lives to their own popularity. We find this, too, in the church itself. The church often will seek to do what is popular and pleasing in order to expand its audience and extend its influences. One of the things you learn very quickly in seminary is that people have to like you for you to 'succeed.' You have to have a pleasant voice. You have to have a bubbly, happy personality. If you don't, then the offerings will not come in. You will not be able to get your programs up and running. You will not be able to be seen as effective and successful as a pastor.

One of the things that Jesus' Passion teaches us is that popularity can be an empty illusion. Jesus was so alone. Here was the most loving person who was ever born, who had the greatest wisdom we could ever learn, who had such a relationship with God that he could heal and perform miracles. One would think that such a person should be popular, but the Cross of Christ says that he was not popular at all. He was rejected by the multitudes. He was rejected by government. He was very unpopular with the religious leaders of his day. And, those few people who truly did like him, the disciples, even they, at the end, were scattered, more concerned about their own personal lives than they were about doing anything to help him in his mission.

Yes, he wound up completely alone. He was, upon the Cross, a very unpopular guy. He was the lonely guy, to make reference to Steve Martin's movie. Yet, that is not an indication of failure. You see, he did what was necessary and right. He did what was good and true. He had his relationship with God, and it was so solid that he knew what his calling was and what he was here to accomplish and carry out. He saw that this was not a manifestation of his own personal ego, because what he was doing was denying himself. He was trying to help others to recognize their own capacity, trying to help others to overcome their own egos, trying to help others to take up their own crosses and follow Him, trying to get others to eliminate the demons in their lives and to live lives of forgiveness, health and love - in other words, to experience the Kingdom right now. He wasn't trying to make himself great. He was simply trying to do what was right.

But, he died a very lonely guy, not popular at all, doing what was right, doing what was good, doing what was true. Doing what was Godly and fulfilling his mission made him extremely unpopular. . . . So, don't bother obsessing with trying to become popular and with having many devoted followers. No, rather become obsessed with learning who you truly are, who God truly is, and what is good and what is right and what is true in your life. That is what really matters. That is what is most important. Popularity is an illusion, and it can take you down the pathway of great darkness.

You find many people get caught in the crossfire of the pursuits of purpose and popularity. They start off as a musician or a politician or an artist or author, following their own inner calling, trying to do what they think is good and right and true. Sometimes, they experience a certain amount of popularity. They then become infected with the popularity and start focusing, not upon who and what they are, what their personal calling is, what is good and right and true for them, but rather upon what the people want. They stop taking risks. They fall into a pattern, and that pattern winds up being the end of their spiritual creativity. It starts being a complete compromise of their art and/or their message. One has to adopt the message of Christianity in a certain way these days if one wants to be especially popular with it. It's much easier to make several million dollars a year through your Christian ministry, talking about how God will take care of all of your problems and provide for you infinite possibilities, than it is to make very little, if any, money talking about people taking up their crosses, dying to themselves, and transcending their egos.

One has to adapt to what people want, we often believe, and in so doing, we can very easily lose our own identity and our own soul. Jesus hung upon the Cross alone, very unpopular, but he did what was right. Let us learn from him to follow the witness of God within our own lives, to follow the witness of the Holy Spirit, so that we might do what is holy, true, and good. Let the masses do what they will. In short, it is better to die alone, a holy and righteous man, than it is to live in darkness and desperation as the most popular man on the earth. Just as Jesus said, what would it benefit a man if he gained the entire world and yet lost his own soul? Your own soul, your own vision - whether it's political, business, cultural, artistic, music, religious - is worth an infinite amount more than all of the popularity that you could derive from simply selling yourself in order to become popular."

-- from a nondescript website I can no longer find

I have heard many voices on the subject of my "popularity" - some eg-stroking, inviting me to "get bigger," and some ego-crushing, inviting me to go away. Having weighed them carefully, I have found that they are all just dust in the wind. I have a mission. I know what it is (so do you). I know who and Whose I am, and I carry on. Having written out this message, and then revisited the Foo Fighters video from yesterday (if you haven't seen it yet, please watch at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKhnmUdmz74), and if you watch very carefully in the very last scene you will see a vivid depiction of Jesus under the weight of his cross. I have no idea if the guy was trying to portray it here, only that he did for me, and I got it, and it said it all.

Noticing him at work again

"The culture of poverty has made for potent politics and spawned best-selling polemics from the right to the left. We don't hear as much about the culture of poverty these days. Perhaps it's because the market turmoil is making us all feel a little bit poorer. Or perhaps it's because a highly visible group is now exhibiting all of the outward appearances and turmoil of the underclass: the overclass. Forget welfare queens and the culture of poverty. Think Wall Street Kings and the culture of affluence. Wall Street types don't live in ghettos, barrios, or the hollows of Appalachia, out of the public eye of most of society, but they do inhabit environments that are equally sealed off socially from the rest of the world - the Hamptons in Long Island; Fifth Avenue; Greenwich, Conn.; and gated, exclusive 'rich-community-wannabes' all over the country. Because they rarely interact in real terms (other than financial) with people of middle-class means, they have become woefully out of touch with the solid bourgeois values that made America great....

There are important differences between the underclass and overclass, notes Susan Mayer, dean of the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy Studies. The overclass is better connected, and therefore it can cause much more damage. 'Poor inner-city kids selling drugs to suburban kids can harm people,' Mayer says, 'but financial markets and marketeers can bring thousands and thousands of people to total ruin.' (What's that they say about one death is a tragedy, but a thousand is a statistic?)

The pernicious culture of affluence merits further study. When self-proclaimed rogue sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh sought to learn about the culture of poverty, he hung out in Chicago's notorious Robert Taylor Homes and befriended drug dealers. The tale is chronicled in his fascinating book 'Gang Leader for a Day.' If he really wants to understand the workings of the most dysfunctional class that is threatening American values and taxing national resources these days, Venkatesh, who teaches at Columbia, should move into a co-op on the Upper East Side and get a job on Morgan Stanley's trading desk. He can call it "Hedge Fund Manager for a Day.'"

-- Daniel Gross, in the back page article of the latest Newsweek Magazine

Ah, there he is again, so sneaky and mean, that old friend, Sylvester McMonkey McBean, this time picking on those "poor rich people" and their crazy schemes to get more. He has the most clever and subtle ways of turning us all against each other, doesn't he though?

As we can so readily see, however, poverty (whether financial or spiritual) exists everywhere we are, among all of us, and there is no point trying to figure out how to separate ouselves from the truth or each other in conquering it. We simply start inside our own hearts, with God (vs. the drug dealers or Wall Street - yea, they're pretty much the same) as our guide. The work on the outside will then get much easier, and we'll gladly be doing it together.

People are asking ...

It seems that Oprah is getting herself into some pretty controversial conversations about hot topics these days, and others are responding pretty intensely to what they "perceive" as her beliefs and intentions. I know how that can feel, if only on a relatively small scale. But, interestingly enough, people keep asking me what I think of this topic and video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW4LLwkgmqA

So here goes. What I think and have to say about it is this: I refuse to be a part of the Oprah show, ever, and that has little or nothing to do with Oprah. And, I refuse to be a part of the "Oprah-bashing" show, if there ever is one, ever (this video is one example of how it would look and sound if there were one). I need none of these energies (persecution, pomposity, pontification, or publicity - these "p"s are all equally poisonous) in order to further or live out my mission. In fact, as I was listening to and watching this video, and to Oprah and those who would bash her for her purported bashing of Jesus as the one and only, for just a second, I was hearing the work of "Sylvester McMonkey McBean" (that dastardly money-grubbing, trouble-maker), and I could see the Sneetches "bickering and comparing and bitterly daring," focused only on who were the "right" ones, the ones who had "stars upon thars" or not. It all can get very baffling and confusing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0LgMpfLD1Y

Why do I feel this way, you might ask? Whay am I not taking sides in this matter? Don't I need to set someone straight here (whether Oprah or the Oprah-bashers, the ones with stars or without)? Well, with that line of questioning, I took a moment and sat humbly before my guide and teacher (you know who) and asked him for his consideration and instruction. He simply smiled at me with that disarming smile of his (he so knows my pain), then he chuckled lightly (reminding me that he doesn't really need my arguments, concern, or protection in this, and neither do Oprah, Eckhart, or Christianity, for that matter), and then he walked slowly away, beckoning me to follow him (I've said yes for the long haul.). It seems he has way more important things for me to be and do than to engage this argument and stress over such things as "abdominal stars," so I won't give them another moment's thought.

Only when I take my eye off the ball of my life's path, and my next present moment, within my life's most sacred purpose, do I allow room for such troubling nonsense, and then I'm lost, regardless of which side of any fence I find myself on. When I am experiencing and living a divided "separation" moment, I have lost touch with the Truth. If I truly believe, there is no argument or conflict, only compassion and opportunity to live the Truth.

For me, if this is genuinely a mission of love, then all there is to do is love, and to examine and try to remove any and all barriers and obstacles to love inside me, as they arise, and they keep arising. This is enough to keep me plenty busy for a lifetime. There's not much outside of me to focus on, really, except the well-being of the objects of my surrendered love. I have enough of a challenge truly loving myself and my own closest family, why would I spend so much of my energy thinking I know what everyone on the planet should be thinking, saying, and/or doing.

I so completely cry out, "Uncle!", no, make that, "Father!", and choose to love "all" the Sneetches on the beaches.

Love,

Jim