A Light In a Pandemic

 We are coming up on a Year of Pandemic.  Many of us have been in lockdown for 11 months.  There is a national mental health crisis occurring.  Depression and anxiety as well as substance abuse are at record levels.  So are divorces.  How do we find Light in all this?   To answer that question I engaged in my prayer practice (previously mentioned) of holding a question with sacred (to me) texts and opening to the wisdom they reveal.   So this is what I got:

From Emanuel  Book I: "Look to understand your negative feels as a loving Mother would understand a confused and frightened child...Do not deny the part of you that is in darkness or it will manifest again. ...With awareness, you give yourself the gift of an opening for growth and change.  Do not criticize yourself because in darkness you could not see."

Those of you familiar with the classic, The Prophet by Kahil Gilbran know that the section on Laws talks throughout it about the contrast between a rigid law following spirit and a joyful and free spirit.  He goes on to say: "What shall I say to these (the rigid law following ones) save that they too stand in the sunlight, but with their backs to the sun? ... What is the sun to them but a caster of shadow?...but you who walk facing the sun, what images drawn on the earth can hold you?

For me this passage serves as a reminder about getting caught up in shoulds or preconceptions which when rigidly held mean we are turned away from the sun and thus in shadow. It means having to face this pandemic with spiritual orientation - looking towards the Light.  Which leads to...

Our beloved Thomas Kelly in the Testament of Devotion: "Continuous renewed immediacy, not receding memory of the Divine Touch, lies at the base of religious living.  Let us explore together the secret of a deeper devotion, a more subterranean sanctuary of the soul, where the Light Within never fades, but burns, a perpetual Flame, where the wells of living water of divine revelation rise up continuously."

I love the rich poetic imagery that Kelly always uses.  He emphatically brings home here are need for each other, for spiritual community, to help renew each other - that our sharing keeps us in a living experience of the divine.  Thus as we face the pandemic community is essential.

Illusions by Richard Bach from the "Messiah's handbook": "Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there.  What your choose to do with them is up to you"  

This one serves to me as a powerful query.   If the pandemic is not in our life as an accident but as collectively created event, then it is incumbent that we understand it on the spiritual level.   I have previously written about this:  http://thefriendlyseeker.blogspot.com/2020/05/i-sent-you-warning.html and   http://thefriendlyseeker.blogspot.com/2020/07/covid-is-still-teaching.html  But he also says all the people in our lives (and that means yes when they are annoying the heck out of us).  Why have I drawn this teacher to me?  As record divorce levels are occurring, and other personal ruptures it is important to ask this question.  The next reading also emphasis this point of how we engage each other right now.

Emmanuel book II:  "Everyone on the planet is your soulmate.  If there is a man selling newspapers on the corner and you are connected to that person with your openness, your love and truth, you are with your soul mate for that moment."   

You may long for an encounter with a stranger right now, but most of us are still going to the grocery store.  We interact with people on zoom, we talk on the phone to people.  And now more than ever it maybe critical to see the soul of the person before us and know that they are sharing an emergency with us.

Neil Donald Walsh: "When you wish to manifest, seek not merely to think of things, but to feel it.  Feel what it would be like to have that.  Feel what it would be like to experience it....Feeling is the way we identify and magnify the energy we wish to experience more of, by resonating with it."  

This is a reminder to those of us who belief in manifestation, as I do, that we must see and feel the thing.  It is particularly hard right now because many of us long for contact with people and trying to imagine that taps into painful longing.  The trick of course is to imagine a party of people, feel the feelings, and then offering it into the hands of God, knowing it will again be and releasing it.  If one can do it with non attachment it is actually a nice little mental vacation trip.

Michael Singer in The Untethered Soul also reminds us that what we do with our mind can also be the source of our suffering and calls us into mindfulness: "You must stop telling your mind that the jobe is to fix your personal problems...Your mind has very little control over this world.  it is neither omniscient nor omnipotent.  ...Nor can it control all the people, places and things around you. ...Whenever it starts telling you what you should or shouldn't do in order to get he world to match your preconceived concepts, don't listen.  ...The truth in everything will be ok as soon as you are ok with everything.  All you have to do is stop expecting the mind to fix what's wrong inside of you. ... The minute you stop putting your whole heart into the mind as if it where your savior and protector, you will find yourself behind the mind watching it."

This is such a helpful reminder about not ruminating about all the political crap which has been happening - it points to how to do some of the above, how to turn towards the sun, how to notice why people an events are in our lives, how to touch into manifesting but in a non attached way.  By stepping back and watching our mind, by adopting a posture of acceptance for what is.

Finally Wayne Dyer from The Power of Intention.  Wayne frequently talks about having our intention (like in the Walsch quote) but being in alignment, noticing thoughts that take us out of alignment.  He urges that we set an intention like: "I feel lovingly connected to others and hopeful."  He encourages us to repeat this to ourselves when negativity arises.

So to summarize all this wisdom: Be gentle and accepting with your negative feelings. Turn away from rigidity and preconception and turn towards the Light.  Use spiritual community to keep you in touch with Living Waters. See all the events and people in your life as teachers.  See the soul of everyone you meet, and it will be a spiritual encounter.  Hold a vision for a good life feeling into that without attachment.  Stop trying to solve your life from your mind - observe instead the events of your life from a place of acceptance.  Have a positive affirmation to say to remind yourself.

To Pray as If Climate Change is Over

I try to pay attention to synchronicities because I believe they are a definite sign of God speaking to us.

Recently while going to Quaker Earthcare Witness national gathering I first while listening to a Wayne Dyer tape in the car heard him quote Nevil, a guy from the early last century, who talked about prayer in a different way.   Then someone at the conference also handed me a flyer about prayer with a quote from Nevil.  Dyer talks about a concept that Neale Donald Walsch also talks about as well: the idea that we are also divine, that we were created by the divine as part of the divine, not separate from, and that when we are connected to our Spiritual Source we have the power to create and experience everything.  All three postulate that we (the collective we) co-create the universe with God.

This carries with it some implications for prayer, that Walsch talks about in his book Happier than God.  The implication being that if we pray “I need money” that we are simply creating more need. If we pray “stop the war” we are simply focusing on war and thus bring more of that energy- that the Divine matches what we bring.   So a better prayer would be ….well not to pray for peace to come because that still carries the idea that peace is “not yet”.  But rather to place ourselves in the frame of mind of really sensing and feeling in our body the world at Peace, getting totally in touch with what it would really feel like.  Interesting the Kabbalah which was practiced by Jewish mystics also directs people to imagine as if it were now that which the person prays for.

So all of this has lead me to really think about the idea of what if we really focused ourselves on the end of Climate change.  (There is almost not right words for this – like how do you describe the absence of oxygen that does not still really convey oxygen?)  The trick of this is not to just sort of imagine going back to some idealized notion of the 1970’s as if climate change was not then beginning.   It means having to fully embrace all the science of climate change – to acknowledge that the burning of fossil fuels, as a reality of physics, warms up the atmosphere.   So it means having to go to a state of living that does not include burning fossil fuels.   That also does not mean going to a time before the industrial revolution.   It means actually seeing a new future that we live into now.   Does anything sound familiar about this?  Early Friends believed that the Society of Friends were trying to live the Kingdom of God NOW, not later.   That we were going to live it into existence.   That Kingdom was also believed to be a world of social justice.

You may be familiar with the Naomi Klein’s idea that we will not be able to solve climate change without addressing the deep flaws of capitalism (and I would add colonialism) which has created climate change.   In other words, a paradigm that allows us to see the earth as something we have dominion over and to take from, a paradigm that can see people and places as sacrifice zones is a paradigm we must abandon.   It is literally not possible to solve climate change from that paradigm.

So my invitation to pray into a picture of the world whole, with climate balance is an invitation as well to see a world of environmental care, of humans living in a new paradigm of being part of the earth and all living things.  Climate change involves how we build buildings, grow food, transport ourselves, heat and light our homes, manufacture objects, and interact with trees to name a few things.   So this prayer is for a radically different and reorganized world.   It is to vision a world of social justice and peace.  Nor does it mean being released from the need to do anything for in fact it means being drawn passionately by that vision of a world made whole to live into it.   It is what I believe early Friends envisioned the Kingdom of God to be.  Can you feel your body relax as you imagine it?  Breath into that image.   Hold it in your heart every day.   Believe in it and start to live into its reality.   Hurry we have no time to waste.   We have lived too long in the kingdom of destruction, hubris and greed.

Bringing Spiritual Intention to our Meetings

I have for many years now been a fan of Wayne Dwyer, author of the Power of Intention, among many books (and often seen on PBS) Dwyers messages is definitely spiritual, but no explicitly Christian, and so not usually spoken about in Friends Meeting - I would like however to bring part of his Light to our on going struggle to have our Meetings support the Life we want for our Meetings.

First I would say we need to have an explicit dialogue in our Meetings - what do we want?  What do we intend for our communities?  Do we want more young families?  Do we want to keep our youth? Do we want more vital ministries?  Do we want a more active and powerful social witness?  Do we want a deeper sense of community?  Do we want our business meetings to be truly spirit led?  Do we want to know the presence of God more deeply?

Whatever the longing - first we must name it - then we must imagine it fully achieved, the spirit of it - not endlessly lamenting the "not happeningness of it" as Dwyer might joke.  Then in tasting what it might taste like we must walk our selves backward from that image.  What conditions would have to exist to allow or nurture that vision?  Would a certain committee of the Meeting be different?  Would worship be different? Would community be different?  Then peel back another layer:  What committees or other activities prepare us for worship or to learn our practice?  What removes the obstacles in worship?  Do we expect to find the Divine on the bench with us? What practices could we change that would better support our cherished intentions?  What practices do we have because "we always did it this way"... or because when we had a lot of children we did x, or because of the force of personality of 1 Friend now long dead, or because we think this is how "all Quaker" do it, etc. etc?

How can we examine our practices and release those who no longer serve.  A number of years sabbatical years were popular for Meetings- laying down all committees for a year and discerning what was essential and bringing back committees only with intention and renewed purpose.  Do our committees match our numbers?  When does a meeting grown to where Ministry and Oversite should be separated (into Ministry and Worship & Pastoral Care)   And when have we shrunk to where they should be recombined into Ministry and Pastoral Care?

Sometimes this conversation becomes a little bit of a "What comes first the chicken or the egg?" conversation because we imagine we cannot do the work that it would take to make a better meeting without more people and yet we feel that without more people we cannot do that extra work.  Here Friends I would remind us that it is not our work alone to do.  This is where it is good to remember God!  How do we invite in God's help?  How do we remember that God also wants these things we want: deeper worship, greater community, etc.  and in fact if we can notice that it is really arranging the practices of our Meetings to let the Light shine through then it is not simply empty form or endless meetings - it is the joyful work of the Holy One and us as the instruments.