Starting With Love

Some Instructions for an Awful Time

“A man becomes a saint not by conviction that he is better than sinners but by the realization that he is one of them, and that all together need the mercy of God.”

— Thomas Merton

If, in the course of living through a bad day or week or year, I find myself questioning what now or what next? or WTF??? I have to give myself something to chew on to release the stress.

Sometimes it’s Good n Plenty’s, sometimes it’s binge watching Downton Abbey.

Lately, it seems like our country / climate / culture is going down the toilet. So even a personal good day is overshadowed by a shady gloom.

And I’m trying to eat my feelings and dissociate less. But I struggle to find a good answer to what next. In part because — like you I am guessing — I have big feelings about what is happening: afraid, mad, frustrated, stuck, worried, spiraling!!

So one good outlet for me is to find inspiration in the writing of those who dedicated themselves to peace and justice. I remind myself what kept them from being stuck.

In the recent Tricycle Magazine article, “Using Compassion for Institutional and Social Change,” authors Lama John Makransky and Paul Condon discuss how the exercise of compassion can and must be the route to real social change.

Righteous anger, they remind, only gets me so far. It’s a selfish expression of fear.

It is in a “fierce compassion” that I can warmly challenge others to see what is impeding their potential and to strive for it.

“Many are ready to fight the evil they see in others. Fewer know how to bring out the capacity for goodness in themselves and others. This is the crying need today.”

— Makransky and Condon in Tricycle

It’s the first principle of a Unitarian Universalist: The inherent worth and dignity of every person. Such a principle is founded on the idea that no person is beyond redemption.

All dimensions of the human spirit have the potential to do good.

And yet … how hard it can be to believe this to be the case, when there seems to be so many examples of “lost causes” in our midst?

I have always aspired to be a pacifist, despite living in the brutal face of truth that war and violence exist and continue to occur on repeat.

For me, giving in to the “reality” that war happens is a fools errand: it allows for that gap to open up — and then for the never-ending perpetration of hatred and violence to begin again.

I prefer to agree with those radical thinkers like MLK and Gandhi who believed that starting with love was the only answer.

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

Martin Luther King Jr.

So when, from time to time, I find myself falling into a negative mind space about the current state of our country, or of the patriarchy, I try to set myself back on the path of compassion. I try to find something within myself fed by love, peace, and justice.

I try to choose actions and words to mirror and, hopefully, multiply the expectation of love and justice I have for the world.

“The evil we see in others is never just in them but also in us … When we act from a perception of others’ evil, we evoke the evil in them. When we act from a perception of others’ dignity and positive potential, we reinforce that in them.”

— Makransky and Condon in Tricycle