We Belong to the Earth

I had the privilege of delivering the following talk at Marin's Climate March on Saturday, April 29, 2017.  Our Fox Terrier Cowboy is with us today. Everyone who truly loves a dog realizes that we don’t own our dogs. One look into those adoring canine eyes and it’s no longer clear who owns whom. The heart opens, and a deeper truth emerges: We belong to each other. That’s why faith traditions tell us: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

But how far does that neighborhood extend? To whom do we belong? To immigrants? To the homeless? To those without healthcare? To the incarcerated? To those who look, love or believe differently? To dogs and cats? To redwoods and rockfish? To aquifers and atmosphere? To the entire world that birthed us?

Life on this planet did just fine without us before we arrived, yet it’s not doing fine with us. Without wisdom, we forget our place in the cosmos. We act like we are the cause and purpose of the planet. We forget who we are, what we are, where we belong. Does the Earth belong to us, or do we belong to the Earth?

Yes, we belong to the Earth herself. We belong to flora and fauna. We belong to each other.

Yes, we belong, and in belonging we are freed from over-consuming, abusing, and destroying. In belonging, we are free to be in relationship with, rather than relationship over.

In belonging, we remember who we are: We are evolution, aware of it own unfolding. We are Mother Earth waking up to her own magnificence, a magnificence that includes every person, every species. A magnificent belonging of all beings to one another.

That’s why we march, why we rally, why we act, why we advocate. We belong to each other.

Thankfully, we have dogs and all creation to remind us.

Arrested by an Iris

Bearded irises erupted in our front yard, proclaiming with royal brilliance spring's arrival. Every time I start to walk past them, awe stops me. I am arrested by beauty. I pause, admire, and am grateful. What if more and more could have the same effect? What if gratitude were available virtually every moment, everywhere? What if my aperture for gratitude expanded to include washing machines, pears, sidewalks and black-capped chickadees?

I'm starting to notice how many "things" support me every day. Socks and sandwiches, cats and carburetors, ivies and eyeglasses. From the simplest convenience to superfluous joy-boosters like the iris, my entire life is sustained and defined by grace.

What if I basked in God-essence exuding from an aeonium's buttery bloom outside my window? What if even the paper towel became worthy of my adoration? What if I acknowledged my office chair for its support and the mouse for its skillful guidance of the cursor? What if I thanked my cuddling pajamas?

Buddhists talk about interdependent arising; no one thing exists in and of itself. Everything is an interdependent web of interconnected causes. Each gives and receives in ever-expanding ripples of overlapping reciprocity.

The enlightened eye sees through the nebulous border where one thing begins and another ends.

What if the division between the pear tree and me totally dissolved? What if the separation between you and me was seen for the illusion it is?

How would life change if midst genuine pain, frustration, injustice, and uncertainty, we embraced with a full heart every tidbit of grace, revered every thread of the interconnected web of all Being?

Would we able to bear such all-infusing gratitude? Can our hearts hold that much sacred joy? Let's find out.

What is Your Original Face?

I had a disturbing dream recently. I was in an underground parking lot, and police were making an arrest. The man being arrested was charged with a crime: stealing other people’s faces. All around the garage were angry men with stitched cheeks and foreheads. Their original appearance had been stolen, and now they had to wear someone else’s face. As I reflected on the dream, I began to wonder: Is the face I’m wearing truly mine? What is my original face?

I wonder how many of us have given up our original faces for the sake of unity? How many of us have sacrificed a core piece of our soul in order to keep the peace, belong, be loved, or just survive?

My original church home was The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. It’s where I was raised, went to seminary, was ordained, and served as a pastor for five years. Twice in American history a major Christian denomination had a conservative/progressive battle, and decided to become more conservative. One was the Southern Baptist Convention, and the other was the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod.

I struggled as a seminary student. The rigid doctrines conflicted with the expansive love of God I had known in my heart since childhood. I was told to ignore such feelings because they were misleading and infected with sin. True doctrine alone could be trusted, as established once and for all in the Lutheran Confession as written in the 16th Century.

So, I buried my heart, put on an orthodox face, and feigned unity.

Years later, before I left that church, I led an education program for Missouri Synod clergy in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. Each year, we’d have a mix of internal and external speakers. For the external speakers, I’d invite someone who might create some discomfort, hoping for a little evolution amongst our clergy, all of whom, of course, were men since the Missouri-Synod does not ordain women.

One time I invited the pastor of the Cathedral of Hope, which was the largest congregation in the world whose primary ministry was to the LGBT Community. The pastor demonstrated how their liturgy and theology mirrored the rest of mainline Christianity. Then he said, “Really, the only difference between you and me is that I achieve sexual friction in a different way than you do.”

I watched old men’s faces turn pale as this registered in their minds. At the end, several of them stood up and railed against him for pronouncing absolution and benediction upon people living in unrepentant sin, people destined for hell. Others, however, with tears in their eyes, thanked him for providing a spiritual home for those who found no welcome in their own congregation. They blessed him and his ministry. For me, a closeted gay minister, it was deeply healing. For the first time, I had heard another Missouri Synod minister bless the fullness of who I am.

After these meetings, one of my tasks was to send a thank you letter to our presenters. We had a standard letter that addressed them as brother/sister in Christ and closed with a blessing for them and their ministries.

Over the years, we had many speakers, representing diverse political views and theologies. This time, and only this time, I was told by fellow ministers not to address our speaker as brother in Christ and not to close the letter with a blessing for him and his congregation.

But I could still hear in my heart the song I was taught in Lutheran school:

Every flower soft and gay, gently smiling seems to say:

"God’s a parent, kind and true, one who loves and cares for you."

That’s the God I knew. That's the Jesus I experienced. I wrote to the pastor, addressing him as brother, and blessed him and his congregation with joy. I was beginning to recover my original face.

What’s your original face? In these times of polarization, fear, and artifice, the best hope for our world is for each of us to to restore our original faces, in all their diverse glory, and let them so shine that others remember who they really are. Ultimately, we are siblings, children of one Essence, an Essence, which I experience as Unconditional Love. How does your original face reveal that Love?

I wrote a haiku about my dream. I've been using it as a kind of mantra when I start to forget.

Original Face

Fun. Heart-connection. God-fire

Wakens world to Love.

If you feel so inclined, please share a haiku about your "original face".

Kwan Yin's Mudra: What Our Country Needs Now

In our garden is a statue of Kwan Yin, the feminine Buddhist embodiment of compassion and love-kindness. Her hands form a mudra, a spiritually-symbolic gesture. It is this gesture that hints at how we can have an appropriate, sustained response to what is happening in our country.

Her right hand is held up, palm facing outward, as a clear and firm boundary. To me, this is the hand of justice, resistance, of a loving "NO" to that which must be challenged.

Her left hand is at her side, palm facing out, as a welcome invitation, a "YES". This is the hand of outreach to those with whom we do not agree, yet whose humanity we affirm, and whom we seek to understand, and perhaps someday even reconcile.

Kwan Yin is able to hold these paradoxical signs because she is grounded, her feet connected to the earth. What keeps you grounded, rooted, connected with a Source larger than yourself?

Kwan Yin embodies loving-kindness. This is the essence of grounded spirituality and constructive spiritual activism. More than a warm fuzzy, this is the sacred love that is our truest identity, residing at the core of all our personal paradoxes.

Rooted in that loving-kindness, we can say both "NO" to injustice and "YES" to dialog with those with whom we disagree. We can pursue a compassionate understanding of those whose actions we must, in all good conscience, oppose.

Only with such a paradoxical practice can we hope to liberate everyone, oppressor and oppressed. And, of course, most of us are both oppressor and oppressed. We have all, in some way, intentionally or unintentionally, been part of the problem: white privilege, fossil fuels, retirement money in morally-compromised corporations, etc. Loving-kindness holds compassion for the oppressed, the oppressor, and for ourselves.

Loving-kindness ignites hopeful hearts that can hold paradoxes. By grounding in loving-kindness and holding this paradox, we might eventually fulfill the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from his final Christmas sermon in 1967:

“I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say: ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good, and so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you. Send your propaganda agents around the country, and make it appear that we are not fit, culturally and otherwise, for integration, and we'll still love you. But be assured that we'll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.’"

Where Truth and Love Meet

"Speak the truth in love." Ephesians 4:15

Twenty years ago I faced a decision: continue to lie about my sexual orientation or tell my parents the truth. I realized that I was closing my heart to them in order to protect myself and that the only way to have an adult relationship was to tell them the full truth, which I did. It was painful for us all, but, in time, with immense patience, we came to a place of honest, loving relationship.

We often pit truth and love as opponents in a virtuous battle in which there can only be one winner. We set up a false equation in which we must choose between truth and love, and end up having neither.

We just came out of an election in which both truth and love were largely absent. The result is a nation divided, hurt, resentful, anxious, angry, confused, and distrustful. Some are happy that their candidate(s) won, but immense damage has been done to our nation-family, and a troubling future looms.

So what now?

Discard the myth that truth and love are somehow incompatible. The path before us requires that we practice both together.

The Sufi poet Rumi wrote: "Out beyond notions of right and wrong, there is a field. I'll meet you there."

That field is Love. It is a place of unconditional positive regard, even for those whose thoughts and behaviors we loathe.  True love is a choice, not a feeling. It is hard work. It's much easier to demolish someone's hypocrisy on Facebook or Twitter than it is to engage in honest dialog.

In that field beyond right and wrong, we meet others as they are, listen, learn, and start to understand.

And in that field, we are also free to speak the unvarnished truth with the intention of remaining in relationship with those with differing views. That field beyond "right and wrong" does not ask as to surrender to evil, but rather we are asked to surrender our self-righteousness, moral superiority, and smug certainty,

This is the pivot, the twist, the middle way. While we radiate respect and seek to understand "the other", we give no ground to misogyny, racism, Islamaphobia, homophobia, destruction of the planet, economic injustice, etc. We speak the truth in love, realizing, with humility, that we too have our own "isms", ignorance, and arrogance.

The how of our response becomes very bit as important as the what.  We choose to "go high" even when others "go low". In our crusades to be right, we can become just as vile as "those people" whom we condemn. Only by holding love and truth together can we heal, do justice, and make peace.

When I came out to my parents I learned that it takes time for beliefs and irrational fears to shift. Only in loving, patient, and courageously honest relating can such shifts happen. I had to say "no" and refuse to stay silent when horrible things were said or done. Yet, I chose to stay in relationship and keep doing the difficult, messy work of listening, forgiving, speaking up with firm love, and owning my own issues. That's the key. Change happens in relationship, not through social media exchanges or even by winning the next argument or election.

Transformation of a family or a nation occurs when we tend both truth and love, when we choose right relationship over self-righteousness, when we have the courage to return, over and over, to that field beyond right and wrong. I'll meet you there.