Mustard Seed

You are one

I have spent much of my adult life sponsoring love and compassion as stronger than cynicism and hate.

Probably mostly, to keep my own morale from cratering

Love, the strongest energy?

Says who?

Well, Jesus, Gandhi, Dr. king.

“My religion is compassion:” Dalai Lama.

Who is their audience? And what part of their audience has the discipline to live that in a transactional world, in which we’re all suspicious that someone who offers us love, probably wants something from us?

After all, Jesus, Gandhi, Dr. King, are all dead, killed by someone who wanted to prove them wrong, to show that violence outlasts love.

A friend who went to a meeting of people organizing a protest, told me that she was trying to figure out why, despite being in synch with what was to be protested, she felt out of synch with the energy she experienced there.

“They were angry,” she said, “justifiably so. And I am in no position to suggest they curb their anger. But something about it didn’t jibe with me.”

I had been to a similar meeting and came away with similar uneasiness.

Dr. King insisted that anger and hate cannot prevail against anger and hate.

Only love, compassion, has the power to transform the energy that feeds injustice and hate.

It takes the same intensity of energy, focused in a different direction.

Dr. King said that, until he was able to love Bull Conner, who turned the fire hoses on little protesting children in Montgomery, Alabama, his energy couldn’t be directed at what he longed for.

Renee’ Goods last words, to the man who shot her dead, were, “I’m not mad at you.”

As this piece unfolds, it might seem to be a call for putting ourselves in front of gunfire.

In a sense, that’s what, at least in a symbolic way, we are doing when we discipline ourselves to meet evil with love.

Most of the time the risk is not for our mortal lives, but for the lives we long for that we’re afraid to offer ourselves for.

What might it be like to begin to see a companion, a fellow seeker, in everyone I meet? Everyone I see?

I love the license plate holder that says: “Become the person your dog already thinks you are.”

I watch my dog and the barista greet each other every morning, and it lights me up.

It doesn’t seem likely to me that the United States might become like a Buddhist ashram, in which the larger community’s discipline and intention is to live as if love were the point of being here.

But I do wonder if there could be enough who adopt whatever practice might lend to their living a life that reflects that belief, what impact it may have on the culture at large?

Jesus said the kingdom for which we long, usually assumed to be in heaven after we die, is in fact right here, seeded among us. And needs only a few to nourish that seed, for it to blossom.

Jesus suggested we consider the mustard seed. So tiny you can barely see it. Or the leaven that, almost miraculously, causes the flour to become a loaf of bread.

Pipe dream? Maybe. But how are you in going up against the power brokers, using the same weapons they use to dismember our hopes?

Maybe it’s because I have so little time remaining, that I feel ready to have a go at it. No longer having a stake in making my way in assembling personal power.

Or may it’s the astonishing power, the wonder, I feel when I dare to love.