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To give and receive love is our primary purpose. It is not to make money or achieve fame or to be beautiful. To give and receive love is our primary purpose. Giving and receiving love occurs only when we are open to intimacy. And intimacy can only be achieved when we are willing to be vulnerable. Sometimes the idea of being vulnerable is more terrifying than actual vulnerability, but the idea can stand twenty feet tall and forty feet wide. The idea can be immense. And so we get stuck. We crave an intimate connection, this is who we are, but fear and desire and judgment and control and illusion encumber our attempts. Sometimes people give up altogether. This dance is over.
By engaging in holding environments as adults, spaces that help us grow both psychologically and spiritually, we can learn new ways to be held, new ways to be in relationship with one another. The love we can encounter from other people does not only satisfy our present needs to be seen and heard and held, it also flows back in our lives repairing some of those old needs and it flows forward giving us room to need less, to forgive our parents, to realize there is enough.
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Faith leaders from across the city have been joining together in an effort to offer our moral authority in service to the cause of Occupy Wall Street. Led by the ministers at Judson Memorial Church, we come from Manhattan, and Brooklyn. We come from Queens and the Bronx. We come from Staten Island and Jersey City. We come from White Plains and Westchester and Long Island. We will be holding a service every Sunday at 3 PM in Zuccotti Park. But if we are to reclaim the moral voice of this nation, pastors and rabbis and monks and imams cannot do it alone. We are nothing without the people. Anyone can be ordained these days. Our authority comes from our creative interchange with the people, comes from the creative moment we share with the people.
Dream Sabbath
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I support the Dream Act and the Dreamers, as these students have come to be called, not because of some religious refrain telling me to be kind to strangers or aliens, or clothing and feeding the hungry. I support the Dream Act and the Dreamers not because there is such a thing as a deserving immigrant as opposed to an undeserving immigrant. I support the Dream Act and the Dreamers because these are human beings who want to continue to grow and develop and stand in the sunshine of life and love without fear. These are people whose circumstances are different than mine, but we are of the same being, we are of the same source, we share the same creation. My lineage is not greater than theirs. That is racism, that is arrogance, that is privilege – but most of all, worst of all, to reject these people, to deny our common heritage, our common bond is to turn our backs on creation and falsely believe that we can stand apart. We are all children of God and there is no preference made in the spiritual realm. There is no distinction honored.
Happiness
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We are wired up for self-interest. No question. But we are also wired up for cooperation. What moves us from focusing solely on our incomplete selves and into a greater understanding of community is an experience of awe, an experience of reverence. Sometimes we feel this when we are walking through a magnificent forest or mountain range or looking up at night into a space with no light pollution so we can bask in the glory of the galaxy. Sometimes we feel this when we are in the company of people we greatly respect or at the birth of our children. Sometimes we feel this when listening to music or watching a performance. Our minds have quieted for a moment and we are not afraid that the self is not enough, indeed we have lost the self and we have connected with the collective, with something greater than us. It is not that we are small, it is that we are expansive. We have spaciousness. Awe quiets the selfish, fearful mind. Awe is the transcending of the self. And awe is all around us, but we can’t often see it because we think this moment is not enough. Happiness is finding ourselves complete in this moment.
