Meditations by Ian White Maher: Praise | Gratitude | Joy | Transformation

The mediation was recorded live at The Seeker’s Table Sunday gathering at. If you would like to join us click: at 6 PM Eastern. This link will bring you to our ZOOM room. All are welcome. If you would like to call in click on our info page to find...

Explore the promise and price needed for moral introspection and to grasp the true costs of our commitments.

The mediation was recorded live at The Seeker’s Table Sunday gathering at. If you would like to join us click: join.theseekerstable.com at 6 PM Eastern. This link will bring you to our ZOOM room. All are welcome. If you would like to call in click...

The mediation was recorded live at The Seeker’s Table Sunday gathering at. If you would like to join us click: at 6 PM Eastern. This link will bring you to our ZOOM room. All are welcome. If you would like to call in click on our info page to find...

The mediation was recorded live at The Seeker’s Table Sunday gathering at. If you would like to join us click: at 6 PM Eastern. This link will bring you to our ZOOM room. All are welcome. If you would like to call in click on our info page to find...

The mediation was recorded live at The Seeker’s Table Sunday gathering at. If you would like to join us click: at 6 PM Eastern. This link will bring you to our ZOOM room. All are welcome. If you would like to call in click on our info page to find...

The older white man sitting next to me leaned in as the talk came to a close to ask if I was okay. “Am I okay,” I thought? No, no, I am not. I am broken. And I live in a world of brokenness. And I feel trapped by all of this brokenness. And I go through my day shutting the brokenness out, perhaps allowing myself to look at it in little doses like I might look through the crack in the door, worried that if I looked at it any more directly I would be washed away in all the brokenness. I appreciated the question coming from my neighbor, but I was struck by it at the same time. Had we not just listened to the same talk? What kind of response did he really want to hear from me? Was he ready to be responsible for the tears that covered my face and turned it red? Was I ready to share my brokenness with this stranger? And why was he not crying? How could he have listened to these stories and ask me if I was okay? I wanted to ask him if he was okay, but that seemed flip. How can any of us claim to be okay?

If we want to become seekers of liberation we must dive into the practices that bring us back into communion. In addition to our personal disciplines of meditation and prayer we would be wise to explore spiritual companioning—the path of walking with others—as essential to our liberation. What would our houses of worship look like if, instead of treating them like sanctuaries where we hide out from the world, we used them to see ourselves as companions for other people seeking collective liberation where my salvation is dependent on your salvation? Conflict does not become death but a path into greater life, because in it we learn how to hold the wholeness of creation. As my friend and I forgave each other, as we hugged one another, as we said the words “I love you,” we came back into communion. We did more than just leave our suffering behind. We committed ourselves to a practice of living the path out of isolation, out of separateness and into the salvation. How different would our world be if, instead of individual salvation, our churches and temples promised salvation through the hard and messy work of intimacy. Living in community is complex. I also believe it is one of the greatest acts of resistance we can do in a world full of alienation.

A day later I remembered the famous verse from the Bhagavad Gita. We only have a right to our work We do not have a right to the fruits The fruits should not be the motivation for your actions And do not shirk your work (Chapter 2 Verse 47) This gave me comfort. I do not have a right to any particular outcome. All I can do is offer my work to the best of my ability. It is the work that is valuable, not the special feelings or the dramatic spiritual encounters I desired so much. No ancestor spoke to me. No epiphany occurred. There are no great stories to share with you about my trip to Stone Mountain. Nothing sexy. But neither do I have regrets. My life is my work and I am blessed by that simple truth. Next year, I will return to pray for the ancestors, not for any prize but because that is what I am called to do. Maybe some of you will come with me. We may never see the end of white supremacy in our lifetimes, but we do our work anyway. For the work gives the world hope, and in the hope lies the holy.

The transition from Michelle and Barack to Donald and Melania has been more than just a change of individuals. I miss the affection they modeled for us so well. As lovers they inspired me. For eight years we lived with a couple who loved each other, completed each other, desired each other, and now we have something very different, something very ugly. And we often understand God through the process of mimesis , through mimicry, through symbol. The First Family models for us a way of being in relationship with each other and also, perhaps, with something more transcendent, with God. We have shifted from an affectionate, playful model to a coercive, commodity model. We have watched Eros die. And we are angry about it.

On November 25th, 1915, a small, group men, robbed and hooded, climbed Stone Mountain in Georgia, to resuscitate the Ku Klux Klan. In the darkness of that cold night, the terrorist nightriders of the fallen Confederacy were brought back to life like some Frankenstein monster. The Klan has lived within us ever since, like a shadow in the American psyche. This year as I watched torches carried again into public, I heard the voices of our ancestors reified in the world through the open-throated screams of angry men. I watched in horror, wanting to separate myself, wanting to be anything but family. But we are family, related through the great delusion of race. We are white, together. This fabricated identity that we collectively just agree is real, when it is not. The ancestors of terror prayed to the God of separation. I cannot, also, pray to this God if I want to find relief. If I want to find liberation. But I am not entirely sure how to reclaim me, which means reclaiming us, from night creation was torn open, from the night evil was chosen. I want to sing songs of love and union, songs of praise and gratitude. But first I must sing songs of atonement. But where are these sacred hymns of recovery and redemption? Where are the prayers of reparation? How do I prostrate myself and ask for Grace to take the terrors from my body, from our bodies? How do I help these ancestors down from the mountain? I feel like I am fumbling in the dark for relief.

Marcus Aurelius famously said, “That which is not good for the beehive cannot be good for the bees.” (Sometimes this is rephrased as, “What is good for the bee is good for the hive,” which is not at all what Marcus Aurelius was saying but not a surprising reduction within the cultural dynamic that wants to put the individual first.) Human beings are relational, not because of our behavior or our programming, but because we all share the same source. In our overvaluation of the individual we must reject the commonality of our source. We have masked selfishness and even exploitation with the cry, “These are my rights. They were given to me by God.” And by splintering Creation into tiny, owned fragments we lost the ability to witness the whole. In this crisis moment, and on this historic anniversary, we are in need of another spiritual reformation. The beehive is in terrible shape because we have chosen to live by the idea that whatever the bee wants to do is what is most important. And that is simply not true.

Our spiritual origins rest in this silent mystery. We cannot know God until we are ready to say yes to the dark. It is in the dark soil that the seed first begins to sprout. It is in the dark womb that the child is created. And it is in the dark mystery that our souls release our ideas of God, our ideas of ourselves in relationship to God so that we might just be.

The God of my youth was a tortured figure forced to walk a high wire over dangerous beasts of prey who snapped their jaws below waiting for the tortured God to make mistake and fall into their pit. This God was a mockery, a buffoon, a clown I stuck high up on that wire. At the time, I did not live with a God of my own, but with the pale referents of the God of other people, with the shadows of their love and distrust. I lived entirely within the experience of others. I had no idea how to look for myself. I didn’t even know that was possible.

I could hear my spiritual director lean into the phone as she asked, And how many people do you think Gabriel visited before Mary said ‘Yes’? Such an idea had never even crossed my mind. The story of Mary, for me anyway, always held a quality of predetermination, like she was chosen for this particular role. It had never dawned on me that there might have been others who had been invited to that sacred relationship, others who, for whatever reason, said no. Of course, my spiritual director wasn’t really asking about Mary, but rather she was asking about my sense of call and what would happen if I said no. The story of Mary is one of the great calls in religious history. Out of her womb is born one of the great spiritual teachers, God to many. I had always understood this story as leading to an inevitable outcome. Of course Mary was going to say yes. But is that really true? As someone who does not believe in fate, as someone who believes we must have free will in our spiritual lives if they are to have meaning, it seems that people must not only have the option to ignore their sacred calling, but often do. We must have the opportunity to say no if we are really going to say yes.

I don’t know if every spiritual experience requires suffering, but I would guess that it does, at least on some level. For the ego to collapse, for us to leave behind the story of who we think we are in order to step into the beloved darkness where there are no boundaries we have to say goodbye to something we have known, maybe even something we have treasured. And in every goodbye there is grief. But there is also solace that comes when we are ready to be honest with who we are, with our brokenness, because in it we find the healing in other people. This is the meaning of a spiritual community. As bad as we might believe we are individually no one is going to turn away, rather there is a turning towards one another. You are suffering. Mmm, I, too, know suffering.

I don’t believe in fate nor in an interfering God. But I do believe that creation is always calling out to us, always inviting us into a deeper relationship, which is made visible in the world by a greater desire for health, and empathy, and connection. The call that comes through us is as much an enticement as anything. A beckoning into a larger experience of companionship, into that experience Thomas Berry speaks of, where we understand ourselves as a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects. This experience of greater companionship winds its way into belief statements we call morality, but not with any particular agenda. The encounter with interconnection simply leaves us responsible, binds our lives to the lives of others we might previously have denied, awakens us the inability to escape the suffering of those we are now bound to.

Our lives are not consolation prizes with our fantasies being the lottery ticket we missed out on, which is not to say we shouldn’t examine “be here now.” We should. We should examine it precisely because it seems to be so important to us, not just individually but culturally. The question is, Can we examine this fantasy without regret? Because a fantasy is not attainable, it is more like a finger indicating a direction of what we would like, which, so often, is just to be happy, to know we are loved, to realize we have enough for everyone. When we can understand what our fantasies are saying to us we can begin to think about what it is we are willing to risk. When I know what I really want, then I know what I am called to do in life.

What is our call as spiritually motivated people? As people who believe in the transformative power of faith? Is it a question of living out our character, of upholding and promoting a set of community values that is larger than our own egos? Or a belief in God that gives us the courage to walk through the darkness even if we are not certain in our own strength? Or perhaps both? I believe we are called to the purpose of resanctifying the world, of resacralizing community and our relationship to one another. We are the people who believe in a more beautiful world. Our eschatology is not judgment and apocalypse, but empathy and companionship.

The anger that lives in us comes both from our personal lives, pain and slights we have experienced, and from the larger community of which we are a part. We cannot fully resolve to be without anger if we are unwilling to address the suffering that exists around us. And we cannot address the suffering of the culture if we choose to see ourselves as separate from it. But when I am in community I don’t have to carry it all on my own. It is also carried by others and it is also carried by God, for I truly am not separate. The redemption of the world comes through us more than we do the actual redeeming. I don’t know how to make a lotus bloom. But I do know how to prepare the ground so the lotus might choose to bloom. I am sad for my nation right now. This self-righteousness, this judgment, this anger is no place to live. But I also believe the suffering allows us to find a deeper understanding and compassion. So for that I am grateful as it gives me the opportunity to love more and more powerfully. What we nurture becomes the future. Let us starve anger and nurture love so we might be the transformation our culture so desperately longs for.

There seems to be a whisper from beyond. A whisper we don’t quite hear so clearly, but we know it’s there. The whisper is so powerful because it calls out to us constantly, like the stream that wears away a rock. And the whisper is the call to beauty. There is a call from beauty, a sacred call, to bring to life, even if only for a few moments, something that takes our breath away. There are people who feel so compelled by this whispering they spend their whole lives in the pursuit of it. Some achieve great results and others less o, but it is a life given over to the call.

Anaïs Nin is famously quoted as saying “We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.” Which leaves a particular indictment of beauty on the table. The grasping for beautiful things, be they people or objects, often makes us look and seem quite ugly. But for those of us who seek the spiritual experience, who seek the sacred, beauty can also be a great guide. Today is not just another day in your life. Everyone you meet, everyone your eyes bless, everyone you experience as a presence is a gift to you. And you are to them. The beauty of these encounters is the feeling of the sacred. And the only real response is gratitude. Beauty is calling out to you, from all around you, it is part of you. If we do nothing but cultivate our ability to see the beauty of our very existence we will have lived amazing lives. And it begins with today. Go out and see the beauty. Go out and see what happens when we don’t see the beauty and then try to add a little in that space. It is healing to bring the sacred into all of our acts. And maybe at some point we will see things as they are because they will be as we are.

We are not here by accident. We have been called to honor the Sacred of the earth. We have been called to choose enlightened compassion over self-centered and socially conditioned power. We have been called to prayer as we move from dominating and controlling power to the power of love and empathy and connection. We have been called into a communion of subjects. The forest is sacred. The sky is sacred. The creek is sacred. You are sacred.

All around us we see people living divided lives because they think they need to protect themselves from the planet and either wall it off or stand above it. But on this sacred day, this day of changing light, even as division lives all around us, may we pray to know that wholeness is always a choice. It would be easy to condemn humanity, but not today. Today, we choose not the divided path of good and bad, but of unity. May we come together to pray and sing and praise the beauty and wonder of Creation. May we come to bow at our spiritual estrangement from the earth. Not to wallow in melancholy nor to lament our actions because we did not do this to ourselves. This is the culture we were born into. This is our inheritance. But neither do we blame the ancestors. They did not know what they were doing when the separated themselves from the living earth. They had our best intentions in mind when they separated their consciousness. They could not have known what the consequences would be, but now we stand at the brink of an ecological collapse and the consequences of our separation from the earth have never been more apparent. But this is not the end of the story.

We live in an era marked by a fleeing from darkness, a fleeing from the reality of mortality and that which we cannot control. We try to illuminate everything, because perhaps if we cast a light everywhere no darkness will remain, but the darkness is so much greater than anything we can even imagine. And so we race around shining our lights in a desperate hope to avoid the pain, which, ironically, only leads to our lives being run and determined by that very same pain because all of our actions exist in response to it. Suffering is profoundly social and when we privatize our pain and cover it up we lock ourselves away from compassion and understanding. Which is why the suffering of each of us is so important. We all have the opportunity to experience transformation and it is our own wounding that calls out to us as a path to serve others. It is our own wounds that create the opportunity for us to explore sensitivity, compassion, and love. It is our ability to say “I understand” that creates the opportunity to be present for another human being, for another species even. Not to solve their problems as much as just to see them. Taking time with our own experience of suffering allows us to dive down like a pearl diver into the wound and find a gift that becomes available to others.

We suffer from a crisis of grace. We suffer from the belief that there is just not enough love for us, for all of us, like there is some sort of grace scarcity. So we hoard and act selfishly believing we will starve tomorrow if we feed those who are starving today. And the tighter we grow and the harder we grow the more suffering we see and the scarcer love appears. This, in turn, leads to a scarcity of praise because when grace is scarce so is joy. But there is no shortage of grace, there is no shortage of love. It is like going to the beach and worrying that there won’t be enough sun for everyone. Rilke writes “walk your walk of lament on a path of praise.” My great hope is that we become known as a people who stand in the world witnessing for justice but doing so from a place of praise. The world is in such terrible trouble, but if we allow the song of creation to come through us we will be changed by it and others will be changed by it. It is through acts of witness that we will grow ever closer to the understanding of ourselves as Gaia, the understanding that grace flows through every atom of our being.

Where is the intentionality to be in deep relationship with the Beloved, with the Divine, with the Holy? It is not just enough to walk away from the structures that don’t feed us; the kings and the creeds and the castes. There must also be an intentional picking up of something, of a sacred life, a community of sacred livers and lovers because the world is not going to heal itself with secular culture either. There are no words or policies or laws to lead us into transformation. Transformation is a spiritual act. It is a counter-cultural act of resistance that demands we take a stand for the living, for life, for the sacred, for the Beloved, for God. We are being called into a time of spiritual renovation. People are starving for a new way of being. We are not called to cause the spiritual renovation. We are called to participate in it. We become it as others become it.

Lovers of love, we are not condemned to being condemned. Our purpose is adoration. But the adoration goes both ways. Just as we lay flowers on the altar, flowers are laid on our altar as well. Just as we light the worship candles, a flame is lit within us as well. We adore this mutilated world and we praise the Beloved. So put away the begging bowl. It is not appropriate. Instead, mount Loves’ stallion. This is the stallion we ride. This is the stallion that will carry us home. You are the richest person in the world because you are desired. And in that holy gaze we can face anything.

Martin Buber wrote, “The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You. All actual life is encounter.” The encounters we have with one another are constant, our faith practice is to engage in them. Most often we don’t. The unhappiness of the world is a result of our refusal to acknowledge the encounters we have everyday. We have a hard time looking at each other in the eyes, especially when we argue. Stories call out to us from people living around the world, around our city, from the seat next to us. Stories call out from people carrying something so heavy but they don’t know how to share it. See me, hear me, respect me, love me. Will we be that mooring in the world for those who are adrift? Will we be available for those who seek to be seen?

The body is a sacred instrument. It is powerful, it is full of possibility, it is beautiful. And yet most of the time we live disconnected, disembodied from this sacredness. This miracle of existence that has come from the stars, which pulses with life, is so often overlooked, undervalued, disparaged, criticized, even blamed for some of our so-called baser behaviors. Lean into your body and listen for the ancient secrets that live in your cells and in your soul. Walt Whitman once wrote, “If anything is sacred the human body is sacred.” And perhaps my favorite line by Mary Oliver reads, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” What you seek is seeking you. Let it come through you. Love the world with your body. Be present for creation, not just with your mind and your heart, but with your temple. You are beautiful, you are full of possibility, and most importantly you are sacred.

Shaking ourselves free from our moral conditioning is perhaps the hardest spiritual task we can take on. It is difficult because we are so adamant in our moral convictions. We would never say, “We know all there is to know about science.” Many of us would readily admit that perhaps 20% of what we now consider scientific fact will be disproven within a couple decades if not sooner. We are constantly learning. But rarely will you hear someone say something like, “At least twenty percent of what I consider acceptable or tolerable today, I will find completely immoral within a couple decades, if not sooner. Acts of violence are only possible in a moral framework. I believe, as a religious position, there is an innate sympathy within human beings, within life. And that it is the moral conditioning, the moral framework, that we live in that allows us to experience or inflict violence. We must demonize the other—humans, the planet—for this violence to be acceptable. To change the world we must become aware of our own moral conditioning.

What you think about God really says more about you than it says about God. God is not a what. God is not a thing. There is no “this is” that can be called God. God is immaterial. But the water we swim in, that which we don’t even recognize all around us, is material. We objectify everything. We objectify ourselves. We objectify God. And we become prisoners of our own thinking. Our purpose is to live in concert with creation. It is to stand in the sunshine of our true self and to witness our true face in the waterfall and the flower and the bird song and in the person next to us. The hidden treasure that lives within you has no material expression. That treasure is simply a lived life. It is curious as to why it is so hard to listen to our own lives and why it seems so desirable to want to live someone else’s life or a life defined for us by TV, but the spiritual path is to let go of that material and to see what magic is waiting for us. This is worship not of some external God, separate and distant, but rather the creative force that is calling out to us, calling out from within us to live our lives.

We often speak of joy as if it is a synonym for happiness, but happiness and joy are different. Happiness is an intimately personal sensation. Joy is about connection...Joy is about feeling a part of something larger than yourself. It is the sensation that overwhelms the shell of the individual and opens us into a sense of belonging and being with. Very often we connect joy with happiness because we feel happy when the sense of belonging overwhelms us. Somewhere along the way we got it into our heads that religion and God is not sensual, not joyful. And somewhere along the way we learned or were taught that loving life is going to get us in trouble, because maybe we won’t be as efficient at work. There is this mistrust of enjoyment, of really savoring this life we have…and taking the time to savor it. And I believe that [Barbara] Ehernreich is right, we are starved for joy.

There is something incredibly beautiful about your soul. Something that draws others in, that draws God to you. What is it? What is it that God desires in you? I think it is not enough for us to try to be good. I think there needs to be some seduction in our spiritual discipline as well. It is important to show God that we are interested in being desired. Just as we might put on that good perfume or the shirt that goes so well with our eyes for the humans we are attracted to, we should also put on display the parts of ourselves that will draw the God of our desire to us. Prayer doesn’t have to be about stripping away burdens, it can also be sweet, like honey. What does Psyche, what does your soul, have to cause Love to fall in love? Find this and you won’t have to chase God. God will chase you.

Whether we like it or not, whether we think it is just or not, the world is now in the care of human beings. Our actions dictate and determine the life of every other animals now living on the planet. All so-called free space is circumscribed by human behavior. The most destructive behaviors are easy to see. The consequences exist right in front of our eyes. Calamity is now staring us in the face as we look up from our hands wondering how it got to this. As someone who believes in the transforming powers of God and as someone who views the prospect of humans rescuing ourselves through material progress cautiously, I believe a successful environmental movement must incorporate a spiritual component.

I don’t want to move on from this grief just yet. All around me I hear the clamor of advocates demanding some action and I, too, want action, but I don’t want it just so I can avoid sitting with this grief. Our cup of meaning, the cup from which we drink our lives, has been broken. It is a mended cup so we knew that it has been broken in the past and we have healed. But today I want to hold the brokenness in my hands and not rush away from it. I want to stare at it directly with open eyes. This beloved world has been shattered. I want to see the faces and know the names of those beautiful beings who died this week in Orlando. I want to sit and witness what has been lost. We will act. Of this I am sure, but today let us just grieve. Let us feel the sadness, the sorrow, the betrayal. Let us hold the brokenness in our fingers, running our touch over the rough edges, bringing home how much it is worth to us. We will mend and engage once more in our call to love the hell out of this world where arms stretch out to embrace one another, where the tears of rejection are wiped away by nurturing hands. But today I grieve, today I witness, today I am just sad.

Altars are the sacred sites on which we place both our gifts and our sacrifices. But the intention behind the act is the same — this I give to you, this precious part of me I give to you. Just because there is something in us to overcome, something in us that no longer serves, that needs to be put down does not mean that it is not precious. Every sacrifice is precious. And still, more than souvenirs in our lives what we seek is the crucial link with the eternal. The coming transformation of humanity is going to be a death and rebirth on a community level, a world-wide level. But it begins with you. It begins with you being the hero of your own life, looking at the attachment that is keeping you from the more expansive life you know is possible, and then going forward, placing it on your altar, and letting it go.

What has to die in your life for you to be reborn? What sits between you and the more expansive life you know is possible? What has to die in your life to allow you to become part of the great awakening of humanity? If we are lucky, we will face the great challenge, the one the small and large character-defining moments have led us to, the one that asks us to die entirely so that we might be reborn. This is what makes the hero. This is why we cheer for Luke and for Neo and for Jesus and for the Buddha. In them, in their stories, we witness not only their death but also their rebirth as new beings. And in their example we are inspired to look at the great challenge of our own lives. In this way we live in a mythic world.

Last summer I went to the desert with friends to watch some art burn. There were massive, intricate, ornate temples and pagodas created solely to be enjoyed for a few days after which they were set alight; offerings to the Gods of impermanence. The night of the great fire was a spectacle unlike any I have ever seen. Tens of thousands gathered around a human image standing hundreds of feet over our heads, the product of months of sophisticated engineering and hundreds of hours of labor, and we stared waiting for it to return to dust and ash; just as we too will one day return to dust and ash. That night as the great wooden man burned, Grace burned away the small image of my ego allowing me to stand humbly in the company of other men, a grateful elder with trembling hands and another marked with the willingness to say yes, and for a few moments I lived beyond the walls of wrongdoing and rightdoing in that field of companionship the poets write about. And I felt free.

We are facing a changing time. The effects of the isolated self are coming home to roost. We can no longer plunder the Earth with impunity. We have come to understand that we are a nested, complex organism that has been thrown out of balance because we thought we were individual actors who didn’t impact the collective world. The coming collapse of the environment is asking us to take our collective identity seriously. The shift we are being asked to make in our understanding of ourselves is not one that amplifies the isolated individual, the rampant self-improving person, but rather the healing of the body we as beings are a part of. The healing of the larger body will also heal us. But we need a spiritual practice that has depth. That holds us accountable, that supports us in the giving of our gift to the world, that allows us to practice a transformation we can experience as a group of people rather than on our own. I understand that it is easier to say there is something spiritual about life than to say I am part of a collective expression called God, which is a transforming and creative force, particularly when we’ve trapped God behind the harmful actions of small people and the communities they represent. But God is not limited to them or even limited to what we have created in our own minds. It is a peculiar courage in our culture today, as so many of us walk away from religious institutions, to be not just a spiritual person, but a religious person in the sense that you decide to give expression to God as part of a community, as part of a larger body of believers who know that we have not seen paradise yet but that it is not impossible either. Our imagination is limitless. Our spirituality, when focused and developed in community, is able to produce changes not only in us but also in the world.

I don’t believe in a Golden Age. Stories about how great the world once was always strike me as fantasy and I think about my friend’s grandmother who once looked at me from the side of her eye saying, “The Good old days? There were no good old days.” But that doesn’t mean things haven’t been lost. In a similar way, those of us seeking our spiritual calling also find ourselves adrift in the world today. The decline in attendance at religious institutions in no way indicates a decline in desire for a sacred relationship. Many are just seeking a response for this desire elsewhere with many of us turning to the private chambers of our hearts having decided the institutions no longer serve us … or worse. And while there was never a Golden Age of God, something has been lost in this world of building your own religion, where we abscond into our climate-controlled rooms, isolated from the discomfort, but isolated nevertheless.

There is something that happens to us when you and I agree we’re in relationship, something that flows from my eyes into your eyes and from your eyes into my eyes. It is a sacred acknowledgment of our mutual being. Nietzsche, who was obsessed with his own independence, named this thing that happens between us a debt that we owe to one another. In our acknowledgement, I owe you something and you owe me something. The healthier, safer world we dream of prioritizes the sacred acknowledgement, the debt we owe one another. This doesn’t mean that people won’t come in and out of our lives, but when we lose someone we are invested in we are left with a hole, a void that cannot be filled because the relationship was not commodified. When we are invested in other people we are not replaceable.

Paradise is not a place with walls. Nor is it a place with no walls. Paradise is not an intellectual concept. Words are not going to get us there because in so many ways words force us to choose a side. The only answer is action, opening to the spiritual experience, being willing to be led by God into the awakened space of our unity in life and in love. It is time for us to raise the blinds and let the light shine in on our being by letting go of right and wrong, by letting go of the walls we use to divide us from others. The experience is not emptiness from a loss of identity, but joy as we encounter the love of all creation. Who has it and who does not have it? You have to answer with an action.

Maintaining a daily meditation or prayer practice is the single most common desire I hear expressed when talking with people about their spiritual lives. But often it is framed as a desire for something that is just beyond reach. I wish I had more time, they say. I wish I had more discipline. It is normal for people to struggle with a daily meditation or prayer practice. But lacking time and discipline, unfortunately, are not the reasons most people cannot commit. Many of us, if not most of us, have a hard time committing because we experience discomfort in the quiet of contemplation. Or, we imagine we will experience discomfort and we want to avoid it. It is a discomfort with ourselves. I believe the world suffers from a spiritual problem and the spiritual solution begins with the time I spend on my cushion befriending my anxieties and insecurities so I can understand and recognize them in my body.

We are not so helpless and so fallen that our salvation depends on the judgment of God. God has no judgment. God does not have the capacity to judge. The creative force only wants to be with us, to move through us, but we must be willing to embody this force, to make room in our lives to be transformed. Rather than saying, “I will transform my life,” how might our relationships change if we said, “please transform me so there may be more healing and forgiveness in the world.”

If you believe, as I do, that cultivating your spiritual life is vital to your sense of well-being in the world, vital to your very health then cultivating a sense of Yes in your life is of primary importance. Within us there is an awakening that wants to emerge. Thomas Merton once said we become contemplatives when God discovers itself in us, when God awakens in us. The awakening begins when we say yes and consent to the desire that comes from beyond our will.

We all suffer from an attention deficit disorder. Not in the sense that we can’t hold our focus, but that none of us get enough attention. And in our loneliness, we fill our lives with material substitutes for what we really want, which is just to be seen and heard and held. We are a culture that is gorging on material while starving for love and attention.

There have been decades of choices that brought you to this moment. Are you ready to follow the spirit further? What would your life be like is praise rested at the center of your being? Praise for being offered the opportunity to be lifted into freedom?

What keeps you from encountering the sacred love affair? Encountering God, experiencing the sacred as a living force in our lives, is the first step in healing our planet.