If Love is the answer what is the question? The Rev. Rali Weaver

First Church and Parish in Dedham

February 15, 2009

Two weeks ago I was in Raleigh, North Carolina visiting my friend Susan Johnstone. Susan is the co-founder of a private progressive School in Raleigh. It is a school for Middle and High School Students who need more personal connection. It is based on the democratic process.

Although she took some time off to be with me Susan had to go in on Friday because they had let go of a teacher the week before who didn’t have the skills to teach in that environment and they needed an extra pair of hands because the High School Teacher had the day off. So Susan asked me to lend a hand, which with my past teaching experience I was happy to do.

Understanding as she does about Unitarian Universalism and our foundation on the democratic process, she also asked if I would lead an hour and a half lesson on anything I felt might be useful to the High School Students.

Having recently taught Spiritual Discernment here at First Church I decided to bring an hour and a half of those lessons to the high school students. More specifically I decided to give them an overview of decision-making using a spiritual lens and focused specifically on the use of Clearness Committees. If you aren’t already familiar with Clearness Committees, they come from the Quaker tradition and focus primarily on using group wisdom to explore questions of the individual.

The group simply starts with choosing a focus person. Then that person is held in the group consciousness in silent meditation. After about 3 minutes of silence the focus person is invited to share their thoughts or concerns or quandary for 3 minutes. After the person finishes his or her time speaking the group is able to ask and receive answers to clarifying questions. Meaning factual questions to which there is a definite answer such as “how long have you felt that way?” Once the clarifying questions are through the group sits, holding the concerns of the focus person in their heart for 3 more minutes. Following the second round of silence the group offers up more intuitive questions focusing on non judgemental caring thoughts that might help the person clarify their hopes and fears. These more intuitive questions are not answered but simply written for the focus person to reflect upon later. To close there is more silence and then a short closing of the focus person’s choosing.

I share with you this structure to give you a context for the loving caring environment in which one student shared his grief.

At the Raleigh Progressive School as we practiced this technique one young man after the three minutes of silence in which the group held him in loving kindness, shared very simply that he felt difficulty receiving love.

I think this is a very profound awareness. How many of us would be able to admit that we feel some difficulty giving or receiving love? His peers listened intently and opened their hearts to his concern. When they were done asking clarifying questions and sat holding his concern in their hearts the caring in the room was palpable. The intuitive questions were all over the map. “What obstacles are in your path to loving fully?” “What kind of love do you feel difficulty receiving?” “How does receiving love keep you from being loving to others?” “How does not receiving love keep you safe? How might it actually be a barrier to your safety?” “How might you heal your heart so it can love and be loved more fully?” “Do you know in your heart that you deserve love?”

The student listened patiently while questions such as these and more were offered and recorded. In the final silence he cried as his peers held him in their hearts once more. At the end of the experience he asked for one word from each person and his peers offered up words such as “love, sadness, hope, possibility, and liberation.”

After the High Scholars had all dispersed for lunch, my friend Susan explained to me that the focus student had actually come to them after experiencing a great deal of loss. Several of his family members had died in a short amount of time including a best friend.

This bit of knowledge helped me to make sense of his emotion. What I know about loss is that during a period of grief our ability to love and be loved feels impeded. Not that the ability to love is really gone but only that it is muted during a time of grief and even though you might be surrounded by love it feels muted and you cannot feel it or see it or experience it.

I believe this is true at some level for any for any type of grief. Whether we have experienced the death of a loved one or experienced some other loss or trauma or abuse our world goes into a spin that makes it hard to find solid ground again.

In the book I read from today by Robert Sardello he offers an image of a clear blue perfectly calm lake reflecting the mountains and sky. “You see in the lake the reflection of the blue sky above and the great rolling clouds. You see also the reflection of the mighty pine trees, of an eagle flying overhead, and also the reflection of yourself. (in the perfect stillness) Someone then throws a stone into the lake; the reflection becomes wavy, unstable and dizzying. (and) The reflection is (then) disrupted in two directions simultaneously, vertically- the sky, clouds, birds trees—and horizontally, one’s own image.”(pg 97). He suggests that “This disruption of our own image is like the suffering of trauma” and grief and he goes on to explain that because the disruption is going on in two plains both in the world and in us we naturally try to steady one part of the picture usually the “I”. The problem becomes that in order to do that we must put a barrier between the world and ourselves and focus only on one part. For the time of vulnerability after a traumatic event this is an essential part of healing. The problem comes in when we cannot remove the barrier and as a result of trauma or grief we remain removed from the world or unable to navigate the currents that surround us.

When I was a teacher working with children with Behavioral and Emotional Impairments I would often leave at the end of the day feeling as though I had been run over by a truck. It wasn’t until I began receiving acupuncture that I realized what was happening to me and was then able to create some resistance to it. When I first started going to acupuncture my acupuncturist would put what felt like hundreds of needles in my back. They didn’t hurt but felt energetically electric. She said that from those points she could see toxins release. She explained to me that I was catching other people’s bad feelings as you would a cold and the needles in my back were a way of eliminating those toxins.

Over time I used meditation and guided imagery to shield myself from the emotional daggers my students would unwittingly lob at me each day. The problem became that although I could tolerate a great deal of verbal hostility and abuse without loosing my temper I built up walls in my heart to loving that did not serve me outside of the school. I had difficulty putting on my armor just for school and taking it off at the end of the day so I pretty much stayed in that protective mode all the time.

Over time and with more open-hearted meditations and by putting myself in safer places I have learned to shield myself more and more from other people’s negative emotions while keeping my loving heart open wide. I am not perfect at this. But I think this practice of shielding and remaining open is the question that leads to the answer of love.

How do we stay open to all that the world throws at us without loosing a bit of the compassion we were born with?

The answer of course is Love. The only way to stay open to all that the world throws at us and maintain our compassion is to center every action from a place of Love. If we are grieving we start by intentionally offering love to ourselves-- if we are encountering opposition from the outside we counter by offering intentional love to the other.

No matter what the question is or from which angle we encounter it the answer is love

How do we make the world a better place? Love everything

How do we live amidst such imperfection in life? Keep on Loving

How do we heal our soul? With Love

What is the meaning of life? Love

Love is all there is.

This is of course quite easy for me to stand up and to say and hard to do. When we are feeling low or our buttons are pushed or our insecurities are exposed, it is not our natural response to offer love.

But I believe that heightening the awareness of our own feelings and being gentle with our own hearts and then striving to respond in love at all times is the only answer.

Last week I had the good fortune to spend four days at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Heath in the Berkshires of Western Mass. Kripalu Yoga is focused on gentleness, on nurturing, on non-judgment and on love. The stress is not on perfect posture, although perfect posture is encouraged, the stress is on practice on trying and when you fail picking yourself up and starting again.

After mornings and evenings of gentle yoga framing my days I left feeling revived not only from the action of nourishing my limbs but from the practice of it, from the gentle simple non-judgemental practice of it. It was that place of non-judgment of relaxation of universal love that healed my winter cold and made me feel full of life again.

One afternoon as we were returning from a hike down to the lake we encountered another Yoga student in a walk down to the lake. He had a sign around his neck, which read: “I walk in silence with a smile”. As I passed and witnessed his smile it seemed to fully embody the fourth love- Caritas or Agape. It was a smile full of the joy that comes from the peace of non-attached giving. And passing him I felt lifted. My blistered hiking feet felt free to continue the walk unabated. My load was lightened by his smile.

Once we begin to understand how our emotions enter into the current of everyone else’s body energy we will realize how essential it is that we heal our own souls if we want to make a true difference in the world. It is genuine kindness that people remember. It is the authentic smile that lifts other souls.

If we know this we can begin by nourishing our own hearts so that we can brighten the pathways of others.

The answer is to love. To love everything, to love our grief because it reminds us of what we lost, to love our imperfections because they point to our humanness, to love our imperfect bodies because they are the roots to our spirit, to respond in love to everyone we meet -whatever their condition- because we are all a part of an interdependent web of life and we know that not one of us stands apart.

May we take seriously our responsibility for all souls we encounter in this life starting with our own.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

.