“While you are proclaiming peace with your lips, be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.”
—St. Francis of Assisi
We are living in a strange time of immediacy. There used to be a time when Amazon primarily evoked an image of a rainforest in South America, and it took effort and patience if we wanted to have something nice, new or different.
Maybe that’s why the tantalizing possibility of being able to get almost anything for almost nothing at almost any time of day is too much to resist, even if we suspect we could make do with less. Maybe this sense of immediacy has also made it harder to keep perspective when it feels like nothing is changing in response to our efforts to improve our lives.
This state of mind has far-reaching implications for our community. If we are framing our experiences with scarcity, craving and worry, we become drained and ineffective too quickly. We end up falling into preservation mode for “me and mine” and are less likely to hold space for new ideas and people. Our sense of community and who belongs there becomes much smaller, and our brains trick us into thinking that’s what we need to survive.
But what we need to survive has never been more evident than it is in light of COVID-19, Me Too and Black Lives Matter. Wealth disparity abounds, and the forces that oppress have infiltrated our societal structure so deeply that we don’t even know where to turn for justice, turning instead to disillusionment or avoidance to make it easier to get through the day.
The truth is, there is a lot of scarcity in our country, but this is a justice issue, not something that can be addressed by pacifying ourselves with material goods at the expense of long-term societal health and wellbeing.
As a white female, I have privileges men and women of color do not have. I have what I have because of a system that was built to reward whiteness. That’s the nuance. I might not have everything I ever wanted, or as many rights as others, but that shouldn’t stop me from asking the question: what can I do from where I’m standing to lift others up? If I’m flinching and depleting in scarcity-mindset, it’s hard to ask that question. It’s hard to get out and vote. It’s hard to take risks. How can I look for ways to help others with my eyes closed?
Scarcity breeds worry, exhaustion and self-preservation. In that sense, feeling whole is almost a radical way of achieving your best self in order to help others. Seth Godin says, “All the easy problems have been solved, so you’re going to have to solve something difficult.” Solving difficult problems is exhausting to say the least. The time for arm-chair activism has long passed.
If we can’t experience wholeness, when do we allow our souls and bodies to rest? If we cannot rest, how can we generate the energy needed to live values we speak and better serve friends, family and community?
African Americans and other people of color have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. Black Americans are more than twice as likely to be unarmed when killed in police custody compared to white people. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, people across the nation have raised their voices with outcries of heartbreak, rage and grief, and rightly so. Social media feeds are buzzing with indignation. Many mobilized, at great personal risk, to march and demand change through protests, demonstrations and, in some cases, were brutally suppressed doing so. Even where small gains were made, it’s clearly disproportionate to all that has been taken, and there is much left to accomplish.
Passion is great, but it only gets us so far. This era demands sustained, unglamorous effort. We must find ways of being that cultivate energy and vitality, but not just because it helps us better enjoy our lives and each other. It’s so that we can be strong enough to stay present with difficult moments, with the lack of progress, with the rage and despair, with the ups and downs, and still remain committed to the grace we’re capable of. So that when we see someone’s wound, we want to help clean and dress it, rather than sending thoughts and prayers from a comfortable distance.
As an iron-clad would-be-knight riding to war, Francis of Assisi looked down on people. He became Saint Francis when he shed his armor, dismounted the war-horse, and stood eye-level with the illness, famine and poverty around him, and changed. It was the most beautiful, great work of his life, to show how peace is proclaimed first by deed, and then by word. “While you are proclaiming peace with your lips, be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.”
The benefit of living in this unique time as opposed to any other is that the map to happiness and wholeness drawn by spiritual teachers for millennia is being corroborated by research. Our understanding of how mindfulness enriches our lives, for example, is owed greatly to this secular research. Gone are the days when psychologists merely strive to understand mental illness. Now the growing discipline of positive psychology is seeking to objectively uncover the ways of being that promote mental wellness and happiness within individuals as well as communities.
One such researcher, neuroscientist and author Dr. Alex Korb, explains that gratitude is essential for mental health and wellbeing. He tells a story of a moment in his childhood to illustrate this point:
The Difference Between Fishing and Catching
Once, while at Boy Scout Camp, I saw an old scoutmaster heading down to the lake with a rod and reel. A couple hours later, as he was walking back, I asked the scoutmaster how it went.
“Great,” he responded.
“How much did you catch?” I asked.
“I didn’t catch anything,” he replied, adding, “It’s called fishing, not catching.”
—Dr. Alex Korb, The Upward Spiral
In this circumstance, the scoutmaster may very well have been a Zen master!
Gratitude is a word with a lot of baggage, because it’s often used as a way to ask people to settle down and stop making a fuss. What’s meant here is not simply “appreciate what you have.” It’s much more radical.
Radical, transformative gratitude is about appreciating all the gifts in our lives so deeply that we cannot bear to live in a world where others do not also have the same in their lives. It’s about loving and valuing something so much that you want it for everyone who crosses your path.
How can we achieve our dreams of possibility for the future if we continue to play a zero-sum game where I can only have what I have (and boldly want more) while others live in fear that they could die because they chose to take a walk down the street? I cannot speak peace where there is no peace. But I can, at any moment, call it into my heart.
If we have been imperfect in our gratitude, there’s no time to feel sorry for ourselves. Cynthia Bourgeault illustrates this point so eloquently in The Wisdom Jesus where she talks about repentance. The translation of repentance is derived from the Greek metanoia. It’s not about feeling sorry for yourself and excessively apologetic, she explains: “It doesn’t even mean to ‘change the direction in which you’re looking for happiness’,” said Bourgeault.“The word breaks down into meta and noia … which literally mean ‘go beyond the mind’ or ‘go into the larger mind.’” Repentance is about moving out of a “me-first” mindset and returning to the fold.
There’s good news: gratitude is so incredibly powerful that we don’t even have to be perfect practitioners for it to make a huge impact in our lives. That’s worth remembering, because life isn’t always peachy and rose-tinted even during the best times.
“You can’t always find something to be grateful for, but just because you can’t find it doesn’t mean it’s not useful to look. It’s not the finding of gratitude that matters most. It’s remembering to look in the first place,” Dr. Korb explains.
And the more frequently we look around for things to appreciate and be grateful for, the more we will remember to do it in the future. Korb says that’s because our brains are physically changing in response to looking. Each thought blazes a neural pathway that becomes stronger each time we try.
Humanity has made strides toward a safer, more equitable world, but we are not done. In fact, this work can never really be finished. The second we think we’re done working for justice is the second we stop ensuring its existence. Let’s steel our resolve for peace, knowing that peace is not the outcome, but it is the way.
The path is the way. May our hearts be whole, our feet be light, and our compass true.
A Prayer for Peace
by St. Francis of Assisi“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved, as to love.For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
Thoughts to consider:
Who am I when I am my best self?
How might I build my life to cultivate that best self? What do I truly need to do so?
—Jessica Lien, Prairiewoods development coordinator