During my short ride on this planet, I want my efforts to add weight to the sum of goodness. At the deepest bedrock, I sense that life is more than a competition for possessions and comforts that feather my nest at the expense of others, that I am here to help shape a world that is better for my having walked here. I want my basic orientation to be one of service, helping, and healing. I would call it a stance of love. I am not alone. Most people share this desire, want to know they are contributing to something bigger. The drive to foster love is a human fundamental.
I feel momentum behind this stance, a wind at my back. It is more than an accumulation of separate people, however numerous, making individual moral choices. Taking a stance of love seems to align with forces flowing through the fabric of existence, like the gravity that pulls the planets through the heavens. Every act that furthers love is rowing with the current; every act in opposition struggles against the waves.
How do I know this? I take a reading from my internal compass. When I give or receive a kindness, I feel the flow, a palpable warmth surging through me. Conversely, I recoil from unkindness. My compass recognizes what is alien, a foreign body my spiritual immune system must reject.
But what about that other human fundamental, the drive for survival that runs on fear and warps our minds? In its more distorted phase, we could call it evil. Here is the sticky point, the question I cannot answer: if the cosmos is built on an architecture of love, why does cruelty seem to flourish? How can weeds of poison, noxious and rotting, grow from a soil meant to flower? I want to believe in the underlying stream of empathy, compassion, and care that calls to me. But I am enraged and repelled by heartless acts of brutality, war, and genocide, suffering at a level that pierces my soul and leaves me bleeding. How can I act with love toward those engaged in greed and power? What does loving action look like in the face of evil? To do nothing seems weak, an act of apathy or acquiescence. The anger in me wants to meet fire with fire, but I know if I pick up a hammer forged in that furnace, it will burn me. The flames will only grow.
Over the years, I’ve learned I can’t argue myself into an answer with these impossible questions. The process is not mental. Thinking just spins me in place, screwing me deeper into nowhere. I have to call upon a different faculty to suss it out. As best as I can fathom, a stance of love requires meeting the world with an open heart. Not a metaphor, but an actual feeling of warmth and receptivity in the center of my chest. Curious. Alive. It is wicked-hard to remain there when I want to scream or cry. So I scream or cry, but stay as open as I can. As I do, the warmth gets stronger, fresh insights offer up.
My choices are always wiser when my heart is open. At a local scale, people around me can sense that I am loving, not hateful, and the chance for something new increases. At a global scale, I hope my small opening widens in the stream, gathering with others, adding to the flow. If we are connected in the ways that I believe, then I have done my part by dampening the flames, not stoking them.
Am I right? How can I be sure I’m not placating my fears with pleasant dreams about a universe that is loving at its core? More questions to which I have no answer, but I’m not sure I need one. I’m willing to allow an open heart to be my guide because it’s working.
Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash