Politics, Awareness, and Love

I want to be more loving. To be more forgiving, big-hearted, generous of spirit. When I touch this side of myself, it feels good to the bone and reminds me that I fulfill something fundamental when I act from The Well at the center of my being. But in our current political times, I feel a darkness seeping into me, and The Well can seem far away, dry, exhausted. Maybe even poisoned.

Politics. A word fraught.

In one sense, politics can mean the structure and policies of our government. But in a larger sense, it’s also how we organize society, the collection of choices we make as we thrash out the messy details of how we differ and agree. We are shaped both by the decisions we make and how we make them. Each small choice along the way fills The Well or depletes it. Together, they tell the story of who we are as a people.

The choices we have seen in recent years have left many of us horrified, appalled, heartbroken. The shape that is emerging is grotesque, and the story it tells about us is shameful. I recoil when I realize the road we are on seems headed for more of the same in the coming years.

I don’t often write about politics. Stumbling Mystic is devoted to a different, parallel track of the human project. I write to understand the call of an impulse that moves me toward The Well, pulls me to the center where my goodness blooms, and reminds me that a bloom of goodness rests in the potential of every person. I worry that writing about politics will diminish this devotion. Political views today have become adamant, vehement, like blocks of pre-cast concrete. To talk about politics arouses stale arguments that enflame without enlightening, switching the track of conversation to an empty siding that can go nowhere.

But our spiritual life is not bound by categories, and to avoid a subject is to pretend it has nothing to teach us. How can I approach this thorny thicket in a way that is true to my center and the path I’m committed to? The cruelty I see is blatant, the pain it causes is real. I am angered. What am I to do with my anger? How can I be a force for good, opposing harm, and also embody the qualities I know are abundant at The Well? I need a fixed point across the river where I can tie my rope, a guide line, something I can hold to in my crossing, even as the current sweeps me under. My guide line is to remember the larger purpose of our common journey.

The human journey is not meant to be easy. In my understanding, we are here in physical form to experience joys and pains, make mistakes, care for each other, learn and grow, and ultimately, to return. Our guiding principle is to seek ever higher levels of awareness and love. Each step in the direction of awareness and love advances the project; each retreat delays our final arrival. The constant conundrum of life is that we face ever more thorny challenges, calling forth from us greater ingenuity and deeper reserves. Faced with cruelty, pain, and the rising froth of my own anger, can I stay present? Can I love even here?

My reactions of hate and fear are normal. They can seem like competing forces to awareness and love, but I only believe that in my weaker moments. When my grip on the guide line is firm, I recognize that hate and fear are lower elements of my nature that need to be surfaced and subsumed. Our current times are just another challenge confronting me to realize that no one is deserving of my hatred; to know that hate and fear are poisons that do not fight evil but feed it; to not be blinded by my anger but see beyond it; to widen the channel of my heart, yet again, as a font of kindness, generosity, forgiveness, and courageous action. If politics is the shape and story of who we are, how can it not be the battleground, playground, and common ground for our spiritual growth?

Our shape is not cast in stone. A story can change if the people in the story change. We are at our most powerful to change course when we remain awake to all experience and center ourselves in the inexhaustible capacity to love. That is how we drink from and replenish The Well and find the strength to make choices we are proud of.

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