Spiritual Common Sense

There is a lesson mankind has long been taught but yet to fully learn.  From generation to generation, from Moses to Mohammed, Jesus to Buddha, Gandhi, King, Mother Teresa, Mandela and the rest, we are reminded:

We are here to love one another.

Love is a verb.  It is not a passive state, but an active force.

Love is the one thing you cannot get enough of and the one thing you can never give enough of.

 We receive love not in proportion to our power, possessions, or position in life, nor in correlation to our needs and desires, but only in proportion to our own capacity to love. 

The only way to have love is to give it.

No matter what the problem is the answer will always be found when we surround it with love.

Thus it is that in loving and giving we find the meaning and purpose for our lives.

All we really need is love.

For many of us this is the best time of the year.  For me it’s particularly meaningful when I consider how quickly the season of thanks preceeds the season of giving.

If the 4^th of July is Independence Day, Thanksgiving could just as easily be called Dependence Day.  It is the time set aside to formally recognize something we should acknowledge with every breath we breath – All of life and everything in life is a gift.

The essence of life is a chain of love.  Love binds all things together with interdependence.  Plants and animals trade atoms and air – oxygen for carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide for oxygen.  The water that falls on the earth passes through and is collected in the rivers, lakes, and oceans until it rises to fall again.  The earth too must give so that it can receive.

This interdependence is what gives meaning and purpose to our lives.  Much has been said on this subject but no one has said it better than Henry Emerson Fosdick.

“The Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea are made of the same water,” Fosdick observed.  “It flows down clear and cool from the heights of Hermon and the roots of the cedars of Lebanon.  The Sea of Galilee makes beauty of it for the Sea of Galilee has an outlet; it gets to give…but the Dead Sea with the same water makes only horror, for the Dead Sea has no outlet; it must keep its bounty.”

On November 19, one hundred and fifty years ago Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address.  It is one the most remarkable, if not the most remarkable, speeches in American history.

A local newspaper focusing on the length of the speech, said Lincoln “could hardly have said less.”  In truth, one would be hard pressed to say more.

There are only 27I words in the Gettysburg Address, but every word matters.  It is dense – more poetry than prose.  It is at once a reaffirmation of the past and a prayer for the future – a prayer uniquely appropriate for his time and equally valid in ours.

With his first sentence, Lincoln restates the founding principles of the United States, reminding us America is the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose.  In his words, America was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

In saying this, Lincoln echoes Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence.  “All men are created equal and independent,” Jefferson wrote and “from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The printer and publisher Benjamin Franklin perfected Jefferson’s prose and gave the Continental Congress the language familiar to us today:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

It can be argued that no other concept has had such a profound impact on American society.  No single phrase is closer to the heart of America, more institutionalized and broadly accepted in principle; yet, none of our founding principles has been the source of more controversy or more frequently challenged in application.

The Civil War was the first and most significant test of our commitment to equality.  Lincoln’s remarks reflected that fact.  He spoke at 3:00 pm on a dreary afternoon four and a half months after the Battle of Gettysburg.  In the dusk, Lincoln looked so pale some said he was ill.  He was sad and somber.

No wonder.  In three days, more than 45,000 men had died or were wounded at Gettysburg.  Tens of thousands had preceded them.  Lincoln knew many more would follow before the war was over.  And the fate of the union still hung in the balance.

“It is for us the living,” Lincoln said, acknowledging these facts, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced… that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Many wars have followed.  Many more have perished in the name of liberty.  Many battles have been fought to fulfill in the promise of equality.  The challenge to form, in Lincoln’s words, “a more perfect union” continues and is unending.

It is a mistake to assume we can ever achieve perfection.  But it is an even greater mistake to cease trying.  America is always a work in progress.  America is becoming.  America is a promise.  America is an ideal to cherish and a dream to pursue.

They called to tell me Rachel was dying a few days ago.  It came as no surprise.  She has been battling cancer for years.

My last communication with her was by email 3 months ago and that was brief.  She said she was having trouble hitting the keys and preferred to talk.

She said she would call me.  She never did.  My calls to her went unanswered.

Still, the news she was in hospice and down to a few days hit me hard and it’s hard to explain why.  When I think back, we only saw each other half a dozen times.  We talked by phone infrequently – maybe once a year.  Yet, from the moment I met her, I felt a connection I could not explain.

The first time we met, she couldn’t understand why I had come to see her, why I wanted to interview her, or what she had to say that would be of interest to the world.  Sure, she had a large family and, yes, 19 of her 21 kids where adopted, but so what.

One of her kids, Benjamin, the boy without a brain was something of a medical marvel (See: Lessons from A Boy Without A Brain, posted 7/16/13) but that was of no significance to her.  Ben and the others society saw as disadvantaged were her children – nothing more, nothing less.  To her mind, her family was not unlike every other family in the neighborhood.

Despite her humility, Rachel was anything but ordinary.  She was the equal of any man or woman I have meant and I say this as one who has been privileged to meet some of the most remarkable people of our time.

The first thing I noticed about her when we met was her joy and boundless compassion.  The second thing I noticed was that she had a rare ability to speak truth.

I asked her what I thought were simple questions, obvious questions, the same questions I would ask anyone else, and received unexpectedly profound answers, answers that seem to come to her fully formed without thought or effort (See:  Forget Yourself, posted 6/23/2012).

So when she called one morning a dozen years or so ago to say she had found the answer, the reason we felt so close, I listened expecting her to say something worth remembering.  I wasn’t disappointed.

She said she was reading and meditating that morning when a thought came to her:  There is no distance between souls.

“That’s it,” she said.”

And so it is.

Rachel was right.  There is no distance between souls.  Never has been.  Never will be.

Distilled to its essence, the common denominator of all the moral precepts laid down by the founders of all the great religions is selflessness.  Collectively and continually, they remind us we cannot see God until we take our eyes away from the mirror – turning away from ourselves, from our self-centered ambitions and pursuit of power and possessions.

The prison population provides the most dramatic example of the damage we do in pursing our parochial personal interests.  Most of those who are incarcerated have taken selfishness and self-centered behavior to its logical conclusion.  At their core, these people are the “takers” of the world – the takers of life, liberty, security and property.

After thirty years of working with prison populations, Mimi Silbert, founder of Delancy Street, confirms this observation and takes it a step further.  She notes most of the people in prison have always been on the receiving end.

“They are either receivers of punishment and hate and aggression, or they are the receivers of welfare, the receivers of therapy,” she says, “but they are never the doers.  They are never the givers.”

Conversely, the simplest ethical approach to life is to give as much as possible and take as little as necessary.  In the words of Israel Zangwill, “Selfishness is the only real atheism; unselfishness, the only real religion.”

The more we receive without giving, the less we think of ourselves and the more dependent we become.  The givers of the world have reversed this spiral. The more they give, the more they want to give, the more they can give and the better they feel about themselves.  They have learned the most profoundly selfish thing we can do is to be selfless.