“In Returning and Rest You Shall Be Saved”

Do not fret. Peace. Let not your heart be troubled; neither let it be afraid. Here is why these scriptural commandments are so important today and for the future world.

“In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” Isaiah 30:15

The soul of the nation had fallen into rampant self-interest, materialism and greed. It neglected and oppressed the poor. It strayed from the sacred way of love of neighbor and love of the ways of spiritual wisdom. Its politics had become corrupt, its alliances unholy.

The prophet Isaiah warned the nation, because “you put your trust in oppression and deceit, and rely on them…this iniquity shall become for you like a break in a high wall, bulging out, and about to collapse, whose crash comes suddenly, in an instant.”

Isaiah’s words have spoken to many nations over the past 2,500 years, not just because of their warning but even more importantly because they show that there is a path out of that imminent destruction.

The sacred way of the Spirit that created the earth and all life is merciful. It is infinitely forgiving of those who turn back to its ways while there is still hope of recovery.

This proved true for Isaiah’s society and for others throughout the ages. We need to listen and follow its wisdom today: “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quiet and in trust shall be your strength.”

The path back begins in returning to where the Spirit lives within us all, the golden room of the heart’s true core, and resting there. Strength comes in quieting the ego’s selfish, agitated human thoughts and listening instead for the wisdom that arises from the Spirit through our silence and deep trust.

As I write this, America is voting for its President and the composition of Congress and state governments. The outcome will shape our future in many ways.

But whatever the outcome, we still will have the same enormous challenges that threaten our democracy and the survival of the human race and all living species. We still will have brutal social, economic and environmental injustices that must be changed and healing that must be undertaken.

The wisdom of Isaiah says that we need more than just the right politicians in office. No matter who is in these positions of power, we need a shift of cultural consciousness, a change of heart and mind that can come only one way—in returning and rest, in quietness and trust.

We need to break the obsessive, compulsive, white-knuckled, gut-clenched mode of being that many of us have developed over the past several years of political turmoil and several months of intense election anxiety.

We need to break the addictions of the ego to anything less than the Spirit’s ways of right living.

Whoever is in power, we need to be the change we wish to see in the world from our deepest heart outward, starting today. We can live from that calm refuge even here in the agony of fearful uncertainty.

We have a new world to create, the fulfillment of the ancient prophets’ dream. We need rested, strong and quiet souls that are trusting in the Spirit’s guidance and power in order to fulfill that hope.

So take a deep breath. Take a break from the news. Go outside and notice the beauty. Connect with a dear friend. Read some eternal spiritual wisdom. Listen to music that connects you to your depths. Best of all, meditate or pray. Return. Rest. Quiet. Trust. That is where the path begins to the strength we need to save and renew our world.

This Time Asks Us All to Be Heroes

William Sloane Coffin was a hero with a great soul, which is one definition of a saint. His courage, hope and faith led him to risk his life as a Freedom Rider. They led him to jail in protests for justice and peace. They engaged him in one struggle after another in his “lover’s quarrel” with his nation.

This photograph shows him being a hero of another kind. It was taken in the year after his son, Alex, died in a car accident. Bill described coming into the United Church of Strafford in paralyzing grief and playing music until he had subdued the inner struggle enough to return to his outer struggles.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a similar hero with a great soul. He wrote in his book The Strength to Love, “A positive religious faith does not offer an illusion that we shall be exempt from pain and suffering, nor does it imbue us with the idea that life is a drama of unalloyed comfort and untroubled ease. Rather, it instills us with the inner equilibrium needed to face strains, burdens, and fears that inevitably come.” (from Chapter IV)

We need that inner equilibrium today because we are living in a fearful time that asks us all to be heroes with great souls. Human greed has raged out of control while human technology has gained planet-destroying power. Social injustice, economic inequity and environmental destruction have brought us to the brink of an inevitable revolution.

On the one hand, the side of greed with its ego-driven fight for its self-interest cannot continue without a revolution against democracy and nature. On the other hand, it will take what King called “a revolution of values,” a change of cultural consciousness, in order to reverse humanity’s self-destructive direction.

It will take heroes with great souls to change our consciousness, not only because we are up against the most powerful corporate and media empires the earth has ever seen, but also because the source of the problem—the fearful, selfish ego—is in us all.

We all are tempted by self-interest. It takes a hero to win that inner struggle enough to love a neighbor as our self.

It takes a hero to follow the Golden Rule and to care for the earth as our common home.

It takes a hero with a great soul to live as an altruistic citizen of a democratic republic, which is why John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He said unregulated avarice and ambition “would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.” As we are seeing every day.

How can we be the heroes and great souls that America and the earth require?

Bill Coffin said in a Riverside sermon, “Human unity is not something we are called on to create — only something we are called on to recognize.”

This contains the key wisdom we need. King put it this way: “The Holy Spirit is the continuing community creating reality that moves through history. He who works against community is working against the whole of creation.”

The Holy Spirit is the name we give to the impulse that moved the first single cells of life on earth to form communities with other cells. Four billion years later, that same Spirit is at work trying to overcome the ego-driven forces that divide human from human.

We do not have to create our unity with one another and with the earth, we have only to look deeply into the reality of nature and our own heart and find there the Spirit that created the universe, and align our values with its values, and take its will as our will, and use its power as our power.

This is why Mahatma Gandhi led his followers to spend two hours in meditation, prayer and the singing of hymns every day. They were emptying themselves of the ego’s control and opening to the Spirit’s guidance.

It is what made them the heroes, great souls and saints they had to be in order to change the consciousness of their culture and create a nonviolent movement that could overcome the most powerful Empire in the world.

Which is exactly what we need to do today.

We need to free ourselves from whatever paralyzes us or keeps us stuck. We need to open to the Spirit’s inner transformation so we can transform the world.

That is what the photographer Jon Gilbert Fox caught William Sloane Coffin doing at the piano in the Strafford sanctuary that summer day.

It is what we each are doing when we play music or meditate or pray or walk in nature or have a deep heart to heart conversation with a wise friend. We are listening, changing our consciousness, recognizing more clearly the sacred way, connecting more deeply to the Spirit’s guidance and power. We are becoming the heroes, great souls and saints this time requires.

This Website’s Purpose Redefined for a New Time

Dear Readers,

The Welcome Page of this website now has a new statement of purpose. You can read it here. Please use the share buttons at the bottom of the page if you think people you know would be interested in this. Thank you!

This Website’s Purpose

Summary:

“Who is there big enough to love the whole planet? We must find such people for the next society.” E. B. White, “Intimations,” December 1941

This website has a passionate purpose: to help us become big enough to love the whole planet, not just in theory but in practice. It seeks to help us become citizens who have the vision and the will to create the next society that is founded on a shared love of the whole world.

The passion behind this website is the same that you can hear in Greta Thunberg’s voice, or the Black Lives Matter protests. We have reached a crisis point. We have no more time, we cannot pass this on to any future generation.

There will be no future generations if our generation does not reply to E. B. White’s question, “Who is there big enough?” with the answer, “We are!” But how can we become such people, and how can we change the world quickly enough?

I hope you will find inspiration, support and practical help for accomplishing that here.

The Call to Transform

E. B. White was by far not the only voice ever to call us to transform ourselves to a more enlightened consciousness that can see the true oneness of all life and to transform the world into a place of oneness and love of neighbor as self.

The wisest humans of every culture and spiritual tradition have called on humanity to make this transformation. The voices began at least twenty-five hundred years ago at the dawning of the Axial Age and have continued with increasing urgency—Greek philosophers, the Hebrew prophets, Buddhist, Taoist and Hindu teachers, Christ and the contemplative Christian tradition, Sufis and indigenous wisdom-keepers. In the 20th Century Albert Einstein, Dorothy Day, the Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were only a few of the many who cried out for our transformation.

Today Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousefzai, Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama, Joanna Macy and Mary Evelyn Tucker and thousands more are telling us it is now or never—we have reached the crisis point where human consciousness and society must undergo this transformation or face the real possibility of extinction.

Gus Speth sums this crucial wisdom up beautifully in his book The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Speth co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council and World Resources Institute. He Chaired President Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality. He was Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Here is what he says:

“Many of our deepest thinkers and many of those most familiar with the scale of the challenges we face have concluded that the transitions required can be achieved only in the context of what I will call the rise of a new consciousness. For some it is a spiritual awakening —a transformation of the human heart. For others it is a more intellectual process of coming to see the world anew and deeply embracing the emerging ethic of the environment and the old ethic of what it means to love thy neighbor as thyself. But for all it involves major cultural change and a reorientation of what society values and prizes most highly.” (To read similar words from others click here.)

We have very little time. The next decade is our chance to limit the scale of the environmental crisis and create a sustainable, just and peaceful global society. Much excellent, detailed work has been done to envision what a healthy civilization and planet would require. Bringing about world transformation seems achievable, but as Gus Speth says, “only in the context of…a new consciousness.”

We may elect leaders who will work on world transformation, but for them to have the power to overcome opposition and make the changes we need will require a new dominant cultural consciousness. Building that support and political will seems like the harder task.

This website will focus especially on how we can transform our individual consciousness, the foundation for cultural and world transformation.

The co-founder of Centering Prayer, Thomas Keating, says, “If one is truly transformed, one can walk down the street, drink a cup of tea or shake hands with somebody and be pouring divine life into the world…. The essential thing…is the transformation of one’s own consciousness.” (Mystery of Christ p. 275)

“If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself…. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation…” Hua Hu Ching 75, attributed to Lao Tzu

“If you want a golden civilization, you must start with what is golden inside of you. If you want a civilization that will thrive for a thousand years, you must start with what is timeless inside of you.” George Kinder, A Golden Civilization and a Map of Mindfulness

How Can New Consciousness Evolve Now?

The Tree Sprouts New Branches, Human Consciousness Evolves, the World Is Transformed

One year there was solid bark, the next year a new branch had burst through where no one could have expected it.

I was clearing a field once and liked where a maple tree was growing, but it had been shaped by the old thicket and was bent over toward the light. A neighbor knew trees better than I did and insisted I was foolish to think it would straighten up and flourish, but I was happy in my foolish hope and left it.

He was right, the old trunk did not change direction entirely, but it sprouted a new branch like the one above, and that branch grew straight up and soon became the new lead trunk. The old, bent trunk diminished to be a side branch.

We face a crisis in human evolution that threatens to destroy the world that has carried us to where we are today. We are in danger of turning our planet into a habitat in which humans cannot survive and, along the way there, turning our civilization into a crucible of survivalist fear and violence in which the human spirit cannot thrive.

We do not have at this time the collective will to change our ways and act for the long term well being of our habitat. We do not take the necessary actions as a society even when we hear the urgent cry of scientists, see the first stages begin of the suffering to come and acknowledge the wisdom of the religious traditions calling us to care and act.

Our hope is that the human spirit can rapidly evolve to have that collective will.

We know it is possible because humanity has evolved through crisis points in the past. Whole new branches of insight and understanding and new ways of living have sprung from the solid bark of old ways.

We have hope, and that hope resides in our hearing the calling within our hearts as we look at what is happening in the world, and then exploring where that calling leads. The hope is for our individual transformation that will give us the wisdom and power to transform the world. Continue reading →

What Is Waiting in Your Golden Room?

by Thomas Cary Kinder

What is waiting in your Golden Room? A surprise, probably.

Often the EVOKE Life Planning process turns up surprises:

A successful business executive goes through EVOKE to help plan for retirement and uncovers an old secret dream to run a bait and tackle shop, and no one is more surprised than she is at the joy it brings her.

A man uses Life Planning to help plan the next phase of his career, which is to launch a nonprofit to address global poverty, only to discover that before he can undertake any major new enterprise he needs to reconcile with his father. He is surprised to discover how much that pain is draining his vigor. He sees how valuable his father’s wisdom and support could be as he confronts the obstacles it will take all his vigor to overcome. It could delay his launch date, but there is no question he needs to do it. The Life Planning focuses on how he will go about it, and sets aside exploring the nonprofit path for later.

The first time I went through the EVOKE process I was a pastor who had been overworking for years and was on the brink of total burnout. My Life Planner was the Yoda of all Life Planners, but even he could not help me get through my exhaustion, bitterness and hopelessness to find the light in my heart’s core. We flailed around in impenetrable shadow until finally I nearly screamed that I just wanted to run away to a cabin in the woods and have everyone leave me alone.

Surprise! I am writing in that cabin now, where I have come to meditate and write and be rejuvenated many times a week for ten years, thanks to a sabbatical grant from the Louisville Institute and Lilly Endowment that enabled me to build it.

The forest around this cabin has been logged over the years, and there are stump sprouts–clumps of as many as five trees growing in a tight circle around where a tree was cut. Other trees have fallen and rotted where they lay and a line of trees has sprouted up fed by the rot.

We come to a transition point in our lives and may envision the tree that will rise out of the old life, but other things may need to grow first. Surprises may pop out of our Golden Room. We look down and see not a sapling but a vigorous clump of mushrooms, and if that is what we find, that is what we need to do, trusting that either we will discover our greatest fulfillment in this unexpected direction or that this is what the universe or Spirit needs of us now, and it will lead to something else.

The EVOKE Life Planning process calls the light we find in our Golden Room a Torch. Continue reading →