Rev. Janis Farmer
I continue to struggle to find words that describe how I feel as I hear and see the nationwide and worldwide protests, the riots and the looting. I’m having trouble knowing when reporting is accurate and trustworthy, and when it is inflated or intentionally inflammatory.
And I’m having trouble finding solid ground to stand on, and have no comfortable place to put my sense of sorrow and loss and the deeper losses I recognize, glimpse, and can’t even imagine.
Perhaps that is exactly as it should be. While it remains true that there is “no spot where God is not,” it sure doesn’t look like that from where I sit. I guess that’s probably true for a lot of other people, too.
In “The Science of Mind,” Ernest Holmes wrote, “Jesus tells us to resist not evil, to love our enemies, and to do good to them who would do us evil, for this is to manifest the spirit of love, which is God. God loves all alike and causes Its rain to fall and Its sun to shine upon all. In arms which are all inclusive, Divine Love encompasses everything.”
So how do we look, and actually see, and then respond appropriately, when our world is so divided and so, appropriately, up in arms?
And how do we wrap our minds around the idea of the innate value of all human life, including Black and brown lives?
“The Guest House” by Jalaluddin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks (The Essential Rumi)”
“This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all! even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”
A modern parable from Jonathan Kestenbaum: A young couple moved into a new neighborhood. The next morning while they were eating breakfast, the young woman saw her neighbor hanging the washing outside. “That laundry is not very clean; she doesn’t know how to wash correctly. Perhaps she needs better laundry soap.” Her husband looked on, silently. Every time her neighbor hung her washing out to dry, the young woman made the same comments. A month later, the woman was surprised to see a nice clean wash on the line and said to her husband, “Look, she’s finally learned how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her this?” The husband replied, “I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows.”
And so it is with life … What we see when looking at other people depends on the clarity of the window through which we look.
So don’t be too quick to judge others, especially if your perspective of life is clouded by anger, jealousy, negativity or unfulfilled desires. Judging a person does not define who they are. It defines who we are.
We know that the point of view we hold as we look determines what we see. If I see, as Rumi suggests, difficult or challenging times arriving on my doorstep as leading me to some new beneficial or increased awareness or some new delight, then I am more likely to receive them more kindly. If I don’t know that my own windows are dirty, I will see another’s action in a less supportive, and less accurate, way.
Ernest Holmes wrote in “Love & Law”: “Practically the whole human race is hypnotized because it thinks what somebody else told it to think. It thinks from its physical environment. ... The impersonal, eternal law receives the impression of my thought, & if I say, ‘Everything is wrong’, then it is wrong. In Christian Science, they call it the law of reflection. Like produces like; like attracts like; like draws to itself like, always.”
So what am I getting at? That idea is simply if I don’t choose to direct my mind, then it and I will automatically follow the well-worn path of least resistance known as collective unconscious, default thinking, or what-everybody-knows-that’s-not-actually-true, but is as true as I allow it to be, because it is done unto me, and to you and to everyone in the world, as we believe.
Racism exists because it exists in your mind and my mind. We have to root it out of our own consciousnesses. It’s a belief in separation.
We need to take appropriate actions in the world of form, but more important than even that, we need to change how we think about what is going on in the world, how we talk about it, how we pray about it, and how we perceive it.
This practice is not for the timid.
It takes a strong faith, a strong will and a profound understanding of overarching love that will allow each of us to go against collectively held beliefs in separation, and the ability to look past the physical life experience.
It also requires a strong desire for healing and wholeness rather than punishment or vengeance.
We get to choose the world we experience every moment of every single day.
