Musings

Every once in a while, I am called upon to stand formally in my role as an Interfaith Minister.  This is a short talk I gave as part of the Easter service at the Whidbey Institute on Whidbey Island, WA.

I was asked to tell a story of hope and renewal. Of Redemption.

My first thought was to turn my attention to my past, scanning my personal horizon for an emotionally packed story of transformation. One that would take everyone on the journey I took towards my own redemption. That would be a model, a parable, an inspiration. You know what I mean.

I couldn’t find one.

I wracked and wracked my brain for the images to come forth that would meet the challenge of speaking for a few minutes between songs in an Easter service.

They were not there.  There was no story.  It’s not that I haven’t had pain or trauma in my life and gone through to the other side of meaning and healing, it was that I couldn’t find any energy left in any of those stories.

Then I realized that that was the story! The story of redemption, of death and resurrection, is no longer about me.  It’s not about a singular Christ figure or any individual.  It’s not about the past.  It is about we.  It is even about yes we can. And it is about now.

Will we, as humanity, make it through this initiation where we literally have to change our minds about what we are, what our purpose is and what we are going to do with our one rare and precious planet?

From my point of view, we have to recognize that while each of us is unique in and of ourselves, we are all cells in a larger body.  We all have a function—and it probably isn’t to be the one to gobble up all the goodies so that everything else dies.  That’s generally called cancer—it kills the host body.

We need to change the balance of what we are in relationship to each other and to our world: in our beliefs, in our thoughts, in our bodies, in our actions.  We can be heroes or we can be extinct.

I just spent a weekend in a seminar with Rick Tarnas where he laid out the evolution of Man from being embedded in Nature, to our long separation in the rise of the axial monotheistic religions through the height of the Copernican revolution.  We are on our way back now, coming into a new awareness of our oneness with Nature, but from a much larger perspective, where we now recognize we are in a race between initiation and catastrophe.

How do we do it?  How do we go through this initiation? We do it the way Christ did.  We die to our old identity and resurrect into a broader field of awareness, capacity and compassion.  What I’ve learned over the years and why I can’t find an old story is that my sense of “I” has already died many times, only to find myself resurrected in the same body.  From my early plant medicine journeys, through past-life regressions and non-dual awareness trainings, in every vision quest in the desert, for every failure and illness and symptom of aging, I have died to an old sense of self, to who I thought I was.

I let of go my identity with the project, the relationship, or what my parents did to me, and opened to a new possibility.  In facing that death, I discovered I didn’t die but actually became more alive.  For me to get through the trauma of my mother’s abandonment of me in childhood took me years of therapy and everything from Est to Hoffman to Jungian analysis and a whole resume in between.  More recently I poured two full years of my heart, soul and energy into a project only to have it come to a screeching halt in one vivid moment of clarity.  Patterns that used to take years to redeem now dissolve in seconds and I am free.

This ability to face death and go through it is what gives me hope. And for every one of us who has passed through that dark passage whether in birthing, dying, failure, accident or illness and found ourselves still in the same body, we contribute to a thinning of the veil for others and to the possibility of an empathic civilization.  We don’t journey for just ourselves, whether it is partaking of a sacred medicine or fasting on water for four days in the desert or sitting at the bed of someone dying as we chant the Heart Sutra.

We need to know how to be with ourselves and stand with each other in the passages.  The hope is in the ‘we’, in the journeying together.  Most of you, by the time you reached adulthood have had some kind of initiation where you faced death—whether you chose death as an advisor forty years ago when you read Carlos Castaneda or have been thrust into a confrontation through the near-death of yourself, the loss of another, or the death of a belief, an idea, an identity, a relationship, or a dream. You are still here.  You went through the gate of the initiation and survived. It is what we know how to do.

We are now faced with a collective initiation—a rite of passage from adolescence to the adulthood of humanity where we shed our childish ways of indiscriminant consumption and ignorance of the consequences of our actions and take up the responsibilities of living in harmony with others and in balance with Nature.  We are initiates.  There is never a guarantee in any initiation that we will make it through to the other side, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t stand and face it.  What gives me hope is that so many have already faced this process, so that together we already know how to face what comes.

Thich Nhat Hahn said that the Buddha will return not as an individual but as a sangha, a group, a collective.  This is the time of ‘we’.  Can we, as humanity, go through the initiation, the vision quest in which we die to what we were, pass through the threshold into the liminal time, the unknown space, the deeper mystery and be there in our strength and capacity and wholeness and open to a greater unfoldment?  I believe we can and do hold the pattern of redemption, of what it is to transform, to be present for the death as Christ was, to understand that forgiveness and even gratitude are in order as we surrender into what is next.

What is next is a new and mature relationship with Life, our life, each other’s lives and the life of Earth.  We were born into the temple of Life and we are passing through the initiation of becoming conscious partners with its unfolding.  And it is not a Life that negates, denies, or fears death.  Death is part of the larger cycle of Life.  The process that creates living, being incarnate, being embodied is a rare and precious privilege, a staggering mystery, one that calls from us our utmost consciousness, care and capacity.

“Redeem” means to save from a state of sinfulness, to restore honor, worth or reputation.  May we redeem our relationship to each other and our Earth and restore honor, worth and reputation to Humanity’s presence on our planet.

What’s your immediate response when you hear the words “Future Center”?

I first heard them a few months ago from Bob Stilger who had been working in Japan as a witness and host and facilitator for the cultural transformation underway in the aftermath of the disasters in 3/11. See his blogs about his journey. See my previous blog about him.

Several possible images flickered through my mind about what a Future Center would be and how it might function and why it is emerging now. Nothing I could fantasize came close to the very exciting and fascinating reality that’s unfolding as I write. A Future Center is not the Bridge of the Starship Enterprise, the Millennium Falcon or the Battlestar Galactica. It is not a place in the future with unfamiliar or weird costumes, gadgets and behaviors. It is not science fiction.

A Future Center is here now, wherever people choose to stand and work together in Circle to co-create their future. The Future is where what we are experiencing now as the rapidly changing conditions of our lives meets all of the skill, knowledge and wisdom gathered over our lifetimes, directed by our intention and where we put our attention. A Future Center is conscious evolution in action, choosing our destiny in relationship with the planet we inhabit.

Many people are experiencing new conditions for their lives—financial loss, homelessness, the after effects of tornadoes, fires and floods. Yet in few places have the destructive forces of both Man and Nature been so concentrated as in the 3/11 triple catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan. Perhaps that is why Future Centers are emerging in Japan. As a wise Japanese Elder said: “Perhaps this happened to us because we could respond.”

And responding they are. When systems collapse so dramatically, new ingenuity is called forth. How can the ingenuity that sees new possibilities, new kinds of relationships, new points of view be gathered and disseminated? This is the purpose of a Future Center.

It starts as a place of listening to what is happening around you. If people who are alert and watchful come together like scouts for a wagon train and share what they have seen in their forays forward, a vision begins to emerge of the larger surroundings, the larger pattern. What are people needing, what’s feeding them, where are the healers, what songs are coming forth, where are love and community blooming? What factors contribute to that happening? What new possibilities become visible as we listen to each other?

A Future Center isn’t a thing as much as it is a process of witnessing, a collecting of multiple perceptions, a gathering of ideas that are working and then choosing to do something together that serves the community. What’s key in the Future Center isn’t the physical walls or where it’s located. It is the set of principles of how to be with each other in a creative life-affirming way that forms the structure which holds a Future Center together.

Many of us have not been taught the skills to function well in the kind of community interchange that goes to deeper levels of trust and acceptance, truth and vulnerability, wherein lie the possibility of creating something new and beautiful. Future Centers are training centers for the kinds of skills that enable us to heal our communities no matter what disaster befalls us. Japan is pioneering a way to listen, to respect, to have compassion for and to act together in a way that supports wholeness, that brings out the best of the collective creative human soul/mind/spirit. Simply put, a Future Center is a really good way to help a group of people discover what they want to do collectively and collaboratively.

As Bob Stilger says: “It’s not any complicated technology.  It doesn’t require huge dollars to be able to do. It’s noticing what’s actually going on and then working with emergence within the system. People come together asking “What can we do around this particular issue?  What can we do with our community to make it better? What we can do with this particular opportunity?” Part of what the Future Center movement does is build awareness of a very flexible yet very powerful reflection-action methodology for people to listen to each other and figure out together what they want to do.

“It is not difficult, but does require hosts of the dialogue and a core team that is designing the whole dialogue process.  It’s important to articulate the principles and the processes and the methodologies that make it possible for work that we naturally know how to do as human beings to become more powerful, more effective and have greater impact.”

In the Future Centers that Bob is helping to establish in Japan, there are a few basic principles:

First: Name the phenomenon that’s already beginning to happen and invite more of it.

Second: Start with the basic understandings for community building that have evolved out of Berkana Institute and other groups working with community based organizations in different parts of the world.

a) Every system is filled with leaders
b) The knowledge and the wisdom we need are already present.
c) We have enough resources to begin.
d) We just need to have a sense of direction and then begin taking steps.

Third: Choose and work with a core set of dialogue methodologies: Circle, World Café, Open Space Technology, Pro-Action Café, Non-violent Communication, and others as ways to host a deeper interaction among people.

Fourth: Be aware of the seven steps which naturally lead to collaborative action:

a) Build relationships
b) Identify Needs
c) Gather Data
d) Generate Ideas
e) Converge around what we want to do
f) Prototype solutions out of that convergence
g) Communicate results.

Much more detailed resources can be found by going to Bob’s Blog and reading his eight page summary of a 30,000 foot overview of Future Centers.  Deeper resources include a 43-page guide to Future Centers that elaborates the principles, processes and the methodologies being used right now in Japan to initiate the Future Centers movement.

It doesn’t seem to matter what it is—changing schools, starting a company, moving, writing—fear is always at the beginning. I am not going to make it, do it, write it. It will be too big for me, I won’t be able to meet the challenge. I am inadequate to the task.

This particular line of thinking seems to go on and on ad infinitum until one day there is a moment—sometimes ritually celebrated, sometimes not—where all of the fear just isn’t enough to stop the forward momentum of just doing it. Invariably, I have found that I do have the ability to do it, I can make it, I do write it. Except when I’m absolutely sure that I have it nailed and then there is usually something of Life’s comeuppance that has me realize I couldn’t have possibly seen what I didn’t know I didn’t know.

I guess in some ways that makes the fear a good companion—can’t get too cocky and arrogant ahead of time. Have to enter humbly with curiosity and presence. Nothing else to do. Take this writing for instance. It’s paragraph three and the words are just coming out as I simply sit in the chair and say go. Now. Or as the swoosh that’s sold a million shoes says: just do it.

What is the feeling at the point of entry when you go through the gate and stand on the other side of the door facing the unknown, like the Pevensie children in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? Overwhelm at the vast territory to be explored, reflected upon, written about. How do I take on New Stories in a way that has any link with the passion in my own heart for how desperately I feel we need a new story of who we are, how and why we got here and what we can do about it? How to start with myself in a way that communicates the longing I feel, the possibility I know for us to make just the smallest tweak in how we answer Life’s questions that would rebalance how we are on the planet.

However small the adjustment in our worldview, the consequences are vast in both time and space. We, as individuals in any given country may not be able to see the long-term outcome. It’s difficult to look at the forces moving in our world and not see widespread drought, famine, displacement, death. Maybe “we”–my little body moving around in space and those near (or not near) to me–will die before there is a change. Maybe much of humanity will die. In truth, all of humanity will die eventually, or at least all humans. Maybe humanity continues. Yes, maybe humanity continues, morphing into a form or at least a series of beliefs that we can barely recognize from this point of view.

What might that point of view be? From here it looks like moving to the point of view that the universe is alive, that we are in relationship to forces that are much larger than us. We are not the center of the universe anymore than the earth is the center either of our solar system or our galaxy. We are beings who have been blessed with the faculty of being able to reflect on the amazing complexity and beauty of our world and to recognize that we are in a living universe that it is growing and changing, as are we.

Over the years we, as a collective humanity, have come to recognize that women have souls, that Black people (and every other color) have souls, that dogs and cats have souls. Plants feel and play music and respond to us—our anger, our love, our neglect or attention. Why is it such a stretch to think of the planet as living? Certainly we can look from afar and see the pulsings of rivers into oceans, the clouds moving across the face of the mountains, the ever-changing patterns of weather moving through like the breathing of an enormous being. The Gaia hypothesis is many years old now and quite widespread as a belief system. Why not the universe, might it also have intelligence, intention, a soul?

My favorite bumper sticker is “Evolution Is God’s Intelligent Design.” Why is this not obvious? There is no conflict here. The difference between fundamentalists and evolutionary biologists is semantic. Sort of like the story of the three men and the grapes, all wanting the same thing calling it three different things so they’re fighting. How silly. There is no possibility of looking at the wonder of the unfolding universe and our unfolding capacity to comprehend it and not see intelligence in the design. From the way a flower or an embryo grows to the rhythms of planetary geometry to the exquisite efficiency of the DNA molecule, it’s impossible not to see intelligence, design, pattern, elegance, beauty. In fact we would do well to follow nature’s design and when we do we have a much easier time of it as the burgeoning field of biomimicry reflects.

The question is what is the force behind that intelligence and how do we relate to it? Some see the equivalent of a person, in the form of God, who is doing the designing. Some even think “He” did this in a few thousand years and stopped when he got to us. Whether you call the force “God” or “Life” or “Universal Intelligence” or “Great Spirit” or “Evolutionary Impulse”, something is creating beyond our capacity to fully understand it—try as we might. It might even be that our trying is part of the deeper basic force of creation. We are also learning, growing, changing. We are being shaped and changed and expanded as is our planet and our world. It is bigger than us and it’s not fundamentally about us. We are not the only ones creating, participating in the unfoldment. Many other forces are at play. We can partner with the forces but we cannot subdue, subsume, or subordinate them.

To see humanity as it is now as the pinnacle of evolution with nowhere else to go–just us here mining a dead planet–is quite a narrow point of view and doesn’t take in the whole of creation. It may feel safer and less overwhelming to think that way, but it’s so not the truth. It’s like not believing in rain—it doesn’t matter whether you believe what is true, you still get wet.