Why This Goes So Deep

marigolds and cathedral
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

We are birthed into sangha, into sacred community. It is called the world.
Adyashanti

Yesterday, a friend in Mexico sent me this quote regarding the election:
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the Hawaii Legislature in 1959, two years before Mr. Obama was born in Honolulu, and declared that the civil rights movement aimed not just to free blacks but "to free the soul of America."

My friend also sent this picture from her neighborhood in Mexico.
It reminds me of other words of Dr King regarding visions of the Promised Land,
and, much to my chagrin, it reminds me of Ronald Reagan’s “Shining City on the hill.”

Actually, this is a Catholic edifice built by the Spanish on top of an Aztec structure, the world’s largest pyramid.
I deliberately divert my attention from the subjugation of the Spanish act.
I choose instead to focus on these words of Isaac Newton:
If I have seen farther than most men, it’s because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.

Words. Visions. Souls and politics. We are in this all together.
For days now, I have been trying to articulate what has touched me so deeply about Barack Obama’s election. For me, it’s hasn’t really felt about race and civil rights.

"I’m white. I can’t really get what this means to African Americans. All I know is that deep inside my heart and belly, something has grabbed a hold of them. Something huge has been stirred. There’s joy and tears and I cannot find the words. But, is has to do with Goodness."
This is what I told a black friend, a Dutch citizen, on the morning after.

My friend’s eyes blazed. “Pat, that’s exactly how I feel!”
She too couldn’t really attribute the depth of her feelings to issues about race.
Only later, after she heard from overseas relatives would she come to me and say,
“Pat, in Holland, they call you nigger right to your face.”

Yes, huge issues regarding race are being addressed. There is that level. But, even my black friends feel there's something deeper going on. Something else eludes my understanding.

A day later, I still hadn’t found the words.
But, I had recognized that the stirrings deep inside is exactly what I feel when I truly hunger for the Divine.
There is joy because I can intuit what is possible.
There is heartbreak because I know I am not there.
And all the hope and joy and heartbreak exist beyond all words,
exist beyond all superficiality.

How very strange.
Why should an election feel the same as hunger for the Divine?
Then, I recalled the first time Obama made me cry.
It was his 2004 speech to the Democratic Convention.
I cried as he made me recall the Goodness of our nation’s ideals.
I cried as he recalled in me my sense of separation from our Goodness.
I cried as he stirred up the vision, the hope, that as a country we might one day live up to our potential.

Then, on the drive in to work this morning there was an old Jim Croce song on the radio:
Like the pine trees lining the winding road
I’ve got a name …
Like the singing bird and the croaking toad
I’ve got a name…
And I carry it with me like my daddy did
But I’m living the dream that he kept hid

I hadn’t heard the song in years.
It conjures images of idealistic college days and little kids marched on stage to sing for parents swelled with pride.
It seems a song about potential.
But, today I noticed that it also sings “living the dream that he kept hid.”

That’s it.

There is a dream, a hope, a profound hunger, at the core of each and every human being.
And, we keep it hidden.
Our deepest dream is far too precious, too heartbreakingly beloved, to risk revealing consciously even to ourselves, let alone admitting it aloud to the World.

It is our hope of one day reuniting with our own Divinity.
We not only keep it hidden, usually, we down right deny it.

We aim for something much more superficial, something more obvious and of the World.
We become under-achievers and over-achievers, drug addicts and CEOs.
We become smart and suave and cynical.

We revel as our children sing in innocence,
yet we hide our hearts in unconsciousness.
We become Adults: conservatives, liberals and libertarians, black and white and multi-racial.

We tie ourselves into knots.
We divide against ourselves as we live separate from our true Self.

Then this skinny, young, black guy comes out of nowhere
and has the audacity to offer us Hope!
And guess what…The American people stood up and shouted, “Yes, we can!”

Last night as I mulled this over more words came to mind.
They are the words with which Thomas Jefferson concludes the Declaration of Independence:

… with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

Yes, Dr. King was right.
This is a matter regarding our souls.
And that is why my heart is breaking and my tears are those of joy,
And why the election was indeed about Hope.

I kept breaking into tears yesterday.

And it's not about the economy, stupid.

It was about my heart opening in a deep and rather inarticulate manner.

It's about Hope.

It's about Goodness.

It's about All of Us.

Tikkun Olam and Obama

blue on blue
Originally uploaded by JKonig

Tikkun (“tee kun”) comes from the mystical Hebrew idea of tikkun olam which describes humanity's shared responsibility, along with God, "to heal, repair and transform the world."

There is a magazine by this name, the voice the of the “Tikkun community” which is composed of people of many faiths.
Editor Rabbi Michael Lerner has an article in this month’s issue entitled, “The Obama Phenomenon.”

To entice you to read it in it’s entirety, I have excerpted a portion here:

…this editorial is not about Obama as much as about what he elicits in others, and should not be read as an endorsement of him.

The energy, hopefulness, and excitement that manifests in Obama’s campaign has shown up before in the last fifty years…

It was there in the 1960s and 1970s in the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, and the movement for gay liberation.

One felt it flowing at rallies and demonstrations at which Robert Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Betty Friedan, Isaac Deutscher, Joan Baez, and Martin Luther King, Jr. articulated their visions.

It was there again in Earth Day, in the anti-nuclear movement, and in the movement against the war with the Contras.

It was there during the campaign of Jesse Jackson in 1988 and the Clintons’ campaign in 1992. And it has been there—dare we say it—in the growth of the religious right and the Campus Crusade for Christ.

What is that energy and excitement, and why does it touch people so deeply?...

The phenomenon in question is this:

the intense desire of every human being on this planet to overcome and transcend
the materialism and selfishness that shape the global economic arrangements
and permeate the consciousness of all people,

to overcome the looking-out-for-number one consciousness that divides us…

and to overcome the alienation from each other that this way of being has created
so that we might once again recognize each other as embodiments of God or Spirit…

We Avert Our Eyes from One Another

Every gesture, every word, every deed …
every message we give ourselves
all combine to either reinforce our separation and estrangement from each other
or to reconnect us in a deep way that allows genuine mutual recognition,
the seeing and hearing of who we really are,
the contact we have with the sacred in ourselves, in each other, and in the world.

Recently, some columnists have compared Obama to a rock star because his supporters seem to treat him more like that than like a politician.
They are only partially mistaken.

What the best and most fulfilling rock concerts of the past several decades have offered one generation is what other multi-generational mega-churches or Super Bowls and World Series’ offer to others:

a chance to momentarily experience a transcendence of all those feelings of loneliness and alienation…

The Effectiveness of Not Demonizing

Obama’s appeal starts from his insistence on not demonizing the Other…

Obama knows that most people want a very different world,
but don’t believe it is possible unless someone else makes it happen.

He challenges his audience by telling them that there is no one else,
that they themselves are the people who must make the world different.

To quote Obama from his Super Tuesday speech:
So many of us have been waiting so long for the time when we could finally expect more from our politics, when we could give more of ourselves and feel truly invested in something bigger than a particular candidate or cause.
This is it.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
We are the change that we seek.

This is About Us, Not About Obama

…no matter how spiritually and emotionally dead the majority of people on the planet may appear to be,
no matter how lost in their pursuit of money and fame and sexual conquest and me-first-ism and don’t-bother-me-ism,

the truth is that the resurrection of the dead is always at hand, always a possibility.
Human beings can always be awakened again to choose life,
to choose love,
to choose kindness, generosity, ecological sensitivity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation.

That capacity of human beings is what it means to have a soul…

I hope you take the time to read more of this essay. (I left out some interesting details.)