Last time I reflected on what beauty – real beauty – is: the beauty that lies at the heart of everything. I suggested that it is the cultivation of this beauty that will literally save us: from our (frightened) selves as the poet Hafiz describes our default stance in the world; and from the forces that would exploit this fearful stance.

Mary Oliver – a New England poet that many of us know – has been a rich resource for me in this search for real beauty that has dominated my own life:

‘…all my life

I have been restless –

I have felt there is something

more wonderful than gloss–….

I have not been sure what it is…

I’d imagine all of us get a sense of what she is saying about a deeper – truer – reality that is at the heart of everything, including ourselves. Some call it the soul or the true self or the divine spark. It’s that part that surprises us with its unexpected power in those difficult situations when we find something inside us that allows us to just keep going.

Most of us were taught by our various religious cultures that this soul is confined simply to humans, only to discover through our encounters with the world that this deeper dimension is actually in everything: our animals who love us, the flowers that delight us, the trees that speak to us – in the words of Mary Oliver again – and tell us who we are and how we should live:

‘Around me the trees stir in their leaves

and call out…

…”It’s simple,” they say,

“and you too have come

into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled

with light, and to shine.”

 I’m reminded of a line from a poem by the Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins, called God’s Grandeur (‘….the world is charged with the grandeur of God’) where he says:

‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things..’

For Mary Oliver this ‘deep down things’ is in the natural world of trees and oceans that ‘offers itself to [our] imagination’ and announces [our] place in the family of things…’  She describes how the things of the world – ‘each pond with its blazing lilies’ – reflect the inherent beauty of life in what are essentially prayers – ‘heard and answered lavishly’ – even if we are blind to it all; or, as she puts it

‘..whether or not you have ever dared to be happy…’

It is the awareness and the cultivation of this beauty that will save us; will teach us how to be a prayer in our own  way. For her, our prayer, as the human expression of this being/beauty at the heart of things is simply to pay attention – to be aware and to be present – and allow this awareness to elicit astonishment:

‘..to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world..’

and thereby:

‘instruct myself over and over in joy, in acclamation…’

But, then she takes this appreciation of beauty to another level:

‘…Nor am I talking

about the exceptional…

the very extravagant -

but the ordinary,

the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations..’

This is how we will cultivate an awareness of the beauty that is at the heart of everything and thereby come to relate differently to the world. This is how we will save ourselves and our world. In fact, this is why we are here – this is our essential purpose as human beings: to pay attention in order to see the beauty and then acclaim it, each of us in our own unique way.

Another favorite poet of mine – Rainer Maria Rilke – adds a theological dimension, as it were, to Oliver’s simple spirituality. This appreciation and acclamation of beauty is our very raison d’etre:

I want to free what waits within me…

…I will sing you as no one ever has..’

In another place, he goes even further:

‘Take your practiced powers and stretch them out…

for the god wants to know himself in you…’

Even without Rilke’s theological deductions, I think Mary Oliver gives us plenty on which to build a real beauty reclamation strategy. I love the way she pulls it all together:

‘When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms…’

Now there’s a beauty worth living for: a beauty that lasts, that will survive; a powerful beauty that will allow us to keep going;  a beauty that will save us.

Finally to help us with this work of reclaiming beauty from exploitive and destructive forces, let me offer a simple, concrete practice that comes from the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda:

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,

let’s not speak in any language;

let’s stop for one second,

and not move our arms so much….

If we were not so single-minded

about keeping our lives moving,

and for once could do nothing,

perhaps a huge silence

might interrupt this sadness

of never understanding ourselves

and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us

as when everything seems dead

and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve

and you keep quiet and I will go.

In these amazing days of Spring-resurrection, when beauty raises her splendid head everywhere to the point where it is almost too much, just taking a moment every day to interrupt the sadness that can so easily take over our lives, would be a great way to begin our ‘reclamation-of-beauty project.’ Let’s give Rilke the final word:

Earth my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you longer

Need your spring times to win me over – one of them,

Ah even one is already too much for my blood…

The other day a friend sent me a ‘Dove’ (soap) commercial from a few years back that spoke about the ways in which beauty has been distorted, especially for women, through a veritable ‘onslaught’ (the name of a video that is part of the Dove campaign – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eihluKwRo0) by the beauty-products world that presents beauty simply in terms of physical attributes – “younger, smaller, lighter, fuller, tighter, thinner, softer…”. ‘Talk to your daughter,’ the video says, ‘before the beauty industry does.’

My intention here is not to praise the efforts of a soap company that is, as you may know, part of an enormous corporation (Unilever) that would probably do anything in order to sell its products. However, there is an important message in the midst of the clever advertising about beauty being more than skin deep that we could build on.

In recent weeks I’ve been reflecting on beauty as the very heart of things: anything, in fact; or anyone. Clearly, this is an awareness that needs to be cultivated in a world where beauty is presented as an unattainable ideal and used by groups,  like the so-called beauty industry, in order to make profit on the dissatisfaction that this creates. I also acknowledge that  there are many reasons for this distortion – some of them ancient – that range from Greek ideas about beauty that underpin our western culture, to male dominance in most cultures (including our ‘enlightened’ modern culture) and the many forms of oppression that this has visited on women, both deliberately and unconsciously, over the centuries.

Dostoyevsky said in one of his novels – The Idiot – that beauty will save the world. I’m sure he was not talking about an unattainable ideal but of  a true awareness of  beauty which would in turn shape the way we relate to the people and things of the world. But how cultivate this deeper awareness of beauty for ourselves since all of us are part of – and have conspired with – what is really a dangerous illusion that causes us to distort everything: our sensibilities, our values, even our relationships.  What we need, in fact, is a veritable campaign to rescue and reclaim beauty as the heart of life it is meant to be.

I’ve written elsewhere about our annual race here in the Pound Ridge Reservation – our Leatherman’s Loop – that we start with a blessing about beauty: ‘beauty before me as I run, beauty behind me…I see beauty all around me…in beauty may we all be.’ It is perhaps an intuition about the wisdom that Dostoyevsky is describing that brings people to the Loop. But we need more than an intuition: what continues to be done to women – and to all of us thereby – provides an immediate challenge and a critical focus for a strategy to save our world through beauty. And also a simple way to begin. As one commentator on the Dove campaign put it: ’Start thinking when you compliment a woman on her hair, clothes, etc. Then, instead of complimenting her on her outer beauty, compliment her on her inner beauty like her personality, her kindness, her grace. ‘It’s surprisingly hard…’ my friend noted, and then concluded: ‘Perhaps if people felt more entitled to experience “beauty”, they just might be more discerning, and less susceptible to  the ubiquitous onslaught of artificiality that oppresses and depresses us all’

I’m not sure if I’ve shared the following piece before, but this little poem – called The Rose - by Hafiz, who was a fourteenth century Persian poet applies here in a special way:

How

Did the rose

Ever open its heart

And give to this world

All its

Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light

Against its

Being.

Otherwise

We all remain

Too

Frightened.

Too frightened to be the beauty we are? Too frightened to cultivate the beauty that connects us? Maybe the Dove commercial’s suggestion – about how to compliment our women – is not that simplistic or naïve and might even serve as a simple starting point for our Dostoyevsky-inspired beauty campaign to save the world!!

In Part II of this reflection I’ll have a look at the insights of some other poets about beauty and their suggestions on how to cultivate it in our everyday lives.

Of course you ask yourself who could do such a thing and why: how angry and frustrated can you be? how righteous and judgmental? While there has always been terrorism, this horrendous way of expressing your opinion seems worse now than ever before: more frequent, more destructive.

On a related level, how do you deal with this in the sense of what do you tell your children? I was reading some attempts to do so this morning that ranged from statements like ‘love always wins’ – this is the work of a tiny minority of distorted people – to exchanges about God – ‘if he is responsible for the good then he is surely responsible also for the bad.’ Both of these stir deep emotions: the first – love always wins – raises the specter of places like Somalia or N. Korea where fear-filled violence seems to continue to survive and even thrive; the second – the God question – raises doubts about a God who would allow this to happen or whether any such God could exist.

The strongest response – certainly the one that gets most support – is around the image of people rushing to help at the risk of their own lives. I’m reminded that all of us are able to transcend fear and clear danger to our own lives when the conditions are right: when our child is threatened, for example. It’s as if a true self emerges like a superman who resides beneath the layers of function and role in moments when this higher self is called for. When the collective self of the public was in danger, the superman who was the essential identity beneath the nerdy, reporter role of Clark Kent, emerged and soared to the heavens. In time, the public came to expect this. In the same we way we are not surprised when people forget their own safety in the face of mortal danger and offer themselves to the care of others. The comic book story is an articulation of a profound truth which is that we know who we are at the deepest level. We also realize that for many reasons we forget this essential truth and live simply as the superficial identities of our functions and roles, distorted by the illusions of  possessions and powers, even in the form of their absence. Sometimes, the identification is so complete and the distortion so profound that we are unable to think or act with any awareness of connection to or responsibility for others: we are unable to love in other words. It strikes me that the opposite of love is not hate because that would imply a connection with others but simply emptiness: lifelessness…death. When this happens we are capable of the kind of destructive nihilism that we witnessed in Boston.

So, yes, it is important to remember that it is a small minority that perpetrates atrocities like these and that the good always outnumber them; that we shall overcome, finally. But it is also important to understand why this happens to people; to us.

In a conversation today, a colleague was paraphrasing from a book by Steven Pinker – The Better Angels of Our Nature – that spoke of the ‘civilizing of ourselves,’ suggesting that we are, in fact, less violent toward each other today compared to our primitive ancestors, but that we are also super-sensitized now to events like this one so that our sense of horror is increasingly heightened when they occur. While I would dispute that we have come so far in our civilizing process given the evidence of the conflicts and casualties of the past 100 years, it would seem fair to suggest that, since we experience less fear than our cave-dwelling ancestors for whom the dark was a nightly experience of terror, we have less reason to see others as threats and so less reason to visit violence on them. However, these experiences of dark-terror were clearly imprinted (genetically) on our psyche and therefore remain in not such deep recesses of our brains, emerging in times of threat. In this context, the higher self that we (I certainly) think and speak about is a later addition to our consciousness: a social construct even that emerged as survival became less uncertain and there was more time for reflection on the transcendent. In other words, the ‘higher self’ evolved with the rest of us, though the fear-driven self remained as default in times of threat. My question though was what of the clearly deliberate and vicious actions like yesterday’s bombings? I can understand spontaneous violence in response to immediate threat but this bombing seems far beyond any spontaneous fight or flight reaction. So where does this kind of violence come from that would create misery and death so deliberately and viciously?

Later it struck me that the fear of others can morph – has often done so – into fanatical thinking and behavior that individuals who are particularly distorted by this fundamental angst about others whom they perceive as threats to their very existence can turn into campaigns of death and destruction. We have seen it all too often in recent times, from the Nazi holocaust to Rwandan genocide, and from Christian conflict in N. Ireland to Moslem conflict in Iraq. We can see it even in the distorted blaming that has already gone on since the Boston tragedy.

I said above that the opposite of love is not hatred but emptiness. I would add that it is an emptiness born of fear. If love is inclusive, fear is exclusive; if love connects us into community, fear separates us into enemy camps. It is fear that creates the emptiness of violent nihilism. Love, therefore, is the only thing that can drive out fear and address this horror: love that connects and engenders empathic awareness, love that understands and holds differences in a way that can generate new life.

So, when the pain of this tragedy eases, and when the appropriate emotional (grieving) responses of sadness and despair, and anger and frustration have allowed us to come through the immediate horror, we will need to find ways to mitigate, if not prevent this angst-based violence: ways that go beyond rhetoric or easy prescription (like the increased security measures that will inevitably come). We need to find ways of injecting love – as connection and mutual understanding – into our schools and into our businesses and into our communities, just as deliberately and just as strategically as the distorted purveyors of violence and death inject fear.

These words of a song by Gregory Norbert, formerly of the Weston Priory Community in Vermont, floated into my memory as I explored how to help some students of a colleague of mine access – or, as I put it ‘learn to speak’ – their truer self. They have been studying, among others, Eckhart Tolle, who says that who we truly are lies beyond our thoughts and the identities that these create, in what he calls a ‘pure consciousness.’ To experience this true self is to awaken, as it were, and to realize that you are one with the universe, and that there is only one ‘eternal moment’ – now. The past and the future, where we spend most of our thinking – or thought-encased – moments only exist in the sleep-like state that the mind induces. But we can learn to detach from what are simply illusions and be in the present moment; we can awaken to what is the only reality.

I think we’ve all tasted such moments, if only for a nano-second: for example when the song of a bird takes us ‘out of ourselves’ as we say, or when we fall in love and forget – lose – ourselves in another, at least for a while. These obviously spontaneous – in the sense of uncontrived – experiences are clearly a kind of gift – a grace – but they can re-direct our lives into a pursuit of this truer reality which we intuit is the only thing that will make us happy and satisfy the longing that lies deep in every heart, no matter how forgotten or suppressed. Tolle would add that there seems to be something – a cosmic intelligence, he calls it – pushing us toward a more permanent state of awakening. But we are easily fooled by the illusory things that modern society in particularly skillful ways offers us as the way to happiness, because our ‘thought-based’ self  is really unsure of itself and fears its own destruction. To be awake, however, is the only way to be happy and know that you don’t need these things: to be awake is to allow life to ‘flow’ through you. Ultimately, becoming awake is our purpose in life; everything else – including pursuing good in whatever way -  must come from this awareness or consciousness, otherwise it will only be an extension of our illusions.

Now, tell me, who would not want to go down this path of awakening? Of course, the question is how? And obviously, the answer is not that clear or there would be more awake people in the world and the world would consequently be a different place. Tolle offers what he calls’ Portals to Awakening’ that include becoming aware of silence, and becoming aware of the nothingness behind thoughts. I actually try to practice this myself and have done so for years and would certainly recommend it. At the same time I’ve come to see that meditation of this sort is not the way for most people, so my inclination has been to encourage a form of dialogue – what might be  called authentic conversation – as a more accessible awakening method. My thinking is that we all talk – at least after a fashion – and occasionally have experiences in conversation that are akin to the glimpses of awakening described earlier. So if we were simply to raise the level of our conversation – on special occasions set aside for this purpose though these hopefully would seep into everyday exchange – we might manage to create the conditions for grace to arise more frequently. Perhaps, if there is an interest, I might elaborate on this kind of conversation in later Blogs. Let me know.

In this reflection, however, I want to conclude by telling you about an effort that is exploring ways of doing this work of awakening online. Through what the program calls ‘global virtual collaborations’ the intention is to foster the rise – the group is actually called RISE – in human consciousness that the leaders of the program feel is already underway. One of the goals of their work with organizations, most of whom are literally global (which is why they come to RISE in the first place to get help with online meetings), is to help them expand their sense of what they are doing: their self awareness. Thus for example, one English teaching organization, after a RISE training, changed its mission statement from teaching English to helping people feel like global citizens. Check out this intriguing approach to awakening: www.risebeyond.org.

But I can’t finish without relating all this to the season – Spring – and to the religious feasts it has inspired – Passover, Easter. The season cries out awakening – resurrection and transformation: resurrection to an expanded awareness and identity – a truer self; transformation of the way we think and live in the light of this awakening. The plants return but enriched by the lives of those that have preceded them, suggesting an unfolding – expanding – reality; the birds return with new songs that build on the songs of others, suggesting a deeper awareness that has to be celebrated.

Many years ago when I lived in Kenya, my colleague and I tried to reflect this more grounded – even earthy – sense of resurrection. We found a piece from a poem called The Great Hunger by the eccentric Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh who developed his awareness of a larger reality through working with the land – what he described as the ‘stony grey soil of Monaghan’. In this great epic that is not, as the title might suggest, about the Famine years of Ireland but about a culturally suppressed sexual hunger, Kavanagh describes the (not unusual) awakening of rough, hard-working farmers to this infinite reality we have been discussing. I offer it to you as a Resurrection gift:

Yet sometimes when the sun comes through a gap

These men know God the Father in a tree:

The Holy Spirit is the rising sap

And Christ will be the green leaves that will come

At Easter from the sealed and guarded tomb.

relationship is not too hard for us;

the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,

and being swept along is not enough….

Rilke

The announcement last week of the election of a new pope elicited a mostly positive response not only from Catholics but from people in general. I think this was mostly because Jorge Borgoglio seems to be a decent man: humble, down-to-earth, fair;  a holy person in a real sense, like the universally popular saint whose name he took. Pope Francis I, however, is no less conservative than the man he replaced, certainly not in terms of the (mostly sexuality-related) issues that have defined the debate in the Catholic Church in recent years: celibacy, the ordination of women, homosexuality, gay marriage, abortion, contraception. Some may have wished for a more radical shift from the electing conclave of cardinals: a different kind of leader – younger (Francis is only two years younger than the man who resigned at least partly because of his age), more creative (in order to address the complex issues of today’s world), and braver (in order to face the inevitable resistance to any real change). Of course, given the fact that the new pope was elected out of a group of cardinals who were all selected by the previous two popes who were extremely conservative in all the controversial areas just mentioned, it was hardly likely that they would have been able to find, never mind choose, a pope to match these criteria.

This is not to say that the new pope will not need to be at least creative and brave (he obviously can’t do anything about his age, except to stay young in spirit). But what I have begun to sense is that Pope Francis may be a transition leader, a role that will also require creativity and bravery though for different work than the leader of a new era will have to do. In the first place, he simply can’t be – is probably not equipped to be – the kind of leader that a new era will need. In fact, a transition leader is one who still belongs to the old paradigm; the difference is he has already begun to see that this paradigm is shifting.

A transition leader must therefore be able to do at least two important things: first, present in simple and clear terms, the essential principles of the vision that underpins all forms – paradigms – without having to insist on or impose the interpretations of these principles that the old paradigm has developed. For example, such a principle might be the sacredness of marriage, while an interpretation might be a position that holds that marriage is only between a man and a woman.

The second important thing for a transition leader would be to lay out a decision-making process for moving through the transition period, or perhaps more accurately a simple method for determining the appropriate form of decision-making for the various issues that will be have to be discussed. That would mean that some decisions might be a straightforward ‘decide and announce’ form because they do not require anything more than that: like a decision about whether the church should actually be in dialogue with the world. Other decisions – like those concerning the controversial issues of sexuality mentioned above – will require other forms of decision-making: exploratory groups, for example that will engage the Catholic community (as well as other relevant perspectives) and offer their findings to a genuinely representative group of the Catholic community who will make the decisions that may need to be explored again and again as the world changes: on issues like celibacy or financial transparency, for example.

I have been working with leaders in transition where, in some cases, the transition is more than institutional but also includes a personal paradigm shift for the leader. Thomas Kuhn coined this famous term – paradigm shift – in his 1962 classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in which he described a process that begins with the breakdown of the old order or paradigm in the face of new, often unprecedented challenges, followed by a claim from a perspective – usually on the margins of the old paradigm – that it can address and resolve these new challenges. The initial response of the leadership of the old system is to reject – even attempt to discredit – this claim, sensing its threat to their existence. However, the next stage, Kuhn explained, is a gradual movement (shift) to this new perspective as the old system continues to experience breakdown: a shift that gathers momentum until sufficient people have changed to allow the new perspective to become the center of a new paradigm. The role of a transition leader is to foster and even facilitate this process.

When – or rather as – this happens, new leadership begins to emerge out of the new paradigm that will do the work of establishing it, addressing initial crises, and helping create new structures and forms for its ongoing existence. In other words, the new leadership will emerge after – not before – the transition has (sufficiently) taken place. Which is why it is not possible to either expect or even anticipate the form that the leadership of a new paradigm will take. For example, in the case of the Catholic Church, it could well be a more collective (collegial) leadership, which was the form that the Vatican Council of the Sixties promoted, but which the Church was probably not ready for at the time.

So, perhaps in a way, Pope Francis is both the best we could have expected but also exactly what is needed at this time. Our instincts, I would say, reflect as much, perhaps because we see that he has the most important quality – the sine qua non - of a transition leader which we might define as humility. For humility will allow him to listen – to the spirit of the original vision as well as the spirit of the times – and to work with an increasingly complex world without being swept along.

There are obvious reasons, from the more benign – religious institutions have failed to respond adequately to a changing world – to the more tragic – the many kinds of abuse of power. Still, the failure of the religious system does not mean that religion is no longer an important dimension and force in human life. A failure of the education system would not mean that we no longer need education, just as a failure in the health system would not mean the end of health care.

The good news is that some of the things that have come out of our changing world – technology obviously – have begun to offer new ideas and new forms for addressing – and more effectively – the basic needs that these institutions are meant to serve. For example, the future of higher education will clearly include more and more online forms (one example is the ‘MOOCs – massive online, open systems – that threaten the future of universities), while increasingly sophisticated forms of online health records will certainly change the shape of health care. Moreover, people are increasingly able – partly because of technology – to address these basic needs themselves: learning on the web, for example, or finding more effective alternative approaches to caring for their own health.

But what might be the equivalent of this for the religious dimension of life: what  forms will religion take in the future if indeed it is true that we still have the needs that religion is meant to serve?

Over the past months, conversations with young men have encouraged me to explore this question in more depth. What I picked up from these conversations was a desire for some kind of support system to address the continuing challenge of what I described above as living your own truth – a purpose or value-based life – while attending to the still important work of survival. Most of these men are not part of any formal religious system though they spoke about what I would see as expressions of the religious impulse: the desire to make sense of life, including discovering one’s purpose in it, as well as the desire to make the world more just and more sustainable for their kids. So I sent out an email to invite a group to come together with no more explanation than this: to explore how to hold together these two critical dimensions of purpose and survival. The response to this rather general and even vague invitation was intriguing: everyone responded positively, even if they couldn’t make the meeting. And when those who could came together last week, it was even more intriguing. For two hours that felt like ten minutes, they shared stories and experiences that reflected a clear hunger for larger meaning and a desire for the honest conversation of real community that might help them discover or develop this, as well as support them in their various attempts to live out this larger meaning and their own deeper truth in a world that does not make – or even allow – room for it.

They spoke of what they already did to address this need: running, gardening, advocacy, prison work, the arts, music. They explored frameworks of meaning that fell mostly into nature – (re)connecting to it – and culture – developing and promoting it through justice and politics. And they concluded that real community would be the way they could do this critical work of integration and balance (of meaning/purpose and survival). Real community, they said, meant a safe place where one could be open – even vulnerable – without fearing judgment; clearly a form of support system, not just through hard times, though, but also through times when we would simply need encouragement to follow our truth. But real community could also mean a conversation where new – holistic – ideas could be explored, like the creative conversations Ben Franklin used to convene. There was also the thought that these conversations might translate into action – a project of some sort – that would support justice or promote an ecological awareness: balance in the social sense. The essence of this community, they concluded, was authenticity and tolerance whatever the focus.

Now, I have no intention of creating a new religion here. As many of you know, I stepped away from formal religion – including the role of priest – many years ago. However, as I have said in recent Blog posts, I feel a strong impulse to reclaim what is my own deeper truth, that is also my essential purpose or identity, partly because I see a new need for it. So far, I have defined this new priesthood only in broad terms, like ‘presence’. Perhaps, though, there is value in simply being present to these young men in a way that will encourage them – affirm their instinct – to create this kind of community that will help them hold the tension of truth-work and survival-work that most of us despair of with the passing of time but that good religion can help us maintain.

 One of the forms public conversation has taken over the years is a (hopefully) peaceful rally where we come together in large numbers to reflect our collective concern and explore our collective options in a way that is both symbolic and also politically powerful. Such a gathering took place yesterday – February 17 –  in DC where tens of thousands of people – 40,000 was the final count – in buses and cars from nearly 30 states, gathered to deepen their understanding about the issue and some of the things we need to do at a personal and systemic level, and also to express their concerns and their hopes in a way that will further a creative resolution of this collective challenge. The Berry Forum ‘hosted’ one of these buses to bring our Iona students and faculty as well as other concerned members of the community to this ancient ritual.

We gathered under the Washington Monument (obviously a symbolic starting point), in the VERY cold, bright sunshine, engaging with each other, commenting on each other’s banners – we carried one of Thomas Berry proclaiming ‘the great work’; others were less poetic but equally important (one stated: ‘I am freezing my ass off for Climate Change’). Then music – a mix of rock ‘n roll and hip hop that reflected the two ends of our age spectrum – convened us around a stage to listen to speakers as police helicopters circled above, wanting, perhaps unconsciously, it felt, to be part of the ritual. Bill McKibben, the organizer of the movement that is called ’350.org’ (referring to the measure of parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere that scientists say we must reduce to from the present level of 392 ppm), opened the proceedings with a passionate expression of gratitude for what he called ‘the largest climate march in U.S. history.’ The speakers who followed him represented the growing diversity of the movement from indigenous leaders from across the country to clean energy investors, like billionaire, Tom Steyer, and from environmental leaders, like Mike Brune of the famous Sierra Club to civil rights activists like Rosario Dawson. The same diversity was reflected in the crowd which, together with the youthful energy of the students who had come from all over the country to demonstrate how they are trying to get their colleges to divest from the fossil fuel industry, lifted my heart in a special way. For without the awareness and energy of our young people there will be no change.

The message to the President from the speakers was simple and clear: it is time to live up to your rhetoric and lead us forward on climate, they said. Former White House ‘green jobs advisor,’ Van Jones, added: ‘this will define your legacy, Mr. President.’

When these calls to action, which were interspersed by dance music to help keep the biting cold at bay, were over, we processed to the White House. I say ‘processed’ because I was reminded of the religious processions of another age, with banners flapping in the wind, and the chants spontaneously erupting from different parts of the crowd, and the great cry that started somewhere and moved down the lines like the great waves that we do at football games which have become the sacred liturgies of many.

I think that this kind of gathering is a noble, as well as a creative way of engaging in a genuine ecological dialogue. On a personal level it feels like the facilitation of such a dialogue is a fitting form of the new priest work I am seeking to do which reflects an intuition that has been there from the beginning: namely that the work of a priest is to be a bridge builder: between people and cultures (my early missionary work was at least intended to do that), between people and the earth and the other forms of life we share it with (I explored this work for years with the UN), and between levels or stages of life or self – the transition moments in both this life and between life and death. Ultimately, perhaps, the bridge is between human and divine, perhaps as a relationship that enables the miracle of an unfolding world: Rilke describes the relationship like this

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out

until they span the chasm between two

contradictions…..For the god

wants to know herself in you….

I might add a footnote that is a bridge with last week’s blog post that referenced the pope’s resignation and how it stirred old feelings in me. Another title for the office of pope is ‘pontiff’ which comes from the Latin word pontifex which literally means – yes indeed – ‘bridge builder.’ I have shared the story with some of you how, when I was a little boy in Belfast and was asked the most common question adults appear to put to children when they are stuck for something to say – ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ – I used to answer, ‘a pope.’ Of course the adults would smile and make smart remarks, like, ‘oh yeh, the first Irish pope,’ as well as other, less benign remarks. There are probably many reasons for this unusual response that I won’t go into here, Enough to say, at this stage of my process in which it has taken me forty years since my official ordination to priesthood to begin to get a glimpse of what being a priest might mean in today’s world, at least for me, the childish response feels gently relevant.

I’ve always found Lent to be a powerful symbol, probably because change and transformation have been my work for all my life in one way or another: at one time as a priest, later as a consultant and trainer with individuals and organizations. This year it is impacting me even more profoundly and I’ve been wondering if it’s because of the news of the pope’s resignation. While no supporter of what the Vatican and the Catholic Church have become, I can’t help but lament the loss of critical resources and support for an essential dimension of human life that good religion brings. I say ‘good religion’ to emphasize the importance of relevant and evolving versus frozen and insistent belief systems and intractable structures that support them. The pope’s resignation – the first in 600 years – made me wonder at how a system that gave meaning to the lives of the intelligent people that was the generation that preceded me could collapse so quickly and so completely to the point where it is no longer relevant, never mind compelling or inspiring, to the majority of those who call themselves Catholics, never mind the rest of the world who, in other times, would have looked to the Catholic Church as an important spiritual leader.

Of course there is a personal dimension to this. Many of you know that I was a Catholic priest working mostly in Africa but that I resigned many years ago, at least partly because I could see what was happening to the Church – not the details (of sexual abuse, for example) but the general inability, or more accurately unwillingness, to respond to the signs of the times – that would result inevitably in the kind of sad confusion we see today. I entered – or perhaps it is truer to say that I stayed the course to ordination – because of what the Church in the Sixties was promising to become and do as a church in the modern world. One of the documents of a world council – known as Vatican II – initiated by an aging Pope John who clearly read the signs of the times, was actually called ‘The Church in the Modern World.’ After ordination, I lived a decade of possibility as a priest that was born out of this great initiative when everything seemed possible, from a genuinely diverse church to a relevant force in the changing life of the world. At the end of that decade, though, new leadership at the Vatican tried to close the lid on what they saw as a Pandora’s box, something that was echoed in other fields, like politics, with people like Reagan and Thatcher, and like business and economics, with the growing disparities they fostered that were encouraged by the policies of these leaders.

Since my resignation I think I’ve struggled to find ways of living that would reflect the fundamental purpose and values of priesthood that I believe are still – always – important to integral human living. Then, more recently I decided – and announced on this Blog – that I was going to try to reclaim and redefine priesthood for myself, finally concluding that it had indeed been an archetype I had been following that did not simply go away when I resigned from the role within the Church system. I must add that this has been very challenging for a number of reasons, nor have I been successful yet in achieving a satisfactory resolution of the challenge. My dreams, which are often about belonging or relevance, certainly suggest as much.

Evidence today shows that the need for priests in the fundamental sense of facilitator of integral transformation, which is how I have come to see the role, is greater than ever now that the religious institutions, which are no longer relevant to most – especially to the young – have left an enormous vacuum that is being filled with all kinds of garbage. I was reading this morning that we in the US spend $10 billion a year on video games, along with billions more on other kinds of entertainment, on top of $13 billion last year on cosmetic surgery to maintain the illusion of youth that this fantasy entertainment promotes.

I realize I’m jumping around here, from thoughts of Lent and resigning popes to enormous social issues and personal dreams, but I believe that they are related: that my dreams, like messengers of the Gods – certainly tools of the psyche – continue to call me – call all of us – to be real; to address the world we live in; to bring our own unique capacities to this world. So, let me try to pull this together for myself by saying that I think I’m going to use this Lent, as part of my reclamation work, to help me enter more deliberately into my ongoing process of grieving – the loss of an old life – and transition – to a new life of priest that is relevant to the world we are all facing into today. I don’t know what this will mean but I suspect that it may have something to do with real presence – to people and to things – in a way that will help them grow and become more truly themselves. I’m not sure yet what concrete things I will do to mark this Lenten process but I’ll begin by giving up beer – not easy!!! – to allow the urge to remind me of my purpose. I’m sure other practices will suggest themselves…

If this resonates with any of you – and I suspect it will – post a thought. Catholic today? Religious = ? The value of old rituals like Lent? By the end of Lent they are promising a new pope. It is hard to see how he could be that much different since the Vatican garden has been planted with similar varieties for many years. But you never know: it is Lent after all.

Wow, I thought, this could be really important, for all kinds of reasons, including the fact we need all the creativity we can muster today in order to redress the mistakes we have made in recent history in our relations with the earth and each other, but also to address the new level of challenges we face that are the result of these mistakes. My intention here is not to glorify or romanticize indigenous peoples and their cultures but rather to explore something important that may indeed have been left behind in our understandable efforts to control our environment and secure our survival. Let’s recognize that we have brought this capacity (to control our environment) to unprecedented heights (along with all the benefits of modern society it has produced) but have lost something fundamental along the way: namely the capacity to relate appropriately with the earth and with each other. Instead we followed a different trajectory with the result that while we have developed our capacities to control our environment far beyond anything our Indigenous ancestors could ever have dreamed of, we have at least weakened the capacity to play our role as the self-reflective modes of the earth – the artists of the universe – that the Aborigines describe as their ‘Dream Time’ and that my old mentor, Thomas Berry described as the purpose and work of human beings.

Obviously, this capacity to control our environment has raised all kinds of new problems for us that threaten to overwhelm us and we hardly know where to turn. Simply working harder can only get us so far; what is required is new thinking: a new way of thinking in fact that is based on a different relationship with the world. I would suggest that this is actually the relationship our ancestors touched and, in some cases – like the Australian Aborigines – developed to a high level, but that we dismissed as our capacity to control increased. Of course we can’t go back in time, no more than we can ‘un-know’ what we now kno, but we can try to understand how we might recover these capacities: learn what some of these ancestors did to develop the relationship they had with the world that would allow us not only to survive but also to thrive by moving to a level of our development as humans that got truncated along the way.

In fact we don’t have to go back as far as our indigenous ancestors to (re)learn these ‘Dream Time capacities,’ partly because we have practically managed to suppress their insights (including among the remnants of these indigenous groups), and partly because it would be quite impossible for us to put ourselves in their shoes. However we can (re)learn comparable practices that managed to survive the suppression brought about by the mechanistic mind of modern society in particular (though the roots go much deeper). I am thinking of the various traditions that we would categorize as artists, mystics, etc., that actually are the places where this ancient ‘Dream Time’ wisdom survived, like an indigenous plant hidden among new growth.

The essence of these ‘Dream Time’ traditions is a relationship of presence and communion (Vs control and utilitarianism) with the world in all its forms. It is the insights of the poets: the ‘community of the spirit’ that Rumi spoke of; it is ‘the great way’ of the Tao Te Ching; it is Wordsworth’s ‘power of harmony’; Rilke’s ‘earth invisible’….. It is also the amazement of the scientists: ‘I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest are details,’ said Albert Einstein. And the wonder of the environmentalists: ‘When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect’ are Aldo Leopold’s words in his Foreword to A Sand County Almanac (1949).

The point is that what the Australian Aboriginals called ‘the Dream Time’ is a way of thinking and relating to the world that determines everything else. It is sad that we lost this along the road to securing our survival, but it is a relief to realize that we can find it again today in our time of need.

His words also reminded me that his window of opportunity for using this power to make a difference is a small one. Michael Beschloss, the ‘presidential historian’ commented afterwards that L.B. Johnson passed what became the historic programs of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security in the first months of his second term. So I was listening very carefully to what this re-elected President said in his Inauguration speech that would suggest what he will be trying to do this year.

In the first place he spoke about change and the reality of our interconnectedness and interdependence when it comes to facing the new challenges that change brings: ‘…we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.’ I loved the way he segued from this into the essential nature of equality: ‘My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it – so long as we seize it together.’ And then: ‘For, we the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.’ It was artful how he precluded old criticisms about how we undermine ingenuity and hard work when we provide security for those who need it: ‘…no matter how responsibly we live our lives,’ he said, ‘any one of us, at any time, may face a job loss or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm.’ So, we simply have to commit to supporting each other in such times with essential programs that ‘do not,’ he stressed, ‘make us a nation of takers (the reference was clear); they free us to take the risks that make this country great.’

It was a great preface to his elegant description of our journey toward equality over the last century and a half – from Seneca Falls to Selma and to Stonewall: women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights. And it was an appropriate foundation for speaking about the next stage of this journey: ‘We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.’

Wow! This was his first hint of what his focus will be in his second term: he is setting the stage, I thought: offering a framework within which all the other critical issues will – should – be addressed, including gun control and immigration. It was amazing to me – a relief, more accurately – that he did this: provided what I believe is the real context within which everything else can – must – be addressed; the only realistic context, in fact, for without this, everything else can be little more than well-meaning reaction to the new challenges that we are facing. For example, to address gun control simply in the context of the Second Amendment is to be inevitably mired in arguments about human rights that will be pointless without a healthy world in which to exercise these rights. To speak about immigration without looking at the impact of greater demands for so-called natural resources for human survival is like the famous reference to moving deck-chairs on the sinking Titanic that Bob Dylan sings about in his new album (Tempest which is vintage Dylan, by the way). His next words reminded me of the world of Australia I experienced earlier this month and mentioned in my last Blog: ‘Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling droughts, and more powerful storms.’

It was on this foundation that he laid out the path of the future – for all of us as well as for his second term. We can’t wait for others, neither in terms of responsibility nor in terms of economic advantage. We cannot resist the transition toward a sustainable future, in fact we must lead it in order to maintain our economic vitality along with our national treasures (forests, waterways…). ‘That,’ he said, ‘is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God.’

And it is on this foundation that we will also build our approach to security and peace, not the ‘perpetual war’ that has for too long been the destructive and unsustainable engine of our economy. When we have to, he said, we will defend our people and our values ‘through strength of arms’. But, he added, we will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully, not because we are naïve about the dangers we face but ‘because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear.’ For me, this approach is also reflective of the reality of our interconnectedness and inter-dependence.

He tied all of this back together when he acknowledged the Holiday with which his inauguration coincided by referencing Martin Luther King’s clear understanding that ‘our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.’ And he finished by emphasizing the urgency of the task to make the principles of our nation real for every American. His statement about climate change already expanded this task to include future generations, I would suggest that it will in time be expanded further to include other expressions of the one life we all share and that the Aboriginal People I wrote of last week include when they say ‘all people.’

Finally, how we do this is equally critical: ‘We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.’ And, of course, our work will always be imperfect and our victories partial, for we are part of a process of learning to live together on an Earth we share that will continue indefinitely.

All of which brought him back to the humanness that I noted in his looking back on the people in the Mall: ‘My oath is not so different from the pledge we all make to the flag that waves above and that fills our hearts with pride.’ His words reminded me once again that he – along with our leaders in Congress – is a mirror for our own collective face and the reflection of our interconnected process toward life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.