Activating Peace

"May you become in practice all that you are in potential. May the love that informs every cell in your body permeate every thought in your mind."  

Thomas Ashley-Farrand 

I came across this quote this morning.  I find it encouraging, and I pray you will as well.  I am thinking that the idea of working for peace is off track.  There is only peace.  Everything else is a reaction. Therefore, the only way to "work for peace" is to become the peace that is inherent in all of life.  It really is more of a revealing than an achievement.  

   

This week Tyler and I watched the movie, "Gandhi".  Gandhi's story is large, much like India herself, and difficult to contain in a three hour movie.  I liked the movie and certainly Ben Kingsley's portrayal of Gandhi was masterful.  However, I believe that a weakness of the movie is that it did not highlight that at the heart of Gandhi's life was a complete surrender to the teachings in The Bhagavad Gita ( Sanskrit for The Song of the Lord).  He truly was able to renounce the trappings of the world and allowed the text to come alive in him.  "The Gita has been a mother to me ever since I became first acquainted with it in 1889...But you must approach Mother Gita in all reverence, if you would benefit by her ministrations."* 

I have always found strength in Jesus' words in John 14:27:  "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid."  Both Jesus and Gandhi knew the world to be a pretty unreliable source of peace.  Peace is of God, and is God, and God is always offering peace to us no matter what is going on around us.  May we accept this gift, and then live it in the world.  Then, we, too, can turn from being reactionaries to "actionaries," ones who through our very lives bring peace.     

  

*Gandhi the Man, How one man changed himself to change the world, Eknath Easwaran, Nilgiri Press, 2011, p.127  

  

photograph:  San Leandro, April 2020  

The Consistency of Love

There are quite a few photographs of Gandhi in Easwaran's book, Gandhi The Man, How One Man Changed Himself To Change the World.  With the exception of some pictures taken early in his life when he was trying to fit into European culture, he always dressed and looked the same.  Just about the only difference was whether or not his torso was clothed.  His attire was of the Indian poor regardless of whatever world leader he was meeting with at the time.  Gandhi renounced the world's so-called values,  so he could more fully love the world. I think this letting go will be one of our great lessons of this pandemic disease. We may need to surrender much, but in that renunciation, we hopefully can discover our core of love.  More importantly, we just might learn to live and reach out from that core.  We are part of God's mandala.      

While we associate Gandhi with non-violence, Easwaren's work has shown me that at the root of Gandhi's non-violent movement was an  ever-expanding love.  Gandhi himself said that it takes practice.  He recommended that we start with our families and then let that love spread. I am reminded of the Loving Kindness prayer (which is rooted in Buddhism) that begins with our own hearts, then to those we love, and then to those who are causing us discomfort, whether we personally know them or not. He and his wife had some stormy times, but he eventually understood that it was she who was teaching him to love through her consistency.  

  

In Gandhi's life and work, I do hear Jesus' teachings, although Gandhi's personal sacred text was The Bhagavad-Gita.  Love is universal; Christ is universal, and God speaks through all traditions and cultures.  Therefore, most traditions have much more in common than they have ways of differing. The journey is the same.  It is a journey to love because there is only love. Everything else is a reaction, usually coming from fear, which is rooted in ego. This morning I am struck by Paul's wisdom in Ephesians 3:14-18: 

  

This is why I kneel before the Father. Every ethnic group in heaven or on earth is recognized by him. I ask that he will strengthen you in your inner selves from the glory through the Spirit. I ask that Christ will live in your hearts through faith. As a result of having strong roots in love, I ask that you'll have the power to grasp love's width and length, height and depth, together with all believers. I ask that you'll know the love of Christ that is beyond knowledge so that you will be filled entirely with the fullness of God (Common English Bible).    

 

Be at peace, dear friends. We are all a part of God's ever expanding love.  I give thanks that your soul is in this world.   

 

 

 

photograph: San Leandro, March 2020