Listening...

If one is not listening for the heartbeats of God, why be able to hear at all? Listening is key to the spiritual life... as it was to our ancient forebears in the complex task of survival...

​Are we not though, right now, also confronted with an equally complex task of survival? Thousands of living species are going extinct every year in a massive die-off which further strains all life, and every relationship, on the Planet...

​Listening is also key to our collective dreams of peace on Earth and justice for All... we have to become willing to hear one another's story that we might learn to share one another's pain... This is the great lesson that I learned in our Soup kitchen: food was just an excuse to get folks to come through the door. Our real task was to invite conversation: to enter, with reverence, into one another's story. Folks would self-heal to the degree they could shine some sort of light into their own darkness... and be welcomed to look into the darkness of another heart...  

​While I do not believe that "healing" is necessarily the be-all and end-all of relationships, soup kitchens, spirituality, or of social work and activism, it is nevertheless in making conscious our multi-layered-unconscious that makes our burdens bearable (even if just barely)... Listening is the gift of the opened heart... Living-while-broken is oftentimes the best that we can do: but with folks around who choose to stay in conversation is loving-in-action, and not "just" love in dreams... this, living-while-broken, slowly becomes New Life, and new life always brings with it, Community...

​"Where two or three are gathered", so said Yeshua the Poet of Nazareth. Each of these small circles of listening become the enfleshed, newly vitalized, Body of Christ... It is the Mystery of the Tao riding the tiger of life... And it is the Sacred Affirmation of I see you and I am amazed! It is precisely here, in this to-the-roots-amazement, that we and God give birth to each other...