You Are the Universe...

                               You are the Universe in ecstatic motion. -- Rumi

I can't drink. Nevertheless, don't you think this might be a good time to get drunk: and then maybe stay drunk for the rest of the year? Pausing, I of course know that beer was not an aid to Rumi's enlightenment or in his prescription for times of struggle and suffering... So...

I remember a quote that I included in my book, Resplendent in Rags, it is from Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov: We do not understand that life is paradise, for it suffices only to wish to understand it, and at once paradise would appear in front of us in all its beauty... (Fr. Zossima) This is something different from getting drunk...

"It suffices only to wish to understand it"... In words both ardently political and spiritual: this means to be woke! Yeah, you conservative nuts: get woke! Instead of recognizing the loving spiral of spirit and life weaving through and about everyone and everything, both leaders and us drift aimlessly in the inevitable grief of apparent separation: constructing systems of privilege, profits, and power that exist only to rape, exploit, and dominate: rendering the masses, and now the entire Planet, twisting in the winds of fear and hopelessness: easy prey for charlatans of religion and politics: who are interested only in getting their small share of the Unholy Trinity...

This wokeness is not at all about becoming a "liberal". Liberals are just as much slumbering beauties as are conservatives. I frequently wear a button on my coat that boldly states: "Jesus was a Liberal"... I wear it hoping for a bit of provocation: no one has yet made a comment! What I want to say is this: "This is just a tease! I don't think that Jesus was a liberal at all! Rather, I do think that he was the most radical man ever! I mean, have you ever read the Sermon on the Mount, or Matthew 25, or his claim that the kingdom of heaven is within all of us! Man, that dude was through and through ​radical!" 

Like Lao Tzu and his Tao Te Ching. Like Mahatma Gandhi and nonviolence. Like Dorothy Day and Catholic Worker Soup Kitchens, Houses of Hospitality, and Farms. Radical. Radical with genuine wokeness. The Kingdom of Heaven is within us: the Way is spirit and life everywhere and within everything: there is no separation: this is philosophically called non-dualism. Instead of this and that, friend and enemy, me and you: there is, Only One, a Universe of ecstatic motion! We can, one minute from now, get woke! Jesus said and practiced the most wokeness imaginable: Love your neighbor exactly as you love yourself: who is your neighbor? Every single person and thing! Leave no one out or behind! Build the evidence of the Kingdom of Love right here, right now, on Planet Earth. Radical. 

Woke.