39 Heaven on Earth

Needed Now: a New Story That is Out of the Box

By: Martin Rutte

It’s time for us to step out of the box.

Why? The significant problems we’re facing aren’t being solved: wars drag on, millions suffer severe drought and famine, ice caps melt, global financial markets collapse, terrorism continues. People have lost faith in many of our institutions – schools that don’t teach, governments that can’t govern, marriages that don’t endure, religions that fail to use their moral authority to end the world’s sufferings.

Add to this the underlying belief that we as individuals can’t make any impactful difference, not just in making these situations better, but in ending them. The prevailing sense is that none of us can make a difference, that one individual can’t take on a problem—war, hunger, disease—and end it. We’re led to believe that one individual can’t take on an institution — government, the financial industry, the church—and make it work. There’s nothing we can do, the world’s problems are too overwhelming. We are blocked by hopelessness, powerlessness, and resignation.

The world’s current story is not helping the world work; it doesn’t empower us with optimism; it doesn’t cause us to engage the major sufferings and solve them. It gives us no sense that we’re moving in the right direction with a momentum that’s growing and expanding. It has run its course. It is tired and ineffective. It can, and it must change.

Hope lies in creating a new story of what it means to be human and what it means to be humanity. We need a new narrative that touches our souls and engages us to participate in creating the kind of world we long for. We need a new vision that unleashes what we already know deep in our souls about the kind of world we want, that helps set free our optimism and energy, and that supports us in taking the steps to make our vision for our world real.

At present, we know how to create Hell on Earth. Why not create its opposite? Why not create Heaven on Earth? And why wait? We can start right now. After all, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

It’s easy to begin. Here’s how:

1. Recall a time when you experienced Heaven on Earth.
2. Imagine you have a magician’s wand and can create Heaven on Earth. What is Heaven on Earth for you?
3. What simple, easy, concrete action will you take in the next 24 hours to help make this real?

Each of us starts by asking and answering these questions of ourselves and perhaps two others. By engaging people in creating Heaven on Earth, we help start a new, fresh, view of the world. That world becomes full of opportunities and brimming with possibility. Into this new human story we are invited to creatively contribute how we can each make a difference. The new story of Heaven on Earth provides the context, but it is you, the individual, that creates the content. If you speak to just two people today about Heaven on Earth and each of them speaks to two the next day and so on and so on, everyone on the planet can be spoken to in only 32 days!

To the skeptics who ask, “What about those for whom Heaven on Earth would be eliminating a particular race or belief, or continuing to pollute the environment?” They are the minority, the very tiny minority. Unfortunately, they are often the people who control the world’s agenda today. No more. It’s now time for the vast majority of people in the world who want a good and decent and working world to be in charge of building our new world story.

Historically, the problem with world visions is that they seek to impose their view, “Follow my way and it will all work.” But imposing a vision never works. It can’t because it removes the freedom to choose. The vision of creating Heaven on Earth is different in a very significant way. It doesn’t impose, it evokes. It evokes the global vision that already lives within each of us.

People do know the kind of world they want, but they’re overwhelmed at the thought of making it happen, or embarrassed at what people might say if they talk about it. Once people are given the opportunity to discover their own truth about the kind of world they want and feel free to talk about it a powerful transformation occurs. A part of themselves they’ve always known, but haven’t met, is revealed. And once this evoked vision of Heaven on Earth is unleashed, a simple, powerful, and effective creativity emerges that begins positively impacting the world.

We can begin to have the kind of world we long for. We can begin living a new story of what it means to be human and what it means to be humanity. We can begin creating Heaven on Earth here and now.

***

Martin Rutte is a co-author of the New York Times business best-seller, ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work,’ and is Chair of the Board of the Centre for Spirituality and the Workplace, Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax. He is also the founder of Project Heaven on Earth and is a management consultant specializing in corporate social responsibility and strategic visioning. He conducts Heaven on Earth workshops globally. More at: http://www.projectheavenonearth.com <http://www.projectheavenonearth> , and on Facebook at: Project Heaven on Earth.

38 Great Gift of Greed

I heard a great story from the late Father Anthony de Mello (AKA Father Tony), a Jesuit priest from Goa, India’s smallest state.

Father Tony talked about the God Vishnu who, according to the Hindu tradition, is the Supreme and all-pervading being who brought the universe into existence. (Substitute your own deities and names as needed.)

Here’s my telling of his story:

Once upon a time, Vishnu visited a man in his dream.

He told the man, “If you go to this corner at noon, there will be a wandering mendicant, and he will give to you the greatest of all gifts, if you only you ask him for it.”

As instructed, the man went to that corner at the specified time.

Then, as predicted, a wandering mendicant approached him.

The man was so excited. He exclaimed to the mendicant, “Excuse me, you won’t believe this...or maybe you will...but I was visited by the God Vishnu, and he said you would give me the greatest of all gifts, if only I asked you for it.”

The mendicant replied, “Certainly. Anything I have, I would be so happy to give to you.”

The mendicant opened his satchel and showed the man its contents. Among them was a giant, glittering diamond the size of a baseball.

The man eyed it, mesmerized. “May I have that?”

“Sure! I don’t need that. I picked it up at a river bank about a week ago.”

The man was thrilled! He took the diamond, and shortly thereafter, the mendicant walked off.

The man fantasized about riches, fame, and everything he could get now that he owned this diamond.

About ten minutes later, he realized he had made a terrible mistake. He raced after the mendicant.

“Wait! Sir, wait!” He caught up and pleaded, “I’ve made the wrong decision. I don’t want this diamond. I don’t want it at all. Please take it back.”

The mendicant took the diamond, placed it back in his satchel, and said, “Okay. Well, what is it I have that I can give to you?”

The man answered, “What I want is your ability to not want the diamond.”

Isn’t that a great story?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be free of want, desire, and greed?

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright once quipped, “Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.”

Personally, I love material stuff. I love electronics, technology, and whatever the people at Apple are selling. I have greed. I fantasize about extinguishing my wants (and perhaps you have thought about doing the same for yourself), but I don’t think any of us can ever fully eliminate our desires. The best we can do is to realize our wants, and then work towards minimizing them.

• If you could ask that mendicant for anything, what would you ask for? The diamond or the ability to not want the diamond?

Spiritual-religious advice: In lieu of (or in addition to) the tangible gift you would normally give someone during a holiday or other special event, write a card stating what qualities or attributes you would give to that person if you could. I’m certain they will appreciate it more than any “thing” you might buy them.

37 OY Thinking

OY Thinking = putting others before yourself.

O = Others. Y = You.

OY Thinking is the mindset where the desires of others are given priority above your own needs.

Are you guilty of OY Thinking?

I know that I often am.

(OY Thinking is endemic amongst “nice” people.)

It often feels easier to be a caretaker for others than to take a good, hard look at ourselves, acknowledge what it is that we want, and then do it.

(Also, being “selfless” looks good.)

But, to be healthy, functioning adults, we need to put ourselves first. If not we are willingly — and often unwittingly — committing violence against ourselves. Putting others first is both exhausting and unfair.

The recently deceased sage Thomas Merton wrote:

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender oneself to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. It destroys your own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of your own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom, which makes the work beautiful.

I’m not talking about being selfish — insisting on your own way to the point of doing things to others that you wouldn’t want done to you. What I’m talking about is putting our priorities in the right order.

I’m not saying that we oughtn’t take the concerns of others into account, and certainly, certainly, there are plenty of circumstances in which we need to put the needs of others before our own. (Parents, anyone?)

There is a very famous aphorism attributed to Rabbi Hillel (a contemporary of Jesus) which says:

If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And, if not now, when?

Spiritual-religious advice: Put a stop to your OY Thinking.

36 Nagy's Buddha's Anger

This article was written in conjunction with my friend Nagy, the Zen Buddhist-Priest. Learn more about his work Prison Dharma Network (http://www.prisondharmanetwork.org/directory/organizations/75).

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The Buddha on how to handle other’s anger: don’t take the gift!

A woman, whose son had left her to become a disciple, confronted the Buddha and showered him with great anger. She was a widow and her son had been her sole source of support. She poured out a great virulent wrath in the Buddha’s face.

The monks watching were shocked.

They wondering why the Buddha said nothing to defend himself – after all, her son was taking active steps in the path towards the liberation – couldn’t she understand that?

When the woman left they asked why he listening, did nothing, but, seemingly, took the abuse.

He said two things:

1. she was suffering and we must show compassion for all who suffer
2. I did not have to accept her “gifts’.”

(The story ends with the Buddha telling her the son to go and take of his mother and that he could always return.)

Isn’t that advice of the Buddha’s something that we all know? That we must be compassionate and that we needn’t accept other people’s rage. People only attack us when they feel their suffering is too great to shoulder. If we can understand this, then we need not take in their gifts.

35 Rip Van You

Imagine you could travel back in time to visit yourself at 1/2 your current age.

What five things about you NOW would be most surprising to you THEN?

1. ______________________________________________________________
2. ______________________________________________________________
3. ______________________________________________________________
4. ______________________________________________________________
5. ______________________________________________________________

I doubt any of us would have predicted our lives to be exactly or even remotely as they currently are.

We delude ourselves, wanting to believe that things do not change so much. But, they do. We do. All things change – including us.

(Moreover, those people who you stopped talking to a few years back, they too have changed.)

My answers to the above exercise -- when I was 21, graduating from college and planning on attending architectural school -- I never would have imagined that:

1. I live in LA
2. I teach math to inner-city Latino kids
3. I am ordained as a rabbi
4. 3,000+ people pay attention to what I say 77% weekly
5. I care more about being loving and loved than clever and right
   

(I think I would be equally surprised by each, but I really like and am proud of #5.)

How about you? What surprises you about your life?

Spiritual-religious advice: in pondering how your life has changed muse over how attached you might be to the idea that your self is (at least somewhat) permanent.

34 Major Annoyances

There’s a popular saying in the business world: You can’t manage what you don’t measure.

I want us to do an exercise that will measure something in our spiritual-religious lives with the hopes that by measuring it, we can improve our spiritual-religious fitness.

As with all exercises, this one works better, the more you work it. If you just read about it, it will only work so well; but, if you actually do it... well, you know...

Materials:

• pen or pencil
• - a small pad of paper to carry around with you.
• (I’m sure you can even configure your technology for this too.)

Directions:

• Make a note of every time you are annoyed.

Detailed direction:

It doesn’t matter what you’re annoyed about — the food arrives and it’s extra spicy (when you ordered it mild), the phone rang during your only chance to take a nap, your laptop froze in the middle of working on a project, the kids aren’t getting dressed on time — just make a note of when you’re annoyed.

You aren’t making a note of what annoyed you, just the time during the day when you became annoyed. (If you want to mark that the annoyance was major or minor, that would be good, too.) All you need is a list of when these things happened.

For example:

• Monday, 10 am, majorly annoyed.
• Monday, 10:45 am, a little annoyed.
• Monday, 4:45 pm, annoyed.

Follow-up direction:

After you have collected a week’s worth of data, examine it to see if you can find any interesting patterns.

Rationale:

Most of us probably have no idea how many times we get annoyed per day.

If I asked you, “Hey, how many times do you get irritated per day?” You might say a lot, you might say a little. But could you quantify it? Could you say with certainty how many times you’re bothered per week?

Do you get more annoyed in the mornings or on the weekends? How about Mondays?

We don’t know unless we track it.

And if we don’t know how many times we get annoyed, how are we ever supposed to prepare? How can you brace yourself for annoyances if you don’t even have a good estimate on how often those annoyances occur?

Not tracking annoyances and thinking you’ll understand them is like trying to keep on budget without knowing how much money you’ve spent.

My hypothesis is — and it’s working for me and others who have done this — the more you know, the more informed you are.

If you learn that you average one major annoyance every 1-2 waking hours (I’m not saying that’s a lot; I’m not saying that’s a little), then you’ll be prepared when to expect your next major annoyance. Moreover, if you’re used to experiencing a major annoyance every 1-2 hours and you suddenly go 4 hours without a major annoyance, that might make you feel kind of good. Or at least, it might take some of the sting out.

Spiritual-religious advice: Track your annoyances.

Feel free to email me your thoughts, comments, or if you found this exercise to be majorly annoying.

33 Spiritual Barometer

Wouldn’t it be great to have a "spiritual barometer" — something that would let you know the condition of your religious health on any given day?

I think we all have such built-in devices, it’s just a matter of taking the time to figure out exactly what they are.

So far, I have discovered at least four of my spiritual barometers: architecture, Jane (my wife), and traffic.

· Architecture — When my spirit is a bit low, awful architecture infuriates me. But when my spirits are higher, I will see the very same goofy looking edifice and laugh out loud.

· Jane — Sometimes I find Jane’s foibles (like her inability to return library books on time) endearing. However, there are occasions where late-fee accruals exasperate me.

· Traffic — There are days when traffic is unbearably annoying to me and other days when I am at peace with it.

In the preceding examples, the variable that changes is my mood — not the building, my beloved, or the blockage of cars. In other words, the world is the same, my spiritual barometer reading is altered.

When I keep track of the readings on my spiritual barometers it allows me to make adjustments in the way I react to the world around me. When I find myself annoyed by a set of circumstances that wouldn’t bother me on a different day, I know I must take great care to be kind to both myself and others.

How about you? What are your spiritual barometers? What can you monitor that will inform you as to the state of your soul?

The antics of your pets or relatives? The cost of things? The sounds around you? When you can't seem to remember things? When you find yourself asking God for something? When you find yourself leaving more generous tips? The ego of people? The toilet seat being left up or down?

See if you can't find a few.

Finally, let me advise that we shouldn't try to use our spiritual barometers as indicators that we need to change anything about our self or our perception of the world. Instead, let us use them to note, with amused detachment, whatever state of awareness we are currently experiencing

Our spiritual barometers can be the greatest of tools to help us find the willingness to be mindful our feelings and explore greater consciousness.

Spiritual-religious advice: Figure out your spiritual-religious barometer.

32 LCK - The Healing Power of Kindness

Kindness!

What a wonderful moment it is, O God, when a kind person walks into our lives. We feel so protected and encouraged. So safe from the pain we often bring to ourselves and from the crushing harm that others sometimes inflict on us as well. There is such profound healing in a kindly spirit. The abrasions that we experience from daily being rubbed the wrong way are washed and soothed by the gentle voice or touch of a kind person.

God, I am willing to overlook a multitude of imperfections in a person who is kind. I am not saying that I am in favor of human frailties and faults but I am greatly in favor of kindness.

I am in favor of how, when everything else fails to restore my will to persevere in life, a kind response to me will usually energize and motivate me to keep on keeping on. I know that everyone cannot be intelligent, witty, or gifted in the ways that usually make people sit up and take notice but I know that we can all be more kind.

Help me to be a kinder person, O Lord, . . . even if no one notices.

31 Band-Aid

A few years ago, I cut my thumb pretty badly while I was working on some stained glass. No stitches though — thank God.

Here’s what I wrote about it:

There’s a band-aid covering the tip of my very sensitive left thumb.

It's going to get better, just not on my timetable.

I want to point pull back the band-aid and check to see if my thumb has healed.

I know it hasn't. And yet, I still want to check.

I know that my body — a most glorious, self-righting organism — will heal itself after a week, or two, or three.

But I still want to check now.

I think life is like that.

There are some things in life that just can't happen any sooner than they can happen. And while we know this, we obsessively check on them anyway.

This is spoken to Rainer Maria Rilke:

I would like to beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Sadly, we often lose patience with ourselves for failing to be just slightly ahead of where we actually are.

I encourage you to put a band-aid on your finger and let it remind you to wait patiently for your life to unfold.

Spiritual-religious advice: Wait. Be patient. Life will unfold.

30 Real Religious Moments

Take a moment to ponder the most religious moments you’ve experienced in your life.

I’m not talking specifically about a moment in nature, at a shrine, or anything like that — but rather, events that made indelible impressions on you spiritually. Moments when time stood still, when you were in that thin place between the ordinary and the divine, when you knew you were a part of something greater, holier.

I’ll give you an example from my own life.

One of the most profoundly religious moments of my existence was when my son needed stitches. He had hurt himself badly at the playground and was taken to the emergency room.

Understandably, he flipped out when the doctors mended the tender cut near his eye. They used wipes, syringes, and needles to clear away the wound.

Emmett thrashed so wildly on the emergency room table, I had to hold him down.

(This isn’t exactly true. The technicians were the ones to hold Emmett down. But in my revised version of reality, I needed to be the one holding my boy.)

I had to physically restrain him with all the strength in my upper body as the doctors performed their medical work.

Emmett looked at me, screaming in terror. He was beyond delirious. I could do nothing but hold him down and look back at his sobbing eyes.

That was one of the most religious moments of my life!

(Just writing about it now, I feel myself taken back to that touch of holiness I encountered. There is something inexplicable about it. It may have to do with the fact that Emmett felt close to death, or that I thought I might lose him.)

Another religious moment occurred for me while I was listening to a woman talk about her past. She was in unbelievable pain as the words came out — her distress evident in all parts of her body. Being there, being a witness to her pain, watching her dealing with it right in front of me, was a truly religious moment for me.

How about you? Have you experienced deeply profound moments in your life, where you witnessed something holier?

It’s always challenging to talk about these kinds of things with words. To describe something unlimited, like a religious experience, with the medium of language, feels like trying to taste the sweetness of a peach based on a mere photograph of the fruit.

Real religious moments don’t always come when we’re doing what we think we should be doing. They just happen.

Jason Siff, a meditation instructor, defines meditation as what happens when you are meditating. I would like you to think of religious experiences similarly — that they are simply those things you define as “religious experiences.” After all, you are the foremost authority on what a religious experience is for you.

This brings me back to the mission of Religion-Outside-The-Box — to empower you in your spiritual-religious life.

Spiritual-religious advice: Contemplate your religious moments.

Thin Places - Sparky Jamison

My friend Sparky Jamison is one of Annie's Godparents. Jane and I admire her and her husband Jeff's relationship and the relationship they have with their children – both of whom are now off in college. ¶ A while ago, Sparky read a phrase of Marcus Borg's and was excited about it. I asked her to write it as an article. Here it is. Thank you, Sparky.

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Every now and then, as I seek God in the everyday, I’m astonished to find that there is the thinnest of membranes between us, God and me — a time or place in which I can sense a nearness of spirit that’s hard to describe. Those moments are likely to leave me with inadequate words, for it’s an experience of profound comfort and grace and, dare I say, understanding of my place in God and God’s place in me. It’s not ecstasy. It’s quieter. But it’s so intense that it can’t be sustained for very long.

Marcus J. Borg, in his book The Heart of Christianity, uses the term thin places to describe this nearness.

[Thin spaces are] places where the boundary between the two levels [ordinary experience and the sacred] becomes very soft, porous, permeable. Thin places are places where the veil momentarily lifts, and we behold God, experience the one in whom we live, all around us and within us…A thin place is anywhere our hearts are opened. To use sacramental language, a thin place is a sacrament of the sacred, a mediator of the sacred, a means whereby the sacred becomes present to us. A thin place is a means of grace….sometimes our hearts are broken open by such experiences.

Borg goes on to say that thin places can be a literal place, or an experience. It can be music or art, joy or suffering. It can be worship or prayer. It is “the opening of the self to the Spirit of God by spending time in thin places – those places and practices through which we become open to and nourished by the Mystery in whom we love and move and have our being.”

The most profound such time was just after the death of my mother a few years ago. When she took her last breath, just before her heart stopped, a single tear slipped out of the corner of her eye. Just one very small tear. It might have simply been a physiological response to a body shutting down. Or it might have been something else. It stayed with me, and still does. It was a message to me of sadness and relief and love and surrender. And comfort. In the days after her death I talked at length to those closest to me about God’s nearness in that moment. Words tumbled out of me, into willing ears and onto pages. I described the gift of bearing witness to her death, and her passage to God– where? - as a moment during which a window was open wide. And it remained open to me for many days. I had a sense in the days that followed that I needed to stay by the window and pay close attention to God as long as possible because I knew it would gradually, necessarily, mercifully, nearly close. And it did.

A prayer: Our hearts long to be broken open in this way. Mine does. When it happens, God make me willing to remain by the open window while I can.

Employment Opportunity: Self-Hate Required

Imagine the following on an advertisement:

Are you overly critical of yourself?

Do you invest in misery?

The Bank of Self-Hate is looking to hire!

Hopefully, you are not overly qualified.

The idea comes from the book There Is Nothing Wrong With You: Going Beyond Self-Hate by self-proclaimed teacher and student of Soto Zen, author Cheri Huber. She explains that many people do "good deed" after "good deed" depositing "credits" into a proverbial bank account. When they decide to treat themselves well and attempt to make a metaphoric withdrawal, the banker at "the Bank of Self-Hate" informs them that they haven't done enough.

She advocates the seemingly insane notion of self-love.

How about you?

Do you feel you haven’t made enough deposits in your proverbial bank to warrant you being kind to yourself?

Spiritual-religious advice: be kind to yourself simply because you are you.

Jealousy/Envy

Today I’m going to talk about the seemingly twin notions of jealousy and envy, and how they’re different.

The first word “jealousy” has its root in the word “zeal.” You can hear the similarity in the Spanish word, celos. And that makes sense, because there’s some zeal, some excitement, in jealousy! When we’re jealous, we feel passionate about getting something.

Aristotle suggested that there’s jealousy, and then there’s envy. The two aren’t necessarily the same. Jealousy leads people to strive for greater things: “Oh, that person has a really cool car,” you tell yourself. And suddenly, you’re trying to figure out how to get a really cool car for yourself, too. That’s jealousy.

Envy, on the other hand, is much more insidious. You see that another person has a really cool car, chariot, etc., and you say to yourself, “I don’t have that. I’m gonna take their wheels so they can’t enjoy it.” Envy occurs when you won’t let the other person have something, because you’re so upset about it. You’d rather deprive that person of their right to possess something – instead of working to get your own.

All jealousy and envy stems from a perceived lack. You can only feel either emotion if you think there’s something important missing in your life. If you were content, truly content, you wouldn’t desire anything, so you couldn’t possibly feel jealous or envious about anything.

Here’s another example of how people often get confused about the nature of jealousy and envy. Sometimes we think the more we love a person, the more jealous we ought to be of that person’s relations. “Oh, I’m jealous that he’s spending so much time with anyone else besides me.” The more jealous we are (this tends to be the case with adolescents), the more we think it’s love. That ain’t love, that’s jealousy! And that’s not even the good kind of jealousy.

So why bring up this topic? There’s a spiritual-religious exercise lurking in all of this, of course.

“Moral indignation is often jealousy with a halo,” said H.G. Wells. I think he was right. That’s an awesome statement. Moral indignation is often jealousy with a halo.

Moral indignation is where you say something like, “Well those kids shouldn’t be going out and doing blah blah blah.” It’s when you get on your high horse and start judging and condemning other people.

Moral indignation occurs, because deep down inside, you wish you had whatever those “morally corrupt folk” have. You, perhaps only secretly, wish you would allow yourself to do what they’re doing.

Maybe those kids feel free, and you lack a sense of freedom. To make yourself feel better, you get your panties up in a bunch. You get all freaked out, and tell yourself, “Morally, what they’re doing is just wrong.” Maybe it’s not wrong, maybe you’re just jealous.

Here’s what I want you to do. This is our moral-spiritual-religious exercise for the week:

Think about something in your life which you get morally righteous about. Is there some way of flipping that thing upside down, looking at it, and thinking perhaps you’re just jealous? Maybe you feel some envy over people whom you are supposedly morally superior to.

If there’s a perceived lack in your life, work to examine what is causing the lack instead of directing your envy onto someone else.

Spiritual-religious advice: investigate the cause of your jealousy and moral indignation.

LCK - Showing Forgiveness

Oh Lord, it is a wonderful feeling to feel forgiven by people we have wronged. There is no lower low in all of life than to have done something terribly wrong to another person and to feel as if that wrong will never be forgiven. We have all had that soul-numbing experience, Lord. We have walked around with a leaden heaviness in our heart wishing we could live a previous foolish moment all over again and prevent a terrible wrong we had done from ever having occurred.

How strong our need for forgiveness is, O God.

And when this forgiveness comes to us it is like a re-birth. A resurrection. A reviving of our soul at the very door of death itself.

Thank you, dear Lord, for placing in my pathway forgiving individuals. People who have the kindness to absorb my painful treatment with grace and who gave me my life back again by forgiving me. So much like you these wonderful people are. They gave me not what I deserved but what I so badly needed. I am very grateful for what these dear forgiving people are teaching me and grateful, too, for what you have taught them.

Have a Mentor

Today might just be “Have a Mentor” Day.” (I invented it.) Play along with me on this...

I want you to imagine yourself as a mentor. Think of a youngster, someone who doesn’t know as much as you do about general life kinds of things. Maybe this is a high school student or a young person interested in working in the same professional field as you.

Think about the role of a mentor – to provide guidance, support, caring, and resources. You’re teaching a mentee what they need to know. You’d be assisting them in their personal, professional, or psychological development.

If your mentee arrives late to your meeting, you might coach them on the importance of punctuality and the consequences of tardiness. But you wouldn’t yell at them harshly, “You were late! I’m never gonna be your mentor again!” That would absurd, right?

The mentor is supposed to be a gentle guide. The idea is to establish a healthy, long-term relationship with this person, to be patient with them over time. You have to be kind. They have to want you to be their mentor, or it just won’t work.

So why bring this up? Here’s the Rabbi Brian catch, where it gets flipped around a little bit.

I want you to think of yourself as a mentor to yourself.

As of today, you are now officially your own mentor.

Think about how you would best mentor yourself, assisting yourself with whatever you’re going through in life right now. What if you were to treat yourself the way you would treat a mentee – with respect, kindness, and caring?

I have this feeling that you, like the rest of us, are a little harsh on yourself. You probably engage in some self-castigation every once in awhile – maybe often. You probably kick your own ass pretty hard thinking this might motivate you to do the best you can. This is just silly, right?

I’m suggesting, and even hoping, that you can find some compassion for yourself. You wouldn’t treat a young mentee the way you might treat yourself, so why do it to yourself?

Where did we ever get the idea that we ought to beat ourselves up? That’s asinine.

Spiritual-religious advice: Be a kind mentor to yourself.

Temptation

I’d like to share with you a quote that helps put into perspective the severity of most of our temptations:

The less the temptation, the greater the sin.

Say what? Does that make sense? The less the temptation, the greater the sin.

Let’s break this down, and we’ll see how it makes sense.

Pretend someone has uttered obnoxious words to you. Perhaps it’s an offhand comment, a teasing remark, or a scathing criticism. Nothing too severe, but not exactly a pleasantry. How do you respond? You might be tempted to tell that person off, right? But, chances are, you wouldn’t spit in their face, kick them in the shins, or murder their kin.

Most of us might be tempted to tell the person off. This, compared with the aforementioned options, is a pretty minor sin. And that’s the point.

Few of us (I hope) would be tempted to punch the person in the face. We know that punching them would constitute a major offense, a much greater sin, and there would be serious consequences as a result. The thought of punching them probably doesn’t even cross our mind.

We’re not as tempted to punch them in the face (greater sin) as we are to tell them off (minor sin).

Thus the less tempting it is, the greater the sin.

This is true for other areas in life, as well. Imagine you’re out somewhere, eating dinner at a restaurant or socializing at a party. You might be tempted to smoke a cigarette or have a second helping of desert, but not tempted to murder someone or take their jacket from the coatroom. You might be inclined to eat too much ice cream, but you wouldn’t hold the chef hostage with a gun to his head.

We’re usually more tempted to commit “minor” sins than major ones. There is often greater temptation in committing smaller sins.

My point here is that whatever is actually tempting us (sleeping in a little later, procrastinating on a chore, anything) – these things are probably not that bad. They could be much worse, right?

If we view our temptations as “little things,” this may take a bit of pressure off us. Not that I’m advising we do them – but if we came to understand that the things we’re tempted to do are not actually that bad, then we can stop beating ourselves up when we’re tempted to do them.

Let me say that again in different words: if we see that our temptations aren’t so bad, we might stop lambasting ourselves for being tempted and thereby possibly lessen both our self-castigation and our inclination towards doing such things.

Think of it this way: at least you aren’t driven to do really terrible things!

So today, I want you to ponder the stuff you’re tempted to do. Chances are, you’re not being tempted to do anything that bad. You’re probably doing A-OK if those things are your worst temptations.

Spiritual-religious advice: ponder your temptations with compassion.

Surrender

Today I want to return to the basics and talk about a classic spiritual-religious topic – surrender.

In spiritual-religious circles, the concept of surrender is treated differently from how it’s treated in war. The surrender I’m talking about here is not a synonym for “losing.” Surrender means we are willing to stop trying to control the whole world. Surrendering involves letting go of the misguided belief that we’re the ones driving the ship. It also requires releasing the proverbial steering wheel, standing up, and sitting somewhere else.

But how? How can we relinquish our desire for control? After all, it seems to be a basic, biological instinct.

We love control. We love it. We love it.

If you’re like me, you might even believe you possess a magical super power that enables you to control almost everything. Even though you know this is not true, you still sometimes believe it. How do you know if you have this somewhat delusional thinking? It’s simple: do you get upset when you discover there are things are outside of your range of influence?

The great serenity prayer says, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

While not all of us seem to always have or act on this wisdom, at least most of us have heard its voice whispering good advice to us. The key is listening to and acting on it.

Case in point – my father’s health. I know I can’t do anything to save his health. Even though we had a beautiful, heart-to-heart conversation yesterday, the fact remains that I can’t get my father’s body to reverse certain deteriorating processes, and I can’t get him to take any better care of himself than he can. Both parts of the previous sentence are significant. I have neither the magic ability to get his body to spontaneously heal nor the ability to force him to do anything more that he can do.

We often think we can get people to do more than they can do.

I must surrender. If I don’t, I’ll continue driving myself (and probably my family) nuts by trying to control that which I can’t control.

I must cultivate in myself “wisdom to know the difference” between what I can and can’t control. Intellectually, I know which things are in my bailiwick and which aren’t. I just need to act on this knowledge. I must release my illusion of control, my fantasy of possessing a super power over the world.

Recently I heard someone say, “You either let go or you get dragged.” What a great quote. Let go or be dragged. When we let go, we find a new sense of freedom. We feel liberated – unlike when we’re busy clinging to something we’re powerless to change.

Somebody else gave me this image: Imagine you let go of a balloon, yet you step on the string with your foot so the balloon doesn’t fly off. What’s the point of letting go if you’re not really letting go?

Now think about your own life. Consider the things you know you ought not to be stressing over. Maybe there’s something or someone driving you nuts, but you keep trying to change it all. You know what I’m talking about – that thing in your life.

How can you let go of it? Picture yourself washing your hands of it, or throwing your hands in the air, finally being free of it.

You work on letting go of yours, and I’ll work on letting go of mine.

Spiritual-religious advice: Surrender!

LCK - Speaking and Listening

Generally speaking, Lord, I think women talk more than men.

It seems to me that in everyday social interaction that women tend to talk more and men tend to listen more. I am not making any judgment about this interesting difference but I can see where this inclination and practice on the part of men and women could become a source of real frustration for them both. I can imagine a woman wishing a man would open up and talk more and her man wishing that she would talk less and just listen to his words sometimes spoken in muted silence.

It is not an easy thing, O Lord, to always know when to speak and when not to. I am sure you have that problem with all of us from time to time. I suppose there are times when you might want us to just keep quiet and listen and other times, of course, when your heart aches for us to open up and speak truthful words to you.

I can speak and I can listen, dear God, but I am not always very good at knowing when to open my mouth and when to keep it closed. Help me to have a better sense of timing. I certainly don't want to be guilty of keeping my mouth shut when the right word could make a difficult situation better. Nor do I want to be guilty of covering an important quiet listening moment with unimportant blabbing that keeps me from hearing what I should hear.

LCK - Being Generous With My Praise

Dear God, we speak so many wonderful words about others at funerals. Why is it that we do not speak these same wonderful words to one another daily when they can be heard and appreciated?

I have witnessed the difference a timely word of praise can make in the life of a person who does not feel very worthwhile and who may doubt whether their contributions to life are of any real importance or significance to anyone. I have seen how people can come to life again as a result of one sincere and well-placed compliment given to them or a timely word of appreciation spoken for the smallest thing they might have done for someone else.

Words!

Life-giving, mood-enhancing words.

How easy it actually is, dear God, for us to dispense these words lavishly . . . but we do not do it nearly enough. How stingy we are with what could be a powerful remedy for another person's miserable day.

A simple word of praise. A compliment. A note of appreciation.

So much better gifts are they than flowers given at a funeral or a spoken eulogy that will never be heard by the very person who needed to hear those life-giving words much earlier.

Pass/Fail

Ever been curious as to why this newsletter is called the 77% Weekly? Well, here’s the answer: it is published 40 out of 52 weeks of the year. It goes out every Monday, except for the last Monday of the month. 40 divided by 52 is approximately 77%. And in school, 77% was considered a passing grade.

When I named this newsletter, it was because it dawned on me that we push ourselves too hard. We strive to get 100%, we tell ourselves we must get an A or an A+ in this thing called life, and that anything less is unacceptable. We push ourselves so hard that we have this tendency to end up stressed out and missing the point.

Life is not graded — it’s pass/fail.

There was an old joke in rabbinical school:

Q: What do they call the person who graduates at the bottom of the class?

A: “Rabbi.”

The prayer classes I took were pass/fail.

(Wouldn’t it be odd to think I got a “D” in prayer?)

In the same way, life is pass/fail.

Think about this — achieving a 77% passing grade means you can make errors 23% of the time. You can get it wrong 23% of the time, and still pass successfully.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t give myself permission to make that many errors. I hold myself to such a high standard of living that I have to be right all the time. But the reality is, we’re allowed to make all those mistakes. We’re human, after all.

I need to remember to have compassion. I must remember that it’s not about getting an A all the time. I only need to get a 77%.

Regardless of your theology, think for a moment about God’s point of view (we are just using that term for argument’s sake). Would God give you a passing grade? Would God be proud of you just for being you? For dealing with life the very best way you can? I think the answer is a resounding yes.

Spiritual-religious advice: Stop grading yourself. You’re doing OK.

Not Striving

In the Zen tradition, wu wei is a lovely phrase that means “not striving.” It refers to actions that occur naturally. I interpret it as “not trying to impose your own will onto a situation.”

This is a wonderful concept, a thought that I’m dealing with right now.

Lao Tzu summed it up beautifully with this line:

Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?

What a great idea.

And of course, the answer is no, I don’t have the patience to wait.

(I’m only half-kidding.)

We should all have patience to wait. To not strive. To not impose our own will. A lot of our problems would solve themselves, if we’re just patient. When we try to start fixing things immediately, we get in the way.

Here's an image for this: imagine there between where you are and where you want to be there is a wall. You know full well that the wall is scheduled to be demolished in a week. You can either wait for the week to pass, or you can spend 7 days hitting the wall with your head and then deluding yourself that you were the one who caused the wall to crumble.

If you had only waited patiently, you would have gotten through the week without giving yourself a headache.

Wu wei means non-striving.

Non-striving occurs when we get out of the way and stop fighting our destiny. (I dislike using that word — it makes me think of Darth Vader telling Luke it was his destiny to join the Dark Side.) While I dislike the notion of fate or destiny, it is nonetheless crucial that we stop fighting what we were meant to do in this life.

I experienced some things recently that I haven’t liked, but they happened, nonetheless.

I have the choice to strive against them, to fight against reality, or to accept these things.

I have the choice of saying, “This is true. This happened to me. I don’t know how I’m going to fix everything, but the answer will come. The right action will arise by itself.”

Related to this line of thought is karma. (What follows is different from the common, TV-land interpretation of karma.) Karma is the baggage you accumulate from the times that you were striving and you ought to have been not-striving and vice versa. When you strive to do something you know you shouldn't be doing, you produce the “bad” karma that will trip you up.

One of my favorite quotes of all time is related to this concept. It is from Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters to a young poet:

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

We would be better off not striving. We would do ourselves a big favor by allowing the world to be as it is.

Spiritual-religious advice: Pick a day this week to devote 20 minutes to allowing the world to unfold as it may, without imposing your will on it.

Hand-Wash to Less Doubt

Are you the type of person who second-guesses yourself? If so, get a load of this.

(This isn’t exactly a spiritual-religious article, but it’s so cool that I wanted to share it with you.)

Scientists have long known that the act of ablution — of washing yourself — makes people feel like they’ve washed away their sins. (Think: Lady Macbeth.)

We know that washing the self is a metaphorical action associated with cleansing the soul. Literally, you wash away the dirt, the grime, the germs — but in a spiritual sense, you also wash away the darkness, the black spots on your conscience, to arrive at a “clean slate.” (On a related note, when I wash my car — which I do far too infrequently — I somehow feel cleaner.)

Washing not only makes clean, but it helps you feel cleansed.

Makes sense, right?

A recent study reveals something more about washing your hands: When you’re trying to make a decision you’re ambivalent about, if you wash your hands after making the decision, you’ll feel less ambivalent.

Spike W. S. Lee and Norbert Schwarz conducted the study at the University of Michigan and wrote about it in Science Magazine. Here’s a quick summary of what happened:

• The scientists asked undergraduate students to review a list of 30 CDs and rank them according to the top 10 they’d like to own.

• They had the students choose between the 5^th and 6^th CDs on their ranked list, in order to receive one of those as a free gift.

• The scientists asked some of the students to perform a seemingly unrelated task — rating soap. Some students were told to rate the soap only by looking at the packaging. Others rated the soap based on actually using it to wash their hands.

• They found that students who washed their hands with soap felt less uncertain about their selected free CDs. There was less beating themselves up about their decisions. The students who had only looked at the soap packaging second-guessed themselves about which CDs they had chosen.

The moral of the story is: wash your hands.

I know it sounds silly, but try it.

Hey, you eat food frequently, right? Do you ever second-guess where you should go to eat, or what you’re going to eat? How about this: for the next week, after you decide where or what you’ll eat, wash your hands and see if you experience less “post-decisional dissonance,” as the scientists call it. (Doesn’t post-decisional dissonance sound so much cooler than regret?)

Maybe washing creates a sense of calm?

Spiritual-religious, but really more hygienic advice: Wash.

LCK - The Burden of Imperfection

I wish I could do one single thing perfectly well, dear Lord, so I wouldn't get so discouraged at the many things I do so imperfectly. I eat too much; I get angry too often; I think unkind and impure thoughts more than I would like to admit; I am far too ambitious; too frequently I am jealous; and I am much less thoughtful than I know I ought to be.

After decades of trying to improve myself one would think I would be getting more things right than I do. The truth is, I am not actually inventing a whole lot of new and foolish things to do each day. Instead, I find myself simply repeating the same old foolish things I have done for a long time. I am having to re-learn those same old not-quite-learned lessons all over again. Practice has not made me more perfect. It has, instead, made me more discouraged and weary.

Be patient with me, O Lord. Help me to be more patient with myself as well. If I act foolishly, please help me to make that foolish action a solitary occurrence. Keep me from the embarrassment and suffering of revisiting and repeating old failures over and over again. I know that I am not yet what I ought to be. I just don't want to be stuck on what I once was.

Believe in Believing

I meet a lot of people who identify themselves as religious. Most of them don’t actually believe in God in the classical sense of what folk assume it means to “believe in God.” However, most of them believe in “believing in God.”

In other words, their desire to believe in God is greater than their actual belief.

I picked up this notion from a book by John Shelby Spong called Liberating the Gospels: Understanding the Bible with Jewish Eyes. (I highly recommend this book if you want to expand your understanding of the New Testament.) The point I’m elaborating on here is ancillary to the thrust of the book. Nonetheless, it’s what I want us to focus on. Here are Spong’s words from p. 299:

Most religious folk no longer believe in God in any real or genuine way, but they are still convinced that they believe in believing in God.

Isn’t that true!?

To make this notion a little less abstract, I’ve included a little diagram:

Spong’s point is that people are more comfortable with the idea of believing in God than they are with actually believing in God. That’s revolutionary. Ponder that for a bit. What he’s saying is that lots of people want to believe in God, and that’s nice. But that doesn’t mean there is a God, or that people actually believe in this God.

We often confuse wanting something to be true with “it” actually being true. Just because we want to believe something doesn’t mean it’s true.

Now as opposed to what I frequently do — take something unrelated to religion and write about it with a spiritual-religious bent — I’m going to take this theological notion and bring it in a different direction, unrelated to theology. This will be the trust of this article — there is a distinction between wanting something to be a certain way and it actually being that way.

Do any of the following thoughts resonate?

· I want to believe that a dear friend of mine isn’t an alcoholic, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.

· I want to believe certain things didn't happened in my life, but that doesn’t mean they didn't.

· I want to believe that tomorrow all my problems will have vanished, but, alas, that’s not going to happen either.

We so desperately want something to be true that we often delude ourselves into belief.

And this makes sense. Who would want to realize the opposite? It’s uncomfortable to realize, “I was just believing that because I wanted to — not because it’s true.”

Taking a real, empirical look at how things really are can be upsetting!

Spiritual-religious advice: Think about all the things you take for granted that you assume to be true, simply because you want them to be true.

Plato Was Wrong; Now Be Kind!

Here’s something kind of fun for me to say: it turns out that Plato was wrong. That’s news, right? That’s a headline! Plato, the big name in Greek philosophy, the classic western scholar, was incorrect!

OK, why am I saying this?

Plato had this basic idea that when people are exposed to the truth, they will cast away their illusions. (Click to read my awesome retelling of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.) He believed that when humans observe what is right, they let go of things that are bad for them. He taught that when we discern what is real, we will move in the direction of truth.

Well, Plato was wrong.

You know this. You know people who do the wrong things all the time. Even when they’re fully aware they should be doing the right thing, they continue engaging in bad behavior.

There’s a chance you, too, might sometimes be prone to not doing exactly what you should be doing. Right? We’ve all experienced this.

We say “yes” to the person we wanted to say “no” to. (Or we say “no” to the person we wanted to say “yes” to.) We eat things we know aren’t healthy. We do things to ourselves that we know are injurious. We do the opposite of what Plato was talking about. (This might suggest we’re all a little self-destructive — and maybe even insane, too.)

Similarly to Plato, economists used to think people always did what was best for their bottom line. But then social economists came along and said, no, that’s not true — people don’t always do what’s monetarily in their best interests!

Worse than the fact that we do these harmful things to ourselves — and here’s my point this week — we must also come to grips with the realization that other people in our lives do bad things to themselves as well.

When we observe a person doing something wrong, we must accept, “That’s just how people are.”

When you witness a person doing something you clearly know they shouldn’t be doing, don’t get frustrated about it — just accept that they’re another human being proving Plato wrong.

The trick is for us to have compassion for others, and compassion for ourselves. We might get really frustrated when we see someone harming him- or herself, especially if we love that person.

But we need to accept that this irrational quirk is simply human behavior. We must open our hearts and say, “That’s how we’re all flawed.”

So, Plato was wrong. People don’t necessarily do the right thing.

Spiritual-religious advice: Pardon others for not doing what (you know) they ought to be doing.

(Oh, and good luck with this one. It’s far easier to preach and understand than to practice.)

Re-Humanize Yourself

Martin Buber, a 20^th century Jewish philosopher, is best known for calling attention to two types of human interactions: “I-it” and “I-Thou.”

According to Buber, “I-it” relationships are those in which we treat something as an “it,” a thing, a material object. How you treat a pencil or a printer represents an “I-it” relationship. (I would be surprised if someone had a different type of relationship with a pencil.) “I-it” is where you use the thing for whatever its intended purpose should be. You treat the “it” as an object to be utilized.

You've had a sense of being treated as an "it" any time someone is talking to you and you get the sense that you could be removed from the situation, another person be put in your place, and they wouldn't change a word.

By contrast, “I-Thou” relationships are much holier — these take place when you relate to something in its entirety, rather than using it as a means to an end.

We get into trouble when we confuse the two.

When we treat things the way we should treat people,and when we treat people the way that we should treat things, then we have problems.

This way of thinking suggests that for us to really experience the world, to be truly alive, and to be fully human, we need to experience more “I-Thou” moments and fewer “I-it” moments. (According to Buber, God — as he understood God — is the ultimate “Thou” with whom we all strive to have a relation.) Through our humanity, through our act of being human, we can become fully absorbed in “I-Thou” relationships — where we treat people as people, not as things, and thereby get a sense of God.

These relationships don’t only occur between ourselves and other people — they also occur within ourselves. Think about your own life and whether you’ve had an "I-it" or "I-Thou" experience within yourself. There may be times when you’ve used yourself, and there may be other times when you fully appreciated and accepted yourself.

The goal in “I-thou” relationships is to re-humanize ourselves by experiencing the full range of what it means to be human — flaws, anger, sadness, and all. (I feel compelled to mention the song Re-Humanize Yourself by Sting and The Police. The lyrics preach the same idea, and the song title is where the title of this article comes from.) The goal is to become more human, more real, more “I-Thou,” less “I-it.”

That being said, here’s an exercise for you to try. Think of three things you do in the course of a week (you probably do them daily) that diminish your humanity and keep you from feeling truly human.

1. Even though the following dehumanizes me and keeps me from feeling and being truly human, I nonetheless _________.
2. Even though the following dehumanizes me and keeps me from feeling and being truly human, I nonetheless _________.
3. Even though the following dehumanizes me and keeps me from feeling and being truly human, I nonetheless _________.

Now think of three things you do from time to time, which you could do more of, to make you feel really human.

1. I feel more human when I ___________.
2. I feel more human when I ___________.
3. I feel more human when I ___________.

Spiritual-religious advice: Commit to not doing one of those dehumanizing things. And... commit to doing one of the things that makes you feel more human.

By us becoming more human, we’ll find more God — whatever that might mean to us.