Unconditional Love

Unconditional love is the invisible, dream-like landfall where we never fully come ashore. Unconditional love is a central human aspiration exactly because it is almost impossible to fulfill. We are mortal creatures of living and dying and how we love and what we love is conditional upon where we stand in the drama and the seasonality of that living and dying.

Love may be sanctified and ennobled by its commitment to the unconditional horizon of perfection, but what makes love real in the human world seems to be our moving, struggling conversation with that wanted horizon rather than the actual arrival.

The hope for, or the declaration of a purely spiritual, unconditional love is more often a coded desire for immunity and safety, an attempt to forgo the trials of vulnerability, powerlessness and the exquisite pain to which we apprentice ourselves in a relationship, in raising a family, in a task we love and desire.

The hope for unconditional love is the hope for a different life than the one we have been given. Love is the conversation between possible, searing disappointment and a profoundly imagined sense of arrival and fulfillment; how we shape that conversation is the touchstone of our ability to love in the real inhabited world.

The true signature and perhaps even the miracle of human love is helplessness, and all the more miraculous because it is a helplessness which we wittingly or unwittingly choose; in our love of a child, a partner or a road we have to take against all the odds.

Our roads and journeys of love are always lived through beautiful humiliations, through disappointments, and through forms of imprisonment: of our own or another’s strange behavior or simply subject to the seasonality of the world; the arriving weather of existence always blowing through once stable lives and many times, blowing us apart.

Unconditional love is the beautiful hoped for impossibility, and yet we could not fully understand the nature of our helplessness without looking through the lens of that hoped-for perfection. We are creatures who do not get to choose between what we want and what is wanted of us, and we seem to embody the full vulnerabilities of love only when we dwell at the moving frontier between this wanting and being wanted.

The invitation is made to us every day whether we desire it or not, to enter a deeply human world of robust vulnerability, shot through with a sometimes joyful, more often difficult helplessness; to risk ourselves in the conditional world in which we live and to accept that there is no possible path we can follow where we will be untouched by the heartbreak, the difficulties and the joys that move us and move through us.

Conditional or unconditional, the only path possible seems to be in giving our self unconditionally to the conditionality of each overwhelming, disturbing and rewarding, guise of love.

On Love & Hate

As another calendar year draws to a close, normality as we know it is coming unhinged. For the last few years it has been possible for most people (at least the relatively privileged) to believe that society is sound; that the system, though creaky, basically works and that the progressive deterioration of everything from ecology to economy is a temporary deviation from the evolutionary imperative of progress.

We are entering a time of great uncertainty. Institutions so enduring as to seem identical to reality itself may lose their legitimacy and dissolve. The social and environmental horrors likely to be committed could incite massive civil disobedience and possibly disorder. It may seem that the world is falling apart. At such moments, it is a normal response to find someone to blame, as if identifying fault could restore the lost normality, and to lash out in anger. Hate and blame are convenient ways of making meaning out of a bewildering situation. 

Anyone who disputes the blame narrative may receive more hostility than the opponents themselves, as in wartime when pacifists are more reviled than the enemy. Racism and misogyny are devastatingly real in our world, but to blame bigotry and sexism for the repudiation of the establishment is to deny the validity of our deep sense of betrayal and alienation. It does violence to the truth. Such is the cost of preserving a dying story. That is one reason why paroxysms of violence so often accompany a culture-defining story’s demise.

The dissolution of the old order that is now officially in progress, is going to intensify. That presents a tremendous opportunity and danger, because when normality falls apart the ensuing vacuum draws in formerly unthinkable ideas from the margins. Anything becomes possible with the collapse of dominant institutions. When the animating force behind these new ideas is hate or fear, all manner of nightmares can ensue, whether enacted by existing powers or those that rise against them.

That is why, as we enter a period of intensifying disorder, it is important to introduce a different kind of force to animate the structures that might appear after the old ones crumble. We call it love. So, let’s start with empathy. Empathy is akin to solidarity, born of the understanding that we are all in this together. In what together? For starters, we are in the uncertainty together. We are exiting an old story that explained to us the way of the world and our place in it. Some may cling to it all the more desperately as it dissolves, but what’s done is done.

We as a society are entering a space between stories; in which everything that had seemed so real, true, right and permanent comes into doubt. For a while, segments of society have remained insulated from this breakdown (whether by fortune, talent, or privilege), living in a bubble as the containing economic and ecological systems deteriorate. But, not for much longer. Not even the elites are immune to this doubt. They grasp at straws of past glories and obsolete strategies; they create perfunctory and unconvincing shibboleths, and they have no idea what to do next. When even the custodians of the story no longer believe the story, we know its days are numbered. 

We are entering a space between stories. After various retrograde versions of a new story rise and fall and we enter a period of true unknowing, an authentic next story will emerge. A story that will ask: “What would it take to embody love, compassion and inter-being?” We see its lineaments in those marginal structures and practices that we call holistic, alternative, regenerative and restorative. All of them source from empathy, the result of the compassionate inquiry: “What is it like to be you?”

It is time now to bring this question, and the empathy it arouses, into our social discourse as a new animating force. If you are appalled at the current situation, and feel the call of hate, perhaps try asking yourself: “What is it like to be a hated person?” Ask it not with a patronizing condescension, but for real, looking underneath the stereotype to find the real person. Even if the person you face appears hateful, ask: “Is this who they are, really?” We hate what we fear, and we fear what we do not know. Let’s not make our opponents invisible behind a caricature of evil.

What is beneath the hate in our world? Why do we dehumanize each other? Hate is just a bodyguard for grief. When we lose the hate, we are forced to deal with the pain beneath. This pain is fundamentally the same pain that animates moral superiority. We need to stop acting as if we are better than others, no matter how broken they appear to be. We are all victims of the same world-dominating system, suffering different mutations of the same wound of separation. We live in a civilization that has robbed nearly all of us of deep community, intimate connection with nature, unconditional love, freedom to explore the kingdom of childhood and so much more. 

The acute trauma endured by the incarcerated, the abused, the raped, the trafficked, the starved, the murdered and the dispossessed does not exempt the perpetrators. We feel it in a mirror image, adding damage to our souls atop the damage that compels violence. Thus, it is that suicide is the leading cause of death in the military. Thus, it is that addiction is rampant among the police. Thus, it is that depression is epidemic in the upper middle class. Something hurts in there. Yet, we are all in this together. One earth, one tribe, one people.

We have entertained teachings like these long enough in our spiritual retreats, meditations and prayers. Can we now take them into the world and create an eye of compassion inside the hate vortex? It is time to do it, time to up our game. It is time to stop feeding hate. Next time we speak, can we check our words to see if they smuggle in some form of hate: dehumanization, belittling, derision... some invitation to take an ‘us versus them’ approach. Notice how it feels good to do that. And, notice what hurt still lies underneath.

This does not mean to withdraw from the social conversation, but to rewrite its vocabulary. It is to speak hard truths with love. It is to offer acute analysis that doesn’t carry the implicit message of: “Aren’t those people horrible?” Such analysis is rare. Sometimes, our evangelizing compassions veer into passivity. We need to confront an unjust, ecocidal system. Each time we do, we can stare hate in the face and never waver. We will access inexhaustible tools of creative engagement; and hold a compelling invitation to the haters to fulfill their beauty.

The Present of Presence

Most people have not yet fully processed the magnitude of the economic crisis that will continue to deepen in the next years. Our lives may depend upon working through the causes and logical consequences of this disaster, which can be blamed on the greed and ineptitude of the ruling elite. The short-term prognosis is devastating. The hundreds of billions, potentially trillions, of dollars created by governments for bailouts should lead to hyperinflation and a sharp rise in the price of basic goods. At the same time, analysts are predicting that some governments will be insolvent by next year and forced to declare bankruptcy.

One consequence of the credit freeze has been that many farmers around the world, who often live on narrow margins and depend upon loans to see them through the annual harvest, have not been able to get credit. This could lead to diminished production of food at a time when climate change is reducing the amount of arable land. Last year, there were already hunger riots in a number of countries, and by next summer we may see famine on a larger scale.

Hunger may also become a problem in the developed world. While layoffs and mass foreclosures continue and economies contract, a large segment of the populace (who have no savings and much debt) could become a new pauper class. We have already seen over a million homes turned over to banks in the US alone. One can only wonder where those people, and the millions more soon to join them, are going to end up.

Meanwhile, the turmoil in the markets will continue, potentially getting much worse. Apparently, hundreds of trillions of virtual dollars spin in the roulette machine of the derivatives market, which is beginning to disintegrate. The collapse of the housing market may be followed by mass waves of credit card defaults. The world economy was a house of cards, based on the extraordinary premise that ever-expanding debt was a desirable product, and it is now falling down upon us.

We are facing a time of great change and spiritual challenge. Those of us who have undergone a process of awakening and initiation during the last decades will be called upon to act as truth-tellers, leaders and compassionate caretakers for the multitudes that have been duped and deluded by the system. We may have to abandon our comfort zones and personal ambitions to be of service to the situation as it unfolds.

In the time available to us before the situation becomes critical, priorities include strengthening local communities and disseminating techniques of self-sufficiency, such as getting many more people to grow their own food. It is tragic that our mass media continues to act as a mechanism of distraction. The media could be used to explain to people how our world is changing, to teach them the basic life skills that we forfeited a few generations ago, and to imprint new behavior patterns based on sustainable life-ways. Perhaps public broadcasting, at least, can be repurposed for this necessary effort.

The partial nationalization of financial institutions around the world reveals the failure of capitalism; the end of capitalism in its old form. In the future, it should be obvious that capitalism was a transitional system for our global community. Capitalism meshed the world together through networks of trade and communication, while maintaining monstrous inequities and irrational misuse of resources.

The question that faces us now is: what comes after capitalism, and how do we get there? In the short term, we may see dangerous efforts at authoritarian control. The longer-term answer may be a collapse of centralized structures of authority and the blossoming of a new form of global direct democracy; what the anthropologist Pierre Clastres called "society without a state." By necessity, our future system will be collaborative rather than competitive.

If the crisis now confronting the human community is mishandled, vast populations will experience untold suffering and starvation in the next few years. If "we the people" can rise to the occasion, we may be able to radically change the direction of human society, along with the basic paradigms and underlying operating systems of our culture, in a rapid timeframe. This appears to be the message of many prophetic traditions which have anticipated this climactic passage in human affairs - as has been said:"We are the ones we have been waiting for".

As we approach the holiday season and the Gregorian New Year, we can give thanks for having been born into this extraordinary, precious time. Our actions over the next few years could have tremendous consequences for humanity's future on this planet. At such a juncture, the best present we can give to the people around us is our authentic presence; our willingness to listen, learn and remain open to transformation, as the pace of change quickens around us.