Take No Prisoners

I wonder where you are today? What aches lie in your body? What heaviness burdens your heart? What doubts slumber in your mind?

There is no secret to liberation from the daily digest of human woes, but there is nourishment in knowing that though you many not control the future and cannot change the past, for the very next moment, the very next breath, you can see yourself as beautiful.

You are the light of the world, and my prayer is that if we can take courage to grow our compassionate conciousness, we may extend our freedom beyond one moment, or one breath, and out to our one world.

May it be so.

(inspired by a poem by Sufi poet Hafiz, below)

We have not come here to take prisoners,

But to surrender ever more deeply

To freedom and joy.

We have not come into this exquisite world

To hold ourselves hostage from love.

Run my dear,

For anything

That may not strengthen

Your precious budding wings.

Run like hell my dear,

From anyone likely

To put a sharp knife

Into the sacred, tender vision

Of your beautiful heart.

We have a duty to befriend

Those aspects of obedience

That stand outside of our house

And shout to our reason

"O please, O please,

Come out and play."

For we have not come here to take prisoners

Or to confine our wondrous spirits,

But to experience ever more deeply

Our divine courage, freedom,

and Light!

- Hafiz (We Have Not Come To Take Prisoners)

Intentions of Compassionate Communication Practitioners in Unitarian Univeralism

• 
  We seek peace resulting from a Thou-Thou connection (a deep knowing and embodiment that the other person or being has inherent worth and dignity). This makes it possible for our needs to be met without depriving any person or persons the resources necessary to have their needs met. Compassionate Communication Consciousness is about seeking peace and justice in every moment.
• 
  In this complex world, we recognize the difficulty of living a life based on the values of equality and justice. Thus we realize the importance of an intentional spiritual practice as a basis for peaceful living, which in Compassionate Communication includes growing in intrapersonal and interpersonal relational skills. Practicing is not just building, but living the beloved community.
• 
  This spiritual practice of Compassionate Communication is deeply Unitarian Universalist as reflected in our principles and traditions. We have a long history of learning from others (unsealed revelation), affirming the inherent worth and dignity of all beings, recognizing our interdependence within our communities of mixed species, and our hope in the community forming power of love that comes through covenanted community.
• 
  There is no “right or wrong” way to “do” Compassionate Communication. We look beyond formulas, creeds, or specific steps in a spiritual practice, to growing our individual and collective consciousness so that as a community we increase our ability to love and stay engaged. To stay engaged and in relationship in the complex interplay of human fumbling and bumbling is to live out the hope and grace of religious covenant, the foundation of Unitarian Universalism.
• 
  Because Compassionate Communication embraces the heart of Unitarian Universalism and because inner peace is not separate from outer peace, seeking to grow and practice peacemaking in our hearts and congregations is a priority. Our sense of urgency arises from our capacity for individual, group, community, and societal violence, domination, and broken relationships, much of which we may unwittingly be a part. Suffering may be ever present, yet the possibility of peace and healing arises in every thought, breath, word, and action.
• 
  With this possibility of being the peace we wish to see in the world, we seek leading the change in our congregations and in our communities. We do not lose our way in anger and hurt because we recognize the opportunities inherent in conflict and relational tension to increase our own capacity for peacemaking within, among and between. By turning anger into a celebration of mourning unmet needs we can stay in relationship in the midst of conflict and enhance our ability to hear and consider everyone’s needs. By letting go of specific outcomes and strategies, we engage ever more deeply and joyfully with one another. With an invitation to play, we eventually overcome the differences between our strategies to meet needs, and instead concentrate on developing our collective spiritual life. In this creative milieu, we have the chance to truly understand the needs, dreams, and longings of others. In this understanding our congregations become ever-stronger centers of liberation and service.
• 
  Knowing the importance of support in this work, and how our shared practice will grow with your presence and input, we invite you to join us on our email list serve http://lists.uua.org/mailman/listinfo/uu-speakingpeace and on our website http://www.uuspeakpeace.org/.

Mending Our Covenant - Singing Hallelujah While Playing for Change

I recently gave sermon, “Virtue, Vice, and Economic Advice.” In the service I played two music videos to highlight how we humans have broken our covenant with all of life, and how we might mend this covenant. In terms of Compassionate Communication, we live under an economic system where the needs of many aren’t even on the table, leaving many to starve while others stuff themselves at a feast made abundant only through the suffering of other beings. I believe it is possible to live another way, to equally consider all the needs of all life, and then to get creative about finding solutions out of this fix we are in. To know the needs of others, we must know of their lives, and mourn the sorrowful abundance of misery and unmet basic needs in this world. For this aim, I made a music video to the song, “Hallelujah” (sung by Alison Crowe and lyrics by Leonard Cohen). Once we can find a way to hold in our hearts the unmet needs of our earth and her beings, creative possibilities emerge, such as shown in the second video, “Playing for Change” set to the song “Stand By Me.” Though there is heartache in the world, we can find joy and playfully engage with others to mend our hearts and the living covenant that we were born under – the beauty of life that cannot be denied, be it in rainbow, human on the road, or bird in our hand.

Beautiful Booby

Brown Booby (photo by Aviceda)




Recently I spied a Brown Booby, a kind of marine bird so named because of its silly antics. We also call others and ourselves boobies, our inner chatter full up self-defeating scripts and obsessions. What a loss that we don’t see that we are as beautiful in our natural state as is the Booby, and that if we can see this, we can fly free as a bird.

I believe this freedom is for everyone. To rid ourselves of rigidity, any negative judgment of self or another requires painful and yet liberating inner surgery. This procedure requires that we feel the pain and regret of unmet needs, in ourselves primarily, and stay in that energy for a while without trying to fix the situation or ourselves. Ultimately in a transcendent fashion, there is nothing to fix. We are perfect just the way we are and in that liberation, we can actually transform ourselves in every moment with every breath, word, thought, and action.

One way to believe that you belong on this earth as part and parcel of its emerald beauty is to recall a situation or something you saw that brought unpremeditated joy, peace, or a smile to you. Perhaps it is a child laughing in a park, a bird soaring overhead, a sunrise or sunset, the stars at night, a song, or a conversation with someone. In that moment, honestly, are there any judgments of yourself or others? Our inner work is to train our minds and our hearts to see that every moment is full of beauty and of loss, and in that cutting edge of reality, we may clean up the edges of our wounds and bind up the broken. May it be so.

Street Credibility

This morning in the Gainesville Sun there is a story about an aspiring rapper who robbed a store in Gainesville to gain credibility as a rapper. As part of his plan, he shot a store clerk in the temple with a BB gun. I admit to a flash of dark humor about the “silliness” of our humanity and what our nature and culture brings us to do.

Yet there is also an internal flutter of discomfort and sorrow that says “this is not just this one man, or the rap culture, or street violence, this is in all of us.” To gain status, to gain acceptability, and to ease our fears we commit acts of violence or domination throughout our days, perhaps mostly in small ways.

If the spirit of the universe could look down on our spinning blue boat home form afar, she/he/it might also be struck with sweet sorrow about our kind. I also know that seen from afar, that the Spirit of Love’s heart would swell witnessing the countless acts of kindness committed on the street – someone waving someone else into a parking spot, another helping an elderly person across the intersection, and people offering words of comfort, solace, food to the homeless who call the streets and the woods their home.

Somewhere deep in us there is a place of choice, where we can act out the hope that we can offer life-giving acts throughout the day in the smallest of ways. In this fashion, we gain credibility with our own selves, and began to also see the beauty and power of us to live and breathe the beloved community in every moment.

Shining Your Mirror

Recently while in Guatemala I kept hearing how “bad” humans were and that we weren’t as good or pure as the birds and the forest. The people telling me this were folks working with front line conservation in very bad conditions in the north forest of Guatemala. They were using all their people skills, mental abilities, patience, and heart to treat one another with compassion and to help save the planet. I worked with them as avian veterinarian, and also as “conservation chaplain,” trying to help them by being the mirror that showed their human essence as being beyond wrong doing or right doing. Believe me, this took work, because I had also to keep doing my deep spiritual work of shining my own mirror so it could reflect love and beauty back to them. It isn’t easy to shine with acceptance in a world so full of pain, sorrow, and disappointment, however, I know no other path for we humans to come into our own possibility of belonging on this planet so that the days of all beings may be long, and belong.

Where in your life do you experience others or yourself as “wrong” or “right?”How do you shine your own mirror so that others see that they are being wrongdoing and rightdoing?

To My Selves

This poem was written by one of the co-authors of the Heart Talk curriculum that our congregation taught on Sunday mornings in the fall of 2008. She and I were having an email exchange where I was suddenly struck with the interdependence of life and one of the maxims of nonviolent communication – my needs can only ultimately be met by considering your needs, and that beloved community means coming up with strategies for meeting needs that also meet the needs of everyone, and of this beautiful world. No one was born to sacrifice their needs for another. Out of this interaction she wrote this poem which I share with you below.

This will be my last blog for a while as I will be in Guatemala for the next month (most of April 2009). I will be thinking of compassionate conservation while there and how this consciousness may facilitate conservation projects and promote the flourishing of the beings that they serve. For these beings are also ourselves.


To My Selves
Veronica Lassen

You are not alone
There is no alone.
You’ve never been alone.
For we are One.
Even in your despair
One with the Life Force

That was too much to hold by yourself

Rhythmically pulsing all throughout existence

The trees held you in their arms

One with the dancing planets

The earth understood you
One with the singing of fixing
Nitrogen bacteria and tree root

Companions you’ve never met
One with the love that permeates

Were praying that you would open to love

This cherished Uni-verse

Meditating between the notes
This one-song.
Filling all matter and space with

Relationship