There is a new podcast beginning next week called “Love. Period” by Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis. In her introduction podcast she talks about loving yourself, loving your friends and loving the world in the context of loving God.
Can love heal the world?
How can we live this out?
How do we love ourselves?
I am in search of answers to these questions and so many more questions!
I was affirmed in my search for answers this week when I heard a story on NPR-Morning Edition on April 28th. The segment highlights musicians who write songs about life in the Pandemic. The musician was Mark Ramos Nishita (moniker: Money Mark) sharing his most recent song about the times we’re in. His strategy to get through life is to have empathy for all things that are in the world. And to really understand what love is. It was the words that hit me, not so much his singing.
“Fight With Love”
by Money Mark
“Living in these heavy days, sorry, but it’s always been this way.
Maybe we’ve turned a corner finally,
But I’ve learned not to accept the guarantee.
Got to fight with love – you got to fight with love!
Imagine if the hate were gone.
Why does it take so long?
Love is power, tension, dimension.
Love is everything – the heart, the intellect…
Do you feel the love?”
My heart hurts for the hurting people in our country who are discriminated against because of the color of their skin. Have we turned a corner on hate?
During the week of April 11-16, 2021 Father Rohr wrote about friendship. I think the love we feel for our close friends is a glimpse of the love that God has for us and calls us to have for one another.
He quotes a twelfth-century Cistercian monk Aelred of Rievaulx (1110 – 1167) and his view about friendship with other people as a way to deepen our friendship with God in Christ. He writes:
“How happy, how carefree, how joyful you are if you have a friend with whom you may talk as freely as with yourself, to whom you neither fear to confess any fault nor blush at revealing any spiritual progress, to whom you may entrust all the secrets of your heart and confide all your plans. And what is more delightful than so to unite spirit to spirit and so to make one out of two that there is neither fear of boasting nor dread of suspicion? A friend’s correction does not cause pain, and a friend’s praise is not considered flattery.”
When there is love in your life, you should share it spiritually with those who are pushed to the very edge of life. The more love you give away, the more love you will have.
I will close with a Friendship Blessing from John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
“May you be blessed with good friends.
May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.
May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where
there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness.
May this change you.
May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold
in you.
May you be brought in to the real passion, kinship, and
affinity of belonging.
May you treasure your friends.
May you be good to them and may you be there for them;
may they bring you all the blessings, challenges, truth,
and light that you need for your journey.
May you never be isolated.
May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your
anam ċara.
-Cindy B.