Repurposing Our Power

The collective mutation that will turn things around

Decades ago there were some famous forest fires in a state out West. Many started as what were called “acceptable burns,” meaning fires raging at a level where it was considered best to just let them burn.

But that particular summer there were simply too many such fires - ones that otherwise might be considered “acceptable” but which were happening too frequently and too close together. The conflagration that followed changed the calculus of professional fire fighting forever.

It seems to me that’s where we are today.

If it were only climate change, perhaps we could focus on the problem and even solve it. If it were only voter suppression and nullification laws, perhaps we could focus on the problem and even solve it. If it were only extreme wealth inequality, perhaps we could focus on the problem and even solve it. If it were any number of other things that now make up the cascade of ever-intensifying problems in our midst, perhaps we could focus on the problem and even solve it.

But too many fires are burning now, and they’re way too close together.

The last two weeks have demonstrated the utter bankruptcy of institutions that supposedly exist to protect us from such challenges as we are facing now. From a UN Climate Change report that says humanity is basically on “Code Red,” to the tragic scenes of people trying desperately to escape Afghanistan before it’s too late, it couldn’t be clearer that our political establishment has not just ill-served us, it has harmed us. It has presided over both climate and military disasters of incalculable measure, all because it deferred to its donors before the needs of people - those for whom there’s been so much money to be made on fossil fuels, and so much money to made on war. No one is looking at our country or our world today and thinking, “Hey, guys. Well done.”

Rather, we appear to be institutionally incapable of responding adequately to the social, environmental, and economic dangers in our midst. Forces we had depended on for individual and collective security are now suspect, so deep is their proven record of either unwillingness or inability to do the job we thought they existed to do. Trust in our institutions has turned to active ridicule and distrust for good reason. All have been corrupted by the three-pronged false god of corporate ownership, corporate donations, and corporate lack of apparent concern for who or what must die in order for its profits to increase.

Hieronymus Bosch

But we the people allowed this to happen.

For years we’ve been cruising on the Titanic, headed for the iceberg but enjoying the buffet on the upper deck, asking questions no more substantial than where we could get more lobster mornay.

The problem is not that Americans are bad, or uncaring, or unintelligent. But we were certainly played. The entire basis of a consumer society is the creation of appetites that satisfy individual but not collective needs, our social conscience like a computer that was hacked. We’ve been constantly programmed to think more about material desires than spiritual prerogatives, and more about our own needs for pleasure than for the survival needs of most of the people of the world. As individuals, we might have been trying our best to live decent lives. But as a society, we’ve been permitted, even supported in ignoring the indecency of hungry children, environmental destruction, outsized militarism, racial and criminal injustice, and more. The most difficult conversations - things that in a sane society should matter most - have been pushed to the periphery of our culture, and the periphery of our minds.

The system was served by that, the infantilization of our citizens benefitting its financial needs. Media and political consultants argued that it’s best “not to bring people down.” Media stopped talking about things that matter because such topics don’t always get ratings. Politicians stopped talking about things that matter because such topics don’t always get votes. People who arguably shouldn’t care about such things, did so shamelessly. Our entire culture began to feast on utter meaninglessness, make a lot of money on that and call it success.

People do have a hunger for meaning, and an appetite for things that matter. They welcome an opportunity to be deep, and real, when someone respects them enough to provide it. I know because I have seen it. Yet that depth is at odds with the shallowness of our dominant culture.

This week, that truth is on fully display. Institutions that have wallowed in shallowness, and pretense, and corruption, are fully seen now for what they really are. From climate crisis to homelessness crisis to Afghanistan crisis to pandemic crisis and more, it’s clear that the worst of our problems run deeper than which party is in power. Nice people, perhaps, but not the grown-ups, the sophisticates, the knowledgeable ones they have pretended to be. From politicians to military leaders to media moguls, the establishment elite of this country have brought us to where we are. The levers of power have been in their hands, and we are where we are because of it.

For someone born in the middle of the 20th Century, as I was, America’s decline has been stunningly precipitous. We saw our leaders assassinated. We saw the US war machine on full display in Vietnam, long before Iraq or Afghanistan. We saw how trickle down economics was hollowing out the economic heart of this country. But still, we expected the center to hold.

Now, the center has been smashed into a thousand pieces. What was, is so clearly not working. And it is up to us to forge another way.

Pablo Picasso

The “other way” means something more than another political party, or another policy, or another leader, or another economic system, or anything less deep than another orientation to life entirely.

All of us learned about evolution when we were children. A species that continues to behave in maladaptive ways will either evolve or it will go extinct. And so will ours. Our irreverence, our foolishness, our lack of responsibility towards ourselves, our children, each other, animals and the earth itself are not just wrong; they are unsustainable. It’s time to stage an intervention on ourselves, to disrupt the pattern of insane perception that has led us to where we are today. We must recognize fear as a false intelligence and embrace the wisdom of the heart.

I read a book called “Into the Magic Shop” by Dr. James Doty, a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University. The book is partly autobiographical, as Doty tells of a woman he met when he was a child who told him she would teach him “real magic.” And she did. Later in life, as a scientist, he learned how much truth she had taught him…that the heart is as intelligent as the brain. That this is not just poetry, or metaphor; it is science. It turns out the body receives as much direction from the heart as from the brain.

That is the evolutionary trend that will save us. For in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “Power without love is reckless and abusive.” The powers that were meant to save us have harmed us, as far too often and in too many ways they’ve represented power without love. Our technological power, financial power, governmental power, military power, physical power, even scientific power have not only not kept us from the edge of the cliff that humanity now stands on. In fact they’ve been used to take us there. It’s time to pursue another kind of power entirely. It’s time to pursue the power of love.

In the words of Teilhard de Chardin:

• “Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire.”

Harnessing the energies of love is what will ultimately save us. And it won’t be done by “somebody else.” It will be a collective mutation, the formation of a critical mass, enough of us stepping up simply willing to try. We’re not a bunch of enlightened masters or saints, but the imperfect and wounded and sometimes desperately frightened people that we are - simply more willing and committed than we have been before to embrace the better angels of our true selves. We will fill the crevasses of every dry and broken place, from dinner tables to PTA meetings, from union halls to legislative chambers, from the bedroom to the voting booth, with the love for which our world is starved.

A Course in Miracles says it’s not our job to seek for love, but to seek within ourselves all the barriers we hold against its coming. We cannot give the world what we’re not willing to become, so the work for all of us is to seek those barriers and let them go. Whether we see this in spiritual or secular terms, the work is the same: to identify the places where we don’t allow love to determine our thoughts and actions, recognizing this is a place in the universe where the power of love is not allowed to flow. All of us are needed now to generate and to maintain that flow. This is our field of reparative possibility, the amniotic fluid that will nourish and out of which will be born a new world. This is the new direction, our turning away from the iceberg. We must turn away from the cold hard ice within ourselves.

Today’s Meditation:

May the hand of God

unblock my heart.

Where I am harsh, make me gentle.

Where I am critical, make me merciful.

When I am wounded, make me healed.

Where I am confused, give me clarity.

Where I am weak, make me strong.

When I am mean, may forgiveness free me

from the bondage of my judgmental mind.

May I then become a conduit

for the love that has set me free.

Amen

We can re-weave the fabric of our torn society by repurposing our power. We can embrace a new definition of what it means to be healthy, what it means to be powerful, and what it means to be strong. And we can claim that power. No more false respect for abusive power, in others or in ourselves. If we want a new world we must create a new world, and the only one that will really be new will be one that is aligned with love.