I write this in the middle of the heart-wrenching, gut punch of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the ensuing riots. I’ve watched in disbelief as our city is turned upside down, businesses ruined, destruction and looting rampant. The question that keeps coming to me is how to respond from a place of love.
In previous blog posts I’ve written about the futility of fighting against things (Accepting the Unacceptable). I know that my desire is to approach life from a place of love. So what does love tell us about what’s happening?
Here’s what I believe it’s telling us.
People always do the best they can in every circumstance, even when that best is stunningly unhelpful. Sometimes we’re all in a place where we have trouble seeing options and we act out of the only choice we believe we have. Looting and destruction come from a place of great pain, deprivation, isolation. They are the acts of someone who so desperately wants something that they’re blinded to the consequences of their actions.
These are times that challenge my own desire for non-judgment. I so easily condemn the people on so many sides: the police officer who killed a community member, the other officers who stood idly by, the protestors who use violence as their modus operandi. I even judge others who make judgments about others. When judgment is so prevalent, none of us can really see the truth.
Every breath we take should be filled with compassion, for others as well as ourselves. That even though we sometimes need to take strong action to keep people safe, that action should be filled with compassion. Compassion for those whose lives are being uprooted by others. Compassion for those who are doing the uprooting. Compassion for those in the middle doing their best to bring peace and security to everyone. Love tells me to do my best to see and feel what the experiences of others is. It tells me to exclude no one. It tells me to honor the emotions we experience, regardless of what those emotions are. It tells me to trust that the deepest desire of everyone is for peace, love and security, regardless of how they express that desire. It tells me to look as hard as I can to see that deepest of desires and to focus on making everyone whole. It tells me not to create us vs. them categories. Regardless of the differences we can see in color of skin, values, behavior, level of wealth and opportunity, roles in society, it tells me we’re all united by our humanity.
Even though this time of great turmoil feels very unsettling, I believe the universe is always seeking balance and that it is doing that now. The unbelievable cruelty and injustice done to all peoples who have been enslaved and whose culture struggles with that legacy for centuries, is seeking balance. Those who condemn that balance seeking are also looking for balance. They don’t want the pendulum to swing too far back in the opposite direction. At some level they know how oppressive and unfair the past has been and they don’t want to stay there, this time with them on the opposite side. Fear and anger are constant companions of imbalance. They make us do terrible things.
I believe the best way for me to respond with love is for me to be brutally honest with myself about my own abilities for brutality, cruelty, ignorance, arrogance. And that’s why it’s so difficult to make progress. Being honest with oneself in this way is extremely uncomfortable. But seeing these things in myself allows me to feel compassion for others who also experience them. Only then can I move forward from a place of love. Before removing the mote from my neighbor’s eye, I must remove the log from my own.
Wishing us all honesty, healing and joy.
© 2020, Paul Boehnke. All rights reserved.
This was a beautiful post, Paul!!!
Thank you, Chrissy. I’m generally a pretty even keeled person. But I have to admit that the last couple months have brought enough waves that I have occasionally fell in the water. This is my attempt to crawl back out to dry land.