One of my dear friends from Seminary is a Dominican Roman Catholic. He was attending the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology while I was at a different school, but the Graduate Theological Union is a Consortium of many learning traditions and styles, and we took enough classes together to become colleagues and friends.
He’s also a traditional intellectual, very rational and logical like the Dominicans tend to be.
I am not.
But again, relationship. A real friendship can carry you through a lot of disagreement. One of our fundamental divergences is around the question of moral relativism. I tend to be much less interested in the parameters of what we are defining as the moral realm, and more interested in the interactive behaviors within it. My friend tends to be much less interested in the nuances of interaction and more interested in the broad systems established to hold the questions themselves. And through time and conversation, we came to realize that for both of us, the how mattered greatly to the what.
By that I mean we both understood that considered or done, morality must stem from love, from the heart. That how we engage, consider, act, study, apply guided what the fruits would be.
And of course scripture tells us this over and over again. It is not what one puts in oneself that defiles, but what comes out. It is not conformity to strictures and laws that makes one righteous in the eyes of God but rather an adherence to the greater law of love.
How and why we do what we do matters. In fact, it might be the only thing that truly does.
This week, I am wrapping up the preparation for the first installment in a Seminar series on Scarcity & Abundance. While I have been ordering my thoughts about what to say precisely when, the world has been on fire and crumbling beneath our feet. It has been distracting to both my attention and my heart. It is easy to be swept away in that deluge.
And I suppose that there was a time in my life when this tumult would make me question the efficacy of what I’m doing. Talking about ideas? What? While the world burns?
Yes. Precisely.
Because how matters to what, and the potential what regarding the Climate Crisis is very, very bad. Conversely, the potential what is also very, very good. The thing is, how we live now isn’t really much good for anyone. And we have needed to shift how we engage with Creation for a long time.
The new systems and ideas that emerge will be guided by how we think about these issues now. NOW is the time to establish our touchstones, our practices, our commitments. Now is the time to prepare the mechanisms, policies, and mindsets that will buoy us as planet through this apocalypse.
We are not doing well with most of this right now, and we have some big work to do. We are making choices as we experience this pandemic that concern me -our defaults too often steer towards fear and separation. It takes a continual commitment to finding new ways in order to discover them. Hope is a choice. Yes is an action.
This doesn’t mean you float around untethered just loving things. That really doesn’t work. You can’t decide to think and act differently and then expect instant change. There is actual work to be done to stay grounded in a reality counter to our default environments of isolationism and suspicion.
Practices of gratitude, regular internal inventories, intentional exposure to new ideas and influences -all of it can provide an antidote to the erosion and decay of fear and scarcity.
This weekend’s Seminar lays out the structural overview for encountering Scarcity & Abundance. We’ll get into its foundations, where the ideas go deeply wrong, and how we might begin to shift the landscapes of Lack and Plenty. The Live Seminar (via Zoom) is Saturday 8/21, 2-5 MT and we run re-broadcasts Sunday morning (9-12 MT) and Monday evening (5-8 MT). I hope you can join us. You can sign up here.