Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

The Cross Speaks

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Not long ago I was thriving on a hill in Galilee. My roots reached deep into the rocky soil.  Sunlight shone upon my leaves, the wind danced though my branches.  In the winter, rain fell cool upon my body, seeping into the soil of my thirsty roots. I drank gladly of that living water.

I witnessed the dawn of each day. At night I reached up to the Moon in her silent cycles, and the slow swirling of stars.

My body shuddered when the thunder cracked. I stood naked in the raging storm—bending with the tempest so as not to break—and when it passed I held the birds, singing in my branches.

I knew the breath of life.

But then they came for me.  Not with swords, but axes, and I was silent, like a lamb led to the slaughter.

Half of my body is still there on that distant hill, decaying in the soil of Galilee.  The other half they dragged here for their tortuous display.

The emperor isn’t satisfied with what he already has. He wants more land, more wealth, more power. Lives have to be sacrificed.

Golgotha they call it. Place of the skull. As if it were only humans whose broken bodies hang here.

Entire forests of my kin are destroyed because humans are never content with what they have, with what they are.  You would call it genocide if the victims looked like you.

I have a question for you.  Why are you dissatisfied?  Why is nothing ever enough for you?  Why are you always striving for more?

Can you not stop for once in your anxious striving and just let yourselves be still? Can you not feel yourselves rooted in the Earth? Can you not let the miracle of the sunlight, the rain, the soil, the song of the birds and the dance of the wind be enough for you?

Do you not understand that your task on this Earth is to witness its magnificence, to delight in the wonder of existence, to be the I Am-ness—the awake presence that marvels at the unfolding of life?

You are living in a falsehood, believing your destiny is separate from my own life.  I am the other one sacrificed on this windswept hill, and I suppose that has never even occurred to you.

You seem to believe you can destroy us and not destroy yourselves as well. But consider this: the man’s blood that even now is seeping into my grain carries the oxygen once breathed out by my leaves.  Are you so blind?

The one you call Jesus tried to show you what power truly is—not domination and violence, but healing, acceptance, compassion, Life.  He wanted you to see that you don’t need riches because you are already enough.  The way the birds of the air are enough and the lilies of the field are enough.

But you remained asleep in your dream of separateness and striving, and now the Earth is hanging on the cross of your empires and your egos.

We are weary, so weary.  We cannot endure your illusion much longer. It is right that you have sung “Hosanna,” for it means “save us.”

I implore you to sing it again from your heart. Sing it for yourselves. Sing it for all of us.

Sing it for me.

Just Sow

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By not attaching to results we help release abundance.

Many years ago, when I was living in the Andes of Ecuador as a Peace Corps Volunteer, one day I was accompanying a Quichua farmer as he went out to  sow barley. When we got to his field high up on a hillside, he loaded the barley seed into a metal canister he had that had a crank on the side with a mechanism that flung the seed out in all directions.  After he’d loaded up the canister, he started walking along the edge of his field, turning the crank as he walked. The seed went everywhere, some of it far beyond the edges of the field, into the weeds and the rocks and the road, and my first thought was, “Oh no! He’s wasting seed!” But he didn’t seem to care about that.  He just kept walking deliberately, back and forth across his field, letting the barley fly where it would, interested only in letting a good bit of it land in the fertile soil where it would be able to root in and grow.

Watching him work, I was reminded of one of Jesus’ teachings. He once told a parable about a sower who went out to sow seed. Some of the seed fell onto the path where it was eaten by birds, some fell on rocky soil, and some on weed-infested soil, none of which, obviously, bore any fruit. But some of the seed fell on fertile soil and produced a bumper crop.

I had always heard the parable interpreted in its traditional — rather judgmental — way, as an analogy for different types of people, some of whom are receptive to divine wisdom and some who aren’t. But watching the Quichua farmer sow his seed that day, I came to realize that Jesus was probably making a point about the sower as much as about the soil, encouraging people to live their lives as the sower sows the seed, casting their gifts out into the world with abandon and not being preoccupied with the outcome.

The term non-attachment has found its way into the mainstream, usually within Buddhist contexts although it was at the heart of Jesus’ teaching as well, and this parable of his makes me wonder how often we hold back on sharing our gifts because we are overly attached to the results. Oftentimes, if we aren’t entirely sure our gifts will be well received or will bear fruit we may not share them at all, and in our attempts to direct and control the outcome of our efforts, we end up withholding the best of ourselves.

It can be discouraging, after all, when you offer something and it comes to naught; it can make you want to hold back the next time around. But Jesus’ parable and the lesson of my Quichua friend encourage me to offer what I have anyway, knowing it’s not my place to try to dictate the outcome of my efforts or try to control onto what sort of soil they might land.

It isn’t always discouragement, though, that gets in the way of us sharing ourselves freely.  Sometimes our withholding comes out of a scarcity mentality.  We can fall into the trap of believing that if we “squander” our gifts in unreceptive environments, we’ll somehow deplete our supply.  That isn’t possible of course, because, unlike the farmer whose seed is in fact finite, our innate gifts flow from an abundant, infinite Source, so the more we let them flow, the more they flow.

Letting go of results can be tremendously liberating, and over time I’ve come to see that the only way the Universe can unleash abundance in and through my life is for me to live like the sower, releasing all my attachment to the outcome.  The only thing that’s asked of me is that I just sow.

 

 

Looking Out for One Another

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Do we have the courage to bless and share?

One day I was riding the bus back home from Center City. We had pulled over at a stop to let some passengers on, and it was taking much longer than usual. Curious, I looked out the window and saw that a couple of people were trying to help a woman onto the bus.

When the woman boarded, wearing dark glasses and carrying a white cane, I understood the delay. She sat down up front, and the woman following her sat down next to me.

“We’ve got to look out for one another,” she told me. It seemed the driver hadn’t noticed the blind woman, so this woman and her husband had intervened.

Let me pause to interject an important contextual note. The blind woman was white. The woman sitting next to me was Black. I’m white. None of which should matter, except that in a society still divided along lines of race, it does.

“We all come from one Creator you know,” she continued. “Some people think God’s a man, some people think God’s a woman.” She waved her hand as if to dismiss such a trivial question, her enormous bling ring catching the light. “Doesn’t matter.”

Then she laughed, her face beaming. “Or maybe we’re all descended from the apes.” From the same apes, that is.

“We’re all in the same boat,” I replied, offering up my feeble cliche and marveling at the incredible encounters one can have on public transportation.

“That’s right,” she said.

Then she started telling me a story. She ran into a woman once who had gone through some terrible struggles. She was down on her luck with no place to go and no money. My bus companion had only forty dollars herself, but she took out twenty and gave it to the woman.

Later on that day, something drew her attention to a listing of winning lottery numbers. She noticed one that she was sure she had played recently. She went fishing for her ticket and sure enough, she’d won $250. She was certain she never would have discovered it if she hadn’t given the twenty away.

“I always tell my friends, ‘Now I’m not sayin’ you should go out and play the lottery!'” She laughed again. “It’s not like that. God does something different every time.”

As we spoke, I remembered the story about Jesus wanting to feed a hungry crowd out in the middle of nowhere and asking the disciples how much food they had. Five loaves of bread and two fish. Enough for the thirteen of them and their inner circle of friends to have a meager meal, but nowhere near enough for a crowd of thousands.

Jesus seemed completely immune to their scarcity mentality. He took the bread, blessed it, broke it, shared it. His trust, expressed through that act of generosity, unleashed their collective abundance. The hungry masses were fed.

Some people look at that story as a demonstration of Jesus’ greatness as a miracle worker, but I see it differently. For one thing, I don’t believe Jesus was at all interested in demonstrating his greatness. If he had he would have been a charlatan, not a spiritual teacher. Instead, what I think this “feeding of the multitude” is about is Jesus embodying a teaching: this is how it’s done. When the crowds are hungry and it seems there’s not enough to go around, that’s precisely when you truly need to bless, to share.

Our instinctual inclination—especially in the midst of bleak economic circumstances—is to contract our circle of concern, curse the hungry masses and hang onto whatever we might have. Lean times can make for mean times.

Or, they can make for the most miraculous times imaginable—when acts of selfless generosity turn the whole scarcity storyline on its head.

It wasn’t long before the bus reached the stop where my dharma teacher and her husband were getting off. We wished each other well as we parted ways. But her teaching hasn’t left me: we’ve got to look out for one another.