Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

The Sacrament of Civil Disobedience

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Handcuffs_on_table
There are two types of civil disobedience. One originates with the ego, the other with the soul.

In response to a reader’s comment on last week’s blog post,  The Ultimate Keystone Demonstration: Love, I said I often use the word “sacramental” to describe some of my experiences of engaging in civil disobedience. In that post I talked about what seem to me to be limitations of conventional civil disobedience, and yet over these past days I’ve also been thinking more about those moments when c.d. felt sacramental to me and why.

I think of a sacrament as a visible action using tangible elements that touches upon an intangible truth. A sacrament has the power to transcend the action and objects themselves, opening a portal to a Reality that is beyond our ordinary consciousness, and it always has at its heart the understanding that we are one with something much greater than ourselves.

As I’ve thought more about why certain moments of civil disobedience have felt sacramental to me, I realized that it wasn’t because of the actions in and of themselves: crossing the property line of a military base singing Amazing Grace or sitting in front of the doors to a Federal Building reading the Beatitudes. Rather it was because I and those I was with were choosing to abide within the understanding that we were one with each other, with those arresting us, and with a Reality that transcends us all.Continue Reading

The Ultimate Keystone Demonstration: Love

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The question I find myself asking is: What are we demonstrating?
The question I find myself asking is: What are we demonstrating?

A few weeks ago I ventured out into a snowstorm to attend a demonstration concerning the Keystone XL Pipeline. The State Department had just issued its environmental report which said the pipeline would have a negligible effect on climate change, and now the ball’s in President Obama’s court to decide whether to approve the pipeline’s construction.

Contrary to the State Department’s report downplaying the environmental consequences, the pipeline has been described by some environmentalists as the “line in the sand” in terms of our energy policy because the greenhouse gasses that would result from refining and burning the tar sands oil “would tip the scales toward dire climate change”. Climate scientist James Hanson has gone as far as saying if the pipeline moves forward and the tar sands extraction continues, the “game’s over” in our efforts to avoid runaway global warming.

Those of us who braved the cold and the snow that day to express our concern about the pipeline huddled next to the Federal Building in Center City Philadelphia listening to a handful of speakers talk about the implications of the pipeline and about the pledge that thousands of people across the country are signing, committing themselves to civil disobedience should the pipeline be approved. The organizers then said they would lead us in a training in which we would role play getting arrested. Some of them would play the role of police and the rest of us would come forward in groups, simulating a blockade of the Federal Building doors, and be “arrested.”Continue Reading

Toxic Thought Remediation

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What kind of thoughts are you spewing into the noosphere?
What kind of thoughts are you spewing into the noosphere?

A vortex of plastic twice the size of Texas is floating in the North Pacific Ocean, and a similar one in the Atlantic. Because of the way the ocean currents converge, these locations have become the aquatic dumping grounds of all the plastics we toss onto our streets and into our streams that eventually find their way to the ocean. Over time those plastics, some of which break down into small polymers, are ingested by birds and aquatic life, becoming part of the food chain of the entire planet.

I’m mentioning this because the plastic vortex floated through my mind in meditation recently, offering itself as a visible depiction of the effect of our thoughts.

Thoughts, like plastics, are energy, and thoughts are what we cast out into the ocean of consciousness encircling the planet, the noosphere as Teilhard de Chardin called it. When we generate thoughts that carry the toxicity of hatred and violence we are polluting the environment of Earth’s consciousness, which of course includes our own consciousness as well.

This toxicity of thought is extremely intense right now in the political sphere and becomes amplified in social media, and the disregard and disdain for the so-called “other” that we witness in our public sphere is the same disregard and disdain that is threatening the biosphere. Our thought pollution and the pollution that is choking the oceans are completely intertwined.

Helping Restore the Planet by Cleaning Up Your Mind

On this blog I often talk about our need to move beyond the prevailing consciousness which sees the world through the lens of separateness, the consciousness of the ego. I talk about this for a good reason, because the unprecedented challenges Earth faces right now can only be met if we humans undergo a radical shift in our consciousness. In fact, I believe this is the most essential task facing us in our day. If we are going to make it through this initiation into adulthood as a species we will have to move beyond the ego consciousness that has created the crises we now face. In other words, our future rests on what we do with our minds every bit as much as what we do with our plastics.

Like the biosphere, Earth’s noosphere has been polluted over centuries, and the thought legacy we’ve inherited of violence, oppression, prejudice and exploitation is something we all have a role in cleaning up, just as we each have a role to play in helping clean up the water, soil and air.

Obviously the most important thing each of us can do — and the one thing nobody can do for us — is to clean up our own mind, our own mental backyard so to speak, and the way we do that is by simply refusing to feed negative thoughts that float through our minds. We deny them the nutrients they need of attention (which can also come in the form of resistance), and by doing so we allow them to begin to dissipate.

Please notice that I didn’t say that we stop having negative thoughts. The truth is we all have them from time to time; they come to us quite unbidden. But when they come we have a choice whether we will indulge them with a good juicy story they can feed on.

One of those juicy stories, and the one that’s often the hardest to detect because on the surface it seems so righteous, is the story that says you’re a bad person for having negative thoughts. When you judge yourself (in the interest of improving yourself, of course) you’re actually generating more toxic thoughts, causing your and the planet’s suffering to continue.

Rather than practicing judgment we have the power to practice compassion, acceptance and forgiveness, which are the only things capable of dispelling the pollutants of violence and hatred that swirl within and around us. By practicing compassion, acceptance and forgiveness we begin to transcend the ego’s story of otherness and in so doing we begin to heal the fragmentation that lies at the heart of so much of the suffering on Earth.

So the next time you hear about something like a plastic vortex in the ocean, or politicians duking it out over ideological differences, or read a post on Facebook that vilifies or ridicules the “other”, see if you can hold the situation and all the players in your heart, encircling them all love. Because truthfully, their fragmentation is our fragmentation, just as the ocean’s pollution belongs to us all.

Solstice Greetings

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Rather than sharing a written post in honor of the Solstice, when we in the northern hemisphere experience the planet turning back toward the light, I thought I would share one of my collages instead.

May this season fill you with the knowing that mystery is real and possibilities are endless.

 

 

Happy Solstice to You All!

Patricia

 

 

Scandalous Halos and the Incarnation

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Nativity icon
What a difference it would make if we asserted the sacredness of the entire cosmos.

A couple of years ago, while sitting in the balcony of a church waiting for a concert to begin, I was pondering a mural of the Nativity that was painted on the back wall of the chancel.

In the painting Joseph and Mary were kneeling beside the infant Jesus who was lying in the manger. Nearby were a donkey and a cow, and off to the right the magi. But more than the figures themselves, it was the halos that caught my attention, halos that only appeared around the heads of Mary, Joseph and Jesus.

“That’s exactly the problem,” I thought to myself. The mural, placed in the position of the holy of holies, was inadvertently broadcasting the very belief that has led to so much devastation and suffering on our planet: the belief that humans alone carry the divine light, and not just that, but only certain humans.

Christmas is the season in which Christians celebrate the Incarnation, the Divine breaking into our earthly existence, taking on human form and the fullness of human experience. Yet over the course of my life, as a result of my own spiritual explorations and experiences, I have come to believe that traditional Christian understandings of the Incarnation obscure its radical implications.

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Dreaming of Earth’s Awakening

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I recently had a dream whose vivid imagery continues to linger in my mind. In the dream I and a few other people are witnessing an extraordinary phenomenon.

A huge spider web is being lifted up like a cloth by numerous butterflies of many colors and varieties. The web is composed of a multiplicity of hexagons, like a honeycomb, and inside each, made of the same filament as the rest of the web, is the outline of a burning candle. The web is breathtakingly beautiful and all of us know how amazing it is to be present to witness it.

The phenomenon we’re witnessing, I realize, has to do with the evolution of consciousness on the planet, a sign that it has reached a new level, and I find that I am now able to levitate, though I know it has nothing to do with me personally but is part of this cosmic unfolding. Continue Reading

Opening to the Great Love: The Second Aspect of the Spiritual Life

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How do you open to the Great Love?
How do you open to the Great Love?

In last week’s blog, Knowing Yourself, I wrote about what I see as the first aspect of the spiritual life and I offered some practices to help us grow in self-awareness. This week I’d like to explore what I see as the next aspect of the spiritual life: opening to the Great Love, by which I mean the consciousness that animates the Universe and each of us, the Reality in which everything is being birthed, nurtured into its fullness, and received back again in complete acceptance. This second aspect of the spiritual journey is one in which we come to the real, experiential awareness that we are not living our lives as isolated individuals alone in the cosmos.Continue Reading

The Philadelphia Love Experiment: Bridging the Cultural Chasm

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Why not?
Why not?

One Sunday I was getting hot under the collar reading an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about an ongoing budget battle in the Pennsylvania legislature. The article cited one state representative from rural PA who was talking about our mass transit system as a fiscal black hole. He said our buses don’t do a thing for his constituents.

Another representative from one of Philadelphia’s suburbs went on the counterattack, citing a study that shows that the Philadelphia region generates 40 percent of Pennsylvania’s revenue, even though we have only 32 percent of the population—and we receive only 27 percent of the transportation funds.

I looked up from the newspaper and said to Kip, “Philadelphia ought to secede from Pennsylvania!” It was not my most spiritually enlightened moment.

But the frustration was real. Our city’s public schools are on the verge of collapse. Our roads and bridges are deteriorating. We need gun control laws to keep illegal handguns off our streets. And without SEPTA—our mass transit system—the city would be paralyzed by gridlock. Thousands of people who don’t own cars would be stranded, unable to get to work to help generate that 40 percent of Pennsylvania’s revenue.

Yes, our buses do do something for rural constituents.

But at every turn, when Philadelphia tries to move legislation to address our urban problems and improve the quality of life here, we are thwarted by legislators in Harrisburg who see the city as nothing but a cesspool of welfare leeches, drug addicts, and morally corrupt hedonists.

Not surprisingly, most of us who live here see things differently. We see the brokenness and challenges of the city, sure, and sometimes it breaks our hearts. But we also love the vibrant tapestry of cultures and traditions here. We love the spunky innovations, the world-class orchestra, theaters and art museums, historic Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell that people travel from around the world to see. We love the visionary steps our city is taking to make Philadelphia a green, sustainable city. The list could go on and on.

Just think, if we seceded, we could keep that 40 percent of revenue to ourselves, and we’d be golden.

Deep down though, even as I said it, I knew that seceding wasn’t the answer, even if it were legally possible. There’s enough division already in this country, and the way forward isn’t to create more, but to find ways to bridge the chasm that divides us.

Loving Enemies

Yesterday morning, as I was reflecting on this sad state in Pennsylvania I wondered, what is the answer? We seem so locked into this us-them frame of mind. How can we stand down? Soften the lines in the sand? Lay down our swords and shields and find some common ground?

I feel a sense of urgency about this because I know these divisions aren’t just plaguing our region. They are the greatest obstacle to our nation meeting the many formidable challenges before us.

It doesn’t help that our differences have been christened “The Culture Wars.” (Does everything have to be a war for us? War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on Women?) And yet I don’t think I’m overstating it to say that many people in rural America and many people in urban America see each other as enemies.

Kip and I co-pastored for nearly five years behind “enemy” lines in a small, rural Missouri town, 65 miles south of Kansas City. One of our parishioners laughingly told us a story of when she was a child growing up during WWII. One Sunday the pastor asked one of the church elders to pray for their enemies. The elder got up and prayed, “Dear God, please remove our enemies from the face of the earth.”

I don’t think that’s what the pastor meant, but I bet a lot of us would pray pretty much the same way given the chance. Life would be so much simpler if our enemies just, oh, I don’t know, got raptured up one day.

Living in that small town was a cross-cultural experience, and like all the other cross-cultural experiences I’ve had I’m very glad I had it. I got to see up close, through the eyes of people who had lived there all their lives, the struggles they were facing:

  • Farms that had been in families for generations were being foreclosed on because small farmers couldn’t compete with corporate agriculture.
  • With the influx of corporate retail stores, family businesses were going under.
  • Job opportunities were scarce, and mostly minimum wage.
  • Towns throughout the region were decaying because their young people, seeing no future for themselves, were moving away never to return.

People were feeling powerless before cultural and global forces they couldn’t control. They were watching a cherished way of life slowly dying. And yet in the midst of it all they kept the faith, kept taking care of each other, kept holding potlucks, and kept trying to think of ways to protect and resurrect what they once had.

When you know what other people are dealing with, it’s really not hard to pray for them. Love them even.

All of this got me thinking about our current situation here in the commonwealth. (By the way, I love that Pennsylvania is a commonwealth. It just kinda says it all.) What if people in Philadelphia started praying for people in rural PA? Not because we want to guilt-trip them into being nice to us, nor show them that we can take the moral high ground, but because we have listened to their struggles. We sincerely want the best for them, as much as we do for ourselves.

I can’t help but believe such a movement would help repair our relationships and open a path forward in a way politics never will. We are Philadelphia, after all, the City of Brotherly/Sisterly Love, and brotherhood and sisterhood don’t stop at municipal boundaries.

Can you imagine if congregations all over the city started a prayer movement for our rural siblings? Maybe it could be called The Philadelphia Love Experiment. Maybe we could make animosities vanish into thin air.

Somebody has to take the first step—refuse to participate in the warmongering anymore and reach out the hand of friendship. Why not us?

I also think about how Pennsylvania is known as the Keystone State. Take that in for a moment. A keystone, that one crucial stone at the top of an arch that keeps the whole structure from collapsing in on itself. It sure seems to me this tottering, torn country could use something like that.

A very famous declaration came out of Philadelphia once that completely rocked the world. We could do it again if we wanted to, but this time we wouldn’t be declaring independence. We would be honoring the reality that we are all, like it or not, interdependent.

Let’s we the people just do it.