Healing America’s Narratives: What’s Love Got to Do With It? Part 2

Posted on November 21, 2023 by Reggie Marra

[Part of our ongoing exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow, this essay continues our exploration of Chapter Twelve’s inquiry into the role of love — and its lack — in American culture. The book is available here.]

In Part 1 of this inquiry into love, we introduced Br. David Steindl-Rast’s, Dr. M. Scott Peck’s, and Marianne Williamson’s respective reflections that love is “the joyful acceptance of belonging,” “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” and the absence of fear.¹

With the intersection of these views of love as our starting point, let’s explore how we might observe the presence or absence of love and actually “practice” love in our own lives, and observe the presence or absence of love in others and decide how much time we want to spend being around and influenced by those whose behaviors discourage the healthy manifestation of love.

The previous post ended with these words: “With whom and what do you joyfully accept belonging? For whom are you willing to extend yourself? How does it feel — or might it feel — to live a moment, a day, a year, or lifetime in the absence of fear?” Each of these depictions of love can be observed and practiced.

To what extent do you joyfully accept belonging — to and with yourself, members of your family, your friends, colleagues, neighbors, pets, written, visual, and audible sources of information and entertainment, strangers, those you disagree with, and the natural world? How might you practice joy, acceptance, or belonging to and with any one of these?

To what extent are you willing to extend yourself in order to nurture your own growth or the growth of others? Where is the boundary beyond which you are not willing to extend? These questions are not intended to elicit guilt, shame, or inadequacy — no one can be all things for all people. Healthy boundaries are essential for a healthy life. A commitment to everyone and everything is most likely a commitment to no one and nothing.

How familiar are you with a feeling of no fear (or anxiety or worry)? What might an absence of fear feel like, and how might it manifest? Imagine a moment (or longer) during which what you habitually fear, worry, or hold anxiety about does not exist. Engage your senses — see it, feel it, hear it, taste it, and smell it — how does it look, feel, sound, taste, and smell? Is it light or heavy? Is it expansive or contracting? How might you practice letting go of fear, anxiety, or worry?

We’re not speaking here about the immediate, rational fear that comes up as the bear or large dog attacks, as the tornado or tsunami approaches, or as the gunshots ring out in the school, store, or church. We’re referring to the habitual, heavy, persistent state that arises not from an immediate threat, but from a pattern of attention to and concern about an uncertain future. How would it feel to let that go?

Love is always present. It becomes palpable when we let fear go.

My experience, ironically, is that this needs to be an ongoing practice. We must practice love — despite its pervasive presence.

_____

The “joyful acceptance of belonging,” is from Br. David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness: the Heart of Prayer, (Paulist, 1984), 167; “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” is from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, (Simon & Schuster, 1978), 81; and ‘the absence of fear’ (not a direct quote) is based on Marianne Williamson’s reflections on A Course in Miracles, (Foundation for Inner Peace, 1976, 1992) in A Return to Love, (HarperPaperbacks, 1993).

Healing America’s Narratives: What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Posted on November 7, 2023 by Reggie Marra

[Part of our ongoing exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow, this essay explores Chapter Twelve’s inquiry into the role of love — and its lack — in American culture. The book is available here.]

Regarding the subtitle’s question, the answer is, well, just about everything.

Over the course of some twenty years I paid attention to others’ views on love. I listened to friends and family, read fiction and nonfiction including scripture from various religions, and did my best to understand what I felt through my own direct experience. Three particular views among many spoke to me personally, and I “assembled” a working perspective on love that lives at the intersection of the three:

According to Br. David Steindl-Rast, Dr. M. Scott Peck, and Marianne Williamson’s reflections on A Course in Miracles respectively, love is “the joyful acceptance of belonging,” “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” and the absence of fear.¹

Throughout, amid, beneath, within, and above America’s collective national Shadow lurks a lack of love. Not that love doesn’t exist in the United States — it does — but where it is not lacking it most often manifests as an exclusive, conditional, qualified, and group-centric love.

We are willing to joyfully accept belonging with or to extend ourselves for the benefit of selected, but not all, others. Those other others we fear — sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, but fear them we do.

Where this leads, has led, and will lead us is toward a deeper, truer, more inclusive, and less conditional — if not unconditional — love. Within the developmental shorthand that points to our increasingly inclusive, balanced, comprehensive, and complex movement through it’s about me, it’s about us, it’s about all of us, and it’s about all that is perspectives, an it’s about me orientation is the earliest and least inclusive view available to us.

But without a healthy iteration of this view, which allows each of us to love our self and makes it possible to look in the mirror and authentically say, “I love you,” to the essence of our reflection (give it a try), self-love remains repressed as part of our Shadow — and this repression inevitably limits the fullness of our love for any other(s). In Teachings on Love, Thich Nhat Hanh made it clear that, “Until we are able to love and take care of ourselves, we cannot be of much help to others.”²

Choosing to extend one’s self in order to joyfully accept belonging as, to, and with the perfectly beautiful, blemished being each of us is strengthens our will to extend our selves on behalf of the perfectly beautiful, blemished beings you, they, all of us, and all that is are. Both the foundation of healthy self-love and the expansion beyond it are essential.

In, Outlaw Culture, bell hooks expressed being puzzled by folks who authentically confront one “domination” while often passively supporting or ignoring another. She pointed specifically to black men who fought against racial discrimination but ignored the plight of women, and to white women who were on the front lines of gender discrimination but ignored the racial discrimination against their black sisters. She observed that many activists act on behalf of self-interest, attempting to end “what we feel is hurting us,” rather than on behalf of “a collective transformation of society, an end to politics of dominations.” She concludes:

“This is why we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self-centered longing for change. Fundamentally, if we are only committed to an improvement in that politic of domination that we feel leads directly to our individual exploitation or oppression, we not only remain attached to the status quo but act in complicity with it, nurturing and maintaining those very systems of domination.”³

She clearly states the necessity for a love that moves from embracing what concerns me or my particular us to the wider embrace of all of us and all that is. Sound familiar?

Consider the words of Siddhartha Gautama, passed down by many, including Gandhi and King: “For hatred can never put an end to hatred; love alone can. This is an unalterable law.”⁴ Remember the words attributed to Jesus Christ: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”⁵

In Across That Bridge, John Lewis acknowledged the roles of faith, patience, study, truth, action, peace, and reconciliation in his vision for change in the United States. He also made it clear that for those who studied, trained in, and practiced nonviolence, “not simply as a tactic, but as a way of authentically living our lives — our sole purpose was, in fact, love.”⁶

In response to a question from Krista Tippett in 2020, author Jason Reynolds defined antiracism in this way:

“…[it’s] simply the muscle that says that humans are human. That’s it. It’s the one that says, ‘I love you because you are you.’ Period. That’s all…. That element of ‘I love you because you are you’ should be the most human thing we know. It should be a natural thing to say, ‘Look, I love you, because you remind me more of myself than not.’”⁷

While simple on the surface, those last eight words are subtly sophisticated and quite challenging when engaged beyond the conceptual — in the everyday world with other human beings. The prospect that you remind me more of myself than not recalls Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s recognition that our work is not so simple as separating all the good folks from the evil. It is more complex in that each human heart — each of us — carries the potential for good and evil.⁸

With whom and what do you joyfully accept belonging? For whom are you willing to extend yourself? How does it feel — or might it feel — to live a moment, a day, a year, or lifetime in the absence of fear?

_____

The “joyful acceptance of belonging,” is from Br. David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness: the Heart of Prayer, (Paulist, 1984), 167; “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” is from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, (Simon & Schuster, 1978), 81; and ‘the absence of fear’ (not a direct quote) is based on Marianne Williamson’s reflections on A Course in Miracles, (Foundation for Inner Peace, 1976, 1992) in A Return to Love, (HarperPaperbacks, 1993).
Thich Nhat Hanh, Teachings on Love. (Parallax, 1998), 21.
bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, (Routledge Classics, 2006/Routledge 1994), 243–44. In making her case for love, hooks also cites Peck’s “the will to extend one’s self…” view and King’s “I have decided to love,” 247.
Eknath Easwaran, trans., The Dhammapada, (Nilgiri Press, 1985), 78.
John 13:34, NIV Study Bible, (Zondervan, 1973, 1995).
John Lewis, with Brenda Jones, Across That Bridge: A Vision for Change and the Future of America, (Hachette, 2012), 183.
Jason Reynolds, “Imagination and Fortitude,” On Being with Krista Tippett, June 25, 2020, https://onbeing.org/programs/jason-reynolds-imagination-and-fortitude/
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. Accessed via https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/13750-if-only-it-were-all-so-simple-if-only-there

Healing America’s Narratives: Self-Discipline

Posted on June 19, 2023 by Reggie Marra

[Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.]

Knowing we are going to die, how, then, shall we live? The livings, indignities, and dyings depicted throughout Healing America’s Narratives and this series of posts offer examples of how not to live. As an antidote, Chapter Eleven of the book offers the potential benefits of paying attention to who we think we are, the stories we choose to tell and how we choose to tell them, the impact we have and how we are impacted, what we might not see — including, but not limited to, Shadow — who our people are, the inevitability of our death, and how we are in relationship with all of it.

To truly pay attention in this way, some level of healthy self-discipline is required — not the discipline of the angry parent wielding a belt, but the discipline that helps us move forward when things are difficult. In The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck defined discipline as “the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems,” and he characterized “these tools [as] techniques of suffering, means by which we experience the pain of problems in such a way as to work through them…learning and growing in the process.”¹ Peck’s toolbox contains four essential tools: delaying gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth/reality, and balancing (learning to discipline discipline).² These tools may seem obvious conceptually, but they must be embraced and embodied if we are to benefit from them in this third decade of twenty-first-century America.

Briefly, delaying gratification requires that we engage what is painful before we, and often in order to, experience what’s pleasurable. Do the hard thing first; get it out of the way. Dr. David Schnarch and Dr. Steven Hayer³ use the term clean pain to refer to our ability to delay gratification and move into the pain of difficult circumstances when we know something must be done, even if we’re not sure what it is. Dirty pain is what we encounter when we try to avoid what is necessary, uncomfortable, and uncertain. The clean pain of delaying gratification often leads to learning, growth and healing narratives; the dirty pain of avoidance or denial tends to lead to increased suffering, a lack of resolution, and illness narratives.

Accepting responsibility requires that we honestly own what’s ours — that we accept and engage those problems that are ours to solve. It is at the heart of healing our narratives and owning and integrating Shadow. It requires that we do the difficult work of wisely and compassionately discerning what belongs to us and what belongs to others. It challenges us to be present to and move beyond the harmful belief that either everything, or nothing, is our responsibility.

Individual dedication to truth or reality (used synonymously here) requires that we know what we mean by these words; collective dedication to truth requires that we agree on these meanings or at least honor each other’s meanings. Our working definition for these essays is Parker Palmer’s view that “truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline.”⁴ So, truth is an unfolding part of the infinite game; it is a conversation to which all are invited⁵ — not the domain of one individual or group — and it is important and welcomes and requires both deep feeling and healthy rigor.

Finally, balancing invites the disciplining of discipline and avoids obsession, rigidity, and inflexibility. It allows us to take a day off, to rest and recover, to eat the icing (or even dessert) first, to recognize that sometimes good enough — even if that phrase gets caught in the throat or knots the stomach — is more appropriate than best, great, or good.

Another model of discipline that can be useful comes from retired college basketball coach, Bob Knight. Knight also described discipline as having four components: Do what has to be done. Do it when it has to be done. Do it the best you possibly can. Do it that way all the time. I won’t do a point-by-point comparison with Peck’s model. My experience is that each of these models has value in the practice of self-discipline.

Love is also required if we are to truly pay attention, and we’ll explore it in a future post. In the absence of love, there’s a good chance discipline will either be ignored or manifested in unhealthy, punitive, subjugating ways — whether self- or other-directed.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth, (Touchstone-Simon & Schuster, 1978), 17–18.
Peck develops each of these in detail on pages 16–78.
Dr. David Schnarch and Dr. Steven Hayer, in Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, (Central Recovery Press, 2017), 19–20.
Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, (Jossey-Bass, 1998), 104.
The idea that “all” are invited is important, and it needs to be qualified. A more accurate characterization might be “all who are authentically dedicated to truth.” An example: Trump strategist, Steve Bannon, argued that it was the media and not the Democratic party that was the “real opposition” and that “the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit” — which Trump, Bannon, and others did quite well. Michael Lewis, “Has Anyone Seen the President?” in Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, (Brookings Institution, 2021), 163.