Sunday Contemplation # 30 Tears For America

Prayers From The Mountains Of Our Dreams

Photo by Rodrigo de Mendoza on Unsplash

• This Week’s Quote

• This Sunday’s Contemplation

• A Guided Meditation

• Grateful For

• This Week’s Community Chat

• Upcoming Activities

This Week’s Quote

This Sunday’s Contemplation

Good Morning Dear Friends:

I hope that your lives and hearts are richly beating this weeks. I hope that you will bear with me this week as I try to share my heart with you about America. I woke at 3.30 am this morning, filled with emotion, filled with the need to connect with each of you.

I was born in Australia. I went to America in 1977, a young man in search of what life could mean. It was not my plan to stay, but the dream of America caught my heart. I stayed, married an American, and we bore our children there. For reasons for another time, we returned to Australia via three years in China. I lived in America for 20 years. The history of my wife’s family in America began soon after the Mayflower. I love America, her family’s hearts beat deeply American. I love the dream that is America. I love the people of America, past and present. The world needs the dream that is America to survive the desert winds now blowing against it.

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Our tears fall from the inner mountains of our dreams. They are the streams formed by the clouds of the possibilities.

Those tears are the prayers of despair and gratitude that water the valleys of our lives.

Without the dreams and the tears they produce, we are parched deserts of ourselves.

I recall a night in Boulder Colorado in 1980 I think. A good good friend of mine, a Brit, both of us born outside of America, prayed together, all night, for America. Tears flowed as we asked the God of our understanding at the time, to bless and protect America. Tears that even then reflected our deepest concern that the dream was being stolen by the blindness of self serving.

Our tears in Colorado were joined by millions of much much more precious tears shed in much much more sacred rooms than ours. The tears of gratitude shed by immigrants escaping tyranny, arriving in a land of possibilities. The tears of despair, entreaty and surrender shed by soldiers about to lose their lives, defending those possibilities. The tears of God falling as grace, on our inner mountains when we could not find the strength to nourish our own dreams.

The most holy centre of America is the dream of freedom…for everyone. Like all of the most precious dreams of our lives, the responsibility for holding it sacred is ours.

History is full of tyranny. Dreams burnt at the stake of ignorance.

So too today. Tyranny is always, always, always fueled by the ignorance that creates the “other” out of the sacred ones who journey this life with us. The “other” is the illusion of force.

This is not a political statement. Political posturing is the dance of self serving. Government of the people, for the people, is the impossible challenge at the foundation of governance. It is the ground where the disagreements of the well intended are nourished and passionately battled in the hope of discovering what might be true.

Politics without the sacred is just a tool of tyranny.

So we are here in the moment where we wonder if the dream will survive. This moment has been coming for some time. It is always the place of those that the dream has gifted the most, to ensure that those gifts are shared with the many. Those holding the benefits of the gifts, particularly the ones with the responsibility to hold the sacred…yes sacred…places of power, have too often failed to honour that gifting.

Those failures fertilised the ground of discontent and suffering that tyranny exploits.

We are all responsible for the place we are now. Me too. “I should have stayed”, “what could I have done better?”, “what can I do now?” I too search for the ways that I might hold the dream that is America closer.

Parcelling out blame becomes a pointless shadow game that masquerades as taking responsibility. History will likely name the villains and identify the signs of rot.

Our part nows is to hold to the dream. Doing so will likely take our tears, and is already taking lives.

I trust that the people of America that I came to know and love, will find ways to hold to the dream. I do not pretend to know how that is going to show itself. At the moment I can only offer the prayer of my tears.

My experience is that each one of us has access to a deep and silent wisdom within. Living your wisdom, and me living mine, begins with discovering it is there, always. It is the tectonic plates that push the mountain of our dreams closer to the surface of our lives.

If we just look outwards, the challenges and obstacles look immense. So too the situation in America at the moment, immense and overwhelming. Our first look must be within, towards the heart of our own wisdom, and within to the wisdom that formed the foundations of the Constitution and the dream of America.

What that inward looking will call us to do in our day to day lives we do not know. What we do know is that it will call us to act with love and compassion. That is no soft centre, but a centre of steely resolve. Love is not a weapon, it is the power that cannot be destroyed by the weapons of hatred and ignorance.

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My experience and description of the God I prayed to in 1980 has changed. I no longer bow down to an all powerful God, somehow separate from me. I still bow and surrender to the One that we all, I mean all, are part of, inseparable from, and whose nature of peace, love and grace is the ground of our being. I still marvel at the infinite field of energy and limitless Awareness that silently awaits our awakening. It is the blindness to that Nature that fuels our suffering and ignorance.

To rescue America from the rocks it’s failures have thrown it upon, is going to take a movement of people acting in concert. The songs of that concert will need to be filled with love, hope, strength and community. What form all that takes, I do not know. I do know that we will be called to tears to nourish the strength needed to stand together.

Let me finish with more holy words than mine, spoken by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 at Gettysburg. Still true today as ever.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

One hundred years later, in pursuit of the same dream for all people, for which he also gave his life, Martin Luther King Jr. said this:

Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

Blessings and Peace to all of you this day.

Thank you for reading this. See you next week I hope.

A Guided Meditation

I have received quite a bit of feedback that a guided meditation connected to the topic of these contemplations has been appreciated. When appropriate I will provide one each week. This week’s guided meditation is called The Mountains Of Our Dreams.

Grateful For

I include this section because I found that when I read or hear about what others are grateful for, I tend to think more about what I am grateful for. Feel free to share what you are grateful for in the comments. I think it is a beautiful service to others.

This week I am grateful beyond words and in tears, that we are built to dream.

This Week’s Community Chat

The theme in the chat this week is: The dream that is America.

I would appreciate your thoughts and insights about America today.

As always, also feel free to share anything else on your heart.

Thank you.

Upcoming Activities

My friend Sally Avison have be hosting Wise Hearts Circle zoom meetings. We are reconsidering a better format right now and will be back in touch as soon as we have a plan.

Should you want to message me directly, please feel free to do so.