I was talking with a young business person about my humanitarian work and how to promote it successfully. He suggested I needed to understand that everyone who gives to humanitarian projects or organisations does so to feel less guilty. We feel guilty for the personal power and ease we enjoy as those who are relatively privileged in the world when we are confronted with others suffering hunger and others things. He was suggesting that all successful humanitarian fundraising is about increasing that guilt so people give more to relive it! We give enough to be able to continue to enjoy without our pleasure being spoiled by feeling guilty about it. He did not see this as a bad thing to use! He simply wanted to me understand this was the thing I needed to appeal to! He was saying we give to take away a negative, not because we really care!
I did not like his analysis. Yet I have to admit there is truth in this when I pay attention to my own motivation for the sacrifices I make. I certainly have, in past years, given to reduce guilt in precisely the way he described. I would freely enjoy my privilege while also giving something to most charities that asked for it. It is actually now that I have less and am needing to budget more carefully that my motives are becoming clearer. I do give out of discomfort with things I enjoy while others are suffering but not so I can continue to enjoy those things. Rather, if those enjoyments no longer feel right while my friends who live in poverty are suffering, I let go of those things. I do not try to live exactly as they live. That is neither possible nor helpful. However I do ask whether I enjoy things because I really need them or just out of habit and a sense of entitlement. I no longer think of my income as mine to do with as I please. It is there for love. It is there to love others as I love myself. This weekend I sold my sports car, my lovely little 2015 Mazda MX5 Roaster (manual and soft top of course). I replaced it with a Hybrid that was $12,000 less than I got for the sports car. This money will, mostly, pay back money I have given to humanitarian work that was set aside as tax savings and for my own future planning. I have "borrowed from the future" to respond to some needs I couldn't see how I could afford to respond to. Not all those decisions were good decisions. A wise person has said, "Every 'yes' is a 'no'". When we cannot say "no" to human needs that we are faced with, that is a problem. We cannot relieve all human suffering. Sometimes all we can do is be present with someone in suffering neither they nor we can change, Yet I could change these things by taking from money for my own needs. It was "my" money I thought. I had the personal power to make that decision. And so I did. Yet this was a weakness not a strength, a vice not a virtue. This was, about my unwillinglness to be present to suffering when I had the personal power to take it away. This was not living in love because I did not love myself in these decisions. I said "no" to myself and "yes" to others. When I put my car on "TradeMe" I cried. I had no idea I loved it so much. It really has brought me a lot of fun and joy, far more than I even thought driving a car could give. It looked very expensive and that embarrassed me. I don't like to be thought of as "rich". I feel shame associated with wealth. I know when I was really struggling with a level of poverty I did not think kindly of people who owned expensive cars, houses, yachts and so on. Why? Is this "true" guilt (guilt because I am behaving badly) or "false" guilt? It is surely a good thing for my behaviour to change when I become aware I am living unjustly. However the shame I felt was all about other's opinion. I care far too much about what others think of me. The past three years have been mentally and emotionally tough for me as I have transitioned from "Nicholas Ian Frater" to "Nicola Sian Frater". Coming out publicly as a trans woman was the easy bit. The really tough times was leading up to that decision. However the emotional and mental journey through the hormonal side a girl's puberty at age 64-66 has been rough. And it has triggered childhood trauma and taken me to some very dark places I almost did not survive. This is not an easy thing to go through while everyone is expecting you to have the maturity of a 66 year old! And the HRT meds themselves can trigger serious mental and emotional instability. So my little sports car was both a distraction and a comfort through some of the darkest experiences of my life. That, I now realise, was a need. I should not have felt guilty about it. I did feel discomfort around the harm I was doing to the earth by driving a petrol driven car and enjoying its power and acceleration. We use most fuel when accelerating. Getting to the speed limit in the shortest time possible (and making some noise doing so) was one of the really fun parts of driving this little car. And I loved driving it around windy mountain roads So I would hop in and drive it just for the pleasure of driving it. It was also right to enjoy it for a time and right to let it go, Now that I have sold my car I am very happy with that decision. It feels right that I enjoyed it for a time and right to let it go now and look back on that as a wonderful memory. Coming back to the young business person's analysis, I don't want to manipulate money out of wealthy people using guilt. This is not an "ends justifies means" situation for me. I do want to facilitate community with others who really desire to journey deeper into love love for those who are poor, really desire to live in love for self and others in a wholesome and mature way, to grow some friendships with people who are relatively poor and powerless, both in their own communities and in in our global community, and to learn the courage to say "no" and well as the courage to say "yes" both to self and others.
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Many years ago (38 years ago to be precise) I was part of a singing group that was blessed with a young and highly accomplished violinist. First a disclaimer: I'm not a musician and it was a long time ago so, musicians, bear with me if I get the detail or terminology incorrect. He arrived one day with a violin which had only just been completed by a master violin-maker for an older, professional violinist. He told us he had been given it for a year to "play it in" for its new owner. He explained that this was a great privilege as he was being entrusted with the task of playing this instrument until the very cells of the timber from which it was made became alligned to the music played on it. It was critical not to drop it or bang it as this would undo all that good work.
I thought about this in relation to my own ambition for the final chapters of my life. I want to be "played in" through loving until my life and being are fully attuned to love. So what actually is love? This is where language fails. I am, within my Christian tradition, a mystic. That is, I seek to experience God, not merely serve God. I am 67 and have been praying for as long as I can remember. All that time I have been seeking to journey into God and God's love. The more I do so the more I would say love us an emptying. It is an outpouring, from your heart first, which is reflected in outpouring from your material resources. The tricky thing about that is this can be misunderstood as self-negation, as saying you do not matter, your needs do not matter. Jesus seems to teach "self-denial" and that has been a strong, and I think very damaging, emphasis in 2000 years of Christian teaching. In fact when I was a child we sang a song in "Sunday School" with these terrible words, "Jesus and Others and You what a wonderful way to spell JOY, Jesus and Others and You in the heart of each girl and each boy. "J" is for Jesus for he has first place. "O" is for others we meet face to face. "Y" is for you, in whatever you do, put yourself LAST and spell JOY." The problem with this is that it teaches children they are less worthy than anyone else in this picture to be the recipient of love. We are not. We are each as worthy of receiving love and another. Love is lavish and generous. There is something joyfully reckless about love. We need to experience a lavish, reckless, outpouring of love toward us before we are ready to give it, to pour out love from our own heart, our own life. Jesus spoke his words of "denying self", of "taking up our cross" and following him into a context in which to follow him could well result in death. So he was speaking about a real cost. He was warning would-be followers to "count the cost", to check they had it in them to go the distance with him or not start out on that journey. He also was addressing these words, particularly, to men, who were used to being served, not used to serving. Sadly we have spent 2000 years turning this into a culture of self-negation, of thinking of ourselves as unworthy of being loved lavishly. We have also used this teaching to reinforce the oppression of women and people lower in the social heap. We have taught them to serve.....US, to know their place in relation to US. Love is also delight. There is a beautiful line in the Jewish Wisdom in which "Dame Wisdom" and God are delighting in humanity which they have made. We need to "get" this in the core of our beings, that we are DELIGHTFUL to God. Love for others is delighting in them, enjoying them, and letting them know how delightful they are to us and how much joy they bring us. Love, if it is real and genuine, leaves others feeling like they are the most important person in the world, at least to us in that moment. This is because, when we know we are "delightful" we can lavish delight on others. We can truly enjoy all kinds of people. It does not on how attractive they are. It is inherent in their humanity. They are delightful because they are human. Love is also adoration. This is where it connects, perhaps the only place it connects well, with romantic love. Romantic love is not really about the other's needs. It is about brain chemicals that get released into our system and create such lovely feelings in us that we think this person is perfect for us. Until the drugs wear off! Yet the adoration that is natural in romantic love is something we all yearn for. We love to be loved like that. We love to be "adored" by someone. And we can gift another this. We can find things in them which are "adorable". These are some of the qualities I find as I journey into God, a lavish, reckless, outpouring of Godself from the abundance that is God, a delighting in humanity, and an adoration. Is it possible for God to "adore" us? Do we adore our children when they are new babies? Do we adore them sometimes when they don't know we are watching them? Yes, we do. And God adores. I pray each morning opening myself to God and to love and in part of my daily meditation I use the words, "Loving, adoring, delighting, outpouring". This is the music I want to play in me until the very cells of my body become alligned to it. One of the things I launched this website for was to build a global community of people committed to Living in Love. I am a devout Christian. For Christians, love for God comes first and is the source of everything else. Yet this community is not only for Christians, and not only for religious people. So it is what Jesus called "the second most important commandment" (in the Jewish Torah) that is the basis for this community: Love your neighbour as you love yourself. I have friends who I call my kindred who hold all kinds of beliefs or who are atheists, agnostics, or humanists. I call them my kin because of their practice of kindness. They care that the world has so much suffering. They act to change the world, reduce suffering, and increase happiness. So I am searching for people like this. I am wanting to connect with them and connect them to one another. I am wanting to share ideas and skill and work together to do something special in the world. And I see Social Media as a tool for this. It may not be designed to bring rich and poor, powerful and powerless, together, we have to "engineer" that kind of connection. However I hope Social Media will naturally bring together those who wish to show kindness and work for justice in global relationships.
I am wanting to find people willing to risk a radical obedience to love. I am not speaking of Jesus "new" commandment specifically to his followers that they should "Lay down their lives for one another" as he laid down his life for them. This is so open to abuse and an unhealthy kind of self-negation that I do not wish to point to that ideal in this community. Difficult enough is a radical commitment to simply love our neighbour AS WE LOVE OURSELVES. This does not call for self-negation. Yet in a world in which I am part of the 1% that consumes 99% of the earths resources it is a quite scary commitment to make. What would it cost us, personally, to do our bit to even such impossibly unequal scales? Could we survive such sacrifice? 99% of the world are expected to survive far worse than a global "median". Yet it seems inconceivable to reduce my own consumption to what would be an equitable median. So I want to suggest a more personal and realistic path for those beginning this journey or who are already on it and want to go deeper into love.
Poverty is firstly about powerlessness. Poverty does not arise from the inequitable distribution of food but from disempowering people, taking away their power over their own land, their own food producing resources. Colonisation and “Cash Crop” loans have in common a mentality of “civilizing” a people while stripping them of power over their own land. So, ultimately, we destroy poverty by empowering people to change their own lives. Promoting “economic growth” at a national level will never “trickle down” to those at the bottom of the heap. However, while I tend towards the "left" there is a weakness in left wing ideology which sees wealth as like a cake of a set size which simply needs to be divided equitably. What happens when we think like that is that we disempower people and teach them to be dependent upon endless handouts. And then the wealth of a whole community diminishes. The cake, actually, gets smaller and smaller. The economy of the whole nation shrinks. Wealth can be created at a grass roots level through empowering people to start their own small business ventures, through nurturing entrepreneurship. Many marginalized women throughout the world have been empowered by helping them start small businesses and helping them survive the pitfalls of running and sustaining a small business. Small business people have to work incredibly hard to succeed, way harder that the average wage earner. Yet for poor people who have lived with no power, and no hope of changing their situation, such a hard road is a welcome one, a road that give hope of a different future. And if we multiply small business in a community, we grow the wealth of that whole nation from the bottom up instead of pouring money into the hands of those who already have the most power. With this kind of grass roots help we reduce the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest in a nation while growing the whole nation’s wealth.
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AuthorMy thoughts about Living in Love Archives
May 2024
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