Spiritual teacher Mirabai Starr considers how our imperfect families and relationships are opportunities to practice divine love, acceptance, and compassion:
It’s hard to give up our fantasies of a life where beauty is built in and we don’t have to work at finding it. It’s easy to recognize the presence of the sacred in the saintly hospice chaplain who turns your mother’s deathbed into a temple…. But what about your boring job, your addicted partner, your hometown that feels more like a strip mall than a community? What about your dining room table at dinner time?
One of the things it means to be an ordinary mystic is to bow at the feet of your everyday existence, with its disappointments and dramas, its peaceful mornings and luminous nights, and to honor yourself just as you are…. A mystic finds the magic in the midst of the nitty-gritty, the crusty spaghetti sauce pot in the sink and the crocus poking out of a spring snowfall, the unsigned divorce papers on the kitchen table and the results of your latest blood work on your computer screen.
I know that’s not always easy. I am continually challenged to stop arguing with reality and instead soften into what is. For instance, my students may think I’m wise, but my kids seem to think I’m a dork. I don’t love this disconnect. Like you, maybe, I set myself up with an array of preconceived notions about the kind of family I would like to make, and then beat … myself [up] when things don’t work out the way I envisioned.
Through accepting reality, we find a greater capacity to love what is.
Over time, I learned to let go of my fantasy of the perfect family and to find beauty, meaning, and wholeness in the heart of reality. Unpredictable, ever-changing, humiliating, and humbling reality. I began to take a look at the white supremacy embedded in my liberal self-image, noticing the odor of a white savior complex rising from my resentment that my brown children did not appreciate all I had done for them. Eventually, I even came to love unlovable me, against all odds.
Chances are, if you are a parent, whether adoptive or biological, you too have experienced the collapse of your parenting fantasies. You also have received an open invitation to accept the kids you have and forgive the parent you are, with a degree of humility bordering on humiliation and a dash of humor that can sometimes carry maniacal overtones….
This is the human condition. And at the very center of your own shattered dream, the face of the sacred flashes and glimmers. The holy disaster is a beckoning. Come. Enter the fire of love and let it remake you again and again. To be an ordinary, everyday mystic is to take your rightful place on the throne of what is.
| MLK: The False God of Science |
 Click Here for AudioIn his first sermon about idolatry from July 1953, Martin Luther King Jr. makes clear that few idols are entirely evil. Their lure comes from their goodness and utility. This is certainly true of science. MLK noted how science has improved our world:“It was quite easy for modern man to put his ultimate faith in science because science had brought about such remarkable advances, such tangible and amazing victories. He realized that man through his scientific genius had dwarfed distances and placed time in chains. He noticed the new comforts that had been brought about by science, from the vast improvements in communication to the elimination of many dread plagues and diseases.”King’s words are even more relevant today as smartphones and the internet have “dwarfed distances and placed time in chains” in ways he could never have imagined. It is this remarkable power that makes science such a tempting idol. The solution, King said, is not the abandonment of science nor the demonization of those utilizing it for good. Because it has been idolized in the modern world, some Christian fundamentalists incorrectly see science as a threat to God and faith, and therefore reject it entirely—even during a global pandemic that killed millions. This, said King, is the wrong response. Instead, we must utilize the gift of science while also recognizing its limits. He said:“Is not science important for the progress of civilization? To this I would answer yes. No person of sound intelligence could minimize science. It is not science in itself that I am condemning, but it is the tendency of projecting it to the status of God that I am condemning. We must come to see that science only furnishes us with the means by which we live, but never with the spiritual ends for which we live.“In this sermon, the 24-year-old minister was echoing Augustine who said, “Idolatry is worshiping what should be used and using what should be worshiped.” Science is a powerful tool that we ought to use for the alleviation of suffering and the advancement of the common good. Yet in the end it is just a tool to be used, it should never be a replacement for God, as some atheists and materialists are inclined to promote. Science can help us accomplish our God-given work, it can satisfy our God-given curiosity about the natural world, and it is a critical resource for helping us alleviate suffering which makes it an ally, not an enemy, of God’s mission and his kingdom. Despite these blessings, however, science can never reveal the deeper mysteries of purpose, origin, and destiny. It cannot answer our deepest human needs which are satisfied in God alone. Simply put, science can answer the question “How?” but never the question “Why?” Science is a means but it cannot give meaning. DAILY SCRIPTURE PSALM 19:1–14 COLOSSIANS 1:15–20 WEEKLY PRAYERHilary of Poitiers (310–367) Keep us, O Lord, from the vain strive of words, and grant to us a constant profession of the truth. Preserve us in the faith, true and undefiled; so that we may ever hold fast that which we professed when we were baptized into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; that we may have you for our Father, that we may abide in your Son, and in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. |
