our longest stride

Diane Pendola has put out another wonderful reflection in her season essay called Earthlines:

Can we destroy evil by destroying a person who incarnates evil? Or are we all diminished by this choice,  sinking us as a community towards the evil we seek to eliminate? Jesus said, "Those whose sins you forgive are forgiven. Those whose sins you retain are retained." I wonder, if by championing the death penalty we do not continue to retain the sin in our own communal body? In a cosmotheandric reality we are not a collection of individuals, we are a community of persons. As a community of persons, intrinsically interconnected with one another, can we choose to live by the higher values of our human natures?  Can we lift up the most wounded members of our body rather than seeking to destroy those parts of ourselves that stubbornly resist destruction (as history demonstrates) but which still remain an open possibility of transformation? I am not saying that the perpetrators of this horrible crime should ever be on the streets again. But can I - we -see them as human, as  human beings capable of great evil,  perpetrators of great evil but more than the evil within them? This is very difficult. But it goes to the heart of who we understand ourselves to be as human beings. Human consciousness is  responsible for the greatest evils in the world- and the greatest love. Do we believe that evil is an ultimate power? Then there is no possibility of forgiveness and the law of karma eventually devours us.  Do we believe that Love is the ultimate power? Then forgiveness is possible. Then we can re-invent what it means to be human.

...  I am engaged in an experiment that demands the longest stride of soul I ever took. Those relegated to the dark cells of our prisons and the rejected corners of our minds are us. We rise or fall together. We cannot deny the evil that is within us any more....

    The human heart can go to the lengths of God.

            Dark and cold we may be, but this

            Is no winter now.

            The frozen misery

            Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move,

            The thunder is the thunder of the flows,

            The thaws, the flood, the upstart Spring.

            Thank God our time is now when wrong

            Comes up to face us everywhere,

            Never to leave us 'til we take

            The longest stride of soul one ever took.

            Affairs are now soul size.

            The enterprise

            Is exploration into God.                             (Christopher Fry, The Sleep of Prisoners)

I suggest reading the whole essay and getting on her email list! 

Haola and Happy Holidays

Death Row Prayer Cards

Today I discovered this story on the Death Penalty Focus website that told  of Ray McKeon's  creation of the prayer cards for Death Row inmates in 2002.  Having one of these prayer cards on my dash board for a year or so was a powerful experience as I would pray for the Death Row inmate, his family, the victim and their family. It was me that was transformed.  Prayer by prayer I opened to the humanity both suffering and healing.  The power of these simple cards really is at the root of this current Call to Prayer.  Thanks Ray!

Work of unimaginable significance

Today I was at a local Restorative Justice Meeting and had a deep inquiry conversation with my co-author of the phamphlet and then this opens up in fromt of me in my inbox.... four steps forward today!

 There's Nothing "Magical" about Societal Healing by James O'Dea

"Yet we know that our collective wounds can be addressed and that societies can make progress in healing the most virulent wounds of the past. Social healing tools involve learning about the role and practice of deep dialogue; learning from the basic insights of mind/body health and healing; drawing from contemporary insights into the nature of consciousness and human capacities; testing new approaches to collective trauma recovery; practicing modalities of listening including compassionate and integral listening; promoting forgiveness and atonement; learning about different cultural approaches to restorative justice; exploring the process of truth-telling and mutual acknowledgment; and exploring the interface of personal narrative and historical narrative where subjective experience is empathically honored. None of these approaches is particularly fast-track.
...
This is work of unimaginable significance for humanity, requiring the ability to access reservoirs of courage and compassion. It is work on the long road of healing. The miracle is that it is able to encompass any past horror and resolve it in a way that it no longer ends up in the hearts of future generations.
Maybe, just maybe, a day will come when a wave of love will enter unhampered into the hearts of coming generations with such power that it washes away all the toxins of hatred.
And not unlike the hundredth monkey who learned to wash the mud off her yams and started a revolution, whose innovative behavior entered the field of awareness for other monkeys to copy, maybe reconciling love in enough humans will tilt the whole human enterprise away from its contagiously wounded past. Until then, one healing step at a time, and then another, and another."

Spontaneous Evolution

Last night I saw Swami Beyondananda and purchased the book, Spontaneous Evolution his alter ego Steve Bhaerman wrote with Bruce Lipton.  It looks like an excellent chance to dialogue on the evolution of the prison system.  Even if this is a conversation solely between the book and myself, I feel good about it being in the common.

In the introduction they lift up the biological example of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.  Both have the same DNA but are receiving and responding to a different organizing signal. From within the dying cells of the caterpillar, a new breed of cells energy called imaginal cells emerges and creates an entirely new form.

Those of us deeply engaged in awakening the potential of our prisons to become a healthy, healing environment contributing to the betterment of our collective human story on this planet, are the imaginal cells, it is from us that an entire new form will emerge.  Our prayers send the signal and collese the energy the (our) imaginal cells need for the transformational process.

As Swami Beyondananda enjoys saying, "we are the answer to our own prayers!"  And even as we may not have an articulated vision for what that answer might be, we offer up our prayers.  We can trust that the information for the new way forward is in our collective DNA.  Every spiritual tradition calls us to move from fear to love, this is the overarching evolutionary process of human life. All life forms seek their free flowing nature.

As we pray for the prisons to become places of healing and peace we are taping into the deep evolutionary nature of life it self seeking its own true nature.  As we pray for the prisons we are activating this natural desire and energizing the millions of imaginal cells seeking the new way.

As we pray for the prisons, we naturally shift away from old beliefs focusing on the worst in people, and begin to believe in the possibility of transformation for everyone and every institution. The stronger our beliefs, the greater the opportunity for this shift to occur within our lifetime.

Radical change in mindset (for example shifting to a belief that slavery is immoral) has taken centuries, and decades (shifting belief that tobacco is unhealthy), and now years (global warming). In our interconnected world we can shift very quickly towards fear and love (9-11).

Prisons as a special kind of health care delivery is very possible, we have the information, we have the creativity, we have the skills, all we need is the desire.  Prayer takes the desire hidden in our hearts into the collective field. Prayer is an act of empowerment, for such an effort will only manifest as a result of the shifting of our collective will.