Choose Love

I find that since the political conventions in August I have been using my meditation time mostly to diminish my generalized anxiety. The insight I received was that I should separate out my emotions about what had already happened from my fears about what might happen next. It felt clear that I would be my best self if I used about ninety-five percent of my capacity to focus on metabolizing the emotions about what had actually happened. My understanding seemed to indicate that I had enough internal strength and energy to work on staying current with, understanding and healing those reactions. What was keeping me out of balance was that although I did not have enough capacity to spend anymore than five percent of my energy on possible future events, they had been running away with me.

The final illumination was that in order to stay personally in balance I must always choose love. The expression that this took was the reminder that the rain falls on the just and the unjust. God loves all of us. God loves candidate A. God loves candidate B. God loves me. The spark of the Divine resides in us all. In the final analysis, after all of the feelings have been acknowledged, it is this love that I must come home to. It is the truth of both loving our neighbor and loving our “enemy”. I was reminded that sometimes choosing love means choosing something bigger than the current situation. When it is difficult for me to find in myself love for candidate A and B, I can shift my thinking up to something bigger than both of them, that I do love, like living in a country that says it ascribes to the ideal of both truth and justice. I don’t set aside my commitment and call to make justice in the world. I remember that all of those justice making efforts must take root in the soil of love. Love that embraces me and all of us together.

The Rev. Dr. Roxanne WhiteLight is the leader of the on-line Creation Spirituality Interfaith Experience. Roxanne is as a regular guest preacher at several local Maui churches. She is part of Resource for Christian Spirituality that offers pilgrimages to the site of the former Hansen’s Disease Settlement at Kalaupapa, on Molokai. She regularly teaches classes and leads retreats on a diverse range of topics including the blessings of creation, Aramaic Understanding of the Jesus’s message, Mary Magdalene and spiritual development. She also teaches Chi Kung, Interplay and other embodied spiritual practices. She was ordained in 1993.