Genesis of Change

"This is the genesis of change,

 right before our eyes, and it's inspiring."

- Jim Whitlock 

Originally published on Oct. 20, 2011

Today we are being graced with a look at the Occupy Buffalo experience by Jim Whitlock, who is well known among Buffalo's peace and justice community for supporting a variety of peace initiatives. 

     As an active member of the Inter-Faith Peace Network, IPN; Riverside-Salem UCC, and serves on the Board of Governors of the Network of Religious Communities as the voting alternate for IPN, with Rev. Pierre Albrecht-Carrié as primary IPN representative, he is deeply committed to social justice. He has also been serving on the Coordinating Board of the Western New York Peace Center for eight years. 


"I took a Russian graduate student down to our own encampment last night. They all drew her right in and even across the language and culture differences she was struck by the spirit of the group. Indeed, that's what impresses me most of all, their spirit. More than with most such ad-hoc groups, I see God's light shining brightly in each and every one of them.


We're not so numerous in Occupy Buffalo as they are in Portland, OR, but we seem to be following similar paths with regard to marshalling non-intrusive support from those of us who have already been around similar blocks.

In Buffalo we have a lively background network of old-timers who are working on recruiting and coordinating local union leaders, legal support volunteers, and people to help with food supplies, a porta-potty and shelter support. I stopped down yesterday afternoon, for example, to donate a decent propane heater and a few 20 lb propane cylinders, after making sure that we would likely have organizational support for ongoing propane costs. It's just lovely the way one after another union and benevolent association is falling-in behind the folks out there in our public parks and squares.

When I participate in the consensus-model assemblies and discussions, I'm struck by what seems to be a clear throw-back to the Greek city-states, archetypes of democracy, vital thriving town-square democracies, except that what we see in our town squares today is far more egalitarian, property ownership not being required to cast a vote. If you're there and can raise your hand, you're a citizen with not only full voting rights but even the power to completely block a motion with nothing more than your own solitary blocking vote!


Oh, I know, what a nightmare of confusion and endless debate, you might say. But no, they're also marvelous with a generosity of spirit and a surprising maturity that allows them to converge reasonably once all relevant points have been heard and considered. If our futures are in their hands, we have good solid reason to remain optimistic.


I'm also struck by the number of new faces, especially during the daytime general assemblies on weekends. They include a complete cross-section of ages, including young moms and dads with infants in papoose-carriers right on up to old dinosaurs like me. And in Buffalo, at least, about half the crowd (based on my random sampling) have never before been involved in any sort of political activism at all! So who cares that it's taking time for such an ad hoc group to forge clear objectives and messages? The folks who have never been out before have taken a first small step and they like what they feel. They'll be back. And I believe in social momentum -- bodies in motion tend to stay in motion, accelerating as they go. This is the genesis of change, right before our eyes, and it's inspiring.


We're touching people -- one on one, person to person and heart to heart -- the only deeply meaningful way. They're clearly affected. The rest is in Gods hands and cannot be bad. Besides, the most precious wisdom I've been given the last few decades is that outcomes are not our department. We only get to do the legwork and if it's good legwork with good people then we'll make progress and the world will be a little bit better when we stop to rest."

Top and center photos by James O. Whitlock

Americans must stand together, put aside political differences

     Almost prophetically, in this Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s final speech he thanks his audience for coming despite a storm warning. That storm is among us today!

     There have always been those wise and courageous ones who lift us up out of our dispirited struggle in a world of war desperately in pursuit of peace. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was such a person. His dream ignited a national and global dream for peace.

     Dr. King’s vision is timeless. It still speaks, leads, inspires and guides us forward, calling us to unity. He called us, as he was called, to dream a much bigger dream for our lives, our communities, our nation, and our world.

     Among Dr. King’s closest friends were people like Thich Nhat Hanh who inspired him to help shoulder his banner for peace. They ignited a passionate vision for peace and global healing that continues today among those who hold a lighted lamp in these dark days.

     While our nation is a house divided against itself, polarized by strongly held views which are sometimes incomprehensible to the opposing side, NOW would be a great time to begin healing that divide, rebuilding our nation based on Dr. King’s dream and step together into our brighter future strengthened by our unity as one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for ALL.

     Together! We can do this! Today! We must do this!

     If we honor our nation’s founders who courageously stood up against an oppressive empire only a couple short centuries ago, who bequeathed to us a responsibility to protect and preserve their dream of a free nation, one for which they fought and died, we must heal the enemy within our borders, and mend our own divisiveness.

     Sadly, there are those in our government who are leading us astray, pulling us further apart by fanning the flames of division. We need to stand together in opposition to anything that divides us or attempts to defeat us. We are strong, and even stronger united together.

     Over the years, we have stood up against oppression as we identified it in our midst in the many forms it showed up and weeded it out. We seemed to find the strength, vision, and courage to come together to preserve the soul of our nation.

     Today, together, we must dream of a reUnited States, and mend the great and terrible divide that is tearing us apart.

     In honor of the late Dr. King, we must put our differences aside. The list of what can divide us is long, insidious, and wicked (political, religious, ethnic, economic).

     There is a much bigger dream awaiting us, if we can stand up against the enemy within our nation that seeks to destroy us, even seducing us to combat our brothers and sisters with whom we share this precious country. There are many more important things we as a nation can do for ourselves and the world than fight a civil war of the heart here. Let’s hold Dr. King’s dream closer to our hearts and have the courage to face down whatever attempts to divide us.

     The future of our nation is in our hands.

A Divine Invasion of Love

The nativity of Jesus is an extraordinary and radiant account of divine intervention into the dark world of humanity at a time that typifies all of human history throughout all time, all cultures, generations, centuries as far back as recorded history reaches.

Originally, I considered the Jesus story a "living myth," one that actually occurred but one that has an archetypal iconic depth of timeless meaning that speaks to us on almost every level of our common existence. It seemed like a parabolic unfolding with incredible depths and meaning.

After further reflection, I began to see the Jesus story as more than that. While it may have happened historically as reported in Matthew and Luke, it is a sacrament itself - an expression or revelation of a divine reality within our dark oppressive culture of death. It has catalytic power to change us, to move the mountains that stand in our way of living authentically, guiding us into the divine/human beings we were meant to be.

As I read it again after some time, it seemed the sparkling radiance of the Star that lit up the night sky, terrifying shepherds who were watching their flocks, was a sign of a divine penetration into our "dark night." Then, a heavenly chorus of angels, divine messengers, arrived as accompanying ambassadors from another realm, announcing the arrival of a king, whose arrival was quite normal - through birth.

The birth of the divine infant was in stark contrast with the way humans typically announce the arrival of a dignitary from another country with all the fanfare, red carpets, even military display - uniformed men marching in perfect step to the orders of a commanding officer to display a nation's power.  Military might versus angels from heaven is a startling contrast of the intersection of heaven and earth. 

One can almost hear heaven saying to the people of Earth, "Hush thy noise, ye men of strife, I've come in peace to heal and help you."

Heaven sent angels.  We send tough, power-crazed military leaders threatening to nuke the world.  Heaven's king came as a vulnerable infant born to a young woman in a remote cave where animals were stabled, wrapped in soft cloths and placed in the animals' feeding trough of hay - a manger.

The infant king, unlike a Saudi leader staying in a Trump tower, needed nothing more than the love he came with. It was powerful enough to speak to a world in dire need of the gift he brought us.

He simply brought the love he came from. He was the message and the messenger.  Human beings since, have worshipped and idolized the messenger but may have lost or forgotten the power and value of the message. 

This precious baby, this gift from heaven brought heaven to us. He was a jewel of great price clothed in a human body.  He was the pearl of great price - precious, powerful, efficacious; yet, he was a jewel we failed to understand and rejected.  Perhaps, it was because the false human leadership felt threatened because His love couldn't be controlled or corrupted.

The pearl of love he was and brought us is self-less, surrendered to life itself, nonjudgmental, accepting, honoring, compassionate, caring, fearless, and courageous, informed and driven by a rare and unique wisdom through which He was able to connect with a greater source of universal intelligence, consciousness, compassion, and power.

The love that he was is magnetic, electronic, transformative with the ability to change matter, rearrange particles on a cellular level with the single stroke of thought.  His power emanated from the love with which he thought and projected according to his intention which was only love.

He was living love by Being Love and Doing Love. He was thoroughly saturated with perfect love which he revealed as the creative life force itself.  

He instructed us how to become as he is, and thereby be free and powerful.  He wore our humanity infused with the essence of life itself - Love. We learned from him love is a power stronger than death even transcending every limitation we could think of - including torture and death. 

He was the essence of love, the perfect emanation from the universal creator.  His love came here to teach us how to love.  

In contrast, Herod and his minions - the illegitimate chief priests of the temple, must have intuitively sensed his cosmic power.  They must have felt threatened. Their limited, fear-driven power was the insanity that ruled this world - and still does - enslaving and slowly poisoning everyone and everything.

He allowed us to see his Radical Love in all its brilliant power and beauty on the same stage as their dark, manipulative, selfish, secretive, psychopathic exploitation of the animals and the poor, reducing the lives of the people to bare subsistence.  His message to them is his message to us today.  Love.

His love wept, felt compassion, and yet was unfailing, uncompromising, relentless, courageous right up to the end when his love forgave those who falsely accused him, whipped him, and hung him up to die.

In the end, as in the beginning, they couldn't kill his love.  The power that he was so far surpasses anything we could ever imagine. It transcends everything we've ever known.  As life itself, it is still here.  He said this love is who we are.  It is who we were designed to be. 

In his prayer, he offers us an idea on how to get back to who we are. In an act of our free will, we pray, "Thy will be done," we pray to our divine creator.  We surrender and submit to love, who is the creator and creative force for our lives and our world. 

still  under construction . . . 

Peaceful Paradise

I wrote the following on November 26, 2011, when I lived in Portland, Oregon.  It was a powerful time in my life for many reasons.  I share this again because I still feel and believe it as much as I did then.

Our magnificent Earth, spread out before us like a rich banquet, was always meant to be a lover's playground, a paradise in which we would sense and feel the Great Lover's presence, who also shared with us His own love, wisdom, and perfect union with our own souls.  

This beautifully diverse planet was meant to be our home, with challenges to our survival to teach and evolve us spiritually and with gifts of food, companionship of the animals, beauty from the flowers, rivers, mountains and valleys.  The ecstatic beauty around mirrored the passion and joy of our own love embedded within us, the greatest of gifts from our Creator.  

Our life here was always meant to be about love, the spiritual essence of the Great Lover, who with His love courted our love and was overjoyed with its return. Whenever we loved another, the Great Lover felt His own love returned to Him. We were created to love. We were made into material form from spiritual substance, to be a container for the Great Lover's own love, to experience in the deepest regions of our eternal souls the greatest of loves, borne first on the wings of our very ordinary human love - the love of two people.  

It was always meant to be simple.  Love is simple.  It flows like a river, as the I Ching says and as Jesus says to the woman at the well.  Are we not all like that woman at the well, seeking eternal truth in a world now flooded with deceit?  But are we all willing to offer a cup of water to a stranger?

When we open our hearts, we are lifting the stone rock that covers the well.  When we sing in joy; dance in free abandon; selflessly hold another's secrets or wounds or hands or embrace another in love to share that great love the Great Lover has placed within our own beings, we draw from the great well.  

When we look into the eyes of our human lover, we see into his or her soul with our own. In that moment, we are the most honest, the most holy. In those moments, we are drawing from that well. 

When we love another, our minds are freed from our ego, own fear, competition and greed.  Love breaks the bondage of the ego.  It is the ultimate freedom from a world of judgment, criticism, selfish consumption, punishment.  

When we are drunk in love, we can sing in the rain, push through winter's stormy ferocity without feeling the cold or wet. That love makes us courageous and free.  In those moments, we move beyond our own limited humanity and are connected with our truest, most sacred nature, our divine nature, our most human nature.  In those moments, we touch God in the flowing of His love through our own inner wells into the heart of another.

                                   

                                   There is no salvation for the soul

                                   but to fall in Love. 

                                   It has to creep and crawl

                                   among the lovers first.

                                  Only Lovers can escape 

                                  from these two worlds 

                                  This was written in Creation.

                                  Only from the Heart

                                  can you reach the sky

                                  The rose of Glory

                                  can only be raised in the Heart.

                                                        - Rumi

When fear or trauma closes our hearts, we can sink into the darker layers of our human experience, a den of thieves where the ego reigns, oppressing, hungering to feed itself until it grows into a dragon, frothing in fiery hate and anger, preying on others with its lies, which are a mockery, a broken mirror offering only shards of love. 

Maybe the world has forgotten there is or ever was a well in the heart. We could slay that ancient foe if we were willing to open our hearts, risk the scorn and ridicule of fear.  Are we willing to open that dark den of pain, where our soul has been languishing a lifetime?  Are we willing to hold our own self, our "inner child," separated for a lifetime from the source of its life by our own betrayal, our own self victimization? It takes great courage to open our hearts - maybe first to another and then to ourselves, where we can encounter our own divine child.  

In each chance to love, we are given a gift from the Great Lover to try again, to love again, to enter into the great marriage, the divine love relationship. 

This great love, is what it was always all about.  It may be the essence, the center, of the teachings of the very earliest church, the one I see as the only authentic Christian church, which met secretly centuries before the formation of the Roman Church with its popes, male hierarchy and magisterium, which came to rule the western world like the oppressive monarchies with which it once kept intimate company.

The first of Jesus' miracles was the wedding at Cana, a living parable of what real love, a wedding of our selves with the Great Lover, would be like.  It transforms us from ordinary beings into spirited beings.  It changes our dull lives into lives of so much joy, so much vitality.  It lifts off the stone that covers our inner well, where the light of love, the sacred substance of God flows freely, unrestrained by any of the dark powers of this world. 

When we accept the invitation life gives us to love another, despite our simple, flawed, frightened and broken human lives, we meet the divine lover, the Beloved, in the eyes of another simple, flawed, human being.  I truly feel that God would rather we reach to love another than live in fear's dark pit.  It may be the most courageous thing we ever do, but to live with a closed heart is not to live; it atrophies our soul, diminishes our light and wastes our precious time here doing nothing.

                       Those who don't feel this love

                        pulling them like a river,

                        those who don't drink dawn

                        like a cup of spring water

                        or take in sunset like supper,

                        those who don't want to change,

                        let them sleep.

                       This love is beyond the study of theology, 

                       that old trickery and hypocrisy.

                       If you want to improve your mind that way;

                       sleep on.

                       I've given up on my brain,

                       I've torn the cloth to shreds

                       and thrown it away.

                       If you're not completely naked,

                       wrap your beautiful robe of words around you,

                       and sleep.

                                                         - Rumi

Our Ascension

As you search your mind, your soul, your heart, you may find that you've been living in a dark dream for most of your life, or maybe you haven't.  Maybe you've been living a life of great joy, of on-going enlightenment, one day after another and are now so full of the power of light and love that you could lift up to the highest heights.

Did you know that we were born to fly, to soar spiritually, and become powerful enough to change matter and create - maybe even the great pyramids? Maybe we really once did - maybe a million years ago - during an ancient golden age that is long lost from our collective memory.  Hopi (Native American) sages say that the human experience on Earth has had five rounds and each one has somehow self-destructed.  We are now in our fifth round. This time we won't self destruct.  We are going to make it.  I believe it.

We will each begin to spread our wings when and as we access our own power, our own self-determination to pursue our own dreams, our own blueprint, which I discussed yesterday. Until we do that, we are locked down, tethered to the cave, by our fear.  When we become free and filled with the joy of life, the power of our own creative spirit, we will begin to extend our spiritual wings.  Fear is an anchor, a cage, a dungeon.  Liberty and freedom open us to our own power and creativity.  The world needs each and every one of us to extend our wings as far as they can reach and then lift up, feel the power throughout our selves, our lives, our bodies and allow that power to extend through to the tips of our great magnificent spiritual wings, filling us completely with the power of God's light, love, and life.

Then, we will restore our beautiful Earth. We will reduce our populations by honoring the dignity of each person which includes limiting our population.  We will honor all of life on this precious planet. We will remember how to be kind.  We will ensure that every child has clean water, nutritious food, education, and love. We will grow spiritually until we are so full of God's great spiritual light and love that we will all become like angels in our ability to create, heal, and love - love as we've never loved before. 

This is my prayer for all of us.  My prayer, my blueprint on my own internal vision board, is that we would all be filled with the light of heaven. It's there if we would open our minds, our whole selves to it and be very intentional about what we seek for our lives individually and collectively.  I pray and envision that we would all become joyous, loving, great beings of light.  I pray that we would all unfurl our tightly bound wings and spread them until all their tips touched and we wrapped the globe with our light and healed our beautiful Earth, a perfect home for us.  And, in that great celebration of life, light, and love, I pray we would all ascend to a higher dimension while still on the Earth.

Cosmology of liberation

If you are ever to find peace - and joy - you first have to free your mind.

The single predominant mystical path to God in the teachings of Jesus and Moses is the concept that we, as children of God, are called to be free as God is free, filled with the creative power of love as God is love.  It is a cosmology of liberation, a paradigm of whole-life freedom beginning first with a free mind. Some worry that liberation means freedom from the law as if there is no other kind of freedom.  There is another kind of freedom. 

Perhaps Buddhism has the best description of it, but then so does the Gospel of Thomas.  Buddhism calls us to detach from everything and the Gospel of Thomas calls us to "be passersby."

The ultimate freedom is freedom from our own thoughts, which stem from the thoughts and emotional manipulations - even physical oppression - of others that have been handed down to us, even taught to us by well meaning parents and others.

To test if your mind is free, ask yourself: "Am I in a deep, all pervading state of bliss?"  "Do I feel God's love for me?" "Do I feel peaceful no matter what is happening to me or around me?" 

Probably, like most of us, you will grasp the idea but still feel little things nagging at you.  It's winter in the northern hemisphere and the lack of sunlight has a depressing effect and so we enter into that state.  There's never enough money to accomplish our goals and so that takes a toll on our joy.  Etc.  Then, there's the fear of what your boss will say or do next, what your kids will do or who they might bring to the dinner table, or the million other things that seem to sabotage your day.  There will always be these things.  There always have been and there always will be. 

The challenge is not how we will pay our bills or children's college tuition.  The challenge is how are we going to stay centered in our Christ-consciousness where there is only peace and bliss.  How are we going to stay in an inner state of paradise and not get dragged out into the mental hell of all these demanding things.  That is the challenge.

When our mind is free, it won't be attached to any thought that will take it away from its natural state of bliss.  If we are not in bliss, our minds are not yet free.

As you consider this, you may want to take some time to think again about what you're thinking and feeling.  Even make a list of the thoughts that seem to torment you and trace them back to their source.  That source will be some dragon of sorts.  Once you unveil them, like the little man behind the curtian in the Wizard of Oz, you will dispel its power over you.  You can do this with all the thoughts that hold you captive in a perpetual state of dis-ease.

Remember that God's reality, authentic eternal reality, is an endless sea of God's perfect, powerful, abounding love for you. It is a love so powerful, so radiantly creatively alive, that you would be immediately transformed by the simple awareness and acceptance of it.

The new world will be about this.  It will be about liberating your mind from all those old thoughts that hold you in a state of dis-ease through guilt and manipulation in all kinds of little incidious ways.  And, while you're navigating through those thoughts, like sunken barges in a shallow marina, consider that all that is true, that is authentic and real, is love.  It is the power and life, the creative power to create the world you would rather have.  It's yours once you claim your mind back from all those others who have gotten into your head and are holding you captive in a dungeon of on-going spiritual poverty. 

This is just a thought I share with you as I also work on this.  It's a journey and maybe the most noble of any journey we'll ever take.  I know it is for me.  So, join me, as we set sail for paradise right here, right now, right where we are.

Give Me Your Hand

God speaks to each of us as he makes us, 

then walks with us silently out of the night.  

These are the words we dimly hear:  

"You, sent out beyond your recall, 

go to the limits of your longing.  

Embody me.  

Flare up like flame 

and make big shadows 

I can move in. 

Let everything happen to you; 

beauty and terror.  

Just keep going. 

No feeling is final.  

Don't let yourself lose Me.  

Nearby is the country they call life.   

You will know it by its seriousness.  

Give me your hand."  

Rainer Maria Rilke, 

The Book of Hours