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On the evening of Valentine’s Day, the holiday of love, 200 people gathered to unite under the desire to disarm hate.  Prominent members of different religious communities spoke in response to the hate they have encountered. They each spoke with power and conviction, pushing for unity across all traditions while remaining firm in their beliefs.  The common thread across all speakers, was that we need to get to know one another. Without getting to know one another, common misconceptions are held which further drive apart communities. Tree of Life Rabbi Jeffrey Myers suggested that we get rid of the word hate and replace it with “H”. Rabbi Myers said (paraphrased), “violence is a manifestation of H speech.  It is these words that grow into actions. In order to address H, we must remove the root.” In reflecting on these profound words, I must agree. I believe the root of the problem is the heart.  I am reminded of a verse from the Hebrew Bible, “As water ref...

Each week, I look forward to a new episode of  On Being  to download and accompany me to my local Planet Fitness. Lured by the promise of hearing a new installment of Krista Tippet’s show, I muster the discipline to dutifully pound the treadmill for fifty minutes. As I provide my aging muscles a modest work out, I also exercise—often  strenuously—my imagination, my empathy, and my spirit. Tippett’s interview with poet Claudia Rankine (aired January 10, 2019) provides a perfect example. The two women held a candid, powerful conversation about the pain—often invisible to white people—that is woven into the everyday reality of people of color in this country. They did this in a way that avoided rancor, blame, and bitterness, even as they dove into a fraught topic—one that often divides people rather than bringing them closer together. Rankine shared passages from her 2014 book  Citizen: An American Lyric , a collection of poems that gives voice to and documents the cu...

In a society in which we feed ourselves on goals accomplished, problems solved, and questions answered, how do we handle unresolved loss? How do we bear the weight of grief that does not find closure? Krista Tippett interviewed Pauline Boss in an episode of On Being that aired on December 13, 2018. Boss is a family therapist who coined the term “ambiguous loss” to describe the type of loss associated with situations such as divorce, mental illness, aging, a death without a body to bury, or immigration. Boss and Tippett talk about these types of personal grief as well the societal grief associated with genocide or slavery, the suffering that is built into the DNA of a race, religion, or nation that is transmitted through generations. Pauline Boss discusses the fact that grief cannot always find closure. We do not all progress through the stages made popular by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross until we reach acceptance. We cannot expect people to package up their grief and put it away b...

As I am reading Robert Atkinson’s book “The Story of our Time; from Duality to Interconnectedness to Oneness” I am pondering the importance of meaningful conversations, such as Krista Tippet’s “civil conversations” that need to take place in order to widen the stratosphere of the mind across the globe and make the knowledge of our common humanity a realization throughout all strata of society. If we compare the four billion years of the history of our solar system to the distance of a mile, we see homo sapiens appearing 200,000 years ago, which is equivalent to less than an inch within this mile. During this span of time our ancestors came to successively see themselves as members of a family, a tribe, a village, a city, and a nation. The process of nation building has ended, and our world has in the past century and a half shrunk to a global village. We all breathe the same air, and we have become literally inter-connected economically, financially, scientifically, as well as thr...