One Heart at a Time ~ Answered Prayer

Answered Prayer

Lynda Allen

I sit beside the river and pray.

There are no words to my prayer,

there is only me in the silence, prayerful,

waiting for the words to form that can express the longing of my soul for reunion.

The longing of my soul for the Beloved,

the one I have felt,

to appear, to take form before me.

A tail thrashes and breaks the surface of the water.

Raindrops form perfect circles as they rejoin their kin in the river.

With its prize firmly grasped in its talons, an osprey shakes off the water like a dog,

following a perfect dive below the surface.

All touch and transform the ever flowing waters.

The Beloved recognized in each raindrop and ripple,

in each dive below the surface,

and in each stirring that reaches out from within.

One Heart at a Time

I am afraid.

It was one line from a song I heard a few days ago. It caught my attention. We all feel afraid in some aspect of our lives. We are afraid to fail, we are afraid to succeed, we are afraid to love and even to be loved, we are afraid to take a risk, we are afraid to be alone, we are afraid we will be bad parents, we are afraid to let our loved ones down, we are afraid we will get sick, we are afraid of the unknown, we are afraid of each other. There is so much we fear at one point or another and yet we rarely talk about our fears, some don’t talk about them at all. Without looking at them or facing them, they just continue to live within us.

One of my greatest fears is that I won’t live my purpose, my purpose to listen the way I know how to listen, and share what I hear. There, I said it, and the world didn’t come to an end because I was afraid, but my dream could end if I don’t move past the fear. The sad truth is that often we let the fear we feel, create the very thing we fear. I will choose to feel the fear and continue to move forward anyway. A great lesson I learned from a great man, civil rights leader James Farmer. Courage, he told me, is not the absence of fear, but the choice to move forward despite the fear. Courageous people are not fearless, but they won’t let their fear make them less.

Looking upon my fear with as much grace and courage as I can muster, I set it aside.

For years I have struggled with how I can best live my purpose in this life. It’s clear to me that one thing I’ve come here to do is to listen, to listen to individuals, and to listen to the words that move through my heart. The words sometimes come from a bird, a tree, or a flower. Sometimes they come from the inspiration and insights of a great teacher. Sometimes they come from a photograph or a song, or people I know, or even people I haven’t met. There are stories and poetry all around in this beautiful, grace filled life. Always, always the true origin of the words is Spirit.

The struggle is always what to do with those words. So far, I have shared them as best I can. The constant I have always known about them is that they were always meant to speak from the heart of Spirit, to my heart, to the hearts of others. They are meant to create transformation; a kind of alchemy between the spirit and the human. I know this because I have witnessed it within my own heart. I have witnessed it in the process of writing; watching the pain flow freely and by the end of the flow of the words, discovering that healing was woven within them. My heart’s desire is no more than to offer that same alchemy, that same opportunity for healing to others.

I am afraid though. I’m afraid because I don’t know what that looks like; I don’t know the plan for that sharing. That fear often distracts me and keeps me from doing anything at all. Even when I know part of the plan, I can still let that fear of the unknown stop me. Not this time.

At the beginning of the year I felt a calling, a nudge, an inspiration. I don’t have to know more than this one thing: the words are meant to reach out one heart at a time. For now that is all I need to know, and I do know it, deep within me. So I am consciously, mostly joyfully, birthing what came to me as One Heart at a Time.

To begin with I will be sharing poetry on my blog and on Facebook and potentially other social media platforms. Perhaps it will be just one poem a month, but with intention. The intention is that the poem be shared, one heart at a time. I invite you, if the poem speaks to you, to share it with other hearts, and to encourage them if they feel called to, to share it with other hearts. Share it in any way you like, in person with a loved one, online, in school, at church, at a poetry reading, however you feel called to. All I ask is that you note where it came from – with Peace, Gratitude, and Love from my heart to yours.

The Infection of Hatred

Here's how I'm looking at the state of affairs in the United States at the moment.

We have an infection. We collectively ignored it for too long. So it has gotten deeper under the skin than we had imagined, and it has formed an abscess. The bacteria that created the infection is hatred, and it entered our system through a wound created by fear. We've been told for so long to fear the other - the other color, the other religion, the other political party, the other gender, the other class, the other side of the tracks - that the words eventually broke through the skin of our collective consciousness.

As with any infection, when left untreated the patient can develop sepsis. According the Mayo Clinic, "the goal is to treat sepsis during its early stage, before it becomes more dangerous." Here are some of the symptoms of the early stages:

Heart rate higher than 90 beats a minute

Respiratory rate higher than 20 breaths a minute

Has anyone else been feeling like collectively things have been ramping up, that our hearts have been beating faster, or that we've had to remind ourselves to take slow, deep breaths? I think we have moved past the early stages of our infection.

Here are some signs that it has progressed to severe sepsis: Abrupt change in mental status, difficulty breathing, abnormal heart pumping function, abdominal pain. Sadly, I believe the patient can safely be said to have moved into a state of severe sepsis.

Again according the Mayo Clinic, "Most people recover from mild sepsis, but the mortality rate for septic shock is nearly 50 percent. Also, an episode of severe sepsis may place you at higher risk of future infections."

Here's the really wild thought that occurred to me. What if we wouldn't collectively have noticed the infection below the surface in time without the fever of hatred, the racing hearts of ugly words? What if we were so blind to the infection that this was the only way to draw our attention to the illness before it killed us?

So what do you do when there's an infection under the surface? One of the possible courses of action is to put a poultice on the skin to draw the infection out. What can we use to draw out the infectious bacteria of hatred? Well, a poultice works by using “substances that naturally exhibit drawing power.” What are people drawn to that is more powerful than hatred? The answer is simple but true; love. Say what you will, there is nothing more powerful than love, nothing that can more easily draw the attention away from fear. In the wise words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.”

The choice then that lies before us as a nation is clear, and it’s not about electing a president. It’s not up to the candidates, the pundits, or the media. It is up to each and every one of us in every interaction we have, every day. It’s a choice we can’t wait until November to make. We are already burning up with fever. We must choose now, will we choose to heal ourselves through love, or succumb to our infectious hatred?

Raised Voices

So here’s the thing, I’ve been listening to The Book Thief. It’s an excellent, powerful, heartbreaking story set in Nazi Germany. It’s interesting because the narrator is Death. I’ve never thought about how busy Death is during war, especially a war where people are dying not just on the front lines, but by the millions in concentration camps. Camps that were created because of leaders living out the hatred in their hearts, because of leaders living their false beliefs of superiority, because of leaders grouping whole religions or races together and labeling them good and bad, because of leaders without compassion, but also, and most frighteningly, because of people of compassion staying silent out of fear.

This is not the time to be silent in our country. There are people vying to be the leader of our beloved nation who have fear and hatred and bigotry in their hearts and it’s time we call it what it is. I can’t stand quietly by and wait until all that’s left for me to do is to try to save one or two lives from the suffering of unimaginable persecution. We must call a bully a bully now, we must point out racism and bigotry now, we must stand together now for what is good and just in our country, of which there is much. Most of all we must first root out of ourselves any bigotry or racism, any thoughts of superiority, any hatred, any fear, because make no mistake, these things are showing up in our country because they are showing up or have shown up in ourselves. We must look at our neighbors and see a reflection of ourselves. We can’t just turn away and say, they are uneducated, they are racist, they are hateful. We must find those things in ourselves and turn them out. Then offer our hand to our neighbors.

We must. Or else we may soon find that we can no longer recognize or live with ourselves.

In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” 

Let us be friends with raised voices. Now.

A Definition of Privilege

I woke up the other morning with a definition of privilege floating around in my mind. I wasn’t working on a piece about privilege, so I’m not sure why it appeared at that moment, however since there has been a great deal of discussion and debate about white privilege I got myself to my computer to see where the definition led. It seemed like a clear and simple depiction for the concept. White privilege (or any kind of privilege) is the luxury of imagination. It is the luxury to choose whether or not to imagine. It is the luxury to use the phrases, “I can only imagine,” or “I can’t even imagine.”

People of privilege can only imagine the experience of being followed around a store from the moment you walk in until the moment you leave, because of an assumption that the color of your skin makes you more likely to shoplift. People of privilege can only imagine what it’s like to be stopped by the police over and over and over again because of racial profiling.  People of privilege can choose not to imagine what it’s like to grow up as a young black man in the United States knowing that because of the color of your skin you are more likely to go to prison or to die young. According to this disturbing article in the New York Times, 1.5 Million Missing Black Men, “more than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life,” disappeared either through incarceration or death. People of privilege can only imagine what it’s like to be the mother or father of one of those young men and know that you can’t keep your child safe from bigotry and the physical, spiritual, and emotional harm it brings.  People of privilege can only imagine what it’s like to be the only white face in a classroom, or a boardroom. People of privilege can only imagine what it’s like to be hired, or asked to sit on a committee to make a company or school look good, rather than simply because of the talents and skills you bring. People of privilege can choose not to imagine what it’s like to be hated simply because of the color of your skin. That is a true  luxury, having the choice to not even imagine what the suffering of others is truly like.

I think what is at the root of the resistance we are feeling in our society is that white America is only now truly beginning to recognize the privilege they have had the benefit of, and rather than acknowledging it and seeking to correct the imbalance, many are giving in to the deep fear  of losing that privilege. Only now are we beginning to notice what it’s like to be identified by the color of our skin. Previously, the only time it really was relevant was on a form where Caucasian was usually listed first. We were raised knowing that the good guy always wore white and the bad guy was always dressed in black. We didn’t have to use our imagination to make ourselves the good guy, it was assumed.

I hate to even have to make this point, but I know there will be people who point out exceptions. So of course there are white people who don’t have the same privilege as others, and white people who are followed around in stores because of how they look, and a myriad of other exceptions. That isn’t the point. The point is we have the luxury of pointing out the exceptions.  

It’s always been my hope that one day we will be able to celebrate each other’s gifts and beauty without prejudice. There are many steps along the way to that day, one of the first is to recognize and acknowledge the imbalances in our society. Only then can we address them and work to create balance. Imagining that day is a luxury I will gladly indulge in. However, imagination alone won’t get us there, it takes looking deeply at ourselves and facing our own prejudices and privileges, then rooting out the first and sharing the second.