The Real Contest

Speaking from the Heart: Your Voice Matters

The purpose of this blog is simple. A huge battle is in progress. We are not just potential casualties. We have the power to affect the outcome. This is a safe space for us to figure out together how we can, and why we matter.

You don't have to be a wild-eyed, crazed prophet walking sideways to believe that there's a universal if not a cosmic battle. Evidence is all around.

Some say that the battle is between God and the Devil. There's plenty of precedent for putting it that way. A less loaded name is the struggle of Good and Evil.

I think that the real combattants are Love and Fear. A little verse in the in one of the minor letters of the New Testament claims, "Perfect love casts out fear [1 John 4:18]." I think that is demonstrably true. It is a truth being revealed all over the globe.

I'm writing this in the year 2024. According to TIME magazine, at least 64 nations plus the European Union have had or will have elections this year. In some that have already happened, victors are progressives and liberals. In others, anti-democratic parties and individuals have won. What to make of it? We are living amidst swirling currents of all sorts. It is no secret that poverty, mass migrations, wars, terrorism, violence of all kinds, and above all the enormity of climate change both burning and flooding the planet in many places make us anxious, scared, and often hopeless.

Democracy itself, for at least two centuries the hope of the world's poor and disenfranchised, is now in the dock, its future uncertain, its credibility questioned.

All of that breeds a constant field of fear. We are not the first generation to have experienced a conglomeration of exhausting, hope-depleting developments. For many of us, the old gods who were supposed to protect us, shield us, and save us are dead or as good as dead.

I haven't given up. And if you've read this far, chances are you haven't either. I continue to believe in the Power of Love. I'm not imagining that "love" is synonymous with niceness. I don't think that love is soft, cushy, and sweet—though it sometimes can be. I think Love is another name for God. I think love in its many forms is the power that ignited the Big Bang. I believe that all evidence points to what the wisdom traditions of the world have been proclaiming and curating for ages: everything comes from a common Source and thus everything in the universe (or multiverse) is related.

All over the world people are waking up. We are becoming conscious despite our own resistance. More and more people see that we cannot continue to believe in endless growth. We cannot deny that the earth's resources are finite. We are reluctantly facing the fact that, in the words of poet James Broughton, we must "love one another or die."

The only way I can imagine tending and growing this life-giving understanding is to create spaces where we can support each other, inform each other, test our thoughts and theories, trust and be vulnerable, experiment with truthful speech, dare to be wrong while being humble about our views, connecting to those who aren't in the same bubble as we.

That's the purpose of this blog. It's a safe space where we can be ourselves, seek to understand each other, resist easy answers, be skeptical of trying to reach premature consensus that often masquerades as unity. It's a place where we don't have to apologize for what we believe, worry we won't be accepted, or slammed for misunderstanding somebody else.

Your voice matters because you matter. As John Donne put it four hundred years ago, no one is an island. Everyone is a piece of the continent. We are involved in humanity. So let's figure out together what we can do to help humanity hear the wakeup call.

If perfect love casts out fear, then of all things we most need to figure out how to invite perfect love to show up. The only stage on which love will be seen and known is my life and yours.