October 25, 2012

• The importance of sharing personal concerns

• Life is about letting go of judgment

• Whatever is done out of nonjudgmental love is always adequate

We affirm with grace, strength and conviction that each of you and all people are in the light of God. You are all in the view of God. You are all in the warmth of God. You are all recipients of the total love of God. You are all in the care of God.

You speak in this gathering of your concerns—concerns for yourselves and for others. In some ways, there was more openness than you have sometimes exerted in the past. Human life is about relationships, and it is essential that everyone—not just in your gathering, but everyone—has opportunities for sharing not just what gives great joy, but sometimes more importantly what causes you anxiety, pain, worry.

Too often you greet one another with a perfunctory “how are you” and an equally perfunctory “fine.” But no human being is fully “fine” as defined by “no worries, all is as I would wish.” When you put up barriers of self-expression, you’re preventing the outreach of the loving presence of others. Certainly when you meet someone on the street who says informally, “How’s it going?” you may not feel that you can go into great detail about what specific afflictions, emotionally or physically, you are going through. But you should in your lives find others with whom you can truly share your deepest concerns, for in that sharing you actually gain personal insight, and you benefit from the presence of others who are sincerely concerned about what it is you feel is needed in order to achieve the balance in life that you seek.

Meeting as you do, you are presented with opportunities for sharing at a very significant level, and in that environment you are provided an opportunity to grow in your compassion, in your ability to listen, in your ability to communicate loving care for another. All human beings can benefit through the opportunity of personal sharing. In an environment that is loving, there is no defensiveness, there is no fear, there is no shame in expressing what it is that occupies many of your thoughts. Having a chance to share also means being open to those opportunities when others not in your group, perhaps even strangers, for reasons unknown to you feel free to share something of their own lives with you. That offering of those life fragments is always done in faith that in the sharing, there is no risk of judgment.

All of you in this group, beyond the group, have the opportunity of being judgmental or of rejecting that judgment. Each person alive has interests that are directed toward the self and not outward toward another. No one, as we have said, is fully selfless, but nevertheless each individual has the capacity, the strength, to be present as a good listener with an open heart.

There is much you can do to help others, but perhaps the most fundamental step in that direction is providing an environment that is clearly accepting, that is clearly loving. You may have friends and neighbors, colleagues, family members for whom you may not have an easy time exercising full acceptance, but that is part of the beauty of growing as human beings, that you take where you are and you elevate yourselves to a higher level. This is not a level above your neighbor, but rather a level closer to your neighbor.

You can establish a closeness with the individual you perceive to have the greatest threat upon what it is you hold most sacred. You can raise your level of love, your level of compassion, your level of committed listening. All of this can be done through no further visual evidence than merely being present. It is that being present that starts the process of being loving. We can talk at great length about the importance of being loving, and yet all that we may explain has little impact without your commitment to what being loving is, what it means, what it can do.

You are always asked to be nonjudgmental. Each of you knows the value of being nonjudgmental, but you proceed through your lives exercising the very judgment you condemn. Commit yourselves to the principle of nonjudgment, and you will open the door to becoming more loving. Judgment is a barrier to love. It is a barrier to uplifting, to supporting, to encouraging, to comforting. If you wish to be truer in your expression of love to another, drop all conditions that you place upon a relationship. You love because that is who you are. You do not love because of how a relationship is superficially designed or described. To be loving means to be fully accepting, fully embracing, filled with coming to a realization of the oneness that you share with another.

Life is about relationships, but life is about letting go of judgment. Life is about accepting who others are. This acceptance goes beyond considering what someone does and rather is focused upon who someone is.

God loves each of you because of who you are. You are a creature of God. God does not love you because of what you do. Likewise, God does not punish you because of what you do. There is no guilt when you fully accept the reality of what it is to be loved by God. There is no guilt to be experienced by any human being at any level other than a guilt motivated by fear of judgment. Take away the judgment—there is no guilt. Take away the guilt—there is no barrier. Take away any sense of barrier, and you then experience complete oneness.

You’re asked to encounter others without judgment by accepting who they are, not what they are or what they do. How do you apply this to criminals, to those who are at cross-purposes to your own sense of what is right, to what is wrong? You accommodate this by fully valuing the importance of another within the total framework of God’s creation. You may find as a society that there are behaviors which are considered inappropriate at whatever level—legally, morally, spiritually, philosophically, whatever—but that does not change the value of the human being. Likewise you must be able to accept your own failings but realize those failings are not a reflection against you. They are not a devaluation of who you are. They are merely a manifestation of what you do.

A woman in your group is concerned about how best to care for her sick husband and also how best to care for herself. The first step for her is to accept her own inadequacies and not feel burdened by a guilt that somehow she could or should do more. She should also place herself in her husband’s shoes and understand his emotions, his frustrations, his fears, and his sense of burdening her. There is nothing that she can do that is truly inadequate. Whatever she does out of nonjudgmental love will always be adequate, will always be enough.

When you try to understand your relationship to another, you cannot look at a relationship as a checklist. There is no checklist that must be filled completely in order to fulfill a relationship, because as long as there are items on a list that have not been checked off, there will be a feeling of guilt, a feeling that somehow more will be done. Relationships that are fully loving totally abandon a checklist.

You respond to others because you love them. You do not respond to others through a series of expectations, for such a series can never be fulfilled. One never gets to a position in a relationship where you can say, “I’ve done my part. I’ve done everything.” There will always be something about which you would say to yourself, “I could have. I should have. I still must.” That approach is never productive. You are who you are. Your capabilities are your capabilities. Another’s ability to receive what you offer is not a measure of your own adequacies or inadequacies.

You must work to find opportunities of being open to one another. Every human being requires this type of openness. Feel you can be comforted. Feel that you can be uplifted by your own strengths, by your own capacities to be loving. You are fully strengthened by God. Your lives are filled with those opportunities to be simply open to the moment.

Your lives are blessed by the opportunities to give but also to receive. You cannot be proud to such a degree that you place barriers between those who wish to give to you and yourselves. All must be open. All must be barrier-free. All must be accepting. All must be guilt-free. The concept of inadequacy is always a self-fulfilling concept and never leads toward love.

How you respond to those around you should never be a responsibility but a natural act of love. When you seek peace, you are seeking peace in your relationships, regardless of the level of that relationship—individual, corporate, community, national, international, spiritual, whatever descriptor is applicable. Look for opportunities for such openness, and have faith in your own abilities to be one another’s keeper, one another’s provider, one another’s window toward God’s place at your table of relationships.

You are who you are. You are created by God. You are of equal value in the eyes of God. You must therefore be of equal value to one another as you see one another.

We rejoice when we observe your openness to others, both your compassion and your vulnerability. It is the openness that provides the opportunity for your spirit to soar, to fly, to experience the greatest expression of love, and to ultimately become Love.

You are blessed as you allow that spirit the flight of love. You are blessed when you accept your full adequacy, your full value. You are blessed when you free yourselves of guilt. You are blessed when you free yourselves of shame. You are blessed when you free yourselves of regret. And you are also especially blessed when you look upon another with full acceptance as an equal spirit sharing the reality of human life with one another.

Amen.