A few nights ago (in a long, rambling, almost tearful email), I gave up talking about the election. A friend sent me a forward quoting Obama on Meet the Press saying “together [Michelle] and I have attended several flag burning ceremonies in the past.”
Anyone who has ever heard Obama speak would have known he didn’t say it. The diction and grammar in the piece were terrible. I shared with my friend that believing the report presumes the most respected papers in the nation no longer research or accurately report on the candidates, let alone offer sound endorsements. It would also require the assumption that the governmental infrastructure, people, and traditions of this country were so weak that they could be overcome and devastated with one man’s election to the presidency. Colin Powell, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Warren Buffett, and Ben Bernanke would have to be unmitigated idiots or anti-American conspirators to endorse a man they couldn’t trust to defend, love and honor this country. Believe them or the uninformed individual who drafted that email?
I had forgotten my own advice though, however briefly. I had forgotten to check in with Source. Fortunately, a friend I shared my response with reminded me that night is darkest just before daybreak. He reminded me that all the hatred we are seeing and the rigid, fearful cry for the familiar signal a desperate grasping for a consciousness that is fading. The politics of separation and laissez-faire economics no longer serve us.
Though change is inevitable, we can all be resistant to it. It’s why it’s hard to change our diets, difficult to let go of poor relationships, and challenging to think differently about race, religion, or sexual orientation. Barack was right when he said that when things aren’t going well people “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” We cling to whatever gives us power, authority, or “righteousness” over another. We all do.
True we are spiritual beings having a human existence. However, we tend to respond to the human, physical appearances first. When there is a call for change or a call to accept something that we don’t fully understand, when there is a call to do better than we have before, anything within us that would resist that change comes up. It must. Think about what it might have been like to be one of the first people to learn the earth is round. You would have been appalled and sad for the ignorant person who told you that. Until you learned something different. But, for many of us, the world is still flat in this regard: president’s still look a certain way; our differences in opinion put us in opposition; someone must be right and someone must be wrong.
What Obama has done, in part, is remind us all of our fullest potential, especially when we work together. He has reminded us of the importance of service, respect, diplomacy, and shared values. That it is not us-them, but us. We. The people. But, we’ve been out of practice and many of us have gotten used to the divide.
The night is upon us. We are finding it difficult to see each other’s point of view, and see the light within every single person; a light that never goes away. What goes away is our willingness to see it. There is this thing about free will (spiritual plane) and free markets (human). Free reign allows us to travel undisturbed as far away from our home as we desire, in pursuit of whatever flight of fancy or whim. As Rumi illuminated in “Reality and Appearance,”
“Anyone in whom the troublemaking self has died,
sun and cloud obey.
If you wish to shine like day,
burn up the night of self-existence.
Dissolve in the Being who is everything.”
When this night falls, and day breaks, I think we shall begin to see only light and we shall have a leader who believes and calls on the light within each of us. This is our choice.
Copyright © 2008 Garry Bevel
