Your “spirituality” is not measured by how much you (or I) read the Holy Scriptures, sing hymns, pray, clap your hands, run around a sanctuary with a purple flag, dance to contemporary religious music or reject those who do.
It’s not determined by how much you visit your place of worship or how much money you donate to its causes.
It’s not affirmed by your title (if you have one) or the ornate design of your robe (if you wear one) or the position you hold in the hierarchy of your faith tradition (if you’re part of one).
But, it is affirmed by your willingness to take responsibility for your life, your choices, and the good use of your skills and talents.
A biopsy of the validity and integrity of our faith and spirituality is revealed in how we treat people, especially loved-ones and strangers; how we love our enemies, offer hospitality, respect, regard, love those who reject our beliefs.
Do you clean up after yourself? Are you wisely generous to a fault? Do you love those who are different from you, whose lives might be in direct conflict with what you believe? Do you love others by listening?
If you take full responsibility for yourself, become extraordinarily generous with what you have, embrace diversity, and love others by listening, you will fast-forward your “spiritual” growth. Actually, you will put it on supercharge.
It’s not your title, the reach of your authority, or the crowds who respect and adore you. Rather, it’s how you respect and love and respond to those who don’t.
There is nothing like a good listener for feeding the soul.
A good listener determines there will be no distractions — no phones, text checking, no dings or app notifications or glances to see the time — and will offer complete and uninterrupted and undiluted attention to the speaker.
A good listener listens, says very very little except may offer occasional brief words of encouragement like “tell me more” or “go back to the beginning if you want” or “go into as much detail as you think will be helpful” or “could you tell me that again so it’s clearer for me.”
The good listener knows listening and any attempts at multitasking — even the most subtle — distract the speaker and obliterate listening. A good listener gets all the potential impediments to listening out of the way before sitting down to listen.
The good listener knows a listener’s inner-noise —- things the listener is refusing to hear or address from within — will emerge and sabotage attempts at hearing others and so addresses unresolved personal matters as much as possible so others may encounter a clear-headed listener.
The good listener does not formulate replies or develop counterpoints while listening and does not one-up the speaker with the listener’s own experiences whether they may appear to the listener to be helpful or not.
A good listener sees, hears, knows, acknowledges the speaker by listening — the most powerful and tangible expression of love.
I devised a list of how to participate in the healing of men and women who have been hurt:
Be willing to listen, even if what is being said is what you’d prefer to not hear. Try not to re-engineer (re-frame, recast) what you have heard so it is more fitting with what you’d really like to hear.
Resist understandable attempts to short-circuit growth by trying to ease necessary pain, by offering false affirmations, and by accepting empty excuses for irresponsible behavior. Pain is a very good motivator for change. Resist the urge to remove it when it appears to be helpful.
Offer your presence, not your answers. “I am with you” is more helpful than “let me help you fix it.”
Welcome silence. There are ways to communicate that do not include words. Resist the understandable urge to chase healing and learning away with the incessant use of words and stories.
Avoid minimizing (“it’s not so bad!”) or rationalizing (“What else did you expect?”) or normalizing (“Anyone would have done that!”) the issues that resulted in pain. Do not rob necessary pain of its usefulness.
Promote “future thinking.” Ask questions focused on future wellness and success.
Try to avoid searching for the genesis (the cause) of what has led to pain. Where something comes from is not nearly as important living your way out of it.
Most USA schools are back in full swing…… at least around here they are:
Hats off……
Hats off to teachers and coaches who love the world and its peoples and whose zeal for both results in empoweing students of all ages.
Hats off to teachers and coaches who love their subjects and sports and whose passion for their work opens vast vistas of opportunities for their students.
Hats off to teachers and coaches who are as tough as nails over matters of integrity but are easy sells when it comes to listening and attempting to understand students and their home-lives, peer, and social struggles.
Hats off to teachers and coaches who know their students well enough to be able to anticipate and address problems before unnecessary escalation.
Hats off to school administrators who have the courage to support teachers and coaches in the face of often difficult parents and who have the courage to listen to all parties before they act.
Hats off to school administrators who aspire to serve rather than be served, who understand the power of humility, and who see their essential role as empowering coaches and teachers and students to get the very best from each other.
Hats off to parents of students who seek to respect and learn from their children’s school teachers and coaches and administrators rather than demand rights or seek to chastise or correct.
Hats off to Librarians, Musicians, Counselors, School Security Teams….. and all who work daily to keep our students motivated, kind, and safe.
Andrea Neal, Jay Sherrill and so many others who regarded Thulani and Nate as their own.
Israelite-Nathanael gets an invitation to meet Nazarene-Jesus and responds rather snarkily:
Can anything good come out of Nazareth?
This exchange, recorded early in the Gospel of John, intrigues me and, as a result, I’ve always loved the person and name Nathanael.
He questioned, appeared playful and unintimidated.
On meeting, Jesus greets Nathanael by name, interprets his name, tells Nathanael He had seen him before Nathanael was aware of being seen by Jesus.
In modern parlance Jesus saw through the Israelite, welcomed everything about him, called him into a life-changing journey and Nathanael readily responded
Nothing takes the Son of Man by surprise: Jesus saw Nathanael coming and New Testament Nate more than met his match.
Jesus saw my Indianapolis-born son coming, too.
I didn’t. I had to decide blind.
Privacy laws permitted limited information – African American Male, Date of Birth, Full Term – was all I could know.
Pondering names for my son, whom I was yet to meet, the no guile or nothing false in Jesus’ description of Israelite-Nathanael wrapped it up for me.
Enroute from the courthouse to the hospital, custody papers in hand, with a stop at the K-Mart on Lafayette Road to pick up a few baby-essentials, I named a baby and formed a living link with a favorite character from the New Testament.
“Thula, Thula” I’d sing, following the maid around the house as she sang the prayerful lullabye. I could be on her back, tied with a blanket, listening to the Thula Thula song. The song was about a child urged not cry because the father will soon return from work on the gold mine. The song soothed and reached deeply into me, especially while tied to a maid’s back. There was not safer realm. Theres was no place warmer or more comfortable.
At 10 or 11 years old I learned from teenage boys and men named Thulani who came regularly into our dad’s tea-room the name means peace and stillness, to be quiet and comforted.
Temba means hope.
It is the name my adult Zulu friends called me once I reached adulthood and tried to unlearn so many things of childhood.
Although no one said it or taught it, I learned not to reveal excessive interest in the lives of the young men who came daily to the shop but rather to proffer indifference. I knew I was not to walk to the street corner too often in the evenings where they played lively music on guitars, hand made from wood attached to emptied cooking oil containers. No-one had to tell me of the barriers that came with my whiteness. I knew I was not to enjoy watching the young men dance and smoke the loose cigarettes – purchased from me at the tea-room, 2 cents each for unfiltered Lexingtons and 3 cents for filters – and laugh and rough-house bare foot on white suburban corners. The kitchen-boys’ or garden boys’ uniforms, white coarse red or blue trim v-neck shirts marked them legitimate workers in white suburbs even until late at night or at least until dad’s shop closed at 9.
They’d drift off to a concrete block room at the farthest corner of the yard of the property where they worked. The young men washed their master’s car and weeded the master’s yard, helped The Girl in the kitchen. I learned, although no one taught it or said it, to hide my interest. I wanted to join in and enjoy the lively music and playful antics and raucous laughter and the loud conversations which I could not understand.
But, I learned, although no one said it, to turn my desire to belong into a supervisory stance or glare which carried censure of the noise made by African young men in our white neighborhood where they were fortunate we allowed such antics.
Thulani and Temba were embedded into me by women who were our maids and who most certainly but unknowingly provided complete comfort, peace, solace for the living load tightly strapped to her body, riding her back and, everything I ever wanted for my infant son was provided unintentionally for me some 40-something years earlier when they sang his name.
“Choose something easier. Something American,” said a friend, “no one will remember it.”
Dad owned the tearoom near the top of Blackburn Road next to the Dutch Reformed Church up the road from Park Hill Soccer Club.
You may or not have known him by name but you may have been a woman in need of milk for her baby. He would have given it to you “under the counter” as if defying the boss which, of course, was himself. When you tried to pay he may have whispered “take the milk, my dear. No baby should go without food. Keep your money for something else the baby needs.”
Or, you may have wandered into the shop and said you had no place to stay for a while and he may have said “we have plenty of room here” and given you a bed for a week, a month, even longer.
Perhaps you knew him because you faced addiction to alcohol and he was your Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor and he said “just for today” to you and told you he’d decided he’d no longer drink “just for today” until his pledge spanned decades of sobriety.
Did you know my dad?
You may not have known him by name but perhaps you went to his tearoom where he served bread, milk, kindness and good humor and wrapped the goods with the feeling that you were known, you belonged, you were important.
I shall strive to speak and teach as one who has indeed much to learn.
In every classroom we are all learners.
I shall strive to listen to people in the class (and out of it) as if I were listening to the mountains.
Mountains reveal their real beauty to the dedicated observer, beauty that’s easily missed by those who offer casual hurried glances or who are themselves caught up in how they look or are dressed or what the student may think of them.
Can there be a greater privilege than jetting to Penang to teach Family Systems?
Most people welcome it from a friend or a family member.
“Let us…..spend some time together.”
“Let’s call each other, often.”
“Let us take a walk.”
“Let’s build a community of trust and mutual support.”
“Let’s build a business together.”
“I can do so many things alone but I’d much rather do things with somebody, really, I’d rather do it with you.”
“Why don’t we…..” is also an encouraging and beautiful thing to hear.
“Why don’t we go to lunch, get tea in the park, pack a sandwich or two and head to the beach.”
“Why don’t we just sit together for a few hours?”
“I miss you. I think about you. I wish you lived nearer.”
“I want to see you” – are powerful words that can feed a soul and confirm the idea that it is the thought that counts.
“I want to be with you in what you are facing. I want with-ness with you. I am lonely without you. It’s not that I don’t have people around me or time with people I love, it is time with you that I want.”
May we not hold back on expressing our love to those whom we love.
There are no blue-birds of happiness seeking nests.
It will not take us by surprise, arrive unannounced, and it won’t be ours because we read FaceBook memes or read anything inspirational or challenging anywhere, even the Bible.
And, no Podcast will do it – not even that.
Happiness has no victims. Happiness is an inside job, it is an internal state and it requires our willingness, our cooperation, and hard work.
Our happiness will be a direct result of what you and I do with our days.
Do we serve others?
Are we generous?
Do we accept and embrace and enjoy people who are different from us?
Do we look for beauty that is all around us and within everybody?
[If you think there is no beauty around you and there is no beauty in all people, well, you’ve already unearthed a major happiness blockage.]
Answering these questions with our lives will hold a few of many codes to unlock happiness and let it into our lives. And, this is a big one, our levels of happiness are never, not ever, up to others, no matter how much we may love or not love others. Happiness is not something another can provide for you at least for enduring lengths of time. Neither you nor I will be happier, or less happy, based on who or what we love or who or what we reject.
While I concede having money does make life just a little easier, our happiness levels are totally unrelated to money.
Some of the wealthiest people on the planet are clearly some of the most unhappy people.
Jesus of Nazareth said what comes out of people’s mouths reveals the state of people’s hearts or inner-beings.
Is there a millionaire or billionaire you’ve heard on TV with whom you’d want to share your daily life?
Happiness requires action and appears to play hard-to-get with those who persistently whine, “I just want to be happy.” It appears to play hard-to-get with complainers and those who seem entitled. Happiness and Laziness are not buddies. Laziness repels of Happiness. Happiness and Blamingness – I just made a new word – are not friends and, as far as I can tell, cannot co-exist in the same brain.
Finding a useful cause, a cause larger than oneself, and engaging in it with others who have the same or similar causes, and offering it zeal will quite often spark some thrill-for-life aka happiness.
While you and I are influenced even a tidbit by what others think of us (or what we think others think of us) we dead-bolt access to happinesses.
How and what we think and say of others is far more important than concerning ourselves with what “they” think and say of us.
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