I've given myself a few weeks to begin to digest my experiences at the Orphan Wisdom School in Ontario. So this is the first part of sharing what I learned there.

Do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose. Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently, until the song that is your life falls into your own cupped hands and you recognize and greet it. Only then will you know how to give yourself to this world so worthy of rescue.
– Clearing by Martha Postlewaite

If we subscribe to this progressivist view of history, of evolution, of the unfolding of life in the universe – a view nominally supported by the hearts of the great wisdom traditions, by our own transient observations, and by the findings of science (at least in the human or Earthly near term – perhaps not on the longer galactic time scale). Well, if we subscribe to that – one element of our progress might be that our blessings get better and better, that we get wiser and wiser – In that spirit, let’s unpack this new benediction, a riff on the Davidson Loehr benediction from this summer: May you find:

Maybe it needs some more work, maybe you can help me out…

We often think of justice work as 'external' - we focus our attention on the parts of cultures and systems and institutions that lie outside of us, outside of our control or influence. But this focus makes two mistakes - first, it presumes that we are not implicated in systems and cultures we choose not to identify with, and second, it fails to recognize that our ability to replace the culture, system, or insititution with something better is contingent upon our having done the internal work to create a new possibility. We'll look at some emerging voices in the field of healing justice - voices helping guide us to do the internal work that makes justice possible.

This is the first of a three part sermon series based on the benediction. May you find: Questions more Profound than Answers, Vulnerability more Powerful than Strength, and a Peace that Passeth All Understanding. And here's how we're going to honor it: You Ask, I answer... well, probably more like ponder, speculate, ruminate, you get the idea.

A good covenant is easy to write and hard to practice. What can we do to better live the promises we've already made? How can we honor the spirit of a promise when its literal interpretation shifts from hard to impossible? If a promise can't be kept literally, is it worthless? What do we really owe each other anyway? These questions and more as our struggle continues.

We can't interrupt the transmission of intergenerational trauma without asking deep questions. In the research on play, on imagination, on unconditional love - we begin to see the shape of some similarly deep answers. But can we do the work? Can we relinquish our expectations of conformity and compliance in favor of a world made more chaotic by human expression released from traditional fetters?

In a sequence of five stories from three authors, we'll attempt to find a path through the forest of judgement, into the clearing of showing up for each other, and on to a seemingly mythical land of transcendent connection. Join us won't you?

Thanks and acknowledgement to our three authors: Eckhart Tolle, Stephen Jenkinson, and Charles Eisenstein.