I saw a “God Bless the Whole World No Exceptions” bumper sticker on a car when I was a kid, and it’s been on my own car for a few years. My love of the phrase was gut-level, and I also think I now can explain what it means to me. Although we get this wrong a lot, spiritual life is not about what we believe but how we live. Figuring out how to live “God Bless the Whole World No Exceptions” feels particularly pressing in this US presidential election year. There are incentives for our division, from the most pervasive and superficial (clickbait) to the biological and deeply human satisfaction we feel in sorting out who is “us” and who is “them.”
This was top of mind as my family and I took a pilgrimage to D.C. for President’s Day last month. I am always trying to make the unconscious conscious to help me understand the world and the people in it. On a basic personal level, this feels like accepting and even welcoming all the parts of myself, including those I’d rather hide or pretend didn’t exist. On a societal level, it feels similar: accepting and even welcoming all people, including those with perspectives that I don’t share or find repugnant. Both are necessary to move towards “God Bless the Whole World No Exceptions.”
Living God Bless the Whole World No Exceptions
In recent years, I have found it easier to bless the world than to bless my fellow Americans. Blessing the world involves ethereal things: my heart, my soul, and my mind; blessing my fellow Americans often involves messy history and tangible relationships on the ground. This kind of blessing involves blessing by doing not thinking, which in some ways makes it a sacred ritual. It is time. I cannot go through this election year being part of the problem, creating more us versus them. It is not how I want to live for myself or for my children, and it is not the reality I want to co-create.
At the National Museum of African American History and Culture in DC, our messy and tragic American history was front and center. James Baldwin’s words shone, huge on the main hall’s wall, like a beacon of truth: “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it…history is literally present in all that we do” (see Smithsonian link). I immediately thought of one of my favorite images, a tree ring. For me it symbolizes the ability to contain everything we’ve ever been and experienced, presented without judgment. We can see the hard years, the years where lots of growth was possible, and everything in between.
What would our American tree ring look like? Messy and chaotic? I would prefer it wasn’t that way; my anxious brain loves order. However, it is also a huge relief to acknowledge that our current messy time in history is not unique in its fraughtness. It has been messy since the beginning. If we are always growing, we are always somewhere in the birth process and as anyone who has had a baby or attended a birth can attest, birth is messy.
Acknowledging the messiness of life also shifts our focus. We have a reprieve from expecting ourselves to have perfect ways to reach across the aisle that work immediately. We stop thinking in such black and white terms. My minister Reverend Wendy tells of a woman who initially reluctantly attended her neighborhood UU church. After several months of increasingly steady attendance, she told Rev. Wendy she’d had an epiphany. She realized she had to stick around and be present with people she may not normally encounter so that she could figure out what there is to love about them.
Don’t we all want to be viewed this way? Not with a critical lens, but by someone who is figuring out all there is to love about us. Take a moment and think about someone with whom you struggle (even if the struggle is only in your head). Can you think of anything there is to love about them? Maybe there is resistance, but perhaps there is also an opening here, where you can be on the lookout for what is right about them instead of what is wrong. Maybe you can even name it to them, and watch what happens when they feel caught being good.
One of the foundations of Unitarian Universalism is the idea that we need not think alike to love alike. Instead of trying to get people to think exactly as we do – to literally change their minds – can we find the ways we are all doing love’s work? For me, this feels extremely challenging but also so liberating because I shift from a debater to someone who is on the lookout for love’s expression in the world. I go from, as Barbara Brown Taylor says in her wonderful book Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others, someone who is compelled to defeat or destroy those different from me to someone who is curious, who is able to realize that we are all made of the same basic material (listen to her interviewed on NPR here).
Look for the resonances
Instead of walking around feeling defensive, we can move through the world “looking for the resonances” as interfaith leader Eboo Patel said (listen to his wonderful talk here, begins at 22 min). I love Patel’s word choice – the resonances. We’re treasure hunters, looking for the different ways the same light hits differently according to our view.
Part of spiritual maturity for me is choosing what to focus on so that I can have an impact, knowing that I won’t finish the work. Despite all of the things competing for my attention, including how compelling it is to hate the Other, I want to focus on finding love and looking for the resonances, because they are what I know is most true.
