These excerpts from Jack Kornfield's book
The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace
(which was written in the summer following 9-11)
reflect my values and where my heart is centered and
what I seek to deepen in myself and our world.
With each year my hope and intention is for greater
remembrance and awakening, love and peace.
I am grateful for these loving gifts from Jack Kornfield
which I am also moved to share with you today...
Hatred never ceases by hatred
but by love alone is healed.
This is an ancient and eternal law.
~ We who lived in concentration camps can remember those who
walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their
last piece of bread... They may have been few in number
but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be
taken from us but the last of human freedoms...
the freedom to choose our spirit in any circumstance.
- Viktor E. Frankl
Forgiveness and compassion are not sentimental or weak.
They demand courage and integrity.
Yet they alone can bring about the peace we long for.
~ True love is not for the faint hearted.
- Meher Baba
In spite of all confusion and fear, you are born with a heart
that knows what is just, loving, and beautiful.
In the words of the Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson:
~ Curiously, people resist the noble aspects of their shadow more
strenuously than they hide their dark sides. It is more
disrupting to find that you have a profound nobility of
character than to find out that you are a bum.
If we look at ourselves truthfully, we can feel the possibility of
being more compassionate, more awake, more free.
~ If it were not possible to free the heart from entanglement
in greed, hate, and fear, I would not teach you to do so.
- Buddha
To sustain love we need to develop practices that cultivate and
strengthen the natural compassion within us.
Forgiveness honors the heart's greatest dignity. Whenever we
are lost, it brings us back to the ground of love.
With forgiveness we become unwilling to attack
or wish harm to another.
Whenever we forgive, in small ways at home, or in great ways
between nations, we free ourselves from the past.
We can meet the tragedies of the world with what
Gandhi called "soul force."
~ If you want to see the heroic, look at those who can love
in return for hatred. If you want to see the brave,
look for those who can forgive.
- Bhagavad Gita
In the end, forgiveness simply means never putting
another person out of our heart.
When we clearly realize that the source of disharmony and
misery in the world is ignorance, we can open the door
of wisdom and compassion.
If only we could help each other build temples of
forgiveness instead of prisons.
We can.
In our hearts.
We need to respect our tears. Without a wise way to grieve,
we can only soldier on, armored and unfeeling, but our
hearts cannot learn and grow from the sorrows of the past.
We can do our part toward the healing of the world...
We can begin to build a bridge of tenderness to those
who have been separated by pain and fear.
The greatest protection in all the world
is lovingkindness.
- Buddha
In the end, when we look at our life,
the questions will be simple:
Did I live fully?
Did I love well?
Without love our creative spirit will dry up.
~ An ulcer is an unkissed imagination taking its revenge
for having been jilted. It is an undanced dance,
an unpainted watercolor, an unwritten poem.
- John Ciardi
Our society has forgotten how to teach love.
In the words of John Gatto, New York City Teacher of the Year:
~ Think of the things that are killing us as a nation:
drugs, brainless competition, recreational sex, the pornography
of violence, gambling, alcohol, and the worst pornography of all --
lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as religion.
Even in terrible times we must learn to love.
~ We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, our ravages.
Our task is not to unleash the on the world; it is to transform them
in ourselves and others.
- Albert Camas
The ground for love is found beyond judgment and blame.
~ If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people
somewhere else insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were
simply necessary to separate them from the rest of us and
destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts
through the heart of every human being.
And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Hate if the first and most obvious enemy of love...
The other great enemy of love is fear. Fear contracts the heart.
Its worries and anxieties stop the flow of love.
Do we really want to live in fear?
As the Persian poet Hafiz kindly puts it:
~ Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I'd like to see you in
better living conditions.
~ An honorable human relationship, that is, one in which two people
have the right to use the word love, is a process of deepening
the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this
because it breaks down human self delusion and isolation.
- Adrienne Rich
With lovingkindness we see with the heart.
Lovingkindness gives birth to a natural compassion.
The compassionate heart holds the pain and sorrow of our life
and of all beings with mercy and tenderness.
~ It is this tender heart that has the power to transform the world.
- Chogyam Trungpa
When we come to rest in the great heart of compassion, we discover
a capacity to bear witness to, suffer with, and hold dear with our own
vulnerable heart the sorrows and beauties of the world.
In every place of suffering around the globe, there are those who
have discovered the good heart's capacity to love, and who
are willing to tend to the sorrows of the world as their own.
~ Compassion is a verb.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Love does not try to fix the whole world. It is enough to plant
seeds of kindness and justice everywhere we can.
Compassion, gratitude, and joy are companions to the work of
lovingkindness. Compassion practice offers a conscious vehicle for
the sorrows of the world. Gratitude and joy balance the sorrows
of compassion and awaken in us a generous and gracious spirit.
The human mind can create conflict. It can also create peace.
To find peace in the world we must find peace in ourselves.
To make peace we cannot ignore war, racism, violence,
greed, the injustice and sufferings of the world.
They must be confronted with courage and compassion.
Unless we seek justice peace will fail.
Yet in whatever we do we must not let war, violence,
and fear take over our own heart.
~ If you expect your life to be up and down,
your mind will be much more peaceful.
- Lama Yeshe
Embracing both joy and sorrow, our heart
can remain tender and wise.
Peace is not an absence of change or difficulty. It should
not be confused with withdrawal or indifference to life.
These are the imitations of peace, ways of closing down
based on fear. We must see them for what they are.
With equanimity we can care for all things
without trying to control them.
With a peaceful heart whatever happens
can be met with wisdom.
Peace is not weak; it is unshakable.
Yet to find peace we have to let go of our struggles,
to stop making war with life.
We can direct our actions but not their fruits.
~ No seed ever sees the flower.
- Zen teaching
~ Sometimes I go about pitying myself and all the while
I am carried by great winds across the sky.
- Ojibway Indian
With equanimity we can see clearly.
~ We can make our minds so like the still water
that beings gather around us, that they may see their
own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer
perhaps even a fiercer life because of our quiet.
- William Butler Yeats
Wisdom comes when we see with a vast perspective. Our life is
unfolding in the timeless galaxies. We turn with the stars in
cycles of light and dark, birth and death, joy and sorrow.
~ Oh Nobly Born, remember the pure open sky of
your own true nature.
Return to it. Trust it. It is home.
- Tibetan Book of the Dead
Happy, Loving, Peaceful New Year!
Namaste ~ Molly
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