Companions-in-Blessing
Encouraging the expansion of spiritual friendship in a bumpy world.
By Dennis Rivers — July 8, 2011 — https://ecobodhi.org/guide/companions-in-blessing/
Dedicated to John O’Donohue
The bumps. Someone remarked to me, “life is what
happens while you were busy making other plans.”
The world today confronts me with a variety of crises
that I never planned on, never put into my
appointment book. Global-heat-up is changing the
face of the earth as I write these lines. The United
States is edging toward bankruptcy, having poured too
much treasure into too many wars of choice, and
having imprisoned too many people (2.2 million).
Out-of-control capitalism and industrialism are
devouring the natural world and dimming the chances
of human survival. In the middle of this very bumpy
world, we are challenged to make a life that feels
worth living. And for me that means exploring new
ways to link up with people. It often occurs to me that
the bad news about our planet is sooooo bad that it’s
not clear how isolated individuals (including me) will
be able to cope with it. We have always needed one
another, but I am convinced that today we need
creative and nurturing friendships more than ever
before.
Making a difference. We don’t actually know how
large or how small an influence we might have over
the coming climate catastrophes and economic
meltdowns. Most of the evidence suggests that we
will not be able to stop them. But we might be able to
steer them or lessen them, to some degree. We can
also take a variety of actions now to build more
sustainable communities, rather than just waiting for
the roof to fall in. In such situations of uncertainty
(which is to say, most of the time), the people who
succeed in making a difference come from those who
conceived and believed that they could in fact make a
difference. They may not always have been correct in
their estimates of their situations, but because they
believed that they could make a difference, they tried
a lot harder and succeeded more often. Around 1900,
the great psychologist William James presented in this
idea as an intuition in his book, The Will to Believe.
Almost a century later, Martin Seligman confirmed
this intuition with a variety of experiments, which he
documented in his book, Learned Optimism. In the
past few years this theme has been carried forward by
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. In her book,
Mindset, she explains that people who look at their
lives as a trial-and-error journey of learning are much
more resilient in the face of failure than those who
look at their abilities as a fixed inheritance from fate,
nature or family. Nature loves loops and spirals! The
degree to which we imagine that we are capable of
further development plays a key role in our
development!
Friendships. Now I want to apply these ideas
directly to the area of friendship. If we imagine that
friendships “just sort of happen,” then we will not put
much effort into either consciously nurturing our
friendships or understanding the processes and
dimensions of friendship itself. If, on the other hand,
we imagine that friendship is like some sort of garden,
where what you get out of it is loosely but consistently
related to what you put into it, we will then be much
more interested in working in the garden of friendship.
Touching by Meganne Forbes
Companions-in-Blessing — by Dennis Rivers –Page 2
Friendships under the arch of the sky. It is
interesting to think about friendships in terms of the
location where they occur. We have friendships at
school, friendships at work, friendships forged on the
battlefield, friendships made in the course of struggles
for peace and justice. I think of EcoBodhi friendships
as friendships under the arch of the sky, friendships
that grow out of our gradually dawning awareness of
how deeply we are connected to nature and to one
another. This deep connectedness suggests to me that
making a life worth living will be something that we
do together. Even Tibetan Buddhist monks who
meditate alone for years at a stretch, usually come
back to their monastery and share the fruits of their
contemplation with her brother monks and with the
wider world of spiritual aspirants.
I’ve been searching for a new vocabulary of spiritual
friendship, partly because so many spiritual and
religious communities are quite hierarchical, and
focus people’s attention on the preacher in the pulpit
rather than on the persons sitting next to you. Western
societies have been refining the process of
specialization (in which the many focus on the
excellence of the few) for many centuries, so we have
lots of names for the people who are above us in the
spiritual hierarchy, pastor, priest, bishop, monk, guru,
rabbi, roshi, rimpoche, ayatollah; and we have names
for people who are on the bottom rungs of hierarchy.
Novice, postulant, “taking instruction,” brahmachari,
and so on. We have a few names for the people who
stand shoulder to shoulder with us, but not very many:
friend, colleague, coworker, parishioner, satsangi,
community member, but these horizontal-relationship
names have very little of the drama and majesty of the
vertical-relationship ones. In the realm of spiritual
friendship I know of only two shoulder-to-shoulder
terms. The first that comes to mind is Anam Cara,
friend of the soul, a Gaelic term popularized by the
late writer and poet John O’Donohue in his book of
the same name. The second name that comes to mind
is not really a name at all; it is the Protestant idea of
“the priesthood of all believers.” This horizontal
dimension of spirituality is the great ongoing
challenge of religion and society in the West. From
my observations and study I would say that it is much
easier to produce learned pastors than it is to inspire
community members to care about one another, and to
nurture one another’s personal unfolding. And it is
much easier to produce sensitive, highly-trained
psychotherapists who see their clients one at a time,
than it is to knit together the lives of people who live
within shouting distance of one another.
Because ecology continually presents us with vivid
examples of mutuality, I am convinced that ecospirituality,
to be true to its source, needs to
emphasize the horizontal relationships of mutual
nurturing, rather than our traditional hierarchical
relationship of layperson to expert. Believe me! I love
those ecological experts, most of them professors, and
I read their books and articles with great joy. Thomas
Berry, Joanna Macy, Donella Meadows, Rachel
Carson, Loren Eisley, Jane Goodall, and a host of
others. But their work will not fulfill its promise
unless we can figure out a way to let it live among us
as part of our shoulder-to-shoulder relationships.
Unfortunately, as eco-spirituality is developing, the
new wine is being poured into the old bottles of
specialization. People with PhD’s are giving expensive
hotel ballroom seminars about eco-spirituality so that
people with MA’s can keep up their therapy and social
work licenses up to date. I don’t have anything against
continuing education for the helping professions. But
if that is where our movement ends, we will not be of
much help to a world that is unraveling before our
very eyes.
In systems theory terms, the capitalist / industrialist /
militarist / incarcerationist SYSTEM is “meta-stable.”
That is, it tends to swallow up and digest each new
positive development in society, using the new
energies to reinforce the old pyramids. For example,
computers could have made the world a much better
place, but instead they became the heart of a new
global speculation mania that is wrecking the world
economy. At a more personal level, the pressing
ecological needs of planet Earth have been translated
into sensitive and well-intentioned eco-therapists who,
for $100 an hour, will reintroduce you to your need
for nature. I am reminded at this point of a depressing
song from the 1960s titled “Is That All There Is?”
Six of many pathways. In contrast to the intense
individualism of the United States and other parts of
the world, in which “You’ve Got Your Troubles, I’ve
Got Mine” is the rule, ecology presents us with
wonderful examples of us all being in the same boat.
The following list explores some of the many possible
ways that we could befriend our fellow rowers in the
boat of Life.
Companions-in-Blessing — by Dennis Rivers –Page 3
Meditation in Nature by Meganne Forbes
Companion-in-meditation. EcoBodhi began as a
shared practice of hourly meditation and blessing
among a widely scattered circle of friends and peace
and ecology activists. We are engaged in a kind of
mutual ministry of encouragement and resilience.
Companion-in-prayer. Prayer, meditation, blessing,
celebration and gratefulness are for me overlapping
spheres of the spiritual life. Since nature loves variety,
and I am trying to learn from nature, I encourage
people to approach faithfulness to the Earth through
whichever of these processes feels best. I have a deep
preference that people cherish the Web of life and one
another, but I have no preference among the five
processes just mentioned. All the prayers and
meditations on the EcoBodhi web site are offered as
encouragement for you to write and pray the prayer of
your own heart.
Companion-in-blessing. We begin our lives in need
of food and warmth and care. It is part of the natural
turning of the seasons of life that as adults we become
more and more givers of food and warmth and care.
Similarly, early in our lives we ask for blessings. I am
convinced that later in our lives, it is our role to
bestow blessings and to enter more fully into the
process of blessing others. (There is more about this in
my little book, Prayer Evolving, that is available free
of charge on the Web.)
Companion-in-creativity. I have been blessed in my
life to know several deeply creative people, and their
lives have encouraged my life in ways that I can
hardly put into words. It was not that I followed any
one of them in their particular art or craft, but rather
that they showed me what a person could do following
their own inner direction. That encouraged me to
follow my own inner directions. Now, late in my life,
I am blessed to have a circle of creative colleagues,
and together we dream new dreams.
Companion-in-conscience. For whatever few noble
things I may have done in my life, I take five percent
credit. The other niniety-five percent belongs to
people with a lot more courage and a lot more
conscience than I could imagine. Standing at the gates
of nuclear weapon plants, going to jail as a way of
bearing witness to the needs of future generations,
traveling the back roads of the world to live the love
that is yearning to awaken more fully in all of us, they
showed me that I could have a bigger heart, they
showed me that I could have a bigger life.
Companion-in-transformation. We know the
current way of running the world is not working now
and can’t be sustained into the future. The seas are
dying. The land is poisoned in many places. The
ground underneath the central Arkansas has been so
fractured by oil and gas drillers that the people in
central Arkansas have suffered over 700 earthquakes
in less than a year! Things need to change, but I can’t
change them by myself, and can hardly bear to think
about all the indignities to and violations of the Web
of Life (our only life-support system). In your
company I can weep and yell and pound the table, and
read my bitter poems, and then regain my equilibrium,
the equilibrium of the emergency room nurse, who
must not faint at the sight of blood. And because we
see with different eyes, we each can show the other
what the other might have missed, refining in one
another’s company our best plans and our dreams of a
future more in harmony with nature.
I invite you to expand this list, and add to it the special
forms of friendship that have meant the most to you.
Roles and relationships. In closing, there are three
aspects of these friendship roles that I would like to
bring to your attention.
Companions-in-Blessing — by Dennis Rivers –Page 4
•
The first is that these roles are reciprocal. If I am
your companion in prayer, then you are by virtue
of that fact, my companion in prayer. Whereas, if
you are my dentist, then I am your patient, not
your dentist also. People have been having the six
kinds of friendship that I describe above for many
centuries, perhaps even back to the ancient
Greeks, Chinese and Hindus, and maybe even
further back than that. What I feel lacking in my
own time is a name for these forms of friendship.
In modern times they have fallen into “the shadow
of the unthought:” things that seem perfectly
obvious when we say them out loud, but somehow
were hardly thinkable until we said them.
•
The second aspect of these friendship roles is that
there is very often no money exchange involved
in them. Money is a fantastic human tool, but it
does not work equally well in every area of human
life. In the realm of friendship, I am convinced
that we need a Sabbath from money, a protected
space where the pressures of money do not enter.
That will be a challenge to arrange in a world full
of people so desperate to survive that they are
selling their blood, their kidneys, and their
wombs, and renting out their brains, to the highest
bidder. The pressure to monetize every aspect of
human life is one of the central features of our
crumbling culture. Naming these aspects of deep
friendship is my way of trying to defend them
from the onslaught of buyers and sellers. At least
we can talk about them now.
•
A third aspect of these friendship roles is that
they can be contagiously empowering. If you are
a dentist and you fill a tooth of mine, I am not
empowered thereby to go out and fill someone
else’s tooth. But if you adopt me as your
companion-in-blessing, I am by that very fact
closer to the possibility of adopting others as my
companions-in-blessing. (I find it curious and
sad that we do not have a serious word in
English for something positive that spreads from
person to person. But we do have a vivid
ceremony: it is a frequent practice in large
spiritual gatherings for everyone in the room to
hold a candle. Then, a person at the center of the
room lights the candles of those standing
nearby. Those people in turn light the candles of
others standing nearby, and so on, until
everyone in the room is holding a lighted
candle. Until we have a single word for it, we
might call this “peer-empowerment-inwidening-
circles” or “light-spiraling.” Your
suggestions?)
Conclusion. EcoBodhi is a Gandhian experiment in
being the change we want to see. After many years
of searching for an already formed green spiritual
community that I could join, I decided that I needed
to try a completely different approach. I decided to
begin an hourly practice of the deepest prayer,
meditation, and blessing for the well-being of Life
on Earth that I could possibly imagine, and to offer
myself as a companion-in-prayer to anyone,
anywhere who found comfort and encouragement in
such a practice. (To face the challenges before us, I
am convinced that we will need lots of comfort and
encouragement.) This offer to be a companion-inprayer
is an offer that I extend to you, the reader of
this article, at the turn of each hour, every day of the
year, for as long as I live. In exchange I ask nothing
but your heart’s energy given to the world. As many
times a day as the spirit moves you, give thanks for
the miracle of life; bless and pray and meditate in
the ways that feel deepest to you; say yes to life,
and know that there are people around the world
saying yes to life with you.
Companions-in-Blessing — by Dennis Rivers –Page 5
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