Dear Holy Ones,

When you look at the world, what do you see? When I look I tend to see only the bad things, the way when I sometimes look at others I see only their faults and when I look at myself I see only my virtues. The Talmud teaches us that, “We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.”  So if we are having a bad day, or we are stressed out, or if our favorite team just lost the Super Bowl, or if our political party is not in power, or in the wake of illness and natural disaster, or in mire of the swamps of fascism, the world can seem like a very dark, dismal hopeless place. And yet there are days in the light of the sun, on the receiving end of a smile, when your favorite team wins the game, and you’re feeling good and manage to hear a heartwarming story, and you catch your favorite song playing over some speaker in an unlikely place – that all of creation seems to be just fine.  

Stick around long enough and the world will show you joy and sorrow; life and death; happiness and sadness both too great to imagine in the middle of here and now we seem to have short memories for both tragedy and ecstasy. 

When we talk about paying attention, we usually give a lot of that attention to inner work – what is going on within us. Yet it is just as important to take note of what goes on in the world around us. What does the world show us? And, equally important – what witness do we bear to what we see?

When looking at the world gets you down, don’t ruminate, activate. Don’t post something on Facebook, don’t send an email, but get out there and get face to face. Meet people, get engaged, bear witness. What you’re willing to work for tells me a lot about what you believe and what you see when you look at the world. When we look at the world we see the world not as it is, but as we are. So, my question for you as we enter a month on the theme of Paying Attention is: How are we? How are you? When you look at the world, what do you see?  What will you do?

Jouret Puk was a child when Pol Pot’s regime killed his father and separated his family into different work camps as they executed 2 million people in the killing fields of Cambodia in the 1970s. Puk finally escaped with his mother to Thailand when he was 8 and then to Tennessee, where he learned the game of baseball, which he loved because the children playing it smiled and were happy and that never happened in Cambodia. Puk returned to Cambodia in 2002 to bring baseball and happiness to his homeland, to create a field of dreams on the former killing fields so children could experience the joy he knew from a simple game. Fields of Dreams are possible, even from killing fields, when you look at the world with love and determination.

Shine on,

Rev. Tony