Renewal (also published in Grapevine Spring 2009)

I heard a BBC radio program a while back that touched me – of some young Rwandans who had been both victims and victimisers on both sides of the madness that possessed them.
They had found - and needed to find - that singing and playing together for dance had offered a way to regain an entirely clean present. This did not answer their problems as such - but it opened an intimate spiritual renewal from which to live a step at a time from a good place. A sense of life uncorrupted.
My sense is that only in a willingness or allowing of such total participation do we become altogether present – and in this we align with the very Gift of Being Itself – and so we receive new life. "Behold I make all things new" - (saith the Lord).
These Rwandans may be an extreme case where the motivation for healing is great – but it applies to all who are caught up in histories that blinker and deny the vision of innocence that only an altogether present perspective uncovers.
Such a participation of presence and passion is what I open to in my singing and it invites and touches a like quality in the dancers. Who hasn't noticed tendencies to judgement dissolve through the simple willingness to dance together?
Such experience doesn't answer our problems as such - but can surely renew and encourage us by restoring a perspective that is truly shared - in place of the endlessly recycled self-justified privacy or self-protection that a restless and often fear driven mentality locks us into.
As a young man, an insight came to me that the act of 'blanking' another human being was the soil on which holocausts and genocides depend and ultimately express. Denying reality of another is asserting one's private judge.
We all have to find our way with what we have and seem to be - yet that way is not really about succeeding in the ways that the world tends to fantasize - but is a way of experiencing and sharing in our good. This need be no fantasy but is available by the law of giving and receiving. For by what we give out do we set the measure and the kind of what we receive - and vice versa.
In what may seem to be uncertain times I invite you to become certain - not in conceptual terms - but in the orientation of your heart.
For what we desire is what we give attention to - and what occupies our attention is witness to desires we held before.
Therefore let us renew our appreciation of life, each other and ourselves, by joining in a sense of life shared. For is this not the discernment of being in love - that you walk not alone?