Residence in the Common Stream in a Time of Love and Affliction (2 minute read)

In a time of Affliction, or fear of Affliction, imprinted with the apocalyptic-sounding COVID-19, there is a rising tide of compassion. Look away from the LCD cool fire for a moment and be in residence in the Common Stream.

I know full well that invoking the term “faith” will make many bristle. But faith and science are connected openly in conversation at this moment. The seperation of the two has been exaggerated by the real presence of organizations in our communities fueled by fundamentalist principles that devalue the self-evident, long proven models of our reality. But those are not the streams within most of us wade. Faith and science are both empowered to explore the mysteries, like the presence of conciousness and awakening of biological life. One challenges the other to work harder to abstract a model for our understanding. In an enlightened age we can no longer afford to envision these two as combatants, but rather working together to lift our hearts and our knowledge of the natural world or whatever may be beyond the layers of our understanding.

Which brings me to this, in our time of Love and Affliction: there is tremendous energy radiating to educate, care and simply befriend from across many faith communities right now. People asking the questions: How can we connect and hold the appropriate distance recommended by the CDC or NIH? What do our neighbors and elders need from us? How do we keep the isolation from getting the best of us?

The social spaces are being utilized to organize and educate to scientifically sound behaviors by contemporary faith leaders. They have been recruited by our Govenors to help direct life-saving education. From my vantage point they had already started.

I am seeing a time in the future when we will look back and say: our faiths became what they were always meant to be, our liturgies came from a shared place such that we could see no differences in their structure nor content. We looked at our elders as we did our young and saw ourselves. We called everyone our dearest. We were serving love and humanity…we found our salvation in this life.