Welcome to this conversation

To Get to the Other Side, Episode 8 (aired 8/14): Lasting for the Other Side. What are you fighting for, against or through right now? We are facing hard, hard things personally and societally. If I’m honest, the soldiering metaphor leaves me feeling more tired than brave, and haunted by questions: “What is the ‘good’ fight? How will we keep it up? And who will be left standing?” Informed by her Sikh faith, Valerie Kaur reconnects me with my own. Her visionary voice offers a different metaphor I find deeply encouraging; one that returns us with new power to the age-old call to love our way to the other side. ~Melissa Lock

Key Takeaways & Homework Practice

“Is it possible that this is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb?” - Valerie Kaur

“In the same way I loved you, love one another.” - Jesus

It’s always love. Spiritual teachers before and after Jesus echo the ancient refrain of love without limit, along with The Beatles and millions of poets, song writers, reformers, preachers, writers and lawn signs since. But what does love in action look like? What is your working understanding of that word “love?” 

Valerie Kaur’s new book, See No Stranger offers us a powerful working picture of “love.”  She talked about it with Parker Palmer and Carrie Newcomer this June on their podcast: Revolutionary Love - A Conversation With Author/Activist Valarie Kaur.

Love in action is labor. Messy, hard, sweet labor.

Love encompasses the fullest range of human emotions - not just the dreamy ones!

• “Joy is the gift of love, grief is the price, anger protects that which is loved, and when we think we have reached our limits, wonder returns us to love” 

Love expands the circle of who counts as “one of us” 

• “When we choose to love beyond our own kin... others who do not look like us, even our opponents and ourselves who we too often neglect...THEN love becomes revolutionary.”  

• “You are a part of me that I do not yet know, I must choose to wonder about you…” 

Love is a fight, but not to make other people lose. 

• We fight, we labor for something new to be born in and for ALL of us: Others, ourselves and even those we see as our opponents.

All of us have a role in the revolutionary labor of loving our neighbors as ourselves.

What might yours be right now? How are you breathing everyday? And who are you breathing with?

Homework Practice: 

In See No Stranger Valerie Kaur says “wonder is where love begins.” Who felt strange to you today? Like you they have wants, needs, joys, pains, stories and complicated feelings. Practice wondering about those things for them, even for a minute. Any shifts?  Share with a friend what you noticed in your experiment!  Breathe, push, repeat.

“I’ve come to believe that laboring in joy is the meaning of life.” -Valerie Kaur