How is Your Heart?

“How is your heart?”

“In many Muslim cultures, when you want to ask how others are doing, you ask in Arabic, ‘How is your haal?’ In reality, we ask, ‘How is your heart doing at this very moment, at this breath?’ Tell me you’re more than a machine checking items off your to-do list. Put your hand on my arm, look me in the eye, and connect with me for one second. Tell me something about your heart, and awaken mine.”—Omid Safi in On Being with Krista Tippett (9/16/2017).

Omid Safi, Director of Duke University Islamic Studies Center, once wrote a Thursday column for On Being. He is teaching us to be more intentional in our relationships, rather than simply making lists and completing tasks and assignments.

For example, my usual greeting when starting a conversation is, “How are you doing?” The word doing implies that I am interested in what you are doing, while I actually want to know how you are being—how we can stay connected in this relationship and learn to live together as humans being rather than as humans doing.

Now, I try to say, “How is your heart?” That introduction always draws us more quickly into the relationship we are seeking. Being implies that we live in the present moment, and it is in the present moment that we connect with each other and with God. Our experience of maintaining eye contact also grounds us in the present. If I visit someone who is ill, I also ask permission to hold their hand. Physical contact can also bring us to the present moment. 

We can also apply this understanding of our relationship with each other to our connection with God. Instead of starting our prayers with our to-do list for God and expecting God to give us one, can we open our prayers with “God, how is your heart? Show me your heart and open my heart to you.” 

Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/

 

 

Celebrating 250th with Victories in the Revolutionary War Coming Through Unexpected Consequences

Celebrating 250th with Victories in the Revolutionary War Coming Through Unexpected Consequences

Guest Writers: Steve and Sally Harms

John Trumbull Surrender of Lord Cornwallis

Recent daily readings seem especially appropriate as we celebrate our nation’s 250th anniversary and thank God for the many blessings He has bestowed on our country. They remind us that some of our greatest victories have emerged from our greatest trials.

When we think about the American Revolution, we often reduce our success to inspiring rhetoric and heroic leadership. The reality was far more complex. Britain was the most powerful nation on earth, having emerged victorious from the Seven Years’ War only twelve years earlier. The American colonies had barely one-fifth the population of Britain, and only about 40 percent of the colonists actively supported independence. Roughly 20 percent remained loyal to the Crown, another 20 percent were enslaved and had little voice in the conflict, and many others simply hoped to stay out of it.

One often-overlooked factor in the American victory was biological. When Britain shifted its military campaign to the South, its troops encountered a formidable enemy they scarcely understood.

The organism, named 180 years after the Declaration of Independence, was Plasmodium falciparum and spread by the Anopheles mosquito. Arriving in the colonies through the transatlantic slave trade, malaria had long been endemic in parts of Africa, and many enslaved Africans possessed greater inherited resistance than Europeans or Native Americans. This tragic reality was one reason plantation owners relied so heavily on enslaved labor in the mosquito-infested tobacco fields. British soldiers, lacking prior exposure, suffered devastating illness in the southern swamps, with more than half of Cornwallis’s forces becoming incapacitated.

History reminds us that victories often come through unexpected means. (McNiel JR (2016) Smithsonian Mag)

Steve and Sally Harms

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Walking in Someone Else's Shoes

 Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes

“Within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. The person who hates you most has some good in him; even the nation that hates you most has some good in it; even the race that hates you most has some good in it.

“And when you come to the point where you look every person in the face and see deep down within what religion calls ‘the image of God,’ you begin to love in spite of. No matter what the person does, you see God’s image there.”—Martin Luther King, Jr., in “Loving Your Enemies,” a sermon at Dexter Ave. Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, 1957.

I once worked with another physician whom I thought was incompetent. I felt her decisions did not make sense and were not helpful. She often spoke almost in riddles, trying to consider many sides of a question, while I already thought there was an obvious answer that, beyond question, was right. Moreover, she was amazingly slow to make any changes.

One weekend, I had to cover her job while she was on vacation. Overnight, I realized why she behaved as she did, the magnitude of her responsibility, and the endless number of real and imagined problems she faced. I walked in her shoes, and it made all the difference.

Placing myself in her shoes helped me see God’s image in her and in others I had previously found difficult to understand.

A story also circulates about someone asking Mother Teresa, “How do you stand it when you have to serve some truly despicable person?” With a sigh, she replies, “I look deeply into their eyes and say to myself, ‘My Jesus, what an interesting disguise you are wearing today.’” – Deborah Sokolove, Seekers Church, “Weekly Gospel Reflection,” Inward/Outward.com, Church of the Saviour.

This is also how Benedictine Spirituality calls us to see others. It is called radical hospitality. We are to look for the light of Christ in others. Often, when we have difficulty with others, it is because we are having trouble finding the light of Christ, our God, within ourselves. We have strayed from our path of staying connected to God in our own lives. We have lost the “light” in our lives that directs us to the light in the lives of others. Having difficulty with others is always a “stop sign” to look for the light of Christ within ourselves and perhaps even to ask someone else for help. Walking in someone else’s shoes is always a good starting point for seeing others in a new light.