Love is What the World Needs Now

 

I have decided to stick to love…

Hate is too great a burden to bear.

                                    Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

I remember a song that was a part of my life for a few years while I was in college in the 1960s. The words really spoke to me. “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. That’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.”

That was a time when our country was deeply divided – thousands of people protesting against racial discrimination at home and an unpopular war in Vietnam, and supporters of the status quo labeling the protestors as unpatriotic and dangerous.

Fast forward to today. Once again, our country is deeply divided, and we desperately need a lot more love and a lot less hatred and refusal to even listen to each other.

We have allowed political views to solidify into intractable positions of “I am right, and you are wrong, I am a good guy, and you are an enemy.” As a country, we have turned the idea of brotherhood into one of “us and them.”

How did we get to this ugly place once again?

I believe that we forgot how to love each other. Love does not mean agreeing on everything. It means working to understand each other and to find common ground on which to build a future together.

Often, we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to get to know people we disagree with. We see them as those people who are against me.

The Sufi poet, Rumi, shed some light on this:

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers

within yourself that you have built against it.

That calls for some self-reflection. I realize that so much of what shows up in our lives is a result of the lens through which we view others. As hard as it is for us to look at, we do have to admit that we build barriers to love when we see people who disagree with us are our enemies. That puts up a wall between them and us that prevents us from even trying to understand each other.

So, step one is to turn judgment into curiosity. Why do they think that way? What do they really want for their lives? Can we find common ground?

Paul Tillich answers these with a simple formula:

The first duty of love is to listen.

How do we even begin to answer these questions if we are not even talking to each other?

The Black musician, Daryl Davis, provides an example. He has made it his mission to befriend people in hate groups like the Klu Klux Klan by calmly confronting them with the question: “How can you hate me if you don’t even know me?”

“Give them a platform, he said. “You challenge them. But you don’t challenge them rudely or violently. You do it politely and intelligently. And when you do things that way, chances are they will reciprocate and give you a platform.”

That leads to the discovery of the common ground you both stand on - values, hopes for the future, what you really want for your lives. Once you find out that you agree on many issues, the barriers come down and you no longer see each other as enemy.

Daryl’s efforts resulted in several clansmen becoming his friend and giving up their clan membership. Our challenge is a bit different, but the message is the same. When we take down the barriers in ourselves that prevent us from getting to know people who disagree with us, we find that we have more in common than we thought.

Of course, most of us do not have the time or inclination to go out and engage people one-on-one in conversation about our different views. But we can begin by accepting the idea that we do have a lot in common. We are all individuals, and we cannot be painted by the same brush, which is colored by the ideas in someone else’s head about who we are.

As Jim Krueger reminds us, in the song made famous by Dave Mason,

There ain’t no good guy, there ain’t no bad guy.

There’s only you and me, and we just disagree.

We do have the power to let go of judgments about each other and to remind ourselves that we are probably more alike than we thought. Then we will remember how to love each other and begin to build a better future together.

Love is what the world needs now, and it’s ours to give. Let’s expand and deepen our kindness journey and flood the world with love, sweet love.

Wishing you joy on your journey

Click here for the song, "What the World Needs Now"

Click here see Daryl Davis's compelling TED talk

 

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We’re grateful that you are on this journey with us.

 

With love from our hearts to yours,

Pat and Larry