Election Eve Reflection

In the last several days I have done a burial and a wedding and for me the themes have been the same- how are we connected to each other?

In the burial service the father had died and the widow and the two grown children were left trying to image life without him. This was on All Souls Day (Nov. 2nd) where we focus in on all of the people who have gone before us and how we are still connected to each other in a community of saints. There is an energy - a spiritual energy) that we expend in relationships where love is shared. That energy remains if we but open ourselves up to it. I shared that my father's  love for me - although we spent so much time in my first two years of college fighting each other over his expectations for me to grow up before he died - was still resonating in my present 47 years later. Love does not die a natural death but it can starve and be killed if we insist.

The wedding had the same theme of how we connect with each other to create a "sacred space" between us - "When 2 or 3 are gathered in my name- I will be in the midst of them" - it is out of this sacred space of listening to each other and to the still small voice of the holy dwelling between us, it is out of that space where the power to deal with the conflicts that naturally come up when two different people inhabit the same habitation. In marriages, if you try 1+1 = 1 you create an amorphous ego mass which swallows each of us and one will suffocate with the strongest partner dominating. If we try 1+1 =2  we are roomates who stay together for mutual sadvantage and it ends when one or habit dies or a better opportunity comes up. However, if we try 1+1= 3 then we have a dynamo of energy being unleashed where the space between us is able to touch and heal each other and the world about us.

God created us to live within the context of community; in a shared sacred space where our spirits connect with each other and participating in the power of that which is greater than ourselves. But there is another spirit abroad in this land.  and he looks like this from the Gospel according to Disney:

It is the spirit we see in in large corporations in which directors loot companies for their own private enrichment, where long range planning is one quarter stock cycle or one election cycle or one news cycle. On this eve of the election we see how how the space between us as a nation has been a policy of scorchted earth as both sides push to be right and attempt to destroy one another. Our love of short term advantage and gain is poisoning the ground between us and for what? And all done by those who claim to be supporters of a  "Christian nation"? Do I remember Christ saying "What advantage do we have if we gain the whole world and lose our very selves? "