Spiritual Power

By Deborah King

We complain about those “stupid” Congressmen who are playing games with our health and welfare. We moan and groan about bosses, co-workers, friends and relatives who treat us badly. We want to throw a shoe at the television in disgust at the moral turpitude of our present-day society as seen in the news. In 1963, Martin Luther King said it well: “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” Sounds like an accurate assessment of our current situation. But Dr. King followed this observation with: “Our hope for creative living lies in our ability to reestablish the spiritual needs of our lives in personal character and social justice.”

Spiritual needs, personal character, social justice . . . now there’s something worth investing in. Can we get a government bailout for our deflated spiritual economy? But really, where do we start?

Where everything starts-at home. By changing ourselves, we embody the changes we want to see “out there.”

Try the following exercise in character building. For three days, take note of everything in your world that irks you. Make a list of all the hurts, slights, jealousies, and injustices that you experience personally and the news stories you react to as you journey through your daily life. Then sit down with a journal and pen in hand to reflect on each incident. Something you value was trod upon, denied, or out of reach. Some injustice or some failure to care occurred. How did you respond to each incident? Did you react to the unkind or unconscious moment on the same wavelength? An eye for an eye? Or did you have the presence of mind to stop your knee-jerk reaction and respond with compassion and concern?

Rate your response to each incident on a scale of 1-10: 1 means “I responded completely unconsciously, without thinking or pausing to choose my words and actions,” and 10 means “I behaved completely independent of the circumstance and in alignment with my highest values.” This exercise is not about judging yourself; it is simply meant to provide a reality-check about your own moral character and spiritual power.

If you aspire to a growth spurt in your character, you need to honestly evaluate where you are now. Once you’ve taken time to reflect on what happened, engage your imagination and replay each incident as though you were, in fact, a fully conscious person, able to choose to respond from level 10. Do you see how you might you have brought a heart-full touch or sprinkling of humor to the moment and thus turned the circumstance around? The ability to self-reflect and self-correct is a key element in developing personal character. Do this exercise regularly and you will literally see the change you want to see in the world happening within yourself.

Look at your list again and notice which of the incidents had to do with a violation of the rights of others. These are the issues that concern you in the arena of social justice. Were you steaming mad when Social Security was on the chopping block? Did your heart hurt when yet another innocent Muslim was corralled by Homeland Security? Did word of a child molester going free sicken you?

My concern for abused women, for example, means that I have to address this social justice issue at every turn. The feelings I have are what tells me this issue is my responsibility. What are the issues that raise the hair on your neck? It may be global warming for some, starving children for others. These are the causes you are meant to champion and thus feed the deeper spiritual hunger of your being to be of service in the world.

Get to know yourself through self-reflective practices like the one outlined above and you will serve the world with the passion and insight that is a unique expression of your soul. You may not be the one to come up with the break-through invention that saves the earth’s ecosystem, but you may be the one to relieve the suffering of an abused child, or to save one sick elderly person the pain of loneliness for an afternoon. No act of kindness is too small, and no expression of compassion is lost on your soul.

Again, in the words of Martin Luther King: “If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and Earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great sweeper, who swept his job well.”

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