Beloved Community: The Reality and the Noble Aspiration Reality, Aspiration, and Framework Now in my late seventies, I am keenly aware there are many fewer days ahead than behind me to be in this body on Earth. I love life so deeply and long for the end of unnecessary suffering. The sense of my limited time, my mortality, makes me feel the need to try to express the fullness of what lies deep in my heart about healing our beloved world. I have nothing to lose, and a hurting Mother Earth is calling. I am immensely grateful and deeply content with the life I am blessed to live. I actively feel the gift of having a body and a mind. I look around and see enormous human kindness and caring, courage and resilience, individual and collective determination to fight the good fight for truth, justice, freedom, and joy. At the same time, I am heartbroken about the vast suffering in the world that begs to be healed.

I have wept buckets of tears and raged to the heavens about human cruelty. I have felt powerless to change things. I regularly have bouts of despair about our struggling ecosystem, continued racial injustice, extreme economic inequality, and deepening divisions among people. I see hurt in all directions. I imagine that you too have your moments of gratitude and heartbreak that weave through your life. For me, living in that gap between the wounded world and my heart''s desire is both excruciatingly painful and ultimately motivating. The Aspiration for a Beloved Community The world is laced through and through with jaw-dropping beauty and heart-numbing horrors. We humans are born into this life to navigate these joys and woes as best we can.

I hold in my heart a deep aspiration--for a world unified, just, peaceful, and harmonious, that supports the full flowering of individuals and all species. I long to live happily in the Beloved Community. I am not alone in this longing--I''ve met hundreds of people who have expressed a similar aspiration. Many of us carry an intuitive idea of what a safe, healing, loving world in balance might be. Words like sacred, divine, the Kingdom of God on Earth, the Pure Land, Gaia, living happily in the present moment, sustainable ecosystem, fair economy, and a happy planet point to this heartfelt notion. Some might say this is a very human aspiration, a wish for a better world. Others might say it goes deeper than a wish; it taps into an inherent "knowing" that we bring into human form from the mysterious depths of creation. Whatever the truth,a line from the iconic US labor and Black Civil Rights Movement''s song, "We Shall Overcome," expresses it well: "Deep in our hearts, we do believe, that we shall all be free someday.

" We are not just wanting to transform racism. We are not just wanting to change our economy to one of sharing. We are not just wanting to end war and violence. We are not just wanting to heal our emotional wounds. We are not just wanting to save the planet. We want all these and more, on the way to living in a Beloved Community. The term "Beloved Community" is often associated with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

He put a strong public spotlight on an idea that has been held deep in the hearts of humans for millennia. People across centuries and cultures have yearned to live in a peaceful, harmonious, and sustainable world. Many indigenous peoples, as best they could, have lived according to this idea. Utopian thinkers through the ages have created versions of this very human aspiration. Enlightened spiritual teachers have pointed the way. Dr. King''s uplifting of this aspiration was a great gift to humanity. However, many people mistakenly think that Beloved Community is made up of folks like us, our kind, our people, our kindred spirits, our special group.

This is much too narrow a definition. Dr. King, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, and many others who have contributed to the idea of the Beloved Community, grounded in their respective spiritual traditions, envisioned it as a manifestation of the way love or God or the divine shows up in the material world. For Christian leaders, the Beloved Community might be the Kingdom of God on Earth. In Buddhism, it might be considered the Pure Land--a realm considered suitable for a noble rebirth. Spiritual leaders seem to imply that the Beloved Community already exists as the bedrock of reality. Thich Nhat Hanh might say it is alive and whole in the ultimate dimension--the deeper truth of our interconnectedness. And, of course, the Beloved Community doesn''t just apply to human beings but includes all species and the Earth itself.

In this historical dimension where we live and breathe, the Beloved Community is an aspiration, and our task is to realize its fullness. It is imagined as the community that is based in love and compassion, that lives in harmony, that excludes no one, where everyone belongs, where conflicts are minimal and are resolved peacefully, where oppression is a relic of history, where hurt and mistreatment are quickly healed, where there is a shared commitment to the common good and the well-being of all, where the sacred and vast unknown are honored. As an aspiration, it is "the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible," to use the lovely title of a book by Charles Eisenstein. The painful gap we often feel between that vision and where we are is a measure of our deep conditioning to feel separate. We''re so conditioned that it''s not uncommon to feel separation within ourselves--our minds and bodies--evidenced by our myriad of conflicted feelings and the stubborn divide between our actions and our deepest values and aspirations. But we humans are not and cannot be separate from the rest of the natural world or ourselves. We are part of unbroken wholeness. Unfortunately, this primal ground of our being is often obscured by hurtful experiences, wrong perceptions, miseducation, oppression, and more.

We mostly forget our essential connectedness and wind up divided and disunited, cut off from ourselves, each other, and nature, and we hurt others and the Earth as a result. The challenge is clear. How do we do the inner and outer work necessary to come back to ourselves in order to include everyone and all species in a peaceful, harmonious, creative, caring, relational, global community? This might be a more fruitful question than whether Republicans or Democrats will win the next election, or who''s to blame for the spread of misinformation, or how we safeguard democracy, or how we save the gray wolf. All these are important, but they fall short of a unifying purpose. What if we ask questions like: What makes us happy? How much do we need? What helps all of us be safe? What kind of a community do we want to live in? How do we want to be treated by others? How do we want to contribute to the collective good? What is fair? How do we share Earth''s limited resources? How do we cultivate reverence for all life? What is the balance between individual freedom and collective well-being? How do we restore, renew, reconnect, reweave our relationships with ourselves, one another, other species, the natural world, and the cosmos? What does a world look like that reflects our sacred nature? And then, how do we get there? Six Pathways This book explores interrelated components that are necessary to move us toward a seismic shift in human imagination from "me" or "us" to "all"--the Beloved Community. These components integrate social justice, emotional healing, and spiritual practice. They are not complete or sufficient, but together they begin to form aholistic, mindfulness-based approach toward making the Beloved Community real. These six interrelated pathways are: 1.

Cultivating wise view: Grounding our actions in spiritual depth. 2. Healing hurt and trauma: Releasing grief, despair, fear, and powerlessness so that we may think, act, and love more deeply. 3. Transforming racial and social oppression: Linking climate justice with racial justice and economic justice to break habits of exploitation and foster human unity. 4. Building deep local community: Creating dependable space to recover, refresh, and renew ourselves in the face of environmental and social suffering, and to deepen solidarity. 5.

Living ethically: Practicing reverence for life, deep listening, kind speech, and mindful consuming so that we nurture our compassion to counteract hatred, blame, and "othering." 6. Engaging in mindful social action: Individually and collectively taking action that is nonviolent in methods, transformational in vision, and aimed toward realizing the Beloved Community. Each section of this book is devoted to one of these components. Each includes frameworks of understanding or practice that have proven invaluable to me, and stories from my life related to that component. Sprinkled throughout the book are short practical applications called "Practice suggestions" or "Reflection questions." Certain concepts are revisited in different sections because those practices or views apply to more than one of the six pathways. I imagine these components as intersecting circles, each impacting the others.

Foundational Views It is important for me at the outset to share a set of viewpoints that guide my thinking. I cannot claim these as my own, since I culled them from many thinkers, spiritual ancestors, and social justice movements, to whom I offer a deep bow of gratitude. This list has been refined in my conversa.