How Will We Be Remembered?

To give pleasure to a single heart by a single kind act is better than
a thousand head-bowings in prayer.

-Saadi

“To give pleasure to a single heart by a single kind act is better than a thousand head-bowings in prayer.”

— Saadi

Back in Autumn 2013 I participated in an event that I had hoped would catch on, and yet it seemed to be a standalone experience. My suspicion now is that it may have been an experience that was ahead of its time. The primary focus was to directly address and engage in conversation with an online audience.
This post is not about the experience. I only bring it up because I just found some notes that I took as a participant in that experience. Reading through them I found some wonderful nuggets of insight. Clearly they needed to be re-impressed upon my life.

This is one: As religious scientists, will people who observe us be able to tell by the way we treat each other that our God is Love?

I didn’t write down who asked that question. I wish I knew so that I could credit that person with bringing up a question that speaks to the core of the teaching.

There is a lot of time and energy spent in classes and religious science circles trying to understand and define and embody the thing we call God. Yet, God is indefinable. It is infinite, and any way we try to define it places limitations on the understanding and creates limitation. Any specific expression is ineffective in encompassing God, for it cannot be encompassed.

The most magnificent way we can explain God is to remember that God is Love. This is the through line of so many religious ideologies and faith traditions. The true nature of Love is just as indefinable as God.

We do not require a definition to understand and express God, just as we do not require a definition to understand and express Love. They are the same thing. The question that comes up then is the question above, essentially, are we acting accordingly?

What is our legacy? Are we leaving the planet and our communities better than we found them? Are we acting from compassion in all our actions? Are we releasing judgment, fear, discord, upset, and the like from our own personal lives? Are we critical of the discordant rhetoric in the public sphere, yet blind to similar rhetoric in our private and personal lives?

Daily I am deepening into the notion that my personal Spirituality is best expressed the activity of my life. It doesn’t matter how much I pray, if the prayer is spoken into a void. My prayer must impel action, or the prayer is empty.

I would like my legacy to be that I loved. That’s it. Let’s say in 500 years if archeologists dig up information that can be directly tied to me, my only desire is that they be able to identify beyond a shadow of a doubt, “this is someone who loved.”