Keeping the Faith

How do we find the love?  Where do we look? And what do we do when we can’t see it?

All the world’s faith traditions agree on one point: Love is the answer.

No matter what the problem is — fear, anger, jealousy, sadness — love can assuage the hurt and build a bridge from a moment of pain to a moment of healing. And in many traditions, it’s said that God is love — so love can be a bridge to the divine, as well.

Statue of Buddha Shakyamuni. Photo: Jason Leung

In fact, it almost seems perfect — until we get to the “how” part.

How do we find the love?  Where do we look? And what do we do when we can’t see it?

Twenty-six hundred years ago — several centuries before Jesus of Nazareth was born — a spiritual seeker in India, who had fasted, prayed and meditated for six years on a riverbank, experienced a spiritual illumination that gave him some answers to those questions.

The Buddha Shakyamuni, as he was known, taught widely in northern India, walking on foot from town to town, gathering disciples and preaching a philosophy of love and non-violence.

His teachings, summarized in the collection known as the Dhammapada, or “path of truth,” begin with the acknowledgement that our thoughts determine our experience of the world at every turn:

“We are what we think, 

All that we are arises with our thoughts, 

With our thoughts, 

We make the world.” 

He went on to say that if we think, speak and act with a selfish mind — feeling superior to others and looking down on others — we experience mental suffering and disquiet; and if we think, speak and act with an unselfish mind — recognizing the qualities of others, understanding their faults and holding them as dear as a member of our family — we experience mental contentment and spiritual peace.

…love begins when we recognize that other folks are just like us – wanting happiness, but not quite capable of accomplishing it.

For the Buddha, then, love begins as the acknowledgement that all those who live want to be happy but often don’t know how to accomplish that happiness, often practicing harm in a mistaken attempt to gain comfort and security for themselves.

So in this view, love begins when we recognize that other folks are just like us — wanting happiness, but not quite capable of accomplishing it.

In this view, love isn’t romance — it’s connection. It is the wish that others have the happiness that we also want for ourselves.  It’s not “either-or;” it’s “yes-and.”

Finding that love can start with ourselves. We know how it feels to be happy; we know how it feels to be kind and to receive kindness. We also know how it feels to be miserable, and how it feels to be angry and resentful and push away the kindness of others.

And we know, deep inside us, which of these two feelings we prefer.

Many people remember the teachings of the children’s educator and entertainer Fred Rogers, who used to say that love can be born from feelings of gratitude. During his public appearances, “Mister Rogers” would frequently conclude his remarks by asking audience members to sit in silence for one minute, feeling gratitude “for those who have loved us into existence.”

…finding our way home was the start of sharing that love with others, whose pain he saw as being so evident that it needed immediate care.

Steeping ourselves in this love, in his view, was a way to find our way back to our heart, our truest spiritual home. And finding our way home was the start of sharing that love with others, whose pain he saw as being so evident that it needed immediate care.

Fred Rogers, aka “Mister Rogers”. Photo: Walt Seng

Unusual to find Buddhist philosophy coming from a television personality who also happened to be an ordained Presbyterian minister, but not at all unusual when we consider that the attitude of love and kindness connect us to each other in ways that disarm our fear and anger and unhappiness.

The Buddha said it was important to train the mind — to spend a little time each day letting our chattering minds subside by quietly observing the breath — so we could clear out the confusing torrent of thoughts and feelings and be able to reflect on qualities like love and compassion and basic goodness.

So if we want to find the love that’s within us, we can start by just taking seven or 10 mindful breaths, reflecting on gratitude for what we have, and then by using our imagination to mentally extend that goodness to other people.

Doing this exercise and including everyone in our imaginary circle of love — even people we dislike or don’t agree with — is one way to make peace inside ourselves with those parts of ourselves we don’t like and then inadvertently project out onto others.

And if we could perhaps take moments throughout our day to remember and steep in this gratitude and extend this love to others that we meet, how transformed would our world become then?

This moment in history might be the ideal time to try this out. I’m in — how about you?

Lama Kathy Wesley is a Columbus native and a Buddhist minister at the Karma Thegsum Chöling Buddhist Meditation Center in Franklinton.

This article originally appeared in The Columbus Dispatch.