Making the world a better place.

The one single thing.

Hi friends, It’s been a while since I last wrote to you and I’ve missed it. I’m currently writing a long piece introducing the New Thing I’m starting next month. It feels both exciting and nerve wracking to be sharing that so I’m taking a bit longer to put it together. Hopefully I’ll be (mentally) ready to do that in the next few days but, in the meantime, I wanted to share something that I’ve been wondering about this week.

I’m going out on a limb here but I’m guessing that many of you who are subscribed to Letters from a Soul Friend are also subscribed to Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, the reflections emailed from his Center for Action and Contemplation. If you’re not, you might like to consider it. It seems that a lot of the people who enjoy my writing also enjoy Richard Rohr’s. Recently, someone told me that they found me because they put Richard Rohr and Bedford into Google and my name was the top result. It made me smile.

Anyway…

Something I particularly enjoy about Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations is that they regularly feature writings by other contemporary thinkers. It makes the emails feel more expansive and collaborative than simply being a showcase for his own thinking. There’s also a Story from Our Community section at the end of each email, which is usually a brief note sent in by a reader (make sure you’re scrolling to the end if you’ve never noticed these before!). There’s always something in these emails that stays with me through the day but, thanks to their collaborative bent, it’s frequently something not expressed in Richard Rohr’s words.

This week it was a line in a reflection written by Brian McLaren that caught my attention. In fact, it wasn’t even a line by Brian McLaren but a quote from Marilynne Robinson.

In an interview with The Guardian newspaper she was asked the question, “What single thing would make the world in general a better place?” 

She replied, “Loving it more.” 

I wonder if that makes you pause your reading like it made me pause mine.

Loving the world: the single thing that would make the world in general a better place.

Part of me wishes I could ask Marilynne Robinson to say more - not because I want her to explain herself but because I want to listen. Another part of me is glad that I can’t ask; it pushes me to be the one to expand her words. And so, this week, I’ve been taking these thoughts with me on my morning dog walks and wondering exactly how loving the world makes it a better place.

I can’t say I have figured it out exactly but I do have some tentative thoughts.

Thoughts like…

Perhaps loving the world makes it a better place because you don’t think twice about actively caring for something you truly love. Perhaps loving the world more helps us to see what’s ours to do, whether it’s starting a community project, speaking up about something that seems unjust, picking up the litter instead of complaining about it or just being more patient in traffic.

Or perhaps loving the world makes it better because when you love the world you finally see it as truly is - worthy of consideration and affection, perhaps even reverence. Perhaps the world becomes better simply because you stop seeing it through a lens of hate or disgust or fear.

Or perhaps loving the world makes it a better place because you yourself, in that act of loving, become better (by which I mean you more fully embody your true Self, which is Love). Perhaps the world becomes better as you become better because you are part of the world.

Or perhaps the reason lies in a combination of all three or perhaps it’s something else entirely (please tell me if you have thoughts on this).

In the end I’m not sure it actually really matters how it works. It’s an interesting, possibly even helpful, thought experiment but, ultimately, all that really matters is that we hear the real challenge, which is simply to love the world more. It doesn’t matter if we’ve wrapped our heads around how our love makes the world better but whether we have enough trust that it will (or it might) that we feel the urgency to get on with the work of trying to love it more. And when we have that trust then the question becomes not “how does this work?” but “how can I love this world more?”

One approach rarely fits all and I’m guessing that the specifics of the answer will be different for each of us depending on our unique gifts and foibles as well as our starting point. But if, as Brian McLaren hints at in the rest of his emailed reflection, loving can mean looking, then perhaps loving the world more might mean looking at it differently - replacing judgement with care, othering with openness and distance with attention.

And maybe it’s not just the world that’s made better by loving it more. Maybe situations are made better by loving them more. Maybe families are made better by loving them more. Maybe people are made better by loving them more. Maybe even you might be made better if you loved yourself more.

Whatever it is that you want to be better, I wonder:

Can you trust that the way to do that might be to love it more?

What would it look like for you to make (a tiny) start?

Pondering it all with you,

Jen x