I last reflected on vulnerability, and spoke of openness to the core of our own being, to one another, and to the mystery of life in its blend of joy and sorrow. We mentioned briefly that such openness implies and requires a degree of trust. In order to be vulnerable, to allow another enter our inner space, trust is essential. So, a few thoughts on trust might be in valuable.

I think that the key ingredients of trust are at once a trust in ourselves and a trust in life itself, in the universe. The central implication is the challenge to become ourselves a trustworthy person.

Trust in ourselves means a trust in the deepest part of ourselves, our essential core. To do so implies being aware of and in touch with that core. This is a gradual and never complete process. It involves going beyond the surface of life, the constant pulls from outside. It involves going beyond the scripts of a society that stresses possessions and power over others, a viewpoint that preys upon our fears which are channelled into hostility, and into an “us”versus “them” mentality.

This process of self-awareness unfolds gradually–as we have mentioned often–through solitude, friendship, and social outreach. This uncovering process occurs through quiet solitude in which we become present to ourselves and allow what is deepest within us to emerge to the surface of our awareness. It occurs through friendship, especially its expression in open conversation from our core. It develops through compassion in which we reach our from our deep within ourselves to another who is suffering. It comes through activity in which we place our whole heart, and later become aware of that heart. It takes place through social responsibility and the struggle for social justice, in which we recognize and strive to create situations in which people’s true self may unfold.

Beyond awareness of self within is wider context, trust requires a sense that our core self, who we truly and deeply are, is of worth or value, that we are each a sacred self. Perhaps the most fundamental, underlying form of trust is trust in ourselves. Such trust implies that it is safe, true, and valuable to trust in ourselves, and in the unfolding process of life within ourselves. It implies that we actually experience our basic identity as a sacred self, or are moving in that direction. This of course is the central conviction of everything I have ever said or written, and remains for me always an unending challenge.

Beyond trust in self, extending to trustworthy others, in is trust in the context in which we live our our lives a trust in life itself, in the universe. In his “wonder-ful” book Apology for Wonder, Sam Keen has written that the basis for an authentic life is trust in self and trust in the context of life. He recalls the work of Erik Erikson, who has maintained that basic trust as a necessary component of a healthy personality.

“The foundations of gracefulness,”Keen writes, “are trust in the context within which action must take place and confidence in the ability of the self to undertake appropriate action. … Tension, fear and anxiety are the results of a vote of ‘no confidence.’ … In the final analysis, authentic human life rests upon the inner conviction of the ultimate trustworthiness of reality; the conviction that the ultimate context out of which we emerge into our own hands, and into which we and the self and world we fashion, disappear, is ultimately life-furthering.”

Scholars such Wilfrid Cantwell Smith, Hans Kung, and Karl Rahner, have maintained that basic trust in the meaningfulness of life is the root and heart of all religion. Holocaust survivor and psychologist, Viktor Frankl, reinforces this view by asserting that meaning can be found even in the midst of unavoidable suffering. Student of religion, Karen Armstrong, further states that practical compassion is the universal expression of such a conviction.

In a letter to his daughter, Albert Einstein writes that love is the most powerful unseen force in the universe. Such love energy explains everything and gives meaning to life. “If we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer.”

Finally James Doty, late Founder of the Stanford University Centre for Compassion, contrasts what he calls the fear mode and the heart mode. We are hardwired for heart mode, he states. Our purpose is to love ourselves, and to love other people. At the Stanford Centre, they teach compassion for self. They urge us to give ourselves positive affirmations, that we are worthy, good enough, deserving.

A lot of the negative self-talk, Doty comments, comes from the baggage we carry from our childhood. It then shapes many of our decisions, our relationships, our occupations. This negative self-talk creates a false narrative. It leads us to create the limited belief systems that imprison us.

But, Doty says, we can come to see this is a story we can change. We can change what we believe. In the heart mode, we are coming from a place of service, where we are actively visualizing positive beliefs about ourselves that we are good, worthy, loved. Fundamentally, our world is one we create.

He adds that most people are loving, kind people inside. But they have been battered often by the forces that make them think that is not the case, or that they don’t deserve love. Everybody deserves love. Everybody deserves dignity. Most people, if they actually sit quietly, and are present to and listen to themselves, they realize the falseness of the dominant narrative. If they practice such mindfulness, for example, they recognize that they don’t first of all want things. The want food for the table, shelter, caring relationships, meaningful lives.

And if we look through that lens of what we are doing to be of service to help my family and my environment, it will ultimately help us as well. Our physiology works at its best when we are focused on others, when we are trying to be of service.

May you come more and more to recognize that your deepest self is a sacred valuable self and is trustworthy. May you recognize that your deepest and truest orientation is towards caring, compassion, justice, and love. May you more and more discern which persons you meet and which life situations are trustworthy. And may you strive in whatever ways possible for you to contribute to a more trustworthy society

We wrote last time that kindness to ourselves and others in our everyday life is a key to physical and emotional well being, and is at the heart of all genuine spirituality. At the same time, it is also crucial to exercise some form of social responsibility in accordance with our gifts and the concrete context of our lives. Here we may speak of taking part in a struggle towards creating a world in which respect for the sacred worth of each person is recognized, honoured, and fostered. This approach means that, even when opposition is necessary, it is crucial not to deny or violated the basic human dignity of anyone.

As we noted last time, in their book, On Kindness, Barbara Taylor and Adam Phillips define kindness as the ability to bear our own and others vulnerability. Kindness implies an openness from within ourselves to another or others. In Oscar Wilde’s folk tale, The Selfish Giant, it is by breaking down the walls we have built around us, and letting in children–the the springs of new life–that we grow and develop. Otherwise, we remain in a stagnant winter of heart, hiding behind walls of defensiveness.

At the same time, openness from within allows the entry of both joy and sorrow, healing and wounding. It allows a vulnerable heart. The word vulnerable comes from the Latin vulnus which means wound. The word, vulnerability means, literally, able to be wounded, to be hurt. Yet there is a wider sense as well, as found in the Hebrew Song of Songs. A translation of one line reads, “You have wounded my heart; in Latin, vulnerasti cor meum. In this context, vulnerability does not mean an injury inflicted. Rather it indicates an openness that allows another to reach our core.

An article written many years ago in a Homemakers magazine by Carol Allen has resonated with me ever since. Her topic was joy, and she brought out how joy and sorrow are an inseparable part of life. In her words: “A heart frozen against pain can only stifle joy. … What joy requires is an open, undefended heart — a heart willing to accept the slings and arrows as no less intrinsic to life than the bouquets. … Those who have an aura of joyfulness in adult life are frequently those who have also suffered greatly.”

In this wider sense, vulnerability means an openness to the full experience of life. This attitude would include openness to the depth of our own being, to the entire variety of the feelings, yearnings, and thoughts that are part of who we are. And it is openness to our unique identity that flows from and through and beyond into all the corners of our life. It flows as well into everyone and everything that is bound up with our life. It is an openness that also allows others–at least in situations of trust–to enter our own personal sanctuary. It is finally an openness to the vast mystery of life, to the energy that flows within and through and beyond all that is. It is a recognition that this is a mystery beyond our grasp, literally a reality that we cannot seize or dominate or control, but a mystery of which we are part and which pervades and envelopes all that is.

An essential part of this recognition, a core element of this vulnerability, is that we do in fact have limitations, weaknesses, and errors in our life. Yet to do so is to recognize that this is a reality that we share with all other human beings. It is to recognize that our limits are not a denial of, but inseparable from our sacredness–that we are sacred even as and precisely as wounded beings. Leonard Cohen has perhaps most clearly expressed this truth in his song Anthem: “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” These words vividly express that every life is woven with joy and sorrow, and that it is often in our experience of weakness and pain that the light of truth, compassion, and healing is able to enter. It is able to enter not only into our own awareness but into our awareness of and compassion for others, who share our human condition.

An early life experience brought this reality home to me at the age of six. Walking to my grandmother’s for lunch in grade one, I was struck by a truck and taken to the Toronto Sick Children’s hospital. After two weeks in hospital, I was allowed to return home A few days later, I was allowed to get up. I was delighted, but took two steps and fell. I could not walk. I still recall the vivid impression of utter surprise, total disbelief, and sheer terror.

Very soon, I was walking again as usual, but I have never forgotten how fragile and vulnerable life can be, and how utterly precious. The birth of my younger brother three years later with a chronic heart defect, and the subsequent heart surgery at the age 4½, that allowed him to live for 26 years, only reinforced that impression. In those early years were planted and took root the seeds of awareness that life cannot be taken for granted, that it is a precious and fragile gift to be cherished, appreciated and shared, and that one needs always have a concern for the most vulnerable in our midst.

May you become more and more comfortable with your own vulnerability. May you share it more fully with others, when trust is possible. And may the light of openness, friendship, compassion, and kindness radiate more and more from the crack of this vulnerability

Norman King, August 11, 2025

THOUGHTS ON BEAUTY
In the story of Rapunzel, we are given a portrait of the young woman, taken to an inaccessible tower. Alone there, she sings out of her loneliness. The beauty of her singing rings out through the forest and reaches and attracts a young prince. The image suggests that in solitude, even if lonely, a person is able to return to the core of themselves. That core is beautiful, illustrated by the beauty of her voice.

The beauty of the song echoes the beauty of her soul, heart, or spirit. It is this beauty that can also touch the heart of another, and evoke a response from that place in us that has never been wounded, as Meister Eckhart has written. John Keats concludes his poem, Ode to a Grecian Urn, with the words, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

What seems to be affirmed in these words is the beauty of music, as well as that of all the arts, and also of nature. These in turn are a reflection of the beauty of the human heart. More than that, they are an avenue to the heart of a person. If we are open, beauty can reach beyond all our defenses and wounds to the beauty of the person hidden or hiding behind them. It is a way of saying that our identity is in our sacred beauty, not in our wounds.

Yet in the story of Rapunzel, it is only after he passes through pain, loss, and struggle, that the young man is able to come to see truly and to be healed. In the story of Sleeping Beauty, the young man must also pass through a hedge of thorns at the right time and with the right motives, not in a grasping or aggressive way. His response is evoked by someone who is sleeping. It is called forth, it seems, by who someone is, not by what they have or do. The beauty that is in each of us, and by which call forth the beauty in one another, is deeper than, yet may be hidden behind the thorns of hurt, fear, or hostility.

In another poem, Ode to a Nightingale, Keats appears to contrast the beauty of the bird’s song with the awareness of the brevity of life. His poem raises a perennial question: Does the reality of death take a way the meaning of life?

Susan Cain offers a response in a thoughtful book, Bitter-Sweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. “Bittersweet is about the recognition of the both/and of life–that light and dark, birth and death, bitter and sweet, are forever paired. We need both to accept that reality and also in some way transcend it. This is our inmost longing which can be seen as a longing for home. …We need to transform the sorrows of life into something that nourishes the soul, otherwise we will inflict them on others. She concludes: “This idea–of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love–is the heart of this book.”

She refers to the music of Leonard Cohen as an example. Two lines of his song, Anthem, come to mind: “There is a crack, a crack in everything./ That’s how the light gets in.” He also sings of a “cold and lonely hallelujah.” A black spiritual echoes the same words: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Glory, Hallelujah.” The thought here is that light can emerge from darkness, joy can flow from sorrow. As Viktor Frankl maintained, our life can be meaningful, no matter what the circumstances.

Cain concludes: “We’re drawn to the sublime domains, like music, art, and medicine, not only because they’re beautiful and healing, but also because they’re a manifestation of love, or divinity, or whatever you want to call it. … These are just manifestations of the perfect and beautiful world, of the people we long to be with, the place we want to be. … We’ve come into this world with a sense of exile from our true home, that we feel the pain of separation from the state in which we loved and were loved beyond measure, and that the sweet pain of longing helps us return there, We crave beauty because it reminds us of that home, it calls us to that journey.”

Perhaps, as John Keats understood, the fundamental and deepest truth about life is beauty. It is the beauty of the universe that shines through in the beauty of a sunset. It is the beauty of a song or a painting. It is the beauty of the light that shines through in the crack in everything. It is the beauty of a sleeping child. It is the beauty of a person that ever remains, however obscured by hurt or fear or hostility. It is the beauty of the place in each of us that has never been wounded. It is the beauty of home when we unveil it within ourselves or with another.

Religious Studies scholar, Frederick Streng, has written that beauty is the perfect expression of what is, and that the various forms of art reveal the most profound dimension of existence. “At the heart of artistic effort,” he says, “is the concern to expose and express what it means to be human at its most profound level.” Group of Seven painter, Lawren Harris, observes in a similar vein: “I try to get to the summit of my soul, and paint from there, there where the universe sings.”

May each of you find your way into your own heart and discover its beauty. May you also be given entry into the heart of another, and even the heart of the universe, and be gratefully overwhelmed with its beauty.”
Norman King, January 31, 2025

When we observe infants and small children, we may notice their efforts to learn to crawl, to walk to talk, to learn. They exhibit a tremendous drive, however unconsciously, to grow and develop in all these ways. We may also notice how they respond to smiles, to affection, to genuine caring, and how they shy away from coldness, indifference, and hostility.

Recently, we spoke of loneliness and solitude. On the one hand, loneliness involves a sense of disconnection and not belonging. On the other hand, creative solitude is the experience of being quietly at home with ourselves in a safe and silence space. In the beginnings of solitude, there may be a sense of uneasiness. Gordon Cosby has expressed it well, in a manner akin to that of Henri Nouwen. “Silence,” he writes, “will put us in touch with yearnings, anxieties, pain, despair, envy, competition, and a host of other feelings that need to be put into words if we are to move toward a place of centeredness and come into possession of our lives. The fact is that most of us have an incredible amount of unfaced suffering in our histories that has to be looked at and worked through.”

Dag Hammarskjold has written strikingly of this experience of silence in solitude in his journal, Markings. “The longest journey is the journey inwards; of one who has chosen their destiny, who has started upon the quest for the source of their being.”

In this journey within solitude, we may ask what lies beneath the array of feelings, the mindsets, the presuppositions, all the cultural baggage that has been imposed by our background, our society, our culture. The above example of the child suggests that it is perhaps a profound longing from our inmost core. The experience of the child may also reveal the nature of this longing. It appears to be a longing for life itself, for its unfolding in growth; a longing for understanding and meaning; a longing for love. Perhaps it may be summed up as a longing for home, a longing to be at home to ourselves, which in turn makes possible being at home to one another..

Keeping busy, running to externals, losing ourselves in distractions, is a way of running from ourselves, of being, so to speak, homeless. It may well be rooted in fear, a fear that to journey within may uncover only emptiness. Yet, if we have a sacred worth, we need not fear who we are, or look to an outside authority to rescue us from ourselves, or tell us what to do. Rather we may gradually make the discovery that who we are at our inmost core is of worth and trustworthy. This uncovering may require the clearing away of the debris of imposed and inauthentic images and scripts and worldviews.

This understanding is, I believe, the core of the Narcissus story, It is the challenge to discover an image of ourselves as lovable. It seems also to be the heart of the story of the Prodigal Son. After many wrong turns, he discovers a sacredness within himself, one that is deeper and remains despite any brokenness. As Meister Eckhardt puts it:”There is a place is us that has never been wounded.”

We may then look to others, including literature, music, and the other arts, not to tell us what to do, but to help us discover, or rather uncover, and name who we are. As we noted, there is an immense longing within us: for awareness, love, meaning, beauty, and so much else. It may also be described as a longing for home: a longing to be present to who we truly are and to one another as we all truly are.

Our very sacredness can instill in us the hope that this longing is not in vain, that our lives do have a lasting meaning, a lasting worth and purpose. In this sense that meaning is to struggle gradually to move beyond fear to love, beyond despair to hope, beyond resentment to gratitude. In this process, we are especially assisted by those who genuinely care.

May you come to find a home within yourselves, and so also, become a home to one another.
Norman King, August 29, 2024.

Two striking issues in our time are a pervasive loneliness and an absence of solitude. Both of these tend to undermine our sense of worth. Both are also made worse by the excessive even addictive use of cell phones. Two personal experiences illustrate the difference between a painful loneliness and a more tranquil solitude. I recall going to conferences in an unfamiliar city and hotel. Sitting in that hotel room, empty of any connections or warmth, felt very lonely. On other occasions, I would find myself in my own home, when others who lived there and with whom my life was bound up, were absent. It was an enjoyable time alone, not just as a welcome relief, but because there was an atmosphere of familiarity, warmth and presence.

As an example of loneliness, there comes to mind an all too common situation. A while ago, I saw four people in a restaurant, apparently two parents and their teenage children. All were on their cell phones and no one was looking at or speaking to anyone else at the table. They are texting someone else. It has been reported that young people today are lonelier than ever before. One element here is that in cell phone contact, what is missing is tangible physical presence. In case of texting, contact by sight or voice or body language is absent–everything that gives colour and nuance. It is these forms of tangible presence elements alleviate unnecessary loneliness

Certainly, there is an inevitable loneliness that is part of the human condition. If lived with recognition and acceptance, this inescapable loneliness can lead to greater awareness, sensitivity, and compassion. Yet there is also a debilitating loneliness that comes from isolation, from lack of human presence, from lack of tangible human caring, given and received. Even small gestures of kindness to a teller in a bank, a cashier in a supermarket, or a stranger met casually, can alleviate that kind of loneliness. Even more important is tangible contact with someone close. Another key factor is intimate conversation in which we allow entrance to our vulnerability. In every case the overcoming of escapable loneliness in ourselves and others calls for tangible caring presence.

At the same time, if we are always on our phones visibly, our attention is always from outside in. We are not present to ourselves, we are not at home to ourselves. We are like absentee landlords in our own mind and heart. We are without the solitude that is necessary for wholeness, creativity, and meaningful relationships. Being at home to ourselves, and feeling at home with ourselves, and every dimension of ourselves is one approach to solitude.

It is a matter of time spent quietly by ourselves, in which we allow what is within to rise to the surface of our awareness. If we do so, we may notice the whole range of feelings that are present. While at first this may occasion uneasiness within us, if we attend to these feelings without judgment and with compassion, several things may arise. We may find that beneath our fear or hostility may lie a longing for understanding, love and meaning, and a trust that our hope is not n vain.

Henri Nouwen has described this experience quite eloquently. “To be calm and quiet all by yourself is hardly the same as sleeping. In fact, it means being fully awake and following with close attention every move going on inside you. …Perhaps there will be much fear and uncertainty when we first come upon this unfamiliar terrain, but slowly and surely we begin to see developing an order and a familiarity which summon our longing to stay home.

“With this new confidence, we recapture our own life afresh from within. Along with this new knowledge of our ‘inner space’ where feelings of love and hate, tenderness and pain, forgiveness and greed are separated, strengthened or reformed, there emerges the mastery of the gentle hand. . .whereby persons once again become master over their own house. …“If we do not shun silence, all this is possible. But it is not easy. Noise from the outside keeps demanding our attention and restlessness from within keeps stirring up our anxiety. … whenever you do come upon this silence, it seems as though you have received a gift, one which is promising in the true sense of the word. The promise of this silence is that new life can be born. It is this silence which is the silence of peace and prayer. . . . In this silence, you lose the feeling of being compulsive and you find yourself a person who can be himself along with other things and other people. . . . In this silence, the false pretences fade away, and you learn to see your life in its proper perspective.”

Once again, it is the uncovering of our own worth, and that of all else, as the deepest reality. This conviction, in turn, makes it possible the ability to live gradually into understanding, compassion, and justice.

Norman King., August 12, 2024

The core conviction to which I return again and again is the underlying, unerasable sacred worth or value of the person. This worth remains, though tragically we and others fail to see it in ourselves or one another. We then can readily spend our lives in a futile effort to prove a worth we don’t believe, or lash out angrily at others and a world because we don’t feel that worth.

From an early age, others can have a powerful impact, both for good or ill, on our sense of self. Two quotations express this truth profoundly. The first I thought initially was from Rumi, but, while it is in his spirit, it comes from Sarah Durham Wilson. I recently shared it on Facebook.“The way you alchemize a soulless world into a sacred world is by treating everyone as if they are sacred, until the sacred in them remembers.” The other quotation is from a 20th century psychologist. “We are not who we think we are. We are not who others think we are. We are who we think others think we are.”

The second reflects the tendency in our society to be concerned with what we believe others think of us. I once came across a humourous comment that we would worry much less about what people thought of us if we realized how seldom they did. In a book, The Five Top Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware writes that the first regret is this: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

Gabor Maté, a favourite author, comments that to speak of courage in this situation is to pass a moral judgment on ourselves. It may well be the case, however, that we were programmed as children to sacrifice our authenticity for the sake of acceptance. At the time, this action felt necessary for our survival. Yet Maté affirms that by compassionate–and not judgmental–self-inquiry, we may retrieve and learn to live more and more from our authentic self.

The core of that authentic self is, I believe, our sacred worth. It is the foundation that cannot be replaced. It is the underlying truth that who we are is enough. Our sacred worth precedes and does not depend on anything we do, and it can never be lost by anything we do or fail to do. Our sacred worth can only be lost sight of, or lost at the deep feeling level, and then it can be betrayed in self and others. As Gregory Baum once wrote, most of the terrible things people do is not because they love themselves too much, but because, at a deeper level, they do not love themselves at all. That is to say, they do not have an underlying sense of self-worth.

Much of my own thought and teaching and writing was a wrestling with a sense of lack of worth, of inadequacy, of not only not doing enough, but not being enough. As Maté has said, it is correlative with a sense of not being lovable or worthy of love. That is also why Thomas Moore’s interpretation of the Narcissus myth seems so powerful. He has written that the core of the story is this: unless a person uncovers an image of themselves as loveable–a death and rebirth experience–they will not be really open to give or receive love.

One line in the famous writing called “Desiderata,” I find very striking. “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.” Scientist, Brian Swimme, adds that we are, literally, stardust. All the elements in our physical makeup do indeed come from the stars. As I’ve also noted before, by the very fact that we are breathing, we are part of and so belong in the whole ecosystem of earth, which, in turn, is part of the universe.

As I have mentioned so often, the pathways to uncovering our sacred self are solitude in silence, friendship and intimate conversation, and some form, however simple, of social contribution, from small kindnesses to participation in a social justice movement. These, of course require further elaboration, which we may elaborate in future reflections.

Norman King, July 29, 2024.