Spiritual Guides

Wednesday 20 June 2007

A friend sent me the following question: “If you were to ask 5-10 spiritual ‘guides’ for a personal inspirational essay, who might they be?”

This friend listed: Pema Chodron, Eknath Eswaran, Thich Nhat Hanh, John Dominic Crossan, Walter Brueggemann, Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Soellee, Matthew Fox, and Thomas Merton.

I replied, in no particular order as follows:

“A Palestinian mother who is a widow (her husband killed by the IDF) raising her several chidlren under military occupation.

A Salvadoran teenager who believes in nonviolence even though all around him are peers pressing him to join their gangs.

An African-American college student who has to work 40 hours a week to make ends meet, takes care of her relatives who occasionally crash at her apartment, and sleeps no more than 4 hours a night.

A Mexican youth who works eighteen hours a day, 6 days a week in a maquiladora to help feed his extended family back home.

A Russian-Israeli-American woman who lost members of her family both to Nazi genocide and Stalinist terror.

A Vietnamese-American girl who was tormented by her American peers in grade and high school for being ugly, talking a stupid language, and whose father was interned in Communist reeducation camp where he was tortured on and off for eight years.

A young working-class Irish-American man who just came out to his family and friends.

I think any of these might have something to contribute to another’s experience of inspiration.”