Where does love live?

 Does love live inside another person?

 If you have love in your life is it because a special someone has gone inside themselves and pulled out some of their limited love to share with you?

 Many of us think that way.

 We think that love is inside another.

 We think we are lucky if a special someone gives us some of their love.  That way we have more love. Yeah! More love, better!

We act as if love is like water in a glass.  We need it.  We’re thirsty.  We hope someone will give us some of their love.  In return for that gift (or in advance of that gift), we too will share our love with the other.  Together we have TWO glasses of water!  Yeah, us!

 How lucky, we think, if we happen to want to share some love from our water glass with someone who wants to share love from their water glass with us!

 (So little to share, be careful!)

(So hopeful you will give me what you got!  I need love, a lot of love!)

And when they stop sharing …oh no!!!  How will...

Many think I sit in my office listening to people with problems and they feel a little sorry for me.  “How can you listen to people’s problems all day?!”

 Closer to the truth: I sit in my office being with people with broken hearts.

 They loved. They weren’t loved back. 

The reason? They believe, wrongly, because they weren’t lovable.

 I sit. I listen. Always I am struck with the depth of their humanity towards the person who left.

Always I think that soon they will begin to love the other less.

Almost always I’m wrong. 

They love the other long after, it seems, the other has forgotten them.

Usually it’s 2 years before they can turn their attention to others.

To themselves, they feel pathetic. To me they’re heroic.  

Broken. Each day they get up, go forward, do good. 

They keep the faith.  

I don’t need any sympathy.  I’m honored to be among the remarkables…

…those who continue to love even, and especially, when broken.

Until Sunday evening at the Oscars I had not heard Lady Gaga sing "Till it happens to you."  I loved the beauty, the discipline, the power, the guts, and the defiance that went into her performance.  Incredibly moving.

I loved the backstory about what she was like, pre-performance, with the survivors of sexual assault who joined her on stage later as a part of the performance.  I loved their capacity to just be in their sea of emotions: fear, courage, anger, sorrow, guts ...and I'm sure, for some, love.  And I was so glad for the love and support that poured out for them, from the VP, from the celebs in the audience, from their own unknowing family members.  Beautiful.  Humanity at it's best.

There's another story out here for survivors, though.  And it's pretty complicated story. The "easy" story is to see offenders as bad and survivors as good. That is clearly true in plenty of situations.

But for many survivors it's not quite that simple.  Most survivors will never stand on a sta...

It’s pretty easy to condemn Nazis. Forced labor camps. Killing camps. Final solution. Ugly, repulsive, condemnable. If you’re like me and most people, you say to yourself, “I would NEVER participate in such condemnable behavior.” I believe you.

Here’s something that makes thinking about all of this a little more complicated, though.

Most Germans were NOT members of the Nazi party. Only 7% of the German population was in the Nazi party at its peak. That means, at most, 7% of the population was “directly” involved in 12 years of despicable behavior that culminated in the Holocaust. Cool! That means 93% of the German population was NOT guilty of what I learned to call “sins of commission” in religion classes. Yeah!

But wait … …how did a minority of only 7% get away with millions of atrocities? A super short answer: “sins of omission.” A sin of omission is NOT doing something that we can do, that we ought to do, and that results in damage when we fail to do it.

To bring this back to us...