You Might Say Loving Kindness Is a Two-Way Street
Coffee warms your throat as it travels to your stomach. The sipping is a sort of morning ritual - hot cup in your hand, steam rising up from the liquid, each sip providing a little bit more alertness - a simple meditation to start each day.
This is loving kindness.
“I think about the person who farmed the coffee, the one who packaged it, who delivered it to the store where I purchased it,” says Richard Mickelson, Retreat House Spirituality Center partner. “I’m able to consider all the people who contributed to allowing me to drink a cup of coffee.”
In August, Retreat House, will focus on the Core Value Chesed, a Hebrew word for loving kindness with an emphasis on hospitality and the way we are all connected to one another. This idea can also be captured through words like steadfast love, mercy, goodness, loyalty, and kindness.
Drink that in.
Our God looks upon us with love. She desires that we treat ourselves with compassion creating a direct beam of Divine light intended to radiate on and in all we encounter.
“Chesed is used to communicate God’s loving kindness toward humanity,” says Mickelson. “We have been created in the image of the Divine so we can shine it back into the world.”
You might say this relationship is a “two-way street.” The love we’re given from the Holy One is meant to fill us up so that we might pour it out in our world, enabling beauty to abound.
Through life’s ups and down, pain and comfort, sorrows and joys, it is necessary to create space - space to listen and watch, notice and feel where the Holy in the midst of it all.
Retreat House provides various invitations to pause and make room for the Holy so we might cultivate a more vibrant sense of loving kindness:
Like the coffee needs good sun and soil, we need good companions and fellow journeyers. Those who can offer us hospitality, so that we might welcome them in return. Covenant relationship plays a significant role in living well in community with one another.
Consider some of these Retreat House gatherings offering room to cultivate relationship:
In the Bible, the Psalmist writes in Chapter 136 more than 26 times about our Creator’s love for us, the most expansive invitation of all - to look and see the wonder of the Lord as we live with ourselves and one another with a “Chesed” state of mind and heart. Let it be!
“To him who alone does great wonders,
His love endures forever.”
- Psalm 136:4
Mickelson shares more on embracing Loving Kindness in this video message.