There are many forms of spiritual practice, from meditation to prayer to contemplative reading to walks in the woods. All of them quiet our minds, deepen our experience of the world and expand our knowledge of ourselves. This election season seems to offer the opposite experience. It comes with heightened anxiety and fears for the future. But what if voting, itself, were experienced as a spiritual practice? What if stepping into the voting booth became a quiet, transformative and sacred act?
Like other spiritual practices, voting has the potential to draw us beneath the surface of our lives into an awareness of something deeper and richer. Considering the candidates and issues before us, we could feel threatened and combative. Or we might take a moment, slow down, and get back in touch with our core beliefs about how the world works. Recognizing voting as a spiritual practice, we might find the wisdom to turn away from flashy TV ads intent on escalating drama and division. We might stop listening to partisan pundits and, instead, take a breath, and listen for what scripture calls “the still, small voice.”
It’s easy to think of spiritual practices – like mediation and prayer – as individual, interior, private experiences. But spiritual practice at its best is the opposite. It deepens our awareness that we’re not alone. We remember that we are part of a vast interdependent web of existence, and that each individual life shapes all those around it. During worship each Sunday at First Parish, the congregation takes three deep breaths. It grounds each of us in the moment, but it’s experienced collectively. We breathe together.
That collective act embodies the wisdom of Unitarians like Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), who saw all of humanity as part of one great “over-soul.” It echoes the words of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), who wrote that “We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity.” With Harper’s words in our hearts, we can see that each ballot has a ripple effect that circles outward to transform lives in our neighborhoods, our schools, our counties, our states, our nation and beyond. That’s why voting as a spiritual practice is also voting as an act of compassion.
Stepping into the voting booth, we could make our selections based on our immediate needs and interests, or we could make them based on an awareness that we are just one person in that “great bundle of humanity.” In the days preceding those decisions, we can listen to the candidates – at every level – for what they can do for us, or we can listen for the compassion they have for others. Speaking personally, the candidate who names the unhoused of Portland as a problem probably won’t get my vote. The candidate who names them as neighbors in need of our help probably will.
When you step into that voting booth – or complete your ballot at home – pause a moment, close your eyes, take three deep breaths, and know that you are not alone. An entire nation is there with you, depending on you, just as you depend on them. Consider all that might ripple outward from that moment. How might your vote create concentric circles of compassion, rather than discord? How might your vote have a ripple effect of collaboration rather than competition? How might the spiritual practice of voting help heal the world?
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