When you come from a place of pure love, you live a life that is beneficial to everyone. You
make sure that everyone benefits from your having been here. “Kindness” becomes an
important word to you. Suddenly, you understand its deeper meaning.
Kindness means not only goodness, it means sameness. You realize when you live in pure
love that you and all others are of “like kind.” You are truly kin, and now, suddenly, you see
that when you express pure love you are expressing kin-dness.
This is what it means to be a kin-dred spirit. This is what it is to know a Oneness with all
things. And when, in any circumstance or situation, you use pure love, you help God be more
of what God is, and seeks to experience of Itself.
You help God when you help yourself to God. So have a big helping. Help yourself to as
much of God as you like. For this is the food of life, by which all things are nourished.
Take, and eat of this, for this is My body.
You are all members of that One body. And it is time, now, to re-member.
I would not tell this to you if it were not so. This is the greatest truth, so help Me/God.
I have never seen words come together like that, so meaningfully. It’s all so... symmetrical.
God is symmetrical. God is perfect symmetry. There is order in the chaos. There is perfection
in the design.
I see that. I see the perfection in the design throughout my life—even in my friend Joe Alton
going to jail, though I was shocked when it happened. Joe Alton was found to have com-
mitted some relatively minor offenses relating to campaign contributions, and he spent a few
months in a minimum-security lockup at a federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania.
The lesson for me in it all—something I always knew but had forgotten—was that there are
few saints among us. All of us are trying our best, and many of us stumble, and fall.
This remembering has helped me to stay out of my judgments when the weaknesses of
others are revealed by their actions—and when my weaknesses are revealed by mine. It has
not been an easy task, and I have not always succeeded. But since my days in Anne Arundel
County politics, I have always tried. They taught me to always try.
There was another reason I’d been thrust into Joe Alton’s presence, though, having nothing
to do with this. At some level I must have known that I had to train myself for being with the
public, for dealing one-on-one with large numbers of people. I couldn’t have picked a better
trainer.
Joe Alton had a richer understanding of human nature than just about any person I’d met.
Working with him, first as a low level campaign aide, then as a low-level staff member in the
county government, I had a chance to see him put that into action, and it dramatically
changed my own way of dealing with people.
Joe was besieged by folks wherever he went. At public meetings they would crowd around,
pulling and tugging at him, each person wanting one private moment, a chance to ask a small
favor, to request his help, or just to bring themselves to his attention.