“Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” – Thomas Merton

“Not all of us can do great things,” said Mother Teresa, “but we can do small things with great love.”

I should give fair warning that this is not a dog story, Bud does not chase sheep, and Red is not here being graceful and loving.

I thought a lot  in my life about what kind of  principle guides me, and I get lost and lonely. Without a moral compass, I always fell off the cliff, came close to drowning. I need a gyroscope to keep me moving forward.

Without a moral law, I spun off into space and almost perished there.

For me, moral law is not a political label or party, or any one religion, or a reigning movement or philosophy. None of those have the answers for me.

I get this every- person- for- themselves- feeling about the world around me, most of the people I know are drawn ever more deeply into the social media pages and smart phones and tablets.

Their souls seem to sometimes vanish in there, there is no common sense or signs of a moral philosophy.

Our leaders and people of faith scare me these days, I don’t know where all the Christians have gone, the ones I see on TV frighten me, and I always looked to them for my moral grounding. The Christians practically invented moral law, but it feels  like they have abandoned people like me,   they have run off to hang with the crooked Priests In The Temple.

I am on my own when it comes to moral law, right and wrong, and to choices I can respect.

Everybody seems to be talking to one another every day, all the time, yet they hardly seem to talk to one another at all. The more we talk, the less we seem to connect or really communicate. It feels like words are vast and widening ocean keeping us apart.

I’ve looked all of my life for the kind of moral law that once drove   people and gave them a foundation for how to live, and I can’t find one single one today that speaks to me.

When I look, I see that some are too rigid, some are too loose.

So I’ve patched together my own law, my own rules, a hodge podge of different philosophers,  religious and spiritual leaders, and great writers and thinkers. And my on life, of course, and a thousand ideas I’ve picked up along the way, including some of my own creation.

I’ve gone to look inside of myself. Nature and morality,  I think. A spiritual life. ..Ish.

I call it my moral law. Thomas Merton, who was close to suicide in his youth, wrote that moral law saved his life. He said the moral law is the road to sanity. I sure hope so. Without it, he was just  a broken compass, and so was I.

And even with it, I often struggle to figure which path I ought to take. We are the choices we make, they need to be the right ones, or at least the best we can do.

I have patched together a few principles to steady me and ground me, my moral law.

I don’t mean to get heavy or ponderous here, Maria says the very term “moral law” is kind of boring. This is true, but I’m stuck with it.  I mean to be useful and hopeful, and I’m not sure about being useful but I am certainly hopeful.

So I want to share the brief and few moral principles that I call my moral law, and that more and more, I am learning to live by and honor. The question, said Thoreau, is not what you look at, but what you see (the question in photography as well.)

So I have read the moral philosophers – Kant, Arendt,  Aquinas, Locke. They can get heavy. Joseph Campbell have helped me, Henri Nouwen and Paul Tillich. I think them as my Board of Directors, I run things by them, they can stop me dead with a single thought.

In his famous Critique Of Practical Reason, Immanuel Kant wrote that “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.”

So here we are: some of the elements of my moral law. Take what you wish and leave the rest behind. They are the consciousness of my existence:

-Above all, do not lie to myself: “The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for others. ” –  Fyodor Dostoevsky.

-It is arrogant to think I know what other people ought to do and how they often think.  I don’t tell other people what to do.

-I cannot save other people, only myself.

-I do not hate people who think differently.

-I am broken when I disconnect with animals and the natural world, they heal me and ground me, the are my partners on the earth.

-For the sake of the children, and my granddaughter I am committed to hearing the  cries and pain of Mother Earth, and doing what I can to help recognize and heal her wounds. That is our defining moral legacy, what we left behind for others.

-The creative spark is sacred to me, a gift from the angels, or if there is a God, from him or her. In my world, leaving it idle is a sin.

-In our time, I am called to reach out my hand to the vulnerable and the needy, to the poor and the aged, and the refugee. I am not a Christian, but even when I was young, I was transfixed by the preaching of Jesus, by his call for us to help those who hurt and those who suffer.

And to never turn our backs on the poor.

Were  he to come back, I have an image of him weeping in shame at the sight of the smoldering world, of  what has been done in his name. Will there be any place he can send his betrayers that isn’t under water or on fire?

-I am called to committing small acts of great kindness, to help fill the holes in people’s lives rather than save the or heal them. I am obliged to accept what I can do and what I can’t do. I do this for me, not them.

-I do not need to be good to do good. I just have to be a human.

-Love is the point, love is why we are her, love is the work.

-It is not what I look at, but what I see.

-It is does not matter what others think, it matters what   I think. The only person whose respect I must have is me.

So that is the basis of my moral law. I can’t go outside for these moral laws, I have to go inside.  It helps me make the choices that defines me.