Manners

"Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Manners seems like such a quaint subject. Outside of Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners, few people champion the use of manners in these post-modern times. I know all the arguments -- manners are old fashioned, they're phony, they're for old farts, they're irrelevant -- I was a teenage myself once and deftly spouted each attack on manners while feeling oh so self-righteous and sophisticated.

What Waldo (yea, he really preferred to be called Waldo) was wise enough to see is that manners have little to do with social convention and everything to do with the Divine. Huh? Here's the thing: When Waldo uses the term "fine perceptions" he's talking about our innate ability to see God in each and every person. Thus to not use the upmost manners in our dealings with one and all, is more than just a transgression of Emily Post's rules of modern etiquette, it is a slap in the face of God!

Waldo knew, as all true saints and sages of all times and all places have known, that each person is a holographic spark of Spirit. He recommended manners not as social constructs but as modes of worship. If Jesus was about to enter the 7 Eleven at the same time as you, wouldn't you at least hold the door for him? Every time that you, or anyone else, fails to respond to another in a mannerly way, it is because they fail to see that God is right in front of them! The postal clerk, the bus driver, the bag lady, the greedy CEO, the gangsta rapper, even the Governor of Illinois -- all sparks of spirit, all Divinity in drag.

That makes your spiritual practice oh so simple -- see God in everyone and act accordingly. Let manners flow from your "fine perceptions." Treat everyone the way that you'd treat Jesus at the race track, Buddha at the bakery, or Krishna in a cocktail lounge. Enlightened behavior, aka manners, grows out of seeing the Light in everyone.