I dreamed that life was joy. I woke to find that life is service. I discovered that service is joy.

The nuclear family continues to explode. We speak, of course, about your definition of "family" that derives itself from connection through marriage, bloodline, political or religious tradition, and ancestry.

In truth, these elements do have power, and will continue to hold power. But their value exists primarily within the implicate order that they have provided for your life up to now. You might think of them as givens or starting equations that make up the "rules" for your Grand Game. As such, they have served you well. But, by no means, were they meant to dictate your entire physical journey.

For every implicate order there must also be a voluntary commitment to nourish and support it. Where there is no conscious choice, there is no genuine love. There is only a sense of obligation and heaviness.

Though these qualities do provide a rudimentary sense of security and grounding, they often stand directly in the way of a person moving beyond his heritage into a whole new area of achievement and personal realization.

It does take a village to raise a child. And it does take a village to meet the emotional and sociological needs of those who live in society. Humanity is getting to the place where you can no longer pretend otherwise. For example, many there are who show great disdain for connections that are created in cyberspace, where wandering spouses use computer resources to create "affairs" with strangers. This is felt by many to be disgraceful and wrong. We invite you to consider that such activities may not really be the cause for problems in marriage and family at this time. They are simply revealing problems that have always been there. In a sense, you might think of the Internet as a kind of Global Mind that you have built to explore and connect to your local community and your world. Where the individual mind tends to wander, so will the Internet. It is a reflection, not a cause. And, once the image in the mirror has been seen, how will you bring forgetfulness back to cover it again?

Mandates will continue to arise to officially accept same-sex marriages throughout the U.S. and in many key areas of the world. It measured prominently in the Presidential Race of 2004, and will eventually define life in many parts of the globe. Those who accept these unions will flourish and begin to breathe again. Those who do not will continue to wither and die. The key confrontation here is not really with the issue of homosexuality, though it will seem so.

Underlying the emphasis on the honoring of same-sex marriage rests a great need humanity now has to remove the "religious overtones" that have been wrapped around marriage for the last 2000 years. Physical marriages need to be utilitarian and quite practical if they are to survive. Any successful "marriage"--whether it be a merge of business partners, living partners, project participants, players of team sports, or whatever--needs to be built upon common goals, common circumstance, and a common perspective.

When your sense of commonality departs, the marriage is over--whether or not the official partnership has been dissolved. In some cases today, what is being called a "marriage union" in your society energetically bears resemblance to a person who has died, but has refused to fall down. There is a reason that "God and Government" need to be separate in society.

For the last 2000 years, religion has largely been a divider of peoples, not a unifier of them. That is because your relationship to God/Goddess/All That Is was designed to be a personal connection, not a corporate one. This has always been true of marriage as well. In fact, successful marriages--ones that are kept vital and current--will eventually become the only government you will ever need.

A mandate for the acceptance of gay marriage brings all of this to the forefront, and opens the door for some powerful sharing indeed, among the Earth's peoples, focused upon what a marriage is really supposed to be. This is most excellent, because it will open your eyes to what the institution of marriage has become. Changes in society and personal commitment will begin to shift rapidly at that point.

--The Reconnections