Loving kindness is the spirit of friendship toward yourself and others.

The Buddha said that no true spiritual life is possible without a generous heart. . . . Generosity allies itself with an inner feeling of abundance - the feeling that we have enough to share.

In our own lives and in our communities, we need to find a way to include others rather than exclude them. We need to find a way to allow our pain and suffering, individually and collectively.

over time, offering loving kindness to all beings everywhere, including ourselves, unites us to one another so that we know that we can not go forward forgetting those left behind." Page 62

From the Buddhist point of view, it is true that emptiness is a characteristic of all of life - if we look carefully at any experience we will find transparency, insubstantiality, with no solid, unchanging core to our experience. But that does not mean that nothing matters.

When we see the relatedness of ourselves to the universe, that we do not live as isolated entities, untouched by what is going on around us, not affecting what is going on around us, when we see through that, that we are interrelated, then we can see that to protect others is to protect ourselves, and to protect ourselves it to protect others.

To offer our hearts in faith means recognizing that our hearts are worth something, that we ourselves, in our deepest and truest nature, are of value.