Singing the Heart Clean

Root medicine, the Big Love, and a story from the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement

Oct 31, 2025

Agreeing with most of the shamans and mystics I’ve known throughout the world, I call the originating source of love the Big God. As my grandmother and grandfather taught me, “God is love.” This is all I need to know about God. The alpha and omega of all that existentially matters is found in love. In its purest form, love does not judge, harm, or punish. It embraces all people in its arms, whether saints or hard-time criminals. Love is the great democracy—all of us are equally deserving and welcome. Supreme love brings grace with no disgrace.
It is the shaman’s brightest star.

Bradford Keeney, from “Bushman Shaman”

Last August, Brad and I spent three days at the Budapest Folk Arts Festival. It was uncommonly, unexpectedly inspiring: artists, master artisans, musicians, and dancers from Hungary, Romania, Transylvania, most of the “Stan” countries, and more. We were hunting for a backdrop for our new studio but also buying winter clothes. (We arrived here from New Orleans with just two carry-on suitcases.) Someday we’ll show you our matching wooly hats from Kazakhstan which get many curious looks on the streets of Budapest.

Anyway, for the studio we found this beautiful piece of wool felt hanging in a yurt, made by a Hungarian artist who calls herself “The Felt Witch.” She titled it “Roots.”

Wool felt made by Hungarian artist Sipos Orsi

Her spell worked because we immediately decided to make this our opening theme for the Guild season: “Revisiting the roots of Sacred Ecstatics.” We knew these roots would include Kalahari n/om, Ecstatic Sound Movement (aka shaking medicine), seiki jutsu spontaneity, building the Big Room, the four ingredients of spiritual cooking, mystical experimentation, and so on.1

“Roots” on display during a recent Guild Spirit House Meeting.

But in the midst of our season planning, Brad had a very disturbing dream about dark forces, especially those who fuel hatred, deceit, violence, and greed yet claim to be deeply religious or “all about love.” As Brad was waking up from the nightmare, he heard a voice say it was time to revisit a passage in a book we had found some months earlier but forgotten about. It addresses the New Testament tenets of forgiveness and loving one’s enemies. Of all Jesus’s teachings, these twin roots are arguably the most cherished, misunderstood, and grappled with. I’ll paraphrase the passage in question:

To be able to say, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do,” the divine Spirit of love and mercy must be alive inside us. This requires crucifixion and resurrection: the death of one’s selfishness and the subsequent rise of a newborn mystical heart. The Spirit of mercy the world must receive before it can be saved from the cruel inequity that enslaves it. Those who intentionally commit harm do not carry the Love of God inside them, despite what they may say. Divinity does not reveal itself to them, therefore they cannot help being in the darkness in which there is no clear understanding of what they do.
How shall we respond to their cruelty and ignorance? By loving the divine Equator of all human relations with all our minds, hearts, strength and life. Only when filled with Divine love can our own hearts be cleansed of hatred and despair, that we may put this Love into action in the world.2

Thank you for sharing, re-stacking, and sending this to friends.

“The Divine Equator of All Human Relations.” Brad and I love this new name for God. It not only levels the playing field but speaks to a love so big it stretches around the earth.

Divine Equator, hear our prayer.

(It’s an extra bonus that Equator rhymes with Creator.)

Brad’s nightmare came with the blessing of sending us back to the most important root of Sacred Ecstatics: “Equatorial love” that makes it possible to forgive and love one’s enemies, even when you’re hanging on a cross. If there is a stronger root medicine than divine love for treating the heart and “cruel inequality that enslaves” our world, we haven’t found it. The good news is that despite everything, this love seems to be everywhere:

When I grew up and left Missouri, I found myself traveling the world, meeting many shamans, healers, and spiritual teachers. Although they spoke different languages and wore different kinds of clothing, they all had one thing in common: they were devotees of the Big Love. In my odyssey I learned that there is an invisible and nameless ceremonial space that brings together all worshippers of the Big Love. The altar of this place of spiritual unity offers forgiveness and compassion, mercy instead of judgment. In this home of diverse spirits and presences,
God is the Big Love.

Bradford Keeney

Big Love, hear our prayer.

The same week we unpacked this root teaching in the Guild, we discovered by accident a YouTube lecture by theologian, Harvey Cox, exploring religious doctrines of non-violence (among other topics). Cox, who marched and was jailed with Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights movement, shared this story:

I want to introduce one anecdotal recollection of sitting in a Black church—I think it was in Birmingham—with young people, mainly very young people, planning and praying and singing and getting ready to go out and march. It had been a very tough day the day before in Birmingham with police dogs and hoses and all the rest. We were sitting there and we were singing and we were praying, and Dr. King said:
“Now we’re going to stop for a moment, and I want everyone here to search your heart to see if, in your heart, there’s even a tiny trace of hatred against the people out there who are screaming at you and may be ready to physically assault you. If there’s one trace of hatred there, don’t march, don’t march. It won’t be a disgrace [if there is], but we’re going to sit here and we’re going to sing some more until you have been able to look inside candidly and frankly and see if there’s any trace of hatred.”
King later said that he derived this idea and this discipline from his reading of the New Testament, especially the example of Jesus that hatred and bigotry begin in the heart and then are expressed outwardly. So, unless you can get at the root of it, it’s still going to influence you.3

One of Dr. King’s favorite heart-cleaning songs was Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Precious Lord.” Just moments before being assassinated in Memphis, King famously asked saxophonist and band leader, Ben Branch, to play that song “real pretty” at a rally scheduled two hours later. Those were the last words King ever spoke.

Now it’s time to take our heart medicine.

Big God,
Big Love,
Creator,
Divine Equator,
hear our song.