– Marc Gafni’s friends, collaborators, and colleagues speak out for the sake of restoring integrity. This statement by CIW Board Member Carrie Kish on the Need to Take Responsibility was first posted as a comment to the Center for Integral Wisdom statement on centerforintegralwisdom.org. You can read the statement below or listen to the audio. –
This has been an incredibly sad and challenging time for all of us at the Center for Integral Wisdom. But it has also been a time of deepening and maturing as a community and as a social movement. We have come together for the purpose of evolving the way that humans interact with each other, to expand the conversation around what it means to be human in all contexts – business, entrepreneurship, healthcare, personal relationships, etc. – and to be messengers and activists for love and healing in the world.
To witness the aggressive persecution of Marc and the others on our board has been both terribly sad and incredibly enlightening. The persecution makes me especially sad coming from the Jewish community – a community that truly knows what it is to be victims of indiscriminate hate and persecution. It is shocking what people are willing to believe and say about a person that they have no knowledge of. It is heart-breaking to see how willingly people will believe the worst about others and how mindlessly they will slander and persecute others without looking for evidence or asking questions or trying to find out what the truth might be.
All of our board members have been aggressively attacked with emails and phone calls and through social media channels. Our employers and organizations and places of worship are being sent hateful letters. There are petitions being circulated that people sign without any knowledge of who Marc is and without any thought beyond how he has been labeled because they stand against the behaviors he has wrongly been accused of. People post articles and comments without any thought or understanding of their impact on others or on the world that they are contributing to creating by doing it.
I have known Marc for years. He is one of my dearest friends and I have worked very closely with him. Marc loves people and he teaches people how to love one another. He loves outrageously and attracts people who are beautiful expressions of love and healing in the world. We are working to expand people’s understanding of love and intimacy. Unfortunately, most of us only understand love and intimacy in a sexual context. In reality, our work is about how we love one another, heal one another, and create intimate, life giving, evolutionary partnerships so that the world will be a better place. All of us, including Marc, have impeccable integrity and boundaries. We are called to love ourselves and each other more fully and completely and to expand what it means to be intimate in a beautiful and holy way.
We all need to take responsibility for the love or the fear that we are spreading in the world. We need to take responsibility for where we put our attention and what kind of messages we choose to spread because that is the world we are creating for ourselves and the people we love to live in.
Carrie Kish
Wife, Mother, Catholic, CEO
Los Angeles, CA