It was a few days after the 9/11 tragedy. We had done our best to shelter our not-quite-three-year-old daughter from the constant onslaught of images on the news, but there was no way to censor things entirely, particularly our conversations as the tragedy unfolded. How could this happen? Who would do such a thing? How were we to go on?
So it wasn’t too surprising when, as we got to the end of bath time that evening, she said: “Tell me about the splat in the sky.” Explaining horror to a very small child is not the easiest thing in the world, but I did my best. I explained that there were some people who lived far away who got very, very angry at our country. And because they were so angry they decided that they wanted to hurt as many people as they could, and so they flew some airplanes into buildings. And so many, many people were hurt, and we were very sad. She thought for a moment, squared her shoulders, and looked at me from there in the tub. “They should have made a better choice.”
They should have made a better choice. It’s OK to get mad, but it’s not OK to hurt people. Use your words. Look for a solution. Take a breath. Take another breath. So many of life’s tragedies could be avoided if we would all just adhere to the wisdom that we teach our toddlers.
The men who downed the planes should have made a better choice. Also the Bush administration should have made a better choice than to go to war with Iraq. And now, now there is Syria. And surely Assad (and/or his generals) should have made a better choice than to use chemical weapons. But could it be that we are, in fact, on the verge of making a better choice ourselves? Could it be that the governments of the world will manage to walk the fine line between allowing the unacceptable and committing the indefensible?
Probably it is too soon to get attached to hope. But there it is. In this particular moment, Wednesday, 9/11/2013, it seems like President Obama, Congress and various heads of state have acknowledged that there might be a better choice. That there could be solutions that don’t involve blowing things up. That it’s OK to be mad, but that doesn’t mean we need to hurt people. That we could pause, and take a breath, and work toward a solution that is better than what happens when you rely on hurting people to tell the world how you feel.
What will happen remains to be seen, but today I am praying for a better choice.
Suicide Prevention Day.
Note: If you feel even vaguely suicidal right now, please don’t read this. Instead, please call and talk to someone who can help you! 1-800-273-8255.
When I was a sophomore in high school, undone by the relentless teasing of an older relative, unsure that I would ever leave the barren wasteland of my inner-city high school, I ingested a bottle of aspirin and prepared to die.
After swallowing about fifty pills, I remember going into the kitchen and asking my mother, cooking dinner, why life was worth living. She reminded me of a gospel singer who had recently visited my high school and inspired me, a physically challenged woman in chronic pain who none-the-less managed to infuse her life with joy and humor and great music. My mother’s words were something like, “If she wants to live, why wouldn’t you?”
I did not tell her about the bottle of aspirin. I went back upstairs, and soon my friend and high school debate partner, L, showed up. Earlier in the week, I had invited L to spend the night. I told her what I had done, and then absolutely forebade her to tell my mother. Ah, the cruelty of that act. These decades later, I apologize. L and I weren’t close friends, but I had been to her house enough to know that, like me, she had a father who sometimes erupted in fits of screaming rage at the dinner table. I suspected that he, like my own father, was also physically violent from time to time. So in a weird way, I felt ‘safe’ with her. We lived in the same family system.
And, true to the code of ethics of siblings in a dysfunctional household, L did not tell my mother that I had ingested the aspirin. As I recall, she spent a lot of the night huddled in terror in the bathroom whispering to another mutual friend wondering what to do. Me, I was floating off on a cloud. I went to sleep early, fully expecting to drift off and never come back. (How would that have been for L? I honestly never considered it.)
Well, as you might have figured out, that did not happen. I awoke about 2 AM and barfed my guts out. In the morning, I felt as if I had a bad hangover, but I was alive.
L and I walked to high school in the early hours of the cold winter Ohio morning for a debate tournament. My school never won a single match, but L and I kept trying. Walking to school, I realized I felt too lousy to debate. When we arrived, I told the debate coach I had a bad headache and needed to go home again. Her suggestion that I take some aspirin was met by a sharp bark of bitter laughter from L, with whom I never spoke again of this experience during the following weeks and months of debating together.
I remember, walking home alone, that on the sidewalk there were early winter frozen puddles that you could crack loudly with your boots; icy fault lines moving out from your boot’s heel to the edge of the sidewalk square. I remember thinking that I loved that sound. And the feeling of the ice, slowly giving way, cracking under my foot.
Looking back, I see the sheer luck that led to my staying alive. I did wake up and vomit out the poison—I might not have. My attempts to reach out for help were present, but limited. My mother, cooking dinner while I asked her seemingly random questions, did not know that I was asking her to tell me why it mattered if I lived. L, who did know that my life depended on her, did not speak up because we had both learned well that the cost of displeasing a parent was scarier than anything else—precisely why I picked her to confide my situation!
And so, on this Suicide Prevention Day, I sit with the realization that my distant memory might be haunting people still, with guilt and loss and a wish that they had known how desperate I felt to find peace. Just as I sit with my own guilt and grief about the two friends I have subsequently lost to suicide. I sit with the knowledge that the impulse towards suicide is a temporary one, but sometimes the results of that impulse are permanent. And, most of all, I sit with deep and abiding gratitude to be alive.
Today, and every day, may we listen with care when people approach us and show their tender parts. May we reach out to the ones who seem lost, smile and say hello. And may we never be too scared to tell someone that their staying alive to see another day matters to us more than anything else, that we simply want them to live. To take small comfort in joys as simple as the sound that ice makes when it cracks on the sidewalk.
The spiritual practice of atonement, asking and offering forgiveness, is a practice that actively builds and sustains a robust and healthy beloved community.
When we are willing to take the risk of showing up to each other in all of our gloriously imperfect humanity and begin again and again in love – we are being faithful.
When we are willing to go deeper with our friends and family and neighbors, willing to understand their fears and difficulties – to do more than work with them side by side for years without knowing what causes them pain or brings them joy– we are being faithful.
In Jewish tradition, the Book of Life is sealed on Yom Kippur, not to be reopened for another year at Rosh Hashanah. For Unitarian Universalists, the book is never sealed. Each day is an opportunity to begin again in love, repenting and offering forgiveness as often as is required for the health and well-being of this beloved community.
What harm have you caused in the past year that requires repentance? What do you need to forgive yourself for? Who needs your forgiveness?
This post could also be titled “What Will Our Daughter Learn From Us About Eating, Part 1/xx?” Already, we are in constant negotiations about eating. The current challenge is sitting down. We’d like her to “sit down, please” while she eats so she doesn’t teeter and fall painfully out of her high chair. But about a quarter of the way into what we were imagining was her meal, she’ll stand up and want to keep eating, standing up. How big of a deal do we make of this? What’s really important to teach or insist upon, here?
Already, we are starting to see our Little Bean indicate her likes and dislikes. When we first introduced solid foods (eons ago, now — as in, more than six months), she would be absolutely delighted by a particular thing (avocados, say, or pureed sweet potato) and eat it in mass quantity at every meal for days. All I had to do back then was keep up with the purchase and/or production of The Food of the Week. Now she enjoys some new something for a few meals and then tires of it. The Broccoli Trees that were so delicious yesterday get tossed today, well beyond the high chair tray.
Which brings me to one of my next conundrums. The “finishing your plate” conundrum. I know that these days we over-educated, over-anxious, often-white, pretty-privileged, 21st-century parents are taught not to stress our kids out about finishing their plate (’cause that could lead to obesity or, even worse I suppose, “food issues”). But am I supposed to just not say anything when half of the food I’ve prepared gets tossed off the food tray into never-never land (as in, never to be eaten again)? Isn’t that teaching waste and disregard for the precious resource of healthy, often organic (as in, not free, kid!), carefully-prepared food?
And don’t get me started (at least not tonight, anyway; I’ve got too many other things to do!) on the strange size-ism I’ve noticed throughout our kid’s infancy. For her entire first year, the first thing most strangers would say about our baby was “she’s so tiny!” Well, I’d say, she was born small, but she’s healthy and she eats plenty. At that point the conversation would usually stop because, from what I could tell, the other person was still marveling at how tiny our babe was for her age and thought I should be feeding her butter or something or was quite probably secretly starving her. Yes, she was small, and she is still small. Maybe she’ll be a smaller-than-average adult. But in the meantime, somewhere along the line, she and we will start getting messages about how important it is that she be skinny, thin, slender, petite, and so on (I know this, because some people have already said, after I say “she’s a healthy eater,” “well, I hope she’s not eating too much.” Omg, she’s one! All I want to be worrying about, and this is plenty, are the age-appropriate things like: is what she’s putting in her mouth actually food (or is it dirt, a quarter, or a nail? and is she chewing before she swallows so that she doesn’t choke?) The constant focus on size just bugs me, all around; why is there so much emphasis on size and so little conversation about actual health? Yes, it probably bugs me because I grew up in this world and in this culture, too. And I’m sure she already sees me glancing in the mirror or muttering about trying to lose weight. Already, I worry about what she absorbs from my own self-talk and struggles with food. Are all the questions about eating that I ponder, like those in this post and so many more, are these questions teaching her to be thoughtful about food, or neurotic (um, like me?)?
I am grateful for some of the resources I’ve stumbled upon so far about creating healthy eating habits and rituals with our children. In particular, Super Baby Food and The Family Dinner offer very different and equally valuable tips and tricks for creating positive, meaningful mealtimes. How have you wrestled with introducing foods to your kids, and what have been your best guides? Let’s have…uh…a glass of water, and talk about it.
There’s really no need to refer to specifics. When you’ve been a citizen of the United States as long as I have, you’ve heard it all before: national security; stopping this or that madman; ending drugs or terror or Communism; honor. Whatever. The point is always the same: now, in this situation, violence will actually work to fix the problem. Unlike all those other times! And the United States, like an abusive spouse, swears this time is not like all those other times.
But it is.
A few years back I worked with a group of committed Unitarian Universalists on what we call a “statement of conscience” concerning war. Oh, the squeals. The Unitarian Universalist movement is not, after all, a “peace church” like the Quakers or Mennonites. As a matter of fact, Unitarians and Universalist have been complicit with, if not instigators of, most of the violence in the US since that civil war referred to nowadays as “the Revolution.”
And so the well-meaning and committed group attempting a statement of conscience concerning the violence of nation-states sank into the weeds of “Just War Theory” and other bromides.
Pacifism has never done well among Unitarians or Universalists. The list of pacifist ministers is short, though the prominent Universalist Clarence Skinner and the prominent Unitarian John Haynes Holmes are on it. (The pacifism of Holmes led Theodor Geisel, pen name Dr. Seuss, to write, “If we want to win, we’ve got to kill Japs, whether it depresses John Haynes Holmes or not.”) Another name on the list is John H. Dietrich, a predecessor of mine at the congregation I now serve. It’s a short list, but I’m proud to be on it.
No, the present situation is not like the First or Second World Wars. Fortunately. And, yes, there were some good excuses for killing people, at least in the Second one. Still, the human propensity toward violence and its manifestation in the violence of nation-states is odd, to say the least. It doesn’t serve much of a purpose, either, does it? The human propensity toward violence does appear to be innate, though the fact that murder rates vary from one murder per hundred thousand people in many European nations to twenty murders per hundred thousand in the US argues that violence has a large cultural component. The US is a violent culture, and that violence spills out across the globe.
Will it ever end? Probably not. In the present kerfuffle, pacifists like me will have to bow our heads once again and wait for the inevitable results. But we aren’t required to like it. And we can keep calling it what it is–silly, silly, silly.
As I write, the President and Congress are discussing how to respond to the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Not surprisingly, the blogosphere is full of strong opinions: that we must respond to the wanton abuse of citizens with chemical weapons, that bombing Syria would be a huge mistake, that force is the only solution, that force is never the solution, and on and on.
Here’s my best assessment: there is no good solution. I am certainly no expert on the political situation anywhere in the world, and certainly not Syria. But I get a sense of things from articles I read, and, frankly, the news is not good. As far as I can tell, no one in this fight is the hero, the virtuous protagonist who is bound to win in the end. We Americans love a narrative that echoes our national story of the little guy overcoming the superpower and establishing democracy to flourish for the ages. But whether or not that narrative is justified for the US, it certainly doesn’t look like it’s a tale that’s going to play out in Syria. People are being slaughtered. The suffering is immense. It’s hard to imagine that bombing anyone is going to help, but equally hard to just stand back and tell the world that there is now carte blanche to spray people with poison gas.
I would love to tell you what is right, what I think we should do, what we should all take to the streets and the airwaves and cyberspace to promote. Unfortunately, I have no idea. Here’s what I know. Life is full of untenable positions. As a minister you are called on to support people who have to decide whether to undertake medical procedures that will undermine the quality of their life even as they extend it. You counsel people who are trapped in unhappy marriages who know that leaving would be devastating for their children. You are there for people who are looking at providing years of round-the-clock care for a parent or spouse or child who is slowly failing, who want to give everything to their ailing loved one, but still yearn for a life of their own.
It feels a lot better when you can fix things, when righteousness prevails and happiness reigns. But that happens a lot less often than the stories and the movies would have us believe. All too often, there is no good answer, and whatever the conclusion, there is suffering as well as joy. What you learn as a minister is that while you may never have the stunning piece of wisdom that will set a suffering person on the way to happiness, you can listen. You can be prayerfully present, offering your witness to what they are going through. You can hope that in the conversation something will emerge that is clearer or more creative than what the person walked in the room with.
That’s all I’m able to advocate for at the moment – that there be as much listening as possible. As much prayerful presence as possible. As broad a conversation as possible. I hope that the conversation goes far beyond the president and congress, that it includes the UN, that Syria’s neighbors who are being flooded with refugees have a chance to speak. I hope that out of the listening there will arise some greater clarity, some greater creativity, than anything that we have yet seen.
I know that hope is not justified, that there is little that we have seen from anyone in the situation, including the US, that would lead one to expect something better than bombing. So, if nothing else, perhaps those of us who are without decision-making power, who have no control, can manage to be a model of that listening and that creative possibility. It’s not a solution, but it’s the best answer I know.
Yesterday closed out August, the first month of marriage equality in Minnesota. Fittingly, I saw it out just as I entered it in: officiating at a lesbian wedding. As I have stood before dozens of couples this month, and as I have sat in the chairs weeping for friends, I have a couple of thoughts about pastoral pieces that I think should be included in same sex weddings, at least where the law has recently changed towards marriage equality.
First, in each case there are people who love the brides, or the grooms, who are not ready yet to embrace this notion of marriage equality, and are thus not present to celebrate. I acknowledge that their love is real, none-the-less, and that we at the ceremony pray for the day when all will celebrate love, and join in witnessing same sex couples’ marriage vows. However, in the meantime, we appreciate the integrity and authenticity of those who chose not to attend, and know that they love the couple none-the-less.
This is important because in many cases there will be many conspicuous absences of key family members. Differences in family views were most evident when I officiated at the wedding of Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s lesbian stepsister, (See http://www.patheos.com/blogs/uucollective/2013/08/forty-seven-weddings-and-a-funeral/) but they have been somewhat present in every same sex wedding I witnessed last month. Family gossip lines being what they are, I am fairly confident that word of this naming and inclusion will reach the absent members at some point.
Second, because we have not yet reached a place of universal agreement about the blessing that these weddings bring to our wider community, I urge all who attend, particularly straight allies, to go back to work or neighborhood barbecues, and describe what they witnessed at the wedding. Describe the years that this couple has been together, the love that was evidenced at the service, how good it felt for people to be there, gay and straight alike. How, in fact, it strengthened participants’ own commitments to their spouses.
This is important because our campaign for marriage equality was story-driven, based on reflections of personal relationships with or on the lived experiences of gay and lesbian couples. Though the campaign for 51% of the vote is over, to reach the 80 or 90 percent of support which will ultimately bring us together, the storytelling must continue. People who voted against marriage equality need to hear about how it is actually impacting the people around them, to balance and ultimately dissolve the horror stories of mayhem and destruction of heterosexual marriage which they have heard.
Finally, I have remarked in each ceremony I’ve officiated (tip o’ the hat to my friend Kate Tucker for this frame) that, when couples have been together for decades faithfully and loyally, we are actually present to witness vows between them and the State of Minnesota as much as or more than vows between the couple. The State of Minnesota, finally, has stepped forward with a commitment to support same-sex couples for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part—by providing social security benefits and tax benefits, access to health care and hospital beds, and all of the ease which heterosexual couples expect in the aftermath of the death of their beloved—beginning with access to the body itself, and extending out to inheritance rights, and decisions about the funeral.
The first month is over, but the struggle for marriage equality continues, even as the IRS declares that married couples anywhere can file joint federal taxes. Until the patchwork of equality and inequality tips into a nation where couples don’t need to fearfully pack marriage certificates in their luggage when they travel across state lines, we have our work to do.
Meanwhile, mazel tov to all of the newly married couples in Minnesota and other states this month. Though some of us older folks might grumble that we feel as if we’re in our late twenties again, with weddings every weekend, the joy in the grumbling is readily evident. Finally, we’re being treated as adults!
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I come to church—and would whether I was a preacher or not—because I fall below my own standards and need to be constantly brought back to them. It is not enough that I should think about the world and its problems at the level of a newspaper report or a magazine discussion. I must have my conscience sharpened—sharpened until it goads me to the most thorough and responsible thinking of which I am capable.
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Community has been lost in today’s world. People have become so engrossed in their own wants, dreams and desires that they don’t worry about helping anyone else. One of the truest definitions of community is fellowship, and we can’t have fellowship going about life on our own.
Amongst Native culture, the importance of community is prevalent throughout their history. This becomes evident as you learn of the many different Native customs and beliefs, yet come across one common expression in nearly all Native nations and tribes. For the Lakota people the expression is Mitakuye O’yasin, for the Cherokee it is Ahwensa Unhili, and in English it translates to All Our Relations.
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Some of the old New England graveyards are serene little pockets of neglect. Their slate tombstones lean at odd angles and the elegant calligraphy is barely legible, spelling out obscure colonial names like Ozias and Zebulon. Some of the inscriptions that can still be deciphered tell poignant stories of sons and husbands fallen in long-ago wars and young wives lost in childbirth.
Clusters of brick-sized stones mark the deaths of children in some catastrophic winter. The engraved cries of lament—“Farewell, Beloved Daughter”—evoke a tug of grief even now, though the people named have been dust and earth for two hundred years or more.
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As a Unitarian Universalist congregation with no geographical boundary, the CLF creates global spiritual community, rooted in profound love, which cultivates wonder, imagination, and the courage to act.