I wish I could talk to my Great-Aunt Marie about the movie Twelve Years a Slave, but regrettably “Neenie” died when I was three. This spinster librarian from Detroit did, however, leave a legacy—a self-published book of family history. Written in 1957, this book documented my family’s years in Missouri in the 1800’s.
My parents ridiculed these books; giant unopened boxes of them filled our attic. When my father died, I finally brought one home and began to read it. To my shock, the very first line of the preface, written by Aunt Marie in 1957, tells me my ancestors “left a Virginia country environment where they were relieved of the drudgeries of workaday life by the labor of slaves…they were members of a society in which excellence in manners, morals, and religion were prerequisites.” In 1821, when Missouri became a slave state and offered land at $1.25 an acre, my ancestors migrated there.
I had always imagined these Missouri pioneer ancestors living in a house kind of like Little House on the Prairie. Never did I envision Ma and Pa and the kids with slaves out back, ‘relieving them of the drudgeries of workaday life.’ No one ever talked about our family history as slave-owners.
Aunt Marie says in her preface that the family letters, “too numerous to include, have been incorporated into dialogue. The conversations are necessarily fictitious, but the events are authentic. The story is a family diary with eighteen dramatic scenes.” In other words, old letters have been turned into the equivalent of bad 1957 church skits.
Each of these ‘dramatic scenes’ is scripted, with stage directions and settings written by Aunt Marie herself. These descriptions are the primary reason I wish that Aunt Marie and I could have watched and talked about Twelve Years a Slave together.
Here are a few of the lines Aunt Marie included to ‘set the stage’ for various scenes:
“Smiling blacks bear platters of food to the tables, while strains from banjo and guitar are heard from the rear.”
“Black folks … cluster around the well and weave in and out of the buildings, working, laughing, loafing.”
It wasn’t until I saw and reflected on Twelve Years a Slave and the history of cinematography about slavery that I realized where Aunt Marie’s images came from. They sprang, in technicolor, from her Hollywood-influenced mind. Hollywood has presented dozens of films with images just like the ones Aunt Marie described, showing slavery as a time when blacks smiled and laughed and loafed.
Now, thankfully, Hollywood offers a version of history more grounded in fact. Twelve Years a Slave takes its viewers into slavery, not through the eyes of the slave-owners, but through the eyes of Simon Northup, a freed black man from New York, stolen and enslaved. The film shows slavery as mundane, daily, ceaseless, violence and terror. Some African-Americans I know don’t want to see it, or loathed it. But as a white person, who doesn’t experience the daily relentlessness of racism, the physical intensity of the movie was transformative. Leaving the movie felt like stepping out of a virtual reality booth.
I suspect Aunt Marie would not want to have any of it. Her preferred view seemed to be that owning other human beings didn’t make a dent in one’s ‘excellence in manners, morals, and religion.’ Nor did ceasing to own other human beings involve any sense of repentance. As one ancestor wrote:
“I’m not going to let old John Brown or any confounded abolitionist steal my blacks… I shall free them myself. Freeing my servants will not be a financial loss to me. Most of the negroes I have were inherited. In return for their labor, I have given them food, shelter, clothing, medical care…and security in old age.”
When I utter judgment upon my ancestors, some white folks get upset with me for “imposing 21st century values” on 18th or 19th century people. Do we really have to talk about this? they all but groan.
I guess the primary reason I’m most grateful to Twelve Years a Slave is that it is a kind of family intervention. I was born in the latter part of the 21st century. Silences and lies about my family history were handed to me as intact and unbroken as the four sherbet dishes my mother gave me, which made the journey with my ancestors from Virginia to Missouri. If Aunt Marie, writing in 1957, had come to believe that owning other people was wrong, she never mentioned it. My liberal parents –civil rights activists–never saw reason to talk to us kids about this part of our family history. Like many white people, my siblings prefer not to talk about it now.
Though viciously brutal, the film’s truth-speaking is a relief. Finally! Because when do Americans, or families, sit down with each other and say, “Wow, that was us! We did that! What meaning should we make of that? How did we benefit? How were we hurt? How do we heal our nation? How should we live our lives now?”
Twelve Years A Slave may or may not win Oscars Sunday night. But its real value is in changed and enriched lives: lives of people like me who have new ways to talk about and challenge what Adrienne Rich called “the lies, secrets, and silences” which shroud our national and family and cinematic histories. If there were a category for “Most Necessary,” this would be, hands down, my choice for best picture.
stars will stop
gelling—the
hydrogen and
helium gone.
Someday, each
star will call it
a day & go to bits.
Someday the day
will be as dark as
night, the hydrogen,
the helium snuffed.
Someday, in, oh, say,
ten billion billion years,
time will eddy & stop.
Someday deep will
call to deep with
nothing here at all.
Someday here will be
empty like there,
in, oh, say ten billion
billion years . . .
So off we go to
corral the OK.
Off we go to
fish for the net.
Off we go, a link
in the unchained.
Off we go to someday.
Apparently it is all the rage these days for state legislatures to introduce “religious freedom” bills that would allow people to refuse to do business with someone if it would go against their sincerely held religious beliefs. Clearly we are to understand these bills as a means for people who disapprove of same-sex weddings to not have to provide services for those weddings. On the one hand, this seems like not such a big deal. Who really wants an appalled photographer or caterer harshing the vibe at your wedding? Why should people have to participate in something that they disapprove of? Would I be willing to serve canapés at a dog fighting ring or a KKK rally?
But the proposed laws don’t state that no one should have to provide services that run counter to their conscience. They don’t suggest that it would be appropriate to refuse to do business with BP because you’re still mad about their massive oil spill from a criminally flawed deep water drill, or that we as a society get it if you don’t want to take photographs for the catalog of a clothing company complicit in the abuse of Bangladeshi workers. No, these bills are about religious freedom.
So I call bullshit. Your religion sets boundaries on how you live your life. It may tell you that it is wrong to be in a relationship with a person of the same sex, or to eat pork or to eat beef or to touch a woman who is menstruating. It may tell you that you should wear special underwear or a special hat or to wash your hands and feet before you pray. And no one has the right to interfere with your choices around any of those or a hundred or a thousand more ways of expressing your sincere religious beliefs.
But we don’t need any extra laws to say that. We have one already, called the First Amendment. Got it covered. So then the question is whether we need laws to protect you from in any way condoning other people doing things that are counter to your religious beliefs. Let me give you the short answer. No.
If you are Catholic and you disapprove of birth control, that means you shouldn’t use it. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have to comply with an insurance mandate to cover it for other people. How other people prevent pregnancy is not part of your religious practice. If your religion forbids your eating pork, or mixing milk and meat, don’t do it. But your religion doesn’t forbid you from taking pictures of people eating cheeseburgers with bacon. If you don’t think gay people should get married, then don’t marry a person of your gender. Who you bake a cake for is not part of your religious practice. Your religious beliefs apply to you, and if your God is going to judge you for standing by while other people live out their own religious lives, then your God needs to get a grip.
Of course, the reality of these laws has nothing to do with freedom of religious practice. Their function is merely to serve as a way for people who are losing a legal and cultural battle to try to exert control over something that has already escaped them. It is a place to put all the rage over losing the privilege of being able to assume that the way they see the world is the way everyone sees it. And everyone is entitled to their own rage, as well as their own religious beliefs. But like religious beliefs, no one is entitled to impose their rage on someone else. That’s the law.
Al “Carnival Time” Johnson sings “it’s Carnival Time and everybody’s havin’ fun…”
The twitter feed, the facebook, the news cycle all make it very clear that not everyone is having fun… but this weekend (until Ash Wednesday), I will put my twitter feed down, my facebook and the news away, and I will spend time with the people of my city dancing on the streets in handmade costumes with bands that have been practicing all year. Beloveds, we are going to have some fun.
Carnival time in New Orleans is complex, with a twisted history of racism, classism, sexism — AND it is an opportunity for the utter subversion of the oppressive status quo. It is a time when strangers become friends, generosity is the word of the day, and hope for a new day is lived out in the prefigurative politics of a communal celebration.
See y’all after the Mardi Gras.
I had a great time visiting New York City this past weekend. A couple years ago, I would not have expected to enjoy “The City” ever again.
You see, I called New York home for five years. And by the time we prepared to move out of the city, I was pretty overwhelmed by that amazing, infuriating, beautiful, exhausting island.
For the first four years we lived there, I tamped down my frustration, my fear, my overwhelm. But When we made the decision to move out of the city…oooh, it just came flowing out of me.
Rage at people who pushed me on the subway.
Tears.
Yes, Manhattan made me cry.
But we had just decided to move. We weren’t actually moving for another eight months, so I had to do something. I started a list on Facebook. I called it: “Things to like – or even love – about New York City.”
My first item was the evergreen boughs packed around the sidewalk trees on 17th street in the winter. Number 41 was a favorite: I was grateful for the MTA guy on my morning commute at the 14th Street M15 select service bus stop. He was there the entire year I took that bus. Rain, sleet, snow, hundred degree heat. He was so kind – even in the midst of a mass of rather grumpy commuters. He always said “Good Morning.”
The list helped. It made my last year in New York possible, pleasant even. Friends added to it and helped me see the city in ways I simply could not before I started the list. Searching for tiny things that gave me joy became a spiritual practice. Being grateful gave me new way of seeing the world around me.If you live in New York, perhaps you, too, have noticed that the sidewalk at LaGuardia airport sparkles.
A few months after I started my New York City gratitude list, I was called to the Emergency Room of the hospital where I served as a chaplain. I found the patient who had requested a pastorin an isolation room, protecting either him or the rest of us from germs. I donned a mask and entered. He was delighted to see me. I was, to be honest, more than a little nervous.
As we spoke, I learned that this man was HIV positive, that his HIV had developed into AIDS,and that He had come in that day because his pneumonia had reoccurred. He had cancer too, but he didn’t want treatment. He did not even want to know how much of his body was affected. He felt alright, he said. He was homeless and mostly estranged from his family. He needed some new clothes and wondered if I could help. He spoke quickly, frenetically. I wasn’t sure what would come next.
And then he taught me a priceless lesson. He wanted to read something to me, (I don’t even remember now what it was) and he reached into a tattered pocket to pull out a piece of paper.
After he’d retrieved a broken pair of glasses from a different pocket, he paused, closed his eyes and said: “Thank You, God, for the ability to read.”
Thank you, God, for the ability to read.
His prayer made me reexamine the gift that many of us receive in early elementary school and then proceed to take for granted for the rest of our lives. The man in the ER, with so much to be angry, frustrated, despairing about, with a simple prayer of gratitude, had opened my eyes.
The rest of that day the power of that simple thank you washed over me:
Thank you for the ability to walk, to express myself.
Thank you for being able to open this door for someone.
Thank you, God, for the ability to read.
What before was ordinary, with a reminder, became glorious.
I am trying to remember the power of that pause these days. It is a hard time for many of the people we love. I am learning that gratefulness is not always easy, but always lifts the heart and, it is always as simple as a Thank You For…
For what are you grateful today?
“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
In college, we had this mantra among our swim team: hard core. As the phrase might imply, to be hard core meant maintaining physical and emotional strength in spite of pain and setbacks – whether it was enduring the grueling three-hour long training sessions, withstanding the mental challenges involved with competing at the collegiate level, or surviving the social dramas and angst of college life. Hard core was a compliment in the highest regard, synonymous with strength, resilience, competence, confidence, and independence. To be hard core was to be respected and admired.
And so, for many reasons, I was hard back then (though probably not as hard core as I would have liked to be). I saw things in black and white. Questions had one “right” answer. Success (and, consequently, happiness) had a path that must be followed without deviation. There was little room for doubts, mistakes or uncertainty, and almost no room for acceptance, tolerance, and patience.
And, although being hard core as an athlete may have been helpful, I have found that it isn’t all that valuable to me as a person.
Being hard just doesn’t make much sense to me anymore.
I am learning that life isn’t a series of Either/Or conclusions, but a multitude of Both/And possibilities. It is possible to be soft and strong, to be vulnerable and confident, to be patient and resilient. It is possible to swim around in the doubts without drowning; to say “I don’t know” without being unintelligent; to say “I’m sorry” without being weak; to change my mind without being erratic and unreliable; to be generous without being abused; and to be merciful without being manipulated.
So these days I’m taking a softer focus. I’m looking for beauty in the complexities and differences, appreciating our multi-hued world instead of straining to create a monochromatic one. I’m enjoying the mysteries and unknowns, becoming more comfortable with the questions that have no easy answers. I’m saying “I don’t know” and “I’m sorry” more often and more sincerely. And, impatient as I am, I’m even trying to find joy in the waiting.
The thing is, in many ways, it is easier to be hard. It is easier to see things in black and white, to look for absolutes, and to live in an either/or world. It is challenging and confusing living in the softer world, where few things are fixed and certain and there are infinite shades of gray, along with reds and oranges and purples and pinks. It can be terrifying to live with an overflowing heart without a hard protective shell.
And, in many ways, it is hard work to stay soft. Idealist thoughts of perfection must fly out the window, along with regrets and should-have-been’s. The soft focus is more permeable, letting in the bad with the good and heightening emotional sensitivities. It can be clumsy and awkward walking on shaky soft ground. There are missteps, stumbles, and falls. There are wrong turns and false starts.
Fortunately, with this softer way, the falls are cushioned and it is easier to get back up, to turn around, to try again.
So I’m using a softer focus these days, resolving to keep a softer focus despite any personal or societal pressures to be harder, sharper, tougher.
There is no doubt that I am softer now – softer, in fact, than I ever thought I could be.
And, you know what?
I think that I just might be stronger than ever because of it.
Both. And.
This post originally appeared on the author’s website.
I suppose everybody has a favorite founding document for a religion or a nation. Mine is “Farewell at Delfshaven,” a sermon given by Rev. John Robinson to a group of his Separatist congregation who were taking ship for the Western Hemisphere. Part of the sermon goes like this:
I Charge you before God and his blessed angels that you follow me no further than you have seen me follow Christ. If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as you were to receive any truth from my ministry, for I am verily persuaded the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth from His holy word.
The Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw. Whatever part of His will our God has revealed to Calvin, they (Lutherans) will rather die than embrace it; and the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things. This is a misery much to be lamented.
For though they were precious shining lights in their time, yet God has not revealed his whole will to them. And were they now living, they would be as ready and willing to embrace further light, as they had received.
The way Unitarian Universalists “do church” comes directly from the protestant movements that eventually led to the English Civil War and the decision by some of the radicals that it was perfectly acceptable to God that they supplant the aristocracy and remove their king’s head. . . Radical. It isn’t surprising that the royalty of the day weren’t particularly keen on keeping those sorts around. And perhaps it isn’t surprising that these most protesting of Protestants eventually set up theocracies and felt justified in clearing the land of its native inhabitants.
Yet these radicals—known to us nowadays as Pilgrims, Puritans, and Separatists—were up some positive things as well, such as what we call democracy. And the best of their thought is exemplified by these last words that Rev. Robinson said to members of his congregation as they sailed to England to join another group of dissenters and board the Mayflower.
These parishioners settled in what they called Plymouth, Massachusetts to build what is today a Unitarian Universalist church, which indicates that the beliefs that Rev. Robinson preached, plus about four-hundred years, equals Unitarian Universalism. The deepest beliefs of those religious seekers are the DNA of Unitarian Universalism (for good and ill).
Notice some things about this little sermon: yes, there’s the usual unfortunate bashing of other denominations—in this case Lutherans and Calvinists—but Rev. Robinson was saying two very radical, and I think positive, things.
The first is: “follow me no further than you have seen me follow Christ.” This is still an expectation in the Unitarian Universalist movement: we don’t ordain ministers and then think those ministers are somehow levitating or holy. We don’t think our ministers are special—we expect our ministers to walk the walk . . . all the time, but a minister is just like the rest of us folks.
The other radical thing that Rev. Robinson preached is the very core of the tradition: that truth continues to be revealed. Or, more radically, that we human beings continue to find more and more truth, and we must continue to modify our beliefs according to these new truths.
The Separatists did not “do church” as did most of the Christian groups of the time (and still today). Roman Catholicism had developed along the lines of the political systems of the day: emperors, kings, men in charge. Some protestant groups—Lutherans and Anglicans for example—created state religions. These groups saw themselves—dangerously as Rev. Robinson pointed out—as founded on eternal truths. This justified building hierarchies. Top down.
The Separatists, however, believed in the individual discovery (or revelation) of truth. Therefore, they could not accept hierarchy within the congregation. Each member of the congregation was on a separate path toward truth, and as likely as any other member (including clergy) to find it.
As a corollary, the churches the “pilgrims,” and eventually Puritans, set up in Massachusetts were all individual as well. Each congregation discovered truth for itself. This is one reason the Separatist movement eventually fractured into Trinitarian and Unitarian congregations.
Still today, each congregation in the Unitarian Universalist Association is on its own, to choose leaders, to find their own way toward truth. And the “power,” whatever that is, lies within the congregation, not the association of congregations.
Not an ideal way to run a collection of congregations, a “denomination,” of course, but a great way to encourage freedom of conscience and thought.
Yes, the radical protestant movements of Europe were “precious shining lights in their time,” but nowadays, the belief systems they were founded on are for the most part relics of the past, products of minds “who yet saw not all things.” And, as Rev. Robinson said, “This is a misery much to be lamented.” I, for example, as a minister, don’t use the terms “God” or “Christ” at all in my historically humanist congregation. The light has shown my congregation a different path.
That’s the genius of the idea Rev. Robinson preached: truth just keeps on coming.
“By not finding Dunn guilty of murder, the jury could not unanimously conclude that one white man’s imagination was worth more than one black teen’s life.” -Aura Bogado, Jordan Davis: What We’ve Come to Expect, http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/02/what_weve_come_to_expect.html
“Colorlines publisher and executive director of Race Forward, Rinku Sen, was a guest on the Melissa Harris-Perry show to discuss the dimensions of the Michael Dunn case on Sunday. “What Michael Dunn expected from that interaction was not respect but submission,” she said quoting Tonyaa Weathersbee. “Stand Your Ground laws codify that expectation of submission from young black people to white men.” Rinku goes on to explain how the prosecution’s failure to acknowledge that prevents us from truly highlighting the racial dimensions of this case.” http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/02/fighting_stand_your_ground_law_is_the_anti-lynching_movement_of_our_time.html
No one deserves to die
because a White person is
afraid of not being in control.
Source of all that is holy and true,
heart broken by the dis-ease of racism
infecting this nation,
I am calling out this morning.
Calling out beloveds
whose own humanity has been displaced
by the White supremacist culture of America.
Yeah. All my White people.
Calling us in
to revision this country.
Because our own humanity is lost
when we deny it to another.
Because this is no way to live.
Remember?
I tend to get it from both sides when I talk about spiritual practice: many of my fellow skeptics blanch at the word “spiritual.” And many Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Sufis, and what-have-yous seem to think that rationality and spiritual practice are at loggerheads. But humanists value connectedness and experience wonder just like everyone else. As far as I’m concerned, that’s spirituality.
I grew up Pentecostal. The spiritual practices taught in that tradition are daily bible reading and prayer. There is much talk of “having a prayer life.” As a kid, I assiduously read the King James Version of the bible. I completed the task when I was twelve. Admittedly, I didn’t understand much of what I read, but I credit that practice with preparing me for reading Modernist literature when I got to college. What’s a little James Joyce after you’ve read Leviticus at twelve?
Along about the time I was fourteen I began questioning praying in the manner I had been taught—petitionary prayer. I decided that it was presumptuous to ask God (if that god knows all and can do everything) for anything. On the other hand, I knew then, and I still believe, it is mentally healthy to pause, consider the needs of others, and think of ways that one might help others achieve those needs. That’s another sort of prayer entirely.
Nowadays Christians have rediscovered “contemplative prayer.” It is an interesting practice. But it wasn’t much known back in the days when I was searching.
When I was twenty-two I traveled to Boulder, Colorado to Naropa Institute. I went to study at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. I went because my poetry hero, Allen Ginsberg, was there. I discovered the serious practice of Buddhism.
At Naropa, Ginsberg and Gary Snyder both taught that meditation had to be an end in itself—the point isn’t to meditate on something to write or to be a better writer. Meditation just is. The point isn’t “enlightenment.” Rather, meditation tunes the mind.
I have to admit, I’m fidgety. I didn’t meditate well then; I don’t meditate well now. The writing of poetry became for me a spiritual practice. That, to, focuses the mind and centers one in the moment. I have continued that practice through my life—through births, deaths, disappointments, divorce. Every day, I write. It is part of me. Some days it has been all I have had to keep me going.
I use tricks to keep my writing a priority. I blog. I work on a chapter of the Daodejing every day, polishing a translation I have been working on for a long time.
Most days, I also practice meditation in the Buddhist manner that I learned at Naropa, even though I’m still fidgety. I sit down, quiet the mind, watch the thoughts pass, and realize that they are thoughts. The Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh perhaps sums up Buddhist meditation best in his book Being Peace:
A human being is like a television set with millions of channels. If we turn the Buddha on, we are the Buddha. If we turn sorrow on, we are sorrow. If we turn a smile on, we really are the smile. We cannot let just one channel dominate us. We have the seed of everything in us, and we have to seize the situation in our hand, to recover our own sovereignty.
For me, anyway, the great Buddhist insight is that each of us has the ability to step between a thought and a reaction . . . to realize that our minds are creating stories, that these stories shape our lives, and that these stories can be slavishly followed . . . or changed.
Writing poetry and meditating have sustained me as a humanist. Sure, “spiritual” is an overused word in North American culture. But in that heap of salesmanship, there are some real gems.
I could be wrong, but I rather suspect that Valentine’s Day is the most widely despised holiday in the country. Really, unless you’re in the small minority of people who are in the throes of romantic passion, what’s to like? You don’t get a day off of work, there’s no religious ceremony or significance, and for weeks ahead of time the stores are filled with a boatload of pink and red crap that nobody needs, and hardly anybody actually wants. Jewelry store commercials aside, the number of lives that would be improved by the gift of a heart-shaped diamond is, I suspect, shockingly small.
Worse than that, for many people the holiday is an affront. If you are single, it’s a reminder that society expects people to pair up, and a suggestion that you are probably a loser because you’re alone. If you’re in a long-term relationship that has become more centered on helping with homework and making sure that there is milk in the frig than on lust and making googly eyes at one another, it’s a reminder that popular culture is obsessed with passion and falling in love, and no one will ever make a blockbuster movie that looks anything like your life. If you’re gay or lesbian or in any kind of non-traditional relationship you know that there probably isn’t going to be a card in the drugstore that is in any way designed with your kind of love in mind. And if you’ve recently been through a break-up, or your relationship is going through a rocky period from which it may or may not recover, or your spouse has died, well, then Valentine’s Day is pretty much designed for your own personal torture.
So here’s my suggestion: Maybe a better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day than by buying candy and flowers would be to embrace the fact that love is often difficult. Rather than a day about romance, why not a day for concentrating on loving something or someone that makes you uncomfortable?
You might want to start by loving your crooked toe, or your stretch marks, or the flabby skin on the back of your arms. Anoint them with lotion, and a long, loving look, and consider the possibility that they really don’t need to be any different than exactly what they are.
You could try loving your neighbor who plays loud music and leaves his RV parked so that you can hardly get in your driveway. Maybe the music is his only stress reducer after caring for elderly people all day; maybe the RV is the only place his son has to live; maybe he’s so busy trying to hold his life together that he forgot to consider what would be most convenient for you.
You could work on loving your daughter’s crappy fourth-grade teacher who doesn’t appreciate your child’s unique gifts and has failed to teach her the structure of a paragraph. Chances are good that there are too many kids in the classroom to give each their due and the teacher is exhausted simply from trying to maintain some semblance of civilization until the bell rings.
You could try to love the person ahead of you in the line at the grocery store who has 27 items in the express lane, or the punk who cut you off on the freeway, or the customer service representative from the cable company who does not appear to have the slightest idea what “service” might mean. Just for today, since it’s a holiday.
You might even go all out, and work on loving your ex, or the person they left you for. Not necessarily forgiving, and certainly not forgetting, but just a little warmth, a little bit of an open heart for someone who, like everyone else in the world, is trying to find happiness in the best way they know how. Which isn’t necessarily a good way, but there you have it.
Just for this one day you could practice love not so much as a feeling but as a choice, a discipline, a practice. You could start with the conviction that everyone certainly needs love, and the possibility that everyone deserves it. Not because they have earned it, not because they are loveable, but because each of us is capable of being an instrument of grace, which is another name for the love that we don’t have to earn or deserve.
Happy Valentine’s Day. And good luck.
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