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Mother Teresa said: “To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.”
I first started doing volunteer work in college. I volunteered with Beyond War, a non-profit that highlights the dangers of nuclear war. I volunteered with Results, a non-profit that uses the power of letter-writing to effect policy change on hunger in developing countries and the United States. I volunteered with the National Organization for Women, a non-profit that promotes the equality of women and men.
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I’ve recently been engaged in a fascinating email conversation with a man named Michael Lorence, who found me electronically and reached out. Michael and his wife Diana wanted to share their story of the seven years that they spent living in a 12×12 foot house in the center of 60 acres of woods. They called the cabin, “Innermost House.”
February 2014
“One can be instructed in society; one is inspired only in solitude.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A couple of week’s ago, on a cold Chicago afternoon, after being cooped up for most of the week, my husband and I looked at each other and said, “Let’s go bowling.”
Now, nothing says wholesome family fun quite like putting on some smelly communal shoes and listening to drunk men swear at the football game, but after being cooped up in the house for more of the week, we were just a little bit desperate.
Matt and Jack have gone bowling together a few times, but this was the first time that Teddy had been bowling. After trying on three (three!) different pairs of shoes, convincing him that the bowling ball that looked like Darth Maul was too heavy for him (he’s just a tiny bit obsessed with Star Wars), and showing him how to put his almost-four-year-old fingers in the ball and roll it down the lane, he was ready to go.
“Self! Self!” he stubbornly said in true Teddy fashion.
He walked to the line holding the ball with both hands and I have never been more certain that a trip to the ER for a broken toe would be in our near future. (By the grace of God, he made it out of the bowling alley with all ten toes intact.)
For ten frames, Teddy grabbed his ball, stepped up to the line, and heaved the ball as hard as he could down the lane. Most of the time, he rolled the ball right into one of the bumpers and it would sloooooowwwly bounce its way down the lane. On each of his rolls, the ball moved so slowly, in fact, that I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t make it to the pins. And, more than a few times, Matt and I exchanged a look that said, “Which one of us is going to ask the surly desk attendant for help when the ball stops in the middle of the lane?” (Fortunately, we never had to answer that question, but for the record, it would have been him.)
On every one of Teddy’s turns the ball moved at a snail’s pace, barely moving down the lane until, finally, it would make it to the pins and maybe even hit down a few. As one of THE most impatient people on the planet, I found the delay to be a bit unsettling at first. Waiting for the ball to plod down the lane, I felt nervous, jittery, and antsy.
But, after a few frames, I realized that what I was feeling wasn’t actually impatience; it was fear. Fear that the ball would never make it, fear that we’d have to ask for help from the surly man at the front desk, fear that Teddy would end up in a tantrumy heap of tears.
But, after a few frames, I realized that the ball would eventually make it to the pins even though it looked like it might stop moving at any moment. And with the fear of not making it subsiding, the waiting actually became the best part of it all. Because in the waiting, I had time to soak it all in. I could watch Teddy’s eyes light up as the ball moved down the lane, I could steal a few glances at my husband, and I watch my older son add up the scores on the screen.
Once the fear of never became the confidence of eventually, I was able to look at the waiting and the slowness in a whole new light.
And I wondered: How many other times have I mistaken fear for impatience? Fear of the never or the always. Fear of the falling and failing. Fear of dead ends and asking for help. Fear that without the end, the means just don’t matter.
And in this fast-paced, frenzy to get something or do something or hit the target, how much has gone unnoticed and how much enjoyment have I missed in the slow-moving journey?
I’ve been struggling a lot with impatience lately, wanting things to happen now, now, now. But I am realizing that this need for things to happen on my timetable is less about fulfillment and satisfaction, and far more about fear. Fear of losing control, fear that I will never make it, fear that I am somehow lacking just as I am and right where I am, fear that I won’t be satisfied until the pins are knocked down so to speak.
We tell ourselves that when the pins are knocked down, then we’ll be happy. When we get married, when we have a baby, when the kids are in school, when the kids are out of the house, when we get the job, when we get the promotion, when we are out of debt, when we buy a house, when we get an agent, when we get published, when we receive this award, when we land that sales account, when…, when…, when…then we’ll be happy. And all the while, the ball is moving slooooowwwwly down the lane and there is so much going on while it rolls if only we’d just notice.
The ball moves slowly, more slowly than we’d like, many times. And we wait and we wait and we wait, growing increasingly tired of all the waiting and more fearful that the ball might actually stop. And in all of that fear, we miss it. We miss the twinkly eyes and the emotions, the bouncing back and forth and the graceful movement to it all, the sights and sounds and people and various goings-on that are actually a really big deal if we’d just stop focusing so much on those damn pins at the end of our lane and trust that the ball will eventually get there.
After bowling for a few hours last Sunday afternoon, and watching the ball move slowly down the lane, I realized a few things. I realized that the ball will slowly, eventually, finally reach the pins; it just takes a little longer sometimes. I realized that if the ball does stop, you can always ask for help (even if you have to ask the surly man behind the desk), get a new ball, and roll again. And, most importantly, I realized that there is so much good stuff going on while we wait for whatever it is that we’re waiting for.
So take your time. Pay attention. Enjoy the journey.
And know that, even when the ball moves slower than we ever thought possible, that at least the pins are happy for few extra moments of peace.
This post originally appeared on the author’s website at www.christineorgan.com.
As we conclude this month focused on beginnings, I am struck by the renewed interest in early childhood programs. In 1966, I began my career as a teacher in one of the very first Head Start day care centers, housed in the Plymouth Settlement House in Louisville KY. It was a quality program that changed the lives of the 3- and 4-year old children enrolled in our center. Those 45 children had an exciting learning environment, committed teachers, good food, and a safe place for a nap. Field trips and stories were the order of the day. Language skills blossomed, and curiosity was nurtured. I saw first hand how much an age-appropriate quality educational program can mean to young children as well as their families.
In this month of beginnings, universal access to pre-kindergarten programs was focused on in the State of the Union address, as well as in the NY Governor’s State of the State message. In our push to see that every child has the opportunities a sound education can bring, we ask, will this make a difference? My experience suggests that it will not unless it is followed by a quality K-12 education. As they turned 5 years old, my students left our center with its full day, 11-month educational program. I was horrified when I realized that they would then be enrolled in half-day, 9-month kindergarten classes in a school with many broken windows, and few resources, with teachers who were not supported with books and field trips, art supplies and science equipment. I feared that everything we had accomplished would deteriorate in this new environment. Since then, when I have thought of my students who would now have turned 50, I wonder what happened to them? Was their beginning truly a beginning? Or was it the end?
Much of what has been touted as education reform over the past decade has focused only on ends in the form of test scores. Individual accountability for students and staff is the order of the day. Head Start is criticized because it didn’t change the future. But true beginnings require continuity into the future, and this requires teams of educators and parents building on the beginnings and believing that they can only be successful if they collaborate. No teacher or parent is an island, solely responsible for any outcome. I was a better teacher because I worked with a team. We collaborated with parents, visiting in their homes and inviting them into the center. In the public schools I worked in and to which I sent my children and grandchild, classroom teachers and special educators worked side by side. Art and music teachers were as important as math and reading teachers. Everyone had a role to play, and we are all successful when a child was successful and happy in learning.
So what is a beginning? Is it a starting place, a place to build on? If we don’t build together, then all these beginnings will be dead ends.
How will you build on a beginning in your community, in your life?
Scientific theories do not occur in a vacuum. Like poems or paintings, theories reflect the times and characters or their authors. Darwin’s theory of natural selection, far from being a stark and cold scientific theory, was—and continues to be—an impassioned cry for equality and justice. A cry far more grounded and stirring than anything available in the religions that human beings then, and into our own time, tenaciously claim to be the only source and grounding for morality.
First, a little family history: Charles Darwin’s family was passionately involved in the abolition movement. Darwin’s grandfather, the Unitarian Josiah Wedgwood—of Wedgwood china fame—bankrolled Thomas Clarkson, the great British abolitionist. Britain, due in great part to the work of Clarkson, outlawed slavery in the dominions in 1807 and the colonies in 1833.
(A bit of historical trivia: One of the chemists working in the Wedgwood factory was Joseph Priestly, discoverer of oxygen, and a Unitarian minister. )
Charles Darwin’s father, hoping to tone down the radical reputation of the family, had Charles baptized into the Church of England. But it is an interesting fact of history that the father of the theory of natural selection . . . married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, a Unitarian, and considerably more radical, at least publicly, than Charles.
The fact remains that when the 22 Charles boarded HMS Beagle in 1831, he was a conventional Christian considering going to seminary and becoming a priest in the Church of England.
What changed?
For the full story, read Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution. When we look at Darwin’s life from the perspective of the slavery question, it looks almost inevitable that he should call religion’s bluff concerning its monopoly on morality and show a way toward a higher morality.
In 1845 Darwin wrote,
I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have staid in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master’s eye. … And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty… .
Darwin knew very well that the appeal to religion as a basis for moral behavior would be one of the first objections to the theory of natural selection. Yes, I think he would have pursued his theory, even if it had meant that human beings had no moral guidepost. But I suspect that Darwin knew that the implications of natural selection point in exactly the opposite direction.
Consider how Darwin framed the discussion:
His first proposal, published in 1859 but written in 1837, was this:
Living things are all one: they are “netted together.” (Darwin avoided the question of the “crown of creation,” human beings, as best he could in his first book.)
Then, in 1871, Darwin dropped the bigger bombshell:
Humanity is all one.
And therefore, we must strive toward a higher morality than that which we have developed thus far. Darwin wrote, “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
Darwin was a naturalist. He observed the “facts on the ground.” He heard the cries of a slave being beaten. He knew that slavery persisted in the United States and many parts of the world. The conclusion was plain: Religion is not sufficient to make individuals or governments behave in moral or ethical ways.
Darwin knew that, despite pretensions, Christianity—and the other human religions— more often underwrite and condone the prejudices of societies than point in the direction of a higher morality, a more good and just society. You don’t have to be Darwin in the mid-Nineteenth Century to see that!
I’m not an extremist concerning the effects of religion because, frankly, I think people will be people, no matter what the religious or political overlay . . . on an individual level, that is. The evidence is all around us: The vast majority of human beings are basically “good,” meaning most of us don’t hurt others all that often. Most of us don’t steal things . . . all that often. Most of us behave in ways that add up to going along to get along.
Most of us aren’t Jesus. Or Gandhi. Or Martin Luther King, but we’re not Stalin or John Wayne Gacy either. Most people—Christian, Muslim, or atheist—go along to get along.
That’s on an individual level. Religions get dangerous in the aggregate—when those systems begin to say who can enslave whom; who can subjugate whom; who can kill whom for what set of reasons.
Consider again what Darwin said about slavery and the treatment of slaves:
And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty… .
It is the aggregate that creates the evil, by “palliating”—by underwriting and condoning—the evil deeds.
But in the face of this fact Darwin saw, as perhaps no other human being had ever yet seen, that adaptations are adaptations, brain cells are brain cells. In humans. In primates. In animals. “We are all netted together,” Darwin wrote.
We are still on the frontier of this way of thinking. William Shakespeare long ago said, “A touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” It took Charles Darwin to tell us just how true this is. And we still don’t comprehend it: We are all netted together.
Where, then, is the uniqueness of human beings?
Consciousness. Not the sort of consciousness that tells us whether the sun is shining; not the sort of consciousness that tells us whether it is good or bad to sleep with particular people. The sort of consciousness that allows us to think about the thoughts of others—other people; other animals. This is the most complex form or consciousness. It is moral conscience.
Before Darwin the answer to the question, “why does consciousness exist?” was, “Poof! It’s magic! Set off by the divine spark . . .” After Darwin, the answer is not so neat and tidy. But the answer we have points the way toward a higher morality. Darwin put it this way: “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
This is the profundity of the theory of natural selection: far from making us mere animals, as the religious often claim, natural selection calls us to see beyond the limitations of our time and place. Natural selection posits a mode of being beyond the mere going along to get along. Natural selections tells us to control our basic impulses. Not because those are animal impulses—all our impulses are animal impulses—but because the sort of animal we are can see beyond our selves.
For the last couple of days my Facebook feed has been full of tributes to the late, great Pete Seeger—as well it should be. A genuinely remarkable man, Seeger spent his long life seeking justice, fighting oppression, telling the truth as he understood it, even in situations where the truth was most unwelcome. (If you haven’t seen the transcript of when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, do yourself a favor and read it.) He stood in front of the crowds to protest war, and he sailed up and down the Hudson River fighting pollution. But more than that, he had a gift for bringing people together, for turning a crowd into a community through the power of song.
He was extraordinary, but here’s what strikes me. Anybody who really wanted to could do what he did. Sure, he was a good musician, but there are lots of people with better voices—walk into any college conservatory in the country and you’ll find a singer with a rounder tone, a more operatic sound. Sure, he was good on the guitar and the banjo, but there are people in my personal acquaintance who are better. He wrote some wonderful songs, but they’re hardly models of musical sophistication. His talent was considerable, but not really anything amazing—maybe not even all that special.
What was so incredible about Pete Seeger was not any singular gift or talent. What we celebrate, what we remember, was not a man who could do things no other person could, but rather a man who spent his whole very long life walking with a whole heart toward what he believed in. Whether it was his 70-year relationship with his beloved wife Toshi or an afternoon’s connection with a crowd at a concert or a protest, Pete was fully present, fully engaged, ready to be connected. He was a man who knew the power of the people, and who used the considerable force of his personality not to draw attention to himself, but rather to engage people with each other, and with their ability to create positive change. He gave himself, and he kept giving—not as a martyr, but as someone who found great joy in the giving.
He had, in short, the power of the music. Not the power of musicianship; not the prodigy talents of a Mozart or a Yo-Yo Ma. No, Pete Seeger had the power of living in his music, living through his music. He knew the power of music to tell truths in ways that people could hear them. He knew the power of music to draw folks together through the interweaving of voices. He understood the power of music to raise energy, to call forth energy, to move people forward. He sang, and invited people to sing with him, because he understood the deep connection between music and love, and between love and justice.
And he just kept on doing it, decade after decade. We’ve lost a unique spirit this week, a man who put his whole heart into everything he did, a man who had a whole heart, unbroken by cynicism or despair. But I think what he would want us to know is that any of us could do what he did. Any of us could stand up to injustice, work for peace, speak our truth, sing out and keep singing. Any of us could be an instrument of freedom, of joy, of connection and the power of the gathered will of the people. Any of us could. Pete Seeger did.
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