A Prayer for those Whose Hearts are on Fire
A prayer after the not guilty verdict of George Zimmerman
Spirit of love and justice,
Tonight I am angry.
May my anger burn cleanly,
Joining the light of so many hearts on fire.
May we know anger as a source of strength,
Anger that seeks to purify,
Anger that has as its fuel the power of truth,
Anger grounded in love,
May I live my life so that Trayvon Martin did not die in vain.
May my anger give me strength to take action,
To stand my own ground, the ground of compassion,
The ground of justice which dwells beyond courts of law and its technicalities,
The ground of worth and dignity of every human being.
May we live our lives so that Trayvon Martin did not die in vain,
So that African American youth are not seen as threatening merely because they exist.
May we take steps to bring such a world into vision.
Concrete steps, particular steps, in our own communities.
Anger used well is energy for life.
Anger turned inward saps the strength,
Anger turned to rage severs real connection.
May I use this holy anger well,
Use my privilege well, use my voice and my strength and my power.
May we draw on the strength of those who have turned anger to love through the generations,
those who have made a way out of no way,
those who have burned but not been consumed by this holy fire.
May we remember the strength of our connections to the generations,
The ancestors and those yet to be born,
The strength of our connection to the fighters and the lovers,
May I live my life so that Trayvon Martin did not die in vain.
May we live our lives so that Trayvon Martin did not die in vain.
May he live forever in our deeds, in our commitment to a justice
Which can never be found in any court of law.
O Parenting: You Humble Me
photo by Jenna Starr
Our Little Bean is starting to stand, ever-so-momentarily, on her own. Meanwhile, our lives careen on with her a central part of them: family trips and visits with friends, work and projects, housekeeping and grocery shopping. Occasionally I am blessed with the help of a babysitter or nanny. And as I introduce that person to our home and our quirks, I can’t help but remember to myself my own thoughts and, yes, judgments about people I have babysat or nannied for in years past. Little things make so much more sense to me now. Realizing the judgments I had made while having not-a-clue what parenting really entailed is humbling. There’s no way to really explain it all to a new person entering into our lives. And all of this is humbling: our messy home, needing someone who is initially a complete stranger to come and help, the intimacy of showing someone all the details of how to care for our child, and remembering my own judgments, now years past.
I remember, for example, being quite struck that one mother I nannied for regularly would go to the grocery store and buy bags and bags of groceries and then bring them home and leave them, still fully packed, sitting on the kitchen floor. I mean: the refrigerator was right there. Those eggs were getting warm, sitting there. But now I’ve done the same multiple times: brought in a load of groceries from the car and left the bags sitting on the kitchen counter or floor while I run to the bathroom, deal with a crying kid, check in with my partner, or, I dunno, take a breath and look at the mail for a second. So many things that used to seem like immediate necessities have taken a backseat. Some days The Babysitter comes and I haven’t made the bed yet. Or had anything to eat. To say nothing of the state of the kitchen floor upon which the baby is probably crawling and picking up little fragments of things she’ll inevitably put into her mouth….
There’re all the subtle realities of parenting and letting-go, too. I know there are hundreds of things, little judgments, I made in my mind before becoming a parent and while observing other parents. “I will never let my kid hang out in a poopy diaper.” “I will never feed my kid processed food.” “I will never get angry and snap at my kid.” Blahblahblah I could come up with a hundred, a thousand more of these little judgmental thoughts I’m sure I had, that I still have. But as we approach the end of year one, I’ve learned a hundred times over that pretty much anything I’ve said “I will never…” about I will, at some point, do. Yet again my tendency towards black-and-white, all-or-nothing ways of looking at things rears its head and reminds me: try for the middle ground. Try for “average,” a mentor told me once, for “mediocre.” Accept my own humanity and imperfectness and get on with things like making dinner and doing the dishes.
I’ve just had the pleasure of delving into a delightful mystery by Louise Penny that was given to my partner and which I totally took over sometime during a recent long, multiple-times-interrupted-by-a-wide-awake-baby night. In this first in the series, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache teaches his trainee the four most important sentences to use in their detective work: “I’m sorry.” “I don’t know.” “I need help.” “I was wrong.” What a beautiful teaching. We could all use these sentences in our lives, and certainly as parents. Every day, as our Little Bean learns a dozen new things, I learn at least a few along with her. And often, it’s that I was wrong about this-or-that, or so arrogant some years (or months, or days) ago. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I pretty much always need help. And there’s so, so much about which I don’t know.
But I am learning, and I am grateful. Holly Near has a song about this that I love the first verse of especially: “I am open, and I am willing, for to be hopeless, would be so strange…” But maybe I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know? Maybe you knew this song already? Along with Norah Jones “Humble Me”? And so it goes. Thanks for reading.
But Where’s the Woo-Woo?
“Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books; / Or surely you’ll grow double,” said the early-Nineteenth Century British poet William Wordsworth: “Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife.” He continues,
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
Ah, yes. Romanticism. They headed for the woods for their woo-woo.
And Romanticism hit US shores in Transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson asked, “why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?” Experience. It was all about experience. Emerson began his great Transcendentalist manifesto, Nature, this way:
“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
Whatever else this tradition accomplished, it convinced New England Unitarians that books were fine and necessary on Sunday morning, but mystical experience, the woo-woo of worship, would happen elsewhere. On that hike through the mountains perhaps. Or on the seashore. Only accidentally within the walls of a church.
Emerson’s children hold onto this tradition, remaining mistrustful of the technologies of woo-woo: rhythmic music; glossolalia; shouting and such. Yet, if we take up those leaves called the Norton Anthology of American Literature, we find that there have been a few literary and intellectual movements since Transcendentalism. Perhaps it’s time to move on and, as sage old Emerson said, “demand our own works and laws and worship.”
Almost Heaven
I just got back from a week at a dance and music camp in the California redwoods. The music was outstanding, the dancing ecstatic, the people open-hearted and the trees majestic. It was, in short, almost heaven. (My version of heaven does not include meatloaf prepared by the staff of a YMCA camp, but you can’t have everything.) Really, I think it’s as close to heaven as I’m likely to get.
My theology, and that of most Unitarian Universalists, doesn’t really run to a notion of a heaven that you arrive in after you die. The Universalist side of our heritage declares that a loving God would not consign anyone to eternal torment in hell. But when it comes to the question of what does happen to us after we die, most UUs tend to come down on the side of figuring that there’s no way to know until we get there, so there isn’t much point in worrying about it now.
Sure, every now and again I wonder if some consciousness might continue as my body fades to dirt, and what that might be like. But mostly I wonder why more people don’t dwell in heaven now. I wonder why so many people have to scrabble for the barest existence, when it would take so little to move them toward that heaven we call “enough.” But more than that, I wonder why so many people who dwell in the land of Enough seem so far from heaven.
Of course, maybe I’m missing it. Maybe it’s possible to find heaven in a shopping mall or in front of a TV screen, and it’s just never happened to me. But it looks to me like an awful lot of people spend an awful lot of time working jobs they don’t like to buy things they don’t care about, escaping at the end of the day into the world of people who don’t exist. And I know that heaven isn’t a place you can dwell all the time. For every moment of wordless delight when your baby looks in your eyes and grins there are an awful lot of diapers to be changed. But still, I have to wonder, how much effort have you put into the pursuit of heaven?
Not the pursuit of heaven that means following all the rules now so that you go Up when you die, but the pursuit of heaven right here and now—those moments of expansive joy, deep connection, a bubbling over of delight. The heaven that comes when you laugh with your best friends late at night, or let the music roll through you as you sing in a choir or when you plunge into a lake on a hot summer day. The heaven of burying your face between the neck and shoulder of your sleepy child, or in the deep fur of that same spot on your dog. The heaven of creating a bowl or a sentence or meal that will nourish someone you love.
I don’t pretend to know what heaven looks like, not in this life or the next. In either case, I suspect it won’t look the same for you as for me. But whatever your heaven looks like, feels like, tastes like, I hope that you go out of your way to find it – not by walking the straight and narrow path, but by dancing down the wide road of joy.
Weeding Out Racism
I’m a gardener in the upper Midwest, so in July I spend a lot of time pulling up weeds. Just yesterday, along with a lot of other stuff, I probably pulled up a couple of hundred tiny maple trees, growing from the ‘helicopter blades’ that spin to the ground from my neighbor’s maple each spring.
The first year that I saw these sprouting in my yard, I panicked. I think I envisioned our yard suddenly and abruptly turning into a dense maple forest. I paid my kid a nickel each to pull them up; in the course of the summer I shelled out $100!!! Duly sorted in tiny groups of 20 as she collected her bounty whenever she needed spending money.
Now I know that, unless I ignore them for five or six years, these little maples are the least of my worries. Sure, six or seven of them might implant themselves right next to the tomato plant, but a swift yank and they’re gone forever! Nope, the weeds that drive me crazy are much less dramatic, much more insidious, will never turn into trees but will simply plague me in their short green ubiquity. “We’re here, we’re green, get over it!” they seem to taunt me.
The tough weeds, the ones that I will spend my life pulling and re-pulling, never successfully, are the ones that spread underground, in their root system. Crabgrass. Bishop’s weed. Jerusalem Artichokes. (Bear in mind that a weed is just a plant in a place where you don’t want it! In some parts of the world, orchids are weeds!)
This year a friend took a turn at the horseradish plant I’ve hacked at every spring. “I think I got it all!” she declared enthusiastically. I just smiled and thanked her, confident because of past experience that she had not. Sure enough, though it’s gone from the area she dug—a huge four foot excavation—it’s now reappeared five feet away, in the middle of the strawberry patch. Root systems are invisible on the surface, and thus incredibly hard to eliminate.
Interestingly, pulling weeds yesterday led me to think about racism, and what’s going on in the US right now. Hundreds of hours of media attention have been given to the racist utterings of Paula Deen. Indeed, in our media, this story is the central narrative describing racism. From my view, Deen is a maple tree. Her racist practices, weedy as they may be, are isolated, have their own root system, can easily be plucked out. One second; yank; it’s over.
The racism that is harder to see, and harder to talk about, is spreading underground, evidence of its existence popping into view here and there without seeming connection, much harder to identify and eradicate. That’s the effects of the US Supreme Court eliminating the Voting Rights Act, which as far as I can tell is garnering no mainstream media coverage at all. Already in at least seven places, changes have been made to voting that will drastically affect people of color, and all of us, far more than the epitaphs of a random chef. And yet, I don’t even know the names of the people who are enacting these new ways of doing things. I’m not seeing interviews in mainstream media with them, or with the people affected by their decisions.
The problem with oppression is that so much of how it spreads and lives is invisible. It’s not about individual bigotry or what names individual people call each other. It’s about systems, connections of one thing to another that may not, on the surface of things, appear to come from the same roots.
That’s what I was thinking about while I was pulling up the weeds yesterday, anyway.
Horseradish, flourishing in the strawberry patch
Freedom . . . for Which?
I subscribe to the notion that separating out religion from other meaning-making systems is valid only for the sake of convenience. I agree with anthropologist Jonathan Z. Smith who says,
Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy. (Imagining Religion)
Allowing for humor and rhetorical overstatement, Professor Smith’s point is that we human beings exist in a matrix of symbolic systems that we separate out only for the sake of contemplating (and one hopes clarifying) them. In our minds and in our lives, the meanings are all mushed up, a puree or whip of meaning and purpose. Sometimes we question the powers that be in our lives; often we don’t.
Since Emanuel Kant, it has been clear to many people that human beings are meaning-making creatures and that the meanings we create exist in systems of narrative and symbol. In these systems, it’s us or them: we control them, or they control us. Whenever we aren’t paying attention, it is the latter.
Religions are one way human beings create meaning. A religion is a subset of narrative and symbol within a system. A system separated only for convenience and clarity.
Given this mushy matrix, removing what is conventionally called “religious” (or “spiritual”) from a personal or collective meaning-making system does not leave a hole or gap, but is rather an opening that other symbolic systems will fill.
If the god concept does not guarantee or underwrite meaning and purpose for a human being, something else will . . . perhaps even the insistence that life has meaning and purpose without the god concept! (Hence the “angry atheist” syndrome.)
Think for a moment how many people you know who actually take meaning and purpose from the god concept. My suspicion is that the concept actually functions as shorthand for something else in most human lives.
Theologian Gordon D. Kaufman gives his view, writing:
The central question for theology is not . . . primarily a speculative question, a problem of knowledge at all. Most fundamentally it is a practical question: How are we to live? To what should we devote ourselves? To what cause give ourselves? Put in religious terms: How can we truly serve God? What is proper worship? (Face of Mystery: Constructive Theology)
Put succinctly: “What’s your cause?”
Your cause might be survival. Approval. Family. World peace.
Often the god concept becomes the straw man who underwrites preexisting wishes and prejudices. The symbolic systems we live in are difficult to see and even more difficult to separate into understandable strands. Most difficult of all is putting all the strands back into a conceivable whole. Yet, finally, there is no religion, no politics, no self. Only the forest of symbols we wander in.
As Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”
Clarity of Hindsight
Finding True Identity
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Filled with the holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert. (Luke 4:1) He’s really not much different from us, the man who walked deep into that desert. The one we call Jesus of Nazareth. He, too, was filled with questions. Who are we? Why are we here? Does our life really matter? He, too, knew uncertainty, anxiety, fear. He, too, looked out and saw a world that was changing far too fast, a world where the old rules seemed to give way to something yet to be defined.
Possibilities and Limits
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We are on a dismounted patrol to the top of some ancient ruins. A short walk, but the ground is loose and steep. Rocks and dirt slide down as we walk up. The only way to make it up a steep hill while laden with gear is to look ahead but watch where you put your feet.
