A Confession
You’re wanting to know about the crucified squirrel. But first, here’s what happened to my Christmas lights.
I lived in Iowa City, in a second-floor walk-up over Iowa Ave. Without any warning, November was here. Late fall in the Midwest is like if the planet Venus ends up shoved to the back of the fridge with the celery and other things nobody wants until it gets soft and bruised, and then what do you do? You don’t want it. You can’t throw it away. The interminable winter had not yet arrived, but already people walked the streets with a look of surrender. The sun would sort of give up and sink around noon. Then, for hours, it would rain flecks of ice. I decided to take things into my own hands.
At a store in the mall, Christmas lights were on sale. I filled a basket. Brought home packing tape. Crawled through my window, out onto the roof of the porch. Did up the front of the house, at least the second and third floor. It took over an hour. By the end, everything was a-twinkle, you might say, if you happened to talk like a magical elf. Zig-zags. Curlicues. A milky radiance out into the gloom. At long last, the place seemed like somewhere a person could live.
What I had done was not only for me. It’s not like I should have received a peace prize. But when it came down to being a neighbor, there was the sense of having done what I could.
Then, one day, I come home. The Christmas lights are inside, ripped from the socket, tangled up on the floor. On the tangle, a note. Magic marker. Capital letters. Signed by a person I never had met. The husband of the woman I thought was my landlord. He seemed overcome by rhetorical questions. Hadn’t I realized the risk I had been taking? To go out on the roof? What about the liability? If Christmas lights were so important, why hadn’t I asked?
Look, I get all of this now. I pay on a mortgage. I’ve seen my children bleed. But, at the time, I was what? Twenty-four? All I knew was someone came into my home, and destroyed all I had in my life that would shine.
I checked out the roof. Then, came back, and turned over that same piece of paper. Scribbled out a rebuttal. While I’ve never been up on the law of the land, I was pretty sure a landlord should not just barge in. There should have been a phone call. Arrangements. He should have asked my permission. Who did he think he was, was the gist of my letter. I stuffed it in an envelope, and trudged over to the house, left it in their mailbox.
The next afternoon, I came home to a new note, slid under my door. Same handwriting. But it came out all different. He said he could see my point. He hoped I’d forgive him. I had to, he said, of all things, understand. He had worried. He’d let the worry turn into anger. He wanted me to know that his wife made excellent pumpkin pie. Wouldn’t I come over to enjoy some with them? Pie! The nerve. It was beyond comprehension.
So, the crucified squirrel. In October, walking home, I noticed a squirrel on the side of the road. Killed, almost flattened. Then, in the next block, another. I would not own a car until many years later, so, in those days, doing anything at all always sent me out walking. Which was how I saw these little casualties, splayed out horrifically, in plain view. Carnage, all over town. But try to mention it, and people would shrug, unimpressed, as if I were reciting the order of months: October, November, dead squirrels on the road. I wanted to be heard. To be known. Admired as a prophet. But people seemed to think I was just someone talking.
That’s when I decided on the crucifixion. A squirrel on a cross would make an impression. I’d bring it downtown, or to some public place. As a statement. An indictment of modern society. Or something like that. I wish I could tell you this was somebody else.
Collecting a squirrel took a shopping bag and a shovel. Back in my apartment, the smell of rot sent my project quickly out to the roof. With rubber kitchen gloves, I completed the task. Nailing two sticks together, and then securing the tiny paws to the sticks. I’d intended it all as a message for others. I saw myself squarely on the side of the squirrel, and, for that matter, of all the small creatures who live near the road. Putting forth the perspective of God. But try to crucify something and keep yourself clean. You can’t. Drive a nail through flesh, and you get implicated. I left the squirrel there on the roof, where the rain kept on falling.
Remember the tangle of lights? And the note along with it? Seeing them, what came first was not anger. What came first was shame. The squirrel. The landlord had seen it! He must have. How to ever explain? But, scrambling out through the window and onto the roof, there was nothing. No squirrel. No cross. Only roof. Only rain. It meant the freedom to write the angry letter I wanted.
All that fall, it seemed like God had been folded, and stored until spring in a box up in somebody’s attic. To pray was to stand in another house, in the cellar, asking no one in particular where that box could have gone.
But what happened in that mess was a matter of grace. Not the squirrel being gone when the landlord arrived. A neighbor might have removed it. Or maybe some weather blew it down to the ground. The squirrel’s absence was only dumb luck.
Grace is more than dumb luck. It’s careless anger getting met by an invitation to sit down with pie. Despite what I’d done, and the words I had said, without even seeking it, I was forgiven. But a gift takes receiving. And this one I hadn’t yet learned to accept. It was asking too much. And so winter set in. The universe kept up its ponderous churn. And from wherever God had been hiding came a soft, tender sigh. The sound of one who’s been waiting.
Healing of Memories
At this time of year, we have many opportunities to join together with family and friends, to celebrate, to tell stories, to share memories. Because these holidays are most often colored in happy hues and we look forward to good food and fun-filled events with family and friends, it is easy to focus on happy memories, memories that we treasure and tell again year after year.
But memories are not always happy. Bad things happen. Sometimes these memories are of personal tragedies, while other times they are related to larger national or cultural struggles. What do we do about those memories?
I recently read Redeeming the Past: My Journey from Freedom Fighter to Healer, a new memoir by Fr. Michael Lapsley, an Anglican priest from New Zealand who was sent by his religious order to South Africa in the early 1970s. The book describes his early years in apartheid South Africa and his growing identification as a white man with the struggle against apartheid and the ANC. These activities soon got him evicted from the country, first to Lesotho and finally to Zimbabwe. His continued activism resulted in a letter bombing in 1990 that cost him his hands and one eye. It was these injuries that led to him considering how memories of the apartheid oppression continued to impact him and many in South Africa, even after Mandela had been released, the ANC was unbanned, apartheid was dismantled, and a new non-racial constitutional democracy established.
His own testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began his process of considering how one can heal such memories. The TRC had provided a forum where victims could be heard and believed… could be listened to. Stories spilled out… many of terrible abuse at the hands of the apartheid state, but others by the hands of the liberation movement. “Every story was given equal dignity, and both were seen as wrongs” (p.142). Building on his personal story and his work with the Trauma Centre in Cape Town, he began to see that political freedom was important but not enough. “As a people, we were, and in many ways still are, imprisoned by the memories of the past” (p. 117). Fr. Michael began to see that the TRC was just a beginning. What was needed was a parallel process that would allow all those affected by the long history of oppression in South Africa to work through those memories with others and to in fact heal them. He sought a way to “break the chain of history” that stretched back to the earliest history of the region. He realised that oppressed people who see themselves as victims frequently become victimizers of others, justifying their actions because of past wrongs. This vicious cycle had to stop, but how?
From these experiences has grown his life ministry –the Institute for the Healing of Memories .The Institute facilitates 3-day workshops during which participants tell their stories and listen to the stories of others. The hurts visited one on another are acknowledged and understood. Participants are often able to come to a place where memories as well as relationships can be healed, allowing the possibility of the healing of society at large. While located in South Africa, Fr. Michael has taken the workshop to many other parts of the world where memories also need to be healed after conflict and oppression.
So my question in reading Fr. Michael’s memoir is, how might healing of memories be applied in our individual lives? All too often a victim’s stories seem to elicit the response from the “listener” of a similar experience (often with the implication that the listener’s experience was more difficult). Such “pity parties” often devolve into “my oppression is worse than your oppression.”
What might happen if I were to really listen to what the other person has to share, really listen. What might I learn? How might my attentive listening affect the speaker? What might the outcome be if we all were able to share our stories, our memories, in an accepting environment. What would happen if we each actually tried to hear each other?
Morality: It’s About Hopping Out of That Tree
We all make a decision every day, consciously or unconsciously: Am I going to cooperate today? Perhaps the question is cooperation with a partner. Or the kids. Or a neighbor. Or the people at school or work. Are we going to “go along to get along,” as the old saying goes? How much of ourselves are we going to give away? Because it feels like that sometimes, doesn’t it? That cooperation is giving parts of yourself away?
Dr. Joshua D. Greene is a cognitive neuroscientist and philosopher and director of Harvard’s Moral Cognition Laboratory. Greene has been doing some fascinating work that he describes on the website The Edge.com and he has just published a book, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.
I think that Greene succinctly sums up a central aspect of what morality means. Greene says, “Morality is fundamentally about the problem of cooperation.”
I think Professor Greene is onto something here. This idea clarifies a lot of things that get muddied up when we start reading books on morality and ethics: “Morality is fundamentally about the problem of cooperation.” The thesis of his new book is that there are two types of human interactions that we do: “me versus us” and “us versus them.”
My examples about getting up in the morning and deciding to cooperate with others (or not) focuses on the individual cooperating with a group. But groups cooperate or not as well, and in those cases, too, I think the formula holds: morality is about cooperation.
We saw a failure to cooperate recently in the Washington budget brouhaha. We see it in Egypt. We see it in Syria. We see it in spying on foreign leaders. We see it in drone strikes. Figuring out what’s moral and what’s not moral is not difficult: “Morality is fundamentally about the problem of cooperation.”
Except . . . Professor Greene does insert that little word “problem.” Greene puts it this way:
Each moral tribe has its own sense of what’s right or wrong—a sense of how people ought to get along with each other and treat each other—but the common senses of the different tribes are different. That’s the fundamental moral problem. http://wisdomresearch.org/Arete/Greene.aspx
It’s hard to cooperate with a group that sees things differently. For example, I don’t like a group that would cut funding for food stamps. I don’t like a group that would spy on foreign allies. I don’t like a group that sees “god” differently from the way I do. The list of groups I don’t like goes on and on! (And it may well be that THEY don’t like me either! Maybe they even want to hurt me!) And the perimeters of the groups expand and contract and shift constantly. I don’t think I want to cooperate at all!
Here’s a novel idea: let’s kill everybody we don’t agree with! Well . . . that’s a problem, isn’t it? That’s not such a novel idea, unfortunately.
Greene likens our moral thinking to a camera with two modes: a point-and-shoot, auto-focus mode and a manual mode, in which all the settings have to be consciously manipulated (you know, focus, f-stops).
“Bomb everybody different from us” is the auto-focus, point-and-shoot mode. It’s automatic. It’s gut. And, it’s immoral. It’s a failure to cooperate. The more remote the other group is from us, the more likely we are to react in the point-and-shoot mode.
A key finding in the research done at the Moral Cognition Laboratory is that we have no specific area of the brain that controls moral decision making. When people are asked moral questions, at least three areas of the brain light up. And they are the same three areas that light up when we are asked questions about buying things. Economic decisions.
Several systems work together, evaluating the probability of success and the diminishing returns we are likely to reap. So it appears that our moral reasoning has something to do with our acquisition of food back in our hunter and gather days.
Imagine you are hiding in a tree. Naked. No weapons. And there’s a dead rabbit right over there and you’re hungry—do you hop down out of the protective environment and take a chance?
One of the basic calculations concerning food for a hunter gatherer is, How dangerous is this to me? What’s the profit and what’s the loss?
(We have to be very careful when we get into explanations based on evolution. Neuroscientists can clearly see brain functions in these experiments, but the “why” is much more difficult to discover.)
We all know that watching someone die in our arms feels different than hearing about a death on the telephone. Or reading about it in the newspaper. Or seeing it on television.
Distant things—and distant groups—are much more difficult to care about. We always knew this; now we know it’s in our wiring. How to get around this flaw in a shrinking world is the challenge humanity will or will not solve. Religions and philosophies have been working on it for a while now . . . like, oh, seven thousand years, at least.
Still, it’s all about hopping down out of that tree and saying, “Hello.”
Raking Leaves
People regularly say to me that they wouldn’t want to live in California, because they would miss the seasons. As a California native who has lived in a variety of other places, I understand this. Who would want to miss the seasons of Oh My God it is Really Snowing in April, or It’s So Hot and Humid I Literally Feel as if I Am Melting? But the fact that we give those lovely seasons a miss doesn’t mean that we are without seasons here by the San Francisco Bay. At the moment, for instance, it is the season of Raking Leaves.
True, the weather is dry and sunny, and we’re expecting a high of 70 degrees, but the leaves are turning yellow and drifting into heaps along the driveway. Paradise makes fewer demands on a person than harsher climes, but there are still things that need to be done. Raking leaves is one of them.
There are worse jobs. Dry leaves aren’t heavy, and the scritch, scritch sound of the rake forms its own kind of meditative chant. There are many good ways to rake leaves: setting them as mulch around your garden or piling them in the green waste bin or creating great mountains for kids or dogs to play in. You can use a wide broom if you’re of a very tidy persuasion. Just please, please, never a leaf blower. You can’t think over the sound of a leaf blower. Heck, your neighbors can’t think over the sound of your leaf blower.
And thinking is what raking leaves is for. Raking Leaves is the season to remember that even in paradise, things die, that we and everyone we love will all drift to the ground at last. That each of our lives is merely one little leaf, different but nearly indistinguishable from every other little leaf. That we belong to a tree that will remain standing long after we are gone, whose branches are visible even in the height of summer, if we would care to look, but are so much clearer in this time of stripping down. Raking leaves, one might even consider that the only way to truly connect with the deep roots of that great tree would be to fall, and become soil, and so become nourishment for the larger whole.
Raking leaves, smelling the faint, sharp odor of decay that has already begun, one might long for the rain to finally come and nourish the thirsty ground, turning the hills green once again. Or one might wish for the bright days to never end, to live always in this comfort and beauty. Either way, if you spend long enough raking leaves you will be forced to admit that you have no control, that the rain will come or not come precisely on its own schedule, without your longings having the slightest effect. That the world will give you leaves or grass or flowers or dry earth exactly as it will, and that all you can do is to show up, rake or trowel or hose in hand, and do your best to be grateful for what you are given, and to honor the giver.
The Lights of Diwali, and Also the Dark
Everyone has to make a living somehow. Some weekends, my job has me blessing unions in the name of the Holy. All kinds of people end up finding each other. Once, it was somebody raised in the Black church tradition marrying someone whose family had been Hindu since before time began. So out I went to the Hindu Community Center, for an evening cram session with one of the priests.
To get there, you take the last exit west of Knoxville before the highway divides (south to Chattanooga or west on to Nashville). You can’t miss the exit, and not only because it’s across from Cupid’s Outlet, a log-cabin where they sell discount marital aids. You can’t miss the exit because, at night, it is lit to the horizon with the radiance the sun will one day give off when it finally dies. Like when the flashbulb on a camera explodes in that blinding split-second, only this one stays on. The source of it all is a two-story white building. On the front, it says, “Fireworks” in ten-foot-tall letters, with dazzling red stars shooting out over top. It sparkles like a helicopter arrived, pouring fat sacks of glitter. Klieg lights, bright as any maximum security prison, wash out the landscape. Outsized American flags ring the lot, the largest—a piece of cloth about the size of Knox County—on a pole at the center. A blinking sign in large letters reads, “Open to the Public!” Lest someone might think this was meant to be private. The road behind it winds its way past a place that sells guns, a few sagging barns, then the fenced desperation they call a “golfing community,” before you reach the yellow building where the Hindus all meet.
The priest I was seeking had not yet arrived, but another priest beckoned me into a chair. His English was paltry. My Hindi was zilch. But all kinds of people end up finding each other. So, with smiles and shrugs, we attained a sweet, flickering connection as he tried to tell me about one time he went to Atlanta. For a time, an ocean of difference between us dissolved.
Of the world’s great traditions, Hinduism seems most to pull off the American dream of “E pluribus unum.” Out of many, comes one. This and that, all together. The priest and I, unified. Like how Shakti, the divine feminine power, contains nurture alongside destruction, light along with the dark. The Gospel of John says, “The light shines in the dark, and the darkness has not put it out.” Hindus would not disagree, not exactly. The holiday of Diwali, with its clay jars and fireworks, comes around to say light will win in the end. But no matter how bright the light, the priest might have told me (had I had any Hindi), darkness won’t be extinguished. In this old world, at all times, dark abides. Wherever you can be found–ancient India, maybe, or else only off an American highway where untold travelers, rapt with fear and desire, purchase sex toys and guns and the dream of new life in a golfing community—wherever it is, the dark will be welling up into the light, and the brightest of lighting will not put it out. Instead, light and dark in a life will at long last forge union. Everyone, in the end, makes a living somehow. And it’s my job to bless it in the name of the Holy.
The Language of Faith
Source: Google Images Creative Commons
Last Sunday, while out to lunch with my husband and two young kids, we passed the time waiting for our food by playing Mad Libs. As you might remember, Mad Libs is a word game where one player asks another player to provide a particular kind of word – noun, verb, adjective, etc. – to fill in the blanks of a story. After the words are provided, randomly and without context, the other player reads the funny and often nonsensical story aloud.
If you have ever played Mad Libs, you know just how important grammar and semantics are to the art of storytelling. You also realize just how important words and context are to communication and understanding.
Words are, obviously, incredibly powerful tools. We use words to communicate, to connect, to explain, to inform, and to educate. But words have significant limitations, as well. Unfortunately, all too often words are used as a weapon instead of a tool. We use words to restrict instead of expand, to assume instead of discover.
Ironically, we often try to use language to define those things that are undefinable. We try to explain the inexplicable with rational, but overly simplistic, definitions. We fit people into our prepackaged labels –believer, nonbeliever, Christian, Jew, Muslim, atheist, humanist, idealist, pacifist, liberal, or conservative – and we try to make sense of this crazy, nonsensical, Mad Libs-like world with assumptions and categories.
But when it comes to the Big Questions, to matters of the Heart and the Spirit, there are no definitions. There are no labels. There are no prepackaged boxes.
Quite simply, language fails us when it comes to matters of the Spirit. God (I use the word “God” knowing that the word itself has its own limitations) comes in many names and is experienced in many ways. God and all things Spiritual, by their very nature, are unknowable and personal; they are felt with the heart and cannot always be adequately explained with words.
But, being the intelligent humans that we are, we try to explain that which is deeply felt with words, explanations, and sound bites. And, as a result, any inherent commonality to our human spirit gets lost, the beautiful complexity of differences gets diluted. The words – and labels – that we use become more important than the ideas.
So much division and dissention is created and exacerbated by the labels and linguistic limitations that we put on matters of faith and spiritual belief – concepts that are, quite frankly, too big to fit into any label or verbal representation.
Perhaps, we need to focus less on the words of faith and more on the language of faith. Perhaps we need to stop getting lost in the semantics of God and, instead, learn the languages of God – ones that are spoken and heard in a number of ways.
Music has always been my language of God. I love to sing (off-key) and can clumsily tap away a few songs on the piano, but I am far from what you would call “musical.” Yet music has always been a profoundly moving spiritual experience for me. Whether I’m swaying to a church choir singing “Amazing Grace,” listening to Bon Iver on my iPod, singing along to Bob Dylan in the car, or dancing like crazy with my kids in the kitchen, few things have the power to move me like music. Music creates an internal communication with the Spirit that washes my soul clean, as if I have stepped into a warm shower with the lyrics and melody rinsing away the grit and grime of everyday life.
Spiritual language can be found in any number of ways. My grandpa spoke the language of God through his generous hospitality. It was nearly impossible not to feel like THE most important person in the world when he greeted you. Others feel the language of God through the earth and nature. Gardening, for my paternal grandma, was so much more than a household chore, it was a spiritual practice unto itself. With her fingernails soiled and her hands calloused, as she tended and cultivated, she spoke a spiritual language that only her soul understood, that only her Spirit could appreciate.
Some people speak God’s language through art or poetry, photography or painting, teaching children or caring for animals, caring for the sick or sharing a meal with friends. Shauna Neiquist wrote in Bread and Wine, “When the table is full, heavy with platters, wine glasses scattered, napkins twisted and crumpled, folks askew, dessert plates scattered with crumbs and icing, candles burning low – it’s in those moments that I feel a deep sense of God’s presence and happiness. I feel honored to create a place around my table, a place for laughing and crying, for being seen and heard, for telling stories and creating memories.”
Let’s face it, we live in a chaotic world, where the unimaginable meets the incomprehensive, and devastating realities mix with everyday miracles. We want to make sense of it all. Of course, we do. In our well-intentioned, but misguided, attempts to explain, understand, and communicate, we look to definitions and labels. We rely on assumptions and suppositions, and we look to linguistic placeholders to meet the expansive scope of faith, God, and the Spirit.
We try to define the indefinable.
But maybe if we spend a little less time focusing on definitions of God and labels of faith, and instead focused on feeling the complex languages of God, maybe then we could gain a better understanding of each other and ourselves.
Pie with Spirits
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This is the very pumpkin pie
my grandmother made—almost. Read more →
CLF Nominating Committee Seeks Leaders
The Church of the Larger Fellowship Nominating Committee seeks CLF members to run for positions on the Board of Directors beginning June 2014. Read more →
Tie Tack
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There are many relics in our home—objects to which important memories are attached. You probably have some, too.Each recalls some journey, event, or person that is a part of your life’s experience.
They’re precious on that account—religious objects that summon up powerful recollections. One of my favorites is my tie tack. It’s an opal, full of fiery iridescence.
From Your Minister
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Lately, as my Labrador retriever has been reaching the final days of a long, happy life, I have felt moved to sit with her and share, sometimes aloud and sometimes in my mind, memories of our 14 years together. Read more →
