Plenty and Then Some
This blog post, and the excerpts of a sermon on which this blog post is based, are both inspired by a song, “Help Somebody,” by Susan Werner.
“I got plenty and then some….what do I do?” I can not get this song out of my head, once it’s in there…and because of this refrain, I don’t mind that at all. I love the question and the reframe that this song poses when it pops up yet again in my mind, even—especially—in the midst of running around feeling overly busy, this song reminds me: “I got plenty and then some / what do I do?”
The messages, mantras, and recurring thoughts that we get stuck in our head are, I believe, far more impactful than we realize. They matter. Remember last week when the media was obsessing about Ebola, three cases of Ebola in the United States? I’m as impressionable as anyone and a little too much Ebola coverage in my face and I was obsessing about washing my hands even more than I already do and not sneezing on anybody. Which is, you know, courteous, but as far as Ebola in our town goes, it’s not a rational response. It would be far more productive and useful to send a check to the Red Cross, which has groups actively engaged right now in education and disease prevention efforts in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia.
…I’ve actually just learned that there is now a new disease that has been identified and defined—have you heard about this? It was reported on by CNN starting last Tuesday, and it’s spreading rapidly throughout the United States. It’s defined as “an airborne disease that spreads through conversation, entering your brain through your ears. It’s called Fearbola. Fearbola is so contagious that some victims have contracted it simply by seeing images and videos about Ebola.”
In all seriousness, our spirits are often irrational. We can overreact to anything both positively and negatively, generously and fearfully. I believe that we each and all hold the potential for heaven and hell within us, that all our congregations, communities, cities, institutions and countries have the potential to create either heaven or hell for one another on any given day. You have seen heaven created in the ways that families are held in love and tender communal celebration during a wedding or upon the birth of a new baby; you have seen hell created in the lives of children and their families at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
I’ve heard Susan Werner sing her song in a way that says “I think I’m in heaven—right now, I’m in heaven; what do I do? I go out and help somebody get to heaven, too.” What if heaven is to love and be loved, to have enough of what we most need in the way of food and shelter, access to books and walking trails through woods with golden-leaf-covered pathways? Would you know if you were already in heaven, right now, in this world? If you focused all your energy, all your attention, all of your heart and mind on all that you have plenty of in your life, on being amazed that you have been this blessed, lived this long, loved and been loved this much, known this many amazing and unique people, had that many filling and wonderful meals—how would that reframe lift your spirit into a place of marveling, celebrating, of wonderment, of, quite possibly, enlightenment?
And then, once the vast majority of us appreciate the plenty that our lives have been blessed with, then what? Plenty and then…what?
We each have something to offer, but it’s so easy to forget that. As a congregant quoted by Rev. Rebecca Parker shared so eloquently, “I am a person who has something to give. I am a person who has received abundantly from life. I am a person whose presence matters in the world, and I am a person whose life has meaning because I am connected to and care about many things larger than myself.” Our perspective on whether or not we have enough impacts everything else that we experience, perceive, think, and feel.
…
Sometimes I feel like the need for perspective is what feeds our interest in the news and that in turn encourages the news to be so hyperbolic. We all know that if we want to be reminded that “it could be worse, for someone, somewhere,” we just have to turn on or look to the news! Our minds are naturally competitive, always comparing and contrasting with others. Our hearts long for perspective, hunger for the message that who and what we are is enough. Our spirits rally and resound with the teaching that what we have and experience in our lives is tremendous. What shall we do with all this beauty?
We have plenty and then…some.
We have plenty and then…what?
The Dalai Lama teaches that “the very purpose of religion is to control yourself. He guides us to ask ourselves, each day, as individuals and as a society: what are we doing about our anger? About our attachment, our hatred, our pride, our jealousy? These are the things which we must check in daily life.” This is the purpose of spiritual practice. In Unitarian Universalist terms, I would say that this is cultivating the practice of self-awareness. Or we could call it: inquiry. What is our outlook on the world on any given day? What is the refrain that is running through your mind? Writer Byron Katie teaches an incredibly simple and powerful practice of questioning our own thoughts, asking ourselves “is that true?” about each thought that we find repeating itself over-and-over in our minds. “Is that true?”–what I’m thinking about myself or another person, the thought that is driving feelings of anger or frustration, sadness or desperation, reaction or judgment. Is that thought I’m thinking actually true? And what if the opposite were true, can I really imagine and inhabit that possibility? Is it really true that there’s not enough time or not enough money or that it’s all his or her fault or that he or she would never agree to something we want to do? Is that true? If I question that thought, if I maybe even let it go, what happens then? Katie teaches that heaven is when we are thinking: “This is wonderful. I could stay here forever.” And just like that, with the opposite thought of “this is not quite perfect,” we can find ourselves in the quagmire of hell, and lose all perspective on the plenty with which we have been blessed.
…
What do you, what do we, not even realize that we have an abundance of in our lives? How might we look around and within ourselves and take one more step forward into this world with a greater sense of splendor, of plenty, overflowing in our hearts? What do we do with all this beauty?
Let us commit, and recommit, each day, to being self-aware, to questioning our own thoughts, to asking ourselves, “really? is that true?” to deliberately choosing what stories we tell and re-tell. Let us keep fresh before [us] the moments of [our] High Resolve, that in good times or in tempests, [we] may not forget that to which [our lives are] committed.” Let us find ways to calm our fearful human natures and reach out in love. Let us resolve to let our lights of hope and kindness shine brightly. Let us turn towards one another, open to new possibilities, new ideas, new ways of being together celebrating the plenty we have found in our lives. May it be so.
Who Do You Listen To?
image by Erik Dungan
Who do you let in? These days we have lots of options for who and what we listen to. We can opt to experience constant input at every moment, via the television, radio, internet, cable, social media, on our phones, in our cars, even–yes, I confess, I’ve done it more than once–glancing at things online on our phone in the bathroom.
What I notice is that there is so much input that I have to tune most of it out in order to focus on my life–my kid, my work, the tasks that I need to accomplish on any given day–and then a week or two can sometimes go by and I’ll find myself wondering “what’s going on in the world?” There is so much input and channels of communication that we are initially overwhelmed, so we screen out what we take in–and then feel actually more disconnected than connected.
Have you experienced this? I am regularly trying to take myself off of e-mail lists, but I must also be adding myself to new lists that are of interest to me, because somehow I seem to be getting plenty of e-mail, and it’s not all spam. It’s still not as personal or individual as I would like it to be. Do you scan through your e-mail inbox, as I do, looking for that occasional e-mail message that’s actually individually written to me specifically, Heather, the human being, from another human being, not an automatically generated “Dear Heather” robo-email?
I wonder if it’s why more and more people are turning to texting; at least for me, the robots have not taken over my cell phone inbox yet (please, don’t spread the word about this!) My sister sends a “how are you?” text now-and-then, and I love that (see, Jenna, I do get & read them!) Texting is doable for me while standing in the grocery store aisle or hanging out at the playground with my kiddo. A little bit of texting. But what about the larger world? Our local paper here in Hartford, Connecticut, barely seems to cover national and international news, at least not in a way that really catches my sustained interest and engages in in-depth analysis. While writing this blog post I was reminded of a site I haven’t visited in ages, but would like to go to much more often: Common Dreams.org. Here I can find a little bit more of the broad view–not only what’s been happening this week, but what it means in the context of our larger human endeavor as people on a shared planet.
I genuinely have this question a lot these days: what are the forms of input that you are finding meaningful, useful, reliable, and helpful, for you, in terms of sorting through all the white noise? With so many ways to connect, which ways are the ones that enable us, as human beings, to actually be more connected?
Recipe
Photos from Dinner: A Love Story
Amidst the din of global news and professional things-to-do, one of my great joys and daily forms of calming-my-soul-and-mind the past several weeks has been the recipe. What a wonderful meditative act it is to read someone else’s orderly list of instructions, to follow them as closely as possible while personalizing them as appropriate and inspired, and to then have a finished, nourishing product, all in well under an hour. I’ve been newly energized lately by the passion and positivity of Jenny Rosenstrach, author of multiple books & many articles, including this blog based on the book by the same name: Dinner: A Love Story.
For many years (maybe even decades?) Jenny has been making a list of what she and/or her family will cook and eat for dinner during the week ahead, and keeping that in a journal that she can refer back to and see changing and evolving as her family changed and evolved, and their tastes and interests in food changed and evolved. For me and our little family, simply the act of planning ahead at least 8 hours before, if not a few days before, has brought so much more calm to our dinner experience. Long before dinnertime arrives with a sudden end-of-day lurch, recipes have been identified and a menu chosen. Groceries have already been bought. The ingredients are in the fridge. Taking the frenetic end-of-day “hangry” feeling out of our lives and knowing that all we have to do is allow at least one adult in the family to get dinner assembled has made our evenings much more pleasant. I feel very lucky to be able to get home by six p.m. most days, to be able to plan ahead and buy groceries as needed, and enjoying dinnertime more also means that we are appreciating our kid’s always-fairly-late bedtime a little more, too.
We’ve tried a bunch of new recipes and have incorporated some old favorites into our regular rotation. I’ve only been keeping the “dinner journal” for about a month now, but already it’s fun to look back and remind myself of what I was into cooking in mid-August — “oh yeah, let’s have that again, I forgot about that!,” is now my thought. Mostly I’m just grateful for the insights into ways to make cooking and preparing the daily evening meal more of a sweet enjoyment, an unwinding-and-creative time, and less of a stress event. Just quietly chopping some vegetables, following the recipe, bringing another meal into the station, another day turning towards the nighttime moon.
Home Making
I just scheduled a hair cut. It took me a little while, but it needed to happen. We’ve been in our new home for just under two weeks, it’s summertime, I need a hair cut. I’ve been keeping my eye out for hair cutters in our new neighborhood. I looked up area hair stylists on Yelp and the White Pages. And then I decided to do it the old-fashioned way–I grabbed a little notebook, put on my shoes, wrote my napping sweetie & kiddo a note, and went for a walk. I felt kind of like my inner kid’s image of Harriet-the-Spy, standing out on the sidewalk on a Monday evening writing down the names of places. There seem to be more than a dozen hair salons within a mile of our new home. It was good to just walk around and see what’s going on, what the various places look like, and enjoy the breeze in the evening air. And after coming home and making a phone call, someone named Colleen is going to cut my hair, this Friday. “Colleen?,” I said to the appointment scheduler, wanting to make sure I got her name right. “Colleen.” Okay. Cool! And with just that scheduled, I feel a teeny bit more at home.
This is how I make home. It takes time, but filling out my personal list of services, of who’s-who in my local community, of who I call upon when I need this or that, of where to find this or that special thing–I have learned that this is how I come to feel at home in a place. It’s a process of learning how I will take care of myself, in every way, here in this new town. It’s a process of coming to know a place through all the daily conversations with shopkeepers and neighbors, librarians and grocery store clerks. I have come to recognize how meaningful it is, at least for me, to “nest” in a new home through all the connections with people specific to a place and a local community.
As I and we are in the process of home making, it is impossible to ignore the violence going on around the world. Other people’s homes are being destroyed even as we unpack in our’s. Other people’s children are being wounded and killed even as we take our’s for a bike ride and make her a special birthday cake. I am, of course, grateful for the joy we can bring to our kid’s life, and…I am heartbroken by the pain that other parents on our common planet must be going through. I don’t know what to say or do about it today, but my heart is heavy and my soul is stirring, steaming, stewing. No matter where or how we make our homes, we can not shield ourselves or our children forever from the agony of other families’ pain. Someday, our precocious 2-year-old will ask “why?” about human violence, and I will need to figure out what to say.
Got…a new and bigger question?
Young adults, myself on the right there, at a UU young adult spirituality conference (Opus) in 2005
Here’s the challenge: how to sum up a book which is about how faith communities can “bring young adults back” without carrying forward the assumption or premise on which the book begins — that that is a primary concern to our faith communities, how to “bring young people back?” That that should be what we are concerning ourselves with, how to bring young people back into “our” traditions?
I’ve really enjoyed and appreciated the insights of this book, Got Religion?, by Naomi Schaefer Riley. I’ve found myself telling people about Riley’s well-described conversations with young adults and sharing many of her rich insights, vivid accounts, and fascinating factoids (such as that Jesus never went beyond a forty-mile square area in his lifetime–how that single fact can convey so much about the differences between his time and most of our’s).
Yet I felt, at a number of points, that I wanted a larger, bigger-picture, broader conversation than one about how do we get young people to come…back. Is that what matters the most? As a parish minister in my late 30’s, of course, yes, I delight in seeing people in their twenties and thirties coming to church. But I long for something much more meaningful than just seeing younger faces in the group or crowd. I think lots of young people pass through or dip into spiritual communities throughout their twenties and thirties. What I want is for it to matter. What I want is for our spiritual lives to actually be rich and meaningful parts of our lives, not just about where we go once-in-a-while or whether or not we “join.”
Maybe it seems like a minor point, but it’s one I keep coming back to, over and over again throughout my experiences of ministry and congregational life: We all seem to get so focused on our particular setting or context or denomination and how to keep it alive, make it thrive. Too easily it seems we lose sight of the larger purpose that got us wanting to be a part of a community in the first place–to be there for one another, to be challenged and held and transformed ourselves and to be a part of that transformative experience for others. When we get mired in trying to keep the thing afloat, whether its form, we lose both our focus and our appeal.
That said, I can’t help but be a little frustrated that Riley does not include or even mention Unitarian Universalists in her study. I genuinely believe we create something unique in our congregations and gatherings–intergenerational community that is not concerned with everyone sharing the same understanding of God or needing to connect around shared God-language. I got excited about Riley’s chapter on a Charlotte-area collaborative of “forty or so” churches, but if its goal is truly to “reintroduce a generation to Christ and his bride, the church” (124), well, you’ve lost a whole lot of young people right there. That’s just too narrow of a goal for most of the thirty-somethings I know, and it sounds way too much like a Christianity 101 class.
There has to be some kind of middle path between trying to “get young people” to either join and support religious institutions the way they have been for decades or more, or throw our hands up and watch as “they” go off and form their own new kinds of communities and ways of connecting. I think part of the answer is, as always, looking at the initial questions we are asking, and at least rephrasing the question if not asking all new ones. Instead of “how do we get young people back?,” how about asking the young adults in our lives where they are finding community connection, how they/we are making new friends and figuring out ways to build community locally in our lives? Instead of “how can we get young people into leadership roles?,” how about asking young adults in our lives and communities what they/we would like to see happen in our larger city, state, country, or world, and how we can support them in doing that? Please share your questions to-be-asked in the “Comments” field. I’d love to read, ponder, and ask(!) them.
What is a “weekend,” exactly?
“Have a nice weekend,” people say to each other in passing. Yet fewer and fewer people I know have “weekends,” anymore. Just speaking for myself, yesterday (Sunday) I had an evening meeting to facilitate, nothing major, but it still marks nine Sundays in a row I’ve worked in some way. And it’s not just minister-types like us — when we were in the hospital with our kid, everyone who worked there would say “it’s my Monday” or “it’s my Friday” when in fact it was some other day of the week altogether. So I guess they were still tracking an existing weekend in their lives — a “floating” weekend.
What’s been fascinating to me about the days of the week throughout my now almost 12 years actively working or serving in Churchlandia is that days of the week still do kind of hold their business-week cultural “essence.” It has always felt particularly apart-from-the-world to be working on a sermon studiously and solitarily late on a Friday night. And, no matter how my partner tries to make Monday into a sabbath day, it still feels to me like a day for getting things done, getting “back to business.”
But in particular lately I am curious about the notion and experience of The Weekend. What does it mean for people like my partner and I, for ministers, who hope for individuals and families to be able to come to some kind of service or gathering over the weekend, that fewer and fewer people have weekends? Many people are juggling two jobs, working non-9-to-5 schedules, catching up with office work on Saturdays and Sundays, or dealing with schedules that change from week-to-week, making it impossible to get into any kind of routine with other non-work activities.
One thing I’ve noticed in church life is a generational split between people who are working most of the time and struggling to manage the rest of their lives around their work schedule, and people who are retired or close to retired. Sometimes the retirees are frustrated with the working folks for not participating more in church life. They don’t fully comprehend how much work schedules and expectations have changed in recent decades, impacting people’s abilities to commit to regular meetings or non-work commitments.
Another concern I have is for people’s ongoing stress levels. When is anyone relaxing anymore? There used to be, I gather, more of a general cultural respite, a time when people collectively took a day, at least, off. Now it’s the great exception that something is closed on Sunday — banks and post offices, and that’s about it. I so appreciate that the library is open on Sunday afternoon, and…I know that it’s a drag for the people who have to work there then.
I don’t know what replaces the phrase “have a good weekend” in our culture and country, but I think it’s probably about time something did, because it just doesn’t honor the vast majority of people who don’t have a weekend to enjoy. Maybe we all need to support each other in figuring out how to have a little more rest in each of our days. Maybe the expression could become “Have a restful day,” or something like that. Something that is genuine and true for more people. And church? Maybe we should turn church into a Friday evening multi-generational dance and music party in the sanctuary. Because Friday night still means something.
Those Who Came Before Us
Life is busy as ever, one thing hurtling on into the next, and we are juggling so many different to-do lists at once. In the midst of that whirlwind, I experienced Mother’s Day this year as an opportunity to reflect, ever-so-momentarily, on lineage and the mystery of the past. I enjoyed seeing all the mother-daughter, aunt-niece, mentor-mentee, multi-generation photos that people posted on Facebook. And so I took just a few moments to scan this photo I had recently come across in an old-school photo album. Three generations of my family walking along the Oregon Coast during the summer, five years before I was born (and I am the oldest kid in my generation in this family). Forty-four years ago. All kinds of things they didn’t yet imagine lay ahead–divorces, deaths, births, illnesses, upheaval, celebration, marriages, joys…and many more walks on the beach.
So many different combinations of people had yet to come into their lives. I love just looking at this photograph and their expressions, wondering about the personality of the great-grandmother that I never really knew, and what she had to say to her grandson, my father, as they walked on the beach that day. I love looking at my grandmother, in the blue jacket, wearing a skirt or dress that came to above her knees, her neat blue coat, her sandals with a heel (on the beach!) that she holds in her hand. They are each and all so themselves, in this picture, at least as far as I can tell. They are facing the photographer and smiling with seemingly-genuine smiles — and who was that, taking the picture, anyway? My grandmother, my father’s mom? My grandfather, my mother’s father? A stranger passing-by? Who else was there with them that day? They look relaxed, and genuinely glad to be together, that day. And that’s maybe what I cherish most about this photo, and about life in my family now, and life in general even: that we can cherish the moment that we are in. Who knows what lays ahead. There are always things that are challenging, painful, and in flux. But oh, there is so much beauty to be noticed and celebrated right now, in this moment. May we all find something to celebrate about this moment we are in, wherever we are in our walk along the tide.
Springtime Beckons
photo by Jenna Starr
It’s springtime. Spring stirs in me a feeling of anticipation along with a feeling of unsettledness. What does the future hold? Left turn, right turn, which way? I love the days of good weather and I start to get too much sun for the first time in months and months. I feel that springtime sense of hopefulness, and I get overwhelmed by all that lies ahead. Pacing, pacing, I remind myself. Savor the gorgeous days, when they are here, slow down and enjoy watching the birds voraciously discovering the trees and buds. Enjoy the longer periods of light at the beginning and end of each day. Don’t wear yourself out by trying to do it all.
My family and I are most likely moving this summer, from D.C. to Connecticut. We probably won’t have much of a garden this year, but I still feel like tossing some seeds out onto the dirt, at the very least. At this time of year it doesn’t feel right not to put one’s hands in the dirt for at least a bit. Maybe I’ll optimistically plant cucumbers and let them spread out all over the garden and take over, knowing that we’ll move before there’s any produce to be had. (Barbara Kingsolver has a wonderful essay about this in her Animal, Vegetable, Miracle book — about planting asparagus, which takes at least a year to produce any actual asparagus — in some patch of dirt outside every home she’s lived in, even temporary apartments she knew she wasn’t going to be staying in long enough to see it produce. I think about that all the time — is the planting for the purposes of its end result, or simply for the purposes of planting? Do we garden for the product, or for the act of gardening?
What does the springtime stir in you? Are you outside today? What calls you out into the beckoning world?
Decision Season
illustration by Chi-Yun Lau
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth….”
It’s that time of year. Perhaps it is related to the blossoming of spring, warm weather here in D.C., the sudden feeling of everyone being outside and looking outward for the first time in months. But it’s also what I’ve noticed in myself and with many of those around me–it’s decision season.
A neighbor’s son is deliberating about where to go for college, having been accepted into multiple good schools.
Many colleagues are in the midst of making plans for new ministries to begin this summer and preparing for moves to new towns (myself and my partner included)–so many small and significant decisions involved in all that. Others are deliberating this week about whether or not to continue seeking a new post, with a long list of congregations going into 2nd-round search this year.
For people involved in organizations of many sorts, it is already time to look ahead to fall, to “the next year,” and start planning, taking into account new directions, new goals, and what approaches may need to be left behind or discontinued.
A couple of old friends/girlfriends have surfaced in my life in random and unexpected ways this past week, causing me to wonder: what is she up to now? What is her life like?
We’re approaching graduation season and one of our most beloved babysitters is facing the big questions of “what comes next?”
….All of this just has me thinking about how our life is a constant series of decisions, a very literal Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. We are privileged and lucky if and when we feel like we have more than a few good choices. And all the decision-making can’t help but result in some wondering about “what if…?” What if I’d gone that way, or hadn’t left that relationship, what if I’d chosen to go there for school, or studied this instead of that, professionally…..
For me the reveries keep ending in gratitude for all that is, in my life, and a new determination to savor the present moment. When I step back and survey all the places I could have made some other choice, I return to my life as it is with fresh energy to step into it, to embrace it. I truly believe, as I said to our neighbor’s son, that it’s not where we go to school that ultimately matters, it’s what we do with the time we spend there. Pretty much that’s what I think about life in general. It’s what we make of it. So I come to gratitude, simple affirmation, and contentment. My body, my life, my relationships, this incredible family, our messy home, this complex and amazing vocation. This is the path I’m on, neither the one more or less “traveled by,” but genuinely mine. Embracing that is what has made all the difference.
Think…Less?!
Photo of zookeeper David Kessler by Logan Mock-Bunting
for The Washington Post
Last week, my partner and I spent five days and four nights in the hospital with our one-and-a-half-year-old kiddo. Little Bean has a congenital cyst that has now gotten infected twice since she was born. Once infected, she has to be on IV antibiotics and the cyst has to be surgically drained. Though thankfully not life-threatening or even life-altering, still, it was a stressful and tiring week. We took turns rotating at night between the (more comfortable) fold-out cot and the (less comfortable) recliner. I had to concentrate to remember what day it was when I put on the clothes I was wearing. When unexpected events like this hospitalization come our way, it was and is easy, so easy, to feel totally overwhelmed by everything else in our lives demanding our attention.
I know our general situation is not an unusual one. But someone I read about recently has me approaching it in a fresh way. I have always tended to be a fairly reflective person, wanting to fully process things, journal about it all, go to therapy in order to better understand myself and others, all of that. In the Unitarian Universalism congregations and communities I have grown up in, significant value is placed on developing self-awareness, on the “free and responsible search for truth on meaning.” I have taken that charge to heart by looking for the deeper meaning in everything that happens, constantly asking myself “what can I learn from this?” But what David Kessler’s story makes me wonder is: is it possible that sometimes self-reflection is not actually all-that-helpful? Might it be better, this time, to just focus on the tasks that need to be done?
I remember when I was in 11th grade, hurtling down the stairs in the morning and zipping off on my bike to a 7:20am “zero period” English Lit class. The mantra I would repeat to myself on those hectic mornings was simple: “don’t-think-don’t-think-don’t-think.” Sometimes there is good reason to engage in deep reflection and discernment about a decision or a transformative event in one’s life. And sometimes it’s best to just do the dishes, do the laundry, tackle the tax paperwork, and catch up on the details of life, acknowledging that we all get overwhelmed at times, and that is all that it means. In an age when “mindfulness” is frequently touted as the ideal state, I am aware that there is also still a place and time for keeping ourselves busy and trusting that there will be time for any necessary reflection later. Right now, perhaps what most needs to be done, to quote a much-loved Marge Piercy poem, is “to pass the bags along.”
