The Losing Team
Another election has come and gone. Some people, presumably, are delighted, while others are filled with gloom. OK, it was mostly gloom on my Facebook page. Maybe you worked really hard on behalf of a candidate you truly believed in, and that candidate didn’t win. Maybe the one who did win is the worst kind of corrupt imbecile, totally in debt to the moneyed interests. Maybe you feel like the country is going to hell in a hand basket, and we are all at the mercy of people who think that Ebola is washing our shores on a wave of Black people and climate change is a hoax invented by scientists who want to further their careers.
It could be that we are doomed, and if your plans for this week should happen to include an adult beverage or a childhood comfort food, well I wouldn’t blame you.
But eventually we always come round to the question of what now. Now that the election is over and we get a break from the ads. Now we know just how vehemently we might disagree with our neighbors or family members. Now that the whole cycle of hope and possibility and things not ever living up to their potential starts over again. Now what?
The same thing as always. Sorry, but I don’t have a better answer. Now we make dinner and pet the cat and read the kids a story and decide what to wear to work tomorrow. Now we look for a job that will pay the bills or an apartment that won’t break the bank or a date who won’t turn out to be a complete waste of time. Now we call our friends to comfort them or be comforted. Now we wait to hear back from the doctor or we wait to hear whether there will be an indictment from Ferguson. We visit the rest home, we take the children to soccer or to dance, we cry or look at videos of cats.
Maybe we remember other elections that swept us up in a tide of hope or despair, and we remember how after those elections we kept on doing what we do. I’m in no way saying that elections don’t matter, or that it’s not worth being deeply engaged in the political process. The government sets policy, and those policies affect really important things like who gets deported, who gets health care, whether people can manage to live on minimum wage, what efforts are made to combat climate change, what kinds of transportation we have access to, whether there is funding for research, what is supported and not supported in our schools, and on and on and on.
Politics matters. Having a voice matters. Speaking up for your hopes matters. But it doesn’t necessarily matter in the way that we would like. Paying attention and voting and making calls and writing letters and campaigning door to door doesn’t always result in the person or policy we support winning. And, sadly, even if they do win it rarely means that everything is rosy and the world is organized the way we would organize it.
Whether we get what we want is not what defines our efforts. We are called to care, and to love and to work for justice. Whether or not things go our way at any given moment. I used to serve a church in the same neighborhood as Wrigley Field in Chicago. Although I am not, myself, a baseball fan, I learned a lot from my Cub-loving congregants. The Cubs lose. Everyone knows that. Historically, currently, the Cubs are just not what you would call a winning team. Which doesn’t stop the fans from rooting for their beloved Cubbies, year in and year out.
You love what you love, and you go out and yell on its behalf, following the statistics or the players or whatever markers of success or defeat you might have. You show up and cheer. When your team wins you get a parade. But when your team loses you have the opportunity to gather with your friends and mourn the losses and plot how next year will be better.
Or maybe two years from now, when elections roll around in 2016.
REsources for Living
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I’ve been enjoying looking at pictures of tiny homes lately—little bitty houses made of cargo containers, recycled materials or just a lot less traditional building materials. There’s definitely an appeal to a house that’s no bigger than you need, that pushes you to have less stuff and spend less money and use up less of the planet’s resources.
Coming Home
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1.
It happens with the simplest gestures:
a door swung open,
a light turned on in the hall,
the snap of a lock as it opens
somewhere unseen inside.
All of a sudden the world
turns inside out—
or rather, outside in—
and I can’t remember
what it means to be a stranger.
2.
“It takes a heap of living
to make a house a home.”
Perhaps. But we know
that homes are built
not just by living, but by building.
Homes are built by tricky choices
when you cannot see the result
and must imagine.
Homes are built by days
of patient effort, painting
stroke after stroke
until the color shows pure.
Homes are built by rebuilding
the ceiling when the ceiling falls,
stripping away old layers
‘til the wood comes through,
trusting that when you
connect the wires the electricity
will flow through after all.
Homes are also built by
slow minutes curled together
on the couch just looking.
3.
How to judge a house:
Are the foundations firm?
Is the structure sound?
Can you live with the neighbors?
Will you stay warm through the winters?
When you enter, are you captivated
by the quality of light?
Good Enough: 10 Tips for Sucking Less
Recently Christine Organ (a blogger for this UU Collective) published a lovely post on “good enough” parenting in this competitive age. Frankly, as someone who feels like “good enough” parenting is pretty much the top of my game, I appreciated the reminder that plenty of other folks are perfectly fine parents without living up to their own—and perhaps other people’s—expectations.
But I think we can take this a step further. In a world where we are constantly exhorted to “dream big” and “pursue excellence,” maybe it’s time to admit that there are all sorts of areas of our lives that might benefit from a realistic dose of “good enough.” Once we accept that we are unlikely to win a Nobel prize, solve world hunger or marry a movie star, we might consider the possibility that for certain things, at certain moments, we would be just as well off striving for sucking less, rather than magnificence.
Here then, are ten tips for sucking at life just a little less. Please post additional suggestions in the comments below.
- Procrastinate better. We all know that there are some projects we’re just going to put off as long as possible. Sad but true. But it is possible to be more productive in one’s procrastination. Choose cleaning the kitchen or doing laundry over solitaire or leaving nasty comments on YouTube.
- Be more creative when you yell at your kids. Yeah, excellent parents don’t yell. If you’re already excellent this post is not for you. For the rest of us, it would be good enough to holler “If you two don’t stop bickering I am going to need to claw my eyes out! Either knock it off, do it somewhere I can’t hear, or find me new eyeballs!”
- Decide earlier in the day what you’re not going to manage to get around to, and let those expecting your efforts know that they’re going to have to wait. Bonus points if said informative email does not contain the phrase “Hold your freakin’ horses.”
- Eat healthier junk food. Yeah, OK, kale chips. Maybe. But really I’m thinking along the lines of darker chocolate, take-out that contains vegetables, dried fruit instead of candy. Unless the candy is dark chocolate, which is a health food.
- Take a walk. For bonus points, bring along a kid or a dog. Or not, and have a few minutes to yourself. I’m sure going to the gym or yoga class is excellent, but getting out for a stroll for a few minutes sucks less than sitting all day and all night.
- With your spouse/partner, agree to give each other a free pass on one annoying habit apiece. Excellent people fix their flaws. Good enough people pursue forgiveness.
- Find something you enjoy so much you can’t wait to do it, and treat that as a spiritual practice. Sure, meditation and prayer are excellent, but singing in the shower or playing tennis is pretty good. Good enough.
- Fix something little. The world is full of really huge problems. Climate change, economic injustice and racism are not going to get solved today, most likely. Find something small you can do, and celebrate that.
- Don’t obsess over arbitrary standards of what is “enough.”
- See #9 above.
REsources for Living
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One way of defining religion might be as a place for talking about things that are hard to talk about. What does my life mean? Who or what is in charge? Where did everything come from? What do I owe to other people? What is good enough? How am I connected to the other beings of the planet as well as the other people? Why do bad things happen?
Security
I remember, in the days that followed the 9/11 attack, hearing the endless trope from news reporters, who declared that “nothing would be the same again.” And I confess that my reaction to that repeated phrase was pretty much one of
annoyance. Terrible things happen over and over I thought, and people just get on with their lives as best they can. Nothing is ever the same as it was. Life changes. Sure, for the people who died, for the people who lost loved ones, everything is different, but the rest of us just go on. Why declare that everything is different now, but not for every other tragedy that strikes somewhere in the world?
I was, of course, wrong. Everything did change, if only in subtle ways. Not because we as Americans suffered a unique loss, beyond what folks in other parts of the world had known. But rather because for once we suffered the same kind of loss as countries who had been ravaged by all the various kinds of religious and nationalistic violence that have devastated communities across the centuries. All the years before we had read about Bosnia or Palestine or Libya and thought: those poor people, and gone on with our lives without anything much changing. Violence on that scale was a tragedy, but not our tragedy, not something that would that would touch our own lives.
That’s how we get through the immense hardships of the world. We all know people who have lost their dearest ones to murder, to heart attack, to the slow ravages of cancer or the sudden onslaught of an accident. And our heart aches for those people, but it doesn’t break, because we hold to the illusion that those things won’t happen to us, or to the ones we can’t imagine living without. We can’t afford for everything to be different any time that tragedy strikes around us, or we wouldn’t be able to function. And so our prayer for comfort for the bereaved is always secretly a prayer of thanks that this time we were spared.
But eventually that terrible lightning strikes close enough to home that we are singed. And it turns out that we are not immune, not protected by God or our virtue or our customary privilege. When the World Trade Center towers came down, many of us felt our own personal defenses crumble with them. And everything changed, because we had to come face to face with the reality that loss on such a grand scale really could camp out on our very doorstep.
And then we had to figure out how to respond. Would we build back our personal defenses through going on attack, following the illusion that we could simply exterminate everyone who was a possible threat? Would we declare that some set of people was “bad,” so that we could recreate the illusion of safety by locking those people literally or metaphorically away? Would we will build more walls, choose safety over freedom, aggression over attentive listening? Why yes, we would.
Because anything is better than simply dwelling in the knowledge that we are not safe, that the horrors which befall any one of us could befall all of us, that loss lurks around every corner. Of course we want to hold on to any measure of security we can find.
But after all these years, I hope that we can search for that security with a greater measure of rationality, and perhaps even a greater measure of compassion, than we were able to muster in the wake of the burning towers. I hope that we can remember some of the things that we have learned in painful experience of the intervening years: That striking back at the wrong target doesn’t help. That the enemy of the bad guys isn’t necessarily a good guy. That it is far easier to respond than to control the effect of your response. That complex problems don’t often have simple solutions.
And that, ultimately, our greatest security lies not in any of our attempts to make sure that tragedy never strikes, but rather in our ability to hold and help and care for one another when the hard times come.
REsources for Living
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As someone who grew up Unitarian Universalist, I have to admit that there are some disadvantages to being a UU kid. There are advantages, of course, like being able to celebrate holidays from a variety of different religions, but there are definitely drawbacks. Mostly these problems come when someone asks you, on the playground maybe, what church you go to. It’s hard enough just getting people through the ten syllables of Unitarian Universalist. But if you manage that task then the inevitable follow-up question is: “What do you believe?”
I happen to think that’s kind of an unfair question, especially to put on, say, a fourth-grader. If you say you’re Methodist or Baptist or Jewish nobody asks you what you believe. They have a category in their head to put you into, and they just leave it at that. Now, their assumptions about what you believe might be totally wrong, and I’m sure there is not one nine-year-old in 100 who could tell you the difference between what a Presbyterian and an Episcopalian believes, but the point is that no one feels they need to ask.
But if you’re UU there’s not only the long, awkward name to get through, there’s also the uncomfortable fact that people don’t know what mental box to put you in, so they ask about what you believe. Which leads you to the equally uncomfortable fact that your religion doesn’t tell you what to believe, which really messes with people’s idea of religion in general. And beyond even that, if you’re going to actually answer the question then you need to have figured out for yourself what it is that you believe, and how to say it, which is hard enough for a grown-up, and a real uphill climb for a child.
Close to Home
It seems to me that the outpouring of emotion on the death of Robin Williams was not only for a beloved celebrity, although goodness knows he was that and more. His struggle with mental illness and addiction became an opportunity for the rest of us to talk about our struggles—with our own illness, or the illness of those we love, with our thoughts of suicide or our experiences of the aftermath when someone we love has taken their life. It all hits so close to home, and there are so few opportunities to talk about the pain that so often remains hidden.
Which makes me think about how we respond to the horrors going on in Ferguson, MO. Now, I certainly live nowhere near Missouri—I’m culturally and geographically thousands of miles away, in the liberal, integrated, diverse San Francisco Bay. A handful of BART stops away from where Oscar Grant was killed not so long ago. So close to home.
Now, you may think that “those people” are asking for police in riot gear—they’re rioting, aren’t they? But if the phrase “those people” has floated through your brain, then it is time to sit down and think. Because it is entirely possible that you have never personally experienced the police as a threat to your safety, rather than the essence of those who create safety. It’s possible that you have never been followed in a store or pulled over while driving because of the color of your skin. It’s possible that you have never considered your skin color to be a factor in getting a job or hailing a cab or renting a house. And if, like me, you have lived in the world of that privileged possibility, then the rage of “those people” in Ferguson, MO might seem very distant.
One of the common threads that I have noticed in the discussions of depression in the wake of Robin Williams’s suicide has been people who are or have been clinically depressed explaining that if you haven’t been there, you don’t know. You don’t know what it is like to have the disordered thoughts, the black hole sucking you down. And so you might be tempted to cheer the depressed person up, or blame them for giving in when they have so much to live for. Because you haven’t been there, and you don’t know.
And if, like me, you live within the comfortable bounds of white privilege, you might be tempted to think that the folks in Ferguson, or the growing number of people who are supporting their protest, should move on, should behave better, should treat the police as the friends and community supporters that you know them to be. Because you haven’t been there, and you don’t know.
But, as with mental illness, the fact that you might not suffer from it personally doesn’t mean that it dwells only in some distant land. Of course, it is possible that you have no family members of color, no friends, no co-workers—although I would find it hard to imagine. Certainly, in any case, you belong to this human family that we are all called to love and care for.
If it doesn’t feel close to home—the assumption that Black men are armed and dangerous, the notion that Black people need to be controlled and subdued, the premise that police in riot gear are here to “keep the peace”—if the reality of racism feels like someone else’s problem, or even a “race card” that people of color use to cover up their own inadequacies, well then it might be time to sit down for a moment. It might be time to remember that what you personally have experienced is not all that there is. It might be time to listen. It might be time to remember that in a world that we all build together, every struggle for justice is close to home.
What to Say?
A plane was shot down over the Ukraine, but I didn’t blog about it because, what after all is there to say about the fact that hundreds of people were killed by a missile that was really only intended to kill a few people? “People are not only brutal, they are also stupid” is hardly an uplifting message.
And my senior colleague actually asked me to blog about the influx of children crossing the border into the US, fleeing gang warfare in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. And surely there is something to say about children being stored in warehouses or deported back to life-threatening conditions. And certainly there is something to be said about the fear and loathing which so many people have expressed toward these kids. And there is, no doubt, something much better to say about the folks who are trying to find a way to make it work, to create a place of safety. But I hardly have any perfect solution to what to do with tens of thousands of frightened kids who have nowhere to turn. The best words I know on the subject you have no doubt heard already: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” Which, according to this one guy, is the sum of how God expects us to behave. But, like I said, you’ve heard all that before.
And Lord knows there is plenty to say about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, but somehow I find myself uncharacteristically reluctant to get into arguments with people on Facebook about who is right and who is wrong because, frankly, I think that anyone who ends up killing children is wrong, wrong, wrong. And don’t try to explain to me how your side is justified, because I just can’t get past the fact that you should not be bombing children. Ever.
And, of course, there are all the people dying of Ebola in Africa, and certainly the ongoing terrible news about climate change and the ever-deepening drought where I live are much on my mind. But declaring that we are all doomed is hardly a spiritual gift to present to the world.
So what is there to say? What doesn’t sound trivial in the face of so much suffering, especially when the vast majority of that suffering is of our own creation?
Knowing that humans have created so much horror, it seems like we should be able to make it better. But that becomes even more depressing, since it’s clear that the scope of the problems is far beyond what any of us can fix.
The only words I can come up with are in this poem, which I wrote a couple of years ago in the wake of one more horror that has blended in with so many others:
The Last Good Days
What will you do
with the last good days?
Before the seas rise and the skies close in,
before the terrible bill
for all our thoughtless wanting
finally comes due?
What will you do
with the last fresh morning,
filled with the watermelon scent
of cut grass and the insistent
bird calling sweet sweet
across the shining day?
Crops are dying, economies failing,
men crazy with the lust for power and fame
are shooting up movie theaters and
engineering the profits of banks.
It is entirely possible
it only gets worse from here.
How can you leave your heart
open to such a vast, pervasive sadness?
How can you close your eyes
to the riot of joy and beauty
that remains?
The solutions, if there are any
to be had, are complex, detailed,
demanding. The answers
are immediate and small.
Wake up. Give thanks. Sing.
REsources for Living
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One of the most exciting things about growing up is that you can do more and more things by yourself.
Babies are totally dependent on others. (There’s not much that a person who hasn’t yet learned how to locate their hands can do on their own.) But before long babies generally learn to roll themselves over, and sit up, and crawl and walk and run and before you know it they have grown into people who can ride a bike or make their own dinner or get a job.
