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.
What it Means
Today the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and declared that the proponents of California’s Prop 8 had no standing to argue against Judge Walker’s ruling that Prop 8 was unconstitutional. What these rulings mean in the real world seems pretty straightforward. Same-sex couples can finally resume getting married in California. Same-sex couples who are legally married in states that allow their unions will be entitled to the full federal benefits of marriage. For me, as someone who was married in California during the brief period when it was legal before Prop 8, it means that I won’t have to keep filing my state taxes as a married person and my federal taxes as someone who is single. It means that if I die before my wife that she will be entitled to my Social Security benefits, and that our house will belong to her. The benefits are significant, and tangible.
But the non-tangible benefits mean so much more. The Supreme Court’s rulings mean that we are, like the Velveteen Rabbit, finally Real. At long last the law of the land recognizes what we’ve known all along: that two people who fall in love and commit to one another for life, who have a child and a house and dogs and cats together, who argue and make up and talk about their day and eat dinner and check homework and sleep in the same bed are married. Just plain married. Not domestic-partnershipped or gay-married, but married. Real. Entitled to refer to one another as “my wife,” and have people understand what that means.
I know that a judicial ruling won’t change the hearts of all the people who feel that our relationship is counter to God’s will, or simply icky. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. But everyone is not entitled to have their opinion enshrined as law, and the law has finally stood up and said that equal rights are equal rights, and that your personal theology and comfort levels don’t get to trump that fact. If your church doesn’t want to perform weddings for two men or two women, fine. My church is happy to. Was happy to 15 years ago when Kelsey and I stood up in front of our family and friends, our church community, and declared our life-long commitment and enduring love, and is happy to now. Only now, in some select states of the union, the minister can sign the wedding license knowing that it is Real, not a second-class document that somehow disappears if you cross the state line.
That matters. It matters that so many of my friends, gay and straight, liberal and conservative, religious and unchurched, have been hoping and praying for this day. It matters that in the course of my lifetime we have gone from the Stonewall riots to the highest court in the land declaring that “no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.”
I would like to wrap this joyful moment in a bow and declare, with Theodore Parker and Dr. King, that the “moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But I know it’s not that simple. I know that yesterday the same Supreme Court which today ruled to protect my personhood and dignity ruled against key portions of the Voting Rights Act. I know that the arc of the moral universe is less of an arc than a squiggle, bending this way and that, and only because people take the trouble to bend it. I know that the status of my marriage is a small thing compared to families torn apart by immigration laws, or the bizarre declaration of Citizens United that corporations are people and money is speech. I also know that my 18 years with the love of my life are a gift and a blessing regardless of what the courts have to say. But still, in spite of it all, there is the fact that we have arrived at this moment, somewhat the worse for wear, and with much of our fur worn off, to hear People Who Matter declare that we are, in fact, Real. It is a celebration of marriage, and I, for one, intend to have cake.
When Worlds Collide
I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day about a controversy in her church. A member raised the question to the congregation about what their policy should be about bringing guns to church. This was not a question that had ever crossed my friend’s mind in the course of many years of church-going in Chicago, but she’s in another part of the country now, and the question is real. And, if you’ll forgive the pun, loaded.
There are members of the congregation who cannot fathom why anyone would carry a gun anywhere other than a shooting range or a hunting trip, and maybe not even then. They feel threatened knowing that there is a deadly weapon in their midst, and offended by the idea of bringing an instrument of violence into a place of peace.
There are also members of the congregation who, it turns out, have been bringing their guns to church all along. They see carrying a gun as an act of community service, a way to keep the community safe should it be threatened from the outside. Carrying a gun makes them feel safe, and makes them feel like they can contribute to the safety of loved ones around them.
It does not help that these two opposed and mutually contradictory views are also associated with differences of class and culture, making any conversation deeply fraught. It’s the kind of situation that doesn’t have a clear, correct solution, and the opportunities for offending people, for misunderstanding motives and assumptions, are rampant. There is no compromise. You can’t “sort of” bring a gun to church. You allow it or you don’t, and saying, “Well, just don’t bring a gun if you don’t want to” is not much consolation to a person who feels that they can’t settle into the prayers of the community knowing that a person next to them is armed and prepared to kill.
My friend wasn’t asking for advice, but if she was, here’s what I would have said—and I think it applies to the unsolvable issues that each of us has to decide on throughout our lives. When there is no way to answer a question, it is probably time for a deeper question. There’s no good way for this congregation to answer the question: “Should people be allowed to bring guns into our sanctuary?” But maybe it would be helpful for congregants to be in conversation with one another, taking turns answering the questions “What frightens you?” and “What makes you feel safe?” It might not provide a clear-cut answer to the original question, but it would provide a way for people to tell their stories, to approach one another less from a place of knowing what is right and wrong and more from a perspective of what Nelle Morton called “hearing each other into speech.” People could relate dreams they’d had about guns, tell of their own experiences with guns, tell the stories their parents or grandparents related to them in which guns meant terror or survival. These conversations might not lead to a clear answer as to whether or not guns should be allowed in worship, but they would help to weave the fabric of the community together rather than tearing thread from thread in a pitched battle over who is right and who is wrong.
There are plenty of subjects in this country which have become that kind of battleground: abortion, gay marriage, gun control, aid to the poor, climate change, etc., etc., etc. And it’s pretty much impossible to have a conversation amongst 300 million mostly unrelated people. Which is why it is so important to grab onto these conversations wherever we can: in our churches, on Facebook, with relatives and friends. As we slip ever more deeply into a culture in which differing opinions descend into obscenities and name-calling in the comments sections of news sites or YouTube, it matters more and more that we find ways to turn to the questions behind the unsolvable questions, that we hear each other into speech. If there’s one thing that most of us can agree on, it’s that society and government based in mud-slinging and sheer contrariness gets us nowhere. We need questions that demand that we put our full humanity into the answers.
Courage
I expect by now you’ve heard the story: seen the pictures of the people bludgeoned by water cannons, the dog in a gas mask, the sufi dervish whirling in the street with deliberate disregard for the danger of his surroundings. It started simply enough. A group of people decided to sit in to protest a public park being razed in order to put in one more shopping mall. A group of people, young and old, decided that they had had enough of their country being sold off to the highest bidder, enough of the rights of the people being stripped away at the pleasure of the powers that be. And so they went to sit in the park. And there they sat as the bulldozers came at them, non-violent protesters in the long and distinguished lineage of Gandhi and King and Tiananmen Square and so many others. And in the long and shameful lineage of the British in India and Bull Connor and the Chinese government in 1989 and so many others, the Turkish government responded with water cannons and pepper spray, with police in riot gear prepared to do whatever it takes to subdue the population.
Who will not be subdued. Who continue to flock to the streets. I understand the courage of those first protesters, the ones who decided to sit down in a park and make their presence felt, who were willing to see what would happen when they demanded that someone take the needs of the people, and not just the corporations, into account. Sometimes you summon up what is inside of you and do the brave thing, walk the talk. But what about all those other people, the ones who joined the protest once they knew about the water cannons and the pepper spray, once the news spread (by word of mouth and social media, since the official media kept a complete blackout) of the injured and the dead? What about them? What does it take to knowingly walk into that kind of danger and chaos?
It takes, I think, an allegiance to a self that is greater than the self that feels the police batons and the pepper spray—a self that is injured not by physical indignities, but rather by moral ones. Call it Soul, if you will, this larger self, or call it Community Consciousness or Human Dignity or Living in the Kingdom of God. Whatever it is, it does not belong to a particular time, or place, or religion. It’s what led Gandhi, the Hindu, and King, the Christian, and the young man (Buddhist?) who faced down a bulldozer in Tiananmen Square to counter violence with persistent love. It’s what holds the Sufi dervish dancing in the streets of Istanbul and Bill McKibben getting arrested on the steps of the White House in protest against the Keystone XL pipeline. Who we are is bigger than who we are.
Not all of us. Not all the time. But enough of us, enough of the time, that it seems possible that love might have a chance against greed, that freedom and justice might sometimes prevail. Not all the time. But maybe enough.
REsources for Living
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Perhaps you have seen the bumper sticker: “Born OK the first time.” That’s where we UUs tend to come down. You don’t need to be born again. We don’t hold with the notion of original sin, that babies are born carrying the sin of Adam and Eve’s rebellion. You don’t need to be baptized or washed in the blood of the Lamb or answer an altar call or accept anyone or anything as your personal lord and savior. We’re willing to trust that who you are is OK, at the same time that we hope that as a community we are learning to be ever more responsible, compassionate people.
Acts of God
People are dead, including children. Whole neighborhoods are utterly destroyed, brought down to foundations and rubble. People are injured, traumatized, bereft. And there is no one to blame. No bomber, no shooter, no mad man or terrorist. Simply an “act of God.”
How I hate that phrase, act of God. As if God would come down from the clouds to smite a town out of, what, spite? Vengeance? God does not cause weather events, not out of a need to punish infidels and homosexuals, and not because he needed to call his children home to be with him. You will not find God in the great wind, any more than Elijah did.
No, you will find God in the people who keep calling to find out if their friends and neighbors are OK, in the parents who struggle to assure their children that they are safe, in those who sit at the side of those who mourn, in the mourners themselves. God is in the search and rescue dogs who are tirelessly moving house by house, searching for the scent of the missing, and in their tired handlers who volunteered and trained for this expert, grueling work. God is in the hospital staff tending the wounded and in the family members who wait and wait, hoping their loved one will be OK. God is in the first responders who are still hoping to find children alive and for those who have to carry still figures from the wreckage. God is in the people around the world sending their prayers and their love out to people they will never meet and the people who send their money to the Red Cross or animal rescue groups because it’s the only way they can think of to help.
And yes, God is in the people who dare to point out that while any given weather event is just weather, however tragic, a pattern of more and more extreme weather—the droughts, heat, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, one after the other—that pattern is not an act of God. That pattern is predicted by scientists who study climate change. Which is not an act of God. It is the consequence of a string of human choices. God is not in the droughts and the floods and the tornadoes. God is in the scientists who keep telling the truth when it seems no one is paying attention. God is in the all the people who are trying to limit their use of fossil fuels, in the companies and schools and churches who have invested in solar panels, in the environmental groups calling for meaningful legislation.
God is not in the wind. God is in all the people who see the suffering that is, and the suffering to come, and who choose compassion and justice and the hope of a better world.
Consent
My friend recently shared an article that complained about dog lovers foisting their animals on the non-dog-loving public. Although I am a ridiculously passionate dog lover, I have to say I agree. People who don’t want to deal with dogs shouldn’t have to be approached by them. Also people shouldn’t have to worry about their shy dogs being pawed by strangers, let alone being pounced on by other dogs. Parents shouldn’t have to worry about their children being molested by strange dogs, and dog owners shouldn’t have to worry about their dogs being molested by strange children.
But the solution is not to forbid dogs being out in public any more than we should forbid children being out in public. The solution is simple, although it would seem near impossible based on so much of what we see in the world. It’s called “civility.” Civility presumes a) that you understand that you are not the center of the universe, which means that other people have needs and desires that are different than your own and b) that you can find out people’s needs and desires by asking. Really, does that seem so very difficult?
You can assume, just in general, that everyone exists in a little zone of privacy that belongs to them alone. You don’t enter a stranger’s house without permission, and you don’t enter their personal space. Not because you want to touch their pregnant belly. Not because you want to touch an African-American child’s curly hair. Not because you think they’re sexy and you want to get it on. That zone of privacy is an acknowledgement that a person (or animal) is real, that they are entitled to want and feel and believe as they choose. It’s what we Unitarian Universalists call “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.”
But privacy doesn’t mean that we need to live without connection, each of us entirely separate in our own little bubble. It simply means that you have to ask to be invited in. And you have to wait for the invitation to be accepted. You can ask whether someone would like to pet your dog before letting it come near them, and you can ask permission before petting a stranger’s dog. You can teach your children to ask before petting a strange dog, and you can teach your dog not to approach people without permission. But more than that you can ask a child’s permission before hugging them or picking them up, teaching them more effectively than any lecture on “stranger danger” that each of us has the right to choose who will touch us and how. You can ask a date’s permission before offering a kiss or other physical intimacy, combating the rape culture which insists that there are ways that a woman can “ask for it” other than saying what it is she wants.
You can ask, even when it feels uncomfortable, as when you ask an acquaintance what gender pronoun they prefer, or when you invite someone whose skin tone is different than yours if they would be willing to discuss a topic related to race. You can ask someone with a disability whether they would like help, and you can ask an older person if they would like your seat on the bus. You can reach out your hand past the edge of your own bubble of privacy to see if someone else wants to take it. You can, and you should. But then you need to pause to find out whether that person wants to reach out their hand in return. And if their response isn’t want you expected or hoped for, oh well. It isn’t about you. It just isn’t all about you.
We human beings are a community. We belong with one another. But we do not belong to one another, and the sooner we start acting like it, the better.
For Mother’s Day
What will you be doing for Mother’s Day? I confess it’s never been a big deal in my family, either with my mom or as a mom. Somehow, we just never got on the breakfast in bed, flowers, greeting card bandwagon. I don’t know why. It’s not that I don’t think mothers deserve to be honored. Let’s face it. Mothering is the hardest job in the world. I do not mean that metaphorically, or hyperbolically. It’s the hardest job. Every other job has days off, or at least hours off. Every other job has a limited field of expertise, and doesn’t require that you be simultaneously teacher, doctor, housemaid, entertainer, counselor and a whole host of jobs like construction worker that you might never have anticipated. Every other job, if you get mad at the boss, you can complain to your friends without having to feel like you’re a horrible person and that it’s all your fault. Every other job, if the boss hits you or calls you names you can sue. Every other job, if it gets stressful or tedious or overwhelming enough, you can up and quit.
OK, fathering could conceivably be as difficult as mothering, but it usually isn’t. Dad, if you’re the one who cleans up the barf and checks the homework and calls the teacher when things aren’t going well and strategizes how to deal with mean and gossipy friends and holds the croupy baby in the shower and drives to doctor appointments and reads The Runaway Bunny over and over and over again after washing the dishes and seeing that teeth are brushed and jammies on and explaining why it is that it gets dark at night then let’s face it, you’re a mom. I’m talking about you too.
You, whoever you are, deserve all the kudos that you may or may not get. Not just the dads who are moms, but also the grandparents, aunts, uncles, foster moms, step moms, all of you. You know who you are. However you got there, whether you struggled for years to conceive or adopt, or whether kids got dumped in your lap by circumstances you chose or didn’t choose, whoever you are, if you’re doing the job for life, with no chance of parole, I honor you.
I honor the amazing, creative moms who are helping their children to flower into artists who are moment by moment creating their lives. I honor the patient, calm moms who somehow manage to keep their tempers through the onslaughts of unruly toddlers and sarcastic teens. I honor the moms who exude love from every pore, whose kids learn that some behaviors are unacceptable, but that they themselves are cherished in every moment for the unique and precious beings that they are.
But more than that, I honor the moms who are just getting by. Who entered motherhood not as a divine calling, but as something that have taken responsibility for and will never give up on, no matter how brutal it may feel. The moms who mean well, but get sucked into screaming matches even when they know there’s no point. The moms who sit their toddlers in front of the television for a precious break from the clinging and the running and the mind-numbing repetitiveness of toddler games. The moms who drop their kids off for a play date with a sigh of relief, and who pick them up with utterly untrue assurances that they were missed.
I get it. It’s really that hard. OK, maybe being president is harder, but there’s an eight year limit on that gig. At year eight moms are just getting started. And while presidents may feel the weight of the free world on their shoulders, moms don’t ever get to set down the burden of wondering if their children will be all right, whether they will be happy, whether they will ever learn to put new toilet paper on the roll or wash their own dishes, whether they will turn out to be drug dealers, whether they will have children they are not prepared to raise that could, unthinkably, turn up just at the point when you thought the mothering job was done.
So for all of you moms, of whatever gender and biological relation to your children, here’s a bouquet of virtual roses. I hope that sometime between now and Mother’s Day you get a quiet moment to remember the real gifts that you’ve gotten throughout the year: not only the hugs and the smiles and the sweet snuggling at bedtime, but also the moments when your child has trusted you enough to cry on your shoulder, the times when you genuinely laughed at your child’s joke or they laughed at yours, the flash of insight when you were able to see the world through their eyes. Truly, motherhood is the toughest job you’ll ever love. On a good day.
REsources for Living
Where Danger Lurks
For the last week and a half the news has been pretty much all Boston bombing, all the time. Why wouldn’t it be? There was a horrific act of mayhem in which three innocent people were killed and 264 more were injured. There was a man hunt, a shoot-out, and a show-down that led to the capture of one of the perpetrators, who is now being grilled about his role in the terrible events. The media is full of interviews with everyone who has even the most tenuous connection with the Tsarnaev brothers, and their religion and motives are being analyzed to the finest detail.
In the meantime, a fertilizer plant has exploded in Texas, killing 14 and injuring 200 more. Although the tragedy was broadly announced, very little information seems to be making its way onto the public airwaves as to what led to this horrific event. Now that we know it wasn’t terrorism, we’ve pretty much let the subject drop.
What is it that is so much more compelling about the first tragedy than the second? Why does it deserve so much more of our national attention and imagination? Far more people were killed in Texas, and the property damage was devastating, pretty much flattening the small town. Their grief is just as real, their first responders just as brave.
There are, I’m sure, many explanations, but I’d suggest that the biggest reason for the different levels of national attention to the two tragedies has to do with a known flaw in the human brain. We are terrible at assessing risk. When we hear of a bombing, we imagine that it could happen to any of us. We see a world in which terrorists lurk behind every bush, and we want to do everything possible to stop the bad guys, and to punish their terrible acts of wrongdoing. When we hear of a factory explosion, it’s just an accident, and something that could not possibly happen to us, since we don’t happen to live next to a fertilizer plant.
But the reality is far different than the flight or fight systems in our brains would have us believe. The risk of terrorism to any given person in the US is infinitesimal. Your risk from a texting driver, a legal gun owner or a lightning strike is higher. Your risk, however, from under-regulated industry, of the type that caused the Texas explosion, the massive oil leaks that happened recently from pipelines in Arkansas and Texas, not to mention the Deepwater Horizon explosion that dumped over 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico as well as claiming the lives of 11 rig workers, is far, far greater. If you consider the subtler incursions of unsafe pesticides, genetically modified foods that may or may not be safe, air and water pollution and so forth, then your exposure to risk starts to approach 100%.
In response to the events of 9/11 and subsequent terrorist acts we have spent trillions of dollars and changed our lifestyles in ways that range from how we board an airplane to who sees our private information. In response to the devastating human and natural costs of under-regulated industries and corporate greed we have…a continued call for less regulation, and less money spent on enforcing the regulations that remain.
If we really cared about addressing real dangers we would have applied the trillions of dollars that have gone to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to developing and promoting renewable energy and fighting the effects of climate change. If we really wanted to make our citizens safe, we would be holding the corporate perpetrators of natural and human disasters responsible, and working to see that safety regulations were followed in a way that would prevent future disasters.
But we are bound to a national narrative that tells us that we can combat the bad guys by putting more guns in the hands of the good guys. We are tied into a story which is so dedicated to supporting the capitalist undertaking that while we are willing to give corporations the free speech rights of individuals, we aren’t willing to hold them responsible the way we would with individuals who had committed equally heinous deeds. We are quick slap the label “evil” on people who commit terrible acts, and even to extend that label to the religious or ethnic groups to which they belong. But we seem to just accept the fact that corporations will do whatever they can to maximize profit, and the costs that all of us must bear are somehow simply the price of doing business.
Sure, I want to know why the Tsarnaev brothers committed their terrible acts of violence. And I get that we are fascinated by the rare individual who commits unimaginable acts for unimaginable reasons. We already know why West Fertilizer Co., and BP and Exxon and so many others allowed terrible things to happen on their watch. And it is that prosaic, everyday pattern of choosing short-term profit over life and health that I find truly terrifying.
