We Don’t Know
We don’t know, and we can’t imagine. Who would set bombs to go off at the end of a foot race? Why would any human being do such a thing? What is the world coming to that such acts of violence are beginning to seem commonplace? What sort of beings are we, what sort of a society are we, that wholesale random violence would be an ongoing part of our lives?
We don’t know, and we can’t imagine. And maybe it isn’t such a bad thing to sit with those two facts. We don’t know. And so it does no good to speculate about foreign terrorists or domestic terrorists or mental illness or right-wing or left-wing conspiracies. We don’t know. Maybe by the time you read this, we will. But for the meantime we just have to live with horrible suffering for no known reason. Which is kind of how life is. We don’t know why some people get cancer, or why some babies die in their cribs or why one house is completely demolished by tornado or fire when the one next door is untouched. We just don’t know. You could say it’s God’s will, but usually that’s what the neighbors with the intact house say—“God saved us!”—while their neighbors blankly examine the rubble of what was their home.
We don’t know, and we live in a world of not knowing. Except that we know that brave first responders are tending the wounded and clearing the area of any other explosive devices. We know that people are caring for one another, that shell-shocked bystanders are seeing that the hurt receive medical attention, that people across the country are calling up the Red Cross to see if they should donate blood, that folks everywhere are praying, sending love, wishing for safety and healing. And we know this without witnessing it, without seeing it on the news, simply because that is what people always do. That is who we are.
And who we are is people who can’t imagine. We can’t imagine why someone would commit such a brutal and bloody act because however many times these horrific acts rip across our headlines, 99.99999% of us are the kind of people who not only wouldn’t do such a thing, we are also people who couldn’t even imagine doing it. We might or might not jump in a river in an attempt to save someone who is drowning, but we can imagine it. We might or might not walk onto a busy highway to rescue an injured dog, but we can imagine it. What we can’t imagine is creating wanton destruction, because we are not that kind of people. However many of these horrible, heart-wrenching events happen, they will only be perpetrated by the most infinitesimal fraction of the population, while the rest of us watch and pray and donate blood and do whatever we can to hold safe not only our children and our friends, but also complete strangers whose suffering we can, alas, imagine.
I can’t say whether it’s enough, but it’s how we live in this world.
What We Measure
I read an interesting study recently, which indicated that it turns out that being overweight, or even somewhat obese, doesn’t contribute to overall mortality. Now, the study was interesting in that it called into question our national obsession about weight, but my odd little brain went somewhere different with it. This meta-study, which examined a huge number of direct studies, looked at weight as related to risk of mortality. But isn’t our risk of mortality 100%? If you study everybody for long enough, doesn’t it turn out that everyone dies? Now, I understand that they were probably studying people’s risk of dying within a certain period of time, or before a certain age, or something meaningful, but still, I had to wonder. Why is it that the one question they seem to have asked was whether weight was related to dying? Surely there are significant concerns related to living. I would want to know whether weight was related to whether your knees allowed you to hike or dance, how it affected the level of comfiness your lap provided for a cat or a toddler, whether it made a difference in the amount of health care intervention a person needed. I don’t presume to know the answers to these questions, but frankly, I think they’re at least as interesting as the question of a person’s risk of dying in any given year.
Of course, medical studies are far from the only place where the question of what we measure seems oddly constrained. For instance, in any given week the news on the radio or TV will undoubtedly share with you the percentage of people in the country who are unemployed, and whether the stock market is up or down. But you will not hear about the percentage of people who find their work meaningful and rewarding, nor will your standard news report share with you what percentage of the wealth invested in the stock market is held in the hands of, say, 500 people. We only learn what we ask, and what we ask is narrowed down by what those doing the asking feel that we need to know. Where are the statistics on the percentage of parents this week who carved out time to take their kids to the park? Who is going to tell us how the mental health of people who talk to their pets varies from those who don’t? Where’s the weekly update on the percentage of the population who spent time this week engaged in making music or art?
We don’t have a lot of control over what the economists measure, what the TV and radio stations report, what makes it into the medical journals. But we do have the opportunity to change what data we gather for ourselves. Instead of stepping on the scale each morning to see what we weigh, we could check the number of stairs we could run (or walk) up before getting out of breath. Instead of comparing how much our neighbor’s car cost compared to ours, we could count up the places we manage to go without driving. Rather than keeping tabs on how many friends or likes we got on Facebook, we could keep track of how many kind things we had done for those around us on any given day.
What we measure is a way of saying what matters. What will you measure in your life?
REsources for Living
What if you had x-ray vision like Superman? What would you use it for? Of course, real x-rays let you see through skin and muscle to the bones underneath, but they wouldn’t let you look through the walls of buildings to see what the villains were up to inside. But never mind. It’s our game of pretend, and we set the rules.
REsources for Living
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What does it take to become enlightened? What is required in order to awaken to the truth of the universe? How do you go from your ordinary “I wonder if we’re out of milk?” frame of mind into a higher consciousness? The world’s most famous story of awakening is the story of how Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha.
Before the Court
As I write, the Supreme Court is just finishing up oral arguments on the Defense of Marriage Act. Something, presumably, is going to be decided about same-sex marriage, although what exactly that might be is anybody’s guess. But the thing is, everyone knows the eventual outcome. Everyone—at least everyone who is honest—regardless of how they feel about same-sex marriage, knows that whatever this court decides, same-sex marriage is going to be the law of the land. The scales have simply tipped too far to go back.
By now, most people know gay folks. If they aren’t in their families then they are neighbors or co-workers or folks who volunteer at their children’s school. And when you see people and their actual lives it’s very difficult to come to any conclusion other than…who cares? It turns out to be patently obvious that most gay and lesbian relationships are simply not very interesting, in the way that most straight relationships are not very interesting. People have lives. They do what people do, which is largely working and shopping for groceries and pulling weeds. Gay people just don’t do it very differently.
And when you’ve seen enough gay people picking up their kids from school or their partner’s laundry from the dry cleaners it becomes hard to argue that something that is obviously the same is really totally different. When the best argument you can come up for why opposite-sex marriage is special is that marriage is for procreation and straight couples can get pregnant by accident, then it is pretty clear that your ship has taken on quite a lot of water, and is headed toward the bottom sooner rather than later.
And really, that sooner rather than later is the most remarkable part of the whole thing. Of course there is still prejudice against gay people. But the rate at which that prejudice has faded is astounding. It turns out that, in the end, people have a hard time denying rights to the people they already know. As more and more people are open about their lives and relationships then more and more of their family members and neighbors and friends have to admit into their hearts the fact that we are talking about people. Real people. Just people. Who would like to have the same rights and privileges as everyone else, and probably deserve them.
It turns out that much of the time it’s just not that hard to love your neighbor. The real religious challenge is to love the person who lives across the tracks, across the world, across lines of race and class and culture. So let’s have an enormous cheer for the great progress that we’ve made on the full inclusion of same-sex couples in our society, and let us pray that the Supreme Court comes down on the side of both love and reason. And then let’s get on with the difficult and never-ending work of expanding the circle of love and justice.
A Balancing Act
Happy Spring Equinox! (Unless you happen to live in the Southern Hemisphere, in which case I’d like to wish you a delightful Fall Equinox.) The equinox, of course, is the moment of the year when the light and the dark are in perfect balance, with equal parts day and night. Legend has it that on the moment of the spring equinox it is possible to balance an egg on its end. Science would point out that there’s no reason to believe the truth of this legend—it’s not as if gravity is somehow arranged differently on the equinox, but still…the equinox is a time for relating to the whole idea of balance.
Which, Lord knows, we could all use. Most of us are struggling to find the balance between our work life and our home life, the balance between our children’s needs and our own, the balance between activism and acceptance, between being here now and working for a better tomorrow. And those struggles are never going to go away. The only way to find balance is through a constant series of adjustments, tipping the egg ever so slightly this way and that in the vain hope of finding the balance point where everything is right.
It’s never easy, and sometimes it’s heartbreaking. I am thinking of my friend Lisa, who is struggling with finding the balance of when or whether to have her dog put down. Euthanizing a pet is almost always a heart-wrenching decision, and in this case the dog is young, sweet, and seemingly healthy. But the medications which have controlled the dog’s seizures for some time have stopped working, and so at any moment this lovely animal can go from running or playing or snuggling on the couch to cluster seizures that leave her traumatized and cause progressive brain damage. My friend has been diligent in trying to find a solution, and two different vets have agreed that there is none, that the seizures will return, and that they will be fatal, although not for some time down the road. And so Lisa is trying to balance her love for the dog against the burden of 24/7 care for an animal who may be stricken at any time. She is trying to balance the enjoyment the dog gets from every walk, every ride in the car, every scratch behind the ear against the fear and confusion and suffering of seizures that can come at any time. And there isn’t a perfect balance point. There isn’t any way of knowing what exactly is the right thing to do, when exactly is the right time to let go.
Any more than there is a way to know when or whether it is the right time to leave the father of your children, or when or whether it is the right time to tell your young adult child that they have to leave your home, or when or whether to put your frail and fading mother in a nursing home. There is no way to know the right answer, but there is also no way to avoid the decision, since inaction is as much of a choice as action. Doing the right thing, the perfect thing, is as much of a fantasy as balancing an egg.
Which, it turns out, you can do. Any day, not just on the equinox. It takes some patience, and a delicate touch, but it can be done. You start with the determination to balance what seems impossible to balance, and you find a steady base for your balancing act: I don’t want my pet to suffer. My child needs to learn independence. My mother needs care that I can’t give her. And then you lean the egg just the tiniest bit left and right, searching for a sweet spot that will hold: I can give my dog one more perfect day. I can pay for my adult child’s health insurance, and a security deposit on an apartment. I can make sure that mom’s favorite pictures go with her to the home, which will be close enough for me to visit regularly. Never the perfect answer, or at least never an answer that comes with the guarantee that nothing more or better could be done. But an answer, a choice, a balancing place.
The equinox doesn’t offer us the perfect resting spot where we can be assured that all is right. It offers us spring and growth and change. It reminds us that the perfect resolution for an egg is not to balance on its end, but rather to crack open entirely, so that the chick inside can emerge.
Smoke Signals
The drama of the selection of the new pope has captivated the world, and why wouldn’t it? They’ve just selected the first non-European pope in 1300 years. There is the question of how the new pope will deal with the sexual molestation scandals that have rocked the Church. There is, of course, the reality that the new pope will have the ability to shape doctrine for millions of people around the world. But I have to confess that what has captivated my attention is the smoke.
Smoke signals. The conclave of cardinals uses smoke signals to update the world on how the whole voting thing is going. Now, I get why sending up columns of black or white smoke was a sensible form of communication 1000 years ago, but really? Smoke signals? This is 2013. You couldn’t use Twitter? (#stillnopope, #gotone) When is an embrace of the ancient and arcane a lovely part of the grand pageantry and a way to honor a rich history, and when is it just silly?
Of course, churches with a considerably smaller store of history and tradition run up against the same problem of whether and how to allow the modern world into church life. Do we stick with the old, beloved hymns, or do we introduce more contemporary music? Do we need to pay to send the newsletter out on paper, or can we just email it to everyone? Will putting in a screen for multi-media presentations destroy the look of the sanctuary? Do we offer online small groups in place of gatherings in the church basement?
It’s hard to let go of the way things have always been done. And change is not always for the best. Churches have an important role as conservators of language and ritual that have served the human soul across the centuries. There is a depth to the Lord’s Prayer, the words of Jesus repeated across the world and across 2000 years, that is just not likely to be present in the words that your minister pulled out of thin air (aka The Holy Spirit) on Sunday morning. To paraphrase 19th century Unitarian Theodore Parker, some pieces of tradition are transient, while others are permanent.
Of course, in some instances it doesn’t much matter. The Vatican can keep sending up smoke signals for another 1000 years, by which time humans will no doubt have developed instantaneous transmission of information directly into the chip implanted in your brain, and no one will be the worse for it. But what about adherence to the policy of an all-male, celibate priesthood? In the immortal words of Dr. Phil, “How’s that workin’ for ya?” What about clinging to a prejudice against homosexuality, based on the assumptions of a bygone era? Sometimes the failure to recognize what is a transient holdover from an long-ago society carries a devastating cost, both to the institution and to individuals.
In the days to come, we’ll find out what Pope Francis I thinks is permanent and what is transient within the Roman Catholic Church. But all of us will still have to go on deciding for ourselves what in our own lives is precious and must be preserved, and what we must let go of in order to make room for new growth.
Good Guys and Bad Guys
Depending on who you talk to, the recent death of Hugo Chavez was either the tragic loss of a heroic defender of the poor or the timely end of a socialist thug. Now, I’m not interested in taking sides on this one. I make no pretense at being any kind of expert on the modern history of Venezuela. No, what fascinates me is the need to cast him as misunderstood hero or brutal villain, when it seems pretty obvious that he was neither, or both.
We have this human determination to decide who the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are, and we expect to be able to identify them by their hats. The good guys are noble and honorable and agree with us on all particulars. The bad guys are greedy, unethical and cruel. They espouse ridiculous notions that run counter to all we know to be true. It’s a way of looking at the world that allows us the comfortable privilege of identifying “us” and “them,” so that we can know who is on “our side.”
But for better or for worse, people are rarely that two-dimensional, and we do everyone a disservice when we try to cram people into folders marked “good” and “bad.” The other day a friend posted a graphic that showed a picture of Bill Gates and a cornfield, with the label “evil” over Gates’s head because he owns a vast number of shares in Monsanto. I’m no big fan of Monsanto, but really? The man has done more than anybody since Jonas Salk to eradicate communicable disease in the world, and you’re willing to slap the word “evil” over his head? Pressuring public figures to divest from companies you think are hurting the public is one thing, declaring anyone who is invested in these companies to be evil is quite another.
It takes a little mental flexibility, but if you want to deal in the real world then you could acknowledge simultaneously that Chavez was autocratic and that he improved conditions for the poor, that Gates has done a tremendous job working to save children from disease at the same time that he is culpable for investing in Monsanto—not to mention Windows Vista. A recent French article points out that Mother Teresa allowed a great deal of suffering in her “homes for the dying” that she could have perfectly well prevented. Martin Luther King, Jr. plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation. There is no one who is totally pure, no one utterly evil. The congregation I serve, the Church of the Larger Fellowship, has a ministry to prisoners which includes a pen pal program, correspondence courses and more. We regularly receive staggeringly beautiful letters from inmates who are finding their way to spiritual insight and compassion in the brutally harsh conditions of prison. These men and women have done some dreadful things. They are not (mostly) innocent. They are also not evil.
But when we reduce the world to good guys and bad guys then we conclude that the bad guys belong in jail, and don’t deserve to be treated as humans with hopes and desires. When we imagine that there are good guys and bad guys then we assume that we need to take guns away from the bad guys and put them in the hands of the good guys, disregarding the fact that good guys shoot their wives or girlfriends or themselves on a disturbingly regular basis. When we divide the world into good guys and bad guys we go to war against the “axis of evil” without regard for the human or financial cost, because we know that good will triumph over evil, and we know that we are good.
Of course there are people who commit terrible acts, and who must be stopped. Of course there are people who accomplish heroic feats, and who deserve our praise. But if we think that we can divide the world into a superhero cartoon of good and bad then we have badly mistaken what it means to be human, and our choices will be lead dangerously astray.
We would be better off to let ourselves by guided by the words of Annie Dillard from her book Holy the Firm:
Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead–as if innocence had ever been–and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been.
REsources for Living
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The Passover story is, of course, a story about freedom. It’s the story of how the Israelites went from being slaves in Egypt to being free people with a land and a religion of their own. But I wonder when exactly in the story it is that the Hebrew people finally become free.
Standing on Principle
As the budget sequestration looms, it seems that the government is caught in a stalemate as both sides “stand on principle,” unwilling to compromise on core values. Which would seem to be a good thing. After all, isn’t that what we ask of ourselves and our friends—that we stand up for what we believe in, that we hold fast to what is most dear?
The problem is that most of the values that those in the budget non-conversation are clinging to aren’t actually values. Lower taxes is not a value, nor is smaller government. They are strategies. As are Medicaid, Social Security and Obamacare. Independence is a value. Compassion is a value. Liberty is a value. Equality is a value. These are things that one can stand for on principle. But the defense budget or health insurance for children, or any of the thousands of other things that are part of the government purview are simply means to an end.
So here is my modest proposal: maybe we should start with the values, the essentials, and work outward from there. But how do we know what the essentials are? Who gets to decide what the government is really here for? Well, as it turns out, we already have that statement. If you are of my generation, perhaps you memorized it (and the accompanying tune) from Schoolhouse Rock: “We the People, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution.”
Now, I’m not saying that it is in any way obvious how every given decision should come down when you hold on to these essentials. How much money goes to the common defense and how much to the general welfare? But here’s the thing. While we take these essentials as given, any of the strategies to achieve these ends can be tested and evaluated. Does investing $6000 per taxpayer in a fighter jet system that has yet to function properly most efficiently provide for the common defense, or might the money be better spent elsewhere? Does subsidizing corn or fossil fuels promote the general welfare, or might the general welfare be better off if we put our shared money into fresh vegetables and renewable energy? Does a tax structure that leans most heavily on the wealthiest help out domestic tranquility and the general welfare, or have we found more tranquility and general welfare when the tax burden shifted toward those on the lower end of the economic scale?
Information is never perfect, and past performance does not guarantee future results. Nonetheless, data exists. Strategies have been tried and if we know what results we are hoping for we can evaluate which strategies have proven most effective. It’s not that hard to agree that we don’t want people to starve, but we also want people to be self-supporting, relying wherever possible on their own efforts rather than government support. Rather than getting stuck in complaining about uncaring fat cats or parasitic welfare queens, wouldn’t it be more useful to try to tease out what programs work most efficiently for helping people out of poverty and into self-sufficiency? Rather than scaring ourselves with the specter of socialism or with resentment of wealthy insurance executives it might be more helpful to have a look around the world and see who gets the best health care for the most people for the least money, and try moving our system in that direction. Really, it would seem that those who are the most enthusiastic about a corporate model for government would be the most eager to promote the familiar model of having a vision and a mission, and creating goals and objectives to achieve that vision and mission.
Of course, it’s not that simple. Our government runs largely on sponsorship rather than logic. But isn’t it nice to imagine a government of the people, by the people, for the people, loyal to the guiding principles set out in our Constitution, and led by reason and science to serve the needs of ourselves and our posterity? It doesn’t hurt to dream.
