From Your Minister
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A few years ago, a group from CLF decided to take a trip to the Gulf Coast to help with some reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina. (More than a decade had passed, but parts of the city where poor people live were not then, and probably still are not restored.) Folks joined in from all over the country for this mission trip, facilitated for us by the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice in New Orleans. We had some large vans that we’d pile into and we’d go to sites to clean them up and prepare them for construction.
It turned out our trip was in the beginning of Mardi Gras season. We were there in February. We didn’t know it was Mardi Gras season—it wasn’t the week of Mardi Gras or anything—but it turns out that New Orleans begins to celebrate to some degree after Epiphany (Twelfth Night of Christmas). Which meant there were celebratory parades. So many parades. Parades on side streets, parades on main streets, parades everywhere. Parades of schoolchildren, parades of families, parades of everyone.
So every time we attempted to drive from Point A to Point B, at least some of us would be stopped cold by a parade. At first, I looked at these as an obstacle—something coming between us and what we were there to do. By the fourth or the fifth time we were stopped by a parade, however, we’d park on the side of the road and cheer for the revelers. And we developed a slogan, our own bumper sticker (which we didn’t make): Parades Happen.
You know that other bumper sticker, which I see quite often, “S**t Happens.” No one can argue with the truth of that, because we’ve all seen a variety of stuff happen in our lifetimes which could be relegated to a pile of s**t. Knowing that life is going to be hard and include difficulty is one of the things that parents are expected to somehow pass on to our kids, while simultaneously building their resilience to deal with it. I personally prefer the twist on this bumper sticker: “Compost Happens.” We try to take the hard stuff and turn it into something that can help growth to happen, that can fertilize growth. That is a lot of what we do in life with our spiritual practices.
But parades happen, too. People make them who are present and want to be counted, who use costume and music and creativity and numbers to interrupt the sleepy commute of people on their way to accomplish Something Important. Parades Happen.
Now, I live in Minnesota, not Louisiana, and it is not a place where people are prone to unexpected parades. It is a land of introverts and rule-followers, conflict avoiders and passive aggressive niceness. This is my home and these are my people, but I think we could do with a few more parades. I don’t know how many parades it would take for people in Minnesota to stop being annoyed and cheer for the revelers—maybe thousands. I have no hope this will ever happen. Instead, Minnesotans will dutifully get permits every year for a few large parades which are planned for months and attended by so many people that claustrophobia sets in.
We lower expectations and we quit looking for parades. That’s our loss. Because in this time when no amount of effort in composting can keep up with the pile of negative events transpiring and turn them into fertilizer, parades are important. Reminding ourselves and each other that joy still breaks through, creativity still transforms, coming together and feeling our collective mass still interrupts the dreary repetition of business as usual.
In this year of political resistance and terror for so many, I was completely stunned to find myself falling in love again. Nine years after separating from my ex, reconciled to the fact that I would be single for the rest of my life, I found someone who makes me really happy. Perhaps even more surprisingly, my ex found someone, too. My ex is so sick with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis that she only has short bursts of time when she can get out of bed and leave her apartment, yet in one of those tiny windows, she met someone in her apartment building and they are in love, bowing to the limitations in both of their bodies to spend time together when they are both able.
You just never know when love will find you, or a parade might come by, or someone might wake up and change their ways. It’s good to remember that, even though you can never predict when it may or may not happen. We can try to protect ourselves from disappointment by expecting only negative things to happen, but that negative expectation does not in fact blur the pain when the expectation is fulfilled. Our hearts long for more.
Yet another option, of course, is to become the unexpected ourselves—to ask the people we know if they want to have a parade, to love someone when we don’t know if they’ll love us back, to burst into song or write poetry when we’re heartbroken, to plant flowers where no one would expect them to grow. To get an invisible tattoo—Parades Happen—to remind us to keep our eyes open so we don’t miss one, and to be sure to enjoy every minute of them if they do pass us by.
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