From Your Minister
Podcast: Download (Duration: 6:26 — 5.9MB)
Subscribe: More
At one of the garage sales I love to frequent I picked up a game called “Origins” with a subtitle—“The Game that Unlocks the Secret of Our Past.” The game includes a board with spaces for topics like “products,” or “names,” or “inventions.” To win, you move around the board by coming up with the name of something after its origin is described to you.
In playing this game, I have learned the origins of the phrase “on the fritz,” the invention of the automatic dishwasher, and of the name of McDonald’s. At least so I’m told! The reality is, whenever we look for the beginning of anything, it gets more complicated.
I mean, take the phrase “on the fritz.” The card says that it came about during World War I, when anti-German sentiment was high, and the most common German name in the US was Frederick, nicknamed Fritz. To say something was “on the fritz” was to say it was broken, not working, no good. Hmmm. That’s the origin of that particular phrase, but what is the origin of characterizing badness or brokenness in the image of a particular group of people who are out of favor? How widespread must this have been, this World War I version of that’s so gay! or a million other slurs, that it is still in our vocabulary? (I had always thought it was a Yiddish word, as are so many other words in the “itz” family.) Was there a particular Fritz who launched this? And so it goes, back and back…origin after origin.
Or take the invention of the automatic dishwasher. The game card tells me it was invented in 1880 by a woman named Josephine Cocharane who proclaimed, “That’s it. I’ve had enough. If no one else is going to invent it, I will!” and proceeded to string together wheels and a copper boiler to make this happen. Well, that’s cool! But who was Josephine? What gave her the confidence to believe that she could build something out of a copper boiler and a wheel? When she said “If no one else is going to invent it, I will!” was that because she had already begged her father or husband to make it? And so it goes, back and back.
As a gardener, I see that beginnings and endings and middles are often a matter of perspective.
I mean, in spring, when I’m putting tiny seeds into cups of dirt under grow-lights, and watching little green sprouts come up into the light, it’s easy to think, “This is the beginning. Seeds.” Then, in fall, after the harvest and after the bright colors have faded to brown, I think, “We’ve come to the end. Here is death.” And then I gather the seeds falling out of the dried up flowers, and I think, “This is the beginning of life.”
Really, beginnings are what we decide to call the beginning. Ideally, we see them around us every day, and feel them each time we wake up in our mind, body or spirit. When I was young, a book called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind was very popular. Written by Shunryu Suzuki, one of the foundational teachers to bring Buddhism from the East to the West, the premise of the book is that once we decide we know stuff we quit learning. Suzuki wrote: “The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind.” “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s, there are few.” And practice, for Suzuki, is “just to live, always in reality, in its exact sense.” Reality, in its exact sense.
I don’t live in the exact sense of reality too often, if you want to know the truth. I’m often walking around in beliefs that I came to years ago, which are obscuring my clarity now. Often I live more like a jaded reporter who’s already written the story and is just looking for a quote to fill in what I already know (an expert), rather than as a true investigator, curious to see what is actually there and describe it (a beginner).
If I try to have an exact sense of beginnings, I experience motion. Past, present and future start to blur. Their melding interferes with my ability to live in reality, in its exact sense. I mean, consider this: in a number of non-Western cultures and languages, the past is conceived of as ahead of us, while the future is behind us. That is because we can look ahead and see the past, while the future is unknown, hidden from view behind us. I don’t know about you, but I find that concept both intriguing and physically disorienting. While it makes sense that the past is there to be studied and the future is not, I have spent my entire life hearing about the future before me. (And I wonder if my country might be healthier if we kept the past before us…but that’s another column.)
If the past is in front of me, I have a better ability to examine wave after wave of beginnings. (Suzuki wrote, “Waves are the practice of the water.”) What would it mean to keep the past in front of me? Looking as clearly as I can at origins—of my own beliefs and habits and biases, of cultural beliefs and habits and biases—helps me to shape my present, to choose consciously how I will live right now. And that, in the end, is what molds the future that will always remain hidden behind us.
- From Your Minister - July 1, 2020
- From Your Minister - June 1, 2020
- From Your Minister - May 1, 2020
