Springtime Beckons
photo by Jenna Starr
It’s springtime. Spring stirs in me a feeling of anticipation along with a feeling of unsettledness. What does the future hold? Left turn, right turn, which way? I love the days of good weather and I start to get too much sun for the first time in months and months. I feel that springtime sense of hopefulness, and I get overwhelmed by all that lies ahead. Pacing, pacing, I remind myself. Savor the gorgeous days, when they are here, slow down and enjoy watching the birds voraciously discovering the trees and buds. Enjoy the longer periods of light at the beginning and end of each day. Don’t wear yourself out by trying to do it all.
My family and I are most likely moving this summer, from D.C. to Connecticut. We probably won’t have much of a garden this year, but I still feel like tossing some seeds out onto the dirt, at the very least. At this time of year it doesn’t feel right not to put one’s hands in the dirt for at least a bit. Maybe I’ll optimistically plant cucumbers and let them spread out all over the garden and take over, knowing that we’ll move before there’s any produce to be had. (Barbara Kingsolver has a wonderful essay about this in her Animal, Vegetable, Miracle book — about planting asparagus, which takes at least a year to produce any actual asparagus — in some patch of dirt outside every home she’s lived in, even temporary apartments she knew she wasn’t going to be staying in long enough to see it produce. I think about that all the time — is the planting for the purposes of its end result, or simply for the purposes of planting? Do we garden for the product, or for the act of gardening?
What does the springtime stir in you? Are you outside today? What calls you out into the beckoning world?
However They Have Writ the Style of Gods: Wounds and Healing
Here is the beautiful truth—saints and sinners are the same from the start.
Hsu Yun, Chinese Chan Buddhist (freely adapted by me)
As a young writer, I read everything I could find on the subject of writing. One of the books that impressed me at the time was written by novelist John Gardner called Moral Fiction. If my memory serves me, it is in that book that Gardner argues that every writer has a wound which drives his or her writing. By “wound” Gardner meant a psychological trauma so devastating that the writer revisits and seeks to re-write this trauma constantly in her or his work. (This theory predates the concept of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD.)
It’s not surprising that Gardner should have developed such a theory, since he had suffered a severe trauma in his own life. John Gardner grew up on a farm and, as is often the case, he drove tractors when he was quite young. One day Gardner was driving a tractor with his brother riding on the back. His brother fell off and was killed by the implement the tractor was pulling.
For the rest of his life, Gardner replayed and replayed in his mind the image of his brother falling. He blamed himself for his brother’s death. He never stopped asking himself, “What could I have done?”
Gardner himself eventually died in a motorcycle accident.
As I made my own attempts at writing, I discovered that the old cliche “truth is stranger than fiction” is partially true because writers can’t help attempting to make sense of the random happenings of the world. The human mind can’t help trying. Creative writing is, if nothing else, an assertion of the self in the face of what often appears to be a completely random reality. It’s the human need to create meaning that makes fiction less strange than truth.
But it is not true that only writers have wounds. Sure, some people become writers because of the need to process trauma. But the fact is, as the Buddha observed long ago, life itself is loss. We suffer because nothing is permanent except change.
Think for a moment about something you are hanging onto. Something that you just can’t let go. Something that makes you cringe when you think of it. Something that you replay, like an old movie in your head.
Now. Allow me to ask a very simple question: what do you gain by hanging on to what you are hanging on to?
Pain makes us individualists. As Shakespeare put it,
I will be flesh and blood,
For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently,
However they have writ the style of gods
And made a push at chance and sufferance.
I think that Shakespeare is driving at the insight psychologist Carl Jung had when he coined the phrase “wounded healer.” It isn’t that therapists or ministers or anybody else have the answers to life’s wounds. It is, rather, that dwelling on those wounds drives many of us to be therapists or ministers or philosophers.
And the insight we find, when and if we find it, is that pain makes us individualists, but the cure for pain is reaching out. However we write the style of our gods, we must accept our flesh and blood and dependency on others before healing begins. This is perhaps not an entirely reassuring insight. We would rather see our healers as experts. But that attitude, too, is a fall into individualism. The answer is in reaching out.
The Chinese Chan Buddhist Hsu Yun said it simply:
Here is the beautiful truth—
saints and sinners are the same
from the start.
Earth Day Notes from New Orleans
Last week the Center hosted two groups of youth, one primarily people of color, one primarily white people. As the groups co-navigated the space of the Center and the programming, it was pretty clear to everyone why we talk about race and an analysis of racism as a gateway to serving in the New Orleans community. This week the Center is filled with another group, this one primarily white people from a place of primarily white people. Many in this group have been coming to New Orleans to volunteer for years and some are not sure why they have to talk about race and racism each time they come – other than that it seems to be the price of the trip to New Orleans. There are moments of joy in the work of unraveling oppression and moments of despair.
As I write, my garden fills with love bugs, lettuce, stinging caterpillars, and thyme. Despair and joy ripple through this Earth Day 2014. Those with power to change the laws and hold those who are destroying the Earth’s ability to sustain life as we know it are busy arguing semantics and pocketing short-term profits. Perhaps this is not surprising in a country founded on the belief that land could be bought and worked at the expense of human life.
And so we have to talk. To each other. About uncomfortable truths.
Our silence will not protect us… will not make sure that my niece and your child have trustworthy water and air that will not poison them. The environmental crisis of the Gulf and West Virginia has moved inland with the advent of fracking. White people are learning that their whiteness will not protect them from the brutality of our current economic system, from the impact of decades of valuing imaginary numbers over real life.
And here we are, called to continue the struggle for collective liberation – imperfectly, madly, hopefully… Happy Earth Day, beloveds. Let’s talk to each other.
A Quarterway Home
You’ve heard of a half-way house? Well, this was a quarter-way. For those who no longer needed a locked facility. But only just barely. The quarter-way residents had not been in jail. They’d been where you go when someone decides your brain might bring you harm. But all that was behind them. They’d completed the programs. Had their meds re-adjusted. Now, they were free. Or a quarter-way free.
One had been through a life that left her skittish and cagey. She smoked on the stoop, trying not to remember. Another had nearly completed a doctorate in math at somewhere prestigious before it all came unraveled. But that was years ago. Now, he held court in the kitchen, his lap stacked with newspapers, haranguing the staff in imperious tones. Then there was a woman I’m going to say was called Gina.
Nothing about Gina could not be called big. A hairdo that spread out in every direction. A winter coat sewn with a giant in mind. And a voice with claws that could find you there down at the end of the hall. You know how some people’s complaints are poetic? Well, Gina’s poured out like sludge from the back of a cement-mixing truck that can never turn off and will never run out. A hospital was only two blocks away. That was the place Gina went to shoplift.
As for me, I worked there only a month, maybe two. I left with the idea that I could do better.
By that point, through the years, I had worked for too long in two other group homes. Had subbed around here and there on the overnight shift. Every place was the same. They would make it all homey. You had the living room, the kitchen, the bedrooms, what-have-you, where everyone who lived there could wander all over. The industrial sofa would be urine-resistant. The pictures hung up in frames with no glass bolted down to the wall. Then, for the staff, a locked office, and a lounge with a couch.
A staff area was like you were hiding off-stage. Resident areas? Back on-stage again. Like the set of one of those sit-coms where a family does pratfalls in a brightly-lit house. Except in this sit-com, the girl shaves off her eyebrows to sing Billy Joel, and the teenage boy wipes his own shit on the door. But here’s what I’m getting at: the on-stage and off? Those were other homes, far away. The quarter-way house didn’t come with an off. You were on all the time. Just like part of the family.
How things were laid out wasn’t the only thing different. At the previous homes, I had worked with teenagers. With a teenager, you can make yourself think there is hope. But at the quarter-way, the residents were in their forties, their fifties. The question of whether to hope or not was long settled by now.
But it is in the nature of hope to flicker up just at the moment it seems to be gone. After escaping from Egypt, and passing through the Red Sea, the people of God are out in the wilderness, years from the Promised Land. It says that they murmur, but that’s putting it gently. They are starving. They’re lost. What they do is freak out. Which is when, in the story, the manna appears. Is it dew? Or hoarfrost? A filigree of honey-sweet flakes that you eat at first light, before the sun burns it off. You don’t store up manna. You don’t save it for later. The next day, scripture says, it will stink, crawl with worms. So, it’s food for right now. Just enough to go staggering on toward the dream.
You know the hospital two blocks away? In the cafeteria, you’d see families draped over lunch-tables, on break from the rooms where their loved ones were already failing. If you were hungry, you could get a tray, load it down with whatever, then take it to the lady at the front so she could ring you up. You’ve been somewhere like that. You know how it all goes. The point being, this is not what Gina did.
Baskets of bread-rolls were set out to go with your soup or your salad. Gina would head straight for them and fill her winter-coat pockets, six or seven bread-rolls in each. And then she would just leave.
Did she explode if you said it was theft? Was the concept of stealing beyond her somehow? It’s been so long now that I just can’t remember, but I know we were not to discuss it with her. It was a directive. You didn’t want to praise her for shoplifting, of course. But you weren’t supposed to scold. So, when she slammed through the door, crowing like her pockets had diamonds, not bread-rolls, we all kind of shrugged and averted our eyes.
The night the supervisor heard second-hand I was planning to quit, he called up the house phone. Right there in the living room, with an audience of staff and residents both. Maybe he was upset because now he’d have to find somebody for a job that nobody would want. But what he focused on, in a voice loud enough that it bled through the receiver and out into the room, was you just don’t waltz in and out of people’s lives. Especially the residents, who had been abandoned again and again. If anyone was going to get better, if anyone was ever going to be happy or stable, it was going to take trust, and hanging in there, and patience, and faith. He went on for some time. Wanted to know exactly what kind of person I was. As if there was an answer.
Here’s what I can say. Two weeks before, Gina slams through the door, just like always, coat bulging with bread. But on this day, instead of pushing past me, she stops. Digs a roll from her pocket, holds it out. The shift is over. I’m clocked out. In my wired-shut heart, I’ve already resigned. But I take what she offers. Without speaking, we eat. I do not feel, in that moment, the presence of God. But I see we are lost and that she is my sister. Which is food for right now. Just enough to go staggering on toward the dream.
Pagans, Cheasters, and Nones: Easter and Open-Source Religion
This coming Easter morning, many people will rise and look east. Some will go to a Christian church for their only visit this year. Many will be reminded by priests and preachers that this one day is not enough. Those strangers to churches will be telling the oldest of religious truths: it is the people, not the priests, who make the gods.
“Easter” we call the day, namesake of a deity of the Northlands, Eostre, goddess of the dawn. English speakers still call the direction she arises from “east.” She is the goddess of new beginnings and of fertility, her day celebrated as the earth comes back to life after a long winter.
The holiday (holy day) called Easter is a movable feast, tied to both the cycles of the sun and of the moon—Easter occurs on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox.
Religious holidays are celebrations of recurrence. Children in the Northlands have been searching the wet, awakening grass for eggs on Easter morning for thousands of years. The celebration has spread to other lands; to other religions. To the far corners of the planet.
Nineteenth Century German philologist Jacob Grimm reported that in some remote German villages of his time people still celebrated Eostre with sword dances, bonfires, and the baking of “heathenish pastries.”
It’s difficult this time of year—at least in the top half of the Northern Hemisphere—not to think of new beginnings. Difficult not to dance just a little bit. The iron grip of the deathly ice is finally broken and life is emerging from the long-dead earth again.
This is one of only two days the so-called “C and E” (Christmas and Easter) Christians—also known as Chreasters—fill churches. There are something on the order of eighty-five million Chreasters in the United States.
Statistics indicate that less than one-quarter of US Christians attend church even once a month. But Easter brings ‘em out—even more than Christmas or Mother’s Day(!). Why? Might it be because Easter is such a blend of religious traditions?
Reflect on the potpourri of religions and cultures that make up the concept of Easter as it is celebrated in the United States today. We have a fertility goddess from Northern Europe who survived the invasion of a Southern European tradition, Christianity, based on a Middle Eastern tradition, Judaism, itself an amalgam of religious thinking from the earliest agricultural civilizations of Mesopotamia with a pinch of Zoroastrianism from a certain Babylonian captivity thrown in.
All those ideas added up to create a lunar holiday celebrating a solar god in a myth echoing human sacrifice that originated in Egyptian mythology concerning the god Osiris, a metaphor for the planting and growth of vegetation in the Nile delta.
All that adds up to Easter brunches. And chocolate.
Why Easter? Why is Easter Christianity’s greatest hit?
“Syncretism” is one of those ten dollar words that permeates theology. The word describes the human propensity for combining religious ideas from various traditions.
The poet Wallace Stevens—an atheist by the by—made a very good point when he said, “The people, not the priests, made the gods.” Yes. The people, not the priests, meld ideas to create their religions.
Reflect on one of the greatest failures of human history. In 1231 the Roman Catholic Church opened its Office of Inquisition, nowadays known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. Yes, it’s still in existence. Yet, after nearly 800 years of terror and cajoling, there are more heresies now than ever.
Wallace Stevens continues to be correct: the people, not the priests, make the gods. And we the people continue to vote with our feet. And the more information that flows on our nets and our webs, the more people are going to . . . well, what are we people going to do?
Some will become Cheasters. Some double-belongers. Some nones.
Return to the case of the goddess Eostre. The story goes that Pope Gregory the Great was walking one day in a slave market in Rome. This was in the 600’s CE. Pope Gregory saw a couple of blonde slaves and asked his handlers where blondes came from. The handlers said they were Angles, which at the time meant either the English or Northern Germans. The pope was so taken with these blondes that he decided to devote his life to converting the Northlands to Christianity.
In 601 CE Pope Gregory instructed the missionaries he was sending to England with these words:
. . . the temples of the idols in those nations ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed.
For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed . . . may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they are accustomed.
Syncretism. Gregory’s order was an act of genius. It was a strategy that led to a Christendom that included the far North. But it also introduced a blue note; a note of mystery. Were those people out in the country—“paganus,” pagans, which means “villagers” or “rustics” in Latin—were those pagans, were those people of the heath, those people of the wastelands, those heath-ans—were those away from the centers of power, away from the army and the police of the king and pope and bishop—were they really Christian? Or were they going to their old temples for other reasons?
No one ever knew for sure. And we never will know. But is it a coincidence that the largest concentration of atheists on the planet today . . . happen to live in those Northlands that Pope Gregory Christianized?
Syncrenism. The people, not the priests, make the gods. In computer speak, it’s called Open Source: people with different agendas; different talents; different points of view, all have access to a program. And the result is a better program than those developed through controlled access. Maybe that’s why Easter is Christianity’s greatest hit.
The people, not the priests, make the gods. Religions are the oldest open source software.
The Joy of Taxes
There it is. It’s done. Whether you’re getting a refund or had to write a check, or if you just made it in the nick of time to file for an extension, Tax Day has come and gone, so we can rejoice. Yes, I know, mostly rejoice that the 
hell of dealing with tax forms and receipts and inadequate record-keeping (it’s not just me, is it?) is over for another year. But maybe you can also spare a moment to celebrate the fact of taxes themselves.
Really? Yes, really. Taxes are the practical assertion of a central religious truth: we belong together, and there are things that we can do in service to one another that none of us can accomplish alone. We need one another. My religion asserts that none of us has the whole picture of the nature of God or the meaning of life, but that we come closer to the truth in conversation with each other. Although my religion is less explicit about it, I would claim that my religion also acknowledges that no one of us can build and maintain a system of roads, or serve as a police force, or fight fires or maintain the safety of the food supply or keep airplanes from running into one another or a vast array of other things. And so we band together, pooling our money to make happen collectively what we can’t do on our own.
Now, I have plenty of issues with the details of the system. I am no fan of the percentage of my tax dollars that go into the insatiable maw of the military, and it absolutely drives me around the bend that corporations that are pulling in billions of dollars are paying not one red cent into the common pool. Don’t get me started. These are flaws in the system, and I surely wish they would get fixed. But the system, the declaration that together we can “promote the general welfare,” is, I think, one of the great inventions of humankind.
You know how I know this? Yesterday I went to the library. I don’t go as often now that I usually get my library books in electronic form. But yesterday the book I wanted was available in print and not as an e-book, so I hied myself down to my local library, and felt once again the same thing that I always feel when I go to the library. Joy. Pride. Here is a beautiful building, filled with more than books. (Although, being filled with books would in and of itself warrant a verse of Dayenu, the Passover song that declares of each of God’s blessings, “it would have been enough.”) This building is filled with people. Toddlers with stacks of picture books, school kids on break, adults looking for jobs on computers, teens doing research projects, elderly people lingering over the periodicals. Some event for children is going on rather loudly in the community room while a respectful murmuring prevails in the stacks. There are people of all shades of human skin color, and complete strangers comment on each other’s book choices and share recommendations. It is, in short, heaven.
And I imagine walking into this building with a small child, and showing her the room of bright books, the tables and the pillows for reading, the librarian who is there to answer her questions or offer story time, and saying: “Here. This is for you. We built it together so that you and your friends and the people you don’t know could share in the amazing gift of human creativity. You can come here whenever you want and borrow whatever you want and bring it back because that is the joy of sharing. And maybe sometimes sharing seems hard, but I want you to see just how much fun we can have when everyone shares together.”
And then I want to bring in Cliven Bundy, the yahoo in Nevada who thinks it’s more patriotic to hold a stand-off with the Bureau of Land Management than to pay his grazing fees for using federal land. And I want to bring in the CEOs of Boeing and Verizon and General Electric and the other 23 major US corporations that pay nothing—zip—zero in taxes. And I want to bring in Paul Ryan with his “let’s give it to the rich” budget. And I want to say to them, and to everyone else who thinks that taxes are, by definition, bad: “This is what happens when we remember that we are a community. This is what patriotism looks like. Go then, and do likewise.”
Earth: Our Deep Home Place
The Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalist cluster gathered in an oak -filled park on Sunday to celebrate Earth: Our Deep Home Place. As Earth Day approaches, I share with you a meditation, my invitation to celebrate our beloved planet:
Cosmologian Thomas Berry wrote “Nothing is completely itself without everything else. This relatedness is both spatial and temporal. However distant in space or time, the bond of unity is functionally there. The universe is a communion and a community. We ourselves are that communion become conscious of itself.”
We who are of the earth, children of the everything seed (http://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/children/loveguide/session1/sessionplan/stories/168158.shtml),
we are intimately and ultimately connected to all creation. Through mystery and mutation, we have risen from the fertile mud to look around and celebrate the miracle of earth. As humans evolved, so too evolved rituals to celebrate and interpret the wonder of this place.
When Lao Tzu, the great Daoist philosopher asked, “Can you hold the door of your tent wide to the firmament?” poet Mark Nepo believes he was “challenging us not to define the world by whatever shelter we create but to let in the stars, to throw our tent of mind and heart wide open in order receive and listen to the flow of life.”
Part of my own deep sense of home place in south Louisiana comes from the insistent presence of earth here. There is no day I can travel through town without noticing the majesty and intelligence of the plied live oaks, the whip-like flexibility of the pomegranate trees, the persistent resurrection of the bananas and the gingers. Summer days hum with the life cry of the cicadas, seagulls and crows caw throughout the year, mosquitos whining past your ear, and if you listen closely, I swear you can hear termites chewing away on darned near everything.
This place takes us deep, past language, to a pre-verbal space of knowing, to a place before naming, categorizing and limiting.
When we are still, when we breathe in and breathe out, when we trust that there is space for us and everything else that emerged from the everything seed, then beloveds, we can let go of our fears and submerge ourselves into the deep sense of collective belonging, the vast compassionate love that saturates creation.
Daily we make a thousand choices that shape the earth. May we throw our tent of mind and heart wide open in order to be shaped by the earth, our deep home place.
Decision Season
illustration by Chi-Yun Lau
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth….”
It’s that time of year. Perhaps it is related to the blossoming of spring, warm weather here in D.C., the sudden feeling of everyone being outside and looking outward for the first time in months. But it’s also what I’ve noticed in myself and with many of those around me–it’s decision season.
A neighbor’s son is deliberating about where to go for college, having been accepted into multiple good schools.
Many colleagues are in the midst of making plans for new ministries to begin this summer and preparing for moves to new towns (myself and my partner included)–so many small and significant decisions involved in all that. Others are deliberating this week about whether or not to continue seeking a new post, with a long list of congregations going into 2nd-round search this year.
For people involved in organizations of many sorts, it is already time to look ahead to fall, to “the next year,” and start planning, taking into account new directions, new goals, and what approaches may need to be left behind or discontinued.
A couple of old friends/girlfriends have surfaced in my life in random and unexpected ways this past week, causing me to wonder: what is she up to now? What is her life like?
We’re approaching graduation season and one of our most beloved babysitters is facing the big questions of “what comes next?”
….All of this just has me thinking about how our life is a constant series of decisions, a very literal Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. We are privileged and lucky if and when we feel like we have more than a few good choices. And all the decision-making can’t help but result in some wondering about “what if…?” What if I’d gone that way, or hadn’t left that relationship, what if I’d chosen to go there for school, or studied this instead of that, professionally…..
For me the reveries keep ending in gratitude for all that is, in my life, and a new determination to savor the present moment. When I step back and survey all the places I could have made some other choice, I return to my life as it is with fresh energy to step into it, to embrace it. I truly believe, as I said to our neighbor’s son, that it’s not where we go to school that ultimately matters, it’s what we do with the time we spend there. Pretty much that’s what I think about life in general. It’s what we make of it. So I come to gratitude, simple affirmation, and contentment. My body, my life, my relationships, this incredible family, our messy home, this complex and amazing vocation. This is the path I’m on, neither the one more or less “traveled by,” but genuinely mine. Embracing that is what has made all the difference.
Let’s Agree to Agree on Subjectivity
There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.
~Gertrude Stein
In last week’s post I looked at one way to smooth the waters between theists and non-theists, Pragmatism. Pragmatists say, if it works for you, it’s true.
Now, I know that’s a bit hard to swallow for some people, idealists, mostly. So, allow me to try to get to the same spot from a different direction.
For an idealist, there’s something out there that’s true. Idealists will admit that we see the world as we have learned to see the world; that our seeing affects us and those around us. It affects the world. Our seeing does not, however, make the world into what we see. The world is always as it is.
For example, I may decide that the tree in front of my house is possessed by an evil spirit. I may perform various rites to exorcise the evil spirit. I may even cut the tree down and burn it, thinking that that extremity will at last do away with the demon.
Perhaps I even believe that I succeeded in exorcising the demon and feel better about it all. Whatever I think, the fact of the matter is a dead tree, not an exorcised demon. One is measurable, the other is not.
Before going looking for something. It’s good to know what you’re looking for. What do we want in a god? I suspect the answer is: meaning and purpose in human life; a moral direction to the universe where the good and bad get what they deserve; perhaps even a cheerful afterlife where everyone is twenty-five years old and we get to talk with our grandmothers . . . and hang out with Abraham Lincoln.
That sort of thing.
This is the sort of god that the mainline monotheisms at one time posited for us. It’s the sort of afterlife promised by the sort of churches I attended as a child. Then I read Sigmund Freud (as did the generation a century before me). And I began to think there is a big problem with this god concept: it sounds suspiciously like wish fulfillment. And it can’t be measured.
Mainline Christian theologians don’t paint this picture of God anymore. They have gone in two broad directions: process theology—“god” is in the processes of nature. (A topic for another day.) Or the psychological route, saying: OK, we’ve got two things here:
There is that which is inside the human brain; and that which is outside the human brain.
This is, after all, how we experience reality: the personal and the impersonal. “God” is subjective: inside the human brain. God is not in the scientifically measurable outside realm.
These theologians will argue that putting god in the category of human subjectivity is not a denigration or demotion of God. Lot’s of important things exist only in our subjectivity. For example, I have spent much of my life fighting for “justice.” (Again with the quotes!)
“Justice” is a human subjectivity. “Justice” does not exist in the outside world as a measurable thing. You can’t weigh it. Consider: “Justice” has no meaning to a crocodile. A crocodile cannot act justly, at least from a human perspective.
Is justice an insignificant or untrue concept because it is the product of the human mind? Admittedly, we can say, “That was a just court decision” or “that was an unjust court decision.” But those are instances in time. The are not the concept “justice.”
Groups of human beings agree on the subjectivity called “justice.”
And the same is true of the several concepts of God. God is a shared consensual subjectivity among various groups. A shared consensual subjectivity. We agree that our subjectivities agree with each other and that the concept “God” is this way or that way … for us. That’s why various faith traditions require creeds said aloud: they are attempting to keep the shared consensual subjectivity similar in various minds.
Now clearly this concept of God pushes the idea of human understanding beyond the true / false dichotomy. Beyond the dichotomy that objective is true and subjective is false or at least suspicious. But consider—so far as we know, human consciousness is the most complex thing in the universe. So let’s give ourselves a little credit–maybe everything isn’t a zero or a one.
Computers are better than we are at chess. But not at writing poems. Or symphonies. Everything is not zero or one. Crocodiles or rocks don’t write poetry. People write poetry. And “God” is poetry. God is a human art. Knowledge is more than information.
It may well be that “religion” or “god” or “gods” exist in the same category as we consider abstract concepts such as “justice”—in objective reality these concepts don’t exist, yet the human brain is capable of creating these concepts out of the chaotic particulars of human experience.
Fact is, no matter how many times the US Supreme Court makes a really, really stupid decision, I’m going to keep working for what I see as justice. For many people, the same is true for “God”—despite all the evidence to the contrary, it is a concept that still makes sense to them.
This is why—despite the fact that I don’t share the subjectivity called God—I don’t get angry and shout about it. It can even be fun—and instructive—to to talk over our subjectivities. We might even learn something from each other.
Pulling Weeds
I don’t know about where you are, but here in California we have hit the peak of Weed Season. A few days of long-awaited rain, a couple of days of sun, and the hills begin to turn gloriously green. So does my gravel driveway, and whole swaths of my yard where you are supposed to be able to actually see the things that I’ve planted.
I have to say there is a certain glory to wrenching vast, bushy weeds from the rain-damp soil, filling the 96-gallon green waste bin to overflowing. That was last week. And the week before. OK, and the week before that. And there are plenty more weeds all around the yard, but in my mind it has moved on to lawn time.
Let me explain. I have a big, well, “lawn” probably isn’t the right term. I’m not a fan of the kinds of chemicals that it takes to maintain a pristine lawn, nor the quantities of water. Apparently the previous owners weren’t either. What I have might be better described as a mostly-green, mostly-flat space that serves me well as a place for dog training. But it only works well as a dog training space if it’s mostly free of the kinds of weeds that grow burrs and needle-like seed pods and generally anything prickly. Which, it turns out, is most of your common weeds, which got so common by sticking their seeds onto anything that moves and spreading themselves around.
So I have spent time every spring, for the last several years, meticulously pulling out every little potentially prickly weed that I could get my fingers on. Little weeds. By the thousands. Every year. Which, it turns out, provides a person of ministerial or poetic bent such as myself with ample opportunity to think about the other kinds of weeds we pull up in our lives.
There are the giant, ugly weeds like racism, classism, heterosexim, ableism and all the others. Weeds which we root out and think are gone, until something catches the corner of our eye, or someone else points out that something bushy and threatening has grown while we weren’t looking. These kinds of weeds tend to have roots deep underground that we aren’t even aware of, and they can grow awfully fast under the right conditions.
But today I’m thinking more about the lawn weeds, the little insidious ones that you don’t see until you sit down on the ground, but which will overtake your life if you just let them grow. Weeds of insecurity and shame. Weeds of pride and superiority. Weeds of greed and anger and jealousy and, really, all of those classic deadly sins.
Even when you’re looking straight at these little buggers it can be hard to tell just what you’re seeing. You could easily think you were cultivating righteous anger when self-righteous indignation was really sprouting from the root. Shame can masquerade as humility, although they are not even related species. Heart-felt longing and greed can look the same until the tendrils begin to take over.
I am no expert gardener, but I’ve learned a few things over all my years of plucking weeds. I know that the weeds will always be with us, blown in on the wind or sprouting up from roots that we will never manage to pull out in their entirety. Pulling weeds is not a job that is ever complete. But I also know that it makes a difference. Weeds that once threatened to take over my lawn—or my heart—now are pretty much relegated to the edges. Pretty much. The percentages change. And every time you root out something that you really didn’t want as part of your landscape you make room for something else to grow.
Weeding and watering and living in gratitude for the rain and the sun. That’s what we gardeners of the spirit do.
