But Where’s the Woo-Woo?
“Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books; / Or surely you’ll grow double,” said the early-Nineteenth Century British poet William Wordsworth: “Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife.” He continues,
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
Ah, yes. Romanticism. They headed for the woods for their woo-woo.
And Romanticism hit US shores in Transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson asked, “why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?” Experience. It was all about experience. Emerson began his great Transcendentalist manifesto, Nature, this way:
“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
Whatever else this tradition accomplished, it convinced New England Unitarians that books were fine and necessary on Sunday morning, but mystical experience, the woo-woo of worship, would happen elsewhere. On that hike through the mountains perhaps. Or on the seashore. Only accidentally within the walls of a church.
Emerson’s children hold onto this tradition, remaining mistrustful of the technologies of woo-woo: rhythmic music; glossolalia; shouting and such. Yet, if we take up those leaves called the Norton Anthology of American Literature, we find that there have been a few literary and intellectual movements since Transcendentalism. Perhaps it’s time to move on and, as sage old Emerson said, “demand our own works and laws and worship.”
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.
Weeding Out Racism
I’m a gardener in the upper Midwest, so in July I spend a lot of time pulling up weeds. Just yesterday, along with a lot of other stuff, I probably pulled up a couple of hundred tiny maple trees, growing from the ‘helicopter blades’ that spin to the ground from my neighbor’s maple each spring.
The first year that I saw these sprouting in my yard, I panicked. I think I envisioned our yard suddenly and abruptly turning into a dense maple forest. I paid my kid a nickel each to pull them up; in the course of the summer I shelled out $100!!! Duly sorted in tiny groups of 20 as she collected her bounty whenever she needed spending money.
Now I know that, unless I ignore them for five or six years, these little maples are the least of my worries. Sure, six or seven of them might implant themselves right next to the tomato plant, but a swift yank and they’re gone forever! Nope, the weeds that drive me crazy are much less dramatic, much more insidious, will never turn into trees but will simply plague me in their short green ubiquity. “We’re here, we’re green, get over it!” they seem to taunt me.
The tough weeds, the ones that I will spend my life pulling and re-pulling, never successfully, are the ones that spread underground, in their root system. Crabgrass. Bishop’s weed. Jerusalem Artichokes. (Bear in mind that a weed is just a plant in a place where you don’t want it! In some parts of the world, orchids are weeds!)
This year a friend took a turn at the horseradish plant I’ve hacked at every spring. “I think I got it all!” she declared enthusiastically. I just smiled and thanked her, confident because of past experience that she had not. Sure enough, though it’s gone from the area she dug—a huge four foot excavation—it’s now reappeared five feet away, in the middle of the strawberry patch. Root systems are invisible on the surface, and thus incredibly hard to eliminate.
Interestingly, pulling weeds yesterday led me to think about racism, and what’s going on in the US right now. Hundreds of hours of media attention have been given to the racist utterings of Paula Deen. Indeed, in our media, this story is the central narrative describing racism. From my view, Deen is a maple tree. Her racist practices, weedy as they may be, are isolated, have their own root system, can easily be plucked out. One second; yank; it’s over.
The racism that is harder to see, and harder to talk about, is spreading underground, evidence of its existence popping into view here and there without seeming connection, much harder to identify and eradicate. That’s the effects of the US Supreme Court eliminating the Voting Rights Act, which as far as I can tell is garnering no mainstream media coverage at all. Already in at least seven places, changes have been made to voting that will drastically affect people of color, and all of us, far more than the epitaphs of a random chef. And yet, I don’t even know the names of the people who are enacting these new ways of doing things. I’m not seeing interviews in mainstream media with them, or with the people affected by their decisions.
The problem with oppression is that so much of how it spreads and lives is invisible. It’s not about individual bigotry or what names individual people call each other. It’s about systems, connections of one thing to another that may not, on the surface of things, appear to come from the same roots.
That’s what I was thinking about while I was pulling up the weeds yesterday, anyway.
Horseradish, flourishing in the strawberry patch
Freedom . . . for Which?
I subscribe to the notion that separating out religion from other meaning-making systems is valid only for the sake of convenience. I agree with anthropologist Jonathan Z. Smith who says,
Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy. (Imagining Religion)
Allowing for humor and rhetorical overstatement, Professor Smith’s point is that we human beings exist in a matrix of symbolic systems that we separate out only for the sake of contemplating (and one hopes clarifying) them. In our minds and in our lives, the meanings are all mushed up, a puree or whip of meaning and purpose. Sometimes we question the powers that be in our lives; often we don’t.
Since Emanuel Kant, it has been clear to many people that human beings are meaning-making creatures and that the meanings we create exist in systems of narrative and symbol. In these systems, it’s us or them: we control them, or they control us. Whenever we aren’t paying attention, it is the latter.
Religions are one way human beings create meaning. A religion is a subset of narrative and symbol within a system. A system separated only for convenience and clarity.
Given this mushy matrix, removing what is conventionally called “religious” (or “spiritual”) from a personal or collective meaning-making system does not leave a hole or gap, but is rather an opening that other symbolic systems will fill.
If the god concept does not guarantee or underwrite meaning and purpose for a human being, something else will . . . perhaps even the insistence that life has meaning and purpose without the god concept! (Hence the “angry atheist” syndrome.)
Think for a moment how many people you know who actually take meaning and purpose from the god concept. My suspicion is that the concept actually functions as shorthand for something else in most human lives.
Theologian Gordon D. Kaufman gives his view, writing:
The central question for theology is not . . . primarily a speculative question, a problem of knowledge at all. Most fundamentally it is a practical question: How are we to live? To what should we devote ourselves? To what cause give ourselves? Put in religious terms: How can we truly serve God? What is proper worship? (Face of Mystery: Constructive Theology)
Put succinctly: “What’s your cause?”
Your cause might be survival. Approval. Family. World peace.
Often the god concept becomes the straw man who underwrites preexisting wishes and prejudices. The symbolic systems we live in are difficult to see and even more difficult to separate into understandable strands. Most difficult of all is putting all the strands back into a conceivable whole. Yet, finally, there is no religion, no politics, no self. Only the forest of symbols we wander in.
As Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”
Storms and Solidarity
All day Thursday I wore my Standing on the Side of Love t-shirt, through meetings with academia, organizers, congregants, and staff. A day of solidarity, a day of grief and a day of joy. Solidarity with the Texas State Senator Wendy Davis, who stood on the side of love (without eating, drinking, using the bathroom, speaking off-topic or leaning against any furniture) for all families for eleven hours. Solidarity with communities of color and anti-racist allies grieving the gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Solidarity with beloveds all across the nation celebrating the end of the mis-named Defense of Marriage Act and the first step in the passage of a national immigration reform bill.
It is a lot to hold, beloveds. And this doesn’t even begin to take in the illness of the beloved elder Nelson Mandela or the floods and the fires around the world. Or my dear friends who are moving away from New Orleans this week or the beloveds going through a second round of chemo.
This morning, I sat and watched a summer thunderstorm crash through my neighborhood and gave thanks for this precious moment of unscheduled time, a chance to be fully present to the storms within and without. May you, too, have time to bear witness to your own storms with gentleness and compassion. May you feel companioned by a host of thousands standing in solidarity with you on your life journey.
Beautiful Wordlessness
photo by Jenna Starr
I’ll try to keep this post short. Because that’s what I’ve been appreciating lately: few words. At almost 11 months old now, our Little Bean is right on the cusp of being able to say…something. And what I’m finding is that I’m savoring every moment of this Beautiful Wordless period.
Because she can communicate just fine. She points at anything and everything these days, to see what I’ll say she’s seeing, or to indicate that she “wants that,” or is going to go crawl after something. She grunts and grimaces very clearly when she is “all done” with what she’s eating, and she can (and sometimes does) also sign “all done.” As for the other end of the digestive cycle (forgive me, child), it’s very, very clear from her red grunting face when she’s pooping. When I put music on or pull out the vacuum, she claps her hands with excitement and gladness. She waves hello and goodbye when people come and go. And this week, when she’s ready to sleep, she just crawls right into her co-sleeper and lays her head down.
I’m also appreciating the beautiful wordlessness because it’s so unique. Every other relationship and interaction in my life involves words. Establishing a new working relationship, sorting out a misunderstanding, keeping up with e-mail, or even just reviewing a complex day takes so many words, so many sentences, so much effort. There is something truly sublime about how a baby at a certain age and developmental stage can do all those things, pretty much—connect with people, transition from one event to the next, express frustration or love, unwind from a day—all without words.
For several years before I got pregnant, I was not particularly enthused about babies. I used to shrug about them, really, thinking to myself specifically about all that crying about who-knows-what. The lack of words, which I associated with an inability to communicate, actually kind of concerned and worried me. What would I ever do with a crying baby? Well. I’ve had plenty of opportunity now to learn, to try things, and to sometimes just be present with her crying self. We’ve endured together. I’ve learned that usually the crying is about one of a handful of things, or she just needs to “get her cry out,” as we say around here. Which, honestly, don’t we all sometimes? But as mature adults it can take us hours of talking things through to accomplish the same result.
There is so much we all already communicate without words; I know this, but I like to remind myself of it. Just the hint of a smile or a glance away from the person in front of us can convey so much—I know, I read all about it once. For now, I love to watch our Little Bean playing, reaching for things, moving around our apartment, figuring out how to get from one place to another, discovering the world, all without words, touching everything, looking at me to see if I’ll shake my head no and say that blur of phrase I know she recognizes: “noooo, not-in-your-mouth,” before she moves on to the next thing and the next and the next. Discovering. Beautiful wordlessness.
Being with her on thunderstorming afternoons like the one we had today reminds me to appreciate every person in my life with whom I’ve shared wordless time. A hike along a long trail with 20 feet of sweet silence between us, a bowl of ice cream with only the sound of our clinking spoons after a long day, sitting on the front porch listening to birdsong, pulling weeds and picking sugar snap peas in the garden at twilight—whenever or wherever it’s been, thank you for that sweet silent time. I’m going to be looking to create more of that this summer.
May you also have some beautifully wordless time in your days.
Arguing Over the Light
All religions, all this singing, one song. Rumi
1.
A poet I met once,
Leslie Scalapino, said
“stay in continual
conceptual rebellion.”
She thought we must
“re-form” our minds,
“make it new, every day,”
as Pound put it, or fall
for the snake oil routines
of all the drummers and
askers around us.
“No” to con-vention,
she thought, checking
out of the general meeting
where the selling
is done is “yes” to life.
2.
Seeing things as they are,
Nagarjuna said, is the way
to wisdom. Finding first causes,
hooks on which to hang a hat,
is a fool’s game and leads
to distinctions–this is
not that. And on and on.
Until there’s only suffering.
We like listening
to the snake oil salesmen
throwing out distinctions
and offering attachments.
It’s entertaining.
It’s death.
3.
When an old man was asked
what held the earth up, he
said, “It sits on a turtle.”
And under the turtle?
“Another turtle.” And
under that one? “It’s turtles
all the way down,” the man
laughed. And it is. Turtles.
It’s turtles all the way down;
turtles all the way up;
turtles in every direction,
and turtles because there
is no direction. It’s turtles,
and we, too, are turtles.
Or one turtle.
Or snake oil.
Or light.
They Walk Into the Place Where (a reflection on immigration)
They walk into the place
carrying a bandana,
carrying a balaclava,
carrying a bordada
made by abuela.
They walk into the place
that burns the soles of huaraches,
the soles of tennis shoes
into twisted rubber.
They walk into the place
carrying an extra tee shirt.
An extra dress for a hija.
They walk into the land
carrying cheese crackers
and Red Bull and cheap cell phones.
They walk into the place
where money is god.
They walk into the place
where violence is all.
They walk into the
North American desert,
the border boondoggle,
the land of prisons for profit.
The walk into the land of
“you don’t understand.”
They walk into the land
where violence is the export.
They walk into the land where
loss the rule of the land.
http://www.tucsonsamaritans.org
Doing It All…A Little Bit.
I am going to have to go back to work eventually. I mean, two women and a baby can’t make ends meet on one part-time income in Washington D.C. forever, even with a lot of family and denominational support. I’ve been aware of this since before R was born, thinking about it, trying to figure out what form, type, schedule, and mode of working would fit me well with our new Lives With Baby. Before R was born, I was a full-time parish minister for 6 years, and for many of those years my ministry was my primary focus. I had a nice life, but I did work some significant portion of every day. I often dealt with e-mail until 11pm at night. I often had evening meetings, I often worked on Saturdays, every book or article that I read or movie that I saw usually fed into the coming Sunday’s sermon. I can’t yet fully imagine going back to full-time ministry and doing it in a totally different way than I did before.
And the character challenge for me is that I have tended to be, thus far in life, a pretty black-or-white person, all-or-nothing, doing something fully or not at all. Having a baby is nothing if not an opportunity for reorganizing one’s life and one’s relationship to work. These past 10 months, I’ve had a few moments here and there to think about what I’d like to be doing, if I could be doing anything at all, and though I’m well aware that it’s not unique, what I’d like to be doing is writing more. So as we start to approach the very significant first birthday of our Little Bean, I find myself wondering if I can learn some new things at even just a quarter of the speed that she does. Can I learn to do a little bit of a variety of things instead of just one thing full-bore? Can I learn to juggle with some semblance of grace some part-time ministry, some continued forays into personal and creative writing, some cooking of new and healthy recipes for myself and my family, some yoga and other exercise, some housecleaning, some keeping up with friends and family, some household & family plans and projects?
It doesn’t look like so much when I write it up as a list like that. It’s at 11pm at night, still, when I long to “call it a day” and there are still a dozen things on the day’s “must-do” list, it’s then that I feel overwhelmed and tired. Usually a good night’s sleep is enough to renew me for another overly-optimistic day, but not always. It’s so easy for me to feel like the best way to cope with the feeling of overwhelm is to do less, do less, do less. That’s been my way of coping for a long time. But what that has meant in the past was cutting out things that matter even more to me now. Like during my first year of ministry, while I was living alone and also juggling two other part-time jobs to make ends meet, I thought it was a revelation at the time to eliminate cooking. “Look at all the time I’ve saved!” I remember exclaiming to a friend—no shopping, no food prep, no dishes to clean up. I ate mostly microwaveable meals and things that don’t require cooking, like cheese-and-crackers. Well. You can imagine the outcome of that—I didn’t feel so great, I gained weight, and, frankly, I enjoy cooking, though it’s taken me years and years to really remember that and make time for it again. My all-or-nothing autopilot way of approaching things has meant eliminating, for stretches of time, lots of other things that nourish me as well—exercise, friendships, trips with family, reading for pleasure, writing creatively, gardening, outdoor activities, and so on.
So as I start to seriously contemplate stepping a toe back into the pool of workers, I want to broach my own take on what I think will help me find, even if elusive and fleeting, that notorious balance of work-family-play. I do and will strive to “do it all”…a little bit. I want to work on practicing contentment with doing things halfway. A little bit of exercise instead of the 8-month yoga-teacher-training class I signed myself up for three years ago now. A little bit of cooking new recipes instead of feeling like I need to cook each of my favorite cookbooks from beginning-to-end Julie-and-Julia style, in order to be thorough. And spending time with our beloved kid does not have to mean never leaving her with a babysitter to give me a break or allow us to go out for a night. It doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing in order to be meaningful, rewarding, and worthwhile. Um…right?
Here, In This Flow
The turtles go
out of their water
this time of year,
slow on roadways,
slow to mating
somewhere,
or slow to dates
with car tires.
No, there’s no
enlightenment–
there’s no one
there. (That’s
Buddhism 101
each day teaches.)
No, there’s no
virtue–
there’s no one
there. Only
being.
Lost in this
movement I rub
the cat’s head,
a black cat, a warm,
cloudy morning.
There’ no cat.
There’s no I. There’s
only purring,
this congeries
of movement
to movement–
to car tires,
to this ache
of loss
and fulfillment
in each instant.
There is
this flow
only to be
and savored.
