Paying Attention Again
“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake. . . .Only that day dawns to which we are awake.” Henry David Thoreau
Last June, I posted about paying attention, and I am writing about it again today. Have you heard the sayings that psychotherapists and ministers share what they need to hear and to learn? I know that when I am awake and paying attention life is better. I am more alive. Often, I send my consciousness into the future. I worry about my to do list or think about what we might do next year. Sometimes I let my mind be so busy that I forget to eat. I might drop things or have small accidents. My husband and daughter like to tease me about the time that I spilled coffee on our kitchen ceiling! When I do pay attention to this very moment, I am more present and more alive. With awareness, I can make conscious choices and feel more peaceful.
In my congregation on Sunday, we each meditated with a small river stone. I asked folks to really observe the stone, to see its colors, and to feel its textures and its weight. I asked them to truly pay attention to the small and simple stone. Then I asked them to allow the stone to share its wisdom or to send them a message. I asked them to remember that the stone is part of the holiness of the universe, part of the interdependent web of existence just as we are.
Then I asked them to call a word or phrase from the stone into the room. Here is what they said:
Slow down
Hope
Worn by water
Balance
Peace
Rest
Energy
Friend
Faith
Lasting
Exquisite
Smooth and easy
Solid
Antiquity
Character
Warm
Refuge
Just right
From slowing down and paying attention to a simple object, people became aware of beauty and strength. Through that focus, some of them noticed what they needed in their own lives. There is nothing magical in this. It is simply slowing down and paying attention.
May you be awake and aware in your life.
Seeds
The cattails I brought you
have burst long ago
& sent their fluff
seeding wherever
it was you threw them.
If only I may let go
so flagrantly
as the cattails,
as you;
as wind;
the past;
the seeds.
When there is too much to do…
Some things go undone…
See y’all next week!
Hats & Maps
1. (in the thick)
Once an argument could cut
like a two-edged sword. But
that’s old hat. The headgear
now is helmets. And arguments
cut like shrapnel, every way.
2. (in the city)
I like it that my map
talks to me in a gentle
voice while I drive. Not
like we fallible persons
at all. When I lose
direction, she walks me
back. Recalculates
calm as I swear and
cringe into another
lane to turn around.
3. (in the boonies)
I send nurses now
to find my father
on the farm he so
doesn’t want to leave.
“The GPS,” I warn,
“won’t find it. And
the road signs have
all been shot.” That’s
just the beginning
of an explanation.
4. (in the hat trick)
I strap on my Kevlar,
wishing for a newer
model. I strap on my
sword, knowing it
can never cut enough
ways. When the map
stops speaking; when
every weapon fails;
then, sometimes, the
sharp edges rest,
and the old aches
allow a deep breath.
Collective Joy!
It is Carnival time in New Orleans!
From now until Ash Wednesday, there will be beaucoup parades, parties, and costumes…While February 12th will be “just another Tuesday” in much of the country, here it will be Mardi Gras – the final day of communal revelry before the ascetic season of Lent begins. It wasn’t until I moved to New Orleans that I actually understood the season of Lent. While it may be perfectly obvious for some, it took the context of Carnival, culminating in Mardi Gras, for me to truly appreciate the gift of Lent. A season of contemplation and prayer after a season of glorious communal excess now makes perfect sense.
But first – the glorious communal revelry, the collective joy…
While Lent encourages us to turn inward for reflection, sometimes taking our humanity to task, Carnival gives us the resources to accept and even celebrate our humanity- mine, yours, that stranger’s. Carnival reminds us, in the wisdom of ecotheologian Thomas Berry, that “the universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not of objects to be exploited.”
In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich proclaims:
“While hierarchy is about exclusion, festivity generates inclusiveness. The music
invites everyone to the dance; shared food briefly undermines the privilege of
class. As for masks: They may serve symbolic, ritual functions, but to the extent
that they conceal identity, they also dissolve the difference between stranger and
neighbor, making the neighbor temporarily strange and the stranger no more
foreign than anyone else. No source of human difference or identity is immune to
the carnival challenge… At the height of the festivity, we step out of our assigned
roles and statuses—of gender, ethnicity, tribe, and rank—and into a brief utopia
defined by egalitarianism, creativity, and mutual love.”
Collective joy tells us that we are enough – that we are all enough, that we belong to the wonder of creation. As Rev. Sam Trumbore once prayed:
Ash Wednesday will arrive soon enough…
Now, we feast on the abundance of life
The delight of hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting and touching
In a celebration that unites
the diversity of all races, classes and faiths
at the common table of fellowship…
May it be so.
Happy Mardi Gras, beloveds!
Beyonce at Half-Time
OK, I will admit that, in spite of living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was pretty uninvested in the Super Bowl. Just really not a sports fan. I did, however, find it entertaining to track my friends’ Facebook comments throughout the trouncing, the power outage, the rally and the 49ers eventual defeat. But what interested me the most were the comments on Beyoncé’s half-time show. Some people thought it was one of the most incredible performances they had ever seen. Some people hated it. Some people thought that she was the embodiment of feminine power. Some people thought she was an emblem of sexual exploitation. Some people were offended by the booty shaking and some posted articles which declared that seeing Beyoncé as sexualized was in the prurient mind of the beholder.
Here’s what I know: when I picked up my 14-year-old daughter from a Super Bowl party that evening, it was Beyoncé’s performance, not the game, that had her aglow. She dragged me to the computer so that I could see the performance for myself on YouTube. Here’s what I saw. There the singer was onstage at the biggest homage to testosterone in the nation. She was up there with her all-female band and women dancers and the gal with flames shooting out of her guitar, having, as far as anyone could tell, the time of her life. Yes, she was powerful, receiving the homage of all those roaring fans, all those hands reaching out to her. And yes, she couldn’t have been more obviously, writhingly sexual. Which was, at moments, a bit jaw-dropping as something to watch with my teenage daughter. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder what exactly there is to object to about her hip-swinging, hair-flinging sexiness.
As I have engaged in discussion around the issues surrounding abortion, I’ve heard from a number of people who disapprovingly regard abortion as a way for a woman to shirk responsibility for her sexual choices, to have sex without having to live with the consequences. I have heard from people who are quick to remind those who will listen that sex is for procreation, and that having sex without being willing to take on procreation is a misuse of sexuality, a sexual sin. If that’s your opinion, then Beyoncé’s rampantly sexy performance would be repugnant.
But my religious tradition doesn’t say that. My religious tradition says that sexuality, in its variety of expression— bodies, in their variety of expression—are good and holy. Yes, sexuality can be abused, and sexual expression that causes physical or emotional damage to another person is wrong. But what is sinful is not the sexuality, but rather the abuse. And as far as I can tell, Beyoncé was hurting no one, being hurt by no one, having a grand old time being beautiful and talented and scantily clad in front of all those people.
But is that what I want my daughter to see? Is that the role model I want my African-American teenager to look toward? Wouldn’t I rather than she aspire to be like Michelle Obama when she grows up? Sure I would. The First Lady is brilliant and classy and refined. She is Athena, the goddess of reason. But my daughter isn’t. My daughter is a dancer, a performer, a little bit wild. She is athletic, embodied, more Artemis than Athena. When she sees Beyoncé she sees a massively talented Black woman surrounded by fans, surrounded by fire, putting her whole self out there in a glorious, ecstatic show. That’s what my daughter wants for herself—not the rigors of Harvard Law School, but the joy and the passion that she experiences when dancing. She’s a person who dwells more in her body than her head, and while school tells her all day every day that her way of being is a failing, Beyoncé put it all on magnificent display.
One day, far sooner than I will like, my daughter will make the connection between the pleasure and power of her body in dancing and the pleasure and power of her body as a sexual being. And it will be my job to make sure that she understands about protecting herself and others, about making decisions that are right for her and not just what someone else wants, about keeping her head when making choices for her body. But it will not be my job to squelch her fire or her passion or her pleasure in her big, strong, beautiful body. And if that’s what she takes away from Beyoncé at half-time, it’s OK by me.
Recipe for Grief
I didn’t have grieving on my agenda this morning. Does this happen to you? Isn’t it often a surprise, when you turn the corner and run into grief, like an old friend you had almost forgotten you knew, didn’t expect to see here of all places?
I was just thinking that making a blueberry cake would work better than blueberry pancakes to feed people who wake up and walk through in stages, over many hours, on a Saturday. Almost randomly, I picked up the closest cookbook I could find, to see if my hunches about measurements were more or less correct—I’m not a big recipe person.
That cookbook turned out to be one of those made by a church. In this case my childhood church. In this case, they made it after I was away at college and could not have cared less.I had never used this cookbook; I had no emotion invested in it; it was just the closest one that I grabbed. (I brought several cookbooks to my house when my father died last year and the old family house was shut down. No more pretense that these cookbooks would ever be used, as they hadn’t really, since my mother died in 2002.)
But it wasn’t my mother’s name or some special family recipe in the book that had my forehead suddenly mashed on the butcher block counter, overcome with loss. It was that parade of mothers—if there were men who contributed to this cookbook, I didn’t get that far—who I knew and loved and trusted throughout my growing up years. It was those familiar names, some for women I knew well, many just the last names of kids I went to Sunday School with. So many of them are dead now. Almost all the names I recognized belong to dead women.
When I think of the legacy of “The Greatest Generation,” I tend to think of the men, going stolidly into war against the Nazis, working long hours without complaint, mowing the lawn, participating in voluntary organizations. This cookbook walked me squarely into the legacy of that same generation of women. Women like my mother, the generation who parented ungrateful kids like me through “The Generation Gap” and the feminist movement and all kinds of other liberation movements. Women, so often bewildered, watching everything they assumed they would hand to their daughters and sons change before their eyes and under their feet.
My mother studied to be a teacher, but she, and the other women lucky enough to go to college, also took Home Economics classes. They learned to balance not only nutrition but color on the plate. They assumed without question that their inevitable husbands and eventual children would be the center of their lives. My mother taught me how to iron a shirt, sew, cook, can and preserve, set a beautiful table, host a party, chat with anyone. She taught me early on that motherhood would be the greatest endeavor I might possibly undertake. She taught me about Susan B. Anthony’s time in jail, too, and memorized Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman” speech with me. But all with an apron on.
This morning, head down on the soft wood of the kitchen counter, I felt the absence of that place she and the other women of her generation held. I felt the grief of the loss of those souls for whom making things right for the family was always the highest goal.
I was not sobbing with regret. I don’t wish a single thing were different. My mother and I ended her time on earth together with pure sweetness—me caring for her as tenderly as she had for me in my earliest days. My life choices have been mine, and even if made clumsily sometimes, they have been true. No, this was a stream of grief, running down from melted snow high in the mountains, pure and simple. People die, whether you know them and love them or not. No matter how lovely. Generations relinquish their truths to the new ones that rise. But, every now and then, seeing a long forgotten name over “Grandma Ruth’s lemon bars,” you remember.
Pro-Life/Pro-Choice
Let’s start the conversation here. Everybody is pro-life. OK, everybody who is not Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters. Honestly, do you know a single person who would describe themselves as pro-death? All of us are pro-life, and none of us is infinitely pro-life. All of us value some lives more than others. Is there a person living who feels the same way about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. as they do about the assassination of Osama bin Laden? Have we had the kind of public mourning for children killed in drone strikes in Afghanistan as for the children gunned down in Newtown? If you had to make a choice (and you do) between feeding your own kids and feeding kids in Libya, is there any question who gets fed? We all are pro-life, and we all put more weight on some lives than on others.
Yes, a fetus is a human life, and if you have been trying for that pregnancy, then nothing could be more precious. And yes, the human body routinely self-aborts fertilized eggs, and unless we are trying to get pregnant no one really thinks of that as even sad, let alone tragic. When we say we treasure life, we mean that we treasure the lives that we choose to cherish.
We make religious assertions: “Life is sacred.” “We affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” And those assertions matter. But we are fooling ourselves if we think that those affirmations have easy and obvious applications in the real world. Some people are pro-life, but in favor of the death penalty. Some people are pro-life, but support sending troops into combat. Some people are pro-life, but believe that people need access to guns so that they can defend themselves with lethal force. Some people are pro-life, but favor the right of terminally ill people to choose the means and timing of their death. Some people are pro-life, but favor access to safe and legal abortions. In the real world absolutes fall apart pretty quickly.
So what then are we to do? Choose life. Knowing that the way you choose life might be different than the choice someone else makes. Because, really, all of us are pro-choice. We all want to be free to follow the dictates of our conscience. Everyone wants the autonomy to examine the world in which we live and our place in it, to make the best of what we find, to create love and prosperity and justice. Everyone wants to find their way to life more abundant—for themselves, their family, their friends.
For one woman choosing life might mean choosing to carry a pregnancy to term even though she knows that she can’t raise that child, choosing instead to place the baby for adoption. For another woman choosing life might mean having an abortion so that she can finish her education and build a decent life for herself—and potentially for children she might choose to have in the future. Both are choices. Both are life-affirming.
The job of religion is not to set out false absolutes, declaring that the church has the capacity to decide which lives matter the most. The job of religion is to call us to continually examine what it means to choose abundant life, and to make life-affirming choices. And then the job of religion is to remind us that we must continually expand our vision of which lives matter, of who deserves to have life abundant.
Faith to Live, Faith to Die
I spent yesterday with an almost 90 year old woman I’ve loved for decades, just home from the hospital following congestive heart failure.
A cracker jack team of doctors, as well as a bevy of loving friends and family members, have surrounded her all week, attempting to figure out exactly what is causing her heart to weaken and not pump efficiently. They’re talking about medicine and diet and possible surgery.
She’s clear, herself, about what’s going on: “I’m old,” she says calmly. “My heart is old.” She seems completely at peace with what will happen next, be it more tests and fussing, be it, ultimately, drawing her last breath on this planet sooner rather than later. I can see from her strength that she won’t do anything she doesn’t want to do, but she isn’t troubled by what other people need to do around her either.
Her devout Catholic faith brings her great comfort now, as it has every day of her life.
The priest has been to see her at her hospital bedside, performed what she says is no longer called last rites but “prayer for the sick” and told her, “Your sins are all forgiven now, so don’t mess it up!” She twinkles when she repeats this.
Her daughter, who practices Vipassana Buddhist meditation, spoke to her in awe about her clarity and peace. “Mom, this is what meditation is all about – developing the kind of serenity that you have, no matter what happens! How did you get this way?” to which she simply smiled, and shrugged, as if it were nothing. Just another day in a quietly heroic life.
I’ve watched a number of people meet their deaths over the years, or face sickness and old age, and each time I see someone exhibiting this kind of grace, I pray that I will be like them. I pray that I won’t be fussing over the annoyance of an oxygen tank or telling people to get out of the room and give me some space, but that, rather, I will welcome the presence of others with this kindness and acceptance.
My own mother was a mentor. A lifelong atheist, she told me in her dying days, “They say there are no atheists in foxholes, but here I am. I’m not afraid to die!” Her courage and strength in her final days caused everyone at the hospice to comment on her faith. This seemed a little ironic to me, so I told my Mom what those around her were saying.
She responded, “Faith is how you live, not what you believe.” And when a hospice nurse started praying over her in the name of Jesus, my Mom waved away my scowling reaction. “It’s for her, honey,” she said quietly. “It makes her feel better. I don’t mind her prayers at all.” I, ostensibly a person of faith, pray I won’t be snarling at the well-meaning nurse by my side about church/ state separation.”
Watching these beloved women, and so many others, meet their final days, tells me that faith is indeed how you live, not what you believe. Their beliefs couldn’t be further from each other. And yet, for each of them, as for the rest of us, how they’ve lived, and how they die, is truly faith in action.
Guns: Relationship Status: “It’s complicated.”
I first held a gun when I was eight years old. One of my uncles let me fire his new pistol. I still remember the strain of trying to hold the heavy gun steady so he wouldn’t think I was too weak to try it. All these years later, I vividly remember the incredible rush of power that washed over me as I fired that pistol.
I was eight years old and I held in my hand a tool that could spit fire and knock a beer can off a fence several yards away. I was eight years old and I held in my hand a tool that could have ended the life of the uncle who handed it to me. It is difficult to articulate how much power surged through my little being. I swear I heard the Scots heritage in my mutt-blood swim screaming to the surface with a mighty roar…
Nine years later, the older brother of the uncle who first handed me a gun died after being shot by another family member. Not long after that, the father of my classmate was killed while responding to a domestic violence call. The man who killed him was devastated to realize, once he descended from his pain-killer induced high, that he had killed not only a police officer, but a friend.
Four years ago, my partner called me at the hospital where I was working as a chaplain to let me know that he was not one of the two white men shot to death a block away from my house (where a heroin deal apparently turned deadly). Shortly before that, I had watched an ambulance come claim the body of a sixteen year old boy, victim of a drive by shooting at the other end of my street.
I have lived in the rural life and the urban life and what each had in common was:
- a sense of powerlessness about how the world is run and
- deaths by firearms.
Our country (and colonial powers around the world) has a history of taking away a population’s weapons and property (i.e. indigenous peoples, Japanese-American relocation camps, mass incarceration through a government-created drug war…) when people in power decide to do so. How then, to trust that you really will be safer by giving up your guns?
Christian social justice activist and writer Jim Wallis proclaims:
Former assumptions and shared notions about fairness, agreements, reciprocity, mutual benefits, social values, and expected futures have all but disappeared. The collapse of financial systems and the resulting economic crisis not only have caused instability, insecurity, and human pain; they have also generated a growing disbelief and fundamental distrust in the way things operate and how decisions are made.
I confess that I am grateful to finally live in a gun-free home, I freak out just a bit when even toy guns are pointed at me or anyone I love, and I would love to trust that I could walk through my neighborhood at night without hearing gunfire. But I was also here in New Orleans when the National Guard rolled through with their Humvees and their guns and I know what it feels like to be occupied by a military force – first denied access to my home and property, then patrolled and subject to interrogation once home again.
My faith and my lived experience teaches that life is rarely an either/or proposition. In this interdependent web of all existence, we are all connected, tangled together in a tapestry of history and mystery. It’s complicated.
It is hazardous to talk glibly about gun control unless we talk about creating a nation that is welcoming, safe, and empowering for all people. This conversation is complex and deserves real discernment, not sound bites and bullet points.
Guns do not provide actual safety. They provide a sense of power. [Bear witness: our government is not at all ready to give up its guns, its sense of power.]
I suspect that if we are going to end gun violence, we will have to address the collective needs of all – urban and rural, white and people of color, individuals and institutions – who feel powerless without their guns.
