Drama
For months, we were barraged with a national narrative of a “razor tight” presidential race. (What kind of mixed metaphor is “razor tight” anyway?) But it turned out to be not so close after all. Indeed, some paid attention to voices that were saying all along it would be close, but not so very close, and that the outcome really wasn’t much in doubt. Now a budget deadline is being described as a “fiscal cliff.” Why is so much drama injected into these decisions?
The temptation to ratchet up the emotional intensity of any given situation is real. Perhaps we are motivated by boredom, by a desire to add a sense of passion to situations that would otherwise be marked by torpor and tedium. Perhaps drama makes us feel important, like what we are experiencing is special and powerful. These things speak to essential human needs. We need to feel engaged and interested in life. We need to feel like what we are experiencing and doing matters. These needs are not good or bad; what we do with them, though, can lead us toward nobility, beauty and decency, or down the road to aggression, confusion and chaos.
There are other motives for stirring up drama too. In the case of this most recent contest for the Oval Office, we were faced with a fairly humdrum set of choices. There was precious little talk and debate about climate change, poverty, or the fact that the United States has now been at war longer than at any other time in our history (even in Viet Nam, U.S. combat operations didn’t begin until 1965, ten years before the Paris peace accords), and hardly any discussion about the multiple deployments our armed forces have had to endure or the crisis in mental health that so many of our war veterans face. Talk of middle class tax cuts and natural gas reserves isn’t unimportant, but a deliberate avoidance of other pressing issues necessitates a collective emotional shutting-down. What to fill that void with? “The race is neck-and-neck!”
This is a spiritual issue. What we choose to give our attention to matters. What we choose to think about matters. Do we devote ourselves to ideas and feelings that lead to patience, rationality, open-mindedness, and generosity? Or do we focus on thoughts and emotions that point toward rage, self-righteousness, hysteria and parsimony? What kinds of choices are we demanding that our leaders make? And what choices do we ourselves make?
Follow Rev. Keely on Twitter @evanvwk.
Moving On
In a way, it feels like a magnified version of Christmas – the election, I mean. All of that lead-up, all the wishes and hopes for what you might get this year, all of that investment in trying to get just the right outcome…and then it’s done. The big reveal is complete. And we either did or did not get just exactly what we wanted, or some results feel like the best gift ever, and some are more gravely disappointing than an ugly sweater or a set of pickle forks.
But one way or another, those of us who have spent months obsessing over polls or calling strangers or arguing politics on Facebook need to find something else to do with our time. The decisions are made, the gifts unwrapped. There is only so long one can continue to fill the hours with election re-caps and analyses about how and why this or that demographic voted as they did. It’s time to move on.
Except that it isn’t. Moving on implies letting it go, moving forward as if nothing happened. It sounds like brushing one’s hands together and declaring mission accomplished if your side won, or grumbling off into the night if it didn’t. Neither of those stances really exemplifies the best of democracy or, for that matter, spirituality.
Far better to choose moving forward. If there were candidates or causes you were passionate about, you cared for a reason. You voted because you cared about the environment or liberty or education or marriage or any number of visions of the society that you hope to live in. And none of those visions is either accomplished or lost based on the people or propositions that got the most votes. All of those visions are still merely possibilities.
Every time an election rolls around we are told that it is the most important of our lifetimes, and that catastrophe is imminent if things don’t go our way. And that might be true. But it is also true that the work of the world, the pursuit of justice and freedom and health and wholeness has been continuing—imperfectly—for a very long time, and isn’t likely to be finished any time soon.
So take the time you need to celebrate or mourn the outcome of this most recent election, but don’t take too long. The work of clarifying your vision of the world you want to see, and the work of nudging the world toward that reality, is still very much in season.
How to Vote as an Act of Prayer
We’d love to cast a vote for compassion, freedom, justice. But they’re not on the ballot. So we can’t let the ballot reflect the extent we allow ourselves to envision the world we want to create. Hold that bigger vision in prayer or meditation before turning to the act of voting: a land where justice shall roll down like waters, and peace like an everflowing stream. A land where we bind up the broken and the captives go free. That’s the ballot our hearts and souls can cast, every day and with every activity.
But meanwhile, it’s time to vote! So the following are my ideas about how to turn that activity into a form of prayer.
Before your vote, do thorough research about all of the positions, even the tiniest. You may not love this research, but find organizations or friends who do love to do it and read what they wrote. Print up a sample ballot, mark it up, and stick it in your pocket. Clarify your mind. Scrambling around trying to sort through obscure races in the voting booth will take you right out of praying mode and into guilt and panic!
Walk into the polling place with gratitude that it is there. As the election judges check your name off the list, offer a moment of gratitude for them and their service. Offer a moment of gratitude for all of the check marks on that list, for all of the people in your neighborhood who take time to affirm their freedom and power to vote.
As you walk into the voting booth and set up your ballot, offer gratitude for all who have worked for your right to do so: founding fathers and suffragists, freedom riders and voting rights activists.
Now take out the ballot. Offer gratitude for all who would offer their time and their families and their lives for public service, whether you agree with any of their positions or not.
Look at the names on the ballot of the candidates you will vote for. As you check a candidate’s name, visualize that person’s strongest, most powerful, courageous and bold self. Vote for that candidate affirming the possibility of who they might become in office with strong community support and accountability.
As you check names, visualize yourself at your strongest, most powerful, courageous and bold self. Offer up gratitude for all of the civic leaders and organizations that will help you to be such a person. Commit to being a citizen activist. Cast an invisible vote for yourself beside each candidate’s name.
If you vote on community initiatives, take time to visualize all of the activists who worked to support freedom and justice about this initiative. As you check a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ box, imagine all of those affected by the initiative who vote with you. Especially imagine those who cannot vote, because they’re school kids, or their immigration status doesn’t yet allow them to vote, or because they served time for a crime, or for any other reason. Imagine your beloved ones who have died and won’t be casting a vote. Put them all into your pen and let them help you put in that check mark.
After you’re done voting, and despite the lines waiting, allow yourself a moment just to touch the ballot, to offer up a blessing for democracy itself, for fair elections, for the concept of one person one vote, for the lofty view of humanity which initially envisioned such a system, and which has expanded the notion of ‘personhood’ over the last several centuries.
Leaving the booth, smile at those around you, walk to the machine and insert your ballot, offering one last invisible bow of gratitude as you leave.
Democracy and faith
Religious faith consists of our most deeply held values. It is the summation of what is of greatest importance to us, our ultimate commitments. But those commitments are expressed in many different ways, through many different aspects of our lives; they have to be if those commitments really are ultimate commitments. So of course, our faith expresses itself in what we say, in the work that we do, in the things we like and dislike, and our faith absolutely finds its expression in the way we vote, in the causes we support and in the causes we oppose, and our faith absolutely finds its expression in how we feel about our political leaders. So to pretend that politics somehow isn’t relevant to religious life shows, I think, a very limited understanding of both religion and politics. Figuring out where religious liberalism ends and where political liberalism begins is a challenge for us, not because we’re shallow or confused or unwise, but because the line between political convictions and religious beliefs is actually very fine. Our beliefs, our convictions, our identities, our lives are not so easily compartmentalized. We do not cease to be religious when we step into the voting booth, and we don’t stop being political when we come to church. That’s as it should be. How we balance those things, as well as all the other things demanding our attention and provoking our interest — well, that’s the hard part.
Unitarian Universalists are a people of faith that celebrate the creative power of difference respectfully encountered, the redemptive and healing power of different people being truly themselves and sharing of those true selves with others. Yet we know that we cannot and should not expect to accept everything. We should never make a place in our religious homes for abusive and destructive behavior; we can’t be truly ourselves unless we trust one another, and that means we must impose appropriate, healthy boundaries. And of course, no one religious community is going to feel like home to every single person who visits. Some will walk among us briefly and move on in search of something else. But if we actively exclude anyone, we had better make sure we understand how doing so is an expression of who we yearn to be as a religious people. The idea that if we are going to worship together and pray together and be together as a religious community, we must therefore also vote in the same way shows a very limited understanding of what it means for us to be in community. This is not because our political views are unimportant, or irrelevant to religious life; they are important, and they are relevant. It’s because the foundation of our faith lies in the creative possibilities of being transformed and liberated and healed by constructively encountering difference. If we insist upon unanimity, and explicitly or tacitly exclude anyone who falls outside the self-appointed majority, it can only be because we have very little confidence in the religious faith that supposedly binds us together.
Politics is not often conducive to reconciliation, respect, and mutual understanding. We get the message again and again, loud and clear, that there is no middle ground. On any issue at any given time, there are winners and there are losers. You’re for capital punishment or you’re against it. You’re pro-choice or you’re pro-life. Your state is red or it’s blue. Well, we know that the reality is far more complex. And we know that democracy is messy and inefficient and imperfect; it’s an unending series of processes, and we’d just better learn to live with it, because Winston Churchill was quite right when he supposedly quipped that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.” As a religious people committed to love and forgiveness and reconciliation, committed to mutual understanding and respect and being enriched rather than threatened by difference, and yes, as a religious people committed to democracy, the question for us is how we are to participate authentically in the often divisive processes of democracy while still maintaining our religious commitments.
We have a vision for our nation and our world. It is a vision of a world in which different people can come together and learn from one another rather than fearing and hating each other. Our religion calls us to practice that among ourselves, and to bring that healing, saving message to the world. We can only do so if we encounter our own differences with respect and honesty and love.
Voting as Spiritual Practice, as a Neighborly Act…
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
~ Wendell Berry ~
On this eve of a national election, so many conversations begin with “well, depending on who wins the election, …” In our representative democracy, a lot does depend on who wins elections.
Because of how the presidential election is decided, via the electoral college, it can feel as if your vote doesn’t count, especially if you tend to vote the opposite slate from the majority of voters in your state. I have heard more than a few people wonder out loud if they will even vote this year “since their vote won’t count anyway.”
What is imperative to remember during these bouts of feeling disenfranchised is that your local votes also change the world. It matters who sits on the city council seat, who becomes judge, whether that change to the city charter or the state constitution becomes law. It matters in daily life to real people.
Detention policies, educational opportunities, the right to marry – all of this is decided by voting at the local level. The roots of change have always been local. So read up about the local issues. Discuss them with your peers. And then vote, if you can, my friends. Think of it as a spiritual practice: Read, Reflect, Act.
Our votes matter very much to our neighbors and our selves. May this weekend be a time of spiritual practice for you as you prepare to vote for the sake of your local community next week.
Masks — A Poem for Halloween
Masks
What will you wear for Halloween?
The trees are changing faces, and the
rough chins of chestnut burrs
grimace and break to show their
sleek brown centers. The hills
have lost their mask of green and grain,
settled into a firmer geometry
of uncolored line and curve.
Which face will you say is true—
the luminous trees or the branches underneath?
The green husks of walnuts, the shell within,
or the nut curled intimately inside,
sheltered like a brain within its casing?
Be careful with what you know,
with what you think you see.
Moment by moment faces shift,
masks lift and fall again, repainted
to a different scene. It means,
the cynics say, there is no truth,
no constant to give order to the great equation.
Meanwhile, the trees, leaf by leaf,
are telling stories inevitably true:
Green. Gold. Vermillion. Brown.
The lace of veins remaining
as each cell returns to soil.
Lynn Ungar’s book of poetry, Bread and Other Miracles, is available at www.lynnungar.com
A Prayer in Stormy Weather
Like many people in North America, today I am watching the weather maps anxiously, wondering if the people I love in various places will be safe and sound. Though I am personally far from any swirling images, I wonder whether people I know, and those I have never met, will have a warm place to sleep and food to eat.
Extreme weather is such a clear reminder that we’re not in charge. Sure, people can and do buy batteries, generators, milk and bread, if they can afford to. People go vote early and take in their lawn furniture. People move to a home in a safer place if they have the opportunity to. They adjust their schedules, confer with their neighbors, stay close to pronouncements from public officials. But underneath all of this activity, what is fundamentally clear in these times is that people are not in charge of our planet.
Knowing that we’re not in charge is scary, as are these major weather systems. And yet there is fundamentally something positive about it as well. Someone tweeted today that Hurricane Sandy is saying, “Ignore global climate change in the debates, will you?” The truth behind that humor is that global climate change doesn’t care whether or not it is mentioned. It is on its own trajectory, as all weather is.
So, I pray that everyone is safe this week, that all have food to eat and a place to stay dry. I pray that houses and freeways, libraries and airports are not damaged. I pray that these storms pass over and quickly become nothing but a distant memory of another calamity that did not befall us.
But I also pray that the alertness we are all feeling, the clarity that we’re not in charge, the realization that we need to look out for everyone and hope that they will also look out for us, stays in place whether Hurricane Sandy blows by or hits land. These are life-affirming pieces of awareness, most vivid in times of crisis but useful every day of our lives.
For those of us in the U.S., it feels particularly important, in these last days before the election, to realize how much we are all in it together. Whatever the slogans of parties and candidates may be, in times like this, we all need each other to make it through—the practices of various parts of various levels of government, the generosity of business and churches and civic organizations, the ingenuity and initiative of indviduals.
May we all be safe, and may we all remember how much we need one another in these times, and in all times.
What God Intends
Let’s be fair, here. I’m sure that Richard Mourdock did not in any way mean to defend rape when he said that he thinks that God intends for babies to be born who are conceived through rape. I would hope that no one could believe in a God who intends for women to be raped. But I’m sure there are brave women who have borne their rapist’s baby, whether that rapist is a husband, boyfriend or stranger, and who regard their child as something precious that managed to grow from a terrible beginning. Such is the amazing resilience that can come to the human heart, and wouldn’t God be present in that beautiful redemption?
But let’s get real here for a moment. One could certainly imagine a God who could redeem even something as terrible as rape through the love of an innocent child. But when did it become the government’s job to determine on God’s behalf that this is the necessary outcome? For every woman who has chosen to keep and love a child conceived through rape there are probably many more who choose a morning after pill or abortion to end a pregnancy that they never wanted, and which would be an intolerable life-long symbol of a great violation. Why would you assume that God is not in that decision as well? Why wouldn’t God be there at the side of a woman as she struggles to reclaim her life and her strength and her ability to move forward in the world? Is God not in that woman’s choice to restore her own integrity and wholeness as she understands it?
I won’t presume to speak for God, but I will tell you what I think. When a woman is raped, God’s body is torn as her body is torn. When a fetus is aborted, some piece of God’s potential is lost. But God’s potential is infinite, and a woman reclaiming her life is no less a part of God’s potential. Indeed, every moment when every person chooses life, whatever that might mean to that person at the time, is a part of the potential of God unfolding.
It isn’t the job of politicians to decide which bits of potential God finds most precious. It is the job of each us, day by day and minute by minute, to decide what will constitute life more abundant for ourselves and the world we inhabit, and to act as the body of God in living out that choice. The role of the government is to support those decisions or get out of the way.
We Do Not Fear People Whose Stories We Know…
Back before the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon was attacked by plane, before there was a US Department of Homeland Security, way back when ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) was known as the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service,) – a lifetime ago and yet still less than fifteen years have passed – I served as a Legal Tech for an immigration law firm in Washington, DC. I was a twenty-something white woman, with southern working class roots and a damned fine Midwestern liberal arts college education, figuring out if I wanted to go to law school.
In addition to filing forms at the law firm, I was a narrative gatekeeper. In search of asylum, an HIV-waiver, a work visa? Sit down in that chair and tell your story to me, in all its intimate and gory details. My job was to take your story and craft a narrative that would compel government officials to consider your case favorably (or at all, in some cases).
It was extraordinary work. I met families from Iran, the Philippines, Malaysia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the United Kingdom, Sri Lanka – from all over the world. Each had an extraordinary story – some that were exciting, some that made my stomach turn, some that broke my heart open. After just a few months of working with the firm, I added Tums® to my requested office supply list and I went through them by the bottle.
I was angry that any human being had to share the excruciating details of their torture and their trauma to a recent college graduate and pray that she told their story well enough for an officer or a judge to grant them grace. I was angry at how much harm was inflicted by my country on people who had already suffered much harm in their country. Soon I figured out that I did not want to grow up to be a lawyer. I did not want to risk growing immune to the power of these stories or becoming complicit in the process. What I wanted to do was work for systems change.
Many years later down the winding road of my life, I found myself standing in an ICE office for hours. I was bonding an immigrant – the friend of a friend of a friend, ripped away from his family and hauled out to detention in rural Louisiana.
Memories of dozens of stories from the cases I had worked on flooded over me as I waited in the reception space during the long stretches between each step of the ICE process.
I remembered the proud father terrified that his extremely Westernized daughter would be stoned to death if deport to their home country.
I remembered the gay man who had seen his friends killed for daring to hold hands and who had fled his homeland in fear of his own life.
I remembered the woman raped by an elder of her church and denied the letter of good standing that would have allowed her to become a citizen.
I remembered the sweet faced Latino youth who was infected with HIV while in detention in the US and then denied status because he was HIV-positive.
I remembered their stories and the stories of so many others who struggled to create a better life for themselves and their families here in these United States.
Because I know their stories, immigration will always be a moral issue for me. Because I know their stories, I will not buy into the dehumanizing stereotypes being peddled to me and my fellow patriots. Because I know their stories, I will stand – in an ICE office, in the pulpit, in the voting booth, in the interwebs – on the side of love. I invite you to stand on the side of love, too.
Fireworks
Truth be told, I don’t feel like writing a blog this morning. I just feel like watching Katy Perry and an 11 year old autistic girl named Jodi DiPiazza perform Perry’s song, “Fireworks,” over and over. Having watched it about eight times now—and forced everyone who has been near my Iphone or computer to do the same these past couple of days—I still get weepy each time and feel as if I’ve seen a glimpse of The Holy. (And yes, thanks for asking, I did donate money, too.)
The people I’ve forced to watch it include my own Very Sophisticated Sixteen-Year-Old, who, when instructed, “Come and watch this and cry with me!” sneered when I put it on: “Katy Perry? Seriously, you think Katy Perry could make me cry?” –having listened to Katy Perry Years Ago and all!—but then pleaded ‘something in my eye’ midway through the video. I was glad, because I had posted the link on my facebook page with the words, “Call 911 if this doesn’t make you cry. Your heart is not beating anymore.” Whew. #Notatotalfailureasamother.
I love knowing that all over the country, people of every political persuasion are weeping to this video. I think watching it helps us to remember why we’re on the planet, and who we are as a people, and that it’s not about dueling ideologies. It’s about helping each other ‘ignite the light and let it shine’—helping each other to flourish, to shine brightly as fireworks, no matter who we are.
“Do you ever feel like a plastic bag, drifting through the wind?” Jodi sings to us, and those of us who did not learn the lyrics Years Ago are knocked over by the message and the messenger and how completely they merge. The crowd roars delight, and we see this amazing, brave, child receive the cheers completely in her body and take a deeper breath from the transmission.
“Boom, Boom, Boom, Even brighter than the moon, moon, moon” we watch Katy singing to Jodi, describing the beauty right before her eyes, love pouring off of her whole body right into that child, overflowing, and pouring into us as well.
And, how much do we need that message ourselves right now? Dealing with her autism, Jodi and her family have clearly overcome obstacles most of us can only imagine. But which of us hasn’t felt “like a house of cards, one blow from caving in?”
How much does this country need to believe, as we wade through the rubble of what’s left of our common life together, “If you only knew what the future holds/ after a hurricane comes a rainbow”?
This song’s power has been making me think that we’ve got the communications thing all screwed up. It is with humility as a preacher/ writer that I say music is exponentially more powerful than words. No spoken message could have millions of us watching this video over and over, drinking in its energy as if we have been wandering in the desert for too long and stumbled onto an oasis.
Just thinking: Maybe instead of, or in addition to, political ‘debates,’ which are increasingly less about policy and more about posturing anyway, we should have “sing offs” before the elections. Let artists and musicians sing out their dreams of who we could be, and let the people decide which candidate is more likely to take us there.
But for now, we have Katy and Jodi to help us remember. And I’m grateful for that! (Want to watch with me now?)
