The Losing Team
Another election has come and gone. Some people, presumably, are delighted, while others are filled with gloom. OK, it was mostly gloom on my Facebook page. Maybe you worked really hard on behalf of a candidate you truly believed in, and that candidate didn’t win. Maybe the one who did win is the worst kind of corrupt imbecile, totally in debt to the moneyed interests. Maybe you feel like the country is going to hell in a hand basket, and we are all at the mercy of people who think that Ebola is washing our shores on a wave of Black people and climate change is a hoax invented by scientists who want to further their careers.
It could be that we are doomed, and if your plans for this week should happen to include an adult beverage or a childhood comfort food, well I wouldn’t blame you.
But eventually we always come round to the question of what now. Now that the election is over and we get a break from the ads. Now we know just how vehemently we might disagree with our neighbors or family members. Now that the whole cycle of hope and possibility and things not ever living up to their potential starts over again. Now what?
The same thing as always. Sorry, but I don’t have a better answer. Now we make dinner and pet the cat and read the kids a story and decide what to wear to work tomorrow. Now we look for a job that will pay the bills or an apartment that won’t break the bank or a date who won’t turn out to be a complete waste of time. Now we call our friends to comfort them or be comforted. Now we wait to hear back from the doctor or we wait to hear whether there will be an indictment from Ferguson. We visit the rest home, we take the children to soccer or to dance, we cry or look at videos of cats.
Maybe we remember other elections that swept us up in a tide of hope or despair, and we remember how after those elections we kept on doing what we do. I’m in no way saying that elections don’t matter, or that it’s not worth being deeply engaged in the political process. The government sets policy, and those policies affect really important things like who gets deported, who gets health care, whether people can manage to live on minimum wage, what efforts are made to combat climate change, what kinds of transportation we have access to, whether there is funding for research, what is supported and not supported in our schools, and on and on and on.
Politics matters. Having a voice matters. Speaking up for your hopes matters. But it doesn’t necessarily matter in the way that we would like. Paying attention and voting and making calls and writing letters and campaigning door to door doesn’t always result in the person or policy we support winning. And, sadly, even if they do win it rarely means that everything is rosy and the world is organized the way we would organize it.
Whether we get what we want is not what defines our efforts. We are called to care, and to love and to work for justice. Whether or not things go our way at any given moment. I used to serve a church in the same neighborhood as Wrigley Field in Chicago. Although I am not, myself, a baseball fan, I learned a lot from my Cub-loving congregants. The Cubs lose. Everyone knows that. Historically, currently, the Cubs are just not what you would call a winning team. Which doesn’t stop the fans from rooting for their beloved Cubbies, year in and year out.
You love what you love, and you go out and yell on its behalf, following the statistics or the players or whatever markers of success or defeat you might have. You show up and cheer. When your team wins you get a parade. But when your team loses you have the opportunity to gather with your friends and mourn the losses and plot how next year will be better.
Or maybe two years from now, when elections roll around in 2016.
A Whole Heart: Remembering Pete Seeger
For the last couple of days my Facebook feed has been full of tributes to the late, great Pete Seeger—as well it should be. A genuinely remarkable man, Seeger spent his long life seeking justice, fighting oppression, telling the truth as he understood it, even in situations where the truth was most unwelcome. (If you haven’t seen the transcript of when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, do yourself a favor and read it.) He stood in front of the crowds to protest war, and he sailed up and down the Hudson River fighting pollution. But more than that, he had a gift for bringing people together, for turning a crowd into a community through the power of song.
He was extraordinary, but here’s what strikes me. Anybody who really wanted to could do what he did. Sure, he was a good musician, but there are lots of people with better voices—walk into any college conservatory in the country and you’ll find a singer with a rounder tone, a more operatic sound. Sure, he was good on the guitar and the banjo, but there are people in my personal acquaintance who are better. He wrote some wonderful songs, but they’re hardly models of musical sophistication. His talent was considerable, but not really anything amazing—maybe not even all that special.
What was so incredible about Pete Seeger was not any singular gift or talent. What we celebrate, what we remember, was not a man who could do things no other person could, but rather a man who spent his whole very long life walking with a whole heart toward what he believed in. Whether it was his 70-year relationship with his beloved wife Toshi or an afternoon’s connection with a crowd at a concert or a protest, Pete was fully present, fully engaged, ready to be connected. He was a man who knew the power of the people, and who used the considerable force of his personality not to draw attention to himself, but rather to engage people with each other, and with their ability to create positive change. He gave himself, and he kept giving—not as a martyr, but as someone who found great joy in the giving.
He had, in short, the power of the music. Not the power of musicianship; not the prodigy talents of a Mozart or a Yo-Yo Ma. No, Pete Seeger had the power of living in his music, living through his music. He knew the power of music to tell truths in ways that people could hear them. He knew the power of music to draw folks together through the interweaving of voices. He understood the power of music to raise energy, to call forth energy, to move people forward. He sang, and invited people to sing with him, because he understood the deep connection between music and love, and between love and justice.
And he just kept on doing it, decade after decade. We’ve lost a unique spirit this week, a man who put his whole heart into everything he did, a man who had a whole heart, unbroken by cynicism or despair. But I think what he would want us to know is that any of us could do what he did. Any of us could stand up to injustice, work for peace, speak our truth, sing out and keep singing. Any of us could be an instrument of freedom, of joy, of connection and the power of the gathered will of the people. Any of us could. Pete Seeger did.
Nelson Mandela
The great Nelson Mandela has died. Peacefully, after a long illness, surrounded by the love of his family, his nation, the world. To lose a hero is always an enormous grief, and yet Mandela was one hero who got to see his work through. This time we got the whole inspiring story – not just a man who stood up for his people and who suffered for his rebellion, but also a man who emerged from his long years in prison with a whole heart, with his capacity for love intact. Who was able to lead his country in the path of truth and reconciliation; who was able to walk a long ways down that road toward the land of freedom and justice.
What a gift. Too often we have the stories of the martyrs, the heroes cut down in their prime who live on in our memory and our aspiration, but who never got to step into the Promised Land. Of course South Africa is not a perfected Land of Milk and Honey. This is the real world and grave problems are never simply erased. But Mandela got to see his people choose justice over revenge. He got to see his country tear down barricades, reach across chasms that seemed like they could never be crossed.
In Mandela we had the story of a great man who suffered for his cause, but this time the suffering was the middle of the story, not the end. And as much as we owe to the martyrs, to Martin Luther King Jr. and Victor Jara and Megar Evers and all the rest, we owe still more to the people who live out decade after decade of speaking truth in the spirit of love, who never stop pushing the world toward justice.
Of course, most of these people we never hear about. So today, I will remember the tremendous legacy of Nelson Mandela. But I will also remember people like Molly Piontkowski, who came to this country as a young woman and never stopped working to make it meet up with her hopes of what she would find here. Who was already in her 80s when I got to know her, and was still pushing on the city of Chicago for fair housing, for services for seniors, for shelter for abused women. Who I remember not for the saintly gentleness we expect of elderly women, but rather for her cranky determination that the world simply needed to be a better place than it was.
Molly, like Mandela, is gone now. But we still have Bill Moyers and Wendell Berry—and thousands, maybe millions of you who keep on doing the work of justice and love and truth and peace because it is there to be done. The need won’t go away. I give thanks daily for the people who won’t go away either.
A Month of Weddings
Yesterday closed out August, the first month of marriage equality in Minnesota. Fittingly, I saw it out just as I entered it in: officiating at a lesbian wedding. As I have stood before dozens of couples this month, and as I have sat in the chairs weeping for friends, I have a couple of thoughts about pastoral pieces that I think should be included in same sex weddings, at least where the law has recently changed towards marriage equality.
First, in each case there are people who love the brides, or the grooms, who are not ready yet to embrace this notion of marriage equality, and are thus not present to celebrate. I acknowledge that their love is real, none-the-less, and that we at the ceremony pray for the day when all will celebrate love, and join in witnessing same sex couples’ marriage vows. However, in the meantime, we appreciate the integrity and authenticity of those who chose not to attend, and know that they love the couple none-the-less.
This is important because in many cases there will be many conspicuous absences of key family members. Differences in family views were most evident when I officiated at the wedding of Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s lesbian stepsister, (See http://www.patheos.com/blogs/uucollective/2013/08/forty-seven-weddings-and-a-funeral/) but they have been somewhat present in every same sex wedding I witnessed last month. Family gossip lines being what they are, I am fairly confident that word of this naming and inclusion will reach the absent members at some point.
Second, because we have not yet reached a place of universal agreement about the blessing that these weddings bring to our wider community, I urge all who attend, particularly straight allies, to go back to work or neighborhood barbecues, and describe what they witnessed at the wedding. Describe the years that this couple has been together, the love that was evidenced at the service, how good it felt for people to be there, gay and straight alike. How, in fact, it strengthened participants’ own commitments to their spouses.
This is important because our campaign for marriage equality was story-driven, based on reflections of personal relationships with or on the lived experiences of gay and lesbian couples. Though the campaign for 51% of the vote is over, to reach the 80 or 90 percent of support which will ultimately bring us together, the storytelling must continue. People who voted against marriage equality need to hear about how it is actually impacting the people around them, to balance and ultimately dissolve the horror stories of mayhem and destruction of heterosexual marriage which they have heard.
Finally, I have remarked in each ceremony I’ve officiated (tip o’ the hat to my friend Kate Tucker for this frame) that, when couples have been together for decades faithfully and loyally, we are actually present to witness vows between them and the State of Minnesota as much as or more than vows between the couple. The State of Minnesota, finally, has stepped forward with a commitment to support same-sex couples for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part—by providing social security benefits and tax benefits, access to health care and hospital beds, and all of the ease which heterosexual couples expect in the aftermath of the death of their beloved—beginning with access to the body itself, and extending out to inheritance rights, and decisions about the funeral.
The first month is over, but the struggle for marriage equality continues, even as the IRS declares that married couples anywhere can file joint federal taxes. Until the patchwork of equality and inequality tips into a nation where couples don’t need to fearfully pack marriage certificates in their luggage when they travel across state lines, we have our work to do.
Meanwhile, mazel tov to all of the newly married couples in Minnesota and other states this month. Though some of us older folks might grumble that we feel as if we’re in our late twenties again, with weddings every weekend, the joy in the grumbling is readily evident. Finally, we’re being treated as adults!
Forty Seven Weddings and a Funeral
It’s been almost a week now, but I’m still internalizing the seismic change taking place in Minnesota. Love is the Law! It all began at midnight on August 1…
Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak presided over forty six weddings at City Hall in the wee hours of Thursday, August 1, beginning at 12:01 AM. By turns laughing and crying, he said over and over that these couples were now lawfully married. Watching those weddings of total strangers, I cried several times myself, and laughed a good bit too.
I didn’t burst into tears (as I feared I would) at the legalization of a longstanding partnership that I officiated on August 2, but I did later, driving on a suburban street, when I remembered the moment. What joy to look out at the faces of two women who have stood by each other for a quarter of a century and say, “I now pronounce you legally wed.” What joy in the faces of their relatives and friends gathered by the banks of the beautiful Mississippi in a small informal ceremony in Red Wing, Minnesota. (Here’s a short video piece of that moment, excerpted from a longer video of the wedding by Helen’s brother, Chaunce Stanton:)
Of course, it’s never that simple. Every wedding brings with it the ghosts of those who are not there, whether they are deceased or simply absent. For Nia and Helen, there were large gaps in the family fabric, perhaps not surprising considering that Helen’s stepsister is the aggressively homophobic Rep. Michelle Bachmann. This made the wedding planning both joyful and sorrowful. In our preparatory meetings, as with the other lesbian couples I’m working with on weddings this month, we talked about invitations sadly not issued, or refusals sadly received.
As Helen’s brother Mike said in a toast, Nia and Helen have been models of restraint and respect through this entire battle for equality in Minnesota. It was out of respect for Helen that wedding guests at my table did not lift up a loud toast to Michelle, stating that without her we never would have reached this day.
And yet, that’s pretty accurate. Before heading off for the nation’s capitol, Minnesota State Rep. Michelle Bachmann repeatedly spearheaded the addition of a constitutional amendment defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman. The amendment never got on the ballot when the DFL was the majority, but as soon as Republicans controlled the legislature, after Michelle had moved on to bigger things, they moved forward quickly with it. And, while previously the DFL had held both houses, they were always hesitant and nervous when approached by GLBT advocates to move much of anything forward that was supportive of domestic partnership. Marriage equality would have been out of the question.
Then came the 18 month campaign, based in honest conversations with 27,000 regular Minnesotans involved. Minnesotans defeated the Constitutional amendment, and brought the DFL back into leadership of both houses. After that, DFL leaders were willing to move ahead with marriage equality. Eventually, a few brave Republicans crossed over, and both houses voted yes. And now, here we are, one of the 13 states where folks like Nia and Helen can quit worrying about caring for each other in their old age, and having access for hospital visits, and creating wills that try to assert that they are in fact related. Folks can get on with life! Hopefully we can move on with progressive movement in other arenas—jobs , housing, good education for all.
Which brings me to the one funeral I attended last week, also on August 1. It was for Ron McKinley, a prominent Native American philanthropist, educator, and activist. Hundreds of people of every conceivable culture, race, religion, age, ability, gender, and sexual orientation gazed out over Como Lake Thursday morning, some of us bleary eyed from watching weddings in the wee hours of the morn. I knew Ron only tangentially but know and love some of his family well. We heard testimonies and stories of joy, love, commitment, and wisdom in a life cut tragically short in a motorcycle accident. Several of the speakers commented on how much Ron would have loved the event, and how much the gathered crowd was in fact his legacy. It was an awe-inspiring legacy to me.
If weddings cause all present to re-examine our own relationships, funerals prod those of us outside the most intense sphere of grief to reflect on how well we are living out our life’s purpose. Ron’s memorial service certainly did that for me. As much as the weddings celebrate love and commitment, so I hope do our lives beyond that intimate partner.
So here is my toast: May marriage equality be one more step on our path towards a world where every person, no matter what, is equally valued, supported, and loved, until death do us part.
“I didn’t say it was fair, I said it was the law.”
I asked my ex, my partner of almost twenty years from whom I separated three years ago, the co-parent of a teenaged kid, to attend a $14 community education session with me and update our wills.
We had spent thousands of dollars asserting, in two different states, that we were in fact related to one another: that sharing a home, a car, a life, a bed in fact meant that we would be responsible to one another even after death did us part. It turns out that, as difficult and expensive as that assertion of relatedness was, telling the state we had broken up was a breeze, and cheap to boot.
Our state of Minnesota, and our nation, enthusiastically agrees that we are no longer an item. In fact, they never believed that we were. Since we were all in agreement about this matter, I entered the community ed class in a calm place. I’m cheap, and my cheap self felt pretty happy that $28, for the two of us, would get our affairs in order.
I’m not saying I didn’t feel a tinge of sadness. I wondered, as I felt our after death wishes fit so easily into the pre-typed will templates which the lawyer leading our session had brought, just how much it had cost our relationship to be swimming upstream all those years, asserting that in fact love does make a family. I wondered if, had we been able to relax and float instead, supported without exerting an ounce of energy, our relationship might have survived.
But mostly I concentrated on filling in the forms accurately and quickly, initialing what needed to be initialed and checking boxes that needed to be checked. Everything goes to the kid. Check. Until the kid is 25, not too long now, a trust is established, with the following executor. Check. My ex and I whispered in consultation, no tension or disagreements between us, only wanting to get things set and done.
Most of the people in the room appeared, from their questions and comments, to be leaving their estates to their husbands and wives. They checked the box that said, to my spouse until their death, and then after spouse’s death to our children (insert names here).
But then. At the next table, a man, probably in his late 60’s, raised his hand. “If I want to leave everything to my friend, and then after he dies, to the kids, what box do I check?”
The lawyer clarified. “You want to leave everything to your friend?” “Well, yes, for the rest of his life,” said the man. “And then to our kids.”
The lawyer said off-handedly, “Well, you need to write on the blank line that you disinherit your children.”
The man’s mouth fell open in horror. “I don’t want to disinherit my children! I just want my friend to have what he needs for the rest of his life, and then the children would get it!”
The lawyer asked, as if he were cross-examining a witness, “Did you not say that you wanted to leave 100% of your estate to your friend?” The man nodded. “So that leaves zero percent for your children. Hence you must disinherit them.”
My mellow cheap self was suddenly gone from the room, and my mother tiger self was sitting in my seat instead, with adrenalin-clear vision. I was picturing what it would be like for my own kid to learn, after my death, that she had been disinherited. Like every other adopted child she will be processing, for her entire life, some amount of grief and loss about her birthmother. At that point, she’d also be processing the death of one of her parents. And then to be disinherited on top of it? I wondered, quite seriously, if she would survive.
Glancing at the man who had raised the question, I realized that I didn’t even know if he was gay or trying to care for some other friend after his death. But I did know I wasn’t going to sit quietly. I raised my hand. “So you are saying, “ I asked the lawyer, “That a gay couple could adopt or bear a child, raise that child together, and then they would both have to disinherit that child in order to provide for each other legally?”
The lawyer looked bored. The forty or so people in the room looked longingly at their will templates, studiously not looking up. I went on, “So you are saying, that even without the proposed Consititutional amendment on our ballot in November, which explicitly states that marriage is only between a man and a woman, loving and committed couples are forced to renounce either their children or each other in order to have legal wills?” The lawyer looked annoyed, but I couldn’t resist pushing it. “Are you saying that?”
“Look,” the lawyer said, “I didn’t say it was fair. I said it was the law.”
My ex and I finished filling out our forms, had them notarized, and left. As we walked out, this $14 class didn’t feel like such a bargain.
