Messy & Beloved? Yes.
Beloved Community is ever on my mind lately, both who we are and who we can be. My meditations are guiding me toward increasing clarity about my vision of Beloved Community – it cannot be a state of perfection. Because humans are essential elements in Beloved Community, it is/will be cluttered and messy if it is to be realized.
In my favorite writing book, author Anne Lamott describes clutter and mess as something that shows us “that life is being lived… Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.”
Dear ones – We can make some messes. I look at the news and at my calendar and I am clear – messes abound.
So we must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, of the promise of Beloved Community.
Let us understand that we are loved and beloved now – right now – not just when we finally get it all together – but always, every day. Let this knowledge rest deep in our bones and allow us to love each other the way the Rev. Dr. King called us to – “love in action, agapic love not discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess.”
Letting go of the perfect, we find love-for ourselves and for each other. Messy, yes. And real.
_______________________
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, 1994.
“An Experiment in Love,” 1958.
A Garden Prayer
That shrimp plant
so determined to be seen
poking through the ginger and the fig
like a four year old
waving skinny arms and red cheeks
to those towering above
That shrimp plant
grown from cuttings of a friend
who no longer lives in this country
from a house
that has since burned down
That shrimp plant
breaks at its knobby knees and elbows
when the wind blows too hard
drops to the ground
and grows again
Universe
today I pray
please
please grant us the resilience
of that shrimp plant
Here an Ist, There an Ist, Everywhere an Ist-Ist
The other day I got a subscription offer from a magazine called Free Inquiry, a publication of the Council for Secular Humanism. I’d been thinking about ordering the magazine. Well, here was my chance: a “special introductory offer for blasphemers only.”
Got to love the marketing department. That’s no magazine for me.
Though I am “godless”–in the sense that I doubt the existence of anything that human beings would wish to call “god” and I don’t think a religion is a place any decent god would be caught dead in–I’m neither “blasphemous” nor “sacrilegious.”
If I don’t believe in “god,” how could I be? Those are words with meaning only in God Land. See, I’m a “humanist.” But a “religious” one, not a “secular” one. (What the heck does that mean?)
Oh, that labeling thing! Why do we have to be an “ist” this or an “ist” that? I don’t want to be an “ist.” Being an “ist” is about being a follower. I don’t have any interest in that.
Sure, I get it: some religious people don’t like what I believe. Some even insist upon forcing their isty god on me. I get it. But to somehow think that I’m blaspheming about it makes me a reflection in their mirror. I don’t want to live in that musty old antique shop. There’s just too much out under the blue sky to enjoy.
Which makes me a Transcendtal-ist! Except when I’m in a Logical Positiv-ist frame of mind. And then there’s always . . .
You get the idea. The Twentieth Century was the Age of Labels. Perhaps in the mobile societies created by industrialization labels made some sense, with so many people displaced and wandering the earth to find work. Just in the art world there were Futurists, Fauvists, Voticists, Imagists, and Capitalists. Labels don’t make sense anymore. Isn’t everyone displaced now?
Seriously, folks: why does anyone need to be an “ist” at all?
There’s just too much fun stuff to think. Therefore, pietists and sacrilegists, listen up! Lose the labels and get a life.
If I’ve got to be something, I’ll take “everythingist.”
Who does your heart break for?
Last month I had the joy of participating in the first Life on Fire un-conference (https://www.facebook.com/LifeOnFireTribe).
I was drawn to the gathering by the questions being asked, as well as by the beloveds who were convening us.
• Do you want to transform the world into the beloved community?
• Do you want to live a committed life that takes you to third places, abandoned places, and secular places?
• Do you believe in radical integrity?
• Do you want to live as if you are who you say you are?
• Do you know who your heart breaks for?
Do you know who your heart breaks for?
I know who my heart breaks for. My heart breaks for the neighbor who has nothing and the neighbor who lives in fear that what he has will be taken from him.
My heart breaks for the creatures of the disappearing wetlands and for the communities destroyed because the wetlands are no longer there to protect them.
My heart breaks for the transgender woman who has no shelter to accept her in New Orleans as a woman “because she hasn’t had the operation yet” and for the shelter director whose compassion has been destroyed by the unceasing need that shows up on her doorstep every day.
My heart breaks for everyone dehumanized and treated as less than by the evil of oppression, and for those so blinded by their own hate that they do not realize they have given up their own humanity in the process of denying it to others.
Who does your heart break for, beloveds?
When we find what breaks our hearts open, we can begin to live with a sense of purpose, with a mission, as a compassionate community of faith.
Together
Beloveds, I believe that we are all in this together – and together, we can shift a culture that is dehumanizing us all –
- A culture that prioritizes paper with imaginary value over oxygen, clean water, livable communities,
- A culture that tells some of us we are better than others, tells some of us we are inferior,
- A dominant culture that sacrifices the many for the few and lays the blame for the destruction squarely upon those who are being destroyed…
- A dominant culture that resists even being named, but which much be named to be changed…
Singer activist Ani DiFranco sang in 1995 (Not a Pretty Girl)
I am not an angry girl
but it seems like I’ve got everyone fooled
every time I say something they find hard to hear
they chalk it up to my anger
and never to their own fear
Sometimes I am an angry white woman. And sometimes, I am afraid. I am angry that children are not eating this week because human beings elected to govern the resources of this nation have decided that ideology is more important than people. I am afraid of how much harm is being done, how many lives without safety nets are crashing to the ground even as I write these words today.
And always, always, I am grateful to be a part of a faith on fire – on fire for love, mercy, and justice, a faith that walks the talk, not perfectly, but with a broken open heart of commitment. A faith that says it is okay to be angry and afraid and keep going, keep going… beloveds, let us turn toward each other in this vulnerable moment in our nation’s history.
Let us change the story together.
Swimming in the Christian Waters (or: Beware, You May be a Humanist)
Let’s say you find yourself living in, oh, let’s say the United States. It’s a country where something on the order of seventy-five percent of the population claims to be Christian. Let’s say you don’t believe in any other religion, either: you aren’t Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Baha’i, or any other of the myriad religions brought to the US by immigration or popular books. Perhaps you were even raised Christian. What do you do? How do you get through the year, filled as it is with Christian holidays and tsunamis of piety every time there’s another mass shooting or terrorist act?
Then there is the eternal question: how do you communicate with co-workers and–horror of horrors–the family at Thanksgiving?
I think there are five options:
Convert
Pretend
Reinterpret
Admit you don’t believe but allow for doubt
Resist
Conversion is your easiest course. If it’s an option, go for it. Then you won’t bristle at Federal holidays built around a particular religion. You won’t roll your eyes at each proclamation of every politician concerning her or his Christianity. Convert. It makes swimming in the US waters warm and clear.
Conscience won’t let you do that? Then try pretending. Just tell grandma and Aunt Betty Lou that you love the new pope and you’ve been planning to go back, really you have. Any day now . . .
Conscience won’t let you pretend? Reinterpret. Get yourself to the nearest bookstore (NOT a Christian one) and find writers such as John Shelby Spong, Cynthia Bourgeault, Brian McLaren, and a whole–excuse the pun–host of others. These writers swim in the Christian tradition, yet reinterpret the old metaphors. For many people this is a comfortably place. After all, you can still tell your mom that you’re Christian. And the denizens of Washington, DC won’t get on your nerves quite as badly.
Then there are those who just can’t believe in the whole bloody business anymore. What then? Face it: you’re probably a humanist. You have two options. The first is admitting you don’t believe but allowing for doubt. After all, you probably don’t know how particle accelerators really work either, so it appears that the human brain doesn’t comprehend everything. You’re agnostic! When Uncle Jim mentions how atheists are ruining the country, you can go “um” and then try to change the subject.
If all else fails, resist. I don’t recommend this final option, unless you just feel that you have to do it in order to be true to your conscience. Resistance is perhaps not futile, but it is uncomfortable. You will be joining the beleaguered folks who sue the state of Texas (maybe even Rhode Island) for its latest enormity. You won’t win any popularity contests (and you won’t be elected President). Perhaps Aunt Betty won’t even invite you over for apple pie.
But, hey, the benighted ones hated Jesus too, didn’t they?
The waters of America. Not so easy to swim in for some of us. Oh, and there’s a turning leaf. Almost time for that “controversy” over Halloween. And then a snowflake will bring us a whole new chapter of the War on Christmas . . . . Keep swimming!
Rejoice?
First, gather friends and family. Together, build a structure with at least three sides. Roof it with bamboo or cornstalks, anything you can cut from the ground. Remember to leave spaces where the stars can shine through. Dwell in this place for a week.
“Dwelling” includes eating, talking, singing, napping, reading, relaxing, entertaining, all that is our life. Lounge here, dine here, enjoying the fruits of the harvest. Invite friends and strangers in to dine with you. If it isn’t raining and you’re up for the adventure, sleep in the sukkah you have built. The sukkah is one of the few Jewish practices that involves the entire body in the experience of a mitzvah, a commandment relating to Jewish practice and observance.
Sukkot encompasses a multitude of themes and symbols. This Jewish holiday is rich in life and lessons of an embodied faith.
Dwelling in a sukkah, a little hut open to the elements and slated for demolition only a week after its construction, one is returned to a time in Jewish history when the entire nation was homeless and wandering.
Dwelling in a sukkah invites people to remove themselves from both the materialistic things that normally fill our environment and the illusion of security that our stuff provides to us.
Many of us fill our homes with the most beautiful and expensive stuff we can afford – (sometimes more than we can afford). We are surrounded daily by our material things, symbols of our security and comfort and accomplishments.
Usually, we dwell in the midst of our stuff. Sukkot calls those who honor this holiday to leave their stuff behind for a week and return to a simpler existence.
Focus shifts from what we want
to what we need,
from what is additional
to what is essential.
Sukkot is a harvest festival, yes, but it is much more than that. It is a time when people of the Jewish faith are invited to step out of their comfort zones as a community and make sure that their life priorities are in line with what is of ultimate value. Stepping into a sukkah provides a physical framework for understanding what is ultimately important within a very intimate space.
Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg writes:
Sukkot is the holiday of change! Sukkot is a celebration of the beauty of things that don’t last.
The little hut which is so vulnerable to wind and rain and will be dismantled at week’s end;
the ripe fruits which will spoil if not picked and eaten right away; the friends and family who may not be with us for as long as we would wish;
the beauty of the leaves changing color as they begin the process of falling and dying from the trees.
Sukkot comes to tell us that the world is full of good and beautiful things.
But that we have to enjoy them right away today because they will not last.
The children in our lives get out of the way in no time flat. Our elders die, taking their stories and our love with them. The ones we love cannot not wait for us to finish other things and get around to them. The season of Sukkot brings into sharp relief the contrast between what we value and how we spend our days; the distance – if there is distance – between how we love and how we live.
And it does not rebuke us. Instead, we are invited to give thanks for our restored sight, to celebrate the realignment of our actions with our values. Let us rejoice together, beloveds.
Who’s In and Who’s Out of Institutions (and the immigrants between)
The British social anthropologist Mary Douglas had this to say about institutions:
Inside a religious body you get sects and hierarchies, inside an information network you get bazaars and cathedrals, it is the same, call them what you like. They survive by pointing the finger of blame at each other.
That about sums it up, doesn’t it?
Douglas is most famous for her theory of dirt: She claimed that human groups form solidarity by what we consider disgusting. For example, if your group considers eating sheep’s eyes disgusting, you’re unlikely to become very intimate with the group next door that considers sheep’s eyes a delicacy.
Douglas claims that human groups, or “institutions,” allow those inside the institution to point fingers at those outside the institution. As we stand inside and point fingers, we develop group cohesion: there’s an inside and an outside.
But, it doesn’t stop there.
Douglas thought that first we off-load responsibility for our actions onto an institution, then we begin to allow the institution to think for us. As a matter of fact, Douglas believed that our institutions operate exactly opposite from the way we generally think they do: we think institutions make small, rote decisions for us; but, actually, we allow institutions to do the big thinking for us, and we stick to the small stuff (–you know, such as consuming too many calories and avoiding exercise. Stuff like that.)
Because . . . it’s not easy bearing personal responsibility for the things that institutions such as government do. Yet, if we intend to lead an examined life, we must look in the mirror and ask ourselves what benefits we get from those things we off-load onto institutions.
Let’s think about government . . . oh, say, the United States government: bad immigration policy; institutionalized racism; millions of working poor; gun “freedom” that kills thousands per year, and poorly regulated industry, to name a few problems. Now, ask yourself, What benefits do I get by being in that group?
It’s disturbing.
It’s disturbing because Dr. Douglas is not saying, human beings form institutions and then wag their fingers at outsiders when they aren’t thinking about it or when we get lazy or when we fail to change wrongs. She isn’t saying those other people do that. She’s saying that’s what ALL institutions do. It’s disturbing because a basic fact of human nature is that we form groups, then we lose any ability to act morally concerning those things we have given away to an institution. Then we benefit from the immoral actions.
Now, you can say, “Oh, well, she’s just a crazy leftist feminist postmodernist, so, you know how THEY are!”
Or we can say, “hmm, that’s interesting! How can we use that human propensity both to better understand institutions that we don’t like, and those we do?
How can we use that idea to create institutions that encourage the sort of human action that we see as positive, rather than the sort that we see as negative?
I know you’re already way ahead of me on this . . . ideally, Unitarian Universalist congregations are places where people are not only encouraged, but required to question assumptions. Places where we encourage finger-pointing at systemic injustices, not at the people who may or may not be perpetrating the injustices, for whatever reasons . . .
If we look at Mary Douglas’s ideas from this perspective, they aren’t quite as crazy. Or quite as ivory tower!
Take, for example, immigration.
Consider for a moment that, as nations go, Mexico is not a a poor one. As nations go, the average Mexican is somewhere in the mid-range of income and social well-being for human beings on the planet. It isn’t that Mexico is poor, by international standards, but rather that the income disparity between Mexicans and North Americans is large–as a matter of fact, the disparity is the largest of any two bordering nations on earth.
That goes a long way toward explaining why people might consider crossing a border. To me, anyway, it’s hard to point my finger at a group of people trying to do that.
How have we–and let’s listen to Mary Douglas and include all of us–how have WE—the institution called the USA–responded to the immigration issue? Rather than facilitating the flow of people back and forth across the border, we have tried to stop the flow–we are still following that policy.
Now, I’m old enough to remember when the border was porous. People came here for summer work, then went back to Mexico–they went back home–for the winter. People can’t do that anymore. Because we have spent billions of dollars to stop them. They’re stuck here.
What would you do, if you found yourself stuck in a foreign country, no way out?
First you would go to the embassy, right?
Then you would start calling on your support network . . . family and friends.
Then you would get out your credit cards . . . see if throwing money around might help . . .
What if your loved ones were across the border?
How long would it take before you just took off walking . . . ?
I have a challenge for you: listen to Mary Douglas and get outside your comfort zone. Call yourself on one of your prejudices . . . . Call your own bluff on one of the “institutions” where you sit comfortably and point fingers from . . .
Maybe it’s the institution called race. Maybe it’s the institution called social class. Perhaps it’s the institution called education. Perhaps you wag your finger at close-minded people.
Whatever.
Try reminding yourself this week that, as psychologist Steven Pinker puts it,
“Our minds are organs (like the lungs), not pipelines to the truth.”
Our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth.
Try it. Actually realize that your brain is an evolved organ and has its limitations. And your brain is NOT an institution.
This week, call yourself on one of your prejudices. Call yourself on one of the things you get away with because of an institution you belong to. Step outside your comfort zone. Actually listen to someone who your prejudice tells you can’t have ANYTHING valuable to say.
Instead of pointing a finger and even wagging it a little, sit back and listen.
Try it.
Season of Forgiveness
“I am sorry”
Burning Man 2013
photo by Jim Urquhart
The spiritual practice of atonement, asking and offering forgiveness, is a practice that actively builds and sustains a robust and healthy beloved community.
When we are willing to take the risk of showing up to each other in all of our gloriously imperfect humanity and begin again and again in love – we are being faithful.
When we are willing to go deeper with our friends and family and neighbors, willing to understand their fears and difficulties – to do more than work with them side by side for years without knowing what causes them pain or brings them joy– we are being faithful.
In Jewish tradition, the Book of Life is sealed on Yom Kippur, not to be reopened for another year at Rosh Hashanah. For Unitarian Universalists, the book is never sealed. Each day is an opportunity to begin again in love, repenting and offering forgiveness as often as is required for the health and well-being of this beloved community.
What harm have you caused in the past year that requires repentance? What do you need to forgive yourself for? Who needs your forgiveness?
Culture Shift
There is an old and often told story of a child walking along a beach, picking up stranded starfish and throwing them back into the ocean. In this story, an adult encounters the child and proclaims, “you can’t save them all. Your work doesn’t make a difference.” Replies the child, continuing in her labor “I made a difference in this one’s life. And this one’s life. And this one’s life.”
It is a powerful story about the importance of small acts.
And.
And it is cultural cover for a big lie. If that child doesn’t look beyond the stranded starfish to the re-graded shoreline, she cannot realize that the starfish are being stranded because the new vacation development changed the inflow and outflow of the tide. She cannot see the new drainage line funneling the city’s contaminated runoff into the sea to which she is returning the starfish.
Beloveds, let us commit to looking beyond the need presented in front of us and ask “why is this happening? What is going unquestioned in the larger system that allows people to be hungry, wetland to be destroyed, water to become scarce?”
And while we feed those who are hungry, let those of us who are not hungry recognize that we, too, are benefitting from a system that creates hungry people. Let us wonder, together, why this is – and then begin to work with those who are hungry to change the system that creates hungry people.
It is time for a culture shift, beloveds.
And.
And we are called to be a part of the change. Let the organizing begin.