Recently Christine Organ (a blogger for this UU Collective) published a lovely post on “good enough” parenting in this competitive age. Frankly, as someone who feels like “good enough” parenting is pretty much the top of my game, I appreciated the reminder that plenty of other folks are perfectly fine parents without living up to their own—and perhaps other people’s—expectations.
But I think we can take this a step further. In a world where we are constantly exhorted to “dream big” and “pursue excellence,” maybe it’s time to admit that there are all sorts of areas of our lives that might benefit from a realistic dose of “good enough.” Once we accept that we are unlikely to win a Nobel prize, solve world hunger or marry a movie star, we might consider the possibility that for certain things, at certain moments, we would be just as well off striving for sucking less, rather than magnificence.
Here then, are ten tips for sucking at life just a little less. Please post additional suggestions in the comments below.
for Maggie and Lewis
As the dimming fall welcomes me back, a summer memory feeds me still.
We have risen with the sun, the smell of toaster waffles,
and the demand that I read to you.
Last night’s bedtime story put me to sleep too soon.
So we clear legos from the couch,
and return to lands of make believe,
armed with a light cotton blanket and coffee.
We move from the cool house through the neglected garden.
I can barely make eye contact with the tomatoes.
They too have somehow forgiven me and volunteered anyway.
Past collaborations must be remembered in their bones.
Onward we go, downhill, picking up speed, encouraged by running dogs.
Today we belong not to schedules, not to chapter books or tomatoes.
We belong to the lake.
We leave clothes and a few dogs on the dock
and launch ourselves into the familiar miracle of warm water.
There we are, lying on a rippling bed,
comparing our ability to inflate our lungs
and see our matching toes.
There we are, bodies almost resting now,
facing illuminated clouds
and shadow puppet tree tops.
There we are, imaginations ever reaching skyward until
floating hands touch by accident
and hold on purpose.
We learned from the Beatles that Eleanor Rigby “keeps her face in a jar by the door.” Clearly the Fab Four thought that was not a good thing to do. But what were they critiquing? Was it where Eleanor kept her face? Or that she had a “face to meet the faces that we meet” at all? Should we wear the same face all the time? Is one of our faces the “true” one?
Whether or not there’s noise when a tree falls in the forest, a more pertinent question for us is whether or not we have a face, a personality, when no one is around to experience it. This is why Eleanor Rigby’s plight haunts us still. We know she’s out there. We don’t want to become her. We fear that she is faceless. We fear that for ourselves.
Most of us wish perhaps that we were like the stone imagined by Emily Dickinson,
How happy is the little Stone
That rambles in the Road alone,
And doesn’t care about Careers
And Exigencies never fears—
Perhaps we wish to be,
. . . independent as the Sun
In our hearts, however, we know very well that we are creatures dependent upon others of our kind. And that’s scary.
Interactions Are Us
In the Nineteenth Century, US prisons adopted the practice of solitary confinement, depriving a prisoner of visual stimulation and human contact. At the time, the idea was that a prisoner with some “alone time” would reflect on his or her misdeeds and come out a better person. It was quickly noticed, however, that instead of becoming a moral paragon, prisoners in solitary confinement began to exhibit symptoms of mental illness.
After this discovery, the practice was for the most part discontinued until the late-Twentieth Century, when US prisons began to transition from a rehabilitation model to one of retribution. Now we know that being alone hurts . . . a lot. And that’s why prisons do it. (There are in the US today something on the order of 80,000 prisoners in solitary confinement at any given time.)
We people don’t like being alone for extended periods. It drives us crazy. Therefore, when we are alone, those of us not under arrest find ways to simulate human interaction—TV, social media, perhaps even writing a letter. We are social creatures. We need human interaction. We need an excuse to put our faces on.
Skip the Sermon
My father died recently, and my mother found herself alone after sixty-five years of companionship. She wonders aloud: should she give up and leave her face in the jar by the door? Is it disloyal of her not to do so? She no longer feels like Emily Dickinson’s independent little stone. She feels the full weight of dependency.
My prescription for my mother (and Eleanor Rigby) is . . . Go to church! Or bowling. Or a book club. Something. Father McKenzie’s message (or disconnected ramblings about a book) may not be much to text home about, but the coffee, wine, or potluck involved might just be the ticket.
A member of my congregation recently brought me one of those graphics called a bubble cloud, generated by a questionnaire concerning what was important to a Christian congregation near my humanist congregation. The most-used word? “Community.” And the congregation I serve would would have the same big bubble, “community.” In their case “Christ” and in our case “reason” would be tiny little bubbles compared with the true reason we gather as congregations, community.
Human interaction reminds us to pull our faces out of that jar.
Bowling with Father McKenzie
As the Beatles knew, denizens of post-industrial countries may exist in utter isolation. We often shop in anonymous supermarkets rather than bustling markets. We buy clothing off a hanger, not from the source of the craft. As Robert D. Putnam pointed out, many of us bowl alone.
I don’t think any of us has an “authentic” or “true” face. We adjust the faces we pull from the jar according to the circumstances of our interactions. We have a “going to a funeral” face. We have a “going to the theatre” face, and so on. These are constructed in the bustle of human relationships. Without the bustle, we don’t bother. And that’s not good for us.
Perhaps Eleanor—and all the lonely people—should share a selfie. Not a bad first step in getting that face out of the jar by the door and spiffed up a bit. Then? Go to church. Or temple or mosque or . . . a bowling team. Perhaps even chat with Father McKenzie. Who knows what he knows when he’s not pontificating . . .
Buddhism had been known in the United States since the mid-Nineteenth Century, but really came into its own with the return of Pacific War vets who had spent some time in Japan. (The creation of Red China insured that Chinese Buddhism would not be generally available to the Western World for some time.) One of the aspects of Buddhism that attracted post-War interest is that it is based more in psychology than in theology. Buddhism—at least in the Zen form that came back with those vets—is about practice, not theory. The practice is learning to watch one’s own thoughts and the realization that these thoughts can be changed.
Zen Buddhism might have remained just another exotic thing that came back from the war, something like samurai swords, if not for what was already beginning to happen in Western thought—the suspicion that religion and psychology are more or less the same thing, working the same ground. Monotheist religions can give you salvation; psychology can give you . . . self-actualization. And this idea was coming from different directions at the same time—not only humanists were making the argument. Reformed Rabbis agreed. As did many mainline priests and preachers. And then there was the capitalist angle taken by Norman Vincent Peale with his bestselling ideas about positive thinking.
Take for example the work of the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a survivor of not one but four of the Nazi death camps. Frankl said, “We give suffering a meaning by our response to it.” Yep: that’s Buddhism. Frankl condemned what in the death camps had been called “give-up-itis.” In the death camps, Frankl realized that those who had the best chance of survival were those who found meaning in the suffering and kept on going. Furthermore, Frankl didn’t push a particular path to meaning. The meaning is personal. Again, a bit like the difference between duty and responsibility—a personal choice made without being pointed in a particular direction by outside authority.
Buddhism had long drawn a distinction between suffering and pain. Pain is what happens to you—it can’t be avoided. Wounds happen. But suffering is what you think about the pain. “This is happening to me because . . .” “This always happens to me because . . .” “You are doing this to me because . . .” All of that is negative meaning making. Those are ways of catching a bad case of give-up-itis.
“Salvation” is a hackneyed word. Better to ask, “What will save me?” “What is the source of my suffering and what can give it meaning?”
It’s a truism in looking at prospective seminary students to wonder if they are recent converts to Twelve Step programs. Or newly divorced. Or have recently encountered some other trauma. Are these people signing on to be Karl Jung’s “Wounded Healers.” I’m certainly not saying that’s a bad thing. It’s a natural human thing: Here is my wound; here is my suffering; where is the meaning? Then: How can I help others who have been through what I’ve been through and worse?
And here’s the biggest paradox of it all: just as meaning and responsibility are choices arrived at from individual lives, they are about sharing. Sharing with other human beings.
Isn’t it amazing that—no matter what may happen to us—we can be confident that there are people who will take care of us? This is confidence in the human spirit. It is a religion (if you will) not of victimhood and suffering but of creativity and compassion.
Here is the beautiful truth—saints and sinners are the same from the start.
Hsu Yun, Chinese Chan Buddhist (freely adapted by me)
As a young writer, I read everything I could find on the subject of writing. One of the books that impressed me at the time was written by novelist John Gardner called Moral Fiction. If my memory serves me, it is in that book that Gardner argues that every writer has a wound which drives his or her writing. By “wound” Gardner meant a psychological trauma so devastating that the writer revisits and seeks to re-write this trauma constantly in her or his work. (This theory predates the concept of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD.)
It’s not surprising that Gardner should have developed such a theory, since he had suffered a severe trauma in his own life. John Gardner grew up on a farm and, as is often the case, he drove tractors when he was quite young. One day Gardner was driving a tractor with his brother riding on the back. His brother fell off and was killed by the implement the tractor was pulling.
For the rest of his life, Gardner replayed and replayed in his mind the image of his brother falling. He blamed himself for his brother’s death. He never stopped asking himself, “What could I have done?”
Gardner himself eventually died in a motorcycle accident.
As I made my own attempts at writing, I discovered that the old cliche “truth is stranger than fiction” is partially true because writers can’t help attempting to make sense of the random happenings of the world. The human mind can’t help trying. Creative writing is, if nothing else, an assertion of the self in the face of what often appears to be a completely random reality. It’s the human need to create meaning that makes fiction less strange than truth.
But it is not true that only writers have wounds. Sure, some people become writers because of the need to process trauma. But the fact is, as the Buddha observed long ago, life itself is loss. We suffer because nothing is permanent except change.
Think for a moment about something you are hanging onto. Something that you just can’t let go. Something that makes you cringe when you think of it. Something that you replay, like an old movie in your head.
Now. Allow me to ask a very simple question: what do you gain by hanging on to what you are hanging on to?
Pain makes us individualists. As Shakespeare put it,
I will be flesh and blood,
For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently,
However they have writ the style of gods
And made a push at chance and sufferance.
I think that Shakespeare is driving at the insight psychologist Carl Jung had when he coined the phrase “wounded healer.” It isn’t that therapists or ministers or anybody else have the answers to life’s wounds. It is, rather, that dwelling on those wounds drives many of us to be therapists or ministers or philosophers.
And the insight we find, when and if we find it, is that pain makes us individualists, but the cure for pain is reaching out. However we write the style of our gods, we must accept our flesh and blood and dependency on others before healing begins. This is perhaps not an entirely reassuring insight. We would rather see our healers as experts. But that attitude, too, is a fall into individualism. The answer is in reaching out.
The Chinese Chan Buddhist Hsu Yun said it simply:
Here is the beautiful truth—
saints and sinners are the same
from the start.
I.
In addition to the Unitarian Universalist Seven Principles, the congregation that I serve as minister ascribes to a set of aspirational statements that are specifically humanist. Our first Aspiration is, “To live joyfully and ethically, in loving, reverent relationship with humanity and nature.”
Why do we say such a thing?
Because we are countering a long tradition of life-denying dogma common in the Western world. Doctrines such as that of Original Sin are not an affirmation of life in this world, and, in our view, that’s the only life there is.
You don’t have to go farther than our bulletin board to see an implication of what we mean. Just now we have a poster advocating “sex-positive reproductive justice.” We are countering a culture in which sex-negative attitudes impact the fundamental rights of women.
In my blog post last week I discussed Dostoyevsky’s assertion of free will:
“One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy . . .”
Well, it’s certainly “joyful” to do “one’s own fancy,” but such actions may not meet the ethical or “reverent relationship” criterion. Dostoyevsky’s definition of free will, the freedom to really mess things up, is a negative assertion of freedom. There’s always a the poles: Sex-negative. Sex-positive. Freedom-negative; freedom-positive. Navigating those can be problematic. And traditional Western religions are the problem, not a solution.
How to be sex-positive and life-affirming. That’s why UU congregations take OWL, Our Whole Lives education courses, so seriously. We have this “one wild and precious life,” as poet Mary Oliver puts it, and we have to figure out how to live it here, now—as ethically, lovingly, and reverently as possible.
In Dostoyevsky’s time philosophers were grappling with the implications of the discovery of Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician, who realized that the numbers of births, deaths, house fires, crimes—even the types of crimes—proved to be fairly consistent from year to year. Predictable, in other words.
This led to both the insurance industry and the field of sociology, among other things. My inability to diet and the number of people who die of heart attack and stroke each year in the United States has some connection, now, doesn’t it?
The insurance industry certainly sees a connection.
Unlike in Dostoyevsky’s time, we don’t think much about it nowadays when we hear how many Americans will die of Type II Diabetes or high blood pressure this year. Nowadays we are saturated with statistics. So much so that, with the addition of computers, we live in the next iteration of statistical analysis: “big data” or “predictive analytics.”
Netflix can tell us what movies we will enjoy with a high degree of accuracy. Amazon can send us discounts for things that the crunched data indicate we will consume next. I love a sentence I read about predictive analytics: “Analytical Customer Relationship Management can be applied throughout the customer’s lifecycle.”
Think about that: “Analytical Customer Relationship Management can be applied throughout the customer’s lifecycle.”
So when you start getting coupons for caskets . . . watch out.
It makes me want to go Dostoyevsky’s route and buy something REALLY crazy.
II.
One of the oddest things I have to deal with in multi-faith work is answering the accusation that humanists don’t have a “theology of sin.” As in, “you don’t have a theology of sin, therefore . . . you’re just not all that serious about religion.”
To which I’m tempted to say that humanism doesn’t have a theory of onomatopoeia either.
It’s not that humanists don’t understand what people are talking about when they discuss onomatopoeia, it’s just that it lies outside the purview of a humanist ethic.
It’s simply that I don’t put any credence in the idea that people are born into a “fallen state.” As far as I can see, a “theology of sin” has a lot of baggage that just has nothing to do with reality. It’s a complicated answer to a simple question: Why do people act like animals?” When St. Augustine came up with his theory of Original Sin, people didn’t know that human beings were animals. Call it self-denial. But now we do.
How could an animal that has evolved a consciousness such as we have be “fallen”?
I think that anthropologist Robert Ardrey put it best:
We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. (African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man, 1961.
Claiming that “original sin” is not a true description of reality is in no way saying that human beings are “born good,” any more than saying “I have no vacuum cleaner” means that I can’t clean my floor.
Original sin is a theological concept that serves theological ends. And it is a complex answer to a simple question that does not survive Occam’s Razor.
There’s nothing original about sin. But there is something very original about acting up to human aspirations toward ethics and compassion. We are risen apes, not fallen angels, and we are “armed killers” besides. That is a considerably clearer place to start considering how to be ethical, loving, and reverent, it seems to me.
Allow me to take a crack at a humanist theology of sin, necessarily taking into account evolution. How about this: “Sin” is a lack of cooperation with others.
Looked at from this angle, Dostoyevsky wasn’t defining free will, he was defining actions that do not take others into account: “One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice . . . one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy . . .”
Excessive drinking; smoking; eating too much—these aren’t “sins.” They’re merely really bad behaviors, given what we know about their outcomes. Those seven deadly sins—wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, gluttony—they’re bad for the self and they are bad for others.
“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides.” Too often our incredible reason and creativity has been allowed to invent sharpened sticks . . . and a few other things to kill each other with. This is “sin”: it is a lack of cooperation and compassion for others.
Our challenge is to look reality in the face and do what we can with what we’ve got.
That tale of the Garden of Eden is a good story, but it has led to some bad behavior. Sin isn’t very original.
Allow me to take another shot at a humanist theory of of sin:
Some things, such as what have been called sins, are the default settings on the human body. The out-of-the-box model, so to speak. But every car enthusiast knows that if you want more performance, you’ve got to get yourself an after-market muffler. Human ethics are like that.
Our aspirations toward living “ethically, in loving, reverent relationship with humanity and nature” are mostly after-market add-ons.
OK. So I know that my metaphor doesn’t have the sizzle of two naked people and a talking snake. (That’s good writing!) Still, my metaphor is truer to the human condition.
We are risen apes, not fallen angels. We are prone to un-original appetites, irresponsibility, and killing. Still, we can aspire “to live joyfully and ethically, in loving, reverent relationship with humanity and nature.”
Not bad for a bunch of primates.
There’s an old Zen story that does like this:
Once there was a great warrior. He had never been defeated, and he continued to win every confrontation into old age. He was known far and wide as the only warrior who had never suffered a defeat.
This of course was a challenge to younger warriors, and one day a young man appeared to challenge the old warrior. He, too, had never suffered defeat. His technique had become famous: he allowed his opponent to make the first move, then exploited that move and always won the day.
Despite the concern of his students, the old warrior consented to join in combat with the young man.
On the day of the battle, the young man walked up to the old warrior and spat in his face. The old man did not move. Then the young man began to hurl insults. This had no affect either. Then the young warrior began to throw dirt and stones at the old warrior. The old warrior stood, impassive.
Finally, exhausted by all his effort, the young warrior bowed to the old warrior, admitting defeat.
After the young man had left, the disciples of the old warrior gathered around him. “Teacher! I would have split that young man’s skull open! How could you allow him to hurl such insults at you?”
The old warrior replied, “Consider this: if someone offers a gift and you will not receive it, to whom does that gift belong?”
Nonviolent resistance embraces the techniques of both the old and the young Zen warrior. Like the old teacher, nonviolence does not accept the gift of violence or insults. Like the young warrior, nonviolence provokes a first response, then watches the opponent to see what the first move will be.
On April 12th, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama for parading without a license. There wasn’t a great deal of reading material in the jail, but one of the people arrested with King had been allowed to keep a newspaper he had in his pocket. That newspaper contained an editorial written by eight Euro-American Alabama clergy titled “A Call for Unity.”
The editorial began with the premise that, yes, African Americans deserved equality, but—that said—that said equality should be allowed to happen slowly—in the fullness, shall we say, of time. Without hubbub and marches.
King had heard this argument many times—just calm down and let the South change, slowly but surely. He had heard it from Euro-American centrists; he had heard it from within the African American leadership itself.
King began writing a response immediately. He used the bottom of his shoe for a desk. He wrote first on the margins of the newspaper; then on toilet paper; then on scraps provided for him by an African American trusty in the jail.
What he wrote is one of the great documents in US history, up there with the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. What he wrote is an argument based on the Unitarian thought of Henry David Thoreau’s masterwork, “Civil Disobedience.”
MLK knew that violence was the nature of racism. But it is also a basic human response to threat. In his letter King says this:
In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps:
collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist;
negotiation;
self purification;
and direct action.
We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham.
Besides the moral high ground of nonviolence, King also knew that his cause itself stood for a higher order of morality. In “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau had asserted, “If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.”
King was asking for that plank back. He saw the higher moral order, as did Thoreau and Tolstoy and Gandhi before him. Rather than getting the plank back, the Civil Rights movement got a small concession: I’ll let you hold onto my plank once in a a while, when you’re going down for the third time.
This is the unfinished business of what King started. And the continuing challenge to those who strive for a higher moral order. Still, today, I must restore the plank that I wrestled from a drowning human being. And there are many, many of those.
King’s letter is there still to remind us: “An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”
And,
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Since hearing the news last Thursday of the passing of Nelson Mandela, our beloved Madiba, I have been longing to be able to share the experience with my friends in South Africa. Although we all knew the time would come when he would no longer be physically with us, it has been hard to absorb. He had been through so much, accomplished the seemingly impossible.
But his time has come, as it must to all of us. On Sunday he will be laid to rest with the ancestors. We are left to remember, to cry, to celebrate, to sing and to dance, to carry on his work. Watching the SABC-TV live streaming of the memorial service all day on Tuesday, I was reminded about the meaning of his life for ours. As I reflected on all the news pieces flooding in on the radio, TV and Internet, I feel a sense of gratitude for this life, and yes, a sense of sadness. The words of Maya Angelou in her tribute poem … His Day is Done, written after Mandela’s passing, says it all… The final verse reads: :
…
Nelson Mandela’s day is done.
We confess it in tearful voices
Yet we lift our own to say
Thank You.
Thank You, Our Gideon.
Thank You, Our David.
Our great courageous man
We will not forget you
We will not dishonor you
We will remember and be glad
That you lived among us
That you taught us
And
That you loved us
All!
Mandela has given the world so much; now it our turn to receive these gifts and to pass them on. Our beloved Madiba showed us the way forward when he asked that his birthday be honoured by each of us giving at least 67 minutes of service to our communities, our countries, our world in recognition of the 67 years he had devoted to the struggle for freedom and democracy in South Africa.
He gave… we received the blessing… and now that he has joined the ancestors, it is our turn to give, to pass on the blessing … to make the world a better place for all.
How will you honour Madiba’s life today? To whom and what will you give?
At this time of year, we have many opportunities to join together with family and friends, to celebrate, to tell stories, to share memories. Because these holidays are most often colored in happy hues and we look forward to good food and fun-filled events with family and friends, it is easy to focus on happy memories, memories that we treasure and tell again year after year.
But memories are not always happy. Bad things happen. Sometimes these memories are of personal tragedies, while other times they are related to larger national or cultural struggles. What do we do about those memories?
I recently read Redeeming the Past: My Journey from Freedom Fighter to Healer, a new memoir by Fr. Michael Lapsley, an Anglican priest from New Zealand who was sent by his religious order to South Africa in the early 1970s. The book describes his early years in apartheid South Africa and his growing identification as a white man with the struggle against apartheid and the ANC. These activities soon got him evicted from the country, first to Lesotho and finally to Zimbabwe. His continued activism resulted in a letter bombing in 1990 that cost him his hands and one eye. It was these injuries that led to him considering how memories of the apartheid oppression continued to impact him and many in South Africa, even after Mandela had been released, the ANC was unbanned, apartheid was dismantled, and a new non-racial constitutional democracy established.
His own testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began his process of considering how one can heal such memories. The TRC had provided a forum where victims could be heard and believed… could be listened to. Stories spilled out… many of terrible abuse at the hands of the apartheid state, but others by the hands of the liberation movement. “Every story was given equal dignity, and both were seen as wrongs” (p.142). Building on his personal story and his work with the Trauma Centre in Cape Town, he began to see that political freedom was important but not enough. “As a people, we were, and in many ways still are, imprisoned by the memories of the past” (p. 117). Fr. Michael began to see that the TRC was just a beginning. What was needed was a parallel process that would allow all those affected by the long history of oppression in South Africa to work through those memories with others and to in fact heal them. He sought a way to “break the chain of history” that stretched back to the earliest history of the region. He realised that oppressed people who see themselves as victims frequently become victimizers of others, justifying their actions because of past wrongs. This vicious cycle had to stop, but how?
From these experiences has grown his life ministry –the Institute for the Healing of Memories .The Institute facilitates 3-day workshops during which participants tell their stories and listen to the stories of others. The hurts visited one on another are acknowledged and understood. Participants are often able to come to a place where memories as well as relationships can be healed, allowing the possibility of the healing of society at large. While located in South Africa, Fr. Michael has taken the workshop to many other parts of the world where memories also need to be healed after conflict and oppression.
So my question in reading Fr. Michael’s memoir is, how might healing of memories be applied in our individual lives? All too often a victim’s stories seem to elicit the response from the “listener” of a similar experience (often with the implication that the listener’s experience was more difficult). Such “pity parties” often devolve into “my oppression is worse than your oppression.”
What might happen if I were to really listen to what the other person has to share, really listen. What might I learn? How might my attentive listening affect the speaker? What might the outcome be if we all were able to share our stories, our memories, in an accepting environment. What would happen if we each actually tried to hear each other?
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.
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