What He Deserves
I’m deliberately late to the discussion of Elliot Rodgers’s homicidal spree. If you haven’t read any of the variety of excellent pieces discussing his misogyny, and how this horrific event relates to the threat of violence that hangs over every woman’s head, you should do that before you read anything more here. (Feel free to post links to your favorite pieces in the comments.) It’s important, and it needs to be said, and heard: Elliot Rogers killed seven people and injured 13 more out of a rage based in the fact that women were not giving him the attention (read: sex) that he deserved. While it is uncommon for men to kill people out of this sense of frustrated entitlement, it’s absurdly common for men to make verbal and/or physical advances on women whose attention they feel entitled to.
Which is where I want to go next. Never setting aside the need to address rampant misogyny—nor, for that matter, setting aside the urgent need to address the fact that the US has a rate of gun violence that far exceeds that of, well, pretty much anywhere else that isn’t actually a war zone—leaving these important matters in place, I want to point to one more thing. The sense of entitlement itself.
Elliot Rodgers was not furious just because he couldn’t have what he wanted. After all, almost all of us go through life simply accepting that we’re simply not going to have everything we want. However much I might long for an original Monet, there will never be one hanging on my wall, and I really have never given any emotional weight to that sad fact. That’s just how it is. But when I feel I deserve something, that it is rightfully mine and it is being denied to me, then the anger starts to set in. Elliot Rodgers felt entitled to sexual attention from women, and his fury came not from the fact that beautiful women were beyond his reach, but rather from the fact that he wasn’t getting the women he felt he was supposed to get. Of course, a big part of this problem is seeing women as objects for someone to obtain, rather than individuals with their own needs and desires. But another part of the problem is the idea that wanting something is somehow equivalent to being entitled to having it.
Now, it seems in this country that when people complain about entitlement, they are generally complaining about folks who expect to have health care even if they’re not working, or expect to earn a living wage for unskilled labor, or think that their birth control should be available without cost under their health plan. But you know what? I happen to think that people are entitled to health care, to education, to a wage that doesn’t force them to choose between rent and food. I don’t have a problem with those entitlements, nor with Social Security or Medicare. I genuinely believe that a civil society does best guaranteeing people certain basic things.
But somehow, while a whole lot of folks are ready to blame others for their sense of entitlement to, say, not dying of a treatable illness, these same folks are perfectly ready to tell you that they deserve a mansion or a sports car or a tropical vacation, because they have worked hard for what they have. But you know what? There’s a big difference between enjoying something that you are privileged to have, and declaring that you deserve that privilege. No one deserves a shopping spree or week in an Alpine village. Which is not to say that people shouldn’t have those things, or enjoy them. But the moment that you move from a place of gratitude for the gifts of your life to a sense that the world owes you the pleasures that you crave, you have taken just a step down Elliot Rodgers’s terrible path. Because the more you feel that you deserve, the more you will resent it when those things don’t come to you.
And “Blessed are those who piss and moan because they can’t have everything they want” said no great religious leader ever. Buddhism teaches non-attachment, the understanding that we can’t truly hold to anything. Islam teaches the importance of charity, the notion that some percentage of what is yours doesn’t really belong to you, as does Judaism. Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor,” or maybe “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” either of which works here. A person whose life is founded in gratitude for what is given, and in an ongoing quest to share gifts with others, does not to arm themselves and go on a shooting spree.
Of course, there are precious few of us who are aching to go out and shoot up a bunch of people because we aren’t getting what we want. (Thank goodness.) But there are a whole lot of us who waste a whole lot of time and energy fuming about what we don’t have, and trying to get more of what we think we deserve. What would happen if we just started with the assumption that whatever it is, we are probably not entitled to it? That hot woman at the bar? You don’t deserve her. The dumpy middle-aged lady at the table across from yours? You don’t deserve her either. You also don’t deserve a brownie , a flat-screen TV or a pedicure. Which is in no way to say that it wouldn’t be great for any of those to come into your life. But when you start to view the good things in your life as privileges, as gifts, as grace, then it’s harder to be sullen about what you don’t have, and easier to share what you do. Not only are you less inclined to shoot people, but it also turns out that life is a lot more pleasant.
We’ve Come This Far…
For her 75th birthday, my Granny talked my dad, her 4th born son, into driving her and my Great Aunt Dot out the see the Grand Canyon “before I die.”
Once they had made the long journey from North Georgia to the Grand Canyon, Granny turned to my dad and said “you know what else I want to see before I die? The giant redwood trees! We’ve come this far. We might as well go.” What else could my dad do but get everyone back into the car and go see those amazing trees. What’s another 2000 miles roundtrip with the trickster Granny in your car and in your heart?
Granny was a born again Christian who would speak of her salvation from cigarettes as a miracle worked in her life by Jesus Christ. When she died in 2007, two ministers preached her funeral and they began the service by saying “Granny wanted us to preach a full service today, complete with alter call, because she knew this was the last time she could make y’all all come to church.” I sat in that pew laughing through my tears of grief…and prayed that one day, I would have her courage, her ability to live faithfully into the mystery, even unto death.
My granny taught me to trust the mystery of the world, to delight in the many colorful stories that sustain our days, to ask for what I need to survive, to figure out how to thrive. She taught me to believe that I am loved and can love, no matter what. To believe that you are loved and can love, no matter what.
No matter what.
How Granny learned to live so bravely and unapologetically may always be a mystery to me. But I am ever so grateful for the lessons of her life, of her faithfulness, of her creativity.
Whenever we start to flag, to judge, to doubt, to tire, may we remember and be encouraged by the trickster energy of Granny.
We’ve come this far. We might as well go see the giant redwoods – host General Assembly in New Orleans in 2017, grow our faith in the Deep South, bend the arc of the universe toward justice – whatever faithful longing we carry in our hearts.
Let’s be brave, beloveds, and live into the mystery together.
Give me the heart
I have spent the past few days saturated in extraordinary music, delicious food, dear friends – and almost completely off of the grid, just checking in from time to time with the office and the work phone to keep disasters to a minimum.
Today I return to the world of administration and e-mail, deadlines and accountability, pastoral care and organizing.
Today I pray to the universe “give me the heart.” Give me the heart to love, the heart of compassion and commitment. Give me the heart of return, the heart of restoration.
And I will give. I will give thanks for the gift of life, for the gift of love and compassion bestowed with grace. In my gratitude, I will serve with heart.
I will live from a place of gratitude.
I will say thank you.
Thank you, universe.
Carrots, Sticks, Paddles, and Autopilot
Buddhist wisdom says there are three ways we naturally approach anything—desire, aversion, or indifference. For the sake of convenience, I call them, “yum!” “eeeeewwww” and “zzzzzz.”
I see a slice of cheese cake. “Yum!” I love cheese cake. So, I desire the slice of cheese cake. I grab it. Five hundred calories down my gullet. I see a squirrel that’s been hit by a car. Eeeeeewwww! Aversion. I look away. Then there’s indifference: trees along the route to work, for example. Those tchotchkes around the house that you haven’t dusted in months. Indifference. You just don’t see them. “Zzzzzz.”
I swallow the cheese cake before I even have time to enjoy it. I’m too caught up in my aversion at the sight of the wounded squirrel to help. I don’t bother looking up to see the gift that simple things like sycamore trees or a souvenir from long ago can bring.
Desire. Aversion. Indifference. These are the reactions we naturally have when our brains are on autopilot. And Buddhists say these lead to our suffering. We go through our thoughtless lives wanting, rejecting, and ignoring. And it’s always about me, me, and me.
How can we get out of that cycle?
Buddhism teaches that we have to find a place of equanimity—calmness; composure; evenness of temper.
But how can I keep evenness of temper when there’s cheese cake around? How can I stay composed when I experience disgusting or frightening things? How can I be composed when I’m staring absently out the window and don’t even see what’s in front of my nose?
Equanimity is about being mindful—aware—no matter how tempting, disgusting, or boring something is. Equanimity is about living in the here and now fully. Fully in touch with what surrounds us, without saying “yum!” “eeeeewwww” or “zzzzzz.”
Equanimity is clearly a way of bringing our aspirations into our actions, of bringing what we wish we did and what we do into closer relationship.
Easier said than done! But that’s how it is with religious thinking: it is always about either paddling upstream—against the currents of human nature—or it’s about how human nature is OK after all, at least in certain circumstances.Things like war, murder, torture, xenophobia, oppression. That sort of thing.
Sigmund Freud, no fan of religion, argued that culture does much the same thing as religion. It functions to mitigate the fearsomeness of nature; to reconcile us to the randomness and cruelty of fate; and to explain why culture itself makes so many problems for us.
It seems to me that both culture and religion (perhaps because the separation of church and state is a modern invention) are pretty good at creating duty, because both contain carrots and sticks. They create duty but not necessarily (or commonly) responsibility, which is a personal choice unaffected by carrots or sticks. Antoine de Saint-Exupery put it this way: “civilization rests upon what it exacts from its people, not from what it furnishes them.” The same can be said of most of religion.
Responsibility is a personal choice. A choice arrived at (or not) by each of us. How we get there depends upon the lives and circumstances we experience. Responsibility is a personal ideal. We live up to it.
Which brings me back to equanimity. It, too, is an ideal—we’re always going to default to “yum!” or “eeeeewwww” or “zzzzzz.”
Equanimity. The Buddhists think it’s a good way to act. It’s what made the Stoics stoic.
Source: Neoclassical_Velocity.JPG: Unitfreak
Equanimity. It’s a choice.
Rest Easy
The high April winds blowing damage across the US this week also blew something into town that my lungs are treating as poison. This morning I face the day with more empathy and exhaustion than I have known in a while.
To everyone who struggles with their own health through the quiet hours, may you feel the love and support of your community.
To everyone who serves babies, elders, or the ill through the night, may you know that your efforts matter.
To everyone who sleeps through the night, may you remember to have compassion for those who do not.
Be well, beloveds. Rest easy when you can and know, when you cannot, that you are not alone.
However They Have Writ the Style of Gods: Wounds and Healing
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.
Earth Day Notes from New Orleans
Last week the Center hosted two groups of youth, one primarily people of color, one primarily white people. As the groups co-navigated the space of the Center and the programming, it was pretty clear to everyone why we talk about race and an analysis of racism as a gateway to serving in the New Orleans community. This week the Center is filled with another group, this one primarily white people from a place of primarily white people. Many in this group have been coming to New Orleans to volunteer for years and some are not sure why they have to talk about race and racism each time they come – other than that it seems to be the price of the trip to New Orleans. There are moments of joy in the work of unraveling oppression and moments of despair.
As I write, my garden fills with love bugs, lettuce, stinging caterpillars, and thyme. Despair and joy ripple through this Earth Day 2014. Those with power to change the laws and hold those who are destroying the Earth’s ability to sustain life as we know it are busy arguing semantics and pocketing short-term profits. Perhaps this is not surprising in a country founded on the belief that land could be bought and worked at the expense of human life.
And so we have to talk. To each other. About uncomfortable truths.
Our silence will not protect us… will not make sure that my niece and your child have trustworthy water and air that will not poison them. The environmental crisis of the Gulf and West Virginia has moved inland with the advent of fracking. White people are learning that their whiteness will not protect them from the brutality of our current economic system, from the impact of decades of valuing imaginary numbers over real life.
And here we are, called to continue the struggle for collective liberation – imperfectly, madly, hopefully… Happy Earth Day, beloveds. Let’s talk to each other.
Earth: Our Deep Home Place
The Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalist cluster gathered in an oak -filled park on Sunday to celebrate Earth: Our Deep Home Place. As Earth Day approaches, I share with you a meditation, my invitation to celebrate our beloved planet:
Cosmologian Thomas Berry wrote “Nothing is completely itself without everything else. This relatedness is both spatial and temporal. However distant in space or time, the bond of unity is functionally there. The universe is a communion and a community. We ourselves are that communion become conscious of itself.”
We who are of the earth, children of the everything seed (http://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/children/loveguide/session1/sessionplan/stories/168158.shtml),
we are intimately and ultimately connected to all creation. Through mystery and mutation, we have risen from the fertile mud to look around and celebrate the miracle of earth. As humans evolved, so too evolved rituals to celebrate and interpret the wonder of this place.
When Lao Tzu, the great Daoist philosopher asked, “Can you hold the door of your tent wide to the firmament?” poet Mark Nepo believes he was “challenging us not to define the world by whatever shelter we create but to let in the stars, to throw our tent of mind and heart wide open in order receive and listen to the flow of life.”
Part of my own deep sense of home place in south Louisiana comes from the insistent presence of earth here. There is no day I can travel through town without noticing the majesty and intelligence of the plied live oaks, the whip-like flexibility of the pomegranate trees, the persistent resurrection of the bananas and the gingers. Summer days hum with the life cry of the cicadas, seagulls and crows caw throughout the year, mosquitos whining past your ear, and if you listen closely, I swear you can hear termites chewing away on darned near everything.
This place takes us deep, past language, to a pre-verbal space of knowing, to a place before naming, categorizing and limiting.
When we are still, when we breathe in and breathe out, when we trust that there is space for us and everything else that emerged from the everything seed, then beloveds, we can let go of our fears and submerge ourselves into the deep sense of collective belonging, the vast compassionate love that saturates creation.
Daily we make a thousand choices that shape the earth. May we throw our tent of mind and heart wide open in order to be shaped by the earth, our deep home place.
Decision Season
illustration by Chi-Yun Lau
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth….”
It’s that time of year. Perhaps it is related to the blossoming of spring, warm weather here in D.C., the sudden feeling of everyone being outside and looking outward for the first time in months. But it’s also what I’ve noticed in myself and with many of those around me–it’s decision season.
A neighbor’s son is deliberating about where to go for college, having been accepted into multiple good schools.
Many colleagues are in the midst of making plans for new ministries to begin this summer and preparing for moves to new towns (myself and my partner included)–so many small and significant decisions involved in all that. Others are deliberating this week about whether or not to continue seeking a new post, with a long list of congregations going into 2nd-round search this year.
For people involved in organizations of many sorts, it is already time to look ahead to fall, to “the next year,” and start planning, taking into account new directions, new goals, and what approaches may need to be left behind or discontinued.
A couple of old friends/girlfriends have surfaced in my life in random and unexpected ways this past week, causing me to wonder: what is she up to now? What is her life like?
We’re approaching graduation season and one of our most beloved babysitters is facing the big questions of “what comes next?”
….All of this just has me thinking about how our life is a constant series of decisions, a very literal Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. We are privileged and lucky if and when we feel like we have more than a few good choices. And all the decision-making can’t help but result in some wondering about “what if…?” What if I’d gone that way, or hadn’t left that relationship, what if I’d chosen to go there for school, or studied this instead of that, professionally…..
For me the reveries keep ending in gratitude for all that is, in my life, and a new determination to savor the present moment. When I step back and survey all the places I could have made some other choice, I return to my life as it is with fresh energy to step into it, to embrace it. I truly believe, as I said to our neighbor’s son, that it’s not where we go to school that ultimately matters, it’s what we do with the time we spend there. Pretty much that’s what I think about life in general. It’s what we make of it. So I come to gratitude, simple affirmation, and contentment. My body, my life, my relationships, this incredible family, our messy home, this complex and amazing vocation. This is the path I’m on, neither the one more or less “traveled by,” but genuinely mine. Embracing that is what has made all the difference.
Do Justice
I am ever so grateful that I was assigned The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb: A Spirituality for Leadership in a Multicultural Community, written by Eric H. F. Law, during my studies at Loyola Institute of Ministry – New Orleans. It has been an invaluable source of wisdom as I bear witness to the ways Unitarian Universalism is and is not welcoming. I gratefully commend it to ministers and lay leadership.
Law is an ordained Episcopal priest who grew up in Hong Kong, then immigrated to the United States when he was 14. He has a lot to say about external and internal culture, both the breadth and depth of hospitality. Law offers a helpful paradigm for understanding how to get beneath the surface of what limits our ability to welcome multiple cultures. He writes:
[E]xternal culture – [music, food, dance, art] – constitutes only a small part of our cultural iceberg. The larger part is the hidden internal culture that governs the way we think, perceive, and behave unconsciously… the “instinct” of our cultures…The cultural environment in which we grew up shapes the way we behave and think. Implicit in this cultural environment are the cultural myths, values, beliefs, and thought patterns that influence our behavior and the way we perceive and respond to our surroundings.
Most of the time we are unconscious of their existence.
They are implicitly learned and very difficult to change…Internal culture is like the air we breathe. We need it to survive and make sense of the world we live in, but we may not be conscious of it.
Internal cultural difference is not a matter of different ways of singing or speaking or dressing. It is a matter of perceiving and feeling.
Some of you may remember the scene from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) when Harry Potter sees a strange reptilian horse pulling the carriage and asks “What is it?”
Ron Weasley: What’s what?
Harry Potter: That. Pulling the carriage.
Hermione Granger: Nothing’s pulling the carriage, Harry. It’s pulling itself like always.
Luna Lovegood: You’re not going mad. I see them too. You’re just as sane as I am.
While being called as sane as Luna Lovegood was perhaps not particularly reassuring to Harry Potter, I hope that the image can be useful for Unitarian Universalists.
The carriage of our faith does not pull itself. Unitarian Universalism swims in the waters of implicit culture. This faith, our congregations, and each one of us have internal cultures.
And as Law explains:
The same event may be perceived very differently by two culturally different persons because the two different internal cultures highlight different parts of the same incident… To discover the unconscious, implicit part of our culture is a lifelong process. Some of us go through life like a fish in the stream and never know we are living in water… “When whites and people of color recognize that there are cultural differences in their perceptions of power, they take the first step toward doing justice.”
To Eric Law’s multicultural list I will add other layers of internal cultural perceptions of power differences that usually receive only external attention:
* cis- and trans- gendered,
* the gender spectrum from female to male,
* the spectrum of abilities and mobility,
* the sexual orientation spectrum,
* the class caste from poverty to the 1%,
* the ageism that saturates our lives from infancy to elderhood…
Law believes that “because of cultural differences some people are perceived as lions and wolves and some as lambs and calves” unconsciously, setting up “an uneven distribution of power before groups even meet.”
He writes:
If the church is to become the holy mountain on which people from diverse cultures shall not hurt or destroy each other, we must respond to the call to do justice.
Doing justice in a multicultural environment requires us to understand the consequences of these cultural differences in power perceptions. Doing justice commands us to reveal this unconscious and disproportionate distribution of power. Doing justice compels us to develop new leadership skills that can confront injustice. Then we can create a just community when people from different cultures encounter each other with equal strength.
Our call in this time, as a people of faith, is the same one found on the cover to The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, namely, “Don’t Panic.” Realizing that our perceptions will be strongly influence by our internal culture, let us look around at life outside of our stream and honor that the water we live in is not the totality of the human experience.
Let us welcome grace into our midst, offering mercy to ourselves and to each other as we discern how we are together and how we wish to be together. May we bring our whole and holy selves into a community committed to collective liberation, to radical inclusion, to equity and compassion in human relationships.
Beloveds, let us do justice together, faithfully.