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.
Let’s Agree to Agree on Subjectivity
There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.
~Gertrude Stein
In last week’s post I looked at one way to smooth the waters between theists and non-theists, Pragmatism. Pragmatists say, if it works for you, it’s true.
Now, I know that’s a bit hard to swallow for some people, idealists, mostly. So, allow me to try to get to the same spot from a different direction.
For an idealist, there’s something out there that’s true. Idealists will admit that we see the world as we have learned to see the world; that our seeing affects us and those around us. It affects the world. Our seeing does not, however, make the world into what we see. The world is always as it is.
For example, I may decide that the tree in front of my house is possessed by an evil spirit. I may perform various rites to exorcise the evil spirit. I may even cut the tree down and burn it, thinking that that extremity will at last do away with the demon.
Perhaps I even believe that I succeeded in exorcising the demon and feel better about it all. Whatever I think, the fact of the matter is a dead tree, not an exorcised demon. One is measurable, the other is not.
Before going looking for something. It’s good to know what you’re looking for. What do we want in a god? I suspect the answer is: meaning and purpose in human life; a moral direction to the universe where the good and bad get what they deserve; perhaps even a cheerful afterlife where everyone is twenty-five years old and we get to talk with our grandmothers . . . and hang out with Abraham Lincoln.
That sort of thing.
This is the sort of god that the mainline monotheisms at one time posited for us. It’s the sort of afterlife promised by the sort of churches I attended as a child. Then I read Sigmund Freud (as did the generation a century before me). And I began to think there is a big problem with this god concept: it sounds suspiciously like wish fulfillment. And it can’t be measured.
Mainline Christian theologians don’t paint this picture of God anymore. They have gone in two broad directions: process theology—“god” is in the processes of nature. (A topic for another day.) Or the psychological route, saying: OK, we’ve got two things here:
There is that which is inside the human brain; and that which is outside the human brain.
This is, after all, how we experience reality: the personal and the impersonal. “God” is subjective: inside the human brain. God is not in the scientifically measurable outside realm.
These theologians will argue that putting god in the category of human subjectivity is not a denigration or demotion of God. Lot’s of important things exist only in our subjectivity. For example, I have spent much of my life fighting for “justice.” (Again with the quotes!)
“Justice” is a human subjectivity. “Justice” does not exist in the outside world as a measurable thing. You can’t weigh it. Consider: “Justice” has no meaning to a crocodile. A crocodile cannot act justly, at least from a human perspective.
Is justice an insignificant or untrue concept because it is the product of the human mind? Admittedly, we can say, “That was a just court decision” or “that was an unjust court decision.” But those are instances in time. The are not the concept “justice.”
Groups of human beings agree on the subjectivity called “justice.”
And the same is true of the several concepts of God. God is a shared consensual subjectivity among various groups. A shared consensual subjectivity. We agree that our subjectivities agree with each other and that the concept “God” is this way or that way … for us. That’s why various faith traditions require creeds said aloud: they are attempting to keep the shared consensual subjectivity similar in various minds.
Now clearly this concept of God pushes the idea of human understanding beyond the true / false dichotomy. Beyond the dichotomy that objective is true and subjective is false or at least suspicious. But consider—so far as we know, human consciousness is the most complex thing in the universe. So let’s give ourselves a little credit–maybe everything isn’t a zero or a one.
Computers are better than we are at chess. But not at writing poems. Or symphonies. Everything is not zero or one. Crocodiles or rocks don’t write poetry. People write poetry. And “God” is poetry. God is a human art. Knowledge is more than information.
It may well be that “religion” or “god” or “gods” exist in the same category as we consider abstract concepts such as “justice”—in objective reality these concepts don’t exist, yet the human brain is capable of creating these concepts out of the chaotic particulars of human experience.
Fact is, no matter how many times the US Supreme Court makes a really, really stupid decision, I’m going to keep working for what I see as justice. For many people, the same is true for “God”—despite all the evidence to the contrary, it is a concept that still makes sense to them.
This is why—despite the fact that I don’t share the subjectivity called God—I don’t get angry and shout about it. It can even be fun—and instructive—to to talk over our subjectivities. We might even learn something from each other.
In Which Cackling Self Vanquishes Wild Grief, While Rational Self Could Not
Newsflash: Grief is completely irrational.
Does this surprise me? Not rationally. I knew it, know it, have seen it in my own and other people’s lives. But if I ever doubted what I know, this week has given me complete and utter clarity about it.
I’m on a trip away from home, doing things in the real world, in my real life. I hadn’t set off to take a trip down memory lane, or through the land of grief. But to my surprise, that’s where I seem to be, at least in part. The grief is completely interspersed with vibrant blips of current reality. In terms of time spent, vibrant reality overshadows the grief 10 to 1. But the intensity of the grief has given the whole week a strong flavor. Perhaps because of the strength of current life’s vibrancy, the irrationality of my grief sometimes takes me all the way to Wild Grief.
This was a two-part trip: It began with a meeting in Cleveland of a group of Unitarian Universalists, called “Allies for Racial Equity.” A group engaged in compelling, active work on a very present issue that I’m engaged in now. It had barely occurred to me that, 30 miles away in Akron, my childhood home was now owned by people who were not my parents. But when I got to Cleveland, I needed to head down to Akron and circle that house like a buzzard. So I did, driving along familiar streets, noting things I remembered and things that have changed. In a declining industrial city, most things that have changed are not for the better.
At my childhood home, my rational brain noted that the new people appear to be taking care of some major house issues that my father refused to address, and that is a very positive thing.
Meanwhile, my grief spoke in a completely different voice. Wild Grief began to howl: How dare they? Why did they take down those bushes [hideous bushes I had always hated]? How could they paint the door that new color when my mother had so carefully picked out that purple color [I never liked], and hand painted the door herself, twenty or twenty five years ago? What was wrong with them?
I shook myself a little, drove around familiar streets of schools and friends, streets filled with the ghosts of friends , some living and some dead. Then I headed back to Cleveland, back to my life, back to my trip. Next stop: Boston.
The Unitarian Universalist Association is preparing to sell its buildings on Beacon Hill and move across town. These include office buildings and also a bed and breakfast that I have stayed in, literally hundreds of times, over the past twenty five years. I knew that I was grieving the loss of this home away from home, but it wasn’t until I began to see the ubiquitous presence of the people who are purchasing it, measuring and discussing future plans, that irrational grief began to burn in me. “They’re walking around as if they own the place!” I sputtered to a co-worker, who responded kindly, “They do.”
And from there Wild Grief took full flight. As I was walking to a nearby café, I realized that not only am I losing this place to stay, it’s also unlikely that I will, in the future, spend much if any time on Beacon Hill in Boston. Why didn’t I ever live on Beacon Hill, when my child was young? I asked myself. Look at those people with a stroller! Now my child is 17 and I’ll never push a stroller on Beacon Hill! How could I have denied myself that opportunity? It would have been the best place to live, and I denied myself the experience, which is now gone For.Ev.Er.
Rational self pointed out to Wild Grief that, actually, I didn’t like the five years I spent working in Boston. The climate, the culture, the population density was so alien to me that I pretended to myself I was just there for college and would graduate soon and leave. Rational Self also pointed out that my stays at the bed and breakfast include such memories as my young child getting hives because of the lack of screens in the windows and a mosquito infestation, with air conditioning and heating that never quite worked right. Rational self had all kinds of these reminders, but Wild Grief had no interest. She was off and running.
Walking in one of the Boston streets that my Midwestern heart found so claustrophobic and anxiety producing when I lived here, Wild Grief continued to spiral and escalate. What is this time I live in, anyway? Wild Grief moaned. Wouldn’t it have been better to have lived in the 1950’s, when businesses were building after the war and people got married, had jobs, bought houses, and just stayed put for life? Wouldn’t it have been great to live in a time when things were predictable, and steady?
And that’s when Rational Self dissolved and Cackling Self came in. The 1950’s? Me in the 1950’s? I told a friend about this later and we had a laughing fit, envisioning me, a bitter secretary for a mean and controlling male boss, unable to create or claim or own anything as a woman, slinking into smoky lesbian bars on the weekends hoping not to get arrested, a bitter alcoholic, viewed by the rest of the world as a lonely spinster. And with that cackling, wild grief quit soaring in the skies and spiraled down a tiny hole. From which I am confident she will emerge again any minute and take flight again.
I don’t know what adventures my heart will bring me today, but I hope Cackling Self stays with me. Turns out not only is she more fun, she’s more effective, in vanquishing Wild Grief.
Nomination for Most Necessary Picture: Twelve Years a Slave
I wish I could talk to my Great-Aunt Marie about the movie Twelve Years a Slave, but regrettably “Neenie” died when I was three. This spinster librarian from Detroit did, however, leave a legacy—a self-published book of family history. Written in 1957, this book documented my family’s years in Missouri in the 1800’s.
My parents ridiculed these books; giant unopened boxes of them filled our attic. When my father died, I finally brought one home and began to read it. To my shock, the very first line of the preface, written by Aunt Marie in 1957, tells me my ancestors “left a Virginia country environment where they were relieved of the drudgeries of workaday life by the labor of slaves…they were members of a society in which excellence in manners, morals, and religion were prerequisites.” In 1821, when Missouri became a slave state and offered land at $1.25 an acre, my ancestors migrated there.
I had always imagined these Missouri pioneer ancestors living in a house kind of like Little House on the Prairie. Never did I envision Ma and Pa and the kids with slaves out back, ‘relieving them of the drudgeries of workaday life.’ No one ever talked about our family history as slave-owners.
Aunt Marie says in her preface that the family letters, “too numerous to include, have been incorporated into dialogue. The conversations are necessarily fictitious, but the events are authentic. The story is a family diary with eighteen dramatic scenes.” In other words, old letters have been turned into the equivalent of bad 1957 church skits.
Each of these ‘dramatic scenes’ is scripted, with stage directions and settings written by Aunt Marie herself. These descriptions are the primary reason I wish that Aunt Marie and I could have watched and talked about Twelve Years a Slave together.
Here are a few of the lines Aunt Marie included to ‘set the stage’ for various scenes:
“Smiling blacks bear platters of food to the tables, while strains from banjo and guitar are heard from the rear.”
“Black folks … cluster around the well and weave in and out of the buildings, working, laughing, loafing.”
It wasn’t until I saw and reflected on Twelve Years a Slave and the history of cinematography about slavery that I realized where Aunt Marie’s images came from. They sprang, in technicolor, from her Hollywood-influenced mind. Hollywood has presented dozens of films with images just like the ones Aunt Marie described, showing slavery as a time when blacks smiled and laughed and loafed.
Now, thankfully, Hollywood offers a version of history more grounded in fact. Twelve Years a Slave takes its viewers into slavery, not through the eyes of the slave-owners, but through the eyes of Simon Northup, a freed black man from New York, stolen and enslaved. The film shows slavery as mundane, daily, ceaseless, violence and terror. Some African-Americans I know don’t want to see it, or loathed it. But as a white person, who doesn’t experience the daily relentlessness of racism, the physical intensity of the movie was transformative. Leaving the movie felt like stepping out of a virtual reality booth.
I suspect Aunt Marie would not want to have any of it. Her preferred view seemed to be that owning other human beings didn’t make a dent in one’s ‘excellence in manners, morals, and religion.’ Nor did ceasing to own other human beings involve any sense of repentance. As one ancestor wrote:
“I’m not going to let old John Brown or any confounded abolitionist steal my blacks… I shall free them myself. Freeing my servants will not be a financial loss to me. Most of the negroes I have were inherited. In return for their labor, I have given them food, shelter, clothing, medical care…and security in old age.”
When I utter judgment upon my ancestors, some white folks get upset with me for “imposing 21st century values” on 18th or 19th century people. Do we really have to talk about this? they all but groan.
I guess the primary reason I’m most grateful to Twelve Years a Slave is that it is a kind of family intervention. I was born in the latter part of the 21st century. Silences and lies about my family history were handed to me as intact and unbroken as the four sherbet dishes my mother gave me, which made the journey with my ancestors from Virginia to Missouri. If Aunt Marie, writing in 1957, had come to believe that owning other people was wrong, she never mentioned it. My liberal parents –civil rights activists–never saw reason to talk to us kids about this part of our family history. Like many white people, my siblings prefer not to talk about it now.
Though viciously brutal, the film’s truth-speaking is a relief. Finally! Because when do Americans, or families, sit down with each other and say, “Wow, that was us! We did that! What meaning should we make of that? How did we benefit? How were we hurt? How do we heal our nation? How should we live our lives now?”
Twelve Years A Slave may or may not win Oscars Sunday night. But its real value is in changed and enriched lives: lives of people like me who have new ways to talk about and challenge what Adrienne Rich called “the lies, secrets, and silences” which shroud our national and family and cinematic histories. If there were a category for “Most Necessary,” this would be, hands down, my choice for best picture.
It’s Carnival Time!
Al “Carnival Time” Johnson sings “it’s Carnival Time and everybody’s havin’ fun…”
The twitter feed, the facebook, the news cycle all make it very clear that not everyone is having fun… but this weekend (until Ash Wednesday), I will put my twitter feed down, my facebook and the news away, and I will spend time with the people of my city dancing on the streets in handmade costumes with bands that have been practicing all year. Beloveds, we are going to have some fun.
Carnival time in New Orleans is complex, with a twisted history of racism, classism, sexism — AND it is an opportunity for the utter subversion of the oppressive status quo. It is a time when strangers become friends, generosity is the word of the day, and hope for a new day is lived out in the prefigurative politics of a communal celebration.
See y’all after the Mardi Gras.
Bee Wise
This winter has devastated my sub-tropical garden in New Orleans. I was out of town when the last polar vortex dipped down for a visit. In my absence, all of the plants that I had brought into the house during the first big freeze were left outside to melt into gelatinous puddles. The joyful exception to the sad stories in my garden is the camellia.
And I am not the only one who is excited about the flowers. The honey bees amped up their buzz big time when I snipped a few branches off to share with a friend.
I imagined for a moment that I could hear the thoughts of the cold, hungry bees.
What the #%&$# was the large two legged doing, walking off with these precious blooms???
Perhaps the bees were buzzing nothing of the sort, but it made me think about how hard it is to celebrate the gift of abundance from a mindset of scarcity.
I recently bore witness to a white man proactively insist that the construct of systemic racism is not real, but rather slanted propaganda. That there are only individuals, no such thing as collective identities…
How deep the fear of losing the flower of privilege must be, for such loud, unsolicited buzzing.
How terrified to share what grace has provided…
Bees know the truth and the power of the collective. May we be so wise.
Take Good Care
I was taught in seminary to do ministry with sacred texts in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Our theological and ethical musings are of no consequence if they cannot be applied to what is happening outside the walls of our congregations, if they do not speak to people’s lives.
As the Affordable Care Act comes into effect this month, I’d been wanting to do an in depth exploration of how our Unitarian Universalist values support the struggle for universal health care.
And then I had a baby.
And so it was in between diaper changes, that I heard NPR coverage of the botched rollout of the ACA, of website crashes and governors of some of the poorest states refusing to expand Medicaid as originally called for.
In between feedings, I caught glimpses of newspaper editorials decrying coverage gaps and lower-than-anticipated-enrollment.
As the health care debate raged on, I set up payment plans for our own hospital bills and accepted the care of family and friends who brought food and loving hands to help. I argued with my insurance company about covering portions of my prenatal care, and I applied to enroll my daughter in Connecticut’s HUSKY (Medicaid) program.
And as the pundits went at it, one of my best friends continued her battle with cancer, and another was in a horrific accident that left him in a coma with a devastating brain injury.
Over the past few months, I have seen more early morning light than ever before. As I sit up in the pre-dawn hours feeding my newborn babe, heartsick for my friends, I wrap myself in a prayer shawl, sky blue.
As my heart holds the exquisite joy of new life and the devastation of illness and loss, I sink into the softness of the shawl and the love of friends and the love of God, and I pray for healing, for wholeness, for peace.
I pray that my spouse and I might find the strength and the will to care well for the tiny person entrusted simply by her birth into our care. And, knowing full well that we cannot protect her from harm or shelter her from hurt all the days of her life, I pray that we might have the courage to be a part of creating the kind of world we would like for her to live in. I share all of this, because I have found that the topic of health care quickly becomes deeply personal. It is crucial that we move beyond facts and figures and media sound bytes, that we reflect on how we are cared for, how we care for others and what kind of society we want to create together.
When it comes to equitable health care, I start with our connectedness, our interdependence.
King wrote these words we read this morning from his cell in a Birmingham jail, calling on white clergy to join the struggle for civil rights : “We are,” he said, “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” This is a spiritual understanding of human relations that compels us to care for each other – all of us, even those we might not first see as our neighbors.
Unitarian Universalist minister Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed writes: “The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all. There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others. Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice.” Understanding ourselves as connected, each to all, we know that stranger and friend alike are our neighbors, and that love and compassion are the foundation of the vision we share with King – and with so many others – a vision of a society in which all are provided for and cared for equally.
People of faith do not need to know once-and-for-all how to fix the brokenness of our health care system. We do need to continually lift up the vision of a society grounded in love of neighbor, rooted in compassion for all, and transformed by care.
We do need to hold together the joy of new life and the devastation of illness and loss, and to celebrate the wondrous love that binds us together. We do need to pray for healing, for wholeness, for peace.
I pray that as a nation, we might have the will to care for each other well.
And I pray that each of us might have the courage to be a part of building the society we dream of.
The ACA gives us a tiny nudge us toward that goal. We have a long way yet to go.
