The Joy of Taxes
There it is. It’s done. Whether you’re getting a refund or had to write a check, or if you just made it in the nick of time to file for an extension, Tax Day has come and gone, so we can rejoice. Yes, I know, mostly rejoice that the 
hell of dealing with tax forms and receipts and inadequate record-keeping (it’s not just me, is it?) is over for another year. But maybe you can also spare a moment to celebrate the fact of taxes themselves.
Really? Yes, really. Taxes are the practical assertion of a central religious truth: we belong together, and there are things that we can do in service to one another that none of us can accomplish alone. We need one another. My religion asserts that none of us has the whole picture of the nature of God or the meaning of life, but that we come closer to the truth in conversation with each other. Although my religion is less explicit about it, I would claim that my religion also acknowledges that no one of us can build and maintain a system of roads, or serve as a police force, or fight fires or maintain the safety of the food supply or keep airplanes from running into one another or a vast array of other things. And so we band together, pooling our money to make happen collectively what we can’t do on our own.
Now, I have plenty of issues with the details of the system. I am no fan of the percentage of my tax dollars that go into the insatiable maw of the military, and it absolutely drives me around the bend that corporations that are pulling in billions of dollars are paying not one red cent into the common pool. Don’t get me started. These are flaws in the system, and I surely wish they would get fixed. But the system, the declaration that together we can “promote the general welfare,” is, I think, one of the great inventions of humankind.
You know how I know this? Yesterday I went to the library. I don’t go as often now that I usually get my library books in electronic form. But yesterday the book I wanted was available in print and not as an e-book, so I hied myself down to my local library, and felt once again the same thing that I always feel when I go to the library. Joy. Pride. Here is a beautiful building, filled with more than books. (Although, being filled with books would in and of itself warrant a verse of Dayenu, the Passover song that declares of each of God’s blessings, “it would have been enough.”) This building is filled with people. Toddlers with stacks of picture books, school kids on break, adults looking for jobs on computers, teens doing research projects, elderly people lingering over the periodicals. Some event for children is going on rather loudly in the community room while a respectful murmuring prevails in the stacks. There are people of all shades of human skin color, and complete strangers comment on each other’s book choices and share recommendations. It is, in short, heaven.
And I imagine walking into this building with a small child, and showing her the room of bright books, the tables and the pillows for reading, the librarian who is there to answer her questions or offer story time, and saying: “Here. This is for you. We built it together so that you and your friends and the people you don’t know could share in the amazing gift of human creativity. You can come here whenever you want and borrow whatever you want and bring it back because that is the joy of sharing. And maybe sometimes sharing seems hard, but I want you to see just how much fun we can have when everyone shares together.”
And then I want to bring in Cliven Bundy, the yahoo in Nevada who thinks it’s more patriotic to hold a stand-off with the Bureau of Land Management than to pay his grazing fees for using federal land. And I want to bring in the CEOs of Boeing and Verizon and General Electric and the other 23 major US corporations that pay nothing—zip—zero in taxes. And I want to bring in Paul Ryan with his “let’s give it to the rich” budget. And I want to say to them, and to everyone else who thinks that taxes are, by definition, bad: “This is what happens when we remember that we are a community. This is what patriotism looks like. Go then, and do likewise.”
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.
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.
Pulling Weeds
I don’t know about where you are, but here in California we have hit the peak of Weed Season. A few days of long-awaited rain, a couple of days of sun, and the hills begin to turn gloriously green. So does my gravel driveway, and whole swaths of my yard where you are supposed to be able to actually see the things that I’ve planted.
I have to say there is a certain glory to wrenching vast, bushy weeds from the rain-damp soil, filling the 96-gallon green waste bin to overflowing. That was last week. And the week before. OK, and the week before that. And there are plenty more weeds all around the yard, but in my mind it has moved on to lawn time.
Let me explain. I have a big, well, “lawn” probably isn’t the right term. I’m not a fan of the kinds of chemicals that it takes to maintain a pristine lawn, nor the quantities of water. Apparently the previous owners weren’t either. What I have might be better described as a mostly-green, mostly-flat space that serves me well as a place for dog training. But it only works well as a dog training space if it’s mostly free of the kinds of weeds that grow burrs and needle-like seed pods and generally anything prickly. Which, it turns out, is most of your common weeds, which got so common by sticking their seeds onto anything that moves and spreading themselves around.
So I have spent time every spring, for the last several years, meticulously pulling out every little potentially prickly weed that I could get my fingers on. Little weeds. By the thousands. Every year. Which, it turns out, provides a person of ministerial or poetic bent such as myself with ample opportunity to think about the other kinds of weeds we pull up in our lives.
There are the giant, ugly weeds like racism, classism, heterosexim, ableism and all the others. Weeds which we root out and think are gone, until something catches the corner of our eye, or someone else points out that something bushy and threatening has grown while we weren’t looking. These kinds of weeds tend to have roots deep underground that we aren’t even aware of, and they can grow awfully fast under the right conditions.
But today I’m thinking more about the lawn weeds, the little insidious ones that you don’t see until you sit down on the ground, but which will overtake your life if you just let them grow. Weeds of insecurity and shame. Weeds of pride and superiority. Weeds of greed and anger and jealousy and, really, all of those classic deadly sins.
Even when you’re looking straight at these little buggers it can be hard to tell just what you’re seeing. You could easily think you were cultivating righteous anger when self-righteous indignation was really sprouting from the root. Shame can masquerade as humility, although they are not even related species. Heart-felt longing and greed can look the same until the tendrils begin to take over.
I am no expert gardener, but I’ve learned a few things over all my years of plucking weeds. I know that the weeds will always be with us, blown in on the wind or sprouting up from roots that we will never manage to pull out in their entirety. Pulling weeds is not a job that is ever complete. But I also know that it makes a difference. Weeds that once threatened to take over my lawn—or my heart—now are pretty much relegated to the edges. Pretty much. The percentages change. And every time you root out something that you really didn’t want as part of your landscape you make room for something else to grow.
Weeding and watering and living in gratitude for the rain and the sun. That’s what we gardeners of the spirit do.
How You Makin’ It?
Food for thought on a very busy week:
Living Wage Calculation for New Orleans city, Orleans Parish, Louisiana:
(http://livingwage.mit.edu/: “The living wage shown is the hourly rate that an individual must earn to support their family, if they are the sole provider and are working full-time (2080 hours per year). The state minimum wage is the same for all individuals, regardless of how many dependents they may have. The poverty rate is typically quoted as gross annual income. We have converted it to an hourly wage for the sake of comparison. Wages that are less than the living wage are shown in red.”)
There’s a lot of red on that grid…some perspective as states and Congress debate a minimum wage adjustment to $10.10 an hour…
How Are You…Really?
This week, when friends and acquaintances greeted me with the standard “How Are you?” I answered honestly. My answer wasn’t the standard “Good, good. You?” Our family has had more than our fair share of bad news of late, and it has begun to take its toll. Add a new baby and my spouse finishing his graduate program and a dual job search and I had a lot to say to the question that has become a rote greeting.
I felt self conscious though, about actually answering the question. “It’s a tough time,” I said, slipping in an “I’m sorry” and even an “I’m sorry for answering you honestly,” and when I did share some of what’s going on, a sheepish “That’s probably more than you wanted to know!” I am so grateful that more than one person thanked me for answering honestly, for being real, for being myself. They thanked me and they listened.
I wonder why I felt the need to apologize. Was I really so worried that people didn’t care how I actually am? Is it really that hard to cross the line between social convention and intimacy? It’s got me thinking about how we all have the opportunity to minister to people in our lives. It starts so simply, with asking “How are you?” And really wanting to know.
A Semi-Private Idaho and Life in the Goldilocks Zone
Living in your own private Idaho
underground like a wild potato
The B52s
You’ve heard about the “Goldilocks Zone,” that temperate place where H2O exists in the form of water and scientists speculate life might exist on other planets. I think a Unitarian Universalist congregation should be a Goldilocks Zone where the free exchange of ideas concerning ultimate meaning and purpose flows like life-giving water. After all, the fourth principle of the Unitarian Universalist Association is, “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”
Now, I know that actually the UUA principles are only agreements between congregations, underlining the right of each member congregation to respect the particular theological stance of the various congregations. But, in practice, these principles have been embraced more by individuals within congregations than between congregations, where there is pressure to conform to the franchise—a topic for another day.
I mention this because the congregation I serve, First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, has historically embraced humanism and has its own set of aspirations, the fourth of which is, to “support one another’s journey toward meaning and connection in the here and now.”
That’s a more humanist slant than the fourth principle of the UUA, but aimed toward the same ideal, a Goldilocks Zone for the free flow of ideas concerning ultimate meaning and purpose. This is the ideal. As with most ideals, the congregation falls short in reality. But reaching toward an ideal is a good thing. That’s what ideals are for—to stretch us.
Three methods help get us to the Goldilocks Zone:
Hit the pause button on being right.
Hang your inner judge and jury.
Trust everyone’s path.
Easier said than done. But one way to get there is to become a pragmatist. As in the philosophy called Pragmatism. Sure, you can remain an idealist or a cynic or whatever in other matters, but try pragmatism when it comes to creating a Goldilocks Zone.
Listen to what psychologist and Pragmatist philosopher William James had to say about that most contentious of issues, theism:
If believing as though we have free will, or as if God exists, gets us the results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.
Now, by “free will,” James meant “non-theist” according to the theological understandings of the time. In that light, consider what he said again:
If believing as though we have free will, or as if God exists, gets us the results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.
A pragmatist is a Pragmatist due to a deep skepticism concerning the human ability to ascertain ultimate truth. Since Pragmatists aren’t sure we can do that, they put air-quotes around “truth” and examine not what a truth is but how it affects human behavior.
In that light, notice what William James is saying: belief in a god or belief in no god works when it works. When it “gets us the results we want.” Whichever way we choose, the path we are on becomes “pragmatically” true.
If we can get there, we’re in the Goldilocks Zone for multi-faith communication and understanding.
This way of thinking led William James to write his great book The Varieties of Religious Experience, which makes most short lists for the greatest work of non-fiction in the Twentieth Century. And this way of thinking creates the Goldilocks Zone for both the free and the responsible search that each of us must make for truth and meaning.
Notice that this pragmatic approach accomplishes all three of my criteria for the Goldilocks Zone:
Hit the pause button on being right.
Hang your inner judge and jury.
Trust everyone’s path.
“But wait: my path is better!” Just add a couple of words to that statement: “My path is better FOR ME.”
“But my beliefs are objectively true!” No: your beliefs are objectively true FOR YOU. Both pragmatically—and scientifically—objective reality is always subject to further examination. The Pragmatists knew this in their bones.
Consider the words of a couple more great Pragmatists. Philosopher George Santayana said, “There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval by discerning and manifesting the good without attempting to retain it.”
Let it go.
Consider the words of Pragmatic philosopher John Dewey: “Growth itself is the only moral end.”
Who am I—and who are you—Dewey points out, to judge the religious and philosophical understandings of another person? Maybe you have a PhD in religious studies. That’s great. Maybe you were born UU and have a very open mind and no emotional baggage about religion. Bully for you. Remind yourself: anyone who walks into a Unitarian Universalist congregation for the first time is saying, “I need to think about this ultimate meaning and purpose stuff. I’m not satisfied with the off-the-rack, one-size-fits-all answers.”
Remember that NONE of us have the ultimate answers. The answers that work for others. I don’t have all the answers. I’m still thinking. And as a minister I get paid to think about these things. I thought about titling this, “What I Really, Really Think About God (this week).”
Try this: avoid going “underground like a wild potato.” Share your subjectivity but remember that it is a subjectivity, and we all live in some kind of private Idaho. Insisting on our own rightness leads to an icy world; saying there’s only one way leads to a steamed planet
.
The Goldilocks Zone, where the fresh water flows, is only possible when we get outside our own stuff and listen.
Women with a Vision – and a Voice!
Lately I’ve been struggling with the language of the non-profit world: “giving people a voice” and “empowering people”…
Beloveds, people have a voice. The dominant culture ignores it, drowns it out, disregards it…but people have a voice. People are speaking.
Empowering is defined as “giving someone the authority or power to do something.” The idea that the dominant culture can or will empower the oppressed is an unlikely one at best, a well-funded lie in truth.
Many of you may remember learning abolitionist Fredrick Douglass’s insight:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
In a recent conversation with a community member serving a large foundation I was told, “if philanthropy had been involved in the Civil Rights movement, their answer would have been to air-condition the back of the buses.”
So I have been looking for leaders and models of social change that have stepped away from the institutionally protective illusions of voiceless people waiting to be given power.
Recently I had the honor of sharing WBOK radio time with Deon Haywood, Executive Director of Women With a Vision* (http://wwav-no.org/). She did not waste any precious air time dealing with the smoke and mirrors of dominant culture. She spoke with a voice (hers), from a place of power claimed (not given). Did you hear her?
Beloveds, let’s stop using the white lies of philanthropy to air-condition the damage this country’s white supremacist culture has created. It is time to hear the voices speaking clearly in the world, working to claim power that has yet to be freely shared. People are speaking. Listen.
*The mission of Women With A Vision is to improve the lives of marginalized women, their families, and communities by addressing the social conditions that hinder their health and well-being. We accomplish this through relentless advocacy, health education, supportive services, and community-based participatory research.
What Healing Looks Like
I remember as a teenager, home alone one afternoon, listening over and over to David Bowie sing “Is there Life on Mars?” while gazing at the cover of his Hunky Dory album. I longed to be able to articulate the feelings I had inside me, and somehow this British man wearing makeup came closer than anyone else I’d yet encountered. I remember wondering– if my mother listened to him sing “Is there Life on Mars?” would she at least partially understand the desperation, the hopelessness, the profound alienation I felt all the time? I never dared to ask her. My friends and I got high instead of talking honestly about it all.
I didn’t know yet that I’d come to identify the vague loneliness and misery I felt all the time as heavily influenced by sexism and racism, classism and homophobia, in a declining Midwestern industrial town. I didn’t really get yet, that there were problems that were systemic, that the tiny lives of my friends and me were part of a much larger picture. It wasn’t till I was a young adult, beyond the reach of parents and school systems, accompanied instead by friends who deeply saw and heard me, that I could begin to name the parts of who I was and what I knew.
Last night I went to the “Be Heard Minnesota Youth Poetry Slam Series, 2014,” sponsored by a group called TruArtSpeaks. I saw there a group of young people who have found their voices, and who are speaking and heard at the intensity level I longed for myself as a teenager.
What happens when adults like Tish Jones, the Executive Director of TruArt Speaks, devote their lives to making young voices heard? When their coach Khary Jackson (AKA 6 is 9) takes time to work with them to express themselves clearly and with passion? When a packed house of family, friends, and strangers at a local theater pays and cheers and tells them they have changed us by speaking their hearts?
This is what healing looks like, I found myself thinking, even with wounds that are still gaping, in a world of oppression and violence and addiction and all of the other reasons that these kids and other people suffer. This is where healing begins.
Seven out of the nine contestants were young women of color. They, and the two young men—one African American, one white and openly gay–spoke about the ravages of racism and sexism and homophobia in their lives, of parents who are absent or abusive, of schools designed for them to fail. And there we were, a cheering, clicking, community of support, hanging on their every word. What does that do to a young person, I wonder.
For me, as an adult, as a white person, as a person with power and privilege in the culture, such an encounter also means healing. My healing begins with listening, and believing, young people, and marginalized people, the way I wanted my own mother to hear me. It begins with paying attention. And it extends to supporting the organizations and leaders who elicit these voices, in understanding that without people like Tish Jones and Khary Jackson, the safety to tell stories in that theater would not have been present for the young people on the stage.
This is what healing looks like. Led by the courageous, the ones who speak truths denied by louder voices, supported by love and respect. This is what healing looks like.
I feel profoundly blessed to have attended the slam last night, and to be represented as a Minneostan by the six young people who will move on to the national levels of competition as spoken word artists. But, as the MC kept saying over and over last night, This isn’t about competition. It’s about community, and leadership development, and having a good time together. And we did.