Tornados, Typhoons, and Straw Dogs: Giving Thanks With Some Thinking
Thanksgiving American style. The day declared a national holiday for the purpose of giving thanks. Despite the best efforts of those of a theocratic bent, who or what to thank remains open to interpretation.
My thanks goes to the universe that just keeps cranking out good things. As the fifth chapter of the Daodejing puts it,
The space between
sky and earth is empty,
like a bellows, moving
and moving, and
out comes more.
That’s something to be thankful for. Yet problems begin when all of that “more” between earth and sky begins to get divvied up. And, Thanksgiving being a national holiday, I can’t help thinking of the portion of the universe’s “more” taken by this particular nation and how that “more” is divvied up within our borders. It its harsh realism the Daodejing says,
The universe is neither
“good” nor “evil” outside
of human standards.
The universe treats all things
like so many straw dogs.
Recent survivors of various weather-related calamities might agree with that. Then there are these next lines:
Earthly rulers treat people
like so many straw dogs.
Well, maybe in the China of 400 BCE rulers treated people like so many straw dogs, but here in the US . . . Oh, wait. There was that government shutdown. There is that sequestration. There is that surveillance. Those drones. Oh, and then there’s work on Thanksgiving. And Black Friday. Rising poverty. Rising hunger. Straw dogs.
For Daoists, the answer is clear: the universe itself has no morality—it is neither good nor evil, and governments almost inevitably act in self-interest without regard to the greater good. It’s not what we learn in school, but evidence indicates another story.
I lost my childhood faith for the “big guy in the sky” when I began to suspect the moral calculus of the universe. When I began to suspect that “good” and “evil” are thoughts only in the human mind.
Does “god,” or does “god” not, decide who gets the cookies? And what is the basis for that judgement? Nation of birth? Social class? Skin tone? Religious affiliation?
Is it a moral act to thank such of deity for choosing me? Or my nation? My social class? My skin tone?
It’s not that I’m not thankful. But I’m not thankful to a deity that would put one child in Switzerland and another in Somalia. Such a deity does not deserve thanks, however mysterious “his” ways might be. And a deity that merely reflects the workings of the bellows of the universe? What’s the point?
Government? Yes, I grew up with those cardboard Pilgrims with their very white faces taped to the classroom windows. I understand what I was supposed to take away. Am I thankful to a government that protects the rapacious while ignoring the basic humanity of most of its citizens? Not so much.
Where might the thanks go? To luck? To fortune? To randomness? To that bellows that just keeps pumping?
Perhaps, finally, all we can do is watch and try as hard as we may to resist cynicism and complicity with the powers of what we human beings view as evil.
Here’s the advice to the Daoist:
Take care of what
is within yourself;
the outside will never
stop moving
and moving.
Thankfulness in the face of what we human beings call good and evil must serve as a reminder to think through who and what is dividing up the blessings. Yes, tornados and typhoons sweep away both the good and the bad. The universe treats us all like so many straw dogs. We find ourselves enmeshed in systems of oppression. Our choice is our work against those systems, and how we treat each other.
In the Need of Prayer
In the past few days, I have asked friends and colleagues to pray for a young man they have never met. One of my dearest friends (we will call him S.) is currently on life support in California after a horrible accident. His wife sits by his side as family and friends from all around the world wait for him to come out of a coma. They are in our thoughts without ceasing; and are the subject of so many prayers.
The irony is that S. is not an especially spiritually-inclined person. I have been thinking about what he would say about all these folks offering prayers on his behalf. I’m sure he would be touched, but he might also be amused or even a little annoyed. S. is fiercely devoted to his Jewish tradition, but holds little credence in the super natural. I’ve found myself talking to him directly, trying to reach him wherever he is. I’ve asked him to fight, to heal, to come back to us. I’ve prayed in English and in Hebrew. I have candles lit 24/7. I’ve pleaded with God to watch over him, to heal him, to bring him back to us. In conversation of sorts with S., I have been reflecting on the nature of prayer and why it feels so crucial to me right now.
Three reflections:
- Ann Ulanov calls prayer “primary speech.” “It is basic and fundamental,” she says, “our ground.” In prayer, she says, “who and what we are speak out of us…To pray is to listen to and hear this self who is speaking.”1 Accessing the deepest parts of ourselves, we ground ourselves in our humanness, open ourselves to our most fundamental being and speak the first language of our hearts. Prayer like this is often silent; it is wordless and timeless, connecting us to what is, was, and will be.
- Anne Lamott tells us that there are three prayers: “Help, Thanks, and Wow.”2 Over the past few days, I have found that often all I can manage is “Help,” repeating it over and over in the pre-dawn darkness as I feed my newborn daughter and pray for the man we call “Uncle.”
- And as our community begins a daily practice of sending thoughts and prayers to S. and his family at the same time, twice each day, I am struck by how prayer, however it is offered, makes it so we are not alone. Over the years, I have become a reluctant believer in the “power of prayer,” without understanding what that power might be. I do know the power of being kept in prayer and of holding others in prayer. I am more than grateful to all those who do not know S. or his family and are praying for them – sending love and thoughts, concentrating energy and imploring the life force or God or Love to surround them with care and compassion, strength and courage, comfort and peace. Deep down, I think S. is probably grateful too.
A Prayer for Today:
Sprit of Life and of Love,
Grant us courage where there is fear,
Compassion where there is division,
Peace where there is chaos.
May we find the strength to love one another fiercely,
Wildly and without abandon.
May we be granted the wisdom to know our hearts
And to speak our truths.
May we watch over each other,
Assuring each other that we are truly not alone,
But loved and cared for beyond measure.
May our hands be your hands, O God,
Our hearts filled to overflowing with your love.
Help us to love one another well,
To face the valleys together,
To climb the hills in tandem,
To ask for what we need,
And to receive abundance.
May we lift our heart voices in prayer:
Imploring help,
Extending gratitude,
Exclaiming awe.
For this life that we share,
Even in its darkest hours,
We give thanks.
Amen
Notes
1. Ulanov, Ann and Barry Ulanov. Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982.
2. Lamott, Anne. Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. New York: Penguin Press, 2012.
Where Were You When…?
There are times in history that imprint themselves on our psyche, events that seem to change the order of the Universe. For some it was the bombing of Pearl Harbor, for others 9/11. For me, it is the memory of being in a car with some Brandeis friends driving to Cambridge for a Friday outing. The radio was on, but only those in the front seat heard the news. “The President has been shot” came back to us. My immediate thought was “why would someone shoot President Sachar (our college president)?” It quickly became clear that it was a bigger moment than that: it was President Kennedy who was dead. Disbelief came over me. How could this vital man, a hero to many of us in college at the time, the one who promised a new vision for the adult lives we were just beginning… be dead?
Our day and even our lives changed at that moment. As we went through the next three days, we listened… to the drumbeat of the cortege parade to the White House, the Capitol, St. Matthews and finally to Arlington Cemetery; to the haunting strains of the Navy hymn; to the pageantry and the silences. As the days wore on, the sadness sunk in. But through it all, we shared what he meant to us, we shared our memories. A clear memory for me was the Inaugural Address that frigid, snowy day in January 1961, when this man gave us a gift, our marching orders: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Our generation was being called to make America and our world better, to be givers, not just takers. The coming years would bring many of us to engage in civil rights work, the War on Poverty, Vietnam protests, and anti nuclear demonstrations. My life began to take shape around all of these issues and still does today.
But I am still drawn back to that day in 1963. We returned to campus and our dorms; the floor pay phones were kept busy as one after another of my floormates called home to New York and further. I wondered at all these long distance calls; after all, what could a parent so many miles away do in the face of this tragedy? About 7:30 my own mother called me on that same phone, and then I knew why… when I heard her voice, I knew that the entire world had not gone crazy. She was still there, reaching out to me. Everything had not changed. There were still families caring for each other, sharing memories that connected them to what is most real and true in their lives. There were still lots of people like my mother who would keep on working for peace and justice. As I looked ahead to casting my first ballot for President in about a year, I would hear Kennedy’s challenge to my generation. I would keep asking what I can do for my country… and the world.
What events do you remember so clearly that they changed the way you work in the world? How do your memories inform your life today? Where were you when…?
The Four Yogas and Transcendental Humanism
A group from the local Hindu temple recently contacted me about jointly celebrating the 150th birthday of Vivekananada, the Hindu priest who took the World Parliament of Religions by storm back in 1893 and introduced Vedanta Hinduism to the Western Hemisphere. Vivekananda spoke at the congregation where I serve as senior minister, the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, not once but twice on his initial US visit.
I enthusiastically accepted the invitation. I was pleased that First Unitarian Society had been thinking so far outside the box back in 1893 and wanted to continue that tradition.
This would not be a lecture. This would be a joint worship service—or, as we call it in my staunchly humanist congregation—Sunday Assembly. I point this out to highlight the fact that our Sunday Assembly does not tend to begin with “prayers to the guru” in the order of service.
The four tenants of Vedanta Hinduism run like this:
Definition of the Eternal Truth: Consciousness is Brahman.
Statement of Advice: That Thou Art.
Statement of Direct Experience: This Atman is Brahman.
Roar of Realization: I am Brahman!
Yes, this needs some translation. “Brahman” is the ultimate divinity in Hindu thought—all that is. “Atman” is the singular self. The ego, as Freud would say. How might such a view fit into any sort of humanist translation?
Here’s my shot at it:
Definition of the Eternal Truth: Consciousness is the ultimate.
Statement of Advice: That’s you.
Statement of Direct Experience: Your consciousness is identical with all consciousness.
Roar of Realization: The ultimate (“god” or perhaps Heidegger’s dasein, “the being (that is) there”) is all consciousness.
How far off the beam is this? Not so far, I think. Remember that “Hinduism” is what the British called the various practices of the natives of the Indian subcontinent. Indians had never considered themselves Hindu or codified a “Hinduism.” The broad brush of colonialism painted everyone in the subcontinent. “Hinduism” was, and still is, a congeries of very localized practices that are “religious” only in a Western sense. They are, actually, ways of life. Vivekananda’s gift was to take the essence of Hindu practice—developed by his master, Ramakrisna—and present a cogent philosophy that moved Indians toward an understanding of nationalism that led eventually to the overthrow of their colonial rulers. (Vivekananda is celebrated by not one but two national holidays in India.) Then, Vivekananda took the show on the road, as it were, bringing Vedanta to a world that had hitherto-fore viewed Hinduism as barbaric.
We do well to remember that “Hinduism” contains the Carvakas, from the Sixth Century BCE, the first recorded instance of a truly atheist philosophy. Explicitly atheist? Yep. A skepticism based in a deconstruction of logic. Remember, it took the Western World another 2000 years and more to produce such ideas.
(And, need I mention, that that level of skepticism is still rare in the world?)
But back to Vivekananda, who once said, “He is an atheist who does not believe in himself.” At first glance, that sounds like the rankest new-ageism. But look back at those four points of Vedanta. If the self is Brahman . . .
Sounds a bit like American Transcendentalism, doesn’t it? There’s a reason for that. British philologist (and one of the colonizers) William Jones, better known as “Oriental Jones,” made Hindu thought available to early-Nineteenth Century Americans of a particular intellectual persuasion. People such as the Unitarians inclined toward Transcendentalism—including the Peabody sisters, Thoreau, and Emerson.
Vedanta’s third point is direct experience. The Transcendentalist knew what that meant. They put themselves in the way of lived experience. They lived for those moments.
What Oriental Jones, the colonialists, or even the Transcendentalists, did not know is that “Hinduism” was way ahead of Western thinking. Hindu thinkers had already realized that “religious” breaks down into very different sorts of human activity—what we might nowadays characterize as character or personality types or “intelligences.” This has been categorized in Hindu tradition as the four yogas: devotion, service, meditation, knowledge.
This about covers the waterfront, doesn’t it? For some, devotion to “the holy” is the center of meaning and of religious practice. For others, service to others—what we nowadays call social justice—is the center of meaning. For others, meditative practices calm the mind and center the self. For others, it’s study, study, study and the next theory or book. And some—some practice a combination of these or all four.
Westerners are too often “my way or the highway” sorts of folks. The insistence of belief and belief only as key to Christianity has confused Westerners for some time.
Today? Reflect on the fact that the world’s most populous democracy is not England. Or the United States. It is India. And the children of Vivekananda? They’re fine, thank you. Still multifarious, and now free, despite the broad brushes of colonialism.
And, maybe, just maybe, leading the way into a future few of us yet comprehend. I’m looking forward to celebrating Vivekananda in my congregation. When he came that first time, in 1893, he was a lone voice crying in a Europeanized wilderness. Now . . . Hindus are our neighbors and we are theirs.
And this business about consciousness being the ultimate truth?
It bears some thinking about!
Playing Together
I went to a great concert last night, and it’s made me think about why it is that I like hanging out with musicians. Now, I don’t know any rock stars, but because I’m an avid contra dancer, I get the opportunity to spend time around people who are the rock stars of our little, folkie dance world. And nothing could be more fun, because these people are da bomb. They are who I want to be when I grow up. But I’m wondering if those of us who aren’t massively talented and committed musicians could learn a thing or two about how to practice life from these people. Here’s what I’ve seen:
1) They don’t call it “playing” music for nothing. Every musician I know, while taking their craft extremely seriously, comes at the making of music with the spirit of play and experimentation. They like to try stuff and see what happens. And they don’t worry about it when something sounds terrible, they just try something else. They know that there is no right or wrong way to play a tune, and they take great joy in messing around with things to see what happens. And in the process, they laugh. A lot.
2) They listen. You can’t play in a band, or at least not any kind of a decent band, without putting as much effort into how your sound blends with everyone else as into personally getting the sound you want. Musicians understand that there are times to step forward and solo, times to let someone else take the lead, and times to create such a seamless whole that no one person stands out, only the overall synthesis of the group.
3) They know that energy rebounds. Which is to say that dance musicians get a charge from creating a platform for the dancing out of their energy and skill, which is fed by the energy and skill of the dancers. What you give comes back to you, enhanced by the receiver. Joy bounces.
4) They like to learn stuff. Give Irish fiddlers a chance to take a class with someone who plays Zydeco and they come flocking. Not because they’re planning on becoming professional Zydeco fiddlers, but because Hey, that’s so cool! Percussionists pick up the ukulele and guitarists try the marimba, just because it’s there.
5) It’s all about the love. If you give a group of musicians a chance to sit down and jam together, not only do they take that chance, but they don’t stop. Really. They don’t stop. Whenever I’ve sat down to listen to these jam sessions I’ve had to drag myself off at one or two in the morning with no sign that the players were slowing down in any way (although they may have shifted genres). They are not paid for these sessions. Hardly anyone listens who isn’t playing, and no one applauds. They play, and keep playing, because they are desperately in love with their instruments; with the sound; with the people they are playing with, whether they are strangers or people they’ve been performing with for years; with the fact that they are on this planet and able to create.
That’s what musicians know: Play. Listen. Share. Learn. Love. No wonder my musician friends are so massively cool.
Living History: How JFK’s assassination woke me up
I was sitting in a small desk, and Mrs. Graham was at the front of Room 3 in Overbrook School in Charleston, West Virginia, the day that John F. Kennedy was shot. Randall Hainey’s mom came running in the side door with a transistor radio to tell us.
Handing out lined paper, Mrs. Graham said solemnly, “You will remember this day always. Write down exactly what happened, because you’ll want to tell your grandchildren about it. You are part of history.”
I remember sitting there in disbelief. Someone could shoot the President? I was part of history? Mrs. Hainey and her transistor radio would matter to my grandchildren? I might have grandchildren? Mrs. Graham believed in us, not just as children, but as life itself, as part of the living movement of history. (She remains my favorite teacher ever, all these years later.)
For me, just two days into my eighth year on the planet, it was all a jumble. I could see that my parents, the only Kennedy supporters in our Republican neighborhood, were unraveled.
JFK was the last president who I saw simply and completely through the loving eyes of a kid, a President with kids of his own about the ages of me and my younger brother, whose wife wore clothes that my own mother admired. I’m too young to have had the kind of adoration that my older siblings did—adoration fused in knowledge of any issues or policies that Kennedy might have supported or opposed. I knew The President as The Most Important Man in the World, whose very existence was in some way undifferentiated in my mind from that of Superman or Julius Caesar or Santa Claus.
In the hours and days following his assassination, I remember watching my mother, sitting quietly on the floor, playing with my dolls but riveted by her emotion, while she ironed and watched our black and white TV incessantly. I remember her telling the story, over and over, as if trying to believe it herself, the story of seeing Lee Harvey Oswald get shot on live TV.
My mother, a West Virginia activist, had been quite involved in the JFK campaign. Hubert Humphrey’s brother had been slated to speak at our small Unitarian fellowship in early 1960. He was sick, his brother Hubert was in town, so Hubert covered for him. My mother then leveraged this to call the Kennedy campaign and say, “Humphrey came, so you should, too.” Readers who follow history will recall that West Virginia was critical in this election. So, lo and behold, Kennedy came, and my mother was central in his coming—though he spoke in a much larger venue than our tiny congregational building. (I’m too young to remember any of this. My mother told it to me years later, and my older brother got to shake his hand!)
What’s the point of this blog? I guess, as we spend the week inundated with stories of what happened and what might have been, stories of JFK as larger than life as either Sinner or Saint, what is most interesting to me is the small stories. The stories of how his life and his death woke up people of all ages to our own place in history. If there is anything I want to learn at this fiftieth anniversary, it’s not more details about Jackie’s blood spattered dress. It’s about how ordinary people can claim our lives and our power as being the stuff of life itself. It’s all the tiny ways in which a stunned nation moved forward together, grieved and recovered and made sense of the insensible, whether at elementary school desks, in corridors of power, or over ironing boards. Those lessons—of stepping up, living through, making sense and caring for one another, matter every day.
Mrs. Graham’s words, “You are part of history,” woke me up. They rang like a bell. They were heard by some tiny, incredulous part of me that said, Really? I am a part of all this? I will exist beyond recesses and piano recitals, I will remember this as I create my own adult life? And so it has been. From teachers such as Mrs. Graham, and my mother, and yes, from watching a dignified widow and her children standing in a strange cemetery, I came to understand myself as having a role to play, a role that could matter. Whether we were born in 1963 or not, may this anniversary wake us up to that fact.
Songs that Save Us
Emma’s Revolution came to New Orleans and offered a workshop focused on singing and songwriting for social justice last weekend. I am still reeling a bit from process. Yesterday I caught myself humming a song and wondered “whose song am I singing?” With a flash of wonder, I realized that it was mine.
It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how shut up/shut down the songs within me have been.
We are endlessly adaptable, us human beings. We can adapt to racism, to endless war, to drone strikes and wire taps, to fracking and mountain top mining…We can adapt to deformed seafood and boil water alerts, to a school to prison pipeline and senior citizens choosing between heat or healthcare.
“That’s just the way it is,” we say. We forget that we have the power to resist. We forget that there are unsung songs within us. We forget that adaptability is essential for survival, but there’s more to life than surviving.
We must refuse to adapt to that which dehumanizes us, destroys our habitats and our hearts. We who would be whole and holy – who would thrive together as beloved community – must remember the songs within us. Remember the songs within us and sing them out loud together.
The Playground Atheist Looks Back
It may be that every elementary school, across the whole South, has at least one self-appointed Playground Atheist. You know the type: when all the other kids are showing off their new “WWJD” bracelets and mooning about how cool the youth pastor is, there’s a sharp-eyed fellow, standing there by the slide, not believing any of it for a second. When the typical debates come up—for instance, do dogs go to heaven—it’s the Playground Atheist who explodes the whole conversation. “Heaven!” he’ll say. “Heaven?! What are you, a moron?” Yes, it’s this kind of gentle, persuasive approach that has endeared Playground Atheists to junior Christians through the Southland for time immemorial. And, at Bearden Elementary School, as the Reagan years came into full bloom, the Playground Atheist just happened to be me.
From time to time, the Tennessee State Legislature will cook up a wild idea. So it happened, when I was in fourth grade, that a reporter from the local NBC affiliate came to visit, with a camera-man in tow. The legislators in Nashville were considering whether to mandate prayer in school, and this reporter was on a mission to find out what the fourth-graders thought. To start off, she had us all bow our heads, our hands folded on our desks. Then, she opened it up for discussion. Well, what did we think? To absolutely no one’s surprise, it was Matthew who spoke first. Everyone in the zip code knew Matthew loved Jesus. Just adored him. Brought him up all the time. So, his eyes shining, Matthew accepted the chance to lay out his convictions. All around the room, heads were nodding. The reporter gave thanks, then asked if there were others. A girl in the back chimed in, to reinforce Matthew’s point: this was a world that stood ever in need of more prayer. Reporters are trained to fish for intrigue, for friction. So, as hands waved in the air, she wondered if anyone had a different opinion. The hands dropped. There was silence. A friend is someone who knows just what lapses in judgment you are prone to make, and will leap in to stop you. My lapses tend to be about talking at times when I shouldn’t. I recall the face of my good friend Jeff in those slow-motion seconds staring at me intently from across the room, shaking his head, and mouthing the word, “Don’t.” But there it was. I had raised my hand. The microphone dangled close. The camera drew near. The room emptied of air.
Later, I recalled having made mention of things I happened to know about the Constitution. I still believe it is possible I uttered the phrase, “church and state.” But none of these high-minded words and ideals appeared on the local news that evening at 6:00 and 11:00, and again on the early-morning show. No, instead, what the good people of East Tennessee saw was a chubby boy with thick glasses, announcing to the whole world that God didn’t exist.
As soon as the reporter departed, the whisper of scandal began threading its way through the entire fourth grade. And then the whole school. By the next morning, certain classmates were able to tell me just what their parents thought about a boy who’d say something like that on TV. My parents, I gather, also took in some feedback. What I had was not fame. It was outright infamy. Before, my atheism had been an occasional source of wonder, the kind of pride you take when a neighbor happens to own an exotic bird of bright plumage, to have some proximity to something so odd. The Christians even seemed to enjoy my earnest challenges, seeing it perhaps as a kind of a trial. But this time, it seemed, the Playground Atheist had taken it too far. To say something hateful about Jesus at recess was one thing. To broadcast it so everyone could hear it? Unacceptable.
The week ratcheted on, in the slow agony of exile. But then, Thursday afternoon, two hand-written letters arrived. Both from the Unitarian Universalist church. One was from my Sunday School teacher. The other, from the Minister of Religious Education. Without even opening the envelopes, I knew what to expect. And sure enough, there it was: they were proud. Not of my atheism, per se. But of the character they said they saw in what I’d done. Like ancient prophets our Sunday School class was studying that year, said one, I had stood my ground, and had said what I thought. The next day, the purgatory of exclusion continued. But somehow, I didn’t mind it as much—a cold shoulder was nothing beside what Jonah or Amos had faced. And by Monday, it seemed, all was back to normal.
In all the years since, my theology has evolved. I have taken communion, stopped in awe before mountains. I have prayed till tears come, and sat in meditation for long hours in a dark Buddhist Zendo. But, truth be told, it was as an atheist that I first came to see, in a way that was real and has not failed me since, how I am part of a love wider than my own life, and how that spacious embrace makes itself known to me, most often, through a community like the one that first told me, “You are not alone.”
Let Us Take Care of Each Other
Source: Google Images Creative Commons
“I do believe we’re all connected. I do believe in positive energy. I do believe in the power of prayer. I do believe in putting good out into the world. And I believe in taking care of each other.”
Harvey Fierstein
Early this week, my youngest son came down with strep throat. Like most illnesses, it came at a rather inopportune time. We were out of town, a meeting was scheduled for that afternoon, and I had about a million other work obligations and chores that I should have been getting done.
But when my son awoke with a fever and complained of a sore throat on Monday morning, the schedule and to-do lists were thrown out the window. Adjustments were made. Plans were cancelled. Projects fell further down on the to-do list.
Instead of sticking to the plan and accomplishing what I had set out to do that day, I spent the day schlepping my kids to urgent care and the pharmacy, giving extra hugs, doling out medicine, and drying tears. Add a flat tire to the mix and the day just continued to unravel.
Throughout the day, one word kept coming to mind: unproductive.
I – like many others in our technology-driven, multitasking, busy-is-a-badge-of-honor society – tend to measure the value my day through the yardstick of productivity. How much did I accomplish during the day? How many items were crossed off the to-do list? How work obligations were met? How many projects moved forward?
We all have our own goals and dreams – not to mention our obligations and responsibilities – so we make our plans, write our lists, and schedule our days – and we should. Goals give us direction, helping us work to make things better. Schedules keep us on track, giving us a tool with which to allocate our time. Plans give our day and life purpose, creating a path to get from where we are to where we want to be.
But could it be that there is something more tucked away amongst all those plans and schedules and to-do lists? Could there be some quieter, calmer purpose hidden within all the busyness of our days and of our lives? Is purpose and achievement really meant to be measured by all that we accomplish in a day, in a lifetime? Or could our purpose actually be that we just take care of each other? Could our divine calling be something as humble, yet challenging, as taking care of each other in any way and whatever way we know how?
Does accomplishment lie in our own personal successes? Or does it lie in our ability to build someone else up so that they can achieve theirs? Does efficiency lie in a busy calendar, scheduled to the minute? Or does it lie in deeper relationships, a calmer mind, and knowing that we have made someone else’s day just a little bit better? Is productivity measured in the number of completed projects and tasks accomplished? Or can it be measured in back rubs and uplifted spirits?
I know myself well enough to know that I will always rely on my lists and my plans. I will always strive to be busy, to be doing more. And I will forever have projects, goals, and agendas. I will always strive to be productive.
As individuals and as religious communities, productivity is not only worthwhile and valuable, it is also essential. In order to grow and learn, to do better and be better, to build bridges and promote social justice, we need to continually strive to move forward, accomplish the impossible, and aspire for the unattainable.
But, at some point, the how becomes more important than the what. As the ever-wise Maya Angelou has said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
So, at some point, while we’re busy making our plans and working toward our goals, as a beloved community and as persons of faith, I think we need to ask ourselves: How are we taking care of each other? Because that, my friends, is really the measuring stick that we should be using.
Finally back at home on Monday night, when I tucked my sick-but-on-the-mend son into bed, drawing up the soft covers and smoothing his tousled hair, I knew that by all objective measures my day had been highly unproductive. Yet, I also knew deep-down that I had accomplished more in that day than anything that I could have put on my to-do list.
Still later that night, my husband came home from his own busy, hectic, and stressful day, filled with his own important meetings, difficult clients, and an ever-growing to-do list. He spends workdays being productive (in the objective sense) and providing for the family (in the traditional sense). Nonetheless, when he walked in the door that night and hugged me long and hard, when he said “I’m sorry you had a rough day” and then listened attentively and sympathetically, when he smoothed my hair before I fell asleep, I knew in my heart, that those minutes were – by far – the most productive and purposeful things that he possibly could have accomplished in even the busiest of days.
So here is an item that we should all put on our to-do list, today and every day: Take care of each other.
It’s that simple. It’s that hard. It’s that important.
A version of this post originally appeared on the author’s website at www.christineorgan.com.
How Sisyphus Got It Right
I have participated in National Novel Writing Month three times now. I have never reached the goal of 50,000 words. Last year I came close, with 42,000. This year I’m not even close, having written only a bit over 10,000. The handy-dandy stats machine on the NaNoWriMo website tells me I’m averaging 760 words a day. The average needs to be more like 1500.
I could, if I chose, feel inadequate—I’m clearly failing at the goals. Yet, I intend to soldier on, in the very teeth of failure.
It occurs to me this has been my approach to life. And it’s not a bad one, come to that. I’m a minister, and I do a lot of funerals. Few are the lives that have an onward and upward plot arch. As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen any.
Each day, each week, people in my congregation work to bury the dead, comfort the grieving, visit the shut-ins, feed the hungry, house the homeless, and fix the systemic evils of our social system. Oh, and prepare for the next Sunday service, which comes along with surprising regularity. Each printed order of service is a victory over chaos.
As senior minister, I shake off all the mistakes we make along the way and try to figure out how we can manage to do better next time. My 
congregation never makes that 50,000 word count either. Sometimes we don’t break 10,000. But we soldier on, in the teeth of failure.
Keepin’ on keepin’ on is not a glitzy sort of spiritual practice. There’s no sizzle, as the cliche goes. Yet the mother with Alzheimer’s, the brother with brain cancer, the child who refuses to get it, all those need love and support. And typhoon victims need cash. And the order of service left out several names last week that will need to be included this week, with apology. Life is a victory over chaos.
So, today, I intend to crack that 11,000 word mark on my novel, after the memorial service at one pm. At that rate, the handy-dandy stats machine tells me, I’ll be done by January 3rd. How many orders of service will come and go by then? How many joys and sorrows?
January 3rd isn’t such a bad day to finish the first draft of my novel. Keepin’ on keepin’ on isn’t a sexy sort of spiritual practice, but it works. It works.
