Tonight we stood together around candles that marked the spot where his body was found this morning.  Tonight we poured out our stories and our songs, our prayers and our tears. Tonight we reminded each other that we are loved and loving, that our lives have value and are valued by each other.   Tonight we said good-bye to a good friend and a committed organizer.

So tomorrow, when you read in the paper or hear in the news that another black teenage boy was found shot to death in the 9th Ward of New Orleans, stop. Please stop and send love to his family, to his friends, to the community that cared for him, cares for him still.

Please stop and let your heart be broken, broken open at least a little bit, with compassion for a child who was loved, will always be loved, and for those who love him. Mark the passing of a dear soul light who shined brightly in this world and made it a better place.

If you pray, pray for us, pray with us.
Grieve with us. Mourn with us.

And then – organize.

Organize with us to heal this world, to change it into a place where 15 year olds are not killed by guns — are not killed at all. Make George proud.

A child falls down and begins screaming. It’s common. You did it as a child. I did it.

What happens next?

For me, my parents said, “Get up off the floor! Boys don’t cry!”

When this happens at an upscale pre-school nearby, I’m more likely to hear, “You feel sad!” Or, “That’s frustrating, isn’t it?” Or, “You’re so angry!”

What’s the difference between the two parental responses?

Fact is, any time I cried as a child, I got the same response: “Boys don’t cry.”

Consequently, I learned to suppress my emotions rather than expressing them.

That child outside the pre-school, on the other hand, is being taught the difference between anger and sadness and frustration and fear and embarrassment. That child is developing a palate of emotions with nuance. That child is developing “emotional intelligence.”

Kids treated as I was learn that emotions need to be suppressed. We learn “men don’t do that.” We learn “women are hysterical.”

And so the cliches go, ‘round and around.

And so does the drinking and drugs and physical violence and abuse that come as a consequence of the suppression of emotion.

Now, allow me to add that my parents were preparing me for the world that they lived in: working class people learn to be very careful about emotion. You can’t let the boss see your emotion.

My father was in the Boiler Makers Union. You don’t cry among your fellow Boiler Makers. And you don’t get angry when the boss yells at you.

We were also farmers, and farmers in traditional communities aren’t allowed to get angry either. You can’t show anger when the bank won’t give you a loan . . . and on and on. It’s a life of oppression and suppression in which a show of emotion can be interpreted as dangerous.

That’s the world I was prepared for. Everyone has a story.

We call the result “stable.” But at what cost to both the individual and society?

Professor George Rowan did a study called “A Multicultural Investigation of Masculinity Ideology and Alexithymia.” It wasn’t a best seller, but the study tells us what we already have intuited: In many social groups, men are afraid to express emotion, especially in the presence of other men.

“Alexitymia” describes the result of this suppression: an inability to describe emotions; an inability to sustain social connections; and an inability to sustain interpersonal relationships.

The result is a socially-created sociopath. The result is a dangerous person created by the desire to live up to the social definition of masculinity.

That pretty well describes the men in my extended family.

Think for a moment about how many—and different—lives you lead. Partner. Friend. Manager. Co-worker. Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy . . .

We learn to use different vocabularies in these different niches. We learn to express our emotions differently. In addition, as the dad of two children in the GLBTQ alphabet soup, I know that the gender binary is an inconvenient fiction. Men aren’t from Mars and women from Venus. We come from many planets.

Yes, there are differences in the emotional lives—and the ability to articulate—that can be called gender difference. Still, we have an obligation to try to use our words, no matter what planet we’re from.

The Twentieth Century writer Anais Nin started writing when she was eleven. She continued, obsessively writing of her inner life, for more than sixty years. She said this:

I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown . . . I create a myth and a legend, a lie, a fairy tale, a magical world, and one that collapses every day . . .

It isn’t that Nin had some super-complex emotional life. Or that she was mentally ill. Rather, she had the tenacity to pursue her many selves to the essence of the self. Much like the Buddha. And, like the Buddha, she discovered there isn’t one.

There is no constant self. The evidence is right before our eyes. And right behind them too. What we have instead is an ocean of sensation and reaction. We have emotions, some fleeting, some stable enough to be called moods. These add up to what we call a self. Yet it’s a fiction.

The dangerous and damaging idea behind this insistence on a stable self is what has been called “soul” in the Western tradition. That tradition tells us that the soul is incarnated. Lives in the flesh for a time. Then goes somewhere forever, still constituted as the self that lived on earth. In some traditions the soul is rewarded with heaven or hell. In others the soul blissfully resides . . . well, somewhere.

Such an idea is a dangerous illusion. The only constant is change. And the self and the soul it creates are stories we tell ourselves.

When we figure that out, the Buddha said we are enlightened. Anais Nin put it this way: “I see myself and my life each day differently. What can I say? The facts lie.”

image by Erik Dungan

Who do you let in? These days we have lots of options for who and what we listen to. We can opt to experience constant input at every moment, via the television, radio, internet, cable, social media, on our phones, in our cars, even–yes, I confess, I’ve done it more than once–glancing at things online on our phone in the bathroom.

What I notice is that there is so much input that I have to tune most of it out in order to focus on my life–my kid, my work, the tasks that I need to accomplish on any given day–and then a week or two can sometimes go by and I’ll find myself wondering “what’s going on in the world?” There is so much input and channels of communication that we are initially overwhelmed, so we screen out what we take in–and then feel actually more disconnected than connected.

Have you experienced this? I am regularly trying to take myself off of e-mail lists, but I must also be adding myself to new lists that are of interest to me, because somehow I seem to be getting plenty of e-mail, and it’s not all spam. It’s still not as personal or individual as I would like it to be. Do you scan through your e-mail inbox, as I do, looking for that occasional e-mail message that’s actually individually written to me specifically, Heather, the human being, from another human being, not an automatically generated “Dear Heather” robo-email?

I wonder if it’s why more and more people are turning to texting; at least for me, the robots have not taken over my cell phone inbox yet (please, don’t spread the word about this!) My sister sends a “how are you?” text now-and-then, and I love that (see, Jenna, I do get & read them!) Texting is doable for me while standing in the grocery store aisle or hanging out at the playground with my kiddo. A little bit of texting. But what about the larger world? Our local paper here in Hartford, Connecticut, barely seems to cover national and international news, at least not in a way that really catches my sustained interest and engages in in-depth analysis. While writing this blog post I was reminded of a site I haven’t visited in ages, but would like to go to much more often: Common Dreams.org. Here I can find a little bit more of the broad view–not only what’s been happening this week, but what it means in the context of our larger human endeavor as people on a shared planet.

I genuinely have this question a lot these days: what are the forms of input that you are finding meaningful, useful, reliable, and helpful, for you, in terms of sorting through all the white noise? With so many ways to connect, which ways are the ones that enable us, as human beings, to actually be more connected?

This morning
Sitting with the grief of more painful news
I pick up my pen
And begin moving at the speed of gratitude
For a community that holds each other
in sorrow and in rage
For the light that wakes us and nourishes creation
For the dark that heals us and rests the world

Today I commit to moving at the speed of gratitude
And find my heart has grown larger
Love more possible
Grace more abundant
At this speed.

…
Beloveds, may you too find the gift of moving at the speed of gratitude.

Tis education forms the common mind,
Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.

Alexander Pope

By Kennybozzle (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

One of the major tourist attractions in Chicago is the Willis Tower, formerly the Sears Tower and also formerly the tallest building in the world. Upon reaching the 103rd floor, visitors have the opportunity to walk out on “The Ledge,” glass boxes that reach four feet past the outer walls of the building.

More interesting than the magnificent view is the reactions of visitors. Walking out onto clear glass 103 stories up is scary. And fun. And exhilarating. And some simply can’t bring themselves to do it.

An ad for the building says, “Get out on the ledge if you dare!”

Now, the glass floor consists of three layers of half-inch thick glass and is designed to hold five tons. You’re not going to fall through the floor. So. What scares people?

Tamar Gendler, Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Yale, has named what is happening an alief. An alief is something that hits you out of the blue. Out of the recesses of your psyche. You “a-lieve” from the gut. Your a-lief says, “Freeze! You’re going to fall.”

You “be-lieve” just the opposite. Your mind, your reason, tells you that The Ledge is well-engineered and is there merely as a thrilling curiosity.

I find the believe/alieve distinction valuable. (In a be-lieve sort of way.) Feeling you are going to fall through the glass floor is gut, immediate. You can reason yourself out of it. You may even bring your frozen legs to carry you out onto the glass. You may even laugh at yourself for being afraid. But if human beings didn’t have the alief reaction, The Ledge would be a waste of money, not a major tourist draw.

Poet Alexander Pope formulated the point: “Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.”

I belong to a clergy group made up of Muslims, Jews, Christians, and humanist me. We do public debates, trying to model ways that religious dialogue can be done without resort to anger and name-calling. After expressing my agnosticism, I’m often asked something along the lines of, “If you were bleeding and dying by the side of the road, wouldn’t you pray?”

I answer as honestly as I can. Yes, I would pray. Not because doing so proves the existence of supernatural forces, but because I grew up in a religious tradition that taught intercessory prayer. I don’t believe it, but I will always a-lieve it.

This twig was bent by fundamentalism.

And, by the way, I’m not going out on that glass floor, either.