Like-Hearted People
“You need not think alike to love alike.”
This was the wisdom of Francis David, spiritual advisor to King John Sigismund of Transylvania, the Unitarian king who pronounced the first edict of religious toleration in the year 1568.
You need not think alike to love alike.
At Unitarian Universalist gatherings, I sometimes hear “it is so nice to be with a group of like-minded people.” Beloveds, it is tempting, in the not-so-liberal parts of these United States, to take refuge in liberal religion. Here you are welcome. We often say in worship welcomes “no matter your gender, your race, your ethnicity, your sexuality, your age, your size, the color of your eyes – you are welcome here.”
Your politics, however…Your education level…these might matter …
Seeking sanctuary with like-minded people, while a deeply understandable and very human response, is not the basis of our faith. We are called to honor the inherent worth and dignity of all in our interdependent web of existence– no matter how people vote, what they believe, or where they went to school. Liberal religion is grounded in a theology of inclusion. As Rev. Marilyn Sewell states, “at the center of our faith is not belief, but love.” Love. We are a people of covenant, a people of promise. And we promise to love one another.
During a dialogue on race and class with a group of UU volunteers in New Orleans, one group member casually mentioned the “white trash-y” trailer park area across the tracks in his midwestern home town.
I felt the term sizzle across my skin, leaving a faint contrail of anger and shame… White trash. Trailer trash. Humans who have the skin color of privilege, but few other privileges. Who often live in generational cycles of poverty, who generally have few educational opportunities. Who have had nothing for generations but their pride and their whiteness, neither of which keeps the refrigerator full or pays rent, much less a mortgage.
I remember the day I received a copy of my birth certificate, ordered for the purpose of applying for my first passport. There, in black and white, and forever a part of my American identity: “Place of residence at time of birth: Fort Fredericka Trailer Park.”
I am often reminded in subtle and not so subtle ways that I am welcome in Unitarian Universalism because I am the exception, not the rule of my people. I left my home state after high school, struggled through a liberal arts college education that my public education had not quite prepared me for, got a passport and studied abroad in Central America on scholarship. Much of this was possible because my father joined the Navy at 19, put his body on the line for a chance to break the cycle of poverty and violence that he grew up in. Much of this was possible because my grandmother believed it was important to educate girls to and insisted that her daughter have the same chance to graduate from high school as her sons. It was not a question in my house whether I was going to college after high school. The only question was how I was gonna pay for it.
Without these breaks, these formational pattern changers, I would not be a Unitarian Universalist minister. The educational requirements alone for the training would have been barrier enough, let alone the cost of them…
Come, come whoever you are
We sing and we say these words from the 13th century Sufi Mystic Rumi:
Wander, worshiper, lover of leaving
Though you’ve broken your vows a thousand times
Come, yet again come
Our Unitarian legacy is tolerance, our Universalist legacy is radical salvation for all souls. How then can we reconcile the promise of our faith with the practice of our faith?
It is not faithful to write off a group of people because they do not sound like you, do not think like you, do not have the same life experiences as you. We know this to be true in the marrow of our bones. We know it and so we work on radical hospitality, begin Welcoming Congregation programs, have A Dialogue on Race and Ethnicity. And this is good, faithful work!
Please let us remember, in our stretching, that everyone means everyone. As we discern our internalized superiority and inferiority around race, gender, and sexuality, let us also remember to check our assumptions and oppressions around class and educational privilege.
We are not called to be a faith of like-minded people. We are called to worship and work together as like-hearted people – loving all of creation with compassion and curiosity.
“You need not think alike to love alike.”
Come, come, whoever you are. May you find yourself welcome here.
A Place in the Family
I pretty much only listen to radio in the car, which explains how I stumbled on just a few minutes of a call-in show which featured an evolutionary biologist. I suppose it shouldn’t have been surprising that the question I heard as I was pulling into my driveway went something like this: “Scientists have looked at millions of fossils, but no one has found the fossil that shows the transition from a fish to a lizard, or a chimp to a human. Why should I believe that I’m related to a chimp or a giraffe or sludge at the bottom of the sea when there’s no real evidence?”
I tend to be a little…unsympathetic toward this kind of question. Luckily, I was alone in my car as I shouted back at the caller: “DNA! Have you never heard of a little thing called DNA?” Fortunately, the presenter responded calmly that the caller had brought an excellent question. Then he went on to describe how, based on their scientific knowledge, he and a colleague had predicted where one would find a fossil that showed the transition of species from fish to lizard, and what such a fossil might look like. And then they found it. Where they had predicted (Canada), and with many—but not all—of the characteristics they had expected to find.
The biologist went on to explain how DNA shows us the way in which we are related to all other living beings. “It’s beautiful!” he said. “The chimpanzees are our close cousins and the sea sludge is a distant cousin and the giraffe is somewhere in the middle, but we’re all related.”
And then I got it. The two world views I was hearing about were not simply between someone sophisticated in the uses of the scientific method and someone with less understanding. The caller didn’t want to be related to a chimp or a giraffe or, God forbid, sea sludge. He wanted to be the pinnacle of creation, something utterly different from—and better than—the rest of the living world. To see himself as related to a giraffe would mean being shoved off of the pedestal, removed from his rightful place in the Great Chain of Being. Being related to a chimp would, I imagine, mean losing his relationship with the God who had placed him, as a human, in dominion over the rest of the world.
The biologist, by contrast, couldn’t have been happier to be related to sea sludge. He loved being cousins with the chimp and the giraffe, and his devotion to understanding more and more of the family genealogy was part and parcel with his joy in being a part of the family of things. I don’t know anything about this man’s theology, but as someone who shares his joy in this web of relations, I would imagine that if he believes in God at all, it is a God who is within all beings, in relationship with all beings. He, or at any rate, I, would find the Holy in the whole creative process of evolution, in the unfolding of diversity over time. There would be no worry about losing a relationship with God if we tumbled from the top of the pyramid, because God was never at the top to begin with. Neither were we humans. God was—is—in the connections, in all the crazy ways that we are interrelated with the Family of Life.
I have no idea whether anything shifted in the caller when he heard about the fish/lizard fossil or the linked DNA. How could he process such information, when the price of believing it was so high? But I couldn’t help but wonder whether it felt lonely up there, at the top of the Great Chain, looking up toward God and the angels in the invisible distance, disconnected from the chimps and giraffes and lizards below. Me, I’d rather be down here with the sea sludge, representing just one of the crazy cousins in this massive family gathering we call Planet Earth.
We Are All In This Together
“If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably enough and exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in a prison unless you try the door.” ― Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War
“I spent Thanksgiving Day in Central Lock-up!”
Waiting for keys to be cut in the local hardware store this week, I was completely drawn into the generously shared story of another customer with the shop’s owner. “Pulled over for not coming to a complete stop.” An initial infraction, no grace from those in power, a questionable ensuing search of the vehicle, an old open beer can giving the opportunity to turn a citation into a charge that was later thrown out by a judge as having no merit – later. After spending Thanksgiving in jail. And missing a day of work for court. Which cost him. Literally.
Living one infraction away from lock-up is a situation that is truer for more people in this country than we care to admit. Living paycheck to paycheck is a situation that is truer for more people in this country than we care to admit.
One in three Americans who grew up middle-class has slipped down the income ladder as an adult, according to a 2011 report by the Pew Charitable Trusts.*
One in three Americans who grew up middle-class has slipped down the income ladder.
Others are clinging desperately to the rung they are on.
Upward mobility, the American holy grail, is not guaranteed.
Neither is physical freedom, when prisons are a national industry, investments that can be found in a market prospectus.
Beloveds, if this sounds irrelevant to your life, try the door a bit. See how far your liberties can be exercised if you challenge an economic system that gives 50% of the American population less than 2.5% of the national wealth. See how far your liberties can be exercised if you challenge one of the thousands of ordinances, rules, and laws wrapped around your neighborhood, your state, your country.
The myth of pulling oneself up by one’s own boot straps, the myth of prisons existing only to house bad guys – slowly these are proven to be falsehoods, lies that have been used to justify closing our eyes to the human costs of comfort for a few.
Let us name the house we live in. Let us recognize that in working for the common good, we make a good life more possible for ourselves, our family, our beloveds. This is faithful work. Dear ones, we are all in this together. May we build beloved community together. For everyone.
* Drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (a group of 12,000 interviews that researchers have followed since 1979), the report “focused on people who were middle-class teenagers in 1979 and who were between 39 and 44 years old in 2004 and 2006. It defines people as middle-class if they fall between the 30th and 70th percentiles in income distribution, which for a family of four is between $32,900 and $64,000 a year in 2010 dollars. People were deemed downwardly mobile if they fell below the 30th percentile in income, if their income rank was 20 or more percentiles below their parents’ rank, or if they earn at least 20 percent less than their parents.”
What Do We Owe?
I was talking recently with a friend who is struggling with the question of how extensively to remodel the house that she and her husband just bought. Water damage means that they’re going to have quite a lot of repair work to do on the back wall, which brought up the question whether they should bite the bullet and move the wall back, making room for a larger kitchen. They have the money to make the larger improvement, although just barely. But my friend can’t quite wrap her head around spending that kind of money on expanding their house, when the world is full of so many much more desperate expenses. Can it be right to spend many thousands of dollars fixing up your house, when that money might be sufficient to build a school in India or Africa, when that money could make a house ravaged by Hurricane Sandy livable, when that money could get 100 women started in small businesses through an organization like Kiva?
How much do we owe ourselves and our families? How much do we owe our neighbors? How much do we owe our fellow human beings in distant places? How much do we owe pets, wild animals, the environment? Do we owe anything at all? Does anything at all rightfully belong to us?
If the answer to the question of what we owe is “nothing,” then taxes are an unfair imposition of the collective upon the individual. What is ours is ours. We worked for it (or inherited it) and we deserve to do with it as we please. If other people want things, they can go out and work and earn the money to pay for those things themselves. If the answer to what we owe is “everything,” then it’s time to join a commune, to live in a collectivist society in which everything is shared for the benefit of the common good.
Most of us, however, live in that ambiguous place in between. We want schools and police and roads and emergency relief funds, and we don’t mind doing our part to pay for them. Most of us don’t think that people who lose their jobs should go hungry, that children should lack health care, that people with disabilities should be just left to fend for themselves. We want clean air and water. We feel sad about children dying of hunger or disease, regardless of where they might live. We worry about the extinction of species and the effects of climate change. We want to be part of a compassionate human community, a respectful web of all life.
But we also want to be able to remodel the house or take a vacation or buy electronic gadgets. We want to enjoy the fruits of our labor—even the fruits of our unearned good fortune. So how much do we keep? How much do we give away?
Some decisions, of course, are made for us. The government expects us to pay our taxes, and we can end up in jail if we don’t pony up. On the other hand, we elect representatives to speak for us. Some of those representatives come down pretty hard on the “owe nothing” side, while others are quite willing to raise taxes if they think the circumstances warrant it. Our vote gives us some responsibility for how those decisions are made.
But beyond the vote, each of us has to decide that unanswerable question over and over. What is mine? What do I owe to some larger good? And if there’s a single right answer to those questions, I’ve certainly never heard it.
What I have to suggest is an experiment. Call it the joy test. If you have $50 to spare, make a deliberate choice on how to spend it: a shelter for the homeless, a pair of shoes, an arts organization, a nice dinner out, your retirement account. Commit the money, and then ask yourself how you feel about that choice. Does it bring you joy? Does it do something to ease a sense of anxiety or does your sense of discomfort grow? How does it feel a week, a month later?
I don’t know if the joy test is any kind of adequate answer as to what we owe to others and ourselves. But I have a sense that leading with our hearts, with our deepest joy, might be a step down the right path. Let me know what you find out.
A Heretic Mulls Over Epiphany
Today is The Epiphany, when Christians celebrate as the day when Jesus was revealed to the Gentiles as the Son of God. But what of us who don’t hold this belief–who believe instead that Jesus was a teacher, a prophet, a healer, but not uniquely marked as the Son of God? What does Epiphany mean for us?
Are we still waiting for revelation? Some would say yes; that we don’t have eyes to see. Until we see that Jesus is the one and only Son of God, we are still unfinished. These are the folks who often try to ‘save’ us.
Many Christians, thankfully, are more generous of spirit than that. They embrace a God of love who is not all about damning people who don’t agree on specific creeds or beliefs.
I think of the United Church of Christ’s slogan, “God is still speaking,” with the big comma next to it. This contrasts with that bumper sticker theology: “God wrote it. I read it. That settles it.” Epiphanies are still happening, says that comma. Revelation is not sealed.
Popularly, the word epiphany, with a small ‘e’, means “a sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something. a comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization.” This morning, I’m wondering if letting go of the one Big Capital E Epiphany as the one and only Truth might help to allow more of these small ‘e’, daily epiphanies, truths. It seems to me that a belief that you already have The Truth kind of stops you from looking for it any more! Others will disagree with me, I’m sure.
I believe that Jesus was an exceptional, exemplary role model for the rest of us. A great teacher, healer, minister, human being. But he was a human. (I count myself lucky to be born in a century where I won’t be burned at the stake for saying that!)
In Unitarian Universalist congregations, we frequently read these words from Sophia Lyon Fahs on Christmas Eve: “No angels herald their beginnings/ No prophets predict their future courses/ No wisemen see a star to show where to find the babe that will save humankind/ Yet each night a child is born is a holy night.”
The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has written, “It is probable that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living. This may be the most important thing we can do for the survival of the earth.”
Each night a child is born is a holy night; one more person who may be part of the community which helps the earth to survive has just joined us! These, to me, are the most hope-filled saving words I know. They are also a sharp jab, when I think of the way that many of these holy people are being treated.
My child—my beloved, brilliant, beautiful, wise, child—was adopted from a remote village in China. Had she not come to the United States by way of adoption, it is highly likely that the only way I would know of her very existence, even theoretically, would be through handling something that she, and millions like her, manufactured ‘for me’ in some windowless factory. Her back sore and her eyes blurry, she might be making my iPhone, or iPad, or a piece of clothing or some weird plastic item. This is, after all, how I know, the only way I am related to, thousands and thousands of children and adults in poor parts of the world. Through the goods which they make for people like me.
Yet, because I know my child personally, I know that she is brilliant, and beautiful, and funny, and opinionated, and has dreams of how her own life and the world should be. Just as I would know each of those children in the windowless room to be, given the chance to know them. If I don’t have eyes to see those other kids, does it mean that they cease to be any less holy? Or is it my own holiness that is diminished, by benefiting from their mistreatment?
So happy Epiphany, or Happy epiphanies, or may your life bring you ever more comprehension and sharpening of focus. Wherever we are, whatever we believe, may we all become part of a community committed to the survival of the earth. Whether we agree or disagree about theology, we are all in this together!
Joyful Epiphany
Sunday, January 6th, marks the celebration of Epiphany – a.k.a. Twelfth Night, Three Kings Day, la Fiesta de Reyes. Epiphany honors many sacred events within Christian traditions – the day the child Jesus was visited by the Magi, the baptism of Jesus, his first miracle of turning water into wine at a wedding .
In New Orleans, however, January 6th is most widely celebrated as the night we transition into a new season – from Holiday to Carnival. [Note: We have four fairly distinct seasons in New Orleans: Holiday, Carnival, Festival, and Hurricane.]
The seasonal changes brought by Epiphany are quite visible. Red, green, and blue lights are exchanged for purple, green, and gold lights. Doors and windows bedecked with Christmas wreaths and menorahs transform into doors decorated with Carnival wreaths, masks, and Mardi Gras beads. And the music changes too – carols are gone, replaced by Mardi Gras tunes.
Epiphany is the first day of King Cake season. It is the night of Phunny Phorty Phellows, hopping onto the St. Charles Avenue streetcars, heralding the start of Carnival. It is the birthday of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, and a carnival krewe marches in her honor from the Bienville statue (representing the founding of New Orleans) to the Joan of Arc statue at Decatur and St. Phillip Street.
Epiphany is the night we welcome collective joy, in the form of Carnival, back onto center stage in our lives.
Carnival offers us an opportunity to take a break from taking ourselves so seriously, from our expectations about how the world should be, and gives us a chance to engage in the healing joy of communal celebration. The work of transforming ourselves and the world is on-going. And it is through seasonally and repeatedly choosing joy that we can find the energy we need to continually commit to this work.
“I think that the energy to do all those things [to help make the world a better place] comes from choosing joy,” writes the Church of the Larger Fellowship’s Lynn Ungar. “You can inspire people to a certain degree by sheer terror…However, if we’re going to keep those changes going, if we’re going to find new and creative ways to build better lives, then I think we’re going to have to draw on some deep wells of joy.”
Epiphany opens the lid on a deep well of joy for me and my city.
What is your source of joy?
Where do you find your energy to make the world a better place?
Happy New Year!
The New Year is, of course, traditionally the time for making resolutions. Consequently, January 2nd is traditionally the day when we start breaking those resolutions. Strangely, it turns out that more often than not, we are very much the same people at the start of a new year that we were at the end of the last one. Writing a new number at the top of our checks seems to provide strangely little in the way of deep motivation to give up all of our faults and failings. And really, isn’t it all too easy to find time to ineffectually meditate on all the things in life that we should do better? I don’t really need a sign from the calendar to tell me that I should be more organized, that I shouldn’t lose patience with my teenager, that I should stop eating sweets, etc., etc. I can turn to a wide variety of magazines and websites for advice on being thinner, working more effectively, parenting with greater wisdom and generally being a new and improved model of who I am. I confess to being something of a sucker for those internet lists of the 10 foods to eat or avoid, 9 ways to communicate better with your child, 8 ways to spice up your relationship, 7 ways to look younger, and so on through the partridge in the pear tree.
If good advice and good intentions really made us better, we’d all be pretty much perfect by now. No dice. So I guess it’s a bit ironic that I want to offer you a bit of advice. For what it’s worth. Here goes: Who and what you are is basically fine. And you’re never going to be perfect. How do I know? Because if you are reading this there’s a pretty good chance that you’re a human being. And so the odds are astronomically high that you are both good and imperfect like the rest of us. I’m not saying that you can’t or won’t change—I see people change all the time, sometimes even for the better.
I just don’t think that what makes people change very often includes the many kinds of self-loathing that we are invited to take down from the shelf on New Year’s Eve. Really, has standing in front of the mirror and staring at your saggy bits ever bumped you into a lifestyle of healthy eating and vigorous exercise? So how, then, do we change?
Years ago I heard a speech given by a successful mayor, in which he talked about finding “pockets of health,” and building on those, to the point that the whole city was transformed. You might find a pocket of health in a school that is truly serving its students, a thriving shopping district or a neighborhood where community thrives because people can walk to what they need. By learning from what worked, and encouraging those pockets of health to grow, gradually the city became healthier and healthier.
I don’t know the first thing about government or city planning, but that makes sense to me. Rather than beating ourselves up about everything we do badly, why not focus on growing the things that are good? A few years ago I made my best New Year’s resolution ever. It included only two words: “More dancing!” (OK, two words and a bit of punctuation. The exclamation point was part of the resolution.)
Some years before, my wife and I had started contra dancing, and loved the music and the energy and the community and the feel of moving our bodies through space. The whole experience was pleasurable. It was also good exercise, and not particularly expensive. It was, in short, a pocket of health in our lives. All we needed was more. And so we resolved that when the opportunity to dance came up, we would take it. We started going to dance weekends, and traveling farther afield than our local dance.
And so we met more people who became our good friends. We brought home CDs of music that made us smile. We developed the aerobic capacity to dance for hours on end because we simply didn’t want to stop. We felt more and more competent on the dance floor, enjoying a sense of mastery (of an admittedly simple form). The pocket of health grew.
It didn’t make us perfect. I’m still disorganized, and I still lose my temper with the eye-rolling teenager. But it made life better. More fun. More connected. More energized. More…soulful.
So that’s my advice for the New Year. Think about what feels like a pocket of health in your life—something that gives you deep pleasure. Maybe it’s playing with your grandchildren or walking in the hills or reading science fiction or keeping a journal or growing flowers or snuggling your cat or bouncing on a trampoline or cooking Thai food or singing jazz standards or any of the wonderful range of things that people do because they want to do them. And when you know what that joyful , healthful thing is, resolve to do it some more. Give it your attention. Honor and preserve the time that you devote to it. Allow it to grow. Celebrate that you are tending to your soul, and allow that pocket of health to leave you open to encouraging the growth of the souls around you.
What a Day for a Daydream!
It turns out I’m not as good at daydreaming as I used to be. When I was about nine, my mother would have to physically rouse me from my bed, not because I was sleeping, but because I was spending happy hours imagining my life as Mrs. Paul McCartney.
My fantasies involved boats, castles, me on stage at Beatles concerts—that is, ‘me’ bearing no physical resemblance to any adult I might ever grow up and become. I was devastated when, one day, somehow, I let my dream slip out and my older brother said scornfully, “Why would Paul McCartney marry a nine year old in Akron, Ohio?”
After that I got more realistic. I moved on to George Harrison, the youngest Beatle. Perhaps that first ‘realistic’ decision was the beginning of the demise of my fantasizing prowess.
Because these days, it turns out, I’m no good at daydreaming at all. Over the years I’ve gotten much better at planning, and actually executing plans. I’ve moved across country, switched jobs, launched projects, had a wedding, adopted a kid—done all kinds of other things that took hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny acts and choices, promptly scratched off my to-do list. But somewhere in there, daydreaming fell off the table.
I didn’t know how bad I’d gotten at it until my spiritual teacher gave me an assignment this week. Take time each day, she said. Stare into space. Daydream. Imagine what would be most fulfilling, delicious, inspiring, to do and to be. It doesn’t matter if you’ll never do it, if no one ever could. Just see what you imagine! Find your young self, see through her eyes!
What once would have been a breeze is now really hard. Back then, along with being tall and willowy and beautiful, and marrying a Beatle, I had every intention of being super-wealthy, being a famous writer, traveling to the most exotic places. Now my rational mind jumps right in. Super-wealthy? I say? You want to be part of the one percent? And instead of enjoying, even for a moment, some delicious luxury vacation, or even the philanthropist I might become, I am fuming about the ‘fiscal cliff’ and drafting imaginary letters to Congress. Word by word.
I think what my spiritual teacher is pointing me to (though she is a bit cryptic and never says why she gives me the particular assignments she does) is to find joy in the longing itself. To allow the imagining to take on a life of its own, but primarily to allow that quality of desire and longing to truly take root in me, until I remember what my young self knew—that we are made to dream, as well as to act.
So, here’s what I’ll do, needing structure to help me out. I’m piling up all of the magazines, random bits of ribbon or paper and 2012 calendars in the house, which I would otherwise be recycling as I clean up the holiday wreckage. I picture looking through all of the materials with one focus—to find items which evoke longing in me, which provoke desire, even if I’m not sure exactly why!
After I gather up images, words, whatever I want—ribbons, sheets of color, fabrics, who knows? I’ll piece them together to see how they fit, to see what shapes they make.
And then, at the end of the day, I’ll have—I don’t know what!!! A jumbled mess? A picture of young Paul McCartney, back when he was cuter than a puppy? What I hope to have is a little bit of a snapshot about what longing feels like in me, so that I can begin to recognize its voice when it whispers in my ear. So that I can become a respectful vessel for my heart’s deepest longings. So I get better at this again.
On New Years’ Day, I plan to go through my usual practice, with friends, of making gratitude boards for the year that’s over, and a vision board for the year that’s coming—same process of cutting and pasting, but with a very different focus as I look through my materials. This time, celebrating 2012 and envisioning things I actually hope and plan to do in 2013.
I’m going to be really curious to see what effect, if any, my extra session of fantasizing has on the visioning process. The fun thing about creative experiments is that you can never guess their results!
However you see in 2013, however you imagine it and live it, may it be full of blessings for you and yours. See you next year!
Love & Grief: Two Sides of the Same Coin
One night as the on-call hospital chaplain, I witnessed the end of three marriages, each representing over 50 years of love and struggle, as death claimed the husbands. The depth of grief of each wife haunted me for days. Was this the price of great love? Such great pain? This is what I have to look forward to after years of joy with my beloved?
I found myself restlessly meditating, pacing and praying, trying to unpack the promise of pain. In a sudden flash of insight, I realized that grief and love are two sides of the same coin – AND this is not cause for despair.
Life is about spending that coin. Loving with all my heart, grieving what is lost along the way, and loving more.
I learned to find gifts in sorrow, learning in the bad times. Hope.
I do not grieve what I do not love. Great grief is a sign of great love – and great love is a gift beyond compare. When my parents die, if they die before I do, I will mourn deeply, painfully, for years. Just the thought of not being able to call my mom and dad is enough for tears to spring to my eyes some days. But I have stood with children who do not mourn the loss of their parents, who mourn more for the lack of love they felt as a child than for the grief of their parents’ death. So I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt that love is the gift. I would far rather mourn the loss of a great love, than have no love to grieve.
This really is hope for me. Not that loss is inevitable, no – but that if I love with all my being, the grief will be sharp and deep and clean. The pain will be intense and there will ever be an ache – but an ache of life well loved, not the ache of regrets nor of despair. I look to the beautiful and the sweet, because it will always lift me towards hope. The price of love is steep, but it is nothing compared to the life sucking numbness of not loving, not caring, not trying.
The great deception is that there is safety – that we can protect ourselves or our loved ones from harm. The truth is that life is mystery, change is constant, control is a figment of the human imagination. When I can be present to the truth that nothing is promised – all life is gift, then despair has a harder time getting a grip in my psyche. Each involuntary and thoughtless breath is amazing, is unearned and unearnable. Grace, by another name.
Years ago, I read the words of Anne Lamott, “I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.” “Ah,” said my soul. “Yes!” My source of hope lies in that mystery. I trust the universe to be endlessly creative, to be rife with paradox, to seek generativity. Life will! In the most inconceivable places and times and situations, life insists most creatively and assertively. And death will too. Two sides of the same coin, much like love and grief.
And so, I live holding all that I love lightly and tightly.
Lightly enough that it may take its own path, tightly enough that it never doubts my love.
It is a spiritual practice.
It is a daily struggle.
It is a daily joy.
For So the Children Come
For each child that’s born
A morning star rises
and sings to the universe
who we are
On November 12th of this year, three congregations co-ordained me, giving me a new name – Reverend Deanna Vandiver. On the morning of December 21st, Katherine Grace was born and I received another name – Aunt De!
Beloveds, that every child born could arrive so loved, so cared for as my beautiful niece, baby Kate… For so the children come into this world, into our lives, and we – we are called to love them enough to begin what Howard Thurman called the work of Christmas: “finding the lost, healing the broken, feeding the hungry, releasing prisoners, rebuilding nations, making peace among brothers [and sisters], making music in the heart.”
There is no such thing as “somebody else’s baby.” They are all our children, our beloved miracles of life to care for, to care about, and to commit to healing a broken world so that they may not suffer unnecessarily. As our nation grieves the death of the slain children in Newtown, CT, we are deeply aware of our accountability for their lives and the lives of all children who are harmed by violence and the devaluation of life.
Unitarian Universalist theology tells us that we are a part of an interconnected web of creation, related to and in relationship with each thread of creation. Our society tells us that we are isolated individuals, worth only what we can produce or inherit, and that violence is a credible response to violence. We tenders of the web of life know that violence increases alienation & fear, hides the connections we have to each other, allows us to become numb to the miracle of life, to the wonders of this universe.
My mother has a calendar of days in her bathroom. On the day my niece was born, the wisdom of the calendar instructed “Give people a piece of your heart, instead of a piece of your mind.” Navigating the dynamics of multiple families, hospital policies, and fear for my baby sister’s health with very little sleep, that nugget of wisdom was salvific for me. Life lived from a place of gratitude and wonder is very different from a life lived from a place of ingratitude, anger, and fear.
We who grieve the beloveds of Sandy Hook Elementary are also called to grieve the 800 “civilian casualties” of our country’s drone strikes in Pakistan in the last four years, for the children who are caught in cross-fire in our urban centers, for every child who has lost a parent in the endless US military actions. We understand that we are not called to stand on the side of love for some children. We are called to stand on the side of love for all children. No matter what we think about their choices, their policies, or their cultures, our hearts are called to honor the inherent worth and dignity of all creation.
Beloveds, each child that’s born is a holy child. You are a miracle. So is your neighbor. As we swim through the ocean of the universe, may we remember this wisdom born of a child called Jesus. Love your neighbor as yourself – and beloveds, love yourself – because if you cannot have compassion for the spark of creation that is your being, you will be able to deny compassion to other sparks of creation.
Give yourself and your neighbor a piece of your heart instead of a piece of your mind. See how quickly this begins the work of Christmas…
For so the children come, and so they have been coming for thousands of years…may each child born find peace and love in our hearts and good will toward all of creation as we commit to doing the work of Christmas.
For each child that’s born
A morning star rises
and sings to the universe
who we are