Spiritual Lessons from the Passenger’s Seat
Though she took the book learning part of Drivers Ed this summer, my 16 year old did not get her temporary license until last Monday. That’s because on Tuesday, we were leaving for a 1500 mile roadtrip for a family Thanksgiving, and it seemed like an ideal time to teach her to drive.
When I say “ideal time,” let me qualify that. To me, the “ideal” time to drive with her would have been after she had also taken the behind the wheel drivers’ ed class where the person in the passenger seat, a trained instructor, also has a brake pedal. But, oddly, that’s not how they do it anymore. They want the parents to teach the kids to drive, before the professional teacher ever gets into a car with them. While I find that bizarre and wrong, that massive group of people without 16 year olds seems to find it logical for some reason.
So, we headed off into the sunset, driving from Minnesota to northern Ohio. And then back. Safe and sound. With the sixteen year old driving at least 600 of the 1500 miles! And here’s what I learned, which I share thinking maybe it has application beyond this particular situation!
1. There is no time when beginning will feel safe, but make it as safe as you can. If you wait for safety, your kids will grow old and retire before you ever step aside and allow them to drive. But think through what will feel the safest to you. For me, it was a three lane highway in rural Wisconsin.
2. Start by imitating someone else. We drove around on a few country roads to experience starting and stopping, and then I said, “Just get in the right lane. No passing. Just follow whatever car is in front of you and go the speed limit.” That business of following someone else at first, even if they are the slowest, clunkiest, trailer on the road, is still a good way to begin.
3. Plan in advance how you’ll stop if you need to. Besides staying in the right lane, I knew that we would only switch drivers in wayside rests. No intown driving, no cloverleaves or complicated off-ramps. Just pulling over to a big parking lot on the side of the road.
4. Only do the one thing. In this case, it was driving. At first, we had no radio, no conversation about anything but driving, no eating. In the passenger’s seat, I did not answer phone calls or even look at maps. It was all driving, all the time, for both of us, until that was very comfortable and easy.
5. Consider challenging situations that might arise before they do, when life is calm. Talk about what to watch for in other drivers, to know when they might do something unpredictable. What to do if bad weather hits. What if a flat tire occurs.
6. Verbalizing things that you do intuitively will impress you with the complexity of what you know. In driving, as in other parts of life, there are hundreds of automatic decisions made. As we drive for years on end, we aren’t even conscious of many of them. I found it interesting and fun to speak out loud about things such as whether or not I trust another driver or when to pull back or when to push forward on the road.
7. Despite good planning, life will surprise you. We had planned for me to be back at the wheel long before Chicago, when we assumed the driving would get rough. But suddenly, on a country road that looked as if it would be clear and easy, bad fog came up simultaneously with road construction. There was nothing to do but live through it until there was a safe place to pull off.
8. Handling the unexpected situations well will give you confidence. After fog and road construction, I was more willing to say perhaps it would be OK to think about passing other cars, since that was much easier than what we had already lived through!
9. Take time to enjoy and appreciate progress. I probably told my 16 year old thirty or forty times what a great job I thought she was doing. And I meant it. But I could see that hearing my appreciation built her confidence and she was not annoyed by my repetition.
10. Plan to build on what you’ve learned. Now that we’re home from a highway trip, we’ll begin learning how to drive in town, which involves a whole different set of lessons. But the confidence from the road trip will spill into the local driving and make it easier.
A Different Thanksgiving
Somehow the Thanksgiving plans turned out different than we expected. Like most folks in the US, my images of Thanksgiving include big tables groaning with food surrounded by family and friends. That’s not just a Norman Rockwell fantasy for me. My family both gets along well and cooks well, and Thanksgiving dinner is always a pleasure.
So when my parents announced, months ago, that they would be heading to the opposite coast to spend the holiday with my East Coast siblings, we knew that the holiday would look different, and we talked about friends that we might invite to celebrate the holiday. We would have different faces, but the same effect of feasting and conviviality. And then we kind of never quite figured out who to ask. And then my wife went in for an emergency appendectomy. And so, there we were, a few days out from Thanksgiving, with no real plans.
But hey, we could manage. We’d have a special celebration with just our little family—my slowly-recuperating wife, my daughter and I. Go see a movie. Have some easy-going family time. Choose a couple of favorite Thanksgiving dishes to make and just hang out.
Perhaps this would be a good moment to mention that my daughter is 14. My images of family time and hanging out together don’t usually come out the way I have in mind. Eventually the image of the family gathered around the groaning board devolved into a plan for my daughter to watch the final Twilight movie at the same time and in the same theater that my wife and I watch The Life of Pi. Not quite what I had in mind.
But, you know, it’s OK. Really, gratitude means a lot more in the real world of plans that fall apart than in that all-too-rare perfect world in which everything comes out the way it’s supposed to. I am grateful for my family, even if it’s next to impossible to get the eye-rolling teen to occupy the same space as her less-than-cool mothers for any period of time. I am grateful for my comfortable home, which will not get the thorough cleaning it so desperately needs, since no one is coming over. I am grateful to have enough to eat, even if we end up with In n’ Out Burgers rather than turkey and stuffing for Thanksgiving this year.
I am grateful to be here, in this particular place, at this particular time, which is as full as devastation and war and suffering as any other time, and as full of heroes and incredible blessings. However our Thanksgiving Day turns out, I will take a few moments for gratitude. May I remember to do that all of the subsequent days, whether they turn out the way I imagined or not.
Grateful, even so
The universe, she is laughing at me.
This is my third attempt to write a blog about gratitude.
The first two times got eaten my by computer. I saved them wrong. I know, you think, what are the odds? That’s why I think the universe is having a good laugh.
The first time, I sat in a meditative space and wrote the blog with deep joy. Writing it took me someplace I hadn’t intended to go, and by the time I was through, I had my plan in place for this week of Thanksgiving, as overloaded with tasks as it is: Just focus on being grateful. Don’t worry about anything else. Stuff will get done or it won’t, but my only job is to be grateful.
The second time, writing the blog was a little less inspiring to me, but it was better written. You would have like it. I talked about all of the things I have learned about moving from a place of joy, from a place of gratitude. I said that I don’t believe that stress, or just doing things to do them, is truly necessary for getting things done.
And now here I am grinding this third attempt out, because it is due today and if I don’t write it I will have blown my deadline. Doing just what draft 2 said I didn’t need to do! Draft 2 did acknowledge that yes, there are times, when deadlines or urgency compel us to move from a place of necessity. But even then, said my draft 2 calmer and wiser self, we can be grateful.
So here’s the challenge of the third draft: Can I be grateful even when I am frustrated by my own ineptitude, frustrated by needless and stupid mistakes? And here’s what I see: Yep, even then. I’m still grateful for the chance to speak here, for the opportunity to express myself, for the knowledge that people will take a moment to read what I have written, despite my obvious imperfection. But I also see that gratitude is not always a slow, ponderous, let’s take a moment and breathe deep and be grateful, kind of process. This time other deadlines—places to be, people to feed, other tasks to get done, nip at my heels and call me to move quickly. This time I am grateful on the fly!
So, in this Thanksgiving week that has taken me by surprise, arriving sooner than I expected, and without my readiness, this is indeed my intention: to stay in gratitude, even when I’m not in a state of deep cosmic focus. To let gratitude be there with my to do list that seems to grow instead of shrinking, with all of life’s distractions, with my frustrations, my mistakes, my obligations, my unmet deadlines, with people who annoy me, traffic jams, relatives with different ideas about the perfect Thanksgiving meal, a computer that eats documents when a not-too-bright person is at the helm.
I’ll let gratitude be the spice that makes the soup delicious, even if the main ingredients are beans and rice. I’ll let gratitude be the bow on the package, even if the package is wrapped in old newspaper. I’ll let gratitude be the cherry on top, even if it is on top of a plate of leftovers. I’ll trust that gratitude is there, holding together all that feels like it is falling apart.
And so, during this hectic week, I invite you to be there, in all of the chaos, however you do or don’t celebrate on Thursday, whether you are angry and lonely or mellow and blissful, to remember that gratitude is always there for us to rest in. We can breathe it, sleep in it, eat it with the turkey or tofurkey.
Whatever you do, or don’t do, this week, may gratitude whisper in your ear, arise from your heart, and flow out from all that you do and who you are. Even, or especially, when you screw up, when you feel you’ve got too little too late, when you want to throw a little tiny tantrum. Especially then.
(And please, Gods and Goddesses, may I save this document correctly!)
Drama
For months, we were barraged with a national narrative of a “razor tight” presidential race. (What kind of mixed metaphor is “razor tight” anyway?) But it turned out to be not so close after all. Indeed, some paid attention to voices that were saying all along it would be close, but not so very close, and that the outcome really wasn’t much in doubt. Now a budget deadline is being described as a “fiscal cliff.” Why is so much drama injected into these decisions?
The temptation to ratchet up the emotional intensity of any given situation is real. Perhaps we are motivated by boredom, by a desire to add a sense of passion to situations that would otherwise be marked by torpor and tedium. Perhaps drama makes us feel important, like what we are experiencing is special and powerful. These things speak to essential human needs. We need to feel engaged and interested in life. We need to feel like what we are experiencing and doing matters. These needs are not good or bad; what we do with them, though, can lead us toward nobility, beauty and decency, or down the road to aggression, confusion and chaos.
There are other motives for stirring up drama too. In the case of this most recent contest for the Oval Office, we were faced with a fairly humdrum set of choices. There was precious little talk and debate about climate change, poverty, or the fact that the United States has now been at war longer than at any other time in our history (even in Viet Nam, U.S. combat operations didn’t begin until 1965, ten years before the Paris peace accords), and hardly any discussion about the multiple deployments our armed forces have had to endure or the crisis in mental health that so many of our war veterans face. Talk of middle class tax cuts and natural gas reserves isn’t unimportant, but a deliberate avoidance of other pressing issues necessitates a collective emotional shutting-down. What to fill that void with? “The race is neck-and-neck!”
This is a spiritual issue. What we choose to give our attention to matters. What we choose to think about matters. Do we devote ourselves to ideas and feelings that lead to patience, rationality, open-mindedness, and generosity? Or do we focus on thoughts and emotions that point toward rage, self-righteousness, hysteria and parsimony? What kinds of choices are we demanding that our leaders make? And what choices do we ourselves make?
Follow Rev. Keely on Twitter @evanvwk.
Moving On
In a way, it feels like a magnified version of Christmas – the election, I mean. All of that lead-up, all the wishes and hopes for what you might get this year, all of that investment in trying to get just the right outcome…and then it’s done. The big reveal is complete. And we either did or did not get just exactly what we wanted, or some results feel like the best gift ever, and some are more gravely disappointing than an ugly sweater or a set of pickle forks.
But one way or another, those of us who have spent months obsessing over polls or calling strangers or arguing politics on Facebook need to find something else to do with our time. The decisions are made, the gifts unwrapped. There is only so long one can continue to fill the hours with election re-caps and analyses about how and why this or that demographic voted as they did. It’s time to move on.
Except that it isn’t. Moving on implies letting it go, moving forward as if nothing happened. It sounds like brushing one’s hands together and declaring mission accomplished if your side won, or grumbling off into the night if it didn’t. Neither of those stances really exemplifies the best of democracy or, for that matter, spirituality.
Far better to choose moving forward. If there were candidates or causes you were passionate about, you cared for a reason. You voted because you cared about the environment or liberty or education or marriage or any number of visions of the society that you hope to live in. And none of those visions is either accomplished or lost based on the people or propositions that got the most votes. All of those visions are still merely possibilities.
Every time an election rolls around we are told that it is the most important of our lifetimes, and that catastrophe is imminent if things don’t go our way. And that might be true. But it is also true that the work of the world, the pursuit of justice and freedom and health and wholeness has been continuing—imperfectly—for a very long time, and isn’t likely to be finished any time soon.
So take the time you need to celebrate or mourn the outcome of this most recent election, but don’t take too long. The work of clarifying your vision of the world you want to see, and the work of nudging the world toward that reality, is still very much in season.
How to Vote as an Act of Prayer
We’d love to cast a vote for compassion, freedom, justice. But they’re not on the ballot. So we can’t let the ballot reflect the extent we allow ourselves to envision the world we want to create. Hold that bigger vision in prayer or meditation before turning to the act of voting: a land where justice shall roll down like waters, and peace like an everflowing stream. A land where we bind up the broken and the captives go free. That’s the ballot our hearts and souls can cast, every day and with every activity.
But meanwhile, it’s time to vote! So the following are my ideas about how to turn that activity into a form of prayer.
Before your vote, do thorough research about all of the positions, even the tiniest. You may not love this research, but find organizations or friends who do love to do it and read what they wrote. Print up a sample ballot, mark it up, and stick it in your pocket. Clarify your mind. Scrambling around trying to sort through obscure races in the voting booth will take you right out of praying mode and into guilt and panic!
Walk into the polling place with gratitude that it is there. As the election judges check your name off the list, offer a moment of gratitude for them and their service. Offer a moment of gratitude for all of the check marks on that list, for all of the people in your neighborhood who take time to affirm their freedom and power to vote.
As you walk into the voting booth and set up your ballot, offer gratitude for all who have worked for your right to do so: founding fathers and suffragists, freedom riders and voting rights activists.
Now take out the ballot. Offer gratitude for all who would offer their time and their families and their lives for public service, whether you agree with any of their positions or not.
Look at the names on the ballot of the candidates you will vote for. As you check a candidate’s name, visualize that person’s strongest, most powerful, courageous and bold self. Vote for that candidate affirming the possibility of who they might become in office with strong community support and accountability.
As you check names, visualize yourself at your strongest, most powerful, courageous and bold self. Offer up gratitude for all of the civic leaders and organizations that will help you to be such a person. Commit to being a citizen activist. Cast an invisible vote for yourself beside each candidate’s name.
If you vote on community initiatives, take time to visualize all of the activists who worked to support freedom and justice about this initiative. As you check a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ box, imagine all of those affected by the initiative who vote with you. Especially imagine those who cannot vote, because they’re school kids, or their immigration status doesn’t yet allow them to vote, or because they served time for a crime, or for any other reason. Imagine your beloved ones who have died and won’t be casting a vote. Put them all into your pen and let them help you put in that check mark.
After you’re done voting, and despite the lines waiting, allow yourself a moment just to touch the ballot, to offer up a blessing for democracy itself, for fair elections, for the concept of one person one vote, for the lofty view of humanity which initially envisioned such a system, and which has expanded the notion of ‘personhood’ over the last several centuries.
Leaving the booth, smile at those around you, walk to the machine and insert your ballot, offering one last invisible bow of gratitude as you leave.
Democracy and faith
Religious faith consists of our most deeply held values. It is the summation of what is of greatest importance to us, our ultimate commitments. But those commitments are expressed in many different ways, through many different aspects of our lives; they have to be if those commitments really are ultimate commitments. So of course, our faith expresses itself in what we say, in the work that we do, in the things we like and dislike, and our faith absolutely finds its expression in the way we vote, in the causes we support and in the causes we oppose, and our faith absolutely finds its expression in how we feel about our political leaders. So to pretend that politics somehow isn’t relevant to religious life shows, I think, a very limited understanding of both religion and politics. Figuring out where religious liberalism ends and where political liberalism begins is a challenge for us, not because we’re shallow or confused or unwise, but because the line between political convictions and religious beliefs is actually very fine. Our beliefs, our convictions, our identities, our lives are not so easily compartmentalized. We do not cease to be religious when we step into the voting booth, and we don’t stop being political when we come to church. That’s as it should be. How we balance those things, as well as all the other things demanding our attention and provoking our interest — well, that’s the hard part.
Unitarian Universalists are a people of faith that celebrate the creative power of difference respectfully encountered, the redemptive and healing power of different people being truly themselves and sharing of those true selves with others. Yet we know that we cannot and should not expect to accept everything. We should never make a place in our religious homes for abusive and destructive behavior; we can’t be truly ourselves unless we trust one another, and that means we must impose appropriate, healthy boundaries. And of course, no one religious community is going to feel like home to every single person who visits. Some will walk among us briefly and move on in search of something else. But if we actively exclude anyone, we had better make sure we understand how doing so is an expression of who we yearn to be as a religious people. The idea that if we are going to worship together and pray together and be together as a religious community, we must therefore also vote in the same way shows a very limited understanding of what it means for us to be in community. This is not because our political views are unimportant, or irrelevant to religious life; they are important, and they are relevant. It’s because the foundation of our faith lies in the creative possibilities of being transformed and liberated and healed by constructively encountering difference. If we insist upon unanimity, and explicitly or tacitly exclude anyone who falls outside the self-appointed majority, it can only be because we have very little confidence in the religious faith that supposedly binds us together.
Politics is not often conducive to reconciliation, respect, and mutual understanding. We get the message again and again, loud and clear, that there is no middle ground. On any issue at any given time, there are winners and there are losers. You’re for capital punishment or you’re against it. You’re pro-choice or you’re pro-life. Your state is red or it’s blue. Well, we know that the reality is far more complex. And we know that democracy is messy and inefficient and imperfect; it’s an unending series of processes, and we’d just better learn to live with it, because Winston Churchill was quite right when he supposedly quipped that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.” As a religious people committed to love and forgiveness and reconciliation, committed to mutual understanding and respect and being enriched rather than threatened by difference, and yes, as a religious people committed to democracy, the question for us is how we are to participate authentically in the often divisive processes of democracy while still maintaining our religious commitments.
We have a vision for our nation and our world. It is a vision of a world in which different people can come together and learn from one another rather than fearing and hating each other. Our religion calls us to practice that among ourselves, and to bring that healing, saving message to the world. We can only do so if we encounter our own differences with respect and honesty and love.
Voting as Spiritual Practice, as a Neighborly Act…
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
~ Wendell Berry ~
On this eve of a national election, so many conversations begin with “well, depending on who wins the election, …” In our representative democracy, a lot does depend on who wins elections.
Because of how the presidential election is decided, via the electoral college, it can feel as if your vote doesn’t count, especially if you tend to vote the opposite slate from the majority of voters in your state. I have heard more than a few people wonder out loud if they will even vote this year “since their vote won’t count anyway.”
What is imperative to remember during these bouts of feeling disenfranchised is that your local votes also change the world. It matters who sits on the city council seat, who becomes judge, whether that change to the city charter or the state constitution becomes law. It matters in daily life to real people.
Detention policies, educational opportunities, the right to marry – all of this is decided by voting at the local level. The roots of change have always been local. So read up about the local issues. Discuss them with your peers. And then vote, if you can, my friends. Think of it as a spiritual practice: Read, Reflect, Act.
Our votes matter very much to our neighbors and our selves. May this weekend be a time of spiritual practice for you as you prepare to vote for the sake of your local community next week.
Salvation
I am a Unitarian Universalist who believes deeply that salvation is an inherent aspect of my 
faith. Not just my own personal salvation, though through this faith that has happened, but the salvation of the world.
My faith is not about the salvation of individual souls for a perceived afterlife. I believe that whatever happens to one of us when this physical human life ends, happens to us all. I do not believe in the “Divine Sifting” of souls. That afterlife might be a heaven, or it might be a continuation of being, or it might be reincarnation. But whatever it is, it will happen to us all equally. We are all saved.
No, the salvation that I speak of is salvation in this world, of this world, and for this world. To use Christian language, the salvation that I believe in is the creation of the Realm of God here, and now. It is the reconciling of humanity with each other, and with the world in which we live.
This, I believe, is the vision of salvation that rests at the heart of Unitarian Universalism, a faith which calls us to work with our time, our talent, our treasure, and our dreams to heal this world, to make this world whole.
It means to work for the salvation of this world from the evils of racism and human slavery.
It means to work for the salvation of this world from the evils of war and genocide.
It means to work for the salvation of this world from the evils of poverty and inequality.
It means to work for the salvation of this world from the evils of greed and political apathy.
It means to work for the salvation of this world from the evils of torture and injustice.
It means to work for the salvation of this world from the evils of the closed mind and the closed heart.
It means to work for the salvation of this world from many more evils than this, but it also means to work for the salvation of this world by promoting the good…
It means to work for the salvation of this world by promoting the good that is found in loving your neighbor as yourself.
It means to work for the salvation of this world by promoting the good that is found in learning to love, and forgive, yourself.
It means to work for the salvation of this world by promoting the good that is found in protecting the environment, without dividing ourselves from others.
It means to work for the salvation of this world by promoting the good that is found in joining with others in communities of right relationship, be they found in the family, in the church, in the workplace, in the nation, or (could it be possible) in the world.
It means to work for the salvation of this world by promoting the good that is found in finding where your values call you to bring people together, instead of tear them apart.
It means to work for the salvation of this world by promoting the good that is found in working with others to find their own call to work for this salvation.
This is, for me, a mission of salvation… truly a mission to save the world. It is a mission that I believe must be inspired by a religious vision of what our world would be, could be, will be like when we, the human race, finally grow up. It is a vision of creating the Realm of God here and now… not of depending on God to do it for us.
This is my vision of salvation, and the power behind my Unitarian Universalist faith.
Yours in Faith,
Rev. David
Masks — A Poem for Halloween
Masks
What will you wear for Halloween?
The trees are changing faces, and the
rough chins of chestnut burrs
grimace and break to show their
sleek brown centers. The hills
have lost their mask of green and grain,
settled into a firmer geometry
of uncolored line and curve.
Which face will you say is true—
the luminous trees or the branches underneath?
The green husks of walnuts, the shell within,
or the nut curled intimately inside,
sheltered like a brain within its casing?
Be careful with what you know,
with what you think you see.
Moment by moment faces shift,
masks lift and fall again, repainted
to a different scene. It means,
the cynics say, there is no truth,
no constant to give order to the great equation.
Meanwhile, the trees, leaf by leaf,
are telling stories inevitably true:
Green. Gold. Vermillion. Brown.
The lace of veins remaining
as each cell returns to soil.
Lynn Ungar’s book of poetry, Bread and Other Miracles, is available at www.lynnungar.com