The Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalist cluster gathered in an oak -filled park on Sunday to celebrate Earth: Our Deep Home Place. As Earth Day approaches, I share with you a meditation, my invitation to celebrate our beloved planet:
Cosmologian Thomas Berry wrote “Nothing is completely itself without everything else. This relatedness is both spatial and temporal. However distant in space or time, the bond of unity is functionally there. The universe is a communion and a community. We ourselves are that communion become conscious of itself.”
We who are of the earth, children of the everything seed (http://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/children/loveguide/session1/sessionplan/stories/168158.shtml),
we are intimately and ultimately connected to all creation. Through mystery and mutation, we have risen from the fertile mud to look around and celebrate the miracle of earth. As humans evolved, so too evolved rituals to celebrate and interpret the wonder of this place.
When Lao Tzu, the great Daoist philosopher asked, “Can you hold the door of your tent wide to the firmament?” poet Mark Nepo believes he was “challenging us not to define the world by whatever shelter we create but to let in the stars, to throw our tent of mind and heart wide open in order receive and listen to the flow of life.”
Part of my own deep sense of home place in south Louisiana comes from the insistent presence of earth here. There is no day I can travel through town without noticing the majesty and intelligence of the plied live oaks, the whip-like flexibility of the pomegranate trees, the persistent resurrection of the bananas and the gingers. Summer days hum with the life cry of the cicadas, seagulls and crows caw throughout the year, mosquitos whining past your ear, and if you listen closely, I swear you can hear termites chewing away on darned near everything.
This place takes us deep, past language, to a pre-verbal space of knowing, to a place before naming, categorizing and limiting.
When we are still, when we breathe in and breathe out, when we trust that there is space for us and everything else that emerged from the everything seed, then beloveds, we can let go of our fears and submerge ourselves into the deep sense of collective belonging, the vast compassionate love that saturates creation.
Daily we make a thousand choices that shape the earth. May we throw our tent of mind and heart wide open in order to be shaped by the earth, our deep home place.
“By not finding Dunn guilty of murder, the jury could not unanimously conclude that one white man’s imagination was worth more than one black teen’s life.” -Aura Bogado, Jordan Davis: What We’ve Come to Expect, http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/02/what_weve_come_to_expect.html
“Colorlines publisher and executive director of Race Forward, Rinku Sen, was a guest on the Melissa Harris-Perry show to discuss the dimensions of the Michael Dunn case on Sunday. “What Michael Dunn expected from that interaction was not respect but submission,” she said quoting Tonyaa Weathersbee. “Stand Your Ground laws codify that expectation of submission from young black people to white men.” Rinku goes on to explain how the prosecution’s failure to acknowledge that prevents us from truly highlighting the racial dimensions of this case.” http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/02/fighting_stand_your_ground_law_is_the_anti-lynching_movement_of_our_time.html
No one deserves to die
because a White person is
afraid of not being in control.
Source of all that is holy and true,
heart broken by the dis-ease of racism
infecting this nation,
I am calling out this morning.
Calling out beloveds
whose own humanity has been displaced
by the White supremacist culture of America.
Yeah. All my White people.
Calling us in
to revision this country.
Because our own humanity is lost
when we deny it to another.
Because this is no way to live.
Remember?
I tend to get it from both sides when I talk about spiritual practice: many of my fellow skeptics blanch at the word “spiritual.” And many Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Sufis, and what-have-yous seem to think that rationality and spiritual practice are at loggerheads. But humanists value connectedness and experience wonder just like everyone else. As far as I’m concerned, that’s spirituality.
I grew up Pentecostal. The spiritual practices taught in that tradition are daily bible reading and prayer. There is much talk of “having a prayer life.” As a kid, I assiduously read the King James Version of the bible. I completed the task when I was twelve. Admittedly, I didn’t understand much of what I read, but I credit that practice with preparing me for reading Modernist literature when I got to college. What’s a little James Joyce after you’ve read Leviticus at twelve?
Along about the time I was fourteen I began questioning praying in the manner I had been taught—petitionary prayer. I decided that it was presumptuous to ask God (if that god knows all and can do everything) for anything. On the other hand, I knew then, and I still believe, it is mentally healthy to pause, consider the needs of others, and think of ways that one might help others achieve those needs. That’s another sort of prayer entirely.
Nowadays Christians have rediscovered “contemplative prayer.” It is an interesting practice. But it wasn’t much known back in the days when I was searching.
When I was twenty-two I traveled to Boulder, Colorado to Naropa Institute. I went to study at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. I went because my poetry hero, Allen Ginsberg, was there. I discovered the serious practice of Buddhism.
At Naropa, Ginsberg and Gary Snyder both taught that meditation had to be an end in itself—the point isn’t to meditate on something to write or to be a better writer. Meditation just is. The point isn’t “enlightenment.” Rather, meditation tunes the mind.
I have to admit, I’m fidgety. I didn’t meditate well then; I don’t meditate well now. The writing of poetry became for me a spiritual practice. That, to, focuses the mind and centers one in the moment. I have continued that practice through my life—through births, deaths, disappointments, divorce. Every day, I write. It is part of me. Some days it has been all I have had to keep me going.
I use tricks to keep my writing a priority. I blog. I work on a chapter of the Daodejing every day, polishing a translation I have been working on for a long time.
Most days, I also practice meditation in the Buddhist manner that I learned at Naropa, even though I’m still fidgety. I sit down, quiet the mind, watch the thoughts pass, and realize that they are thoughts. The Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh perhaps sums up Buddhist meditation best in his book Being Peace:
A human being is like a television set with millions of channels. If we turn the Buddha on, we are the Buddha. If we turn sorrow on, we are sorrow. If we turn a smile on, we really are the smile. We cannot let just one channel dominate us. We have the seed of everything in us, and we have to seize the situation in our hand, to recover our own sovereignty.
For me, anyway, the great Buddhist insight is that each of us has the ability to step between a thought and a reaction . . . to realize that our minds are creating stories, that these stories shape our lives, and that these stories can be slavishly followed . . . or changed.
Writing poetry and meditating have sustained me as a humanist. Sure, “spiritual” is an overused word in North American culture. But in that heap of salesmanship, there are some real gems.
Once I crossed the Sierra Madres
with a bus driver named Arturo
who had one arm
and a stick-shift bus.
Sometimes between the
the shift and wheel Arturo’s
good right arm would
pause to make the sign
of the cross toward a portrait
of the Virgin that banged
the windshield from a string.
The lesson here is that
never is a miracle more than
beating the percentages.
Perhaps Arturo still is
waving down the
twisted camino
at each shrine
along the way.
“What’s your hurry?”
always he will ask—
“Do you think you
don’t have time to
find your grave?”
As the Community Minister for the Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalists, I spend a lot of my time immersed in the injustice of layers of oppression. New Orleanians still trying to get back into their homes over 8 years after they were flooded out, transgender women forced to be housed with and often abused by men in prison and in shelters, a football field of wetlands lost in this state every half hour … Each day there’s more. Family diagnosed with chronic diseases, babies born too soon, people die… and.
AND Christmas comes each year in this country, whether you celebrate it or not. While I often find myself in the position of protesting the dominion of the dominant culture, I don’t fight Christmas. I choose to enjoy Christmas. I think that Christmas can be sweetly subversive.
Hey World – people are ill and homeless and jobless and imprisoned and killed! For most of the year, most of the world ignores these hard truths, pretending that the poor are poor because of poor choices instead of acknowledging a system of oppression that radically tilts the playing field towards some –and away from others.
But come Christmas, pretending stops – at least for a moment. Suddenly we collect coats and toys and feel good stories about providing shelter and hope to families down on their luck.
Suddenly we tell a story about a great leader born in questionable circumstances, sharing his birthday crib with the donkey’s dinner, soon exiled to the immigrant life in Eygpt with his family.
Rumors of premarital sex, poverty, immigration … you name it, the Christmas story goes there…
And tells us – joy to the world. Hope has come.
Let there be peace and kindness and respect among all creation.
It’s a 6th Principle: The Goal of World Community with Peace, Liberty, and Justice for All!
Yes, I know. That’s not exactly how the scriptures or even the carols go.
But I am grateful for the promise of this season…For once a year our deeply embedded cultural story tells the world:
Children are precious.
Where you are born should not predict the quality nor the value of your life.
Women too have the holy within them.
It matters that we bear witness to each other and to the vast brilliance of the universe.
Sometimes knowledge needs to bow to intuition.
Life is a gift, utterly unpredictable, infinitely possible.
There is hope for change.
And where there is hope, friends, there is joy. Beloveds, may there be joy for you and your loved ones today and every days.
I was walking in City Park with a community organizer this week when suddenly we were only the width of the boardwalk away from a Great Egret, its fancy fringe plumes fluttering in the morning breeze. We paused, taking in the beauty, marveling at the unexpected joy of such a close encounter.
A few minutes later, on the other side of the lake path, I was startled by the sudden appearance of a pelican swooping in for breakfast. (With all due apologies to the fish), I clapped my hands in delight when I watched the pelican give the throaty head waggle that signifies success.
And I noticed, as our walk continued, that our conversation had transitioned as we were present to the beauty and wonder of where we were. A talk that had begun with the challenges and frustrations we were facing was giving way to some creative collaboration, some hope, some joy.
May you too find beauty in this world to give you hope and joy, to point the way towards collaboration, community, creative resistance to all that would tell us we are less than, not enough.
December 10, 2013
“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” – so begins the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948.
Today marks the 65th Anniversary of this visionary document, created shortly after the end of World War II. In the aftermath of massive global violence, the international community vowed never again to allow atrocities like those of that conflict happen again.
The decades since have been filled with violence and atrocities.
And.
And the arc of the universe has bent toward justice.
For at least there is now an international promise of how we know we are called to be together, a First Principle
guideline leading to a Sixth Principle vision.
To paraphrase the G.I. Joe cartoon of my childhood, “Now we know, and knowing is half the battle.”
May this knowing lead to loving, compassionate doing in the next 65 years.
“As we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, let us intensify our efforts to fulfill our collective responsibility to promote and protect the rights and dignity of all people everywhere.” ~UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
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:
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.
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.
That shrimp plant
so determined to be seen
poking through the ginger and the fig
like a four year old
waving skinny arms and red cheeks
to those towering above
That shrimp plant
grown from cuttings of a friend
who no longer lives in this country
from a house
that has since burned down
That shrimp plant
breaks at its knobby knees and elbows
when the wind blows too hard
drops to the ground
and grows again
Universe
today I pray
please
please grant us the resilience
of that shrimp plant
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