Here in Minnesota, where I live, the State Fair is the main thing going on. It upstages even the dreaded back-to-school days which are also dominant in hearts and minds.
In other places where I have lived, State Fairs are about as central to life as, say, roller coasters, or ferret ownership, or balloon rides. That is to say, some people like it enough to spend time seeking it out, most people don’t, and life goes on swimmingly. That’s not the way it is in Minnesota.
I don’t know why it is, but it would never occur to me, or anyone I know, to miss our state fair in Minnesota. Why? We spend too much money, eat too many calories, stand in too many lines. For those of us who are urban, we see animals that we have no interest in seeing the rest of the year, ogle farm machinery we will never in our lifetimes use, and stare at strange things ranging from seed art to butterheads—Princess Kay of the Milky Way, carved live out of butter as she shivers in a refrigerator in her dress and tiara.
And we get so excited about it! I’ve already been twice, and plan to go back at least once more, with friends who like to see and do different parts of the fair. I begin looking forward to it in early August, and begin to plot out trips, buying early tickets to save a few bucks. I like to go once when the fair is just opening in the morning, primarily to see the barns and animals. I go once during the afternoon, to go to the Midway and ride some rides, play a little whack-a-mole, try to win a useless prize with skeeball tickets. And then I like to go once at night to enjoy some kind of concert. This year it was Bonnie Raitt and Mavis Staples—pure heaven!
Truthfully, I think that looking forward to the fair is about as much fun as going. As the nights get colder and the sky is dark later in the morning, as the back to school sales crank up into full swing, the fair gives us something to think about besides the end of summer. How can you dread the end of August when you get to eat a pickle on a stick? How can September be a bad thing when it comes in with seed art?
This year, when I went with a friend on opening day, the two of us were so excited we could hardly concentrate enough to pick a starting place. Eventually we strode over to the horticulture building. The vegetables on display were no better looking than the ones I see every week at the farmers’ market, but seeing them with judges’ ribbons next to them enhanced their importance.
This year, ‘the great get together’ has a sad shadow side. Elections loom. We have, in addition to the bitterly divisive Presidential election, two ballot initiatives introduced by the Republicans to crank up voter turnout in Minnesota: A constitutional amendment that limits marriage to opposite sex couples, and a voter suppression bill which disallows same day registration and demands government issued IDs—disproportionally disenfranchising the poor, people of color, transgender people, and other marginalized folks.
So at the fair, in addition to the universal experiences of food on a stick and gaping at farm animals, there was also an undercurrent of divisiveness. Plenty of people, like me, picked up bright orange fans that screamed “VOTE NO: Don’t Limit the Freedom to Marry” at the Minnesotans United for All Families booth. Meanwhile, I saw many people sporting “Protect My Vote” backpacks. I’m sure they felt as sad and helpless seeing my fan as I felt seeing their backpacks. Trying to figure out how to have a real conversation about it was an insurmountable challenge as we jostled one another in the crowded streets and competed against each other in Midway games.
Despite those differences, the fair was a good place to remember that we have more in common than what separates us. I pray that I will still feel like that the second week of November, when my stuffed animal prizes will have long since been turned into dog toys and cheese curds are but a distant memory.
Like many of you, I am already bemoaning the tone and tenor of the Presidential campaign. I’m not surprised, mind you, nor are you, I’m sure. While we might have hoped that the candidates and their surrogates would “take the high road” and focus on issues in substantive ways, this fall promises to be the meanest, nastiest, most vitriolic campaign in our nation’s history. I am sick of it already, and it’s not even Labor Day, the traditional “kick-off” date for the campaigns.
To make matters worse, I find many of my friends, both real and “virtual,” pouring gasoline on the flames of division and divisiveness. No sooner are words out of the mouths of the candidates (or some talking head supporting one or the other of them) and – BAM! – social media is riddled with outrage. My friends (who tend to be left-leaning) are quick to both create and forward postings about the latest affront or indignity uttered by their conservative counterparts, often without taking the time to step away from the keyboard, much less to check the facts.
Why, I wonder, do people who ordinarily behave in compassionate ways, support and perpetuate the vitriol that we’re so quick to bemoan? Is it just too easy to pass along a degrading comment about a political opponent with the push of a button? Are we trying to come across as “hip” or clever to our friends, most of whom are already aligned with our position already? We’re certainly not seeking to lift the political discourse out of the gutter that it’s in. Many of us wouldn’t dream of uttering in public many of the accusations we hurl online, yet we hit the “like” or “share” button with reckless abandon. And that makes us participants in, and part of, the problem
As people of faith (no matter what faith you subscribe to), we are called to seek out the best in ourselves and in others. That doesn’t just apply to our flesh and blood selves, but to our online identities as well. In our lives we stand in solidarity against schoolyard bullying. We march for human rights and the doctrine of inclusion. Some of us proclaim loudly and proudly that we “Stand on the Side of Love.” Yet behind the protection of our keyboards and our computers we don’t think twice about “othering” and even demonizing those who don’t share our political viewpoint or who see the solutions to our problems differently than we do.
Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against moral outrage and indignation. We need to voice, both loudly and clearly, our concerns and our solutions. We should advocate for our positions and our candidates. But when we mock, degrade and vilify those who think differently than we do, we debase not just them, but ourselves and the very democracy that we all so dearly treasure.
As we become inevitably immersed in this mean season, I invite you to join me in striving to live up to the principles of our faith, of your faith (whatever it is), no matter how hard that might be. In the language of Unitarian Universalism, let’s ask ourselves how might we continue to “affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity” of our political opponents? How might we remember to strengthen, rather than degrade, the strands of the interdependent web of which we’re all a part? Let’s consider how we might, in the words of Jesus, love not just our friends, but our “enemies” as well? Perhaps it begins by simply taking a breath before we hit “share” or “like” on our Facebook page. May that be our spiritual practice in the weeks and months ahead.
This day, and every day, I wish you peace.
Peter
“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of the mind.” the DHAMMAPADA
This summer, I decided to use contemporary movies as the “texts” for the worship services at my congregation. Partly, this was because I hadn’t been to any movies for several months and this gave me an excuse to go to the movies in these hot summer months. But more than that it is because of the importance of stories, and movies are our contemporary shared stories.
Since humans have had consciousness and language, we have been telling stories. We all have stories; in some ways, we are stories. They are our memories; they are our dreams. Stories are how we share what is important and meaningful to us. They are how we tell each other who we are. Indeed, stories are how we tell ourselves who we are.
Some stories intrigue or entertain us and other stories distress or bore us. The first human stories were told, heard, remembered and re-told. Then the stories were written and collected. Some of those stories became sacred through re-telling. They gave communities identity and meaning. The stories explained the world, life and death. Some of those story collections came to be called scriptures which is a word that means writings. People still think about and learn from these old stories. We still tell, remember, write and read stories. But now a primary way of telling and receiving stories is through television and movies. We think about, talk about and learn from what we watch as well as what we hear. Film can be powerful and emotional. So, I decided this summer to talk about current movies, to see what we can learn from these films. What are the messages in these contemporary stories?
Of course, there can be many messages even in one movie, and as we watch a film, our own experience influences the message we receive. One theme that I experienced in the three movies that I have seen so far may well be part of every movie. The movies are The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Kid With A Bike and The Intouchables. In many ways, these are three quite different films, but all three show how we are transformed in relationships, especially in caring relationships. The movies’ stories are about love, courage and transformation, and because they are stories about life, they are also stories about loss and acceptance.
Authentic, open hearted and mutual relationships allow us to accept our sorrows and our joys and to become more of our own true selves. Even brief encounters if honest and open to the other can change us, and movies, too, have the potential to change us. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the brothers who made The Kid With A Bike, said of their films, “The moral imagination or the capacity to put oneself in the place of another. That’s a little bit of what our films demand of the spectator.” When we are our best selves, that “capacity to put oneself in the place of another” is the gift we give each other.
May your stories be heard and may you be open to others’ stories.
Courage comes in many forms and it wears many faces. We often think of those who put themselves in harms’ way for the sake of others as being courageous. The firefighter who rushes into a burning building. The soldier who risks life and limb to save a buddy who’s been wounded. The mother who shields her baby from imminent danger.
This past week, I saw another face of courage. It was worn by a young woman who lives in Arizona, whose mother brought her across the border when she was an infant. All her life she lived in fear. In fear of the knock on the door in the middle of the night. In fear of the police who patrol her neighborhood. In fear that when she came home from school her mother would be gone, taken to a detention center to be deported.
This young woman, now in her twenties, has declared her freedom from fear and has become an advocate for the rights of undocumented people just like herself. She has attended and spoken out at immigrant rights’ rallies. She has “bucked the system” and achieved both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree from Arizona State. She has started a “language exchange” in Phoenix, where undocumented youth from her community can come and teach Spanish, thereby earning a little cash to support themselves while they also learn to speak English from their students. (See the video here: Spanish for Social Justice ) She is, in all aspects of her life, proclaiming her heritage, her identity and her status in the face of frightening, brutal and repressive forces. And she’s doing it with joy and love. The face of courage that I encountered last week wears a big smile, and it is beautiful.
After hearing this woman’s story, I’m called to ask myself where courage comes from. Not the “run into a burning building” courage (which, while certainly admirable, often is more a reaction to circumstance), but the kind that says “I’m in this for the long haul, no matter what.” The kind of courage that enables and empowers us to get out of bed, day after day, to face a world full of risk and danger. I have to believe that this kind of courage is grounded in love. In the love that we receive from others and in the love we have for the world.
We need a community of love around us to provide the foundation for all that we do. Knowing that we are loved, no matter what, by our family and our friends gives us the courage to venture out into a hostile world. It also forms the basis of our self-esteem, the basis of our belief that our lives matter and that we can make a difference. This kind of love empowers us to declare our own worth in the face of those who would deny it.
A love of the world calls us to engage with it, in all its beauty and all its horror. When we love the world, like a parent with a troublesome child, we acknowledge its imperfections, yet we cast our gaze to the horizon of its potential. Love for the world allows us, in the words of Bobby Kennedy, “to dream things that never were, and say, why not?” And it creates in us the commitment to do what we can to make those dreams a reality.
As I move through the days ahead, I will carry the image of this young woman with me. She is, for me, the new face of courage.
Peace,
Peter
There is a protest at Tent City tonight, the place where Sherriff Joe Arpaio holds thousands of immigrants in his self described ‘concentration camp.’ Where there is never any relief from the Arizona heat, where humiliation is a daily occurrence.
I’m with my people, in our bright yellow Standing on The Side of Love shirts that match the school buses that take us there, Unitarian Universalists in Phoenix for our annual convention. There are hundreds of us going, a couple of thousand maybe, mostly white, middle class, documented. And yet I am afraid.
I’m afraid because I’ve heard there will be counter-protestors, militia folks maybe, perhaps with the weapons which are legal to carry in Arizona. I’m afraid because it’s so hot, because I’m not exactly Olympics material in my physical fitness, because I am taking a teenaged child whose safety means everything to me.
And then, as we sit in worship and prayer, preparing to go, speakers from the local Latino community speak. A young woman describes her decision to commit civil disobedience, to be arrested by Sherriff Joe Arpaio, because she is tired of living in fear, of her whole community living in daily fear of being rounded up for real or imagined infractions and thrown into the Tent City, as they have been for the past 20 years. A young man describes arriving in the United States at age one, and now facing deportation –leaving the only country he’s ever known to be sent to one which is foreign to him.
And I begin to feel embarrassed by my fear. Not ashamed, not guilty, just embarrassed. As if I am a kid who grabbed too many cookies off the plate. And I think, this fear that binds us all, this fear of being arrested and humiliated and tortured in our own country: How does that hold us back? How does that diminish us? The young woman who chose to be arrested says, Yes, she was afraid, but she’s been afraid all her life. This arrest, in a way, freed her. I think of the words of the poet Audre Lorde, in her essay which is desert-island-essential to me, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action:
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
As we get into our bright yellow school bus, a minister offers a prayer for our journey. I say to the driver, Are we holding our departure up because we are standing up praying? And she looks up with some annoyance and says, “No! I am praying!” As I begin to lead the crowd off the bus, she says, “Thank you so much for doing this. My husband is in there.”
At Tent City, I don’t see any counter protestors, with or without weapons. I see a small gaggle of brave locals, who have come to thank us for being there. One woman I speak with tells me that her inability to pay for a traffic infraction landed her there for ten days. She describes the endless heat, the lack of adequate drinking water, the horrible food. She says then, tears in her eyes, “My girlfriend is in for a year.”
Another man holds a sign charging Joe Arpaio with homicide. I ask him how many people have died at Tent City. He says at least five. I ask him if his church stands up to speak out about this. He replies sadly, “I am still Catholic but I do not go to church anymore. Most of us don’t. There was one priest who spoke out for us but they got rid of him.”
As I get back on the bus to go back to air conditioned comfort, a shower and clean pajamas, his words stay with me most. I wish that I could have responded, in Arizona or in my own home state of Minnesota, “You would be welcome in my church!” I know that the Phoenix UU church is doing fantastic work to be welcoming, to stand tall as an advocate for justice for immigrants. And yet I know that, while we stand on the side of love, sometimes we stand too far off to the side, in our fear, in our privilege, buffered, unwilling to disrupt our comfort. I offer a silent prayer and wake up this morning with his words still piercing my heart.
(Photos by Jie Wronski-Riley)
A few years ago, a member of my congregation with a background in science asked me why, in his words, “so many people insist that there’s some kind of life after death?” I don’t think he was prepared for my response, which was to say that it’s because there is.
I believe that that death is not an end, but a change in the way we are in this world.
I believe that life and death are, in the words of Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro, a “twisted vine sharing one root.”
I believe that though what we call “life” may end at death, existence does not.
Surely, our molecules do not die—whether they are burned and scattered, or buried in the ground, the molecules of our being become part of the Earth. They are recycled in the clouds and the rain, falling into streams that sing as they rush towards the sea. They are reclaimed by the bacteria of the soil, reused by the tree that grows in that soil, and then consumed and changed by the flame that feeds on the wood from that tree.
Any student of advanced chemistry can tell you that matter is neither created nor destroyed. Again and again, our molecules will cycle through all of life, for all of eternity. They will change and be changed, they might be converted to energy or infused with more through complex pathways. But our substance exists long after our life has ended.
Surely, our actions do not die—they are remembered in the thoughts and deeds of our loved ones, they are used by people seeking to learn, they serve as inspiration or lessons, memories or building blocks for something new. Every interaction we have ever had with another being changed the pattern of neurons in that person’s brain. We have made imprints—tangible, concrete imprints—in the lives of many, and those imprints spread out like ripples. Our deeds live on in the lives of others. Our presence in a particular place at a particular time creates a different future for all those who would follow us.
So, even if the conscience dies, if there is nothing of a soul to carry on after we are gone, can it really be said that the dead are really dead if there is someone to remember and celebrate them? If there is someone, somewhere that carries their genes or something, somewhere that is using their matter? If there is someone, somewhere, whose life is different for having encountered them?
Can it really be said that the dead are no longer with us if there is someone among us who reads what they wrote, or cooks from their recipes?
Someone who is warmed by the quilts they stitched by candlelight or who treasures the picture of an ancestor they never met?
Someone who has been inspired by their life, someone who has made better by their work, or someone who has learned from their mistakes?
This week, I had the honor and privilege of conducting a funeral service for the father of a member of the congregation I serve. Funerals and memorials are among the very hardest thing I do as a minister—and yet they are also among the most meaningful.
Part of how I face this task is by making visible all of the ways in which the departed loved one we are celebrating lives on. It means we are not so much saying goodbye, as learning to live together in a new and different way.
I recently participated in a church board of trustees’ retreat in which a congregant, Travis Ploeger, lead us in some improv exercises in the style of his work with the Washington Improv Theater. It was challenging and fun to be a part of a group stepping a little out of its collective comfort zone (no Robert’s Rules that night, that’s for sure) and engaging challenges requiring us to think on our feet and open ourselves to what was a novel learning experience for most of us. I was reminded by this experience of some important aspects of religious life and of leadership:
Pay attention to patterns. One of our exercises was a “fortune cookie” challenge in which we all stood in a circle, and each person had to come up with a word to follow his/her neighbor’s word, forming a (hopefully) coherent sentence — or deciding that the sentence had come to an end. One pattern I noticed was that many of our “fortune” sentences began with a noun. Many fortune cookie aphorisms, in my experience, begin with a pronoun (e.g., “You will find good fortune”) or an adverb (e.g., “never,” “always,” etc.). I wondered if one person began with a noun, and others in the group, perhaps unconsciously, followed suit. Patterns can be a source of stability and confidence, through which we can build on the creative and constructive work of others. Patterns can also be confining and can sometimes lead to staleness or to lack of insight — exemplified in the familiar aphorism “But we’ve always done it this way!” By paying attention to patterns and naming them aloud, we are not only calling attention to behaviors that may have gone unnoticed, but we can explore whether those patterns are a source of vitality or an unneeded burden.
Be willing to take risks. Self-consciousness is a prominent factor in a lot of human behavior. Most of us don’t want to look or feel foolish. We want to fit in and to be accepted. Being attentive to social decorum and others’ expectations can help us to meaningfully connect with others. It can also be a source of rigidity and anxiety. A goal of religious community is to establish and maintain human connections in which we can dare to take risks and “think outside the box” in the company of others of whom we have the right to expect forbearance, respect and yes, love. It can be scary to take risks, to throw ideas out there that may seem to be outside the realm of the familiar and the comfortable in the group we’re in; in a religious community, we should encourage that kind of daring from each other, and accept it from one another with appreciation.
Closely related to risk-taking: Creativity is a hallmark of both a rich religious and spiritual life and of constructive leadership. The great religious sages and spiritual leaders of history were not only deeply committed to the ideals and morals of their faith commitments; they were creative, original, and imaginative. Gandhi’s spiritual and political leadership of India’s independence struggle, through the strategy of satyagraha, was a triumph not only of moral rectitude and political savvy, but it was marvelously imaginative. It was a means to an end with scarcely any precedents in history. Undoubtedly Gandhi drew inspiration from sources like Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” but the application of those concepts to the effort to dismantle an empire was an astounding gesture of creativity. By contrast, the heinousness of Nazism was remarkable not only for its sheer brutality, but for the appalling lack of imagination Hitler and his minions showed in trying to address difficult social problems. Scapegoating innocent people is a miserably unimaginative response to communal challenges, which is probably why it never accomplishes anything of value.
How is God calling us to attend to patterns, to take risks, and to use our imagination to meet the challenges we face?
I recently conducted a memorial service for a young woman who had taken her own life. She left behind a loving husband and her five year old daughter, as well as her mother and siblings. It was, in every sense of the word, a tragedy.
I had only met this woman briefly on a few occasions, but she made a big impression in a short time. She talked about having just received an advanced degree and starting a new job. She said she was looking forward to becoming a part of our congregation and enrolling her daughter in our religious education program. She was one of those people you wanted to be around. She seemed so full of life and hope and dreams. That’s why I had such a disconnect when I received a call from her sister, telling me what had happened. “How could someone like that do something like this?” I asked myself. It made no sense. And then in conversations with her family, I discovered that she had been waging a life-long battle with depression and bipolar disorder, and I realized that all was not as it seemed on the surface.
As I have reflected on this woman’s life, and her death, these past few weeks, I’ve reached a simple, but perhaps profound, conclusion: All of our lives are incredibly complex. Each of us has much more going on than we like to admit, to each other and perhaps to ourselves. Every one of us has a story that we hold deep in our hearts, that is ever unfolding, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, and we are much more than we appear to be. We all wrestle with our demons, and yet we present brave faces to the world. And even when we think we know someone well, there’s a lot we don’t know.
Knowing that every one of us struggles, every one of us hurts, every one of us is so much more than meets the eye, we must, in our every encounter, treat each other with kindness. Kindness is the healing balm of the soul. Kindness must be our “default” mode of interaction, because we don’t know what the other person is really going through.
In her poem “Kindness,” the poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes:
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
With this young woman’s death, I realize that it is “only kindness that makes sense any more.” It is kindness that we have been looking for. Kindness is the only gift we can give each other that will ever really matter.
This day, and every day, I wish you peace.
I asked my ex, my partner of almost twenty years from whom I separated three years ago, the co-parent of a teenaged kid, to attend a $14 community education session with me and update our wills.
We had spent thousands of dollars asserting, in two different states, that we were in fact related to one another: that sharing a home, a car, a life, a bed in fact meant that we would be responsible to one another even after death did us part. It turns out that, as difficult and expensive as that assertion of relatedness was, telling the state we had broken up was a breeze, and cheap to boot.
Our state of Minnesota, and our nation, enthusiastically agrees that we are no longer an item. In fact, they never believed that we were. Since we were all in agreement about this matter, I entered the community ed class in a calm place. I’m cheap, and my cheap self felt pretty happy that $28, for the two of us, would get our affairs in order.
I’m not saying I didn’t feel a tinge of sadness. I wondered, as I felt our after death wishes fit so easily into the pre-typed will templates which the lawyer leading our session had brought, just how much it had cost our relationship to be swimming upstream all those years, asserting that in fact love does make a family. I wondered if, had we been able to relax and float instead, supported without exerting an ounce of energy, our relationship might have survived.
But mostly I concentrated on filling in the forms accurately and quickly, initialing what needed to be initialed and checking boxes that needed to be checked. Everything goes to the kid. Check. Until the kid is 25, not too long now, a trust is established, with the following executor. Check. My ex and I whispered in consultation, no tension or disagreements between us, only wanting to get things set and done.
Most of the people in the room appeared, from their questions and comments, to be leaving their estates to their husbands and wives. They checked the box that said, to my spouse until their death, and then after spouse’s death to our children (insert names here).
But then. At the next table, a man, probably in his late 60’s, raised his hand. “If I want to leave everything to my friend, and then after he dies, to the kids, what box do I check?”
The lawyer clarified. “You want to leave everything to your friend?” “Well, yes, for the rest of his life,” said the man. “And then to our kids.”
The lawyer said off-handedly, “Well, you need to write on the blank line that you disinherit your children.”
The man’s mouth fell open in horror. “I don’t want to disinherit my children! I just want my friend to have what he needs for the rest of his life, and then the children would get it!”
The lawyer asked, as if he were cross-examining a witness, “Did you not say that you wanted to leave 100% of your estate to your friend?” The man nodded. “So that leaves zero percent for your children. Hence you must disinherit them.”
My mellow cheap self was suddenly gone from the room, and my mother tiger self was sitting in my seat instead, with adrenalin-clear vision. I was picturing what it would be like for my own kid to learn, after my death, that she had been disinherited. Like every other adopted child she will be processing, for her entire life, some amount of grief and loss about her birthmother. At that point, she’d also be processing the death of one of her parents. And then to be disinherited on top of it? I wondered, quite seriously, if she would survive.
Glancing at the man who had raised the question, I realized that I didn’t even know if he was gay or trying to care for some other friend after his death. But I did know I wasn’t going to sit quietly. I raised my hand. “So you are saying, “ I asked the lawyer, “That a gay couple could adopt or bear a child, raise that child together, and then they would both have to disinherit that child in order to provide for each other legally?”
The lawyer looked bored. The forty or so people in the room looked longingly at their will templates, studiously not looking up. I went on, “So you are saying, that even without the proposed Consititutional amendment on our ballot in November, which explicitly states that marriage is only between a man and a woman, loving and committed couples are forced to renounce either their children or each other in order to have legal wills?” The lawyer looked annoyed, but I couldn’t resist pushing it. “Are you saying that?”
“Look,” the lawyer said, “I didn’t say it was fair. I said it was the law.”
My ex and I finished filling out our forms, had them notarized, and left. As we walked out, this $14 class didn’t feel like such a bargain.
Imagine this:
The day is hot and the line at the gas station is long.
After all, it’s the least expensive gas in town.
I pull in behind a tan Toyota, tired and dusty – ready to fill up my
gas tank and make my way home.
Only the Toyota isn’t moving.
The Toyota and its occupants seemed to have settled in for the afternoon.
Parked and content to sit next to the gas pump without actually
exiting the car to pump the gas.
I was cranky and
growing increasingly annoyed as the seconds – and I do mean seconds – ticked by.
All the other pumps
were occupied and I was stuck waiting with
mounting impatience behind this car that
was going no-where, doing nothing…it was just sitting there.
Finally – after about 30 seconds wait time – the driver of the Toyota emerged
apologetic and mildly frazzled:
“My car” she says “It won’t start. I’ve never had car troubles before.
I just had the battery changed yesterday.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to her.
I only drive my car, I don’t actually know a single thing about cars.
Just then, in a flash, they seemed to arrive out of thin air –
unlikely superheroes – two men were pushing the Toyota.
One, a lanky white guy with a buzz cut, covered from neck to wrists
in tattoos. He was guiding the rescue. Steering the car through the window
as he pushed.
The other, young clean cut Latino gave his all to the task.
I finished pumping my gas and to justify all the hours I put in at the gym,
I joined in pushing the car and driver to safety.
Once safely parked, the three of us fanned out in search of jumper cables.
It became an “operation” and just like that, I forgot that I was hungry, tired, and dusty.
At one point, I paused to look at us. An unlikely tangle of individuals
coming together in community to help a neighbor in need.
Sure, we didn’t live next door to each other, but in that moment
in that gas station, we were neighbors:
A Caribbean woman, an Asian American woman, Latino youth, tattooed white male – we were all working together for a single purpose
Human kindness / overflowing
in a small – yet for the driver of that Toyota – significant way.
Moments such as these unfold for us everyday.
We can choose to step into them or step around them.
It’s always a choice. It’s always a choice to slow down and give our full attention.
To see another into being.
To stop and engage giving of our very best in that moment
whether to ourselves or to others.
No one else has the right to define for you
what your best may be at any given moment.
Only you know what that is
what it looks like
feels like – and truthfully, what you have the reserves for
because, let’s face it: there is a lot of need in the world
There are needs everywhere…and we determine when and how much we give.
Sometimes we are asked to stretch way beyond our places of comfort
To truly see another…to attend…to listen…to be present…to give…
When that happens, when we are able to do that, when we reach back out into the world
Sometimes a little bit of magic happens.
A little bit of salvific hospitality leaps into our reality…into someone else’s reality
and for a moment, we are less lonely.
We are less afraid.
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If preferred, you can text amount to give to 84-321
Quest for Meaning is a program of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF).
As a Unitarian Universalist congregation with no geographical boundary, the CLF creates global spiritual community, rooted in profound love, which cultivates wonder, imagination, and the courage to act.