Let’s say you find yourself living in, oh, let’s say the United States. It’s a country where something on the order of seventy-five percent of the population claims to be Christian. Let’s say you don’t believe in any other religion, either: you aren’t Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Baha’i, or any other of the myriad religions brought to the US by immigration or popular books. Perhaps you were even raised Christian. What do you do? How do you get through the year, filled as it is with Christian holidays and tsunamis of piety every time there’s another mass shooting or terrorist act?

Then there is the eternal question: how do you communicate with co-workers and–horror of horrors–the family at Thanksgiving?

I think there are five options:

Convert

Pretend

Reinterpret

Admit you don’t believe but allow for doubt

Resist

Conversion is your easiest course. If it’s an option, go for it. Then you won’t bristle at Federal holidays built around a particular religion. You won’t roll your eyes at each proclamation of every politician concerning her or his Christianity. Convert. It makes swimming in the US waters warm and clear.

Conscience won’t let you do that? Then try pretending. Just tell grandma and Aunt Betty Lou that you love the new pope and you’ve been planning to go back, really you have. Any day now . . .

Conscience won’t let you pretend? Reinterpret. Get yourself to the nearest bookstore (NOT a Christian one) and find writers such as John Shelby Spong, Cynthia Bourgeault, Brian McLaren, and a whole–excuse the pun–host of others. These writers swim in the Christian tradition, yet reinterpret the old metaphors. For many people this is a comfortably place. After all, you can still tell your mom that you’re Christian. And the denizens of Washington, DC won’t get on your nerves quite as badly.

Then there are those who just can’t believe in the whole bloody business anymore. What then? Face it: you’re probably a humanist. You have two options. The first is admitting you don’t believe but allowing for doubt. After all, you probably don’t know how particle accelerators really work either, so it appears that the human brain doesn’t comprehend everything. You’re agnostic! When Uncle Jim mentions how atheists are ruining the country, you can go “um” and then try to change the subject.

If all else fails, resist. I don’t recommend this final option, unless you just feel that you have to do it in order to be true to your conscience. Resistance is perhaps not futile, but it is uncomfortable. You will be joining the beleaguered folks who sue the state of Texas (maybe even Rhode Island) for its latest enormity. You won’t win any popularity contests (and you won’t be elected President). Perhaps Aunt Betty won’t even invite you over for apple pie.

But, hey, the benighted ones hated Jesus too, didn’t they?

The waters of America. Not so easy to swim in for some of us. Oh, and there’s a turning leaf. Almost time for that “controversy” over Halloween. And then a snowflake will bring us a whole new chapter of the War on Christmas . . . . Keep swimming!

Suicide Prevention Day.

Note: If you feel even vaguely suicidal right now, please don’t read this. Instead, please call and talk to someone who can help you! 1-800-273-8255.

When I was a sophomore in high school, undone by the relentless teasing of an older relative, unsure that I would ever leave the barren wasteland of my inner-city high school, I ingested a bottle of aspirin and prepared to die.

After swallowing about fifty pills, I remember going into the kitchen and asking my mother, cooking dinner, why life was worth living. She reminded me of a gospel singer who had recently visited my high school and inspired me, a physically challenged woman in chronic pain who none-the-less managed to infuse her life with joy and humor and great music. My mother’s words were something like, “If she wants to live, why wouldn’t you?”

I did not tell her about the bottle of aspirin. I went back upstairs, and soon my friend and high school debate partner, L, showed up. Earlier in the week, I had invited L to spend the night. I told her what I had done, and then absolutely forebade her to tell my mother. Ah, the cruelty of that act. These decades later, I apologize. L and I weren’t close friends, but I had been to her house enough to know that, like me, she had a father who sometimes erupted in fits of screaming rage at the dinner table. I suspected that he, like my own father, was also physically violent from time to time. So in a weird way, I felt ‘safe’ with her. We lived in the same family system.

And, true to the code of ethics of siblings in a dysfunctional household, L did not tell my mother that I had ingested the aspirin. As I recall, she spent a lot of the night huddled in terror in the bathroom whispering to another mutual friend wondering what to do. Me, I was floating off on a cloud. I went to sleep early, fully expecting to drift off and never come back. (How would that have been for L? I honestly never considered it.)

Well, as you might have figured out, that did not happen. I awoke about 2 AM and barfed my guts out. In the morning, I felt as if I had a bad hangover, but I was alive.

L and I walked to high school in the early hours of the cold winter Ohio morning for a debate tournament. My school never won a single match, but L and I kept trying. Walking to school, I realized I felt too lousy to debate. When we arrived, I told the debate coach I had a bad headache and needed to go home again. Her suggestion that I take some aspirin was met by a sharp bark of bitter laughter from L, with whom I never spoke again of this experience during the following weeks and months of debating together.

I remember, walking home alone, that on the sidewalk there were early winter frozen puddles that you could crack loudly with your boots; icy fault lines moving out from your boot’s heel to the edge of the sidewalk square. I remember thinking that I loved that sound. And the feeling of the ice, slowly giving way, cracking under my foot.

Looking back, I see the sheer luck that led to my staying alive. I did wake up and vomit out the poison—I might not have. My attempts to reach out for help were present, but limited. My mother, cooking dinner while I asked her seemingly random questions, did not know that I was asking her to tell me why it mattered if I lived. L, who did know that my life depended on her, did not speak up because we had both learned well that the cost of displeasing a parent was scarier than anything else—precisely why I picked her to confide my situation!

And so, on this Suicide Prevention Day, I sit with the realization that my distant memory might be haunting people still, with guilt and loss and a wish that they had known how desperate I felt to find peace. Just as I sit with my own guilt and grief about the two friends I have subsequently lost to suicide. I sit with the knowledge that the impulse towards suicide is a temporary one, but sometimes the results of that impulse are permanent. And, most of all, I sit with deep and abiding gratitude to be alive.

Today, and every day, may we listen with care when people approach us and show their tender parts. May we reach out to the ones who seem lost, smile and say hello. And may we never be too scared to tell someone that their staying alive to see another day matters to us more than anything else, that we simply want them to live. To take small comfort in joys as simple as the sound that ice makes when it cracks on the sidewalk.

As I write, the President and Congress are discussing how to respond to the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Not surprisingly, the blogosphere is full of strong opinions: that we must respond to the wanton abuse of citizens with chemical weapons, that bombing Syria would be a huge mistake, that force is the only solution, that force is never the solution, and on and on.

Here’s my best assessment: there is no good solution. I am certainly no expert on the political situation anywhere in the world, and certainly not Syria. But I get a sense of things from articles I read, and, frankly, the news is not good. As far as I can tell, no one in this fight is the hero, the virtuous protagonist who is bound to win in the end. We Americans love a narrative that echoes our national story of the little guy overcoming the superpower and establishing democracy to flourish for the ages. But whether or not that narrative is justified for the US, it certainly doesn’t look like it’s a tale that’s going to play out in Syria. People are being slaughtered. The suffering is immense. It’s hard to imagine that bombing anyone is going to help, but equally hard to just stand back and tell the world that there is now carte blanche to spray people with poison gas.

I would love to tell you what is right, what I think we should do, what we should all take to the streets and the airwaves and cyberspace to promote. Unfortunately, I have no idea. Here’s what I know. Life is full of untenable positions. As a minister you are called on to support people who have to decide whether to undertake medical procedures that will undermine the quality of their life even as they extend it. You counsel people who are trapped in unhappy marriages who know that leaving would be devastating for their children. You are there for people who are looking at providing years of round-the-clock care for a parent or spouse or child who is slowly failing, who want to give everything to their ailing loved one, but still yearn for a life of their own.

It feels a lot better when you can fix things, when righteousness prevails and happiness reigns. But that happens a lot less often than the stories and the movies would have us believe. All too often, there is no good answer, and whatever the conclusion, there is suffering as well as joy. What you learn as a minister is that while you may never have the stunning piece of wisdom that will set a suffering person on the way to happiness, you can listen. You can be prayerfully present, offering your witness to what they are going through. You can hope that in the conversation something will emerge that is clearer or more creative than what the person walked in the room with.

That’s all I’m able to advocate for at the moment – that there be as much listening as possible. As much prayerful presence as possible. As broad a conversation as possible. I hope that the conversation goes far beyond the president and congress, that it includes the UN, that Syria’s neighbors who are being flooded with refugees have a chance to speak. I hope that out of the listening there will arise some greater clarity, some greater creativity, than anything that we have yet seen.

I know that hope is not justified, that there is little that we have seen from anyone in the situation, including the US, that would lead one to expect something better than bombing. So, if nothing else, perhaps those of us who are without decision-making power, who have no control, can manage to be a model of that listening and that creative possibility. It’s not a solution, but it’s the best answer I know.

Today I am going to try and live into the simplicity and struggle of this covenant (co-created by junior high UU youth at camp this summer):

Respect, Kindness, Forgiveness, Focus.

Today I am going to aspire to be the human being I wish others would be to me and my neighbors.

Maybe tomorrow  too.  So much is possible.

And when (not if) I miss the mark, I will begin again in love.

For myself, for you, for all that is possible when we choose compassion over judgment, hope over harm…

Today.

photo by Jenna Starr

Amid the commotion of our family’s ordinary daily lives, I do pay some attention to the news. The violence in Egypt this week is particularly heartbreaking to observe. The rows of bodies — mostly young men — waiting and waiting in the Cairo heat for a proper burial…that image, along with the one of an elderly woman trying to stop a bulldozer from plowing over an injured young man…those images have lingered in my mind all day today. Meanwhile, there are a thousand tasks to attend to, toys and crumbs and, who-am-I-kidding, whole meals to pick up off the floor as we scurry about just trying to keep up with laundry and dishes and stay thirty seconds ahead of our energetic, feisty toddler.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to think carefully, at length and without interruption, about the whole big decision to bring a child into this broken world, but I do still think about it now-and-then. What is this place where there are simultaneously so many countless joys and delights and equally countless ways to be hurt and to hurt each other? Someday before too too long, she will start noticing things, she will start asking questions. There is so much pain in this world, so many ways that people are brutal to each other, often right in front of our eyes.

At one of our regular museum play areas this week, I spent some time observing the way the kids a few years older than our Little Bean interacted with her. I noticed that most of them, regardless of race or age, seemed threatened by her, this baby who they assumed was going to “knock down [their] tower,” “get in [my] way,” or “play with [my(!)] toy.” One little girl, probably 4 years old or so, kept moving to sit in the little chair that our Bean was clearly interested in sitting in, and then occupying it for as long as Bean was in the vicinity. I could only surmise that something about power was going on here. Here was a baby that either reminded some of these kids of a younger sibling who’d bothered them in the past, or who was clearly a less powerful being that they could exert their power over (or both). It was disconcerting to watch. Is this how we instinctively are with each other? I’ve noticed that older kids — 9, 10, 11 years old and older — seem to “get over” this competition-with-the-baby thing and are interested in playing with her at her level, so I’m relieved to see that. But I continue to mull on what it means to be a Little Person in this world, and what we are letting our children experience when we don’t pay attention.

There was a piece back in July on The Kojo Nnamdi Show that I happened to hear most of while I was in the car running errands, and it has stayed with me; it’s worth a reading of the transcript, particularly if you have more than one young child at home. One of the insights expressed on the show by Dr. Joseph Wright was that “There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that risk for depression, suicidal ideation are linked to the unattended impact of behavioral aggression in young children.” Watching the kids at the museum this week reminded me of this radio discussion so much I wanted to share it with some of the other parents who were there…but all the parents that afternoon looked so dazed and exhausted, spacing out on their smartphones while their kids romped and sometimes screamed at each other…well, it’s hard to exactly know when to make an issue of something. I am learning to observe, to gently explain to our Little Bean what I see going on if she seems confused, and otherwise, to let her play, while she enjoys just playing. She doesn’t seem to take it at all personally yet when a kid runs in the other direction rather than playing with her, or doesn’t play particularly nicely; she still has so, so much to learn and experience about how all people, of all ages, are. She gravitates towards the ones who smile at her, usually adults who look like her Grandma R. And for right now, that’s just fine. That’s all she needs to focus on for now — who is kind to her, who will help her get what she needs and wants, who will listen to her and help her as she struggles and strives to communicate. Some people do, and some people don’t. For now, I’m standing by, watching, learning from the kids a few years older about what our Bean will someday be experiencing and expressing herself, and pondering how to guide our beloved child into this world where so much more love, healing, attention and understanding are needed.