The Joy of Taxes
There it is. It’s done. Whether you’re getting a refund or had to write a check, or if you just made it in the nick of time to file for an extension, Tax Day has come and gone, so we can rejoice. Yes, I know, mostly rejoice that the 
hell of dealing with tax forms and receipts and inadequate record-keeping (it’s not just me, is it?) is over for another year. But maybe you can also spare a moment to celebrate the fact of taxes themselves.
Really? Yes, really. Taxes are the practical assertion of a central religious truth: we belong together, and there are things that we can do in service to one another that none of us can accomplish alone. We need one another. My religion asserts that none of us has the whole picture of the nature of God or the meaning of life, but that we come closer to the truth in conversation with each other. Although my religion is less explicit about it, I would claim that my religion also acknowledges that no one of us can build and maintain a system of roads, or serve as a police force, or fight fires or maintain the safety of the food supply or keep airplanes from running into one another or a vast array of other things. And so we band together, pooling our money to make happen collectively what we can’t do on our own.
Now, I have plenty of issues with the details of the system. I am no fan of the percentage of my tax dollars that go into the insatiable maw of the military, and it absolutely drives me around the bend that corporations that are pulling in billions of dollars are paying not one red cent into the common pool. Don’t get me started. These are flaws in the system, and I surely wish they would get fixed. But the system, the declaration that together we can “promote the general welfare,” is, I think, one of the great inventions of humankind.
You know how I know this? Yesterday I went to the library. I don’t go as often now that I usually get my library books in electronic form. But yesterday the book I wanted was available in print and not as an e-book, so I hied myself down to my local library, and felt once again the same thing that I always feel when I go to the library. Joy. Pride. Here is a beautiful building, filled with more than books. (Although, being filled with books would in and of itself warrant a verse of Dayenu, the Passover song that declares of each of God’s blessings, “it would have been enough.”) This building is filled with people. Toddlers with stacks of picture books, school kids on break, adults looking for jobs on computers, teens doing research projects, elderly people lingering over the periodicals. Some event for children is going on rather loudly in the community room while a respectful murmuring prevails in the stacks. There are people of all shades of human skin color, and complete strangers comment on each other’s book choices and share recommendations. It is, in short, heaven.
And I imagine walking into this building with a small child, and showing her the room of bright books, the tables and the pillows for reading, the librarian who is there to answer her questions or offer story time, and saying: “Here. This is for you. We built it together so that you and your friends and the people you don’t know could share in the amazing gift of human creativity. You can come here whenever you want and borrow whatever you want and bring it back because that is the joy of sharing. And maybe sometimes sharing seems hard, but I want you to see just how much fun we can have when everyone shares together.”
And then I want to bring in Cliven Bundy, the yahoo in Nevada who thinks it’s more patriotic to hold a stand-off with the Bureau of Land Management than to pay his grazing fees for using federal land. And I want to bring in the CEOs of Boeing and Verizon and General Electric and the other 23 major US corporations that pay nothing—zip—zero in taxes. And I want to bring in Paul Ryan with his “let’s give it to the rich” budget. And I want to say to them, and to everyone else who thinks that taxes are, by definition, bad: “This is what happens when we remember that we are a community. This is what patriotism looks like. Go then, and do likewise.”
What Do We Owe?
I was talking recently with a friend who is struggling with the question of how extensively to remodel the house that she and her husband just bought. Water damage means that they’re going to have quite a lot of repair work to do on the back wall, which brought up the question whether they should bite the bullet and move the wall back, making room for a larger kitchen. They have the money to make the larger improvement, although just barely. But my friend can’t quite wrap her head around spending that kind of money on expanding their house, when the world is full of so many much more desperate expenses. Can it be right to spend many thousands of dollars fixing up your house, when that money might be sufficient to build a school in India or Africa, when that money could make a house ravaged by Hurricane Sandy livable, when that money could get 100 women started in small businesses through an organization like Kiva?
How much do we owe ourselves and our families? How much do we owe our neighbors? How much do we owe our fellow human beings in distant places? How much do we owe pets, wild animals, the environment? Do we owe anything at all? Does anything at all rightfully belong to us?
If the answer to the question of what we owe is “nothing,” then taxes are an unfair imposition of the collective upon the individual. What is ours is ours. We worked for it (or inherited it) and we deserve to do with it as we please. If other people want things, they can go out and work and earn the money to pay for those things themselves. If the answer to what we owe is “everything,” then it’s time to join a commune, to live in a collectivist society in which everything is shared for the benefit of the common good.
Most of us, however, live in that ambiguous place in between. We want schools and police and roads and emergency relief funds, and we don’t mind doing our part to pay for them. Most of us don’t think that people who lose their jobs should go hungry, that children should lack health care, that people with disabilities should be just left to fend for themselves. We want clean air and water. We feel sad about children dying of hunger or disease, regardless of where they might live. We worry about the extinction of species and the effects of climate change. We want to be part of a compassionate human community, a respectful web of all life.
But we also want to be able to remodel the house or take a vacation or buy electronic gadgets. We want to enjoy the fruits of our labor—even the fruits of our unearned good fortune. So how much do we keep? How much do we give away?
Some decisions, of course, are made for us. The government expects us to pay our taxes, and we can end up in jail if we don’t pony up. On the other hand, we elect representatives to speak for us. Some of those representatives come down pretty hard on the “owe nothing” side, while others are quite willing to raise taxes if they think the circumstances warrant it. Our vote gives us some responsibility for how those decisions are made.
But beyond the vote, each of us has to decide that unanswerable question over and over. What is mine? What do I owe to some larger good? And if there’s a single right answer to those questions, I’ve certainly never heard it.
What I have to suggest is an experiment. Call it the joy test. If you have $50 to spare, make a deliberate choice on how to spend it: a shelter for the homeless, a pair of shoes, an arts organization, a nice dinner out, your retirement account. Commit the money, and then ask yourself how you feel about that choice. Does it bring you joy? Does it do something to ease a sense of anxiety or does your sense of discomfort grow? How does it feel a week, a month later?
I don’t know if the joy test is any kind of adequate answer as to what we owe to others and ourselves. But I have a sense that leading with our hearts, with our deepest joy, might be a step down the right path. Let me know what you find out.
Run for Your Life!
I have always been fairly athletic, and I enjoy playing a good game that gets my blood pumping. But I loathe exercise. I’ll run all day long if I’m on a court or a playing field, but ask me to run to get or stay in shape and I’ll kindly decline. I’ve tried several times in my life to become a runner, hoping to experience that “runner’s high” that I’ve heard so much about. In fact, when the running craze first hit the East Coast in the early ’70’s, I was among the first to buy a pair of bright blue Nike’s with the yellow swoosh on the side and take to the roads. I lasted about three weeks before pain and boredom overcame me. Two to three weeks seemed to be my limit every time I tried to get on the running bandwagon.
Then early this summer my daughter called and told me she had started the “Couch to 5k” program, and that I should try it too. I was skeptical, but she was persistent. “It’ll be fun,” she said. “Right,” I replied. “Like pulling fingernails is fun.” Eventually, she wore me down and I decided I’d give it a try. “C25k” (as we in the know call it) is an interval training program that starts off with lots of walking and a little running. By the end of nine weeks, you’re not walking at all, and you’re running the full 3+ miles.
I’m proud to say that I have stuck with the program and am now a “C25k” graduate, and that I’ve kept up my running since completing the program. My daughter and I have started looking for a 5K race we can enter together to celebrate our accomplishment.
But the truth is that I still find running really boring. I run a 3 mile loop around town that keeps me mostly on residential streets and a couple of busier roads. I was told that running on pavement is easier on your joints and muscles than running on the concrete sidewalks. So, when it’s not too narrow or busy, I opt to run in the road (always facing oncoming traffic as I was taught in grade school). I watch the oncoming cars carefully, to be sure that they see me and keep a safe distance. When a car gives me a wide berth, I usually give a little wave to acknowledge the driver’s awareness and kindness.
Lately, I’ve developed this little interchange between drivers and me into a kind of spiritual practice. For the past several runs, I’ve begun to say a small prayer or blessing for each passing motorist. As I wave, I say “May you know peace” or “Know that you’re loved.” I wish health, happiness, peace, love, passion, success, and joy to the occupants of the cars that pass me by. For those drivers who either aren’t watching or don’t care to give me some space, I pray for their attentiveness, their alertness, and their foresight as I hop up onto the curb.
In offering these small blessings to strangers who pass me by, I find that I, too, am blessed. As I pray for these things for others, I am reminded of the joy, peace, love, passion and successes I find in my own life. I experience the blessings of good health, of the air that I breathe in, of the incredible machine my body is. I notice the gifts of the sky, the trees, the wind and the sun.
May you know peace today. May you know that you are loved. May you feel joy. And may you find, in some small way, the opportunity to wish that for others as you go about your day.
Love,
Peter
Worship as Emotive Experience
This past Sunday, I became emotional in the pulpit… again. Ok, truth to be told,
I’m always emotional in the pulpit. It’s part of why I never schedule anything for Sunday afternoon, because preaching a good UU sermon will wipe me out, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. I usually maintain enough reserves to make it through the coffee hour, but afterwards I have to go home and sleep for a few hours before I will be able to be worth much at all… and then it’s usually best for me to sit in front of the television and watch a movie.
It’s also why I tell anyone who has anything to talk to me about after the service that they should email me about it. I will listen during coffee hour, I will nod my head and I will even respond somewhat intelligently… and the chances of my having anything I would call “good recall and follow through” are slim. I’m simply operating in what I call my “coffee hour fugue”, a kind of emotional afterglow from the experience of worship, of preaching.
One thing I have noticed is that it was less emotional, less exhausting, and less “coffee hour fugue” inducing when I was mostly travel preaching as when I am regularly presenting worship in a congregation I know, and that knows me. The five years I spent travel preaching, the emotional content I was aware of was mostly just my own. While that was draining, I usually maintained enough energy to make it through the coffee hour and the multiple-hour drive home.
Yet in serving churches in Evanston IL, Midland MI, and now Ventura CA… that is not true. In each case, I believe I am becoming “in-tune” enough with the congregation that I am feeling more of what they feel. When, from the pulpit, I see a congregant with tears in their eyes, I know them well enough to have a fuller appreciation for what all those tears might mean. When I see a congregant laugh, I know them well enough to know some of the parts of their lives that might make laughing difficult. When a congregant comes up to me passionate and energized after the sermon, I now know them well enough to sense where that passion may be coming from (‘cause it is never actually my “wonderful sermon”).
I have said before that I believe we human beings are far more emotional creatures than we are rational creatures. Our ancestors on the evolutionary chain felt emotions far, far longer than we have had anything remotely resembling conceptualized rational thought. Our emotions have had many times many the centuries of development and opportunities to embed themselves into our nature, character and psyche than our capability for rational, symbolic thought has had. I believe that the primary purpose of reason is not to suppress or replace emotions, but rather to allow us to make some order and meaning out of our emotional lives. This understanding of reason accepts that our emotional lives remain the primary influence over who and what we are, and that reason just operates upon that primary influence.
Yet human emotion is often perceived by that reason, and by the outward society that reason reflects, as dangerous. As such, our society has created ways in which emotions can be “safely released”… Think of a football game, where emotions such as aggression, excitement, and anger can be safely released in a controlled manner about a topic that does not truly threaten our survival. Horror movies do the same for fear. Roller coasters do the same for both fear and excitement. Daytime talk shows such as Jerry Springer provide a safe experience of and release of some of our more shadow-filled emotions… jealousy, greed, superiority, etc.
At its least, congregational worship fills a similar role. I know, a shocking thing for a minister to say, to compare what we do on Sunday morning to Jerry Springer. There are some key differences… the first, and most obvious is the emotions that are brought forward in the congregational worship experience. Now, different traditions and different denominations of religious faith work with different emotions on a regular basis. I know that I experienced worship during my childhood in a different faith tradition as a regular emotional flow between superiority and shame. Superiority over all of the “sinners” who would be sent to hell when the judgment day came… and shame over my inability to save them all, and for the ways in which I too was one of those sinners. I know that when I have attended the Pentecostal churches of my mother’s tradition, there was some of that… but there was also the ecstatic emotions of joy, excitement, and connection.
The second key difference between our experience of many other societally sanctioned expressions of human emotion and congregational worship is that, at least in my understanding of the Unitarian Universalist tradition, those emotional experiences are to be shared communally. Experiencing and expressing these emotions is not a solo act. Worship should be a time where we allow the barriers that society creates around our emotional experiences to come down, just a bit… so that we can see one another as emotional creatures. And in seeing that, learn to accept our own emotional selves as normal, and beautiful.
I remember a time after a particular service where I became emotional in the pulpit, and the congregation became emotional with me. After the service, a fairly new member who was a social worker came up to me, quite disturbed. She was concerned that such an expression of emotion in a public way was unhealthy, and that it might even be unethical. Remember, this was after a sermon, so I was in my “coffee hour” fugue… but I think I responded along the lines of that congregations had been experiencing emotions together for thousands of years, and we just needed to be careful of and supportive of one another as we learned to be our emotional selves with one another. Later, that interaction helped me to develop a lens of being more aware of the emotional space of the congregation during the sermon, and to realize that some of the most important pastoral care work a congregation does happens in the Sunday Morning worship service.
Yet, I dream of something more for our time of Worship together than just an expression, even a collective expression, of our emotional selves. I dream of something more than creating a space in the lives of our congregants where it is okay to cry if you are called to cry, or laugh if you are called to laugh. I dream of something more than creating a space in the lives of congregants where it is okay to laugh with someone else, or cry with them. I dream of a space in the lives of congregants and in the life of a congregation where we can come together and not only express our emotional selves, but use the gift of our rational faculty to explore what those emotions mean for our understanding of and connection with life, the universe, and everything.
I want worship that is not only inspirational, but gets at why and how we feel inspired. I want worship that is not only deepening, but gets at why and how we feel deepened. I want worship that is not only challenging, but gets at why and how we feel challenged. I want worship that not only brings us to tears, but gets at why and how we are brought to tears. Not alone… not in a way that diagnoses what is wrong with us or makes us feel inadequate… but in a way that is simply about our learning to trust and care for our emotional souls… together.
I can dream…
Yours in faith,
Rev. David