Waiting for Snow in Carlisle
Today, I carpooled to a daylong meeting with several colleagues. As we rode back toward home, we heard weather forecasts calling for several inches of snow tonight and into the morning. Now, you should know that unlike much of the rest of the country, we have had little to no snow in Central and Eastern Pennsylvania this year. My colleagues and I were all wishing for a blizzard or at least enough snow to have a snow day. Yearning for a snow day . . . a quiet day . . . a chance to slow down. . . and spend a little more time with my husband. I am just like a kid wanting a day off from school.
As she got out of the car, my friend said she would pray for snow and we wished each other a happy blizzard. I appreciate the beauty of snow when I am safe and warm inside, and I love the quiet hush that seems to fall with the snow. I even imagine playing in the snow. Yet I wonder why my colleagues and I want a snow day in order to slow down, to care for ourselves, or to take time with family. Our highly connected world has many of us working wherever we are and at all hours of the day and night. Many of us spend too many hours living like this quote from Marie Curie, “One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.” Our souls and spirits need time. We need to slow down and spend time not thinking about to do lists. We need to take time to celebrate what we have done, to notice where we are and reflect on where we have been. We need to time to play. Some folks wait until they get sick to slow down and take time for themselves.
So snow or no snow, apparently my colleagues and I need to slow down. I wouldn’t be surprised if you, too, need some slow time, some play time or reflection time. Do we need excuses or external events to care for ourselves – body, soul and spirit? If there is no snow, maybe we need to name some days “no snow” days.
May you give yourself the blessing of the time and space that you need to flourish.
Being and Doing, Work and Spiritual Practice
Last week I attended an interesting conference called Wisdom 2.0, about the convergence of technology and spirituality. To say it was interesting is an understatement: For this Midwesterner, listening to folks from the tech industry was fascinating, and the collection of spiritual teachers and industry leaders was artful. (You can watch what happened at Wisdom2summit.com.)
We heard from the folks who started up or lead massively successful technological companies—Google, Twitter, some new ones I hadn’t heard of—talk about how spirituality, and particularly mindfulness meditation, yoga, and service projects are part of their corporate environments. I was inspired.
I was also a little disoriented, and a little uneasy. With all of the talk of spiritual path, of wisdom, there was no talk at all about spiritual community. While we understood that some of the spiritual speakers came out of, and indeed dedicated their lives to, sustaining spiritual community, the talks seemed to suggest that wisdom was something attained by individuals who were devoted to meditation. The only spiritual community lifted up, in fact, was the workplace. Apparently on the job meditation and yoga cuts down on absenteeism and lifts productivity, while also providing health benefits for practitioners.
Pardon me if I don’t think workplaces really qualify as spiritual community. I say this as someone whose own workplace is a church, where I am a minister. Even this church does not qualify as spiritual community for me or the rest of the staff, though our work is spiritual in nature, and involves creating spiritual community for others. Every minister and religious professional knows that we must, ultimately, find somewhere else to ground ourselves and be able to embody the full mess we are, rather than believing our church is there to fulfill our needs. I’m not saying that being with the people in my church is not joyful, rewarding, deeply nurturing. But it’s not where I show up with all of my own stuff to work out. To believe otherwise is a recipe for misery for all of us.
And it’s not that spiritual communities don’t also need to raise money, either. We may be non-profits but we do need to be sustainable. So it’s not as if the concept of bringing in money is dirty or evil or wrong. I’m just a zealot for clear missions, and I think that the mission of for-profit companies is to succeed financially and the mission of congregations is to minister to a broken world. When congregations become centrally focused on raising money, they are not true to mission. And when corporations become centrally focused on the spiritual practice of their employees—well, I don’t think they ever really will.
When I realized that the workplace was being touted as the place to meditate and do spiritual practice, and when I kept hearing business leaders exclaim how this time was good for profits and the bottom line, part of me was afraid. As I write this blog, I’m waiting for some help from an airline which has let me down yet again with bad service. This airline used to be a different company—one dedicated to amazing customer service and care. After a hostile takeover, those same employees who used to do contortions to please the customers must look us in the eye and say there’s nothing they can do to help us. With or without hostile takeovers, I fear this could happen to any company as management discovers anew what actually helps the bottom line, and decides that it’s not spiritual practice after all. Far better to be part of a community which doesn’t care if you are a vice president or a mailroom clerk; they know you only as someone with a compelling spiritual practice. Far better, I believe, to belong to a spiritual community with the sole mission of being a spiritual community.
I loved the conference and learned a great deal. And I suspect I’ll go back next year. Next year, though, I’ll be more intentional and proactive about sorting through the folks present to find others who, like me, are interested in developing spiritual community with the bottom line of spiritual awakening, service, and joy.
High Resolve
“Keep fresh before me the moments of my High Resolve, that in fair weather or in foul, in good times or in tempests, in the days when the darkness and the foe are nameless or familiar, I may not forget that to which my life is committed.” ~ Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman
Carnival has passed. Mardi Gras is over for another year. We are now well into Lent. In the coastal south, even faith communities that do not celebrate Lent, the time of reflection and repentance before the celebration of sacrifice and resurrection, become attuned to the lenten rituals their Christian neighbors.
In her article Lenten Disciplines, Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger wrote:
While Lent does not have the same meaning in a Unitarian Universalist setting that it does in an orthodox Christian context, it is not meaningless. Each and everyone of us is called (by God, the Spirit, our Higher Power, our Better Nature) to be our very best self, a self we often fall short of, sometimes even intentionally. “Giving up something for Lent” does not have to mean that we sacrifice something we love and enjoy (like chocolate, for example) but can be a healthy spiritual discipline leading to our betterment, to our reaching closer to that wholeness we all seek.
Whether or not you religiously observe the season of Lent, as Unitarian Universalists we are always called to a healthy spiritual discipline that heals the brokenness of our lives and our world.
In this time of contemplation, we are invited to re-center ourselves and our spiritual communities. We are invited to ask:
What’s in our heart?
What’s our vision, our passion?
What brings us joy?
Where are our strongest relationships?
What promises do we keep?
How are we called to nurture and heal our world?
“In the days when the darkness and the foe are nameless or familiar,” may we be mindful of our moments of High Resolve that we may not forget that to which our lives are committed.
Blessed be, beloveds.
When there is too much to do…
Some things go undone…
See y’all next week!
Collective Joy!
It is Carnival time in New Orleans!
From now until Ash Wednesday, there will be beaucoup parades, parties, and costumes…While February 12th will be “just another Tuesday” in much of the country, here it will be Mardi Gras – the final day of communal revelry before the ascetic season of Lent begins. It wasn’t until I moved to New Orleans that I actually understood the season of Lent. While it may be perfectly obvious for some, it took the context of Carnival, culminating in Mardi Gras, for me to truly appreciate the gift of Lent. A season of contemplation and prayer after a season of glorious communal excess now makes perfect sense.
But first – the glorious communal revelry, the collective joy…
While Lent encourages us to turn inward for reflection, sometimes taking our humanity to task, Carnival gives us the resources to accept and even celebrate our humanity- mine, yours, that stranger’s. Carnival reminds us, in the wisdom of ecotheologian Thomas Berry, that “the universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not of objects to be exploited.”
In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich proclaims:
“While hierarchy is about exclusion, festivity generates inclusiveness. The music
invites everyone to the dance; shared food briefly undermines the privilege of
class. As for masks: They may serve symbolic, ritual functions, but to the extent
that they conceal identity, they also dissolve the difference between stranger and
neighbor, making the neighbor temporarily strange and the stranger no more
foreign than anyone else. No source of human difference or identity is immune to
the carnival challenge… At the height of the festivity, we step out of our assigned
roles and statuses—of gender, ethnicity, tribe, and rank—and into a brief utopia
defined by egalitarianism, creativity, and mutual love.”
Collective joy tells us that we are enough – that we are all enough, that we belong to the wonder of creation. As Rev. Sam Trumbore once prayed:
Ash Wednesday will arrive soon enough…
Now, we feast on the abundance of life
The delight of hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting and touching
In a celebration that unites
the diversity of all races, classes and faiths
at the common table of fellowship…
May it be so.
Happy Mardi Gras, beloveds!
Joyful Epiphany
Sunday, January 6th, marks the celebration of Epiphany – a.k.a. Twelfth Night, Three Kings Day, la Fiesta de Reyes. Epiphany honors many sacred events within Christian traditions – the day the child Jesus was visited by the Magi, the baptism of Jesus, his first miracle of turning water into wine at a wedding .
In New Orleans, however, January 6th is most widely celebrated as the night we transition into a new season – from Holiday to Carnival. [Note: We have four fairly distinct seasons in New Orleans: Holiday, Carnival, Festival, and Hurricane.]
The seasonal changes brought by Epiphany are quite visible. Red, green, and blue lights are exchanged for purple, green, and gold lights. Doors and windows bedecked with Christmas wreaths and menorahs transform into doors decorated with Carnival wreaths, masks, and Mardi Gras beads. And the music changes too – carols are gone, replaced by Mardi Gras tunes.
Epiphany is the first day of King Cake season. It is the night of Phunny Phorty Phellows, hopping onto the St. Charles Avenue streetcars, heralding the start of Carnival. It is the birthday of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, and a carnival krewe marches in her honor from the Bienville statue (representing the founding of New Orleans) to the Joan of Arc statue at Decatur and St. Phillip Street.
Epiphany is the night we welcome collective joy, in the form of Carnival, back onto center stage in our lives.
Carnival offers us an opportunity to take a break from taking ourselves so seriously, from our expectations about how the world should be, and gives us a chance to engage in the healing joy of communal celebration. The work of transforming ourselves and the world is on-going. And it is through seasonally and repeatedly choosing joy that we can find the energy we need to continually commit to this work.
“I think that the energy to do all those things [to help make the world a better place] comes from choosing joy,” writes the Church of the Larger Fellowship’s Lynn Ungar. “You can inspire people to a certain degree by sheer terror…However, if we’re going to keep those changes going, if we’re going to find new and creative ways to build better lives, then I think we’re going to have to draw on some deep wells of joy.”
Epiphany opens the lid on a deep well of joy for me and my city.
What is your source of joy?
Where do you find your energy to make the world a better place?