The government has come screeching to a halt because Speaker Boehner, under pressure from the Tea Party Republicans, will not allow the House to simply vote up or down on a continuing resolution to fund the government. (Since having an actual budget has bizarrely gone the way of the politically impossible.) Unless the Democrats agree to undo the Affordable Care Act, which has passed the House and Senate, and been affirmed as constitutional by the Supreme Court, not to mention the American people who re-elected Obama by a significant margin knowing that the ACA was an important part of his platform—unless they undo what has already been done and throw in a random selection of Stuff Republicans Want, then they will not vote to fund the government.
It boggles my mind, and only becomes explainable when you recognize that these folks are not only playing for political gain (Look! I’m important! I talked for the better part of a day about things like “Green Eggs and Ham”!), they are operating out of an ideology that declares that by definition, less government is better. If less government is better, then no government must be great. Especially since they get to keep their paychecks for no governing. At the center of their ideology is the conviction that each of us is in this life for ourselves, and that the best thing our neighbors can do is get out of our way.
Now, the temptation is always there to declare those with whom you disagree to be ideologues, while you, yourself, are free from prejudice. But the fact is that each of us is operating out of our own ideology. Just in case you were wondering, here’s a bit of mine:
OK, call me prejudiced, but I’m pretty well convinced that a government with a commitment to my own personal ideology would be off to a pretty good start. But I’d be more than happy to hear what kind of ideology you’d like as the basis for our government. Plenty of room in the comments section below.
There are gifts that
come of breathing,
that come of blood
driving through veins,
no charge. Just being.
One is the noise of existence.
Another is when the noise stops.
After the theater
of the self has closed;
after the season of the self
goes to reruns, music
begins, slow, silent.
Then, you hear . . .
it was the thought itself
that created the chains,
the blinders. When the
mis en scene is struck,
gifts come, without
breath, without blood.
So, evening fell on
you, didn’t it? And
what day. Did not
know what had
broken. You had
not expected it to
have gone so far,
the year. Did not
expect to have
rounded again from
light to dark on
this day. And it’s
surely some saint’s
day or other. Some
thing recurrent to
mark life’s measured
beat. To mark how
life, in some long
and startling
pattern, goes on.
Really, WTF? Has people shooting at strangers become a sort of national pastime? Are we supposed to get used to this? Worse yet, have we gotten used to it? Really, what am I supposed to say? Once again we are in that place of knowing that people have been killed and injured for no apparent reason.
This time it was in the Washington DC Navy Yard rather than a school or a movie theater or a foot race. Once again a shooter is dead. Once again we are scared, grieving, confused, angry. Once again we are looking for explanations, wanting to know who to blame, wanting to know why, wanting some reason to think that this won’t happen again. Once again the horror is real and deep, and the answers frail or non-existent. So what are we supposed to say to make sense of it, to fix it, to make meaning out of the horror?
Damned if I know. I could blame our national obsession with guns, and I do. But these shooters could very well be military personnel, and any conversation about getting guns out of the hands of the military seems like a non-starter. I could blame the glorification of violence in our society, and I do. But I could hardly claim that any given movie or video game or song lyric is to blame for any of these violent incidents, and I wouldn’t be willing to institute censorship even if I thought it might do some good. I am always perfectly open to blaming racism, poverty, social inequality and environmental degradation for a broad assortment of troubles, but I’d be hard put to bring any of them to bear in this particular instance.
And so, once again, we’re left with nothing to do but grieve. No less for the dead and injured in this tragedy than for the last one – or the one before that, or the one before that. I do not believe that we are supposed to simply accept such brutality as part of everyday life. We will lose some of our humanity if we become so habituated to the violence that we just shrug our shoulders and move on. But there is no one right way to grieve. All I can suggest is this:
Hug your child or your spouse or your friend or your cat or your dog or your pillow. Go for a walk. Breathe. Breathe again. Call someone who you would miss if you couldn’t talk with them again. Light a candle. Breathe. Breathe again. Practice non-violence. Walk away when you get mad. Breathe. Breathe again. Hold those who are wounded and dead in your heart. Open your heart to their families. Hold all the unknown others lost to violence in your heart. Open your heart to their families. Hold all the people who are grieving in your heart and know that you are not alone, that there are open hearts everywhere holding the grief and confusion and pain together. Breathe. Breathe again. Breathe again.
The British social anthropologist Mary Douglas had this to say about institutions:
Inside a religious body you get sects and hierarchies, inside an information network you get bazaars and cathedrals, it is the same, call them what you like. They survive by pointing the finger of blame at each other.
That about sums it up, doesn’t it?
Douglas is most famous for her theory of dirt: She claimed that human groups form solidarity by what we consider disgusting. For example, if your group considers eating sheep’s eyes disgusting, you’re unlikely to become very intimate with the group next door that considers sheep’s eyes a delicacy.
Douglas claims that human groups, or “institutions,” allow those inside the institution to point fingers at those outside the institution. As we stand inside and point fingers, we develop group cohesion: there’s an inside and an outside.
But, it doesn’t stop there.
Douglas thought that first we off-load responsibility for our actions onto an institution, then we begin to allow the institution to think for us. As a matter of fact, Douglas believed that our institutions operate exactly opposite from the way we generally think they do: we think institutions make small, rote decisions for us; but, actually, we allow institutions to do the big thinking for us, and we stick to the small stuff (–you know, such as consuming too many calories and avoiding exercise. Stuff like that.)
Because . . . it’s not easy bearing personal responsibility for the things that institutions such as government do. Yet, if we intend to lead an examined life, we must look in the mirror and ask ourselves what benefits we get from those things we off-load onto institutions.
Let’s think about government . . . oh, say, the United States government: bad immigration policy; institutionalized racism; millions of working poor; gun “freedom” that kills thousands per year, and poorly regulated industry, to name a few problems. Now, ask yourself, What benefits do I get by being in that group?
It’s disturbing.
It’s disturbing because Dr. Douglas is not saying, human beings form institutions and then wag their fingers at outsiders when they aren’t thinking about it or when we get lazy or when we fail to change wrongs. She isn’t saying those other people do that. She’s saying that’s what ALL institutions do. It’s disturbing because a basic fact of human nature is that we form groups, then we lose any ability to act morally concerning those things we have given away to an institution. Then we benefit from the immoral actions.
Now, you can say, “Oh, well, she’s just a crazy leftist feminist postmodernist, so, you know how THEY are!”
Or we can say, “hmm, that’s interesting! How can we use that human propensity both to better understand institutions that we don’t like, and those we do?
How can we use that idea to create institutions that encourage the sort of human action that we see as positive, rather than the sort that we see as negative?
I know you’re already way ahead of me on this . . . ideally, Unitarian Universalist congregations are places where people are not only encouraged, but required to question assumptions. Places where we encourage finger-pointing at systemic injustices, not at the people who may or may not be perpetrating the injustices, for whatever reasons . . .
If we look at Mary Douglas’s ideas from this perspective, they aren’t quite as crazy. Or quite as ivory tower!
Take, for example, immigration.
Consider for a moment that, as nations go, Mexico is not a a poor one. As nations go, the average Mexican is somewhere in the mid-range of income and social well-being for human beings on the planet. It isn’t that Mexico is poor, by international standards, but rather that the income disparity between Mexicans and North Americans is large–as a matter of fact, the disparity is the largest of any two bordering nations on earth.
That goes a long way toward explaining why people might consider crossing a border. To me, anyway, it’s hard to point my finger at a group of people trying to do that.
How have we–and let’s listen to Mary Douglas and include all of us–how have WE—the institution called the USA–responded to the immigration issue? Rather than facilitating the flow of people back and forth across the border, we have tried to stop the flow–we are still following that policy.
Now, I’m old enough to remember when the border was porous. People came here for summer work, then went back to Mexico–they went back home–for the winter. People can’t do that anymore. Because we have spent billions of dollars to stop them. They’re stuck here.
What would you do, if you found yourself stuck in a foreign country, no way out?
First you would go to the embassy, right?
Then you would start calling on your support network . . . family and friends.
Then you would get out your credit cards . . . see if throwing money around might help . . .
What if your loved ones were across the border?
How long would it take before you just took off walking . . . ?
I have a challenge for you: listen to Mary Douglas and get outside your comfort zone. Call yourself on one of your prejudices . . . . Call your own bluff on one of the “institutions” where you sit comfortably and point fingers from . . .
Maybe it’s the institution called race. Maybe it’s the institution called social class. Perhaps it’s the institution called education. Perhaps you wag your finger at close-minded people.
Whatever.
Try reminding yourself this week that, as psychologist Steven Pinker puts it,
“Our minds are organs (like the lungs), not pipelines to the truth.”
Our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth.
Try it. Actually realize that your brain is an evolved organ and has its limitations. And your brain is NOT an institution.
This week, call yourself on one of your prejudices. Call yourself on one of the things you get away with because of an institution you belong to. Step outside your comfort zone. Actually listen to someone who your prejudice tells you can’t have ANYTHING valuable to say.
Instead of pointing a finger and even wagging it a little, sit back and listen.
Try it.
It was a few days after the 9/11 tragedy. We had done our best to shelter our not-quite-three-year-old daughter from the constant onslaught of images on the news, but there was no way to censor things entirely, particularly our conversations as the tragedy unfolded. How could this happen? Who would do such a thing? How were we to go on?
So it wasn’t too surprising when, as we got to the end of bath time that evening, she said: “Tell me about the splat in the sky.” Explaining horror to a very small child is not the easiest thing in the world, but I did my best. I explained that there were some people who lived far away who got very, very angry at our country. And because they were so angry they decided that they wanted to hurt as many people as they could, and so they flew some airplanes into buildings. And so many, many people were hurt, and we were very sad. She thought for a moment, squared her shoulders, and looked at me from there in the tub. “They should have made a better choice.”
They should have made a better choice. It’s OK to get mad, but it’s not OK to hurt people. Use your words. Look for a solution. Take a breath. Take another breath. So many of life’s tragedies could be avoided if we would all just adhere to the wisdom that we teach our toddlers.
The men who downed the planes should have made a better choice. Also the Bush administration should have made a better choice than to go to war with Iraq. And now, now there is Syria. And surely Assad (and/or his generals) should have made a better choice than to use chemical weapons. But could it be that we are, in fact, on the verge of making a better choice ourselves? Could it be that the governments of the world will manage to walk the fine line between allowing the unacceptable and committing the indefensible?
Probably it is too soon to get attached to hope. But there it is. In this particular moment, Wednesday, 9/11/2013, it seems like President Obama, Congress and various heads of state have acknowledged that there might be a better choice. That there could be solutions that don’t involve blowing things up. That it’s OK to be mad, but that doesn’t mean we need to hurt people. That we could pause, and take a breath, and work toward a solution that is better than what happens when you rely on hurting people to tell the world how you feel.
What will happen remains to be seen, but today I am praying for a better choice.
The spiritual practice of atonement, asking and offering forgiveness, is a practice that actively builds and sustains a robust and healthy beloved community.
When we are willing to take the risk of showing up to each other in all of our gloriously imperfect humanity and begin again and again in love – we are being faithful.
When we are willing to go deeper with our friends and family and neighbors, willing to understand their fears and difficulties – to do more than work with them side by side for years without knowing what causes them pain or brings them joy– we are being faithful.
In Jewish tradition, the Book of Life is sealed on Yom Kippur, not to be reopened for another year at Rosh Hashanah. For Unitarian Universalists, the book is never sealed. Each day is an opportunity to begin again in love, repenting and offering forgiveness as often as is required for the health and well-being of this beloved community.
What harm have you caused in the past year that requires repentance? What do you need to forgive yourself for? Who needs your forgiveness?
There’s really no need to refer to specifics. When you’ve been a citizen of the United States as long as I have, you’ve heard it all before: national security; stopping this or that madman; ending drugs or terror or Communism; honor. Whatever. The point is always the same: now, in this situation, violence will actually work to fix the problem. Unlike all those other times! And the United States, like an abusive spouse, swears this time is not like all those other times.
But it is.
A few years back I worked with a group of committed Unitarian Universalists on what we call a “statement of conscience” concerning war. Oh, the squeals. The Unitarian Universalist movement is not, after all, a “peace church” like the Quakers or Mennonites. As a matter of fact, Unitarians and Universalist have been complicit with, if not instigators of, most of the violence in the US since that civil war referred to nowadays as “the Revolution.”
And so the well-meaning and committed group attempting a statement of conscience concerning the violence of nation-states sank into the weeds of “Just War Theory” and other bromides.
Pacifism has never done well among Unitarians or Universalists. The list of pacifist ministers is short, though the prominent Universalist Clarence Skinner and the prominent Unitarian John Haynes Holmes are on it. (The pacifism of Holmes led Theodor Geisel, pen name Dr. Seuss, to write, “If we want to win, we’ve got to kill Japs, whether it depresses John Haynes Holmes or not.”) Another name on the list is John H. Dietrich, a predecessor of mine at the congregation I now serve. It’s a short list, but I’m proud to be on it.
No, the present situation is not like the First or Second World Wars. Fortunately. And, yes, there were some good excuses for killing people, at least in the Second one. Still, the human propensity toward violence and its manifestation in the violence of nation-states is odd, to say the least. It doesn’t serve much of a purpose, either, does it? The human propensity toward violence does appear to be innate, though the fact that murder rates vary from one murder per hundred thousand people in many European nations to twenty murders per hundred thousand in the US argues that violence has a large cultural component. The US is a violent culture, and that violence spills out across the globe.
Will it ever end? Probably not. In the present kerfuffle, pacifists like me will have to bow our heads once again and wait for the inevitable results. But we aren’t required to like it. And we can keep calling it what it is–silly, silly, silly.
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.
You danced once, there, in those rocks.
It meant something. It all did—you,
your love, the beautiful stones. You
danced there, happy. It meant something.
Those things, they were as real as
the cotton in the threads of your scarf.
You danced there again, there, in those
rocks. Many things meant something—
your love was there. You danced, looking
to the horizon for meaning.
Those things, they were as real as
the thread in what you had lived for.
Still you dance, in those rocks,
there, wet in the rising tide. Your
love. Your happiness. The stones
cry out. Yet where is the strength
to turn? Even a bow is too much.
Those things. They were as real as,
as real as . . . Those things were real.
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