There Is No Failure But Not To Try
We do not have to wait until we are perfect to practice our faith.
While the perfection of Jesus is lifted up in many congregations on this holy weekend, it is humanity that has always drawn Unitarian Universalists towards his prophetic message of love and justice. Our faith tells us that it is not perfection that is the goal – but transformation.
Within our own religious heritage, we often find flaws in the prophetic men and women who worked to bring visions of respect and mercy for all into this world. Alice Walker, writer and international activist, skillfully names this humbling truth:
“People who go about seeking to change the world, to diminish suffering, to demonstrate any kind of enlightenment, are often as flawed as anybody else. Sometimes more so. But it is the awareness of having faults, I think, and the knowledge that this links us to everyone on Earth, that opens up courage and compassion.”
Ms. A—, a wise soul who once managed the cafeteria of a New Orleans public school, sealed this lesson into my heart. Her “food counts” were always high by accounting standards and, no doubt, the administrative office was concerned that she was skimming off the top. The accounting couldn’t show the extra helpings she slipped onto lunch trays of ravenous teenagers with bottomless pits for bellies and this their only hot meal of the day. She was forever tucking fruit and snacks into the backpacks of children going home to empty pantries. Many afternoons she would pull out food for the young ones – hungry and tired- who were stuck at school after a long day, waiting for their guardians to get off from work and come get them.
The administrative faults of Ms. A— were, in fact, often the tools by which she, with courage and compassion, worked to diminish suffering on a daily basis. She was not perfect. She was practicing her faith.
“Deanna,” she would tell me “there is no failure but not to try.”
May we who dream of justice and mercy, of diminishing suffering, be not afraid to practice our faith today and every day. May we seek not perfection, but wholeness and healing for all of creation. There is no failure but not to try.
Yes, Sweetie, Your Mama’s An Atheist…Minister. It Happens. Now, About This Sunday…
Last September, we moved to the “Little Rome” section of Northeast Washington, D.C. I expected it to feel a little more “holy” this Holy Week (perhaps “holier-than-me”?) but it’s actually felt pretty ordinary, quiet, and not very springy yet. Here and there I see some crocuses insisting on coming up through fall’s accumulated leaves, and in well-sun-warmed yards there are daffodils. For me this is what the adult version of the Easter Egg Hunt has become—the search in my northern hemisphere surroundings for evidence of the certainty of eventual spring. Yes, the wind is blustery and I’m still wearing my winter coat when I go out, but spring is on its way.
In contrast, God is something I’ve never been certain about. For all of my life I’ve identified as Unitarian Universalist, which meant to me as a young person that I was encouraged and open to appreciating and respecting many different experiences and interpretations of God. From my mid-20’s on, when I really grappled with the meaning of the word, I identified as agnostic, as not-knowing. But when “rubber met the road” (by which I mean, preaching, Sunday-after-Sunday) during my six years of solo parish ministry in Central Oregon, I quickly came to wrestle directly with and articulate my own atheism. It was important for me as a minister to feel rooted in and clear about what my beliefs were. My best sermons were the ones when I was able to begin with laughter, then plunge down into the depths of something true and real and hard, and rise up again to connect with others, with community, with the love that I believe keeps us human and mostly humane.
There are a gazillion great posts out there worth reading this week and weekend—reflections on Passover, on Good Friday, on Resurrection, on the growing number of “Nones”—people who choose not to affiliate with any religious institution. When I have a chance these days to read something other than Sandra Boynton with actual undivided attention, I’m enjoying reading Chris Stedman’s book Faitheist. I also commend to you this excellent reprise of Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock’s book Saving Paradise. I hope you take some time to read widely and thoughtfully this weekend, and to be conscious of what traditions you might be choosing to engage in, and why.
For us, in our home, my partner, colleague and co-Mama is heading to New Orleans tomorrow to co-lead a week-long service trip engaged in continued rebuilding-from-Hurricane Katrina efforts there. Easter Sunday church services will be crowded and are right in the middle of morning nap-time right now, so we will probably stay mellow at home, maybe make pancakes, and tune into the Church of the Larger Fellowship services online. Because it’s one of my favorite Easter traditions and Mama C will be gone on Sunday, we had our First-Ever Family Easter Egg Hunt this morning. Our Little Bean reached for each plastic egg and brought it immediately to her mouth of course, simultaneously squeezing it with all her might, causing the shiny purple chocolate kisses to tumble out onto the floor and into my hands, happy to receive them. Spring is sprung. Let’s go outside and run around on the resilient, determined grass. That’s a ritual I can revel in.
Ordinary Time
Though March is not the season of Ordinary Time according to the Roman Catholic calendar, we are embracing Ordinary Time in this one Unitarian Universalist household, right now. (One of many aspects of Unitarian Universalist “culture” that I enjoy is that it often seems as though “rules were made to…be discussed.”) It was been a long, full, amazing, intense year of celebrations and events in our lives, this past year. In this strange but it-worked-for-us order, we went on our honeymoon (February 2012), got married (May), wrapped up 2 amazing jobs (July), had a baby (August), moved across the country (September), started a new job (August/September), unpacked, celebrated winter holidays, unpacked some more (ongoing), discovered we’d moved to Washington, D.C. (I’m seriously just noticing this lately, but let’s say February 2013) and my partner Cathy got ordained (March). Whew. We are thrilled to now be entering what we like to call “The Year of Uneventfulness.”
I also like to think of these days we’re settling into as “Ordinary Time,” and I love the term. I’ve been mulling it over for the past week. A friend asked me the other day about Life With Baby, she asked “Does it feel like it’s flying by?” My first response was still to recall the first four months, during which I sometimes had days that felt interminable–far from “flying by.” I remember clearly the days when Robin would only fall asleep during the daytime in my lap, and so I’d just sit in the blue cushioned rocker by the window for hours. And hours. I tried not to count the hours because I do believe that “a watched pot never boils” and counting the hours until Cathy would get home from work only made the day seem longer. Anyway those days did not fly by.
But now that Robin is seven-and-a-half months? Yes, it’s starting to fly by. And I appreciate the question, because it made me realize that yes, I’d be quite happy to “freeze-frame” for a while what our lives are like, right now. It feels, dare I say, like we sort of know what we’re doing, the three of us, like we all recognize each other and sort of know how to handle each other. Robin is consistently sitting happily (and stably) by herself and now regularly enjoys playing by herself with something simple like a string or a single toy–sometimes for as long as 15 or 20 minutes, studying it, mouthing it, passing it from hand-to-hand, and so on. I call that “working on her project.” Who knows what she’s already picked up from her Mamas–we like to work on our projects.
And we certainly have no shortage of projects (does anyone, these days?). But there is something so absolutely calming about realizing that these are all just the ordinary projects of life. We have lots to do–laundry, dishes, cleaning up, cooking, prep work for upcoming events and trips, appointments and errands, forms and bills, taxes and still more unpacking and sorting. But finally it is Ordinary Time. These are the tasks of living. We are so lucky to have all that we have, the components of our lives that we could so easily take for granted–each other, our lively kid, two cantankerous cats, an apartment we like in a neighborhood we love, our health, meaningful work, supportive families, our eclectic and ever-growing communities of friends. Ordinary Time means appreciating What Is, appreciating all this ordinary extraordinaryness.
The Spring Equinox has just passed; Passover and Easter are coming up. Taxes are due soon. Cherry Blossom Season is kicking off in Washington. These are all significant dates on the calendar–your own calendar may have lots of other important dates on it. And, at the same time, what I wish for all of us are more uneventful, ordinary days. Days that end with a deep breath of gratitude. Days that end with a sense of simple satisfaction. Life is an ongoing list of things to do, for sure, but as the saying goes, “Life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans.” May we all savor the life that happens on our ordinary days.
A Balancing Act
Happy Spring Equinox! (Unless you happen to live in the Southern Hemisphere, in which case I’d like to wish you a delightful Fall Equinox.) The equinox, of course, is the moment of the year when the light and the dark are in perfect balance, with equal parts day and night. Legend has it that on the moment of the spring equinox it is possible to balance an egg on its end. Science would point out that there’s no reason to believe the truth of this legend—it’s not as if gravity is somehow arranged differently on the equinox, but still…the equinox is a time for relating to the whole idea of balance.
Which, Lord knows, we could all use. Most of us are struggling to find the balance between our work life and our home life, the balance between our children’s needs and our own, the balance between activism and acceptance, between being here now and working for a better tomorrow. And those struggles are never going to go away. The only way to find balance is through a constant series of adjustments, tipping the egg ever so slightly this way and that in the vain hope of finding the balance point where everything is right.
It’s never easy, and sometimes it’s heartbreaking. I am thinking of my friend Lisa, who is struggling with finding the balance of when or whether to have her dog put down. Euthanizing a pet is almost always a heart-wrenching decision, and in this case the dog is young, sweet, and seemingly healthy. But the medications which have controlled the dog’s seizures for some time have stopped working, and so at any moment this lovely animal can go from running or playing or snuggling on the couch to cluster seizures that leave her traumatized and cause progressive brain damage. My friend has been diligent in trying to find a solution, and two different vets have agreed that there is none, that the seizures will return, and that they will be fatal, although not for some time down the road. And so Lisa is trying to balance her love for the dog against the burden of 24/7 care for an animal who may be stricken at any time. She is trying to balance the enjoyment the dog gets from every walk, every ride in the car, every scratch behind the ear against the fear and confusion and suffering of seizures that can come at any time. And there isn’t a perfect balance point. There isn’t any way of knowing what exactly is the right thing to do, when exactly is the right time to let go.
Any more than there is a way to know when or whether it is the right time to leave the father of your children, or when or whether it is the right time to tell your young adult child that they have to leave your home, or when or whether to put your frail and fading mother in a nursing home. There is no way to know the right answer, but there is also no way to avoid the decision, since inaction is as much of a choice as action. Doing the right thing, the perfect thing, is as much of a fantasy as balancing an egg.
Which, it turns out, you can do. Any day, not just on the equinox. It takes some patience, and a delicate touch, but it can be done. You start with the determination to balance what seems impossible to balance, and you find a steady base for your balancing act: I don’t want my pet to suffer. My child needs to learn independence. My mother needs care that I can’t give her. And then you lean the egg just the tiniest bit left and right, searching for a sweet spot that will hold: I can give my dog one more perfect day. I can pay for my adult child’s health insurance, and a security deposit on an apartment. I can make sure that mom’s favorite pictures go with her to the home, which will be close enough for me to visit regularly. Never the perfect answer, or at least never an answer that comes with the guarantee that nothing more or better could be done. But an answer, a choice, a balancing place.
The equinox doesn’t offer us the perfect resting spot where we can be assured that all is right. It offers us spring and growth and change. It reminds us that the perfect resolution for an egg is not to balance on its end, but rather to crack open entirely, so that the chick inside can emerge.
What’s (Not) To Worry About?
Well, it’s not the end of the world, by a long stretch. In fact, it’s what I’ve heard is called in the Alcoholics Anonymous community “a bourgeois problem,” or “a luxury problem.” I shall write it down as such in Robin’s Baby Book–another “first.” “First class in D.C. that was filled before we went to sign up.” Parent & Child Learn-To-Swim. It was our (her Mamas’) fault; we thought the staff at the Aquatic Center said that registration was on March 14th, when in fact registration started on March 4th, so the fact that I had diligently marked it on the family calendar and trudged over to the Aquatic Center’s front desk at 7am this morning made no difference: the popular class’s 10 spots were filled, over a week ago now. Luckily, this is one of those things I am able to put in perspective. Oh, well. There will be plenty of other swim classes in Robin’s future. She is so into kicking right now it’s just a matter of figuring out other ways and times to get her into the pool, into the jumper, into the exersaucer. Any day now she’ll crawl. Which gives me some other things to worry about.
As a new, overly-educated parent in the U.S. in the 21st century, there’s indeed a long list of things I worry about. And I genuinely struggle to sort out which ones are worthy of my worry, and which ones to ignore. Getting her into a baby swim class? Not a big deal. But the often-mentioned but poorly documented toxicity of many baby toys troubles me. The high rate of asthma in D.C. combined with the obvious air pollution and rushing streams of exhaust-producing cars concerns me. The increasingly-watered-down regulation of produce, what actually qualifies as “certified organic,” and research I don’t have time to read about genetically-modified-food disturbs me. And lead poisoning completely freaks me out. I’ve read this New York Review of Books article twice and until I get someone to actually screen our apartment for lead contamination, I worry. Don’t you? Did you read this part: “Minuscule amounts of lead can poison a child. The signs of severe lead poisoning—convulsions, pain, coma, etc.—are typically seen when the concentration of blood lead exceeds sixty micrograms per deciliter (a tenth of a liter) of blood. This corresponds to the ingestion of a total amount of lead weighing about the same as six grains of table salt.” Six grains of table salt! A visitor’s shoes could track in that much lead from our D.C. streets in a single afternoon. Of course I worry.
And that’s just it: the list of things I could worry about is endless. A column about parenting that a friend recently shared described part of our role as parents as “constant vigilance.” I’m not excited by this job description; I was already prone to pondering worse-case scenarios, before having a kid. The bumper sticker “If You’re Not Outraged, You’re Not Paying Attention” has resonated with me for decades–but, given that I’m quite attentive-by-nature, how do I not spend all my time being outraged? Constant outrage is not the kind of orientation-to-the-world I want to model for our child. So now I can add to the list “worrying about worrying too much.”
Today our marvelous, wonderfully-mellow babysitter spent 15 minutes doing some initial baby-proofing of our apartment while I nursed The Kid to sleep. There are whole chapters of books I have glanced at but haven’t read carefully about the hazards of the home. What is it, exactly, that our baby can do with an exposed electrical outlet or extension cord, like just the kind we’ve had sitting around on the floor right by her play area for months, until today when I finally rolled it up and put it in the closet? What could she do–put her tongue into it? Her fingers? Do I really want to know? These days I’m well aware I don’t get out of my own head often enough to maintain a healthy perspective. Too often I go to bed stewing on something I read in the paper, noticed online, or overheard on the radio. How do you find that balance between worrying (as in: fretting alone) and acting (as in: accepting what is real and doing something about it?) How do we all find some equilibrium between what I call the disease of “agit-itus” and a more grounded, calmer caring that is conscientious but not frantic?
At some point every day or evening, I sing Robin one of my favorite Unitarian Universalist hymns, the very first one in our shared hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition: “May nothing evil cross this door.” I’m aware of its naive simplicity, though. These days, we know that evil is systemic and insidious. It creeps into our lives through prejudice and ignorance, through exactly the kinds of initially well-intentioned efforts that resulted in the lead studies documented above. What we don’t know can hurt us. What we don’t take the time and effort to think about carefully can harm whole communities, whole generations of people.
Several years ago now, my black Womenspirit clerical robe went missing from the rented sanctuary of the church I was serving (relatively minor worry #127: yes, this can happen. Do people steal robes & stoles? It never turned up.). It was just weeks before Easter Sunday. Chaplain and UU colleague Rev. Karen Taliesin sent me her robe on loan, in a box with a few of the beautiful prayer/mantra/poem cards she creates to give out to the families and staff she serves at Seattle’s Children’s Hospital. One of the cards features a short prayer by Reiki founder Mikao Usui, and it surfaced in my life this week. I’ve had it sitting on our home altar. This first line is: “Just for today, do not worry.”
I’ve known some people who “give up worrying for Lent.” As they say in AA, I’ll start with “just for an hour.” Heck, I’ll start with just a paragraph, just a breath! One full and complete breath without worrying. I aspire to a full night’s sleep without the adjectives “interrupted” or “fitful” anywhere nearby. Months ago now, my partner Cathy gave me a little brown notebook that, starting tonight, I’m keeping in the bathroom cabinet. Each night after I floss and brush my teeth (worry #235 about what’s in toothpaste and the epidemic of childhood tooth decay) I’m going to jot in that notebook what worries are rising to the surface of my thoughts, percolating and steaming there like over-brewed coffee. I strive to leave those worries there, at least for the night, scribbled down in the notebook, shut in the cabinet. I’m going to turn off the bathroom light and go to sleep. And we’ll see what the new day holds. We’ll see.
…born and re-born again
“Love, yes, love your calling,
for this holy and generous love will impart strength to you
so as to enable you to surmount all obstacles.”
~St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier
In the late 1820s, a “change in inner conviction” led the Rev. Dr. Theodore Clapp to begin preaching universalism in New Orleans. This change inspired the Mississippi Presbytery to try him for heresy. The vote was for excommunication. Rev. Clapp returned home to New Orleans after his conviction in February 1833 and attempted to resign as pastor. Instead, a new church was born when the majority of the congregation voted to leave the Presbytery with him. Since 1833, this congregation has survived yellow fever epidemics, the Civil war, fires, fire-bombings, bankruptcy, and church-planting-through-schism. Born out of a conviction that all are loved, this congregation has been re-born, re-created, time and time again.
Eight years ago this May, the First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans was on the brink of a break through. Membership and pledging levels had reached modern era highs, a new minister had been called, counter-oppression work was going on within the congregation – the excitement was palpable on a Sunday morning.
Then there was a burglary in June. And then another in July, along with a Tropical Storm that knocked out power. In August, the local School District chose not to renew its lease with the congregation, creating a vast hole in the budget. And almost immediately thereafter, Hurricane Katrina came through town and the levees broke.
The church sat in 4-5 feet of water for almost 3 weeks. The congregation was scattered across the country. The newly called minister and her wife found themselves digging through muck, trying to pull their dreams out of the destruction, standing on the side of love with a congregation they barely knew.
Knowing its own history, being in relationship with the larger denomination, and living into the mystery have certainly played large roles in this almost miraculous continuity of Unitarian Universalism in the city of New Orleans. And perhaps as significant as all of the above is the thread, woven throughout each incarnation of the congregation, of loving, yes loving, the calling to be a liberal religious presence in the Deep South.
I invite you, in this season of contemplation, to think about the calling of your faith community, the calling of your life. Revisit your history, your most sustaining stories. Be in relationship – locally, regionally, nationally, globally – with all who share some of your story, your faith. Live into the mystery that is each new day with an open heart and a curious mind. And love, yes love, your calling as a person of faith in a world hungry for the conviction that all are loved.
May this holy and generous love impart strength to you as you are born and re-born again into a universe whose only constant is change.
This Is What’s Happening
This is what’s happening, now.
It is the last day of our week-and-a-half West Coast trip. We are in Portland, Oregon, the city where I was born and grew up, where I know a thousand places I would love to go–this and that bookstore, that cafe, and oh, the breakfast places I would love to savor, and the parks and walks and hikes. I’d like to get my hair cut (the last time I got it cut was in December) and take Robin to that all-children’s-book store on Alberta. Instead, we are staying close to the house today. We will be running some laundry while the few friends who are free on a weekday come by and say hi. It is so much easier this way–to not make plans or have big aspirations for the day.
This is what’s happening.
One of the highlights of this trip for me was on the very first day, just after our plane landed in San Francisco, after we waited for everyone else to get off first so that we could take our time looking around under every seat and in every overhead compartment for our whole assortment of bags and belongings. We walked up the ramp and past the boarding gate, and Robin started kicking-kicking-kicking and shrieking with delight. She looked around at the bright shops, kiosks, and quickly rushing stream of people moving in all directions in that busy airport terminal and laughed and giggled, smiled and cooed and laughed some more. And I realized–startled–I realized that she may well have thought that we had permanently moved in to that Boeing 737 with 160 other people and less than 2 vertical square feet per person.
This is what’s happening.
As a Unitarian Universalist minister, an occasional meditator, and a regularly-irregular practitioner of yoga, I have a great appreciation for all the variations of “be here now” that circulate around and through our religious and spiritual traditions and practices. But I also have always loved to plan, to anticipate the next thing, to schedule and “calendar” and try my best to organize the future. A baby is a sure-fire way to cure a person of the enjoyment of planning. It is the planned things that inevitably stress me out, now. That planned gathering will fall right during her new nap time, or come with expectations of getting Her Wiggliness into some outfit that is not her usual comfy footed sleeper. Planned things will often involve driving, or bus schedules, neither of which dovetail with easy nursing. Planned things often involve other people, and most other people are so much busier than we are, these days. I have cut back, and cut back, and cut back, until, most days now, I spend most of the day barely aware of what time it is. I keep a running list going in my head of what Robin might need; that is my ongoing daily meditation now: diaper, food, nap, play, and repeat.
This is what’s happening.
Robin has just this afternoon discovered the clanging joy of banging on overturned pots with wooden spoons, wooden spoons which also make fine teethers. We leave tomorrow morning, and there are so many people and places I would have liked to have seen. But it is a privilege and a practice to set aside for now all the other things we might like to do, and just enjoy this sweet day together, with both Mamas around continuously this whole delightful week, playing in the sunlight and savoring the luscious green that is spring in Portland. An acquaintance told me she looks back on her children’s first years and thinks of them as the “I didn’t” years, a reference to all the things that go undone–dishes, projects, housecleaning, travel. I like that phrase, the “I didn’t” years; it resonates. And at the same time, I want to look back on these years and think of them as the “I did” years. We did, we are. We are choosing to focus on being with our Little Bean. We are lucky and privileged to be able to make this choice, and it is financially stressful some days, energetically challenging other days. For now, for us, this is what’s happening, right here, on the floor: overturned pots, wooden spoons, clanging and laughing and kicking, going nowhere today except around the block to look at the newly bursting flowers, letting our own focused lives be full enough, letting this be bountiful, this ordinaryness be beautiful. This is what’s happening. May it be so.
Good Guys and Bad Guys
Depending on who you talk to, the recent death of Hugo Chavez was either the tragic loss of a heroic defender of the poor or the timely end of a socialist thug. Now, I’m not interested in taking sides on this one. I make no pretense at being any kind of expert on the modern history of Venezuela. No, what fascinates me is the need to cast him as misunderstood hero or brutal villain, when it seems pretty obvious that he was neither, or both.
We have this human determination to decide who the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are, and we expect to be able to identify them by their hats. The good guys are noble and honorable and agree with us on all particulars. The bad guys are greedy, unethical and cruel. They espouse ridiculous notions that run counter to all we know to be true. It’s a way of looking at the world that allows us the comfortable privilege of identifying “us” and “them,” so that we can know who is on “our side.”
But for better or for worse, people are rarely that two-dimensional, and we do everyone a disservice when we try to cram people into folders marked “good” and “bad.” The other day a friend posted a graphic that showed a picture of Bill Gates and a cornfield, with the label “evil” over Gates’s head because he owns a vast number of shares in Monsanto. I’m no big fan of Monsanto, but really? The man has done more than anybody since Jonas Salk to eradicate communicable disease in the world, and you’re willing to slap the word “evil” over his head? Pressuring public figures to divest from companies you think are hurting the public is one thing, declaring anyone who is invested in these companies to be evil is quite another.
It takes a little mental flexibility, but if you want to deal in the real world then you could acknowledge simultaneously that Chavez was autocratic and that he improved conditions for the poor, that Gates has done a tremendous job working to save children from disease at the same time that he is culpable for investing in Monsanto—not to mention Windows Vista. A recent French article points out that Mother Teresa allowed a great deal of suffering in her “homes for the dying” that she could have perfectly well prevented. Martin Luther King, Jr. plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation. There is no one who is totally pure, no one utterly evil. The congregation I serve, the Church of the Larger Fellowship, has a ministry to prisoners which includes a pen pal program, correspondence courses and more. We regularly receive staggeringly beautiful letters from inmates who are finding their way to spiritual insight and compassion in the brutally harsh conditions of prison. These men and women have done some dreadful things. They are not (mostly) innocent. They are also not evil.
But when we reduce the world to good guys and bad guys then we conclude that the bad guys belong in jail, and don’t deserve to be treated as humans with hopes and desires. When we imagine that there are good guys and bad guys then we assume that we need to take guns away from the bad guys and put them in the hands of the good guys, disregarding the fact that good guys shoot their wives or girlfriends or themselves on a disturbingly regular basis. When we divide the world into good guys and bad guys we go to war against the “axis of evil” without regard for the human or financial cost, because we know that good will triumph over evil, and we know that we are good.
Of course there are people who commit terrible acts, and who must be stopped. Of course there are people who accomplish heroic feats, and who deserve our praise. But if we think that we can divide the world into a superhero cartoon of good and bad then we have badly mistaken what it means to be human, and our choices will be lead dangerously astray.
We would be better off to let ourselves by guided by the words of Annie Dillard from her book Holy the Firm:
Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead–as if innocence had ever been–and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been.
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.
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!