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!
Beyonce at Half-Time
OK, I will admit that, in spite of living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was pretty uninvested in the Super Bowl. Just really not a sports fan. I did, however, find it entertaining to track my friends’ Facebook comments throughout the trouncing, the power outage, the rally and the 49ers eventual defeat. But what interested me the most were the comments on Beyoncé’s half-time show. Some people thought it was one of the most incredible performances they had ever seen. Some people hated it. Some people thought that she was the embodiment of feminine power. Some people thought she was an emblem of sexual exploitation. Some people were offended by the booty shaking and some posted articles which declared that seeing Beyoncé as sexualized was in the prurient mind of the beholder.
Here’s what I know: when I picked up my 14-year-old daughter from a Super Bowl party that evening, it was Beyoncé’s performance, not the game, that had her aglow. She dragged me to the computer so that I could see the performance for myself on YouTube. Here’s what I saw. There the singer was onstage at the biggest homage to testosterone in the nation. She was up there with her all-female band and women dancers and the gal with flames shooting out of her guitar, having, as far as anyone could tell, the time of her life. Yes, she was powerful, receiving the homage of all those roaring fans, all those hands reaching out to her. And yes, she couldn’t have been more obviously, writhingly sexual. Which was, at moments, a bit jaw-dropping as something to watch with my teenage daughter. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder what exactly there is to object to about her hip-swinging, hair-flinging sexiness.
As I have engaged in discussion around the issues surrounding abortion, I’ve heard from a number of people who disapprovingly regard abortion as a way for a woman to shirk responsibility for her sexual choices, to have sex without having to live with the consequences. I have heard from people who are quick to remind those who will listen that sex is for procreation, and that having sex without being willing to take on procreation is a misuse of sexuality, a sexual sin. If that’s your opinion, then Beyoncé’s rampantly sexy performance would be repugnant.
But my religious tradition doesn’t say that. My religious tradition says that sexuality, in its variety of expression— bodies, in their variety of expression—are good and holy. Yes, sexuality can be abused, and sexual expression that causes physical or emotional damage to another person is wrong. But what is sinful is not the sexuality, but rather the abuse. And as far as I can tell, Beyoncé was hurting no one, being hurt by no one, having a grand old time being beautiful and talented and scantily clad in front of all those people.
But is that what I want my daughter to see? Is that the role model I want my African-American teenager to look toward? Wouldn’t I rather than she aspire to be like Michelle Obama when she grows up? Sure I would. The First Lady is brilliant and classy and refined. She is Athena, the goddess of reason. But my daughter isn’t. My daughter is a dancer, a performer, a little bit wild. She is athletic, embodied, more Artemis than Athena. When she sees Beyoncé she sees a massively talented Black woman surrounded by fans, surrounded by fire, putting her whole self out there in a glorious, ecstatic show. That’s what my daughter wants for herself—not the rigors of Harvard Law School, but the joy and the passion that she experiences when dancing. She’s a person who dwells more in her body than her head, and while school tells her all day every day that her way of being is a failing, Beyoncé put it all on magnificent display.
One day, far sooner than I will like, my daughter will make the connection between the pleasure and power of her body in dancing and the pleasure and power of her body as a sexual being. And it will be my job to make sure that she understands about protecting herself and others, about making decisions that are right for her and not just what someone else wants, about keeping her head when making choices for her body. But it will not be my job to squelch her fire or her passion or her pleasure in her big, strong, beautiful body. And if that’s what she takes away from Beyoncé at half-time, it’s OK by me.
Pro-Life/Pro-Choice
Let’s start the conversation here. Everybody is pro-life. OK, everybody who is not Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters. Honestly, do you know a single person who would describe themselves as pro-death? All of us are pro-life, and none of us is infinitely pro-life. All of us value some lives more than others. Is there a person living who feels the same way about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. as they do about the assassination of Osama bin Laden? Have we had the kind of public mourning for children killed in drone strikes in Afghanistan as for the children gunned down in Newtown? If you had to make a choice (and you do) between feeding your own kids and feeding kids in Libya, is there any question who gets fed? We all are pro-life, and we all put more weight on some lives than on others.
Yes, a fetus is a human life, and if you have been trying for that pregnancy, then nothing could be more precious. And yes, the human body routinely self-aborts fertilized eggs, and unless we are trying to get pregnant no one really thinks of that as even sad, let alone tragic. When we say we treasure life, we mean that we treasure the lives that we choose to cherish.
We make religious assertions: “Life is sacred.” “We affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” And those assertions matter. But we are fooling ourselves if we think that those affirmations have easy and obvious applications in the real world. Some people are pro-life, but in favor of the death penalty. Some people are pro-life, but support sending troops into combat. Some people are pro-life, but believe that people need access to guns so that they can defend themselves with lethal force. Some people are pro-life, but favor the right of terminally ill people to choose the means and timing of their death. Some people are pro-life, but favor access to safe and legal abortions. In the real world absolutes fall apart pretty quickly.
So what then are we to do? Choose life. Knowing that the way you choose life might be different than the choice someone else makes. Because, really, all of us are pro-choice. We all want to be free to follow the dictates of our conscience. Everyone wants the autonomy to examine the world in which we live and our place in it, to make the best of what we find, to create love and prosperity and justice. Everyone wants to find their way to life more abundant—for themselves, their family, their friends.
For one woman choosing life might mean choosing to carry a pregnancy to term even though she knows that she can’t raise that child, choosing instead to place the baby for adoption. For another woman choosing life might mean having an abortion so that she can finish her education and build a decent life for herself—and potentially for children she might choose to have in the future. Both are choices. Both are life-affirming.
The job of religion is not to set out false absolutes, declaring that the church has the capacity to decide which lives matter the most. The job of religion is to call us to continually examine what it means to choose abundant life, and to make life-affirming choices. And then the job of religion is to remind us that we must continually expand our vision of which lives matter, of who deserves to have life abundant.
Guns: Relationship Status: “It’s complicated.”
I first held a gun when I was eight years old. One of my uncles let me fire his new pistol. I still remember the strain of trying to hold the heavy gun steady so he wouldn’t think I was too weak to try it. All these years later, I vividly remember the incredible rush of power that washed over me as I fired that pistol.
I was eight years old and I held in my hand a tool that could spit fire and knock a beer can off a fence several yards away. I was eight years old and I held in my hand a tool that could have ended the life of the uncle who handed it to me. It is difficult to articulate how much power surged through my little being. I swear I heard the Scots heritage in my mutt-blood swim screaming to the surface with a mighty roar…
Nine years later, the older brother of the uncle who first handed me a gun died after being shot by another family member. Not long after that, the father of my classmate was killed while responding to a domestic violence call. The man who killed him was devastated to realize, once he descended from his pain-killer induced high, that he had killed not only a police officer, but a friend.
Four years ago, my partner called me at the hospital where I was working as a chaplain to let me know that he was not one of the two white men shot to death a block away from my house (where a heroin deal apparently turned deadly). Shortly before that, I had watched an ambulance come claim the body of a sixteen year old boy, victim of a drive by shooting at the other end of my street.
I have lived in the rural life and the urban life and what each had in common was:
- a sense of powerlessness about how the world is run and
- deaths by firearms.
Our country (and colonial powers around the world) has a history of taking away a population’s weapons and property (i.e. indigenous peoples, Japanese-American relocation camps, mass incarceration through a government-created drug war…) when people in power decide to do so. How then, to trust that you really will be safer by giving up your guns?
Christian social justice activist and writer Jim Wallis proclaims:
Former assumptions and shared notions about fairness, agreements, reciprocity, mutual benefits, social values, and expected futures have all but disappeared. The collapse of financial systems and the resulting economic crisis not only have caused instability, insecurity, and human pain; they have also generated a growing disbelief and fundamental distrust in the way things operate and how decisions are made.
I confess that I am grateful to finally live in a gun-free home, I freak out just a bit when even toy guns are pointed at me or anyone I love, and I would love to trust that I could walk through my neighborhood at night without hearing gunfire. But I was also here in New Orleans when the National Guard rolled through with their Humvees and their guns and I know what it feels like to be occupied by a military force – first denied access to my home and property, then patrolled and subject to interrogation once home again.
My faith and my lived experience teaches that life is rarely an either/or proposition. In this interdependent web of all existence, we are all connected, tangled together in a tapestry of history and mystery. It’s complicated.
It is hazardous to talk glibly about gun control unless we talk about creating a nation that is welcoming, safe, and empowering for all people. This conversation is complex and deserves real discernment, not sound bites and bullet points.
Guns do not provide actual safety. They provide a sense of power. [Bear witness: our government is not at all ready to give up its guns, its sense of power.]
I suspect that if we are going to end gun violence, we will have to address the collective needs of all – urban and rural, white and people of color, individuals and institutions – who feel powerless without their guns.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
As we approach the 40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, I am grateful to have been born and raised in a religious tradition, Unitarian Universalism, that has stood strong through the history of the struggle for reproductive justice. Today, I lift my voice to thank some of those Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Universalists who have gone before, and who labor currently, for women’s equality, health and moral agency.
It’s always risky to call out folks simply because we share an identity, especially a religious identity. It can seem as if we are separating ourselves, or declaring ourselves to be part of a club. For me, this is an act taken to ground myself. As my own congregation prepares to hold an online service honoring the complexity and dignity of all families engaged in making moral choices around reproductive issues, I have been asked, “How dare you speak out about this, as if we all agree?”
I would never believe that a few thousand Unitarian Universalists would agree about anything whatsoever! All the studies show that people of other religions don’t begin to agree either, however, and yet their leaders have no trouble declaring that they speak the absolute truth, God’s truth. They claim that God is pro-life, anti-abortion, against women’s equality. So I, who have spent my life laboring in interfaith coalitions lifting up this other point of view, feel it is incumbent upon me to speak clearly as well.
Here come my thanks, to those who have gone before me and labor still, who ground me in this work, who dared before me and handed their daring to me.
I thank Margaret Sanger, who opened the first clinic in Brooklyn in 1916, violating obscenity laws for telling women how to prevent unwanted pregnancies. While we certainly challenge her beliefs on eugenics, she had nothing if not bold courage!
I thank all of those who labored for women’s suffrage, women and men, Universalists and Unitarians, allowing politicians to be elected who would support women’s equality. Abigail Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Rev. Olympia Brown, Julia Ward Howe, Rev. Lydia Jenkins, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and so many others. I lift up your names with gratitude. Amendment 19, 1919. 19 is our lucky number.
I thank all of the Unitarian and Universalist women who worked to make birth control legal and available in the US. I think of the church women, whose names I do not know, who looked through birth notices in Connecticut papers and mailed information to new mothers, illegally offering them birth control access. They weren’t just being kind; they were spoiling for a fight. Eventually they got one, and in 1965, in Griswald v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court ruled that criminalization of birth control violated the right to marital privacy.
I thank all of the Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian Universalists who worked to make abortion safe and legal. The women, and leadership, of First Dallas UU congregation moved this case forward. UUs passed statements at our General Assemblies beginning in 1963. Clergy, especially men, were part of founding and leading the Clergy Consultation service. Hundreds of people were involved with this; many of whose names I don’t know. Please share your own knowledge in the comments section!
I thank the religious educators who, in 1967, agreed that comprehensive sexuality education is part of religious education, and began the groundbreaking sexuality education programs that have been part of religious education programs ever since. There are thousands to name here—deryk Calderwood, Rev. Eugene Navias, Judith Frediani, Rev. Sarah Gibb Millspaugh, and dozens of other writers and curriculum editors. Hundreds of teachers and youth advisors who have led young people through it.
I thank those who continue to focus their ministries on reproductive justice and sexual morality. I think of Rev. Deborah Haffner, Rev. Robert Keithan, Rev. Kelli Clement, to name only a few. I thank the congregations who are actively engaged with supporting reproductive justice. There are so many folks to thank here! Please add their names in the comments section.
Finally, I thank the Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Univeralists who have laid your bodies on the line supporting women as they struggle through these difficult choices. People in medical clinics, providing escort services, literally standing by women. I think especially of my late friend, June Barrett, who was shot in Pensacola Florida, while providing escort service to women as part of her service to the Pensacola UU congregation. June’s husband, Colonel James Barrett, and the doctor they were escorting, Dr. John Britton, were killed. As she lay still in the truck, wounded, but not dead, with these bodies beside her, she told herself that she survived for one reason: To continue to help women have access to legal and safe reproductive choice. This she did until her death.
How dare I speak out about reproductive justice? I can honestly say that I have been given this daring by thousands of others upon whose shoulders I stand. Please join us on Tuesday, January 22, at 3 PM and 7 PM Eastern time, for our online service at www.livestream.com/questformeaning. We’ll be gathering as part of a long tradition.
