OK, we’re now a week into the new year, which is about the time that people’s New Year’s resolutions generally start biting the dust. I have a theory about why this is the case, why all our good intentions dissolve so quickly. It’s my conviction that the problem with most resolutions is that we resolve to do stuff that we don’t actually want to do. Nobody wants to go on a diet. If you liked exercising you’d probably be doing it already. You’re addicted to TV or video games or Facebook because you enjoy them. If you wanted to give them up you would have already done so.
Most resolutions, it seems to me, come out of some Calvinistic, judgy part of ourselves that knows that we are inadequate, broken, and need to be fixed—in this case not by the grace of God, but rather by that fiction know as Will Power. (Wouldn’t “Will Power” be a great name for a super hero?) We are determined to finally make ourselves right, good, admirable, slim. We are broken, but we’re going to get fixed.
And then we fail to fix ourselves, leaving us all the more convinced that we are broken to begin with. But what if our resolutions started with the conviction that we are blessed, gifted, wonderful—but still learning? Then we might resolve not to tidy up our many flaws, but instead to enjoy our growing edges. I still remember with admiration a seminary classmate who, when invited in a class to consider her health and eating habits, and to come up with a change she would make for a month, returned to class the next week having done her homework. “I thought about my eating habits,” she said, “and decided that I like them just fine. So I decided to have dessert every day for the month.” I still have the recipe for Chocolate Decadence that she handed out more than 20 years ago.
OK, so my friend’s solution might be a growing edge in more than one sense of the word for some of us, but something in her resolution struck a chord. She recognized the health she already had, and decided to revel in it a bit.
I’ve made and dropped the usual variety of noble resolutions over the years. One year, however, I made a resolution that stuck. More than that, it changed my life. My resolution, from several years back, was simply this: More dancing! (Always with the exclamation point.) I realized that New Year’s that I liked dancing on those occasions when my spouse and I got around to it, but it wasn’t very often. What I wanted was not to fix something that was broken, but rather to give a way for something that was already whole and healthy to grow. So, with the enthusiastic support of my wife, we started dancing. A lot. More and more. For weekends, or even weeks at a time. We got good at it, but we also found a community, a new connection to each other and a whole lot of joy.
Of course, dancing is very likely not what you want to grow in your life. But there might just be something, some seed of a resolution, some inkling of a revolution of joy that you want to feed. You might want to resolve to get out more in nature, Skype your grandkids, sing in a choir, take up belly dancing, teach your dog to do tricks, grow a garden, travel to Spain. You might want to search your life for what feels most precious, most joyful, most connected, most creative, and make a space for that thing to grow. You might want to vow to have dessert every night for a year. If so, let me know. I have a terrific recipe for Chocolate Decadence.
Over winter solstice, I watched my father tending to KG, his first grandchild, with unconditional love. We had just celebrated her one year birthday and she was beginning to cruise around with increased confidence. As she found herself standing in front of my mother’s highly breakable ceramic nativity scene, KG began to methodically hand each figure to my father. He gratefully received them from her and moved them to another shelf.
My sister, the mother of the much adored child said, “No, KG. No touch.” My dad just stayed there, receiving each figurine from the determined Katie Grace. “I’ll catch them,” he said. “I don’t really tell her no.”
Now I confess, my sister and I both nearly fell off the sofa in that moment. Who was this man gently hovering over his grandchild with a blissful air of yes, the same man who was forever telling us no as children?
“ No! Kristy quit! No, no! Deanna don’t!”
I mean sometimes we thought those were our names: Deanna Don’t and Kristy Quit.
Did someone body snatch our father?
Upon further reflection, I think it is maybe a little less complicated than alien body snatching. I think my father has had an epiphany about unconditional love.
The way that child lights up every time her Pop Pop walks into the room. How she reaches for him no matter who is holding her.
It is powerful to be loved that way. It breaks open our hearts. It tells us we are enough and calls us to love others with broken open hearts. Radically inclusive, unjudging hearts.
Beloveds, may you all know that you are loved the way KG loves her Pop Pop. Unquestioned, unjudged. Loved. Beloved. Yearned toward. Reached for. Held.
May this knowledge continually break open our hearts so that we can experience the divine love of the universe and shine the light of this love onto each other.
May this season of Epiphany bring you not only the sweetness of King Cake – may it also bring you the sweetness of receiving the unconditional love of the universe.
Early in ministry, there are skills to be learned. Preaching, counseling, the coffee-hour nod that says, “Yes, I’m listening,” even if it’s not true. Oh, and another one. Boredom. Overcoming it? No. Letting it pull you down below where you can breathe, and then holding you there. For hours. It’s important to know how to be there, in boredom. But for me, it was something that didn’t come easy. Some skills will take practice.
Apprentice clergy go through a form of ritual hazing known as Clinical Pastoral Education. Here’s how it works. For a few months, full-time, you’re a hospital chaplain. Your mission? To offer support when situations get bleak. To help people face pivotal, primal questions just at the moment something vital is being torn from their lives. And also? Despite the plastic badge that says “Chaplain,” you have not the foggiest how a person would do this. Like when someone lifts her tear-stained face, and says, “Why would God let this happen?” And, in response, you decide now is the time to fetch everyone coffee.
Later, with other glassy-eyed lambs of the chaplaincy, you gather in a conference room with a senior chaplain, to think about what you have done. You do this through something they call a “Verbatim.” It’s just like it sounds—a blow-by-blow you write up of some fumbling interaction you’ve just had with a patient. The purpose is to reveal how very far your attempts are from whatever it is Jesus might have done, had he himself served a turn as a summertime chaplain. With a Verbatim, the lambs become wolves, tearing each word apart. Why, for instance, when the conversation turned to cancer, did you launch into a long story about the time your aunt thought she had leprosy, but it only turned out to be a bad rash on her neck?
Still, basic incompetence has never stopped me, and it would not this time. I got myself assigned to the edgiest units. Ones with names like “Critical” and “Emergency.” No hang-nails for me. No mere broken limbs. Give me “touch-and-go.” Give me “hours to live.” Throw in the surprise arrival of an estranged sister, and I’d be all a-tingle. I strolled the halls, seeking crisis. Buttered up the tough nurses, so they’d let me know when anything truly awful went down. The family room outside surgery was a good place to find trouble. The family room is where the dutiful adult children endure their hopeless grown siblings as loved ones off somewhere undergo God knows what. The dutiful ones keep information in a folder, and they keep track of the time. The hopeless ones are tear-stained wrecks, sprawled on a sofa that’s strewn with wet Kleenex. With luck, they’ve been drinking. Here’s how a chaplain can stir up some business. Walk into a family room, perch on a chair and murmur, “So, tell me, how is everyone?” Like fish in a barrel, friends. Fish in a barrel.
As we breathlessly parsed the Verbatims, the chaplain supervisor rarely ever spoke. He hailed from the great state of New Hampshire, and was a motionless model of the state’s famed reserve. One got the sense that you could have taken a bucket of ice water filled with dead mackerel and dumped it over his head, and the most he would do would be to glance out the window, and emit a slight sigh. It was clear, however, from the way he would occasionally purse his lips in the midst of my Verbatims, that he was of the opinion that a person could stand to tone it down just a hair. Of course, those dry lips that pursed and un-pursed could have meant anything. In the absence of a bucket of ice water, and the way the hospital air-conditioning sucked all the moisture right out of the air, it could have been simply that the poor man was just parched.
In any case, my ministry was one of inserting myself where I wasn’t strictly required. For example, a sober conversation with the heartbroken family of an eighteen-year-old about whether the time had come, finally, to turn off the machines that had kept their boy alive. Already, the small room held the hospital’s medical ethicist, a representative from the organ donation company, and another chaplain named Frank. Did they benefit, as well, from my luminous presence, the guttural tones of my active listening? Because the answer to that question was not yet clear to me, I made sure to be there. Up in critical care, I appeared in the room of a man who was dying alone. He was beyond speech by now. Conversation was out. Companionable silence is something I can do for two minutes, three tops. At last, I hit upon an idea. What the old fellow probably needed was for me to hum hymns. So, that’s what I did. “Old Rugged Cross.” “Amazing Grace.” And, even though it was the middle of summer, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” In my defense, I did hum it slow so it came out a dirge.
Later, in the Verbatim, someone gently mentioned the effect that even a brief outburst of humming can have on the nerves on a typical day, let alone in the hours one is attempting to peaceably die. A otherwise kindly soul said that, in fact, my humming might have helped to hasten the poor man’s demise. Another wondered whether the nurses who had popped in and out all afternoon might have been not actually smiling approvingly at the humming young chaplain, as I had reported, but instead only smirking.
An old friend says I went into ministry for the second-hand thrills. The chance for a front-row seat to life’s wreckage. As if I were a ghoul. Which, years later, still seems off-base. I went into ministry for a regular paycheck. God knows I was not ever going to be any good for much else. You know how all the want ads say the employer is seeking a “detail person?” Well, me, that is not. I once spent ten minutes looking for my glasses only to realize that I was wearing them. My only talents are whistling and catching peanuts tossed into the air in my mouth. Besides, since I was a kid, people have sought me out to tell me their problems, and—God forgive me—through it all, I have been fascinated. Fascinated by how people can manage to get themselves into such an intractable mess. And fascinated by how they can get themselves out. Or else learn to live with it. Or how sometimes they learn to live with it, but then are transported out of trouble through no effort at all of their own, in a way that some will call grace, and others call luck. If there were bleachers on the sidelines of human society, I would enjoy sitting there, watching. Well, watching and cheering. Taking honest delight. Perhaps with buttered popcorn. Yes, I had advice, but I offered it like anyone sitting up in the bleachers who calls out advice—with the full confidence that it will be ignored. By the end of my twenties, it had dawned on me that, to get by in this world, I would probably need to get paid doing something. And ministry seemed easier than teaching kindergarten. So, I was in. And, ok, maybe it promised a front-row seat. Not to the wreckage. But to what stirs within it.
There came the day, late in the summer, when nothing was happening in Critical Care. Nothing in Emergency. I was bored, restless. So, I wandered up to other units, outside my assignment. In one room, a woman lay dying, her family gathered around. But the nice-enough priest sitting there didn’t seem to grasp that this was his moment to shine. I forget how I convinced him, but soon, I’d replaced him, intent on marching the whole family through all the stages of grief, perhaps twice, before the old woman had even taken her last dying breath. Was I badgering these poor souls? Who can say. But, whatever the case, I was summoned for a chat with the chaplain supervisor.
He said that if I went into parish ministry without learning how to be bored, there would come a Tuesday afternoon when things would be slow, and I would stir trouble up out of my own need for action. For the rest of the shift, he said, I was to walk the halls, but to visit with no one. To practice being bored. For me, that afternoon, ghosting the halls without purpose, was more difficult than responding to people who’d been hurt in a wreck. It took some time before I was able to breathe. Walking by rooms where people seemed upset, especially, was like walking by the donuts at a Weight Watchers meeting. Just one? But I couldn’t. And, I will tell you that, as I walked, I realized that, even without an eager chaplain on hand, people would continue to suffer and also to find ways to lessen their suffering. They would die, and the ones they left behind would figure out how to live. Sometimes, these things would happen more easily if I were not there. Sometimes, my absence helped more than my presence. The Taoists have a word called “wu-wei,” the power of inaction. It is there when one is in harmony with the Tao. With the way of all things. Another person might say, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” As if there were a power beyond the merely human.
For over ten years, I have served the same congregation in the same little town. Have I stirred up trouble? Oh, yes. Ask my people. They’ll tell you. But, here’s the thing: without ongoing study in the practice of boredom, without learning wu-wei, a ministry composed purely of action could have made things dramatically worse.
Sometimes it takes a lie
to keep a religion. “It’s
merely a game,” they
told the priests–“how
we fast for days, then
cut a tall pole to climb.
How we costume and
dance. It means nothing,
how we chant in circles
and bleed chickens.
How we climb and fly
round and around in air.
Come, watch–it’s only
a game that gives us joy.”
(And, they didn’t say,
aloud, keeps the earth
going well, returned
to its right turning again.)
“Merely a game we play,
round and around in
thirteen and thirteen turns.
It’s a game–come watch,
priests. Be amazed” (how
sometimes it takes a lie
to keep your religion.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danza_de_los_Voladores
The cat snuggles down
into my empty suitcase,
out to fill for a trip. She
knows something’s up.
It’s a bed, she insists.
A warm place, even an
instrument of stasis. I
let her nestle there,
passing on to other
bustling that needs
doing, done. That I’ve
lived out of a suitcase
won’t perhaps make
my obituary. Not much
does. Yet it is the things
we’ve lugged place
to place; it is the cat
let sleep that is,
was, what we were.
That old Zen mind
noble, not to think of
life when you see
a flash of lightening.”
I say, impossible too
to pack for the long road
and not dwell on passing.
One spring had me moonlighting on crisis response. I was far from an expert. Only shadowed whoever was on-call, to learn what to do when there’s nothing to be done. Mostly, the work took you out into homes where the children who are wanting to harm themselves live. But one Friday night, the call was from a prison several counties away, near the Kentucky line. It took forever to get there, and, when we got near, you could not see a thing because that low valley had been drained of all light.
The prison wasn’t for everyone. Only if you got locked up before the age of eighteen. Like training wheels, to prepare you for the prisons they build for adults.
At the heart of the complex was a windowless room. It had bolted-down tables and the cheer of an emptied-out bottle of glue. Wide-body guards pressed themselves to the cinderblock, like bashful teens at a dance. A prison administrator came in, then went out. And then came in again. There was paperwork, but no one knew exactly which of it was necessary for this kind of case. Of course, the woman I shadowed and I had our usual documentation: cataloging the horror, making a safety plan, writing down at least five positive personal goals.
Finally, one of the guards went to bring back the cause of the problem. He came shuffling out of solitary confinement. Dressed in a pink paper gown that covered only his front. But it wasn’t the gown or the bare ass you noticed. What you saw was the wounds. What he’d done to himself. Gouged furrows of injury striping his legs. Arms like the ground beef that bleeds in its plastic. Any sharps, if it had a point at all, they had taken from him: pencils, forks, spoons, his toothbrush. They’d cut his fingernails, so he couldn’t use those on himself. But still, he kept on. Had spent the day chewing away the side of his lip, so it hung in a flap, giving a direct view on yellow teeth and sick gums. His lip hanging free slurred his speech, but you could tell somebody somewhere had taught him to say “sir” and “ma’am.”
They’d put him in solitary because the psychologist that morning had said, “suicide watch.” This psychologist was young, the prison administrator let us know. Prone to making things out to be more than they were. But, financially speaking, it just couldn’t go on. Suicide watch ties up your staff with the one-on-one coverage. It means you’re understaffed elsewhere, or you’re paying overtime. Surely, we understood.
In fact, it was why we were there. Crisis response could change things. Could override prior orders. Maybe somewhere, they could afford to do suicide watch. Maybe somewhere they had the money to give all the prisoners neck-rubs and footie pajamas. Maybe somewhere. Not here. Surely, we understood.
Of course, there was a story. When he was very young, someone had done horrible things to this boy, to his innocent body. After that, he’d been passed around, house to house, up there back in the mountains where his family was from. Now, what had been done to him, he had done to other small children’s bodies. The trial kept getting delayed for one thing or another, but there was no question. It was open-and-shut. This boy would not see the outside of a prison for as long as he lived.
After Jesus dies on the cross, and is laid in the tomb–but before Easter morning–he goes missing. Scripture is silent on exactly where to. But people began to say that, after his death, he must have gone straight to hell, to set free the captives. Maybe something like freeze-tag, Jesus tapping each person gently, saying, “You’re free now. Un-frozen.” But, arriving into that windowless room, with us all in a tableau of stone-faced despair, what could Jesus have done? Who among us could have been unfrozen? The prison administrator? The guards? The prisoner? The woman I shadowed and me, with our black ball-point pens and unfinished documentation? And what is it we’d do? Sing and dance? Clarify our positive personal goals? Open the gates and run free till the Sheriff caught up?
It may be too late here to say the word, “sin.” Well, whatever the word, listen: sometimes, it isn’t any one thing any person has done. Sometimes, it is the overall ruination. The unholy mess we have found ourselves in. Maybe it’s not an Easter story we’re wanting, of rising up from the wreckage. Maybe what’s needed is a clean break, a fresh start, maybe no less than Christmas.
So, here is a Christmas. It’s a starless dark night in a forgotten dark valley, and somehow, we have ended up huddled together in prison–the prison administrator, the psychologist, the guards, you, me, everyone. Not a prison of cinderblock. Stronger: made of suffering, and of the blindness to it, with walls so high and so distant, we cannot find the gate, and don’t always remember it is where we are. Our hearts are scabbed over. We live without hope. But on this night, the news comes: all of that is now over, the prison dissolved, like a change in the weather, and the world is made new. It is the strangest thing, and we cannot believe it. Here we are, shy in our love, in the presence of God. And here, Lord, is this child. He needs cleaning, a blanket, to be held, to be cherished. He has not yet been wounded, his flesh has not yet been torn, he is not yet in prison near the Kentucky line. Mortals that we are, we cannot promise our adoration will prove to be more than fleeting. But for this flickering instance, in the holy presence of the tender child we will one day betray, the doors of our hearts now are standing wide open, and we are amazed.
As the Community Minister for the Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalists, I spend a lot of my time immersed in the injustice of layers of oppression. New Orleanians still trying to get back into their homes over 8 years after they were flooded out, transgender women forced to be housed with and often abused by men in prison and in shelters, a football field of wetlands lost in this state every half hour … Each day there’s more. Family diagnosed with chronic diseases, babies born too soon, people die… and.
AND Christmas comes each year in this country, whether you celebrate it or not. While I often find myself in the position of protesting the dominion of the dominant culture, I don’t fight Christmas. I choose to enjoy Christmas. I think that Christmas can be sweetly subversive.
Hey World – people are ill and homeless and jobless and imprisoned and killed! For most of the year, most of the world ignores these hard truths, pretending that the poor are poor because of poor choices instead of acknowledging a system of oppression that radically tilts the playing field towards some –and away from others.
But come Christmas, pretending stops – at least for a moment. Suddenly we collect coats and toys and feel good stories about providing shelter and hope to families down on their luck.
Suddenly we tell a story about a great leader born in questionable circumstances, sharing his birthday crib with the donkey’s dinner, soon exiled to the immigrant life in Eygpt with his family.
Rumors of premarital sex, poverty, immigration … you name it, the Christmas story goes there…
And tells us – joy to the world. Hope has come.
Let there be peace and kindness and respect among all creation.
It’s a 6th Principle: The Goal of World Community with Peace, Liberty, and Justice for All!
Yes, I know. That’s not exactly how the scriptures or even the carols go.
But I am grateful for the promise of this season…For once a year our deeply embedded cultural story tells the world:
Children are precious.
Where you are born should not predict the quality nor the value of your life.
Women too have the holy within them.
It matters that we bear witness to each other and to the vast brilliance of the universe.
Sometimes knowledge needs to bow to intuition.
Life is a gift, utterly unpredictable, infinitely possible.
There is hope for change.
And where there is hope, friends, there is joy. Beloveds, may there be joy for you and your loved ones today and every days.
I was walking in City Park with a community organizer this week when suddenly we were only the width of the boardwalk away from a Great Egret, its fancy fringe plumes fluttering in the morning breeze. We paused, taking in the beauty, marveling at the unexpected joy of such a close encounter.
A few minutes later, on the other side of the lake path, I was startled by the sudden appearance of a pelican swooping in for breakfast. (With all due apologies to the fish), I clapped my hands in delight when I watched the pelican give the throaty head waggle that signifies success.
And I noticed, as our walk continued, that our conversation had transitioned as we were present to the beauty and wonder of where we were. A talk that had begun with the challenges and frustrations we were facing was giving way to some creative collaboration, some hope, some joy.
May you too find beauty in this world to give you hope and joy, to point the way towards collaboration, community, creative resistance to all that would tell us we are less than, not enough.
I confess it all seems a bit silly to me, this whole notion of there being a “war on Christmas” because some institutions are wishing people “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas.” Does it really matter? OK, I admit that I, personally, am annoyed with the signs that declare that Jesus is the Reason for the Season. The season, after all, is winter, which is caused by the fact that the earth rotates on a slightly tilted axis, which takes the Northern Hemisphere a little further from the sun this time of year. Jesus has nothing to do with it. Jesus also has nothing to do with a variety of holidays that take place in this season, such as Chanukah, Yule and Kwanzaa.
However, pagan symbolism such as fir trees, holly and mistletoe aside, Christmas is Christmas, and I have genuine sympathy for the people who are concerned that it is time to put the Christ back into Christmas. It seems a bit bizarre to me to celebrate the birth of a baby born in a stable by indulging in an orgy of consumerism. But how people conduct their celebrations is not the war.
No, the war on Christmas, on the man who declared “blessed are the poor,” is being declared by the folks who are determined to cut billions of dollars from programs that keep families from going hungry. The war on Christmas, on the man who overturned the tables of the moneychangers, is being conducted by financial institutions that expect the public to assume the responsibility for their losses on risky investments, while they reap the rewards. The war on Christmas, on the baby who could only find shelter in a stable, is being conducted by immigration policies that have no room for the notion of hospitality. The war on Christmas — on the man who said we will be judged on how we have fed the poor, given drink to the thirsty, clothed the naked, and visited those who are sick or in prison — is being conducted by those who would describe those in need as “takers” and those who think it’s a good idea to fill prisons with young men so that private corporations can make a profit.
Frankly, I couldn’t care less whether you wish me a merry Christmas, happy holidays or simply a nice day, so long as it’s done in a spirit of civility. Pipe Bach chorales and Handel’s Messiah out into the streets, and put up a Nativity scene on your lawn. Fine by me. Be my guest. But don’t put yourself in the role of Mr. Scrooge, loving the fruits of business so much that you care nothing for the poor, and then step out in the public sphere and declare your horror at the neglect and abuse of Christmas. For that is the real war on Christmas, and it looks like Christmas is losing again.
December 10, 2013
“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” – so begins the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948.
Today marks the 65th Anniversary of this visionary document, created shortly after the end of World War II. In the aftermath of massive global violence, the international community vowed never again to allow atrocities like those of that conflict happen again.
The decades since have been filled with violence and atrocities.
And.
And the arc of the universe has bent toward justice.
For at least there is now an international promise of how we know we are called to be together, a First Principle
guideline leading to a Sixth Principle vision.
To paraphrase the G.I. Joe cartoon of my childhood, “Now we know, and knowing is half the battle.”
May this knowing lead to loving, compassionate doing in the next 65 years.
“As we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, let us intensify our efforts to fulfill our collective responsibility to promote and protect the rights and dignity of all people everywhere.” ~UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
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