Hope and the Courage to Act on It

 

I'm conflicted, I admit. Not a day has gone by since the ignobility of the November vote that there hasn't been an idea floated, an action taken, a decree made, an insult delivered, and thousands upon thousands of lies told, and I have felt the need to talk about it. I've been concerned that, in the wake of the complicity of most media in the pretense all this is normal, there won't be a note for future generations, if there are any, that there were people watching and writing it down and recognizing the wrongness of it all.

So I've felt it's fallen to me. But that's self-aggrandizing, almost worthy of trump himself, that anyone reads these missives, let alone they'll remember that there was someone commenting on it in a way that's worth holding onto. 

Besides, and maybe more importantly, I don't want to be that guy. I don't want what little attention I get to be for a list of lies and laments. That's all such notes would be because frankly just noticing this sort of stuff daily is exhausting. 

I want to be known, if at all, for keeping up a good word, for being the port in the storm, the one who keeps his head when all around them is chaos and dread. I do dread the chaos, of course, because not to do so is to give in to the lie that it's a kind of order, trump uber alles. 

I would be remembered like John Murray to whom is attributed this: 

You may possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to hearts of men and women. Give them, not hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.

Quite some thought to be remembered by, isn't it? Of course, John Murray never said nor wrote this. It was attributed to a Time-Spirit counseling Murray in a 1951 pamphlet by Alfred Cole, and somehow made it into a Universalist Sunday text in 1962 and from there into The Larger Faith, the history of the Unitarian Universalists written by Charles Howe. 

But the point here is that, even if Murray didn't write it but Cole created it for his pamphlet, it is still a good distillation of what is important, that we leave people with hope and the courage to act on it. As Ken Davis writes in Don't Know Much About the Bible about the sayings of Jesus, "What's important is that someone said these things or wrote them down." Just as Jesus' words, whosever they may really be, remain a touchstone about how to behave with one another, so Cole's words are a prod to those who comment on the darkness and despair now. As Wayne Arneson reminds us, "The way is often hard, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high." But "Take courage [because] you are not alone."

Let someone else keep the lists. I will uplift hope. 

Hope Among the Meanness

 

I've often lived in an America meaner than the sum of its parts. I was born into the hopeful Kennedy years, and I was five when the Civil Rights Act made things a little better. The American with Disabilities Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency were a couple bright spots, too.

Meanwhile, a majority of citizens supported wars in Vietnam, Laos, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, and lots of little places and little wars in between. Jimmy Carter, with his sensible sweater and solar panels, made me think things weren't so bad. But I remember the Reagan/Bush years, when nastiness was the point and people were encouraged to say what they already felt, the Clinton years, when citizens were left banging on empty factory doors, and the Bush II years, when lies authorized a lot of death.

Obama, well, what can I say. We really saw a difference, both in personal conduct on the president's part and government. That "hopey-changey thing" Sarah Palin disparaged made things easier for a lot of people. Sure, there were still food wastelands in all our inner cities and prices fluctuated, the way they always do. But for the first time, in my lifetime, we had a president who understood that most of us live paycheck to paycheck, a lot of us don't have steady transportation, and those that do can't always afford to use it. Obama understood that bosses could be assholes and owners looked out for themselves long before they paid a living wage or overtime. We felt the meanness many Americans experienced at the hands of officials begin to slip.

Then came trump I. The hood came out. Children were separated from parents. Many children died. The guy who was supposed to be looking out for us suggested we pour bleach in our guts to relieve the symptoms he got the most cutting-edge treatment for. In the name of enriching himself further, he bullied, stole, and cheated. 

We hired Biden, Obama's number 2, and thought we'd bid adieu to America's Bunga-bunga leader. And for a while, especially when Joe made the decision to put country before himself and stepped aside for Kamala, it looked like we had it made. It would be a rout.

It was a rout. But in the wrong direction. 

Kamala was not a flawed candidate, or not any more so than any candidate, and if you want to call a candidate flawed, look to the one with 34 felony convictions, the one whose followers were violent because he told them to be, the one who had to have a new vice presidential candidate because they tried to hang the last one. In any contest, there shouldn't have been one. But there was.

We lost. 

America is mean again in the agglomerate. Get any two together and they'll find a way to diminish a third.

That's who we are, and I want to thank the electorate for defenestrating the notion I wasn't aware I still held that we were a unique nation, one where right wins out, where history is slow in coming but is coming still, where decade by decade the lives of its people get better. This second trump term, even if it ends with him, leaves the clock America lives by spun back, particularly if he names another SCOTUS member. 

This time it's not just Muslims and Hispanics (whose individual votes for him actually increased) on the receiving end of their meanness. It's women (oddly, a group which voted in greater numbers for him than in 2020, despite all they have lost, except for black women, who have never had illusions about America's meanness) and the LGBTQ+ community and people who are already at a disadvantage and whose lives were already endangered. I'm white and straight and already on a lower rung of the middle class, and I can feel the meanness boiling around me. I can't imagine the fear my friends face. 

Amid all this despair, can I offer any hope? Yes. 

While America in the aggregate is mean, individual Americans are not. When I lived in my car, I was often taken in by people I never would have expected. From sharing beers in the truck bed with a bunch of guys who had more guns than teeth, to fundamentalist Christians who gave me a safe place to sleep and eat without attaching their religion to it except as the reason they did it, to any number of people in suits and skirts giving me money because I asked for it, when you get people one on one they surprise and delight you. 

While a majority of us allowed our inner trump to direct our actions and together can terrorize what Jesus called "the least of these," I celebrate the rolled-down car window and a hand holding out a $20 to the guy standing by the exit; the cop who might disdain their behavior helping up the trans~ victim of assault and listening to their story; the angry worker bee who has had it up to here with these illegals handing a bottle of water to the thirsty Guatemalan at 6 AM in front of Home Depot; the self-described trad wife whose greatest fear is she won't have dinner ready on time offering the single mom who's paying with EBT and is short $2 to add it to her bill, and then takes out another $10 in cash for her. 

Are these examples of self-aggrandizing individuals making themselves feel a little better about how they have it by deigning to give a little out in dribs and drabs? Maybe. Maybe it's all we've got. Maybe we're all we've got. Like the beloved Ram Dass said, "We're all just walking each other home." Even Jesus laid it out on the individual: "Sell all you possess and give it to the poor and then follow me." Maybe the best we can hope for in a mean America is the individuals who give away what they have one element at a time, making one person's day a little bit better. 

It's like the kid who throws a starfish back into the ocean. Help that one.

Look to the Bloggers

 I'm not bright enough to come up with a solution to the Hamas-Israel war/conflict, nor to the issues that existed before their Cold War became a Hot one. I wish i could claim to have one, since nearly everyone does. But the simple truth is that I can't even be certain which side has the lesser guilt.

That may sound like a copout. But there is no dearth of people, politicians, journalists, commentators, who are full of certainty. I am just saddened by the incredible loss of life. The killing has been indiscriminate and however and by whomever it is done, the result is the same. 

For my information I go to the BBC and The New York Times but they only provide me with the number of deaths and how they were done. The ways citizens celebrating or sleeping in their beds were killed or the ways citizens with no connection except they lived where missiles and rockets were killed. What I'm more interested in is in the people who are doing what I would be doing in their place: Reflecting out into the world what is happening all around me and what it does to me.

What I've been doing is looking for bloggers who are live in Gaza and the Israeli cities being hit. Thought experiment: Imagine yourself living your life day to day and suddenly bombs begin falling and people start dying all around you. What would you have to say?

I'm not listing any of the bloggers I'm reading, Palestinian and Israeli, because I want you to find them the same way I did. At random and through a lot of trial and error. What you will find is a lot of anger, hatred, fear, frustration, thoughts of vengeance; And you will find thoughts of forgiveness, exhaustion, pride, compassion, hope. No one has a monopoly on those, and certainly no state or group. 

Fred Rogers used to say, "Look for the helpers." I would paraphrase that to say, "Look for the bloggers," especially the ones who live in the areas under attack. They are the ones bearing the brunt of what is being done and blasting out, as best they can, what they experience. If we want the human condition, we can do no better than look to the humans under bad conditions.

 

Just One of Us

There's a debate between Stephen Fry and Gay Byrne on Irish tv in which Byrne askes Fry what he would say to God if he arrived at the gates of Heaven. “I’d say: ‘Bone cancer in children? What’s that about?'" Now Fry, as a roundhouse humanist who doesn't play around, continues, demanding of God "'How dare you! How dare you create a world where there is such misery that is not our fault. It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?’ That’s what I’d say.”

It's a good question, and as any religious student knows, it's the basis for the study of theodicy, the fact that there is evil in the world and how do we respond to God's role in it. If God is an omnipotent force for good, why do so many good people receive punishment in this life, while so many bad people flourish?

There are, of course, all kinds of answers relying on an afterlife and one's soul, but putting those aside, to say "It's part of God's plan" just doesn't cut it. It shouldn't, because by letting God off the hook, we let ourselves off as well. As an old adage goes, "I dreamt I asked God, Why is there suffering? And God said, I was just about to ask you."

Earlier this week while I was walking, I was singing "One of Us", a Joan Osborne tune I especially like because of the inclusion suggested by it. And there's a wonderful lyric that says, "What would you ask [God] if you had just one question?"

I'm not as pugnacious as Fry, so I'd leave out his How dare you! But my question would be almost word for word: Why do children die painfully from disease?

God's answer, I would hope, would be "I don't know." Which both horrifies and relieves me. Horrifying, because while I've long cast off notions of an all-powerful God, there is enough left in me to say, You mean, no one's in charge?

But my relief would manifest more powerfully. I believe that nothing is outside or not God, and that includes cancer and pain and horrible death. I don't accept the bumper sticker theology "God is good all the time," because God can't be. No one who has read the Bible and paid attention to the annihilation, murder on a whim, child-head-bashing, enforced slavery, and straight out genocide its writers attribute to God, can. My relief would stem from the idea that terrible death is not a part of God's outline, that it doesn't mean God has some ending in mind that requires, for instance, that babies die alone when left in the forest by desperate families hoping to reach a better life. Cancer and hunger and rot and mental illness are not evil. They simply are. To look at them any other way is to accept that God is a cruel son of a bitch who has stacked the deck against us. While I don't believe God is good all the time, I also don't believe God is evil. By answering "I don't know" (assuming God did; I don't have a secret conversation to share), God accepts there are some things even outside God's understanding. Far from meaning there is something greater than God, this is my understanding of God's Mystery. 

There's a lovely meme attributed to Adi Da Samraj running around Buddhist circles that says, "Relax, nothing's under control." I'm all right with that and I like to think God, for all the mystery, is too. 

Laugh in his face

When I was in my late teens or early 20s, I wrote a bad short story. This isn't anything in itself. At that age and at that point in our lives, most of us write bad stories of one kind or another. And my story wouldn't have risen to the "so bad it's interesting" level; it was simply an overwrought story full of its own importance and cleverness, and to be honest the only thing I remember of it is that it was part of an attempt I was making then to have all my stories interconnect by showing the different sides of the same characters (for instance, by having one character, an attempted rapist in one story, die in Vietnam saving a wounded soldier in another story), and as an indication of its poverty, I don't even remember the title.

But I do remember its denouement. The story was about elementary students whose teacher opts not to have a Christmas tree in their classroom, leading one child's father to confront the teacher in the parking lot after school in front of the kids. The father, who I modeled after a short, scared, violent man I knew in real life, punches the teacher in the face, knocking hm into the snow, and then drops into a defensive stance. The teacher, straightening up, instead of fighting him the way the kids hope for, laughs loudly at the father, collects his things, and walks to his car, still laughing. This might sound better and more nuanced than it was, and my story suffers from the teacher having to explain to the narrator why he did that.

But my point, that people who mete out violence deserve the deflation of a loud laugh and the unwillingness to take them seriously, is a good one. I don't remember where I got that but it's a good point: Try putting yourself above others by one means or another, and try to keep yourself there by violent reaction, and you need to be brought back to reality by a hearty belly laugh at your expense.

Not with you, but at you.

This is what I think we need in this age of trump, a solid laugh at what he and his supporters say about themselves and about him. To be sure, what they are doing and attempting to do, by taking on for themselves the responsibility of turning back the clock to a time when old rich white men make the rules everyone but them play by, is not a laughing matter. It hurts people in reality, sometimes killing them, and often the most vulnerable. That's what they count on to keep ourselves in line, that they are too serious and frightening in what they can do to us. How much more crushing to their sense of self to be reminded that we know they're afraid. They deserve no solace or pity.

Laugh in their faces.

Your uncle forwards a message that climate change as we're experiencing it is natural. Return it with a laugh. Someone you're having a debate with says trump is doing well for the economy. Laugh in his face. I'm not talking about a titter or a chuckle. I'm talking about a full, inarticulate, unstoppable belly laugh. As if what they are asserting is so obviously on the face of it ridiculous that the only rational response is to laugh at it, because it must be a joke. And make no mistake because trump and his assertions are a joke.

Would this have made a difference, had we treated trump as the empty suit he is at the start of his campaign as a self-referencing buffoon? Some would argue that we did exactly that, and further that it was our inability to take him and his ideas as a serious threat that led us to where we are. That may be the case. Perhaps our having done so worked in his favor, giving him and his followers the impulse to show us up for not having taken him and them seriously. I don't know. But I do know that they're expecting us now to take them seriously, and it's time to point out to them, no matter what harm they may try to do us, that we do not.

We won't leave

There aren't too many people, at least not that I know of or have heard of, who are seriously considering leaving the country because of trump and his policies, but I speculate about it sometimes. In a time when humanitarian advances in voting rights, women's rights, abortion rights, immigrant rights, gay rights, trans~ rights, worker rights, minority religious rights, and the rights of nearly anyone who isn't white and wealthy and self-described Christian are under fire when not in downright retrograde, it's an exercise in both pleasant self-deception and potential self-defense to daydream about it. 

But I won't. I don't think many will. Most of us, I suspect, will take our cue from this drawing. Many Americans may follow a bully, some Americans may be bullies. But most Americans hate bullying and know the proper response to a bully is protecting the bullied. It's what the angels of our better nature demand. 

Visiting Dad, Day 6

The reason I never give up hope is that everything is so basically hopeless. Hopelessness underscores everything--the deep sadness and fear at the center of life, the holes in the hearts of our families, the animal confusion within us; the madness of King George. But when you do give up hope, a lot can happen. When it's not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens like one of those fluted Japanese blossoms, flimsy and spastic, bright and warm. This almost always seems to happen in community: with family, related by blood or chosen; at church for me; and at peace marches.

--Anne Lamott, Small Victories

Seeing dad today was good and different. Good because he was in a very good mood, different because I realized his desire to sleep most of the day has become central to his life. This wasn't a new realization, as I recognized the importance of sleep to him last week. No, I think the important thing was my discovery that this is primarily his life. It's not a bad life, I think he's as content as he's ever been. But I think too that I'm finding that I need to not only to accept it but to live with it as well as he has. I must be as all right with his life and the way he lives it as he is. Can I be? Yes, I will have to be.

258 candles-days 57-48

I have been necessarily absent, as I first prepared for my vacation and then drove back to the thick to spend time with my dad. As a result, I'm behind on posting.

But this is an excellent article that makes the pertinent point on a subject whose scab seems never allowed to heal before it's torn off again. In the words of Simone Leigh, "We need to step up the care to.match the stress."

258 candles-days 157-158

The days when I had many friends who rode this horse are long behind me. But I remain glad of any help in keeping other people like them alive. To argue, as Maine's governor Paul LaPage does, that providing access to Naloxone provides abusers an out that simply leaves them free to shoot up again is not only, like Alexander Walley says, like arguing "that seatbelts encourage riskier driving," but suggests that some lives are more worth saving than others. Arguing that is not a moral choice but a moral failing. After all, no one would say that alcoholics shouldn't have AA available to them because it only gives them the chance to make their next binge sweeter. No one abuses a drug in order to make her life more exciting, only to make it seem that way. The reality is very, very boring. While a lot of people shooting up want to continue, a lot more don't, and they should be given every chance to eventually make that decision. Every chance. As Jesus said, forgiving another type of abuse, "seventy times seven."

258 candles-day 112

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: I'm not much of a Harry Potter fan. I read the first novel, enjoyed it, but never read any of the others. I've seen most of the movies here and there, or at least big parts of them. I consider them contemporary classics, although unlike Twain's definition, they are usually read. But I am a J.K. Rowling fan. Her story has been an inspiration to me, and her purposeful near-total giveaway of much of her Potter-money is what I'd call genuine spirituality. I'm not likely to pick up another of her books, but I am likely to keep her life in sight.

258 candles-day 79

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: A short film about a long run. 

258 candles-day 50

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: A now-viral photo demonstrates an important possibility among police. And while there's no proof the photos are of the situation they're meant to depict, this is the practice of a beloved community.

258 candles-day 20

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases. 

Today: Nursery Fields Forever. 

258 candles-Day 15

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: A friend writes movingly about explaining her cancer to her son.

258 candles-day 2

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.


Today: Greek islanders rescuing refugees.

two reasons i don't weep for this generation

There are actually many reasons, among them increased involvement in protest politics and recognition of the impact climatic change will have on their future, that I have faith in the millennial brood, but these are two that are personal to me.

1) The kids I work with are ages 12-18, with an average of 14 or 15. One evening at the girls' facility one of them made a comment about what she expected her future college career to look like, one-on-one interaction with her instructors, heavy and cultured class-participation, small classes-essentially her experience with groups at the facility. I disabused of that notion. She said, Thanks for shitting on my fantasy, and I flippantly responded, That's why they pay me the big bucks. And the same girl said, No, you get paid to tell us the truth.

2) Last night I was talking with a.couple of the boys about musicians they like and one was running off a list. Ozzy, AC/DC, Guns n Roses, JJ Cale. I did a double take. I said, How do you know JJ Cale? He said, My stepdad plays him all the time. He's really good. I've got a bunch of his music on my IPod. We spent a couple minutes talking about blues artists and their morphing into rock. He told me some Cale tunes I hadn't heard.

I am a fire extinguisher

In yesterday's counseling session I came up with a metaphor for what I do during most of my work. I teach, yes, at least for a little while each day, or facilitate group sessions. But that's only for an hour at a time and I spend at least three hours each week at each unit. Otherwise, what I do mostly is sit or stand around, sometimes talking, sometimes observing.

I explained the concept of the nonanxious presence which I had learned from my teacher Bob Albers and that he learned from Rabbi Edwin Friedman: the idea that sometimes the best one can be is simply present to another, the eye of calm in the midst of physical or mental chaos, the person who has nowhere else to be, nothing else to do, no one else to see. Someone who is there completely and attentively for the person in chaos. I see my role during most periods of my time on the units as maintaining a presence, someone who is calmly there. I'm not bored at these times, even if nothing is going on. I'm just there in a relaxed state, my presence unnecessary in the sense that I'm "not needed" at these times but at the ready if I am needed.

For instance, on Monday I was at one unit having dinner with the boys there as usual and after I put my plate away one of them came up and asked, "Do you have time to talk with me?" I said of course, and we sat down in a little-used room and talked for the next half hour easily and casually about a very troubling subject. True, I do have some experience already with this kid. We've talked a little before, usually after he's had an explosive episode and I'm there to remind him he's in control of his emotions and actions despite what his mind tells him. But there was no indication he was feeling anxious, or no more so than usual, but he was underneath his stoic exterior. He was experiencing an anniversary of an especially traumatic event and admitted blaming himself for it happening. I explained to him, no matter what he'd been told or what he felt, he was not responsible for what happened (he was a victim of this trauma, not an actor in it) and if he wanted some sense of closure from it. He said he did but didn't think he'd experience it. We talked more and he confessed he didn't feel comfortable talking with his therapist about what he wanted from him, especially relating to his emotions about the trauma. I asked if he wanted the opportunity to talk with me before his next appointment (which is today) and he said, yes, and could I come in with him to the appointment? I said I would, if it was all right with his therapist.

The only reason he was comfortable, I think, approaching me in the first place to unburden himself and ask for help (he isn't someone with a reputation for nuance until after he's become violent and then it's only to say he'd wanted help before), is because I'm a known quantity to him, a relaxed resource he's come to see at about the same time every week, doing about the same things for about the same length of time, and not being hurried or impatient in them. I see myself as resting against a wall (sometimes literally) until I'm needed. I am a fire extinguisher.

my truth

I've begun a new position as the spiritual coordinator (read: chaplain) at a pair of boys' and girls' residential treatment facilities and next Sunday I hope to initiate my first chapel service for them. I don't know if I'll be able to read the following message, but after several weeks of trainings, meetings, observations, and time spent with the kids, I've been moved to write this as the overriding message I want my ministry to reflect.

            Ten years ago I was teaching college English at prisons in Minnesota. I really like doing that. It was important work. During break one night an inmate came up and told me he wanted me to know what he’d done to be sentenced.

            Now, I don’t know if it’s as important a thing here as it is in prison, but you don’t ask someone what he or she has done in prison. It’s a private, personal secret in a very public place, People jealously guard it and sometimes it’s literally dangerous for other people to know how you broke the law.

            So when this guy said he wanted to tell me what he’d done I said, “I’d rather you didn’t.” He asked, “why not?” and I said, “right now I’m your teacher and you’re my student and I like you. But if I find out what you did I might not like you so much anymore.”

            But he took the chance and told me. And although it was something nasty, I still like him for who he was. It doesn’t always work out like that but sometimes, when you’re lucky, it does.

            I know why you’ve come to chapel, what it is you want. In addition to a break in your day, you want the answers. You want someone to tell you what they are, about god and the afterlife and heaven and hell. Most of all, you want someone to tell you it’s all worth it.

            I’m here to tell you the not-so-good news but it’s the truth. I don’t know if it’s worth it. I don’t think anyone knows. Some people come to what they think are the answers for everyone but at best they’re just the answers for them.

            That’s not to say you won’t find answers. For some of you, you might find answers in the Bible or the Koran or the Buddhist Sutras. And those are legitimate answers but they’ll be your answers and nobody else’s and you’ll only find them after you’ve looked a long time and really hard at them.

            You want to know what the secret is and that all the crap you’ve gone through, all the worst stuff you’ve done and had done to you, is worth it. That at the end of the day the good outweighs the bad and you are happy and satisfied and the world is smiles and rainbows. That might be the case. It’s not the case for me or most of the people I know. The world is sometimes a beautiful place and sometimes it’s hellish. Most of the time it’s a balance between the two. I hate to be the one to tell you it never really does get better or easier. Not in the way you want it to: you find the pill or the therapy or make the breakthrough that makes that possible. I used to look for those and it might work for a little while. But eventually you see through that and realize it wasn’t the real answer you wanted.

Life is hard. Maybe it’s meant to be. Maybe it’s better that it’s harder for some of us than for others. I can’t promise you it won’t get harder. You’ll make breakthroughs and you’ll backslide, sometimes worse than before. That’s how life is. Someone once said the only constant is change. A Greek philosopher named Heraclitus famously said you can’t step in the same river twice. The truth is that that’s the truth. You might feel crappy as all hell today and tonight feel like yours is the best life in the world. And tomorrow you might feel exactly the opposite. I can’t promise that won’t happen all your life.

            But I can promise you one thing. This is unchanging, no matter how much you search, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how many dead ends you end up following, no matter how many times you scream and fight and curse god and those around you. There will always be someone who will help you. Call it god, call it reality, call it staff, call it the divine in other people, but there will always be people who are willing to be with you. To explain things, to tell you what you might find ahead, to comfort you and remind you that, while the bad things you’ve gone through may or may not be worth it, you are worth it. This is my truth, my good news. No matter how you feel, no matter what anyone says or how the world treats you, you are worth it.

one thing at a time

At times I plan ahead for mental emergencies, not knowing that's what I'm doing. Such a one was my naming and descriptor a week ago for a February 23 sermon: 

Beer, and Thank You: Someone said that the hardest thing to complete is any project that involves sticking with it long after the hoped-for result has disappeared. In simpler words, once we lose hope, we lose interest. But it’s also true that, as Jefferson Smith once said, “The lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.”  Join [us] for a shot in the arm for whatever ails you in fighting the good fight.

 

It comes of reading a column by Gabrielle Giffords concerning both her rehabilitation and the efforts she and her husband have made in support of restrictions on gun availability whose national defeats since the Newtown massacre make the efforts seem hopeless.

I have depression and the dim light of winter always exacerbates it. That I live in the midwest, where I had always grown up despising, and on the rim in the midwest where there are few opportunities for work or the arts or companionship, manages to slip my depression a Viagra. So it is good that I am forced for the next month to consider more closely my own statement that I am fighting the good fight. As I've taken as my mantra the past few years, "One thing at a time."

Here's a video from someone we lost last year to keep us on the road:



If my man Lou can get beyond that mullet we can get beyond this.

the twelve holy days

A sermon given to the

Dakota Unitarian Universalist Church

Burnsville, MN

December 22, 2013

Scholars are well aware now that Jesus, who probably existed either as an individual or as a group of men and women over the first centuries of the new millenium, certainly was not born on December 25 or anywhere in December, at least not according to the New Testament’s testimony.  It would be sometime in the spring according to the gospels, which makes a good deal more sense metaphorically, Jesus as the lamb of god and bringing in the spring of Christianity and all that.  Interestingly, the First Day of Christmas in the popular song we sang earlier is not Christmas.  In most chronicles of the twelve holy days, Christmas is considered the pre-day, day zero if you will.  It’s the day for celebrating the birth of Jesus among Christians, but it’s also associated with the births of Mithras, Attis, Aion, Horus, Dionysus and the Unconquered Sun.  Mithras you may be familiar with.  The Persian god of light, his name means “Friend” and he is often synonymous with the Sun who protects man after death.  Attis or Atys is not to be confused with Attic which means having to do with Athens, but was a young man laid claim to by the hermaphroditic fertility goddess Agdistis who was so maddened by her jealousy he castrated himself in frustration and before he could cut his throat was changed by her into a pine tree.  Agdistis herself, by the way, was also made wholly female by castration.  Aion is the Germanic term of personification for the age of the universe, an eternal being itself personified.  Horus is familiar as one of the Sky Gods as well as a Sun God and is often represented as having the head of a falcon.  Dionysus, also known as Bacchus, is the god of wine and good times.  His name in Roman, Iacchus, comes from the Latin for “shout” and is thought to have originated as an epithet for the rowdy, noisy god.

            The Unconquered Sun is an interesting character because it is both a stand-in for any of the above gods as well as a euphemism for the thing itself.  The unconquered sun is what we see in the sky along about this time.  It is equally connected with the Reindeer Man, a sort of Green Man of the North, a pagan mix of Sintaklass and Odin, who appears at this time of year with the gift of deer.

            Why twelve days?  The number twelve pops up a lot of places in both Abrahamic and pagan beliefs.  Twelve apostles, twelve months of the year, twelve zodiac signs, two twelve-hour segments to a day, the twelve of the Circular Council to the Dalai Lama, the twelve members of the Arthurian Round Table, the historical Twelve Peers of France, the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve imams in Shi’a, the twelve principle gods of the Greeks, the twelve cranial nerves in the human cerebellum, the age 12 when a Jewish girl matures and receives bat mitzvah, the twelve sons of Odin, and even the twelve function keys on my PC keyboard—F1 through F12. 

            The true first day of Christmas is Boxing Day, so-called from the British custom of giving a servant a Christmas box the day after his masters have celebrated.  It’s also associated with St. Stephen, the proto-martyr associated with horses—it’s said his body was returned to his people on the back of a horse—and with wrens.  It’s said that to kill a wren on any day other than Boxing Day is to invite bad luck.

            The second day, December 27^th, is given over to Mother Night or MotherCarey or Mother Christmas.  She is the Anglicized version of the German Frau Holle or Holda or Hulda, a figure of fertility, abundance and justice.  She was often seen, originally, as a beautiful woman in white and with a golden girdle or a sash, dispensing gifts from a sleigh pulled by her dogs.  She probably physically resembled the evil character Mrs Colter played by Nicole Kidman in the film The Golden Compass, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Phillip Pullman based this character on her. 

            But far from the nasty Miss Colter, who Pullman chooses to personify the less savory aspects of Christianity, Frau Holle, whose name means “kindly one,” was a gentle goddess specializing in the care of children.  It was up to the early church to turn her to a witch who stole unbaptized children.  But at midnight on the Eve of Epiphany, it’s said that a man walking home heard voices, many voices, behind him and stepped aside in time to allow Frau Holle and her passel of children and her flowing white train to pass him, the children laughing and running beside her.  The last of the children, the smallest, kept falling behind from tripping over his nightshirt.  The man gave him his own belt to tuck the shirt into.  Frau Holle saw this and rewarded the man with a gift that his own children would forever be without want.  It is important that we recall Frau Holle or Mother Night or Mother Carey or Mother Chrismas as a mother.  She is both nurturing and kind and a shrewd judge of character and it’s for these aspects we honor her.

            Following is Day three:  the Day of Holy Innocents.  In the Middle Ages this day of Childremass was considered particularly unlucky; nothing begun on December 28^th would be completed, since children have remarkably poor attention spans and tend to wander around abstractedly.  The practice for this day is an ancient one that survived until the 18^th century: regularly beating children on this day.  The idea was that by mercilessly flogging and smacking children on the 28^th, one would both drive out the evil spirits that had lodged there the previous year and serve as a surrogate for any deserved beatings the following year.  The practice evolved into a call for ritual, painless token beatings between children and parents, husbands and wives, masters and servants.  On this day we honor children and correspondingly honor both our wishes for what they will become and our recognition of the reality of who they are.  We also recall our lives before their arrival, although it’s probably best not to think of that before we whip them.

            The fourth day is one we might be a little familiar with.  This is the Feast of the Fools, celebrated in the Hunchback of Notre Dame and a few other novels and a MASH episode.  This is the day when the normal order of things is reversed.  Servants become masters, pupils become teachers, women behave like men, and the fools rule.  Naturally, this is my favorite day.  Parties were held, masques given, general mayhem encouraged.  It was a ritualistic method for blowing off steam, the opportunity for people who lived by the strictest restrictions to behave in the riotous, cavalier way they had foresworn in order to keep their places in the community.  At one time, this day was more celebrated and better-remembered than Christmas.  So when someone tells you that we ought to put the Christ back in Christmas, you ought to remind him to put the Fool back in Fool’s Day.

Day five is the Feast of the Boar’s Head.  On this day, two ceremonies are honored:  the Scandinavian tradition that Frey, the god of sunshine, rides across the day atop Gulli-burstin, his golden boar, whose spikes are the rays of the sun.  The second is the older, now lost, tradition in England of the boar’s head, whose meat graced the Christmas table until probably the mid Twelfth century when it disappeared, being brought in as the final remnant of the sacred meal and distributed among the revelers.  It is meet we should remember the boars, now gone in both England and here, by leaving for them a small offering to their memory, an apple or orange, in the event one is still snuffling around.

New Year’s Eve, that most festive of drinking holidays, is day six, and in many places supersedes the celebration of Christmas itself.  In Gaelic Christmas is called An Nollaig Mhor “big yule” and New Year’s Day An Nollaig Bheag “little Yule.”  And why not?  The change of year has sturdier and more aged roots than the ostensible birth of the Christ.  Still, how anyone might have guessed this day would become the night when everything switches off for one year and switches on for the next is a feat of mathematical dexterity I couldn’t begin to fathom.  Nevertheless, December 31^st’s feast is known as Hogmanay and it was the day when the Druid priests cut the sacred mistletoe and distributed sprigs among the people.  Hogmanay itself is a corruption of the French term au gui menez “lead [us] to the mistletoe,” and in some parts of France children still celebrate the day with a race during which they cry, “Au guy l’an neuf, au guy Gaulois” “to the mistletoe, to the French mistletoe.”

This is the day when we take care of the things we have missed taking care of throughout the year.  The trash is taken out and fresh sheets placed on the beds.  Socks are darned and brass and silver shined.  Pictures are hung straight.  This is the day for Reclaiming Unfinished Business, clearing up all those things we neglected the rest of the year.  Everyone experiences a new beginning, a new clearing of the old.  After sunset, juniper branches and fresh water were brought into the house.  The branches were dried out overnight, and in the morning the head of house drank the first sips from the water and sprinkled everyone else with some.  Then the dried juniper was lit, the doors and windows latched, and the house was fumigated with the burning branch.  This ensured the gifts of the new year were appreciated appropriately.  The new year’s blessing was brought by the first person to cross the threshold to visit, called “first footing.”  All the lights were put out except for a single candle, and then that first visitor must step outside, protecting the candle from the elements.  At the stroke of twelve, he reenters, is given a mug of eggnog, and sets about relighting all the candles and lanterns of the house, blessing the house with new light.  Often that person also gives a handsel, a gift of coal or whiskey to make the blessings concrete.

Day seven of course everyone sleeps in.  This is the Kalends of the new year, the hopefulness of the new day.  The old year is now officially dead and while we may not immediately see any benefits yet to the new, there is always a reason to be thankful, even if it is our ability to have made it through another year.  In contrast to New Year’s Eve day, nothing is taken out of the house this day—trash, bones, excrement, they are all left inside until the next day, to ensure blessings of the first footing do not escape. 

One of the nostalgic traditions we think of as Christmas in origin is caroling, but this is actually done on the Seventh Day and is referred to as Wassailing.  Wassail is a heated, alcoholic apple cider and is meant to be shared with the trees of the orchard as well as with the visitors who sing.  Robins are the guardians of apple trees and it was them that the wassail was intended to provoke, cake pieces and bread pieces soaked in the wassail being stuck to branches to reward them for their past year of faithful service.  On this bleak day it is beneficent to intone, “The luck of the year, it is the bird-quiet hour, the midday contemplation of the sun.  On this bleak day, when no sun shines, what wraps the birds in silence, what power blankets their song?”  It’s the day of prophesying and divination—weather divination especially, as you can imagine from a people reliant on weather for their well-being, and one saying from Scotland runs, “Wind from the west, fish and bread; wind from the north, cold and flaying; wind from the east, snow on the hills; wind from the south, fruit on trees”—and the first day’s water drawn from the well is considered especially blessed and called the flower of the well. 

The Eighth Day is the day for sitting inside to contemplate and reflect on snow.  It’s imperative that we remain on snow’s good side, since to be in opposition to snow is to be in opposition to winter and that’s simply a waste of energy.  We pay our respects to snow on this day, for its cancelling out the darkness at midwinter and its transformation of even the bleakest spaces into places of wonder and enchantment. 

The Cherokee have a story about the Ninth day, which is devoted to evergreens.  The Druids of course revered the oak and during Kalends yew and juniper play a major role.  In the middle ages there was a well-known play about the Paradise Tree, a descendant of the original Tree of Knowledge, which Adam smuggled out of Eden and planted in the outer world, where it grew to huge proportions and provided the wood for the cross on which Christ was crucified. 

Back to the Cherokee.  When the Great Mystery created all the trees and plants she wanted to give something to all of them.  But she couldn’t decide among them who best deserved it, so she proposed a contest.  Whoever could keep watch for seven days and seven nights would receive the gift.  All the trees were atwitter to be given such an important duty and had no problems remaining awake the first night.  But on the second night they found it hard to stay awake, and the flowers were the first to fall asleep.  By the third night, the birch and grasses were drooped, and by the fourth night the elms were snoring.  On the fifth and sixth nights, the maples and even the oaks had drifted off, until, by the eighth morning only a few—the pine, the cedar, the spruce and fir and holly and laurel—were still awake and watchful.  “What great endurance you have!” cried out the Great Mystery, and so she gave them the gift:  they would remain green forever and keep guard throughout the winter while all the others sleep.  The evergreens, this story says, are always awake.  And always watching. 

            Day Ten is interesting because it is two different days for men and women.  For both it was the day when each had to return to the drudgery of work after the luxurious time off afforded by the festivities of midwinter.  In the case of women who in these preindustrialized times were often employed as weavers and spinners, it was known as St. Distaff‘s Day, while for the men who were also expected to return to work, it was known as Plough Monday.  Whether the day itself fell on a Monday or not wasn’t important, it was simply another Monday in their eyes.  This became the excuse for another day of celebration as mummers, the bemasked players who appeared throughout the year at festivals and feasts, now sped through town blessing the ploughs and spindles.  Today Plough Monday has been given its own day in England, January 8, separate from the twelve holy days, but it’s thought to originate in another ancient Roman celebration, Compitaline.  In this ritual a small shrine was built where four estates met to the four directions, with a miniature plough and wooden doll set on each alter, and then the first earth-breaking of the new year was done on each property. Until now we are living in Liminal Time, the threshold between extraordinary and ordinary events that for pagans began in late October or early November with Samhain. With St. Distaff’s Day we begin a return to normalcy, what Christianity calls Ordinary Time. 

            The Eleventh day of Christmas, January 5, is the Eve of Epiphany and the Festivalof the Three Kings.  This day is given over to the Magi whose journey is often a microcosm of the journey we ourselves make spiritually.  Consider, they were themselves seekers after something and doing what felt right to them to do, going where their inner compass told them to go, and for so many of us, here today in this church, we have traveled so far and so wide only on the basis of our own compasses, be they in our hearts or our heads.  As the Magi found what they sought in the form of a child, may you find what you seek here. 

            This is the day to consider too the gifts that so often become the major focus of these holy days, forgetting as we do that we are ourselves the recipients of a gift.  I quote now from JohnMatthews: 

At a time when the commercial Christmas has a tendency to swamp the sacredness of the season, we ask and are being asked, ‘What do you want this year?’  There are certainly things we would quite like, things that we hope will be brought for us, but these are not the same as our wants.  True wants are not small things satisfied by prettily wrapped parcels:  they are the immense needs of inner space that can be overwhelmed by all our little wants and yearnings.  To consider our real needs—the things we lack in our lives—is often too frightening, opening up an abyss of need that calls our very existence into question.

Our real wants eat holes in us:  never resting, never loving, never greeting, never finding, never seeking, never being satisfied deep down.  These ravenous wants define our treasures…they create a Christmas list that no store could supply:  time to stop and really enjoy, in a space of quietness and contentment all the things we were put on earth to do.

Space to give and receive love reciprocally.  The grace to seek and find our spiritual joy.  Freedom from the tyranny and burden of other’s expectations, of what others think.  Acceptance of ourselves as we truly are.

            This then is the gift afforded us on the twelfth day.  Epiphany.  It means manifestation, making an appearance, and refers theologically to the appearance of Christ to the Three Kings.  But it’s a lot more than that.  In literature James Joyce gave us another meaning in an early draft of what would become Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  He describes it as a sudden insight, an instant when reality shines through an ordinary object, when “its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance.”  It’s the appearance of what we need.  Perhaps not what we want, because that’s always going to be something good, something we like, and our epiphany is more likely to be something we haven’t considered and don’t want and, god help us, we don’t like.  For me, epiphany is often the realization that the shift from dark to light carries with it a responsibility not to continue hunkering in but, like a bear or a vole, to start the stirring for the reawakening I undergo each spring.  For you it might be a recognition that you’ve had all your needs met and now it’s time to meet them for other people.  For others it may be exactly the opposite:  it’s time to consider yourself a while rather than others.  There’s no one size fits all when it comes to epiphany.  It can come in any number of ways:  in someone’s smile, in the smell of woodsmoke where we thought there were no houses, in the sudden, unexpected taste of a good wine, in the sound of voices where we expected to be alone, in the touch of flesh on flesh that reminds us we are with one another.  These tiny moments bring us out of ourselves and into the wider world. 

            Like anything artistic, epiphany can be ruined by over definition.  Let’s take a minute of silence to reflect on what we have been given.