Ally Yourself

I've been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be an ally. As a white person, a person with economic privilege, a straight person, I've often seen myself as an ally to people who experience less privilege in our culture's system. But recently an anti-racist educator challenged that idea of being an ally, suggesting that the whole concept is embedded in a system of oppression...where some have privilege and some don't, and those with privilege can be an ally. She encouraged me to think about the idea of being an anti-racist white person instead, of choosing to put forth an identity that actively works against the system of oppression. If this is all getting a little heady, let me suggest a more tangible example--a time recently when I might have been an ally, but when I felt like I was just part of a new culture. The recent election included the passage of marriage equality in Maryland, something I had worked a little on and hoped a lot for. In the days that followed, I had an interesting experience. As I spoke with friends who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual--the people who would be potentially affected by the new law because they were now able to marry their partners, at least in one more state--I struggled with what to say. Part of me wanted to say "congratulations!" as though this was their victory. And I recognize that on some level, as a woman married to a man whose marriage has never been called into question, my friends and colleagues who are LGB or queer have a personal relationship with this law that I will never experience. But at the same time, I felt as though I wanted to say congratulations to myself, to all of Maryland, to everyone else who had worked on and hoped for this. I felt not like an ally to a group that had finally won its rights, but like a part of a new thing, a full participant in a society that was doing something right, something loving and inclusive. I think that this was a taste of what it's like to move beyond ally-dom and into anti-ism-dom, whether it's racism or heterosexism or any other kind of ism. Or maybe it's not even anti-ism-dom but inclusion-dom, or equality-dom, or whatever kind of world isn't just about fighting systems of oppression but actually imagining itself without systems of oppression. We have a long way to go, on all those isms. But I'm beginning to think that on that journey, I don't want to be just an ally...I want to be a full traveler. I would love to hear thoughts and responses to all of this, from those who resonate with the word ally, who don't think it's quite right, and everything in between!

Thank Everyone for Everything

I've been thinking about gratitude recently, about how--to paraphrase my colleague Mary Herman on Stone Soup Sunday--Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays that commercialism hasn't been able to ruin. There's something just essentially human about the impulse to be thankful, to thank each other and thank the universe and thank the spirit of love or life or God, or whatever works for us. Anne Lamott, the writer, has a new book out about prayer called "Help, Thanks, Wow" because she thinks a prayer is always one of those things, and the 13th century German theologian Meister Eckhart said, "If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is 'thank you,' that would suffice." In a humanist community, we can be a little itchy about prayer, but we're rarely itchy about saying thank you--or anyway, we certainly shouldn't be. But sometimes it's hard to think whom we are thanking, if it's not another person. There are things out there that no person gave us, but that we love and marvel at and appreciate all the same. Are we thankful to the world? To science? To evolution? Actually, I feel thankful to all of those things, or at least about them. I'm also thankful for what I call grace: for the sort of accidental, or at least serendipitous, beauty in the world. For the care and love that people show each other, and the wonder of the world, and just the way life is so nice sometimes. There was a poem by Marilyn Nelson that I came across a while back which says this better than I can. It seems a little morbid at first, and it's titled "Psalm," which you might think is another of those itchy words. But please do click on this link and read it (I don't want to paste it here for copyright reasons). And then tell me if you see the connection, too, the connection to...I'm not sure, just the luck sometimes of being alive in this world. Happy Thanksgiving.

New York: Everyone's City

My family and immediate area was lucky to escape most of Hurricane Sandy's wrath, but I've been reading about and looking at pictures from New York and New Jersey with a sense of such pain and loss. And that has me thinking about why I feel this heartache so deeply--why the images in the paper and on TV feel like the images of my town, not some place hundreds of miles away. Of course there are people I love in New York City and its surrounding suburbs, and I've visited the city enough in childhood and adulthood to know many of the streets I now see flooded and overrun with debris. But there's something more there--something that I think the country experience on 9/11, too. New York feels like our city, all of our city...or anyway it feels like my city in some way that I can't quite define but surely experience. I spoke last Sunday at our Remembrance Day platform service about places, and how they can remind us of the people we've lost. Now I'm thinking about places we've lost, and the way that we can lose places we've never even been: places that we meant to visit, or that hold a place in our own or in our culture's imagination. How many songs are about New York City, how many plays or movies are set there? Somehow we've all been to New York, whether our feet have ever touched ground or not. And then there's a piece too, I think, about the humanity there...the sheer numbers of people in New York City and its environs, the humanness in all its messy, diverse glory. We can all find ourselves in the faces of New York, if only because there are so many faces to look at. And that, too, tugs on our heartstrings. I don't have any questions today, just the musings of someone who is thinking of my human family north of here. And I bet that, whoever you are and wherever you live, you are too.