You Can't Stop the Leaves from Falling Down

Yesterday I spent some time raking leaves in my yard—the first time this fall. I know it’s far too early to bother, I can see the trees still heavy with green leaves (not even turned orange yet!). But there’s something about creating a little order in a disordered world that appeals to me this morning.

So much of life, really, can be seen as raking too early, or raking when we could just as well not bother. Why make our beds each morning, when we’re just going to pull the covers back a few hours later and crawl in? In fact, why bother getting up at all?

There’s nothing like fall to bring on an existential crisis, a collective wondering of what life means. And it’s one place where I think our religious tradition is a true salvation. We are the meaning-makers, our history tells us…the point of it all is whatever we make it. For me, it helps to think of the biggest we I can. We, the people of the world. We, the people spanning all history. We, the deeply connected ecosystem.

We are writing a story together, a story that is so big and so long we won’t ever get a chance to read it. But every day, we have the opportunity to add to the story, and to make our addition, our chapter, one that tells of hope and love, of relationships and giving, of hard work and attention in the world. We won’t have the chance to see how the story ends—and I won’t ever have a completely leaf-free lawn—but we can make our contribution to the kind of story we think we’d like. Rake on.

Library Meditations

I spent part of yesterday in the library, renewing a couple books and looking for new ones. My practice is to head right over to the new fiction section, and then to indulge in exactly what we were taught not to do in elementary school. I love judging books by their covers.

I stand in front of the shelves and pick them up, the slim volumes with high impact graphics, the big hardcovers with faded sepia pictures on the front. I read the title, see who's quoted on the back, occasionally glance at the description inside the book jacket. And then I assemble my little pile, based entirely on what they look like.

I've almost never heard of any of the titles I bring homes, and few of the authors. This book selection practice is, for me, a moment of trusting what I see, and what others tell me. It's also a chance to try something out about which I have almost no knowledge...to open myself to whatever lies between that front and back cover that I found appealing.

Occasionally I find that the book and I just don't agree--not the genre I had hoped for, or writing I find tedious. But most of the time I'm invited into a world, a life, a story that I hadn't expected and that I love suddenly knowing. Which, when you think about it, is true in life, too. So this week, I invite you to pick up all kinds of different books, all kinds of different people, and welcome the adventure of finding out what's inside.

Blog Action Day: Water!

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Welcome to blog action day! As someone who feeds on human connections, it's no surprise that I love the idea of people around the world talking about the same thing. The topic this year is water, and I wanted to take the chance to talk about one of the Washington Ethical Society's social justice initiatives, a partnership with a small village in El Salvador called El Rodeo.

Actually, what I really want to tell you about is buckets and terracotta filters. That's what goes into a water filtration device that can bring clean water to anyone in the world. Water from any source is poured into the filter and collects in the bucket, then is dispensed through a spigot on an as-needed basis. Because the water is contained in the bucket, re-contamination is avoided. Clean water significantly decreases disease, particularly in children, and I don't need to tell you why that's important.

Those buckets and filters were one of the things that the El Rodeo community identified as a need when they met a delegation from the Washington Ethical Society for the first time this past summer. The emphasis of the delegation was connection building, relationship building--you know, religious stuff. But at the end they talked about concrete needs, and clean water was it.

I invite you to come hear more about the buckets and filters, and about the El Rodeo-WES partnership, on Sunday, October 31 at 12:30pm at WES. Until then, enjoy all the clean, de-contaminated water you drink today, and may every sip inspire a little gratitude.

And the world celebrates...

Could the world have gotten better news than all 33 miners being pulled to safety today? All day long I kept hearing reports: two have reached the top, half are now out, they expect to have them all up by . Facebook status updates applauded each success. Apparently even the president is watching.

We love these stories, stories of human courage and salvation. And it is that love--not the stories themselves, but the way we love them--that convinces me that we as a species truly have the capacity for incredible goodness.

I thought the same thing at a visit to the Chicago Ethical Society a couple of weeks ago. No miners were pulled to safety there, but I had the chance for a wonderful conversation with members about human dignity and worth, about human kindness. Person after person, they recalled stories of people who helped them carry their luggage in foreign countries, taxi drivers who brought them to their hotel and waived away the fare. What I marveled at was not the stories, which happen all the time, but the way that the tellers cherished those stories. They were reminders, for them, of the goodness of humanity.

Then came the story from the Holocaust survivor. He lost his entire family in the camps, walking to Switzerland as a boy. And he spoke about the kindness he found there, about the people who took him in--"me, a boy, who had nothing to give them!"--who fed him and cared for him and sent him to university. I never lost my faith in people's essential humanity, he told me.

This is true faith. May we all believe in it.

It Gets Better...Someday

My heart has sunk each time I've read about another teen killing himself because of bullying based on his sexual orientation. One would have been tragic. At four in the last few weeks, the situation is truly frightening.

Of course people are responding with sadness and with outrage. They should. But some people are also responding with love. Dan Savage, the very funny (and usually very adult) advice columnist started the It Gets Better Project, which airs on YouTube and features gay adults talking about their experiences of bullying and saying, basically, that it gets better. It doesn't change the horror that millions of teens experience every day. But it's something.

We can all do something. The heart of the religious life, in Ethical Culture and in many religious traditions, is the impulse to do good. In Ethical Culture, that impulse is based in our belief that every single person is precious, is worthy. If you know someone, or see someone, who needs to hear that good news again, be sure to say it. If you need to hear it again, be sure to say it. Be good to each other. It gets better, someday, because we make it so.

It's Not the Soup

I just saw a commercial that started with beautiful images--families hugging, a toddler being tossed in the air, an older woman swimming in the surf. The narrator asked us, "what are you doing to get happy?" I thought back to my platform address on Sunday, to the comments I heard from people later that day about what makes them joyful--dancing, playing with their children, doing good for someone else.

Cut back to the commercial, as we see a delighted looking woman and the narrator asks another question: "Have you tried soup to make you happy?"

I love soup. Especially on a cold day, it really does warm you up. It makes me, I suppose, a little happy to have a good bowl of soup.

But I have to tell you, buying soup is not, in the end, going to make you happy. If I could have added one more layer to my address on Sunday, it would have been considering the way that real human connection, religious human connection, is fulfilling in a way that our material culture never will be. Urged to buy more and more of whatever people are selling today, we think we'll find some kind of joy in that experience. I'm here to tell you, it's not the soup. It's the people across the table.

When All Is Not Well

Last night I watched a movie about super hero kids which turned out to be surprisingly violent. It was cartoon violence--the movie was actually a comic book adaptation--but the blood looked plenty real to me. In an attempt to disengage from the gore on TV, I opened my laptop and scrolled through the headlines.

It wasn't better. A man had barricaded himself in a burning building, shots were fired somewhere else in the city. Even People, my refuge of ridiculous pop culture, was no better, highlighting a tragic story of a child lost.

The world is sometimes simply too much for me. I reach my limit of bad things for a day, and I want to shut my eyes and pretend it's all a comic book, none of it heartbreakingly real.

At those times, I often remember words from Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest whose writing I find deeply resonant. This morning, it's these few paragraphs I remember; the whole piece can be found here. May these words be a reminder to you, too, of the beauty that always lies beneath and behind the heartbreak.

There is always tragedy somewhere, as the news reminds us so well. But there is not always tragedy everywhere, which the news does not make quite so clear. The good news, also known as the gospel, is that where ferries are going down, brave people are diving into water to lift thrashing children to safety. Where crops are failing, generous people are providing relief for farmers and migrant workers, and where a young girl is kidnapped from her bed, an entire community is turning out to hunt clues, post flyers, cook food and keep watch with her family.

Meanwhile, there are entire towns where nothing terrible is happening for an hour or two, where parents are caring for children with remarkable tenderness, where nurses are tending patients, mail carriers are delivering packages, and at least one man who owns a small business is taking off work early to coach a girl's soccer team. Terrible things will continue to happen in these places, which the best efforts of such people will not be sufficient to prevent, but their bursts of gratuitous kindness are the mustard seeds from which healing bushes sometimes grow. They constitute the alternate reality that I want to live in, even if it means limiting my exposure to other kinds of news.

When I resist the economy and despair of the dominant world in which I live, I resist from a minority viewpoint that I learned in church. In that alternate reality, which operates on the divine economy, human beings are worth more than what they can buy or sell, and suffering breaks open as many hearts as it breaks down. There are many kinds of evangelism, I know, but here is one I can embrace: in a culture of fear, addicted to the bad news of sin and death, to keep telling stories of human kindness and divine grace—without commercials of any kind. In a world like ours, the church may be the only corporate sponsor that can afford to deliver such good news for free.