Heartbreak

Dear ones, and I mean every reader, every American, every other human. Again today our hearts break as we read the news of the little children killed in Connecticut. Again we ask ourselves what we can do to prevent this violence, to change our laws and our culture and ourselves so that children are not in danger when they go to school. Again we weep. Friends and colleagues have been posting about the need for tighter gun control, and about the very human need to hug our children, any children, hard today. Both of those needs are true for me. And true, too, is the need to weep, to keen, to lament loudly. Sometimes at a memorial service a family member will warn me they might cry, or apologize later for crying too much. I usually say the same thing in response: this is the right time to cry. This is a moment that deserves the respect of our tears. And so if you are crying today, I say thank you. Thank you for having a heart that still breaks, for recognizing in these children your own children, for seeing that we are one human family and that when tragedy hits one of us it hits each of us. I will be crying too. Don't forget--after the crying, we organize, we protest, we legislate. But first, we weep. Again, we weep.

Swimming, Piano, and Lessons of Life

As readers of this blog may remember, my older daughter recently started taking piano lessons. I wrote a few months ago about my excitement for her, and how I was trying to rein it in and allow her to have her own experience. Turns out, she loves them. She has a fabulous teacher, but she also clearly has at least some natural interest in and aptitude for music. She's doing well in the lessons (whatever "well" means for a 4 year old...she's no prodigy!) and most importantly she's having a great time. The last lessons she took were swimming lessons at our local Y. She also had great teachers, but she didn't have much interest or aptitude for swimming. And although I think it's important to learn to swim for safety reasons, we're giving her a break from that...trusting that somewhere along the line a camp counselor will get her the rest of the way from the doggie paddle to proficient. What's interesting to me as I look at her two experiences is how much differently she behaves--and, I think, feels--when she's learning about something that is the right fit for who she is. It has me thinking about all the kinds of things we try to convince ourselves to be: to be a certain kind of parent, or a particular profession, or a kind of exerciser. All the boxes we try to fit into, and then the freedom and joy we feel when we move from that box into another box, an us-sized box, one that really fits our true selves. We can become completely convinced that we're an inept exerciser, only to discover that it's just that we didn't like running, but we really rock at kick-boxing. Or think that we can't study worth a darn, until we discover a subject that we're passionate about, and suddenly we're making flashcards and absorbing material like the A student we never thought we could be. Who knows if piano will stick, or if my daughter will eventually come to love swimming. I just hope that all of us find the freedom to explore until the right box comes along.

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.

Music, Mystery, and Magic

Twice in the last couple of months I've had the experience of hearing a musician create a sound that seems...impossible. Once was at a platform service at WES, when the percussionist Tom Teasley created the most amazing melodies by--as far as I could tell--banging in random places on an overturned bowl. The other time was this past weekend at a colleague's installation ceremony, where an electric violinist used what turned out to be a looper to layer his own sounds on themselves, creating a virtual symphony all by himself. Those experiences, which at the time I just enjoyed for their beauty, got me thinking about mystery and magic more broadly. I liked learning about the looper and how the electric violinist produced those layered sounds, but in some ways it was even cooler when I didn't know how he was doing it. I feel the same way about magicians...I don't really want to learn how the trick works. I enjoy the suspension of disbelief. And how about in the world at large? Rooted in a humanistic faith, many of us value the scientific method, our ability to explore and experiment and learn about our world. Is there a place in all of that for mystery and magic? Are there some things that we don't need to, or don't want to, learn about--things that we just want to wonder at? I imagine the answer is different for each of us. I know plenty of scientists who would say understanding exactly how the universe works makes them find it even more awe-inspiring. And others who say we'll never answer every question anyway, so we can be assured that some things will be mysteries, at least during our lifetimes. For me, a little mystery and magic is a good thing. How about you?

Being...Quiet.

This past Tuesday, I finally did something I've been meaning to do for about seven years. Something I thought would really add to my spiritual journey. Something I've just got to tell you about (obviously, since it's now become a blog post). Something I might talk to you about, too, if I see you...because I really do like to talk. I went on silent retreat. Before you feel impressed with me, I should say it was only four hours of silence. Less, if you count the centering circle in the beginning and the sharing circle at the end. But it was still the longest period of time I have been intentionally, thoughtfully silent. And guess what? It was great! Part of that was the beautiful scenery, a retreat center near Gaithersburg, MD. And part of it was being intentionally quiet along with 20 or so other people, all of us with our own books or journals, our own walks or front-porch sitting, our own thoughts. Similar to meditating with a group of people, I found the energy around me palpable, and so interesting to experience. I was aware of other things, too. I'm someone who's usually on the lookout for metaphorical meaning in the world (a hazard of both my profession and my personality), but that became even more true when I was silent. Suddenly everything I saw or did took on a meaning, reminded me of whatever I was thinking about or wondering about, every question I came to ask. It's not that I thought those were messages sent from on high, but that I found a way to create meaning, to see meaning, in the everyday occurrences that life provided. Of course I was also more aware of my other senses and abilities when my mouth wasn't busy talking. I appreciated the wind more, the flowers. I was able to notice more deeply than usual. Have you tried being intentionally silent for a while? Perhaps much, much longer than I have! What was your experience like? Or--what else brings you that kind of experience in life?