John just handed me the following Latin anagram on a post-it:
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
trans: We go into the circle at night and are consumed by the fire.
I have a cool dh.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Rules, Schmules
This post is dedicated to the wonderful Rev. Dr. Carol Hepokoski, who introduced me to the work of Sharon Welch.
It's hard to be a theologian who doesn't believe in much. I'm always grasping for language. I don't like salvation (see two posts below), good, evil... god is iffy in the best of contexts.
I don't use "morality", to give enother example; I think it implies absolutes of Right and Wrong (um, and who decides what those are?) Unlike so much other church language--darn, that stuff gets welded right onto the framework!--I can accept "ethics" as a reasonable substitute. Which is a piece of luck. Let's talk ethics.
In our house we talk a lot about being In Relationship. With each other, with friends, with strangers, with the innumerable aspects of the earth. I perceive us in a constant dynamic with the world around us--whether we like it or not. We strive to be in balanced and fulfilled relationship. I wouldn't call it a faith, but rather a pagan and buddhist inspired ecological worldview. We are all a part of each other. When we hurt someone else, we diminish ourselves.
I don't care for rules much, and that applies to the Golden Rule as well. Different people like and care and are hurt by different things. I'm a bigger fan of its inverse: don't do things to others that you wouldn't want done to you! (Unless explicitly requested. We won't go there.)
Applying my standard to others doesn't take their individual quirks and cultural influences into account. Again, I don't think in terms of there being a "right" way to do things, but ways that work or work somewhat or don't work.
I don't stay centred in relation. I hurt people. I waste resources. I stumble out of balance, again and again.
And I learn from my imbalances, at a depth that I never experienced while caught up in my former perceptions of "right" and "wrong". Judgement blocks understanding. Never more so than when I judge myself.
This unschooly, UUish perspective of mine may best be termed a situational ethic, rather than a rule-bound one. It calls for bringing my perception, caring for others, and mindfulness into every aspect of daily life. It's an ethic of joy. So... yay!
Curious to read further about situational ethics? I recommend A Feminist Ethic of Risk by UU ethicist Sharon Welch. I credit Sharon with moving me considerably along the unschooling path. When I was assigned this book in seminary, the first chapter challenged my (then) framework so strongly that I couldn't bring myself to read further. I denounced it as "boring" in class. As if.
It's hard to be a theologian who doesn't believe in much. I'm always grasping for language. I don't like salvation (see two posts below), good, evil... god is iffy in the best of contexts.
I don't use "morality", to give enother example; I think it implies absolutes of Right and Wrong (um, and who decides what those are?) Unlike so much other church language--darn, that stuff gets welded right onto the framework!--I can accept "ethics" as a reasonable substitute. Which is a piece of luck. Let's talk ethics.
In our house we talk a lot about being In Relationship. With each other, with friends, with strangers, with the innumerable aspects of the earth. I perceive us in a constant dynamic with the world around us--whether we like it or not. We strive to be in balanced and fulfilled relationship. I wouldn't call it a faith, but rather a pagan and buddhist inspired ecological worldview. We are all a part of each other. When we hurt someone else, we diminish ourselves.
I don't care for rules much, and that applies to the Golden Rule as well. Different people like and care and are hurt by different things. I'm a bigger fan of its inverse: don't do things to others that you wouldn't want done to you! (Unless explicitly requested. We won't go there.)
Applying my standard to others doesn't take their individual quirks and cultural influences into account. Again, I don't think in terms of there being a "right" way to do things, but ways that work or work somewhat or don't work.
I don't stay centred in relation. I hurt people. I waste resources. I stumble out of balance, again and again.
And I learn from my imbalances, at a depth that I never experienced while caught up in my former perceptions of "right" and "wrong". Judgement blocks understanding. Never more so than when I judge myself.
This unschooly, UUish perspective of mine may best be termed a situational ethic, rather than a rule-bound one. It calls for bringing my perception, caring for others, and mindfulness into every aspect of daily life. It's an ethic of joy. So... yay!
Curious to read further about situational ethics? I recommend A Feminist Ethic of Risk by UU ethicist Sharon Welch. I credit Sharon with moving me considerably along the unschooling path. When I was assigned this book in seminary, the first chapter challenged my (then) framework so strongly that I couldn't bring myself to read further. I denounced it as "boring" in class. As if.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Salvation
Delivered at the Universalist Unitarian Congregation of Halifax, January 27 2008
It was the fall of 1994, and I made my bed in a green VW microbus with a pop-up top and manual steering. I had spent the summer in northern Wyoming, living in the bus with a boy named Jack. Jack and I worked in Yellowstone National Park, doing scut work in the kitchens of the lodges forty hours a week, spending the rest of our time hiking and camping and generally whooping it up in a VW microbus sort of way.
As the days got shorter and darker and colder we decided to head for warmer climes. Luckily, our home was made for moving. Unluckily, it had been made in 1978 and had a breakdown on average of once a week. More often if we were actually driving it. We were short on money, and rural Wyoming was even shorter on classic VW auto parts. Our muffler pipe, to give you an example, was held more or less in place by a variety of materials, including but not limited to gum, duct tape, and pipe cleaners.
We never knew what was going to break next, or where. For some reason we didn't allow this state of affairs to deter us even a little bit in launching off on our adventures. First we spent a few weeks in western Montana staying with some fly-fishing buddies who worked as chefs at a 4 star resort. We happily ate 4-star scraps in the kitchen and snuck into the hot tub in the wee hours, balancing our bodies at the junction of hot steam and cold mountain air, gazing for hours at the stars and snowy peaks. After a couple blissful weeks our feet got itchy and we started to meander vaguely in the direction of Illinois, where we hoped to get a few home-cooked meals and perhaps a little cash. I knew my father would be profoundly disturbed by our automotive state—and I’m sure he would have been, had we ever made it home. Instead, we got held up along the way. Several times. This is the story of one of those times.
On an unseasonably warm November day we decided to visit the Battlefield of Little Big Horn. Jack drove through the Crow reservation of southeastern Montana to the entrance gates. To approach the battlefield, one must drive up a large, steep hill to an entrance gate that is poised at the highest point in the surrounding landscape. From this summit you can see for miles in any direction. It was here that the bus died.
Over and over I turned the key in the ignition--to no effect--as a line of vehicles grew, stretching down the hill behind us. Many of the relationships contained in those vehicles had grown a bit overripe after enduring close quarters all the way from Los Angeles or Calgary or Rockville, Maryland, and as we struggled to budge the bus in one direction or another a growing chorus of overripe commentary floated up to us.
Eventually so many of the disgruntled passengers walked up to see what the problem was that the crowd was able to get the bus turned around. We coasted down the hill in neutral, slowly rolling into the parking lot of a gas station/shopping complex on the Crow, or Absaroka, reservation below. With great relief I maneuvered into a parking space in front of the gas station. Jack wiggled beneath the microbus and diagnosed it with a bust alternator. With the help of the phone book we found that we could get a replacement part in town the next morning.
Feeling awfully lucky to have a solution in the works, we decided to splurge and spend the big twenty-five bucks on a room in the hotel down the road. I was pleased to take a break from the bus—which had many charms but neither heat nor running water. Before leaving, however, we decided to stick our heads in the gas station, explain our circumstances, and ask permission to park the bus in their lot overnight. The manager poked his head out the door and looked speculatively at the big green monster. "Sure," he said. “Although you might want to move it to the other side of the lot. Right there by the entrance isn’t the safest place. Someone got hit there just last week." No problem, we figured. Jack pushed the bus while I steered it into a more out of the way space between two other cars. For some reason I found it harder to steer than usual. Perhaps I was just tired. But I found myself cutting a little too close to the car I was trying to park next to. "Jack!" I cried. "Make it stop!" "You're driving!" was his panicked reply. "Step on the brake!" But it was too late. Crash. A man came running out of the souvenir shop. "Hey Brenda, somebody hit your car!"
Brenda shot out the front door with a panicky expression on her face, followed by about a dozen of what turned out to be intimate friends and family members. They had all been enjoying a cup of coffee together in the gift shop café. Brenda seemed a little too upset to talk to us herself, but she called her husband to come deal with the situation. While we were waiting for him the reservation police stopped in to see what the fuss was about. The officer driving the police car tried to take a report of the accident. That turned out to be a complicated process, since each of the friends and family members present claimed to have seen it occur from the windows of the café. Listening to their accounts, I kept looking over my shoulder to see just how many windows that café had—a lot of different ones, apparently. A spirited argument ensued. I got the feeling that they had been sitting there just waiting for something to happen, and were quite pleased that I had obliged them. As the heat of the debate rose, the language of discourse switched over from English to Crow which didn't help me and Jack any in sorting it out. From time to time someone would turn to us and say incredulously, "and you say the car wasn't running when this happened?" I would sheepishly nod, the questioner would shake his head, and the argument would run on. The parking lot slowly filled as people from the surrounding community came to see what the fuss was about.
Finally, Brenda's husband Sam arrived. He had the good sense to take Jack aside and come to an agreement: the following day we would go into town together to get estimates on the damage and we would pay him the lowest one out-of-pocket. This was a great relief to us, as we also had a little proof of insurance issue complicating matters. Furthermore, as long as we were going to town, he offered to take us to the auto-parts store so we could pick up our replacement starter and be on our way. Sam informed the now huge crowd that we'd come to a resolution and, with a few grumbles of disappointment, they slowly dispersed.
The next day Sam picked us up at the motel as we had planned. We had a pleasant conversation on the drive about work and family and the weather, and I felt utterly relieved that I'd had the good fortune to inflict my unique driving skills onto such a pleasant person. And then he asked The Question: Are you saved?
I first thought: “Saved from what? Yes I'm saved, you're saving me from hitchhiking into town" before I realized what he meant. Now Jack had grown up in a particularly southern Baptist part of Texas. He didn't need any help with this question. "Yes, SIR!" he replied enthusiastically, although the closest he'd been to a church in the time I'd known him had been drinking at a microbrewery across the street from one. Sam's eyes turned expectantly to me in the rearview mirror.
Was I saved… was I saved? As a Unitarian Universalist I had a complicated idea of what this meant to me. Should I say yes, and then explain that I thought everyone was saved in some communal, non-original-sin-involving, humanity embracing, hippie love kind of way? But I didn’t think that this wasn’t the question Sam was asking. He didn’t want to know what my out of the box theory of salvation was, or how I saw it fitting into the larger Western culture. And while I didn’t want to anger him and risk getting thrown out of the car before we had transacted our business, neither could I bring myself to be dishonest about this. So I said “no.” And then, while Jack was in the auto parts store for—I don’t know, seemed like about ten hours--I got quite the sales pitch about Jesus and his love.
The first time I told this story from the pulpit, about 7 years ago, I concluded that yes, I was saved, that we all save each other through acts of intentionality and kindness every day. I no longer agree with that, however. In the Unitarian Universalist tradition of lifelong growth and change, my answers have changed with time. And the more I think about how to answer, the more I think it’s the wrong question to be asking.
I don’t believe that I am saved. I believe in luck, or the absence of luck, absolutely undeserved in either case. I may be in desperate need of help at times, but never of salvation. You save something that is lost, or ruined. I don’t think those are appropriate words to apply to living beings. Salvation too often seems to exclude the possibility of you helping yourself, or on the other hand recognizing that your situation cannot be helped, simply endured as possible. It minimizes the role of sheer happenstance in life—that someone who knows Rumplestiltskin’s name will just happen to walk by, and you will luck out for no reason at all.
Sam asked me a question, from his understanding of the world. I perceived loving and sincere intention in it. Still, his question was nonsensical within my framework. Over time I have become much more interested in having meaningful conversations with strangers of all kinds and much less patient with salvation. I know they call it the good news but salvation has never sounded like very good news to me. “Good news! We can lance that hideous boil on the back of your head!” (What? What boil?) Well, it’s certainly news. I’ll give it that.
Perhaps I would have been best off cheerfully replying, “Yes! You’re saving me from a heck of a lot of trouble. Thank you for the ride from the bottom of my heart.” But I also could have asked, “What does salvation mean to you?” and explored his framework together. Too late now, I’ll never know. I made a lot of assumptions about what salvation meant to him and I may have been right. Perhaps he would have enjoyed exploring that himself. I wish I had not let the fear of our differences put the kibosh on authentic conversation.
In the years since my wandering hippie days I have come to view “salvation” as an inherently unbalanced concept. It starts off with a bang, assuming that our world is broken due to original sin. I believe the world is neither broken nor perfect, neither bad nor good. I don’t think that thinking of the world in terms of being good or bad is very helpful for making sense of why things happen or how we might be able to affect them. We make meaning out of what happens. Meaning does not descend upon us from on high, although sometimes it feels as if it is pressed in on all sides. The act of making meaning is part of what makes us human. Making meaning connects us beyond ourselves.
“Good” and “bad” are hard words to get away from in our culture. They leave a great jagged gap in their stead which begs to be filled. In recent years I have started to think more in terms of whether something works, or not, or how well. And I have found that the words “good” and “bad” tend to distract my energy from being open to workable solutions to problems. Asking the questions, “What does everyone here need?” and “How can those needs get met?” frees me up to reframe problems in a number of ways. It allows unconditional love to flow in where judgment used to stand
Now I know some of you are sitting there saying, “The title of the sermon is two Christians and a Microbus. So we have Sam and…who is the other Christian? It certainly wasn’t me. No, it turned out to be Jack, who returned to his Baptist roots after many adventures abroad and now lives in Texas, living the word of God as he interprets it. I call him up from time to time and we argue lovingly about the state of the world. The bus is still sitting in his driveway, and I hear he takes it out for a spin now and again. We both remember Sam with loving gratitude.
May love guide us. May we marvel at the way life can be wonderful, without being good. May the stirrings of compassion that sing in our heart lay the groundwork for loving relationship. May we create meaning in the way that we care for one another. We have but to listen and hear the cry fear won’t still, the dreams, the heart’s call to will. Ours is to respond.
It was the fall of 1994, and I made my bed in a green VW microbus with a pop-up top and manual steering. I had spent the summer in northern Wyoming, living in the bus with a boy named Jack. Jack and I worked in Yellowstone National Park, doing scut work in the kitchens of the lodges forty hours a week, spending the rest of our time hiking and camping and generally whooping it up in a VW microbus sort of way.
As the days got shorter and darker and colder we decided to head for warmer climes. Luckily, our home was made for moving. Unluckily, it had been made in 1978 and had a breakdown on average of once a week. More often if we were actually driving it. We were short on money, and rural Wyoming was even shorter on classic VW auto parts. Our muffler pipe, to give you an example, was held more or less in place by a variety of materials, including but not limited to gum, duct tape, and pipe cleaners.
We never knew what was going to break next, or where. For some reason we didn't allow this state of affairs to deter us even a little bit in launching off on our adventures. First we spent a few weeks in western Montana staying with some fly-fishing buddies who worked as chefs at a 4 star resort. We happily ate 4-star scraps in the kitchen and snuck into the hot tub in the wee hours, balancing our bodies at the junction of hot steam and cold mountain air, gazing for hours at the stars and snowy peaks. After a couple blissful weeks our feet got itchy and we started to meander vaguely in the direction of Illinois, where we hoped to get a few home-cooked meals and perhaps a little cash. I knew my father would be profoundly disturbed by our automotive state—and I’m sure he would have been, had we ever made it home. Instead, we got held up along the way. Several times. This is the story of one of those times.
On an unseasonably warm November day we decided to visit the Battlefield of Little Big Horn. Jack drove through the Crow reservation of southeastern Montana to the entrance gates. To approach the battlefield, one must drive up a large, steep hill to an entrance gate that is poised at the highest point in the surrounding landscape. From this summit you can see for miles in any direction. It was here that the bus died.
Over and over I turned the key in the ignition--to no effect--as a line of vehicles grew, stretching down the hill behind us. Many of the relationships contained in those vehicles had grown a bit overripe after enduring close quarters all the way from Los Angeles or Calgary or Rockville, Maryland, and as we struggled to budge the bus in one direction or another a growing chorus of overripe commentary floated up to us.
Eventually so many of the disgruntled passengers walked up to see what the problem was that the crowd was able to get the bus turned around. We coasted down the hill in neutral, slowly rolling into the parking lot of a gas station/shopping complex on the Crow, or Absaroka, reservation below. With great relief I maneuvered into a parking space in front of the gas station. Jack wiggled beneath the microbus and diagnosed it with a bust alternator. With the help of the phone book we found that we could get a replacement part in town the next morning.
Feeling awfully lucky to have a solution in the works, we decided to splurge and spend the big twenty-five bucks on a room in the hotel down the road. I was pleased to take a break from the bus—which had many charms but neither heat nor running water. Before leaving, however, we decided to stick our heads in the gas station, explain our circumstances, and ask permission to park the bus in their lot overnight. The manager poked his head out the door and looked speculatively at the big green monster. "Sure," he said. “Although you might want to move it to the other side of the lot. Right there by the entrance isn’t the safest place. Someone got hit there just last week." No problem, we figured. Jack pushed the bus while I steered it into a more out of the way space between two other cars. For some reason I found it harder to steer than usual. Perhaps I was just tired. But I found myself cutting a little too close to the car I was trying to park next to. "Jack!" I cried. "Make it stop!" "You're driving!" was his panicked reply. "Step on the brake!" But it was too late. Crash. A man came running out of the souvenir shop. "Hey Brenda, somebody hit your car!"
Brenda shot out the front door with a panicky expression on her face, followed by about a dozen of what turned out to be intimate friends and family members. They had all been enjoying a cup of coffee together in the gift shop café. Brenda seemed a little too upset to talk to us herself, but she called her husband to come deal with the situation. While we were waiting for him the reservation police stopped in to see what the fuss was about. The officer driving the police car tried to take a report of the accident. That turned out to be a complicated process, since each of the friends and family members present claimed to have seen it occur from the windows of the café. Listening to their accounts, I kept looking over my shoulder to see just how many windows that café had—a lot of different ones, apparently. A spirited argument ensued. I got the feeling that they had been sitting there just waiting for something to happen, and were quite pleased that I had obliged them. As the heat of the debate rose, the language of discourse switched over from English to Crow which didn't help me and Jack any in sorting it out. From time to time someone would turn to us and say incredulously, "and you say the car wasn't running when this happened?" I would sheepishly nod, the questioner would shake his head, and the argument would run on. The parking lot slowly filled as people from the surrounding community came to see what the fuss was about.
Finally, Brenda's husband Sam arrived. He had the good sense to take Jack aside and come to an agreement: the following day we would go into town together to get estimates on the damage and we would pay him the lowest one out-of-pocket. This was a great relief to us, as we also had a little proof of insurance issue complicating matters. Furthermore, as long as we were going to town, he offered to take us to the auto-parts store so we could pick up our replacement starter and be on our way. Sam informed the now huge crowd that we'd come to a resolution and, with a few grumbles of disappointment, they slowly dispersed.
The next day Sam picked us up at the motel as we had planned. We had a pleasant conversation on the drive about work and family and the weather, and I felt utterly relieved that I'd had the good fortune to inflict my unique driving skills onto such a pleasant person. And then he asked The Question: Are you saved?
I first thought: “Saved from what? Yes I'm saved, you're saving me from hitchhiking into town" before I realized what he meant. Now Jack had grown up in a particularly southern Baptist part of Texas. He didn't need any help with this question. "Yes, SIR!" he replied enthusiastically, although the closest he'd been to a church in the time I'd known him had been drinking at a microbrewery across the street from one. Sam's eyes turned expectantly to me in the rearview mirror.
Was I saved… was I saved? As a Unitarian Universalist I had a complicated idea of what this meant to me. Should I say yes, and then explain that I thought everyone was saved in some communal, non-original-sin-involving, humanity embracing, hippie love kind of way? But I didn’t think that this wasn’t the question Sam was asking. He didn’t want to know what my out of the box theory of salvation was, or how I saw it fitting into the larger Western culture. And while I didn’t want to anger him and risk getting thrown out of the car before we had transacted our business, neither could I bring myself to be dishonest about this. So I said “no.” And then, while Jack was in the auto parts store for—I don’t know, seemed like about ten hours--I got quite the sales pitch about Jesus and his love.
The first time I told this story from the pulpit, about 7 years ago, I concluded that yes, I was saved, that we all save each other through acts of intentionality and kindness every day. I no longer agree with that, however. In the Unitarian Universalist tradition of lifelong growth and change, my answers have changed with time. And the more I think about how to answer, the more I think it’s the wrong question to be asking.
I don’t believe that I am saved. I believe in luck, or the absence of luck, absolutely undeserved in either case. I may be in desperate need of help at times, but never of salvation. You save something that is lost, or ruined. I don’t think those are appropriate words to apply to living beings. Salvation too often seems to exclude the possibility of you helping yourself, or on the other hand recognizing that your situation cannot be helped, simply endured as possible. It minimizes the role of sheer happenstance in life—that someone who knows Rumplestiltskin’s name will just happen to walk by, and you will luck out for no reason at all.
Sam asked me a question, from his understanding of the world. I perceived loving and sincere intention in it. Still, his question was nonsensical within my framework. Over time I have become much more interested in having meaningful conversations with strangers of all kinds and much less patient with salvation. I know they call it the good news but salvation has never sounded like very good news to me. “Good news! We can lance that hideous boil on the back of your head!” (What? What boil?) Well, it’s certainly news. I’ll give it that.
Perhaps I would have been best off cheerfully replying, “Yes! You’re saving me from a heck of a lot of trouble. Thank you for the ride from the bottom of my heart.” But I also could have asked, “What does salvation mean to you?” and explored his framework together. Too late now, I’ll never know. I made a lot of assumptions about what salvation meant to him and I may have been right. Perhaps he would have enjoyed exploring that himself. I wish I had not let the fear of our differences put the kibosh on authentic conversation.
In the years since my wandering hippie days I have come to view “salvation” as an inherently unbalanced concept. It starts off with a bang, assuming that our world is broken due to original sin. I believe the world is neither broken nor perfect, neither bad nor good. I don’t think that thinking of the world in terms of being good or bad is very helpful for making sense of why things happen or how we might be able to affect them. We make meaning out of what happens. Meaning does not descend upon us from on high, although sometimes it feels as if it is pressed in on all sides. The act of making meaning is part of what makes us human. Making meaning connects us beyond ourselves.
“Good” and “bad” are hard words to get away from in our culture. They leave a great jagged gap in their stead which begs to be filled. In recent years I have started to think more in terms of whether something works, or not, or how well. And I have found that the words “good” and “bad” tend to distract my energy from being open to workable solutions to problems. Asking the questions, “What does everyone here need?” and “How can those needs get met?” frees me up to reframe problems in a number of ways. It allows unconditional love to flow in where judgment used to stand
Now I know some of you are sitting there saying, “The title of the sermon is two Christians and a Microbus. So we have Sam and…who is the other Christian? It certainly wasn’t me. No, it turned out to be Jack, who returned to his Baptist roots after many adventures abroad and now lives in Texas, living the word of God as he interprets it. I call him up from time to time and we argue lovingly about the state of the world. The bus is still sitting in his driveway, and I hear he takes it out for a spin now and again. We both remember Sam with loving gratitude.
May love guide us. May we marvel at the way life can be wonderful, without being good. May the stirrings of compassion that sing in our heart lay the groundwork for loving relationship. May we create meaning in the way that we care for one another. We have but to listen and hear the cry fear won’t still, the dreams, the heart’s call to will. Ours is to respond.
Monday, January 7, 2008
Bibliophile
In a recent conversation on Unschooling Canada, Beatrice Ekoko of Radio Free School asked us what books have had a profound affect on our lives. The question took me down a road of memory littered with the literary.
I've always been a big reader. Early literacy was a wonderful gift my mother gave me, supplemented by quality literature from the first. I read 1982 in
1982, when I was ten and lived under Reagan. It formed the base of
my relationship with government institutions, and created an odd
pocket of sanity inside me in the wilderness of public junior high.
There have been lots of others just as influential. I remember
reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my closet at fourteen and
experiencing a sense of breakthrough to a new level of understanding
immediately followed by the shocking realization that most adults
around me did not operate anywhere close to that
level. I learned as much through New Yorker cartoons and Doonesbury
as any great work of fiction, too.
And in recent years, I'd say Learning To Be White by Thandeka and Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn have been both fundamental frame-shifters as well as
dear to my heart.
How about you, dear readers? What wonderful books have shaped your world--in the distant or recent past?
I've always been a big reader. Early literacy was a wonderful gift my mother gave me, supplemented by quality literature from the first. I read 1982 in
1982, when I was ten and lived under Reagan. It formed the base of
my relationship with government institutions, and created an odd
pocket of sanity inside me in the wilderness of public junior high.
There have been lots of others just as influential. I remember
reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my closet at fourteen and
experiencing a sense of breakthrough to a new level of understanding
immediately followed by the shocking realization that most adults
around me did not operate anywhere close to that
level. I learned as much through New Yorker cartoons and Doonesbury
as any great work of fiction, too.
And in recent years, I'd say Learning To Be White by Thandeka and Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn have been both fundamental frame-shifters as well as
dear to my heart.
How about you, dear readers? What wonderful books have shaped your world--in the distant or recent past?
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Library
The other night I went to a meeting at the Lunenburg library to brainstorm ways to involve the South Shore Regional Library in community development. What fun!
I was raised to revere libraries, and librarians. As an autodidact with an unschooling child, the public library is a particularly important institution in our lives. I'm proud to support the library with my dollars and my ideas, and I was priveleged to meet some of my neighbors who are doing the same. We talked about ways to help patrons evaluate source when they're searching for the information they want. We looked at the children's section together to think about how to make it as inviting as possible. We conjured a passel of program topics to bring people into the library.
If I hadn't already spent all my money going to seminary, I would become a librarian. In fact, if none of my current employment prospects work out, I may yet apply to MLIS programs. 'Cause my spirituality is definitely leading in the direction of a job with, say, dental benefits and vacation pay.
I was raised to revere libraries, and librarians. As an autodidact with an unschooling child, the public library is a particularly important institution in our lives. I'm proud to support the library with my dollars and my ideas, and I was priveleged to meet some of my neighbors who are doing the same. We talked about ways to help patrons evaluate source when they're searching for the information they want. We looked at the children's section together to think about how to make it as inviting as possible. We conjured a passel of program topics to bring people into the library.
If I hadn't already spent all my money going to seminary, I would become a librarian. In fact, if none of my current employment prospects work out, I may yet apply to MLIS programs. 'Cause my spirituality is definitely leading in the direction of a job with, say, dental benefits and vacation pay.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Post-Bacchanalia
Well, we ended up having a lovely holiday.
After preaching my "Blue Christmas" sermon (see post below), I decided it was worth the extra $$ to leave Charlie at home with his babysitter while I ran errands for the last ten days before Christmas. And that was it. As enthusiastic as he was about the holiday, we didn't have a single tantrum after I stopped taking him out into the commercial arena. On the 25th we had a hard time convincing Charlie to open all his presents--he was much more interested in putting them on his sleigh and toting them around the house as he played Santa.
For myself, I decided to scale back even further on the amount of holiday preparations. Stressed out about the bread? Stop baking. Everyone enjoys a holiday with a happy Mum and store bought bread more than one with cranky Mum and her delicious, homemade limpa. Still, it was hard to let go of expectation. It's part of my continuing journey as a feminist and as a spiritual seeker to learn how to say "no". I'm lucky to have such a wonderful, spirited toddler to model it for me.
Santa in his sleigh, complete with reindeer:
After preaching my "Blue Christmas" sermon (see post below), I decided it was worth the extra $$ to leave Charlie at home with his babysitter while I ran errands for the last ten days before Christmas. And that was it. As enthusiastic as he was about the holiday, we didn't have a single tantrum after I stopped taking him out into the commercial arena. On the 25th we had a hard time convincing Charlie to open all his presents--he was much more interested in putting them on his sleigh and toting them around the house as he played Santa.
For myself, I decided to scale back even further on the amount of holiday preparations. Stressed out about the bread? Stop baking. Everyone enjoys a holiday with a happy Mum and store bought bread more than one with cranky Mum and her delicious, homemade limpa. Still, it was hard to let go of expectation. It's part of my continuing journey as a feminist and as a spiritual seeker to learn how to say "no". I'm lucky to have such a wonderful, spirited toddler to model it for me.
Santa in his sleigh, complete with reindeer:
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Blue Christmas
Delivered at the UU Church of Halifax, December 16 2007
Christmas is my favourite holiday. Because I love irony.
Let me give you an example of what the month of December has been like for me so far. My three year old, Charlie, is obsessed with Santa. And we don’t even really do Santa, at least not in the “be good or he won’t bring you presents” way or in a sit on the lap of the Macy’s Santa while an elf takes an $18 picture way. As parents, our choices about how to present Santa are limited are by the extreme Santification of the world around us. There are Santa mannequins at the grocery store, Santa decorations at the library, Santa ringing a bell on the street corner, Santa cookies at the bakery, Santa’s mailbox at the post office, and Santa’s sleigh on the neighbours’ lawn. There isn’t a Santa free zone anywhere.
The other day I needed a set of washers at the hardware store. I took Charlie with me because if I used my alone time to go shopping I’d never have the time to write a sermon or anything else. When we got to the store there was a ginormous fully decorated Christmas tree in the entryway. Charlie threw himself down on the ground to examine all the gifts underneath. “Pesents, Mama!” he exclaims. “Whit one id po’ me?” and then picked out his favourite while I explained that they aren’t really presents but empty boxes wrapped up to look like presents and even if they were presents they wouldn’t be our presents and we have to go buy some washers and we’ll make some presents out of playdough when we get home—that works sometimes, but not this time. He isn’t listening to a word. Instead he’s busy beaming his love on the presents he knows are for him because Santa knew he was coming to the hardware store today and look! What he left! For Charlie! Silly Mommy.
Sometime we leave these situations happy and tearless, after a lot of effort on both parts, and sometimes we leave not so happy. I could really use a low-key elf to help me out. I still don’t have the washers I needed. When we got home Charlie put on a Santa hat and went around the house with a pillowcase collecting presents, which is pretty cute. Then he had a meltdown because I wouldn’t let him climb up to the roof to visit his reindeer.
I didn’t grow up Christian, but I did grow up Christmas, in a big way. This is my smallest and most pleasant Christmas ever so far--and it’s not small and it’s not really pleasant. My poor kid may well explode from excitement before the 25th. It’s so ridiculous that I’m tempted not to celebrate at all. But I can never resist the twinkling of those little lights.
Having a holiday season at this time of year is a response to the darkness. December 21st is the darkest night of the year, the 22nd is the shortest day. We create light in the darkness to battle the cold and the naturally occurring sense of difficulty and despondency at this time of year. It is a strong and fierce time, when we fight against the dying of the light.
Many of our modern Christmas practices originate in Scandinavia, where people spend most of their waking hours in darkness at this time of year. Ancient traditions surrounding Yuletide ritually address darkness and depression. Take holly, for instance. Evergreens were cherished at this time of year as a natural symbol of rebirth and life amid winter whiteness. But holly was particularly prized to decorate doors, windows and fireplaces because of its prickliness -- to snag and capture evil spirits before they could enter and harm a household. Sort of like flypaper for faeries.
When Charlie goes off the deep end with the modern incarnation of Santa it gives me great comfort to reflect on the Scandinavian origins of Santa. Long back before Nickolas popped up his Saintly head there were the red-cloaked Shamans of ancient Iceland, who would imbibe fly agaric mushrooms, most often by drinking the urine of reindeer that had eaten the mushrooms. The Shamans would then climb down the smokehole of a doorless sacred dwelling to experience visions from the gods. Hallucinations of flying reindeer were commonly reported. Sometimes when I’m feeling really exasperated with today’s commercial Santa I feel tempted to make comments to other shoppers about it. "“You know how he got so jolly.” But I bite my tounge. They already think I’m strange enough in Lunenburg. They don’t need me telling them that Santa drank Prancer’s pee.
The whole town of Lunenburg lost power this past Wednesday for several hours. Not knowing how long it would last, we went out into an oddly quiet world to wrap up our business while we could. As the lights in the sky faded, I lit a fire and some candles. My family congregated around the hearth. The quiet of winter surrounded us. We had some bread and cheese and tea. John and I talked about our days while Charlie pretended to be Santa and gave presents to his dolls. Eventually he fell asleep and we, his tired parents, watched his hair gleam in the flickering light as he lay across from us, dogs curled at our feet. It was five o’clock. We were experiencing a natural, normal end of the day for this time of year.
And then the lights clicked back on. In that first second the glare felt unnatural and harsh. It was a thoroughly unpleasant feeling to be sensation to be plunged from natural night to modern day. I sat there a moment, reluctant to give up our peace. Then John ran to check his e-mail and I ran to check my e-mail and we were off to the races again.
Many of our lives feature a second shift at five o’clock. We surround ourselves with bright lights and push through weariness into action, cooking nice dinners and helping with the homework and doing the laundry everyone needs for tomorrow and checking our email and paying the bills and shopping; shopping for food and shopping for Christmas and shopping to get ourselves a little something as a reward for doing what we ought to despite not feeling like it in the least. Even those of us without major obligation to fill or nine-to-five jobs taking up the bulk of our time have overly active evenings this time of year. This whole electrical light thing is very new in the scale of human history. It is great for productivity, but evolutionarily it’s maladaptive. We are resisting strong biological cues to rest in calm. Your place in the family of things is in the dark.
Animals, after all, have biological rhythms that change with the seasons. Including us. I recently read The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren. He’s a former producer of The Current on CBC. Has anyone read it? Warren has some fascinating things to say about the brain. The one that most captured my imagination is his description of a state of consciousness he calls “the watch”. To understand the watch you have to step back a bit to look at human sleep patterns through time and place. In our culture we tend to think of sleeping through the night as optimal behaviour. We go to bed 8 or 7 or 6 hours before we need to get up again. We look for ways to encourage infants to sleep through the night. When we have trouble sleeping through the night, we take medications or natural remedies to help ourselves do it. It turns out, though, that sleeping straight through the night is a very unusual human behaviour, pretty much specific to contemporary times. Whether it is a particularly healthy pattern or even a realistic one for many people is highly debatable.
I suspect that sleeping right through the night is optimal for industry and efficiency, but not necessarily for human health or contentedness. We are missing the very concept of the watch, which is a state of very calm wakefulness in between chunks of sleep. When humans experience darkness for 14 hours in sleep experiments, much as we would currently have without electric light, almost all subjects spend a long night in bed and experience an extended period of restful wakefulness in the middle of the night. This is the watch—a calm, floaty, time out of time when there is nothing to do but lie cuddled in warm blankets and let your thoughts wander . While we do not need to experience “the watch” to function, it seems that in evolutionary terms it is part of optimal functioning for humans and especially at this time of year. The author suggests that many people who experience insomnia and wakefulness are resisting this natural pattern, and indeed researchers have found that by framing this type of wakefulness as a positive event for insomniacs has a powerful effect on their ability to relax, enjoy periods of wakefulness, and eventually drop off back to sleep.
Ever since reading the book and paying attention to my sleep patterns, I have noticed that I do indeed experience a watch hour around 2 am. Rather than struggling to get back to sleep as I have always done, I simply enjoy it. It has become a cherished, restful time. A time to just be, drifting in peaceful darkness. The more darkness in the sky, the more peaceful watch time we should expect to have. Christmas ought to be the most watchful time of year, rather than the least, as we tend to experience it. Both in and out of bed, this is a natural time of year for quiet and reflection.
So, once upon a time, winter was a time of quiet, dark, and scarcity. Today our food supply is relatively unrelated to the cycles of the season and the harvest. Once, Yule or Christmas was a big bang of a feast that stood in stark contrast to careful conservation both before and after the holiday, and that certainly isn’t true any more. Our big bang has gotten bigger, louder, and more blinding, and often far past the point of being enjoyable. During the solstice we are thrashing upstream like salmon to find joy.
How did that happen? Well there are layers upon layers of answers to that question... but I’m mostly going to blame Calvin. Now I’m not Luther’s biggest fan either, believe me, but I really can’t stand Calvin, the author of Protestant Predestination. Predestination basically means that God decided at the beginning of time what would happen through all of history, so that when you are born the question of whether you are saved or damned has long since been decided. There’s nothing you can do about it—faiths, works, nothing. What a bad idea. But also a very popular one. As a public theology, Calvinism has had a truly immense influence on religious, social and political developments, particularly in Europe and North America.
To the Calvinists, material success and wealth was a sign that you were one of the Elect, and thus were favoured by God. If you are saved then the evidence of God’s grace will show in your life. Ill? Destitute? Signs of God’s disfavour. Wealth and good health? You must be one of the elect. So whenever the chips are down the Calvinist doesn’t have just the presenting difficulties, but the deeper concern over what those problems mean about eternal salvation. Well, guess what, the natural reaction is to assuage that anxiety by creating the appearance of well being, the form but not the content. And here we have the single largest and most powerful motivation for Keeping Up Appearances. For prioritizing looking good over feeling good. It’s not something that occurs on a conscious level. It is deeply woven into the weft of our society.
This has so much to do with the way we currently celebrate Christmas. In many ways it has become a show of Official Happiness separate from our actual feelings. The celebration is disconnected from its roots in darkness and despair. Those beautifully wrapped empty boxes under the tree at the hardware store are an elegant symbol of the Protestant tradition. I heard that the corporate offices of Mastercard have a statue of Calvin in the lobby. They certainly have enough to thank him for.
Christmas isn’t some magic panacea of ills. The stress of extra activities, stress of cleaning and cooking and buying presents and dealing with the expectation of being happy as opposed to how we really feel most of the time dealing with all this stuff. We get locked into our overproduction, into creating a false scarcity of time and energy. The sense of scarcity that we create is particularly ironic for us our current culture. We overconsume and our overconsumption adds to our stress.
People who weren’t doing particularly well at Halloween tend to keep on not doing well at Christmas. People fight at Christmas. People hurt each other at Christmas. Loved ones are estranged at Christmas. People get ill at Christmas, and people die at Christmas. People who have died earlier in the year or even years before surprise you unpleasantly by not being there at Christmas.
It’s a season of love, when many of us don’t feel enough love in our lives. It’s a season of giving, but many of us simply don’t have a lot left to give right now. It’s a season of joy, when many feel numbness or despair. It’s not exactly the best time to start untangling big problems or launch a new fitness program. But when you can’t do anything else, you can breathe. You’re doing it anyway. We’re multitasking right now!
You can breathe into the face of exhaustion, of pain, of depression. Breathe into disparity. I find there is nothing so pressing in the holiday season that it can’t wait while I take three deep, slow, renewing breaths. Not even that schmuck in front of me at the post office who is painstakingly looking over every box the post office sells for the unwrapped present he brought in with him. I breathe through the schmuckiness. I think of my aunt Merry, who loved Christmas so that she changed her name from M-a-r-y to M-e-r-r-y and I breathe through the pain of her absence.
I invite you now to sit comfortably, breathe deeply, taking a long exhalation, pushing the air from the bottom of your lungs out. Allow fresh, clean air to flow in without sucking. Breathe slow and long. Breathe down the excitement. Recognize the darkness. Know that your internal state is okay to feel, whatever it is. It doesn’t make some kind of statement about you, what kind of person you are, or whether you are doing things “right”. It just is.
I share these words, paraphrasing Thich Nhat Han:
Breathing in, I calm my body.
Breathing out, I smile.
Breathing in, I dwell in the present moment.
Breathing out, I know it is a wonderful moment
Breathing in I feel my tension
Breathing out, I release my tension
Breathing in I recognize Expectation
Breathing out I feel free
Life grinds on, through stress and strife. Even Santa had a long journey of chafing and bumping his way to find a fit. And, btw, if you think Santa had it made after he hooked up with the elves then you need to invite me back to read How Santa Lost His Job.
We celebrate the holidays to battle the darkness without and within at this time of year. If you are depressed despite this, you are normal. If you are depressed because of this, you are normal.
As longest night draws near, may we open ourselves to the night. Let the quiet of winter surround you. Many of us feel lonely at Christmas—but we are not alone right now. In this time and this place may you appreciate the people in the chairs around you, and treat one another with love. Let love be your legacy. Let the peace of darkness find a home in thee. Breathe.
Christmas is my favourite holiday. Because I love irony.
Let me give you an example of what the month of December has been like for me so far. My three year old, Charlie, is obsessed with Santa. And we don’t even really do Santa, at least not in the “be good or he won’t bring you presents” way or in a sit on the lap of the Macy’s Santa while an elf takes an $18 picture way. As parents, our choices about how to present Santa are limited are by the extreme Santification of the world around us. There are Santa mannequins at the grocery store, Santa decorations at the library, Santa ringing a bell on the street corner, Santa cookies at the bakery, Santa’s mailbox at the post office, and Santa’s sleigh on the neighbours’ lawn. There isn’t a Santa free zone anywhere.
The other day I needed a set of washers at the hardware store. I took Charlie with me because if I used my alone time to go shopping I’d never have the time to write a sermon or anything else. When we got to the store there was a ginormous fully decorated Christmas tree in the entryway. Charlie threw himself down on the ground to examine all the gifts underneath. “Pesents, Mama!” he exclaims. “Whit one id po’ me?” and then picked out his favourite while I explained that they aren’t really presents but empty boxes wrapped up to look like presents and even if they were presents they wouldn’t be our presents and we have to go buy some washers and we’ll make some presents out of playdough when we get home—that works sometimes, but not this time. He isn’t listening to a word. Instead he’s busy beaming his love on the presents he knows are for him because Santa knew he was coming to the hardware store today and look! What he left! For Charlie! Silly Mommy.
Sometime we leave these situations happy and tearless, after a lot of effort on both parts, and sometimes we leave not so happy. I could really use a low-key elf to help me out. I still don’t have the washers I needed. When we got home Charlie put on a Santa hat and went around the house with a pillowcase collecting presents, which is pretty cute. Then he had a meltdown because I wouldn’t let him climb up to the roof to visit his reindeer.
I didn’t grow up Christian, but I did grow up Christmas, in a big way. This is my smallest and most pleasant Christmas ever so far--and it’s not small and it’s not really pleasant. My poor kid may well explode from excitement before the 25th. It’s so ridiculous that I’m tempted not to celebrate at all. But I can never resist the twinkling of those little lights.
Having a holiday season at this time of year is a response to the darkness. December 21st is the darkest night of the year, the 22nd is the shortest day. We create light in the darkness to battle the cold and the naturally occurring sense of difficulty and despondency at this time of year. It is a strong and fierce time, when we fight against the dying of the light.
Many of our modern Christmas practices originate in Scandinavia, where people spend most of their waking hours in darkness at this time of year. Ancient traditions surrounding Yuletide ritually address darkness and depression. Take holly, for instance. Evergreens were cherished at this time of year as a natural symbol of rebirth and life amid winter whiteness. But holly was particularly prized to decorate doors, windows and fireplaces because of its prickliness -- to snag and capture evil spirits before they could enter and harm a household. Sort of like flypaper for faeries.
When Charlie goes off the deep end with the modern incarnation of Santa it gives me great comfort to reflect on the Scandinavian origins of Santa. Long back before Nickolas popped up his Saintly head there were the red-cloaked Shamans of ancient Iceland, who would imbibe fly agaric mushrooms, most often by drinking the urine of reindeer that had eaten the mushrooms. The Shamans would then climb down the smokehole of a doorless sacred dwelling to experience visions from the gods. Hallucinations of flying reindeer were commonly reported. Sometimes when I’m feeling really exasperated with today’s commercial Santa I feel tempted to make comments to other shoppers about it. "“You know how he got so jolly.” But I bite my tounge. They already think I’m strange enough in Lunenburg. They don’t need me telling them that Santa drank Prancer’s pee.
The whole town of Lunenburg lost power this past Wednesday for several hours. Not knowing how long it would last, we went out into an oddly quiet world to wrap up our business while we could. As the lights in the sky faded, I lit a fire and some candles. My family congregated around the hearth. The quiet of winter surrounded us. We had some bread and cheese and tea. John and I talked about our days while Charlie pretended to be Santa and gave presents to his dolls. Eventually he fell asleep and we, his tired parents, watched his hair gleam in the flickering light as he lay across from us, dogs curled at our feet. It was five o’clock. We were experiencing a natural, normal end of the day for this time of year.
And then the lights clicked back on. In that first second the glare felt unnatural and harsh. It was a thoroughly unpleasant feeling to be sensation to be plunged from natural night to modern day. I sat there a moment, reluctant to give up our peace. Then John ran to check his e-mail and I ran to check my e-mail and we were off to the races again.
Many of our lives feature a second shift at five o’clock. We surround ourselves with bright lights and push through weariness into action, cooking nice dinners and helping with the homework and doing the laundry everyone needs for tomorrow and checking our email and paying the bills and shopping; shopping for food and shopping for Christmas and shopping to get ourselves a little something as a reward for doing what we ought to despite not feeling like it in the least. Even those of us without major obligation to fill or nine-to-five jobs taking up the bulk of our time have overly active evenings this time of year. This whole electrical light thing is very new in the scale of human history. It is great for productivity, but evolutionarily it’s maladaptive. We are resisting strong biological cues to rest in calm. Your place in the family of things is in the dark.
Animals, after all, have biological rhythms that change with the seasons. Including us. I recently read The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren. He’s a former producer of The Current on CBC. Has anyone read it? Warren has some fascinating things to say about the brain. The one that most captured my imagination is his description of a state of consciousness he calls “the watch”. To understand the watch you have to step back a bit to look at human sleep patterns through time and place. In our culture we tend to think of sleeping through the night as optimal behaviour. We go to bed 8 or 7 or 6 hours before we need to get up again. We look for ways to encourage infants to sleep through the night. When we have trouble sleeping through the night, we take medications or natural remedies to help ourselves do it. It turns out, though, that sleeping straight through the night is a very unusual human behaviour, pretty much specific to contemporary times. Whether it is a particularly healthy pattern or even a realistic one for many people is highly debatable.
I suspect that sleeping right through the night is optimal for industry and efficiency, but not necessarily for human health or contentedness. We are missing the very concept of the watch, which is a state of very calm wakefulness in between chunks of sleep. When humans experience darkness for 14 hours in sleep experiments, much as we would currently have without electric light, almost all subjects spend a long night in bed and experience an extended period of restful wakefulness in the middle of the night. This is the watch—a calm, floaty, time out of time when there is nothing to do but lie cuddled in warm blankets and let your thoughts wander . While we do not need to experience “the watch” to function, it seems that in evolutionary terms it is part of optimal functioning for humans and especially at this time of year. The author suggests that many people who experience insomnia and wakefulness are resisting this natural pattern, and indeed researchers have found that by framing this type of wakefulness as a positive event for insomniacs has a powerful effect on their ability to relax, enjoy periods of wakefulness, and eventually drop off back to sleep.
Ever since reading the book and paying attention to my sleep patterns, I have noticed that I do indeed experience a watch hour around 2 am. Rather than struggling to get back to sleep as I have always done, I simply enjoy it. It has become a cherished, restful time. A time to just be, drifting in peaceful darkness. The more darkness in the sky, the more peaceful watch time we should expect to have. Christmas ought to be the most watchful time of year, rather than the least, as we tend to experience it. Both in and out of bed, this is a natural time of year for quiet and reflection.
So, once upon a time, winter was a time of quiet, dark, and scarcity. Today our food supply is relatively unrelated to the cycles of the season and the harvest. Once, Yule or Christmas was a big bang of a feast that stood in stark contrast to careful conservation both before and after the holiday, and that certainly isn’t true any more. Our big bang has gotten bigger, louder, and more blinding, and often far past the point of being enjoyable. During the solstice we are thrashing upstream like salmon to find joy.
How did that happen? Well there are layers upon layers of answers to that question... but I’m mostly going to blame Calvin. Now I’m not Luther’s biggest fan either, believe me, but I really can’t stand Calvin, the author of Protestant Predestination. Predestination basically means that God decided at the beginning of time what would happen through all of history, so that when you are born the question of whether you are saved or damned has long since been decided. There’s nothing you can do about it—faiths, works, nothing. What a bad idea. But also a very popular one. As a public theology, Calvinism has had a truly immense influence on religious, social and political developments, particularly in Europe and North America.
To the Calvinists, material success and wealth was a sign that you were one of the Elect, and thus were favoured by God. If you are saved then the evidence of God’s grace will show in your life. Ill? Destitute? Signs of God’s disfavour. Wealth and good health? You must be one of the elect. So whenever the chips are down the Calvinist doesn’t have just the presenting difficulties, but the deeper concern over what those problems mean about eternal salvation. Well, guess what, the natural reaction is to assuage that anxiety by creating the appearance of well being, the form but not the content. And here we have the single largest and most powerful motivation for Keeping Up Appearances. For prioritizing looking good over feeling good. It’s not something that occurs on a conscious level. It is deeply woven into the weft of our society.
This has so much to do with the way we currently celebrate Christmas. In many ways it has become a show of Official Happiness separate from our actual feelings. The celebration is disconnected from its roots in darkness and despair. Those beautifully wrapped empty boxes under the tree at the hardware store are an elegant symbol of the Protestant tradition. I heard that the corporate offices of Mastercard have a statue of Calvin in the lobby. They certainly have enough to thank him for.
Christmas isn’t some magic panacea of ills. The stress of extra activities, stress of cleaning and cooking and buying presents and dealing with the expectation of being happy as opposed to how we really feel most of the time dealing with all this stuff. We get locked into our overproduction, into creating a false scarcity of time and energy. The sense of scarcity that we create is particularly ironic for us our current culture. We overconsume and our overconsumption adds to our stress.
People who weren’t doing particularly well at Halloween tend to keep on not doing well at Christmas. People fight at Christmas. People hurt each other at Christmas. Loved ones are estranged at Christmas. People get ill at Christmas, and people die at Christmas. People who have died earlier in the year or even years before surprise you unpleasantly by not being there at Christmas.
It’s a season of love, when many of us don’t feel enough love in our lives. It’s a season of giving, but many of us simply don’t have a lot left to give right now. It’s a season of joy, when many feel numbness or despair. It’s not exactly the best time to start untangling big problems or launch a new fitness program. But when you can’t do anything else, you can breathe. You’re doing it anyway. We’re multitasking right now!
You can breathe into the face of exhaustion, of pain, of depression. Breathe into disparity. I find there is nothing so pressing in the holiday season that it can’t wait while I take three deep, slow, renewing breaths. Not even that schmuck in front of me at the post office who is painstakingly looking over every box the post office sells for the unwrapped present he brought in with him. I breathe through the schmuckiness. I think of my aunt Merry, who loved Christmas so that she changed her name from M-a-r-y to M-e-r-r-y and I breathe through the pain of her absence.
I invite you now to sit comfortably, breathe deeply, taking a long exhalation, pushing the air from the bottom of your lungs out. Allow fresh, clean air to flow in without sucking. Breathe slow and long. Breathe down the excitement. Recognize the darkness. Know that your internal state is okay to feel, whatever it is. It doesn’t make some kind of statement about you, what kind of person you are, or whether you are doing things “right”. It just is.
I share these words, paraphrasing Thich Nhat Han:
Breathing in, I calm my body.
Breathing out, I smile.
Breathing in, I dwell in the present moment.
Breathing out, I know it is a wonderful moment
Breathing in I feel my tension
Breathing out, I release my tension
Breathing in I recognize Expectation
Breathing out I feel free
Life grinds on, through stress and strife. Even Santa had a long journey of chafing and bumping his way to find a fit. And, btw, if you think Santa had it made after he hooked up with the elves then you need to invite me back to read How Santa Lost His Job.
We celebrate the holidays to battle the darkness without and within at this time of year. If you are depressed despite this, you are normal. If you are depressed because of this, you are normal.
As longest night draws near, may we open ourselves to the night. Let the quiet of winter surround you. Many of us feel lonely at Christmas—but we are not alone right now. In this time and this place may you appreciate the people in the chairs around you, and treat one another with love. Let love be your legacy. Let the peace of darkness find a home in thee. Breathe.
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