How to Be an Ally: Church Edition

Being in a community of faith should feel safe and welcoming.

It should ask you to build your skills, to learn to be in community, and to grow as a spiritual being.

It should not ask you to put up with racism.
I was in a training for worship leaders the other day, which was thick with unspoken messages. I think one way I can be a good ally is to speak those messages out loud, in hopes that this will start conversation. We can't end racism as allies, but we can name it when we see it.

Spoken message: Presenters should wear "solid colors," because "patterns are distracting."
Underlying cultural message: People in sari's or First Nation or African dress or loud suits would be quite uncommon in the pulpit, except as an exotic touch, an exception to the rule. If you want approval when you speak, dress as white, older people dress when they go to church.

Spoken message: "Diction is very important if you want to be heard."
Underlying cultural message: If you have an accent I understand easily, I will be comfortable. If you don't, I may get angry or ill-at-ease as I have to strain to understand you. Unsurprisingly, there were no people of color with strong accents in the training -- nobody with an accent had been asked or chosen for the worship team, because accents are (exact words) "a problem." (If you haven't put the work in to lose your "accent," how could you possibly have the commitment it takes to be a worship leader!?) This purposeful exclusion, in plain language, means: Despite the fact that English is spoken in many places, in many different intonations, there are right ways and wrong ways to speak English, and we know what they are! Since we all know a spoken word always has some accent, we must ask ourselves ...Which ones do we consider acceptable? South African or British is okay, but the way they speak in Nigeria or India or Latin America doesn't work for us? Issues of ethnicity/nationality but also class come up here as well. The white upper-class listener's comfort is the priority. Leadership opportunities for people with a non-approved accent, which could include a leader of color, must take a back seat.

Spoken message: "Silence is how you show respect. Clapping is what an audience does at a performance, and church is not a performance."
Underlying cultural message: Rules of decorum are universal. Silence is proper. People who shout, clap, or talk in church or in worship don't fit here. Also could be translated as: "I have never read Ann Pellegrini or gender theory and am not familiar with the idea that in fact church and life might all have an element of performance."

Spoken message: "Well, yes, perhaps if you're talking about a Southern Baptist church, but also that's clapping an act of worship, not clapping in response to a performed piece."
Underlying cultural message: We don't expect someone to come here who comes from a Baptist background, where they also do crazy things like dancing, hooting and hollering. White, middle-class people don't worship that way. We are concerned about having people disrupt our services with noise, and we need you to agree not to do that or encourage anyone else to do that. However people feel the spirit is fine, as long as they do it in their seats, silently. Also, could be translated as "I have never been to a Southern Baptist church."

"Spiritual growth" should not have to mean, for anyone, putting on a brave face through a crisis of faith as they are faced with pervasive assumptions from their "beloved community" about who they are, what they are capable of, how they celebrate in "their tradition," how they ought to speak or present, or what they ought to wear to be respectful in church.

From where I sit, "Being in Community" does not mean someone should have to put up with white folks mistaking you for another person in the congregation roughly the same skin tone as you are. That is not a place where "practicing patience" should be the issue, but "removing ignorance." (See microaggressions.)

In my world, "Belonging" doesn't mean that everyone but you gets to say exactly what they think, about your clothes or your accent or your presentation, while you keep your experience to yourself because it would indict the others in the room who don't understand your background, your traditions.

As a white person seeing this happen, I am not going to be patient with it.
Another person's ignorance is running roughshod in the space where a soul ought to feel safe, and when that soul cries out, it is not allowed to speak, because (!) it might hurt someone's feelings.

Intent does not equal impact. It never has. So, is now the time? Can we start acknowledging the impact of our actions in beloved community rather than wearing our intent as a shield?

Doing church must mean cultural competence, and race/class/gender awareness, or we are missing the whole damn point.

Where is the "New Hope," again?

Sorry, I haven't gotten my pictures back yet — you'll have to use the picturemill in your mind. :)

On the road to Comilla, in the Chittagong District of Bangladesh, thin power lines stretch between clusters of houses and shops.
The bigger, steel utility poles, visible for miles, shepherd clusters of wires toward industrial concerns. "New Hope" is one such, a giant blue factory on N1, the Dhaka-Chittagong Highway, biggest structure for miles, with a Bangladeshi flag for its logo and Chinese characters in its name. It produces fish and poultry feed, and seems to have employed locals to carry sand in baskets to create a sand flat.

There is something difficult in seeing an small older woman in an ochre sari carrying a basket of sand on her head, dumping it, and slowly moving back toward the mammoth sandpile. I'm not sure why. It's honest work. Isn't she carving out the landscape like Bostonians did, building a future city's foundation by moving earth, creating a peninsula where it hadn't existed before?
That earthmoving work, done by the nameless thousands, undergirds Boston's present-day public transportation system, our school days, our nights on the town. People moved earth with their hands, with baskets, and in carts, because those were the tools available — it was a job, presumably for a poorer colonist.
But Boston wasn't contending with quite this level of powerful private industry when its landscape was forming. Maybe that's why this scene still feels ominous to me. The giant factory is so large, and her body so small. She will tire. She will shiver in the rain. She is susceptible to worms and bacteria and hunger. She will come and go. The giant blue feed factory, "New Hope," will live forever, susceptible only to rust, dependent only upon utilities and some organizing human brain — but not hers. (Who decided fish and poultry needed a factory so they could eat? Was that the best choice for this community?)
Is it somehow more ominous because her body is so vulnerable compared to earth-movers and backhoes? Does it feel problematic because the people in the countryside break their backs in the rain to do work that could be done by machine?
Yes. Because the people who hire them know this. Her worth is perhaps 1/100th of a machine. If she says "no," or "how about this way," there will be other bodies to carry sand, if those bodies begin to ask for benefits or education or a neighborhood school, the company might just decide it's cheaper to bring in a machine after all — I can just see that memo, the middle manager looking at his margins, saying, "Pay the damn freight! This has gone too far."
At least the worker who maneuvers the machine is the master of something. Skilled. More than just her arms, her legs, her basket.
That consistent chant of developers, "it'll bring jobs, bring jobs, bring jobs" — what does that mean, exactly, in this kind of landscape? Is any job a gift? What would it take for these jobs, and the local people who hold them, to carry weight and bargaining power? It's not enough to pay for a week's food, while leaving the powerlessness of poverty intact. What would jobs look like that did more?
I should add that New Hope does offer jobs besides carrying sand. Here's an ad for a control center operator for the Gazipur factory. New Hope also has charitable impulses. It has publicly distributed blankets to local residents during the Bangladeshi winter.
But, as developed nations working in developing nations, our responsibility, in service to the larger goal of development, is to offer more than handouts or two or three good jobs in a district. We shouldn't just get families through the week or through the winter, even if they are poor and uneducated. They are not dispensable.
What would a real investment look like? Doesn't she, in her sari in the rain, deserve to be supported in her vision for a better future? Climbing the hill with her basket, does she earn a place at the table, making decisions about the company's future in her community? Does she earn the time to spend with a manager, a decision-maker in the company, talking and thinking about what would support her family's livelihood in the long term?
When she does, that faceless blue factory will start to earn its name.

Observations from a bus, Dhaka to Comilla

Nupur tells me these tall hibiscus are called "kalmilata."

Kalmilata, flat water and rice fields as far as the eye can see, one road only, two thin paved lanes, for mothers with babies, bicycles, painted rickshaws, autorickshaws, CNGs (caged autorickshaws that run on compressed natural gas), trucks, jeeps, open-air schoolbuses carrying 8 or 10 children, traveling buses like ours (the biggest thing on the road), and occasional cars, traveling to and from the city.
The headrests on the bus are encased in white ersatz sanitary covers caked in ground-in grime. I start to itch just thinking about it — my scalp, my neck, my thigh. I don't want to rest my head.
Cattle are packed into trucks moving toward Dhaka, head to tail, jammed like cattle, necks straining toward the sky, eyes show no evidence of thoughts or wishes, not blinking. Straining without moving.
Some homes have woven mats on their floors. People say this keeps it cool.
I see homes on the road to Comilla that have those mats for walls, as the flood waters rise. The monsoons have well and truly arrived.
A swimming baby, maybe three years old, splashing by himself in a pond.
A wailing ambulance is stuck in market traffic, as we travel through a small village; our bus cuts him off with an angry blast of the horn that brooks no refusal. We are through the village in a matter of moments.
Back to the grasslands, where the sand is eroding away under some of the houses. Lengths of bamboo prop up the tin roofs and walls.
Boys have set up a soccer field on a sand flat, bamboo for goal posts, and toed lines in the sand for a goalie's box.
Kalmilata: tall, bending water hibiscus, blood red centers and pink petals.
The most permanent structures for many kilometers are the factories, the mosques, the schools. Madrasas you know by the teardrop shape of the windows.
People and long stretches of pipe carry sand from the bed of the River Meghna to long, flat boats, which will take the sand to Dhaka.
It's a muddy world outside (rain predicted for the next three days) and a young cow is nosing a green apple in the mud in front of a streetside market.
Back out on the grasslands a brown, respectable cow has climbed down toward the water to eat from a vine, compromising her dignity somewhat at a 45-degree angle.
Many of the mud-walled ponds seem to contain fish. The mud walls also offer a path from one mud-flat collection of tin houses to another — some drainage pipes connect the small ponds to the larger, unending stretch of water.
Thin power lines stretch between clusters of houses and shops.
The bigger, steel utility poles, visible for miles, shepherd clusters of wires toward industrial concerns. "New Hope" is one such, a giant factory, biggest structure for miles, with a Bangladeshi flag for its logo but Chinese characters. It seems to have employed locals to carry sand in baskets to create a sand flat.
Another madrasa, boys in uniform and arched windows.

This is a city bus - ours was fancier.

The busdriver won't stop blowing his horn: Once, twice, three times, five times, or a long, angry blast, depending on his frustration level, until they do what he wants — it hurts my ears, my head, I feel it in my ribs. It reverberates. The least belligerent: Two short for mere notification of his presence.
This road is the highest point I can see.
Men in lungi stand in the water plants which sometimes foster a patch of lilies, gathering greens, netting fish, gathering sand. Though it rains, still the people work, the men and boys shirtless.
The horn for a full 8 seconds as the driver tries to pass a slower, smaller bus which is already engaged in its own project of passing a slower, smaller bus. We are nearly off the road.
A woman in a burqa helps to unload a stalk of green bamboo (it is as thick as a grown woman's leg) from a pedal cart.
On one raised sandflat, a tall cylinder kiln for bricks.
A male goat stamps his foot in the mud, perhaps making a point to his female companion.
The trash man has stopped his blue pedal cart and is washing in the pond.
Everywhere, potential buildings stand half-finished — the foundation of a building, rebar exposed, no evidence of recent work, offers a sign, in bright color, announcing, "Palmy Shoes LTD: European Footwear Production."
Did they run out of money or interest?
I can't think this is such a surprise. Folks here seem used to great ideas that don't work out in reality — another thing people might just sort of get used to, like theft or heat, as the means to prevent it do not seem accessible in any way.
A cheery little mosque, painted generously in a variety of colors, its logo a white crescent and a burst of white stars.
We stop for gas. Very soon, there is a lot of shouting. An extremely angry man has exited the ambulance we cut off many kilometers ago, and is shouting at the driver. I imagine that he is incensed on behalf of his wounded brother, who is in the ambulance. "I am late!" the driver protests. But the man's anger is intense. Others pull the man back into the ambulance and they are away.
As our journey continues, the horn blasts become shorter, less certain, less persistent. Is he more aware of his neighbors? Or is it my imagination? This is how I think justice works — I am eager to believe the shouting had an effect, made him a better citizen driver; now perhaps he wonders how his driving affects others.
When we step from the bus, into the mud of Comilla, I offer the driver a note. It says, "Thanks for the ride. May your horn fall off and break into many pieces." I think this is funny and in some way mitigates the physical pain he has caused me.
The look of hope and surprise in his eyes as I hand him the envelope is almost more than I can take. He thinks it is money, or thanks. And perhaps he deserves both. We arrived so quickly. He drove like the very devil was at his heels. I curse my anger, my discomfort, my need for quiet, my need to tell others when they have encroached on my idea of ethics.
Chaim Potok, who I am reading on this trip (taking refuge from the noise and bustle in the warm fold of Ladover Brooklyn), offers this wisdom:

"Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it."

I have long believed this, though the practice of it is a great mystery. In a similar vein, I keep these words on my desktop: "Never tell the truth too plainly," as a reminder that fiction is not the same as what I have written above, a list of observations, plainly told, a travelogue.
Observations, plainly told?
When you see such a small piece of the truth, what is there to tell but the physical, the disparate pieces you are able to see? How can I code the truth when it is always in flux?
Anyway, to offer an observation with kindness I think would bless the person who heard it. Another day, another aggressive bus driver, I will know what to do.
Truth, some, with kindness, lots.

Visiting Kumudini Hospital

Nurse, mother and child at Kumudini*

My visit to Kumudini Hospital in Mirzapur (about two hours south of Dhaka, if the roads are clear and there are no major "jams") began with a friend I met at the swimming pool... she invited me to join the water aerobics class, and then, knowing of my interest in NGOs, kindly invited me to come along when, on Friday, the hospital hosted an open house for dignitaries.
Her grandfather started this hospital in Mirzapur. He built it with his own funds, after coming up the river to in a houseboat from India in the 1930s. The village has grown into a town, and the hospital has both a school for girls and a medical school, which trains promising young women to be doctors and nurses.

People can get medical care here for free. Kumudini charges a nominal fee for medicine — between 5 and 10 taka — less than the cost of a short rickshaw ride in Dhaka, about the price of a banana.

I talk to an older male doctor there, who, when I ask him if he likes his work, says, "Money's nothing compared to knowing you're really helping the people." 

Men's Ward at Kumudini Hospital*

We walk through the wards, full of patients — bed after bed, like the post-WW2 open-ward hospitals I've seen in films. In some ways patients seem more exposed in their suffering, but also less cut off than the small, two-person hospital rooms I'm used to. Those patients who can sit up watch us curiously from their beds. Some are not so alert. One frail older man is so thin and desiccated that I'm really not sure he's not dead. I don't want to stare, but out of the corner of my eye, I watch to see his chest move, just to be sure. It does. It's almost imperceptible, but he's breathing. I don't know what to do with his frailty but to acknowledge it and to wish him good health in this place. The ward has a multitude of open windows, when there is a breeze it is a joy.
The hospital incorporates many faiths. Catholic nuns run the nursing college, many of the patients here are Hindu (a minority in Bangladesh, about 9% of the nation's population) in addition to Muslim. One of the nuns, the third of her sisters to become a nun, speaks to me about the joy that this service, teaching and nursing, has brought her. I get her number so we can talk more.
I talk to a young female doctor who had done her training there, and is now entering her internship. She loves the work, she says, and is thankful for the opportunity. She exudes an air of quiet confidence and professionalism that I think is a clear byproduct of this place, which invests in women, and allows them to invest in their community.


*Photo credit 1: http://bop.nppa.org/2009/still_photography/ winners/?cat=NTP&place=HM1
Photo credit 2: http://www.thedailystar.net/lifestyle/2010/11/04/page01.htm

Snakes and Dragons: Breathing in order to Walk Down the Street

Though I'm embarrassed to say it, after several days in a whole different country, with an entirely different way of dressing, a complex set of cultural norms to learn and experience, and no small amount of political upheaval, my first blog post is about, well, me.

I haven't been sleeping. I'm full of anxiety. I've been really sick with a chest cold. I love my sister's apartment and it makes me happy to share the space, even though she's far away. My Google web sites are showing up in Bengali/Bangla because I had to change the timezone on Google calendar.

And it's hard right now for me to leave the house. Not just because I'm sick -- because I'm anxious. I try to leave the house early in the morning, as a kind of vaccination for the rest of the day -- if I do it once, I can do it again. The guidebooks tell you as a white person here you're always the center of attention, that especially for women it's worse and, of course, more dangerous to be on your own. I get so anxious thinking about it that it's better just to do it. A walk down to the river with some people staring is not nearly as bad as the books make it sound. You really do get to greet almost everyone. People smile. You get to read people's faces, see what they bring to the interaction, without any words. This lady asked me to take a picture with her kids.

Generalized anxiety is like a set of boa constrictors, which never quite kill you but choose a different part of your body and squeeze and squeeze until you're all worn out and scared. And if anxiety is snakes I guess fear is dragons -- enormous obstructions that stand in a path you might take and breathe fire at you until you either give up, or steel yourself to walk through the fire.

I've meditated once since I've been here, a simple vipassana. This I find very nourishing. While I am labeling thoughts and focusing on breath, it becomes clear where my mind is, the patterns it is falling into.

At the end of this vipassana, realizing how much anxiety and fear were present for me, I decided to do a bit of tonglen meditation: breathing in the heavy and icky, breathing out light and effervescence.

I have always done tonglen with some degree of reservation. Pema Chodron describes the practice as breathing in the crap of the world without resistance -- as she puts it, the practice "dissolves the armor of self-protection we've tried so hard to create around ourselves." I strongly resist the idea of breathing in the crap of the world. I never know how to breathe in the heavy, polluted yuck that exists in the world without allowing it to stick to me. Sometimes when I do tonglen, I keep that thick, heavy feeling all day.

But this time I read Pema's passages on tonglen differently -- she really sees this, too, as a place to confront our inner demons. "Start where you are. This is very important. Tonglen practice (and all meditation practice) is not about later, when you may get it all together and you're this person you really respect... You don't have to transform anything... That light touch of acknowledging what we're thinking and letting it go is the key to connecting to the wealth that we have." (Start Where You Are, 1994, Shambhala, 35)

The beauty here is that whatever you do for yourself, you do for others, and vice versa. Breathing in my snakes and dragons, being with them, their fangs and fire and scales and terrible constricting bellies, I had to breathe in fully. And, the next moment, I was still there, breathing. The snakes and dragons weren't gone, but they weren't freaking me out so much. Chodron writes, "When the resistance is gone, so are the demons."

I always thought that finger-wagging phrase, "Wherever you go, there you are" had a deterministic and judgemental cast to it -- I have often interpreted it to mean that my wanderlust was sort of an ill-disguised attempt to try to escape myself. The puritanical schoolmaster in me tells me to stay where I am, don't try to get fancy, don't focus all that energy on getting away.

In fact, "wherever you go, there you are" is an amazing and expansive truth --  wherever you go, you find opportunities to work on different things about yourself, you get to know different things about yourself. Different pieces of you are exposed to the light. Wherever you go, you discover new and beautiful and crazy things about you. There you are.

Here's a funny thing from today... I asked a friend if we could go to a bank, and we ended up at an ATM in Baridhara. There's a smiley guy who sits at the little ATM kiosk and opens the door for you. All day! He sits with the bank all day. There are no tellers, no bank managers, just this guy and the ATM kiosk. And he was pleased as pie to see us.

The air smells like cut watermelons

The air smells like cut watermelons,
light, slightly sweet, like a rare day in July
bringing picnics and lightning
the air is not heavy, but will be heavy soon.
In this moment, action --
we must swim and eat and call to each other;
we find truth in movement,
we try brave things without thinking,
rounding a bend in the road at full tilt
stopping short at the top of the hill
as the deer at the bottom
makes us catch our breath.
Truth is there, too,
in the frozen stock-stillness.
The grown-ups do not swim and
your mother cautions against it as
my father says, "oh let them go,
won't be many more days like this one,"
and he is right.
When the rain falls
like a host of small golden spiders
with the sunlight behind them
everything seems greener, and
your mother collects her Tupperware,
your father gathers his keys, says,
"it's about that time,"
you wave through the window
of the station wagon, and
still my father sits, watches,
ankle crossed over ankle, in silence,
hands clasped at the back of the neck,
and after a while,
I go and sit by him,
and he puts his arm around me
and he smells like dust and thought
and after a while, we gather our things
and go home.

Meditation

singular how the chest
speaks even when the mouth dursn't
when the mouth dares not
or has not gathered its pebbles for stacking
when the mouth is busy eating or talking,
musing, wishing, speculating, explicating, formulating,
still the chest rises to the throat,
it is this ripe cherry truth blossoming out,
plump, created with no especial intent --
it is merely itself, literature,
The Mayor of Castorbridge,
we may ask questions if we choose,
or sit and look on, mute --
after all, questions are strategy --
and tell me the agenda of a cherry.

As we move toward 6pm...

Rapture.
I like this guy's take on it:

This is actually Maine. So, yes, heaven.

Wanting Sumptuous Heavens
By Robert Bly

No one grumbles among the oyster clans,
And lobsters play their bone guitars all summer.
Only we, with our opposable thumbs, want
Heaven to be, and God to come, again.
There is no end to our grumbling; we want
Comfortable earth and sumptuous Heaven.
But the heron standing on one leg in the bog
Drinks his dark rum all day, and is content.

Humans, always wanting to impose the storyline! Why do we need the promise of a change of scenery? Or is it a fearful future we need, to upgrade our obedience, take stock, celebrate our virtue and finally ironically celebrate the near-miss we didn't REALLY believe was coming? But we are allowed to briefly live in this in-between space of knowing and not-knowing tomorrow is coming, which is kind of interesting.

The rapture won't erase the babies and cats, so there will be lots to do. The rapture won't erase my debts, because no matter who goes to heaven, the loan companies will remain. The rapture won't erase work left undone, so I will continue going through papers and budgeting. I will still pump the tires in my bicycle. I will play my bone guitar. 

Here's a funny idea, there may be some extra vehicles out there up for grabs... (The government would emphatically NOT be in charge, how could we render unto Caesar?) I will play my bone guitar, and drive someone else's car tomorrow. If you're planning on being raptured, could you just leave a note on your car? Guitar on the front seat, and keys in the ignition, please.

A great rapture song by ELO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjPqsDU0j2I

Let us dance ourselves into oblivion.

Wrestling with Work and Wisdom

"Rabbi Hanina Ben Dosa ... used to say, He whose works exceed his wisdom, his wisdom will endure; but he whose wisdom exceeds his works, his wisdom will not endure."

The Living Talmud, 133

When the Jewish sages comment on this passage, they consider "wisdom" to be book-learnin'. (This I don't think is true, but I'll get to that later.) Rabbi Simeon ben Eleazar writes about the difficulty in learning without praxis — ideas gained in learning are best supported and allowed to grow with honest real-world effort. In fact, he writes, "[h]e who studies but does not practice is like a woman who gives birth to children and then buries them."

If we do not practice what we learn, we lose familiarity with the truth. A truth becomes stale, stiff, cracked with the heat and lack of use. I am occasionally struck and saddened by the shadow of a brilliant idea, half-remembered from a reading, which, when I try to recall it, I see is beginning to gradually evaporate — I cannot recall it as clearly as I have in the past, I cannot apply the wisdom, as its depth has left me. Have I done the idea a disservice? Is it not as pressing as it once seemed to be? How can I tell lasting truths from momentary fascinations?

Writing is a way of addressing, of facing, of wrestling. It takes hours. I'm wrestling with this late at night, but here I am. Why? Because I can't bear for it to slip away. Again.

The sages suggest that basically one ought to do more than one studies — but, truth be told, I think this reading, in which wise action keeps books honest, is needlessly literal. "Wisdom," after all, is not found entirely in books.

I would instead take this passage as a tribute to the holiness of lived experience — specifically, as a tribute to making mistakes: "She whose works exceed her wisdom, her wisdom will endure; but she whose wisdom exceeds her works, her wisdom will not endure."

In other words, she who acts beyond the familiar, she who acts and cannot fully predict the outcome, she who sees the limits of her wisdom, she who wrestles with the unknown, muscles tensed, present and uncertain, who may be bloodied by the effort, she may gain a limp but she gains true wisdom.

Maslow. It seems he is
enjoying a great joke. 

Psychologist Abraham Maslow, in his understanding of fulfillment, speaks of self-actualizing, never self-actualized— becoming one's potential self is a process. Maslow describes self-actualizing individuals as people with love and enthusiasm, who learn from everyone they meet, who treat the world as their family, who see the world fresh each day — steeped in the Buddhist notion of not-knowing, a deep and friendly defamiliarizing of everyday life, they are forever exceeding the bounds of their wisdom. They are loving and enthusiastic, and make mistakes, experience disappointment, and therefore are forever learning.

Of course, this "forever learning" has challenges. It can be diffuse, stretched out, indeterminate. It can draw and quarter you, pull you to pieces, to move from comfort into challenge again and again. What can bring together all the learning that happens at the boundaries of our understanding?

Rumi, the Sufi poet, writes:

Your intelligence is spread over a hundred "important" affairs,

over thousands of desires and concerns great and small.
You must unite the scattered parts by means of love,
so that you may become as sweet as Damascus and Samarkand.
When you have become united,
particle by particle, from out of perplexity,
then it is possible to stamp the King's seal upon you.
(Mathnawi IV, 3288-3290)

Damascus

Out of confusion, unity.

Out of scattered parts, sweetness.

Out of perplexity, safety — and the means is love.

When the path is unclear, love is quiet discernment. When the pieces don't fit, love is faith in a picture I can't quite see. When I am frustrated by all the things I am not, love is patience.

This wisdom comes slowly. But surely, it must endure.

Paul Simon on a Monday

I'm gonna leave you, and here's the reason why -
I like to sleep with the window open, and you keep the window closed.
So goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Are we really this fickle?
At divinity school, I meet Catholic women who have chosen to stay in the Catholic church, despite the fact that they cannot be ordained. I'm amazed by their strength of character. They claim the tradition, vocally, proudly, but reject the pieces of the tradition that aim to keep them on the margins of leadership and relevance. They battle with traditions that aim to control their lives and bodies in ways that don't respect their autonomy. They argue with historical interpretations of religious truth that make them less sacred than men, less fit to be priests.
In Buddhism, this would be called "staying present to conflict."
For my friend K, this has meant going to her mother's house for Christmas although she is not allowed to make decisions about how the family celebrates, the food they eat, or even what they watch on TV. Evn as some of these activities have conflicted with her values, she says she has learned to be present with the ways the celebration doesn't match her ideal. This year, her mother passed away. She and her siblings recreated her mother's Christmas, the meal her mother would have made. The central relationship that held them all together was wrapped up in a complicated and fraught ritual, made no less important by its immutability and complexity.
Unitarian Universalists are open to searching. We do a lot of it. We create our own rituals, our own ways of celebrating important relationships, our own philosophies a mix of personal experience, old wisdom and fresh perspectives. How many of us have the chance to stick around and try sleeping with the window closed?

Conflict: The Chewy Middle

In many ways our churches present us with this challenge. Our varying backgrounds and ideals mean we may frequently be confronted with a ritual that doesn't resonate or a social justice agenda that leaves us cold. But this is the chewy middle, where church becomes a verb, where fellowship becomes a practice.
The voices of my embattled, centered, visionary Catholic friends are some of the strongest women's voices I know. They have learned to live with conflicting truths, to speak unpopular truth, to confront the imperfection in the party line, as a continual practice. They have learned to face hard-line authority not with a plea for lenience but with two feet planted.
Our more catholic confederates show us clearly the strength that comes when love and vocal resistance travel together.

Renunciation

I'm listening to an online lecture on the Eightfold Path.

I think it's Ajahn Thanasanti Bhikkhuni speaking. She spoke at Harvard several weeks ago. I missed it. (I'm missing a lot of things lately. Good things, things that I want to be a part of. I did something else that morning. Maybe I shouldn't have. But I remember that morning, and I had a great time.)

There's a lot about internal dialogue in this talk— something that at this point in the semester I have to watch carefully. What is our "background noise" like? Ideally, she says, it will be full of "creation, goodwill, harmlessness to our selves." Yes.

First head-shave, maybe 2009

But the thing that caught my ear, early on in the broadcast (about 8:00?) is when she speaks about renunciation. She talks about fasting and "giving up cuddles," two renunciations I have not tried. She also mentioned ... head-shaving!

I hadn't thought of it this way before. Renunciation?
I shaved my head knowing that it felt freeing in social and aesthetic ways. I did it knowing that it adds an edge to the way I look that is both frightening and illuminating for me. I did it knowing that I fit in better with the people I like to fit in with, and get gawked at less by the people whose eyes I don't want to figure into my daily navigation of the world. I did it knowing that it gives me less to hide behind, but also less topographic space to worry about.

If the hair is there, and I'm in public, it should be intentional and lovely. My hair should be somehow welcoming... It should invite conversation. It should allure.

If the hair is not there, I don't have to worry that it's not perfect. And having a shaved head — I don't think there can be a way in which a shaved head on a white woman is perfect, and not jarring to most people, who might think (and actually sometimes say) "Cancer?" or "Sinead O'Rebellion!" as I walk down the street. In shaving my head, I think I accept this.

Head-shaving feels like some kind of renunciation, yes. And liberation. But not neutrality. It protects me from something. It also isolates me from something. It draws me closer to some people, and creates odd, unspoken chasms with others. What have I renounced? What have I welcomed in its place?

The Universe Machine?

So, I missed Bhikkuni in person. Bummer. Now I'm listening to her online instead, and she's still passing along something powerful. I don't think I "cracked the cosmic egg," as my friend Emma is fond of saying. I didn't break the universe. I sometimes envision a really complex machine, something out of Jules Verne, and I'm this little funny-shaped part, and if I don't do my "supposed to" thing, the alarms and whistles start going off and the entire thing comes to a screeching halt and we lose production time.

Or perhaps the machine just embarks on a slightly different project. Because the machine is organic. Perhaps as I am shaving my head or showing up somewhere other than where I meant to, the machine is growing another arm or gear to allow me to do what I do and still exist within the grand scheme and the productive whole. If that's true, in a universe of interconnectedness, not only can't I break the machine — the springs I picture ricocheting across the room are purely imaginary — I can't do even something so weird/bad that I'm really separate. And neither can you.

So, that's all right then.

From: Me, To: You, Re: Thanks

“Parents are people, people with children.”
—Harry Belafonte & Marlo Thomas

They always taught me to speak up.
They always said — probably they didn’t even say, it was so obvious that it needed not even to be said — that my voice was worth hearing in the wider world. That I — smart, funny, interesting, well-read — had the tools to create and think, that I had the right and responsibility to exist in public, to speak my mind, to push back in public discourse against those ideas which I thought were wrong-headed, ill-considered or damaging.

It is essential to recover the fundamental ways in which these two people (the same people who bought me the Marlo Thomas record “Free to be You and Me”) taught me to be who I am, in which they REQUIRED it, in which they reveled in my original, thoughtful, active self.

It is essential because I could spend four incalculable eons listing the ways they wanted me to behave which I resisted, ignored, rejected. Maybe the list starts with wearing skirts to church, maybe with some other troublesome thing. Conflicting notions of female desirability without sexuality, perplexing ideas of humans as grasping, flawed and sinful, ideas about pushing yourself even when it doesn’t feel good in the name of commitment.

But these pieces don’t need to be centered today.

The basic truths about my right to be in the world (vocally, publicly and honestly) are direct hand-offs from my parents. I cultivated them, like bonsai, making adjustments for the ways I think it’s important to walk through the world.

For instance, it’s important not only to speak out against things that you believe are unfair, unkind, or unreasonable, but to speak for the things that are dear to your heart — to speak for love and understanding, to speak for people and families who need help, to speak for a higher way of existing in this world, which is so often lived moment-to-moment in a flurry of digitized, consumerized activity.

As a wise woman at UU church said today, there comes a time when you must negotiate a new relationship with the people who raised you: Part of this relationship is that they treat you like a grown-up. The other part is that you get to treat them as people.

I love this idea. Just people, who are allowed to be flawed, who come through when they can, who do care, who may not have given you everything you needed to get by, who may have left you floundering when you could have used a voice of wisdom because they had complicated stuff of their own to deal with.

When I acknowledge the beauty in the basic lessons they taught me, we cannot be enemies. We are at work on the same project. Yes, it’s complicated. Still, the colors are bright — even shadow is usually layered with color if you look. I think my growing understanding of the beautiful things of which I am capable, of which humans are capable if we can find a way past entrenched cultural barriers and our own resistance, is coupled with increased peace with failure, mine and other people’s.

Thank you and namaste. Thank you for being willing to teach me. Thank you for failing and succeeding. I continue your tradition, I work, I love, I fail and I succeed.

“Not to acknowledge any favor is a sign of ignorance.
The knowledge of the Truth and cognizance of God is but to give each man his due.”
—M. Shabistari, “Garden of Mystery”

Love and oatmeal

“Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.” — Marge Piercy

I think a lot about how to love people. What does love look like? How can I best love people, acknowledging their dignity and difference from me? How can I extend that kind, empowering love to my own self?
When I think of treating people with respect and love, no strings attached, I think of my friend R.
R. is abnormally gifted at loving people even when they don’t give her what she wants, when they are demanding or boring, when they don’t make sense or are lazy. She offers friends a love that makes me think of oatmeal (the kind with cinnamon and honey). It’s nourishing and substantive. It’s not particularly fancy — it is homey, warm and full of good humor. She doesn’t have any complicated requirements about how you have to act in order to deserve it, either. There’s no oatmeal-exchange agreement you have to sign, no proof that you’ll return this love in kind. Her friendship is welcoming. I learn, slowly, how to take part in this warm and bracing exchange. 
In the winter in New England, we're forced to move a little bit more slowly. There's ice, and weather that resists your efforts to be out and about. The time we spend inside with warm food is sacred. Warm oatmeal turns into an event, a ritual, a joy. When it's bitterly cold outside, when the wind is blowing every well-defined thought out of my head, I'm thankful for R, who offers me a space of peace, acceptance and warmth.

Texture of wealth and other odd consumer sensations

I went inside in flip-flops, one of those enormous, high-ceilinged shops, for rich people, with recessed lighting and odd displays with elements you might not expect to see in a shop - a disembodied tap with real running water, sepia photographs of somebody's brother and father, hands on hips, standing on a freshly mowed lawn, and in the window long, long strips of newspaper glued together from floor to ceiling. Every so often there were stuffed chairs made of printed canvas that you could sit in for a moment but which were also for sale, so in sitting you felt slightly guilty, as if you were breaking the rules, because the chair cost 1498 dollars.
Shirts with eyelets, pants costing $168 with ridiculously flared bottoms that you know will raise anyone, even you, up to the height of fashion, and tiny - just tiny - pairs of jeans, for girls who never have to ask you to scoot your chair closer to the table so they can squeeze by.
I try the lotion, I turn it upside down to see the price on the bottom, feeling painfully gauche - this is the sort of thing that goes on in other stores, but here, if you have to ask... It was only ten dollars, but smelled to me like somebody's rose-handed grandmother, loose skin, slow moving in the delicate morning in an empty house.
The dresses were all too small, and some designed so short they would barely cover a bottom, but this is the style now.
The textures are inviting - there are woven throws and wall-hangings, thick wool, like I've seen in South America (for less than five dollars U.S.) in muted greens and what here is probably called "creme."
I am drawn to a crinkled skirt, purple the color of raspberry sherbet - surprising but organic, brown undertones,  and I reach out for it, because it looks so soft, and it is - I can't stop touching, I try to look as though I'm browsing, as though I have a right to touch, but really I'm just captivated. I look at the price again - compulsion, apparently - and the skirt is $98. It seems to stand up on its own and I realize it must have a lining, maybe crinoline. I lift up the skirt, feeling as though I am invading its privacy, looking where I shouldn't, like a dirty old man checking out the goods, or a dirty old woman biting the coin with rotted tooth to be sure it's really gold.
The underskirt is soft linen with lace and I touch it too, imagining what it would feel like against my thighs - it would be like floating through the day, like skating. Some things are created for use, some for whimsy, often without regard for comfort, and it occurs to me that luxury is soft against your skin. This is why women pay 98 dollars for a skirt. Some women, but not me. I don't.
I watch the women who shop here. Some leave with very small bags, others come in with teenage daughters, younger children, and I - compulsion - begin to do the calculations in my head - one item for each child... Clothing perhaps as cheap as $50 for a thin, unbearably gossamer t-shirt - you can see your fingers through it - wearing would be like swimming in a cloud - would my whole demeanor change? Would my life be different if the clothing I bought were soft?
I see $6 mugs with the alphabet on them, consider buying one for my brother and one for his fiance, but I feel as if my hands and stomach are full already, with the smells and the canvas and the curtains, newspaper, bell-bottoms and the sweaters with knobby mustard-colored flowers tucked into a corner like a small country, going about its business, propagating its culture, thick and soft.

Building blocks of narrative

Is narrative is a building, a shape established and carried out for a given set of materials? Can we even assume a given set of materials? Perhaps as the building is coming together, the tools in my hands keep changing, the materials feeling more weighty to the touch as I realize what I have... or as what looked solid now with closer examination seems to be hollow.

The materials might be flimsy, but they might be put together to maximum advantage, offering harmony and shelter. The materials might be shaped to keep out inclement weather or to deter people who wish us harm.

The materials might be top-notch but the design might be so unfocused that it provides no shelter or sustenance — even with great material, the narrative might be basically useless.

Sometimes, in describing our realities, we can lock ourselves inside an unhelpful narrative. I talked to a friend this week who was in incredible pain. He described himself as a car whose battery had run out, who needed a jump from another car to get going again. If he accepts this car narrative to be true, how can he possibly help himself? No matter how well the stalled car as an icon describes what he feels in this moment — tired, out of juice, in need of inspiration — this metaphor as a governing narrative is limiting. I would argue for changing the metaphor before hoping to change anything else.

Still, it must be acknowledged that there is some redemptive power in saying "I." Building narrative is power, regardless of materials or skill. Build the structure and see how it works. Change it if you need to. Tell your story. Even if he or I or you paint any one of ourselves into a corner, we can always paint ourselves out again.

In trying to shape a narrative, any narrative, I convince myself and others who may be listening that I do in fact exist — I am a thinker, an actor. I am voicing a present. Whatever may come after, I.

Waiting for snow

Here the days are clear and cold as we wait for snow to arrive. The city seems to feel a mix of dread and anticipation, like what it was like to be a twelve-year-old girl waiting for puberty. We all know the change will be uncomfortable, terrifying, harsh but probably kind of fun, and whatever the hell it will be it's awfully slow in coming. This is the sky in Boston Commons. Impossibly clear. crisp. blue.

Thoughts on a Young Rilke

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in our heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. —RMR, "Letters to a Young Poet"

Rainer Maria Rilke was, as a young man, intellectually gifted, sensitive, and an appalling sentimentalist. He was concerned with cataloguing moments, with creating pristine frames for the scenes his eyes witnessed, with drifting through nature appreciating natural beauty, even as his sharp critic's mind analyzed the avant-garde in arts and letters. He studied Russian, met (and was cowed by) Tolstoy. Rilke was enthusiastic, and sometimes a nuisance to himself and others, who respected his persistent insights but sometimes wanted him to go away. His enthusiasm could get in the way of their work — he craved connection and worshipped at the temples where he found it. His adoration threw off at least one friend's writing schedule - as she wrote chapters of a novel, Lou Andreas-Salome fought Rainer for the time to pursue her own ideas. On at least one occasion she asked her maid to pretend she was not at home when he came to call, so she might spend time with the characters she was creating, rather than being drawn into the forests around her home, walking barefoot with Rilke. These details I have learned by reading some of the letters they shared.

Rainer's early indiscretions comfort me. This must be how he knows, for certain, that "young people are not prepared for such difficult loving... Young people who love each other fling themselves to each other... They don't notice at all what a lack of mutual esteem lies in this disordered giving of themselves... They must not forget, when they love, that they are beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love - must learn love." Rilke's abiding friendship with Andreas-Salome, as they grew older and left behind the sexual nature of their relationship, is also a comfort. Their love affair shifts into a deep friendship, of which intellectual support and friendly interest between them are key components. Their genuine interest in each other, their dedication to hearing and sharing ideas, their mutual hope for health and growth, all these qualities remain strong, though the sexual element of their relationship had gone.

I can imagine Lou, married, intellectually mature and curious, diving into the pool of this hot-blooded young man fourteen years her junior. I can imagine her calm, world-wise countenance as he vents his spleen, perhaps gentle amusement as he tries feverishly to capture moments she sees with a more seasoned eye, as she pets this boy genius she must have contemplated the blurring of the line between mother and lover. Perhaps she was more comfortable in one role than in the other - perhaps she saw the roles knit together into a sensual, intimate, forbidden, primal mantle. Perhaps this is why Rilke's early letters rail against her patience, her wisdom. He doesn't want her to be a mother figure, but an equal.

I love Rilke's assertion that love is difficult and requires substantial study beforehand. "Whoever wants to have a deep love in his life must collect and save for it and gather honey." To make one's life sweeter, to increase the depth and breadth of one's experience, to order one's life, these are such pleasures, and I happen to believe (as does Rilke) that they make us better lovers of other people and better lovers of ourselves.

Sleeping Slantwise

I often sleep slantwise on my bed. Mostly this is fine, but sometimes I wonder if I am truly, deeply, irretrievably contrarian.
Could it denote some kind of medical or mental disorder? Uncertain.
Most likely it's because of the papers where my feet should be.

Why I Love the T, Part 2 - All Kissed Up

Coming home on the red line, I saw these ladies, ready to rock. I saluted them. Wait, that's ACDC.
I hope neither of them ended up in front of the mad pee-er.
http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/10/08/kiss-piss-scandal-man-arrested-for-urinating-on-fan-at-concert/

On the Bus

Coming home from work exhausted, dizzy from the noisy, creaking city bus, I look up from the book in my lap and see a boy and his father. They both wear baggy jeans and sweatshirts, they are the color of au lait coffees. They sit next to each other on the bus.

Soon, the boy's father stretches out and rests his head in his son's lap. The boy curls over his father's shoulder and puts his head on his father's chest. Their familiarity is intimate, practiced. They touch with the casual, proprietary air one saves for one's own pocketbook or a jacket carried over the arm. My heart swells; it is as if I, too, am being touched in this familiar way.

When this position gets too uncomfortable, the boy (curly-headed and observant) sits up and puts his fingers on his dad's face, playing with the way his father's eyes close and the way his forehead wrinkles. His fingers are neither gentle nor rough, but insistent, inquisitive. The man doesn't brush his son's fingers aside, but waits until, on their own, they finish exploring.

The boy takes an envelope from his pocket, and studies the two Red Sox tickets inside. He asks his father a question, maybe about the seats. I don't like to overhear.

We are headed south into the city from the suburbs, and the bus jangles like a woman's heavy costume jewelry or an aluminum can filled with concrete dragged, without mercy, behind a bicycle. It takes the potholes too seriously. I call my brother first and then my father. My brother is in the middle of something but my father answers with a fond "Why, hullo there!" and it is as if I can touch his face with my fingers. We talk all the way to the bus station and I walk out into the street where it's raining and we keep talking, even though we make mistakes (He thinks I was born in 1975. I wasn't.), we are both unwilling to let go of the connection.