Community/Interconnectedness – Page 12

Forward!

[ Norwegian skyline, October, 2015]

So here’s the question I’m kicking around lately: Since, like many, my sense of the Divine is internal (“That small still voice,” “The Inner Teacher,” etc.) when I actually experience—and am filled by— an inward, physical sense of God/Spirit/Light/Love, is this because I am predisposed to imagine a religious experience as something that happens within me? Or did I just imagine it? Or am I simply talking about That Which is Inexplicable using a construct about inwardness that may be useful but, c’mon! We’re talking about The Inexplicable, right?

Huh?

Okay, here’s what happened: I’d returned home from a magical (though wet) trip to Norway and found my re-entry unsettling. Literally. I had the non-stop, disconcerting sense that my body was gently rocking back and forth as if still on a ship. (It’s called “Disembarkment Syndrome” in case you’re interested) And, frankly, after being in a clean and progressive country that does not share my Home Sweet Home’s appalling record of, say, mass incarcerations or our insane policies re assault weapons, I wasn’t feeling all warm and fuzzy about being back. Heck, no!

But on Saturday, a superbly gorgeous day, despite my wobbliness and general sense of hopelessness, I nevertheless joined hundreds of others to dance and cheer and connect at Honk!, a yearly, Somerville street festival featuring brass bands from around the world who believe in and who support activist causes—and also in dressing up as outrageously as possible, too!

Ahhh. No, I’m not claiming that Honk! cured my Disembarkment Syndrome. I’m still a little wobbly. But as far as my conviction—and my hope—are concerned, I can declare that I’m once again on solid ground. Because, I sweah* that I physically felt Something slide into my soul at Honk. Especially during the opening ceremony—and hearing that precious word, justice, again and again. And hearing members of the Original Big Seven Social Aid and Pleasure Club, an amazing band from New Orleans, talk about their losses during Hurricane Katrina yet still able to celebrate and to praise. Or just hearing “Oh, you can’t scare me I’m sticking to the union” sung by Madison, Wisconsin’s Forward! Marching Band. A “God-shaped hole” ** within me was filled as though I actually felt that missing piece slide into place in my abdomen. I sweah!

Weird, huh. Yes. And what a gift—wherever it came from.

*************************************************************

* (It’s really hard to convey a Boston accent!)

** See my post from July 13, 2010: “I Wrote a Book About It!”

“O, God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”*

[Passing a buoy near Havoysund, Norway, aboard the “MS Richard With”]

To learn of another slaughter—this time in Oregon; ten murdered this time—while traveling along the coast of Norway was to experience such deep, crushing desolation as I had not felt in years. And asking my standard, spiritual-guidance question: “What am I asked to do?” merely let me see that an “answer” that might have come to me had I been home, to send off a generous contribution to Gabby Gifford’s Americans for Responsible Solutions, was no solution at all. (That I realized my stateside instinct might have been TO DO SOMETHING almost made me smile—an indulgent, pat-on-the-head/ isn’t-that-so-cute smile you might give to someone young or naive or sweetly clueless.)

No, I slowly came to understand as I gloomily stared through a rain-swept window at Norway’s stark and misty beauty, what was being asked of me was actually so much harder: I had to “sink down” to that desolation. I was being asked not be numbed. (And, yes, President Obama subsequently used that same word.)

So I did.

*Thy sea, O God, so great,

My boat so small.

It cannot be that any happy fate

Will me befall

Save as Thy goodness opens paths for me

Through the consuming vastness of the sea.

Thy winds, O God, so strong,

So slight my sail.

How could I curb and bit them on the long

And saltry trail,

Unless Thy love were mightier than the wrath

Of all the tempests that beset my path?

Thy world, O God, so fierce,

And I so frail.

Yet, though its arrows threaten oft to pierce

My fragile mail,

Cities of refuge rise where dangers cease,

Sweet silences abound, and all is peace.

~Winfred Ernest Garrison

Beat Your Swords Into Train Tracks and Affordable Housing

Good news: a new subway station/light rail is probably coming to my neighborhood (Cost overruns are making important people like the governor look twice at the project). More Good News: Many car-repair and other businesses dependent upon the fossil-fuel industry which once dominated my neighborhood are, seemingly overnight, being transformed into housing. In other words, the status quo of living in a world dominated by cars, is shifting. Changing. VERY Bad News: This new housing is NOT affordable housing.

“If you want peace, work for justice,” has been my mantra since the 90s. So on Sunday, instead of attending the International Day of Peace on Boston Common, I am abandoning my Quaker peeps to attend a forum on the future of my community, hosted by Union United, a grassroots organization advocating for, you guessed it, affordable housing!

“Where are All Those Babies Coming from?”

[Third Rail, Harvard Square T, 2015]

In conversations a couple of times, lately, I’ve heard the word “upriver” used to anchor whatever that person—usually young, usually progressive, usually really smart—is talking about, a shorthand for systemic, overwhelming, we need to look at and deal with the root causes of whatever social ill you and I are presently talking about.

The backstory to “upriver” (Skip this paragraph if you already know.): Upriver references a much-told story I’d heard back in the early 90s; the third-hand way I’d heard the tale, it had been told by Kip Tiernan, a righteous, early-on advocate for the homeless. Kip’s story went like this: Once upon a time there was a village beside a river. One day someone from the village saw a baby on a raft floating by so rescued that baby, took it home, clothed it, fed it, built a crib for it to sleep in, etc. Next day, two babies, two rescues, next day, more and more until the people of that village were doing nothing else but rescuing babies. The story ends, of course, when someone in that village proposes that someone should walk upriver to find out what’s going on!

Here’s the thing, though: Even though you or I can think upriver about, say, why it’s hot as hell right now in the Northeast although the calendar’s saying it’s early fall—another day in the 90s expected today—or why, right now, close to 60 Million People have been forcibly displaced worldwide (Take whatever time you need to take in that obscenely astronomically number), such thinking doesn’t alleviate our pain, does it.

May our ability to connect dots, to be mindful, to think systemically, to acknowledge root cases, may such mindfulness lead to a precious moment for each of us to hear the answer to our question: “What is it I am called to do?”

What I Might Have Said

[A Beacon on a Beacon Street Sidewalk, Somerville, MA, 2015]

A week ago I held a “No War in Iran” sign at a peace demonstration near US Congressman Mike Capuano’s office. Although engrossed, lately, in issues that feel far more immediate and urgent and, yes, that I am called to do, that horrific sound of The War Machine once again revving its powerful, deadly engine compelled me to show up. So I did.

Halfway through the hour long demonstration—on a crowded sidewalk at lunchtime in front of a mall and office building complex—one of the MoveOn organizers passed around a mic and invited the forty or so protesters to say something. One right after another, five or six men made cogent, impassioned speeches.

“Why is it only men?” I marveled aloud. Overhearing me, an older man invited me to speak. Twice.

Reader: Although that kind man’s repeated invitation felt genuine and inclusive, I declined.

Why?

Mostly, Dear Reader, because what I was feeling and what I longed to say aloud wasn’t cogent, it wasn’t linear, it wasn’t about facts about Iran. No, what I wanted to talk about would have been rambling and quite possibly incoherent unless worked on, edited, rewritten, read aloud; my usual writing process.

Most likely what I would have shared would have been about what had JUST happened a few minutes before, when two lovely, young, elegantly-dressed women had come up to me and said, “Thank you. We’re from Iran.” And how I’d grabbed them and hugged them and, probably to their confusion (or, possibly, their horror) I’d called them “My sisters!” And how I’ve been protesting wars for over fifty years but have never actually hugged someone from Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan or . . . at a peace demonstration. And how, having physically touched those two women, I was feeling my deep and profound and chromosomal connection to the women and children everywhere!

But I also could have expressed my impatience, my indignation to once again show up to protest another @#$%^&* war! “I got things to do!” I could have declared, arms on hips—which would have made holding a mic pretty tricky. “Like the rest of you, I’m working on urgent, in-your-face, this system’s broken; roll up your sleeves stuff! Like climate change. Like our broken criminal justice system. We don’t have time for another war!”

Most of all I would have wanted to clutch that mic, stared out at the crowd with earnest, beseeching eyes, and in a tremulous voice talked about how War and Climate Change and BlackLivesMatter and all the other ways we ignore and deny and desecrate our Wholeness and Interconnectedness reveal our collective brokenness. And how, with every breath, we must acknowledge that Wholeness, that Light. And let it guide us.

(How do you think that would’ve gone over? Yeah. Me, too.)

“Is not this Joseph’s son?”

In the silence of meeting for worship on Sunday, in the midst of my own faith community, after spending a week with others of my faith but not of my community, a touching moment from the Gospels came to me. (That I could not quite remember how the relevant passage was worded may mean I’m destined to sit in silence with a Bible on my lap. Maybe.) This moment from Luke 4: 16 – 30, is one sentence long; a bit, you might say, a little piece of theatrical business to explore or illustrate dramatic possibilities.

So let’s set the scene: Jesus of Nazareth has just returned to Galilee after spending forty days in the wilderness where he’d been tested by the devil—and passed. Having begun preaching in other Galilee synagogues, he returns to Nazareth and his own synagogue and on the sabbath, reads that stirring Jubilee passage from Isaiah. (Some of it. Jesus edits, apparently. But that’s another story, another post.) Like he’s been doing all over Galilee, Jesus wows ’em with his “gracious words.”

But here’s the bit: “They [his former neighbors, friends of his parents, the parents of his childhood friends] said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ ” (Mary’s son, too, we might add.)

Yep. He is. Composed, well-spoken, “filled with the power of the Spirit” after his wilderness-and-devil-and-forty-days’-fasting ordeal, he’s all that, he’s Local Kid Makes Good. Speaks Good. And his wowed listeners are both profoundly moved and remembering him when he was ten and, say, worked in his dad’s woodworking shop or carted water jars for his mother.

And we know thrilling moments such as what happened to Jesus’s hometown residents. We’ve been there. We’ve attended other people’s sons’ and daughters’ rites of passage and experienced, maybe for an instant, a thrill, a frisson.

To be able to witness another person’s growth, change, transformation is holy. And while, of course, it’s touching when a child does these things, watching an adult transform is, for me, seeing Spirit made manifest.

Which, I believe, is Good News.

“. . . Helping One Another Up with a Tender Hand.”

To those three bicyclists I pissed off in Porter Square yesterday:

I’m sorry, gentlemen. My fault; I was totally in your bike lane—and forced you to get around my silver Suburu during rush hour by making you actually walk your bikes onto the sidewalk to get past, keep going. I’m sorry. I really am. You did not need an additional, aggravating hassle on your already fraught commute home.

Not for nothin,’ though: my husband and I and a dear, disabled f/Friend had just driven from Vermont where we’d spent six days with fellow Quakers “living into a covenant community.” “Huh?” “Wha?” you say? Exactly. I’ll spare you chapter and verse to just say this: I’d just spent six days with six hundred people talking about how being in a faith community is about—well, wait! Maybe this will help. Here’s a quote we heard read twice yesterday, just hours before your unpleasant encounter with me on Somerville Avenue:

Our life is love, and peace, and tenderness; and bearing one with another, and forgiving one another, and not laying accusations one against another; but praying one for another, and helping one another up with a tender hand.” (Isaac Peninington; 1667)

So I guess you could say that when, having just dropped off someone with mobility issues at the most convenient place for her to walk to the Porter Square T and, starting to pull away from the curb, I saw the three of you and an SUV approaching, I was in an altered state when I thought: “That SUV will let me in because that’s the Right Thing to do. That’s how these moment-to-moment urban negotiations work.”

Hah!

I’m sorry.

Re rebranding?

[Coal Barge, Ohio River, Louisville, Kentucky, 2015]

Along the same lines as thinking that fussing over a Confederate flag will truly address the deep, deep brokenness of this country, last week I tried to remove the visible label from a Coal purple, acrylic beanie my grand-daughter wears. (She loves the color and looks adorable in it.) Really?

The label wouldn’t come off. (Let’s hear it for Chinese workmanship!) So I was forced to, you know, accept, embrace, move on, maybe even consider that by naming their clothing company after a hated fossil fuel, the Seattle hipsters who started Coal were trying to tell us something about moving on, about transformation; rebranding, so to speak.

(Or not. Got into a conversation with a hipster recently about the coffee beans sold at a neighborhood cafe. He’d just bought a bag but had abandoned it on the counter—where I picked it up. I was reading the coffee beans’ label when he showed up to claim his purchase. “Is it fair trade?” I asked, handing it over. “I don’t know,” he answered impatiently. “I just know it tastes good!” )

Here’s where I am: I accept that my attempted label-removal was ridiculous, nutzo. But given that NStar, purveyors of another fossil fuel, just rebranded itself Eversource, thereby discarding that pesky N for natural gas—slick move, NStar, but I say fossil fuel and fracking and the hell with it—I shall remain vigilant!

[I will be on vacation next week. Check this space in 2 weeks.]

“GOOD MEN trashed”

[“GOOD MEN trashed,” Cambridge Common, Cambridge, MA]

Here we are again. Another slaughter and its ghastly, rote aftermath of stunned horror and outrage and flowers strewn, impromptu shrines erected—and prayer meetings and stand-outs and the NRA not missing a beat to issue its usual, obdurate public statement and, again, demands for gun control and better mental health policies and politicians spouting whatever they believe plays best with their constituency: “Tear down that Confederate flag!” “It was an accident!”

And something stunningly different: The families of the victims uttering the word “forgiveness.” Oh, my.

As I contemplate what I am called to do in the face of another horror perpetuated by another slight, white young man—Dylan Roof, Jahar Tsarnaev, James Holmes, Adam Lanza, Elliot Rodger, Dylan Klebold—those young men’s wide eyes haunt me, beg me to pay attention to the pain behind their eyes. Ask me to at least pray over that pain. Ask me to consider—with compassion if possible—why these young, slight, American males* murdered school children or movie-goers or families watching the Boston Marathon or college students on a Friday night or people of color in the sanctuary of their own church.

That the Emanuel [God is with us] African Methodist Episcopal Church victims’ families offered forgiveness as their contribution to our mourning nation’s conversation BEGS us to get beyond rhetoric and “We’re all complicit” and stridency. Yes, by all means let’s talk about slavery and racism and the white supremacy movement and mental illness and gun control; absolutely. And let’s talk about violence, war, let’s talk about bullying, messaging, gender expectations; let’s connect dots. Let’s get to work, the hard work of going deep, searching, praying for guidance. Yes.

* Jahar Tsarnaev was naturalized on September 11, 2012

“Dangerous Optimism”

[“Rainbow Fountain,” Bryant College, Smithfield, R.I.]

This week, rather than writing something, myself, I’d like to share this wonderful and poignant excerpt from a speech Martin Luther King, Jr. gave at Bennett College, Greensboro, NC, in 1958.

After reading another piece I’d written recently that referenced Dr. King’s “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” my friend Katy sent this excerpt along. She had transcribed the entire speech when working at Boston University—Dr. King’s alma mater. Katy is responsible for the ADDED EMPHASIS.

“…This [after acknowledging that a lot of progress in civil rights had been made] would be a wonderful place to stop–be a great place to stop. But I’m afraid, if I stopped here, I wouldn’t be telling the truth, I’d be stating a fact. YOU SEE A FACT IS MERELY THE ABSENCE OF CONTRADICTION BUT TRUTH IS THE PRESENCE OF COHERENCE. IT IS THE RELATEDNESS OF FACTS. [laughter, then applause] You see it’s a fact that we’ve come a long, long way—that’s a fact—but it isn’t the truth. You see in order to tell the truth, you’ve got to go on and put the other parts in. If I stopped at this point, I would leave you the victims of a dangerous optimism. If I stopped at this point, I would leave you the victims of an illusion wrapped in superficiality. So in order to tell the truth, I must move on [laughter], say clearly that we’ve not only come a long, long way [applause]–so I must say that we’ve not only come a long, long way, but we have a long, long way to go….” [emphasis added]

Word.

“A Thousand Tongues Can Never Tell”

[“A Thousand Tongues Can Never Tell,” a spirit root sculpture by Bessie Harvey]

Mother’s Day, I woke up to a mockingbird practicing a song unlike anything I’d ever heard before from a mockingbird. Sleepily I remembered a Mary Oliver poem.* Sleepily I wondered if I might be hearing the theme song from “the Rockford Files.” (Especially that doodle-doodle-dee-dah-do-do bit at the end of the first phrase?) But then, more awake, I realized I needed to get a grip. “Unlike Mary Oliver, you do not know what music that bird’s been listening to!” I scolded myself. “You do not know all the songs, human and bird, to identify what you’re hearing! Only that bird knows. All you can do is to appreciate that lively, inventive music.” So I did.

Later that bright, sunny morning, wearing a “Black Live Matter” sticker on my Mothers Out Front tee shirt, I joined thousands of people in Boston for the 19th annual Mother’s Day Walk for Peace. Although I was walking with other Mothers Out Front folks, the groupings and clusters of people and baby carriages and dogs snaking our way through the streets of Dorchester were pretty fluid—so at one point along the 5K route I walked beside a young African-American woman I’d never met before.

“What brings you here today?” I asked her after we’d chitchatted about the gorgeous day and how the crowd seemed bigger than ever. (An estimated 10,000 marchers participated this year.)

“I have a son,” she said. “And I want him to grow up safe.”

Such simple words! But a thousand tongues cannot tell all that her stark statement encapsulates, all the stories of all the mothers and all the sons in Dorchester, in Baltimore, in Ferguson; every place and every time since time immemorial. Like that sleepy moment earlier that morning, I was humbled by all I will never know.

“I want your son to be safe, too,” I replied. Because that was all I could say.

*The Gift

I wanted to thank the mockingbird for the vigor of his song.
Every day he sang from the rim of the field, while I picked
blueberries or just idled in the sun.
Every day he came fluttering by to show me, and why not,
the white blossoms in this wings.
So one day I went there with a machine, and played some songs of
Mahler.
The mockingbird stopped singing, he came close and seemed
to listen.
Now when I go down to the field, a little Mahler spills
through the sputters of his song.
How happy I am, lounging in the light, listening as the music
floats by!
And I give thanks also for my mind, that thought of giving
a gift.
And mostly I’m grateful that I take this world so seriously.
Mary Oliver

“They Are Our Kids”

[19th Century Young Girl’s Grave, El Campo Santo, San Diego, CA, soon after Dia de Muertos, 2014]

Don’t get me wrong: I love my daughters, I love my grandchildren. I loved sitting in my Quaker meeting this morning watching Meeting children happily search for Easter eggs outside. I love Christmas, I love birthdays, I love making any child happy by buying just the right gift.

Here’s what I don’t love: The disparity between children like my grandchildren and those happy children I watched this morning and the poor children of this country. As a recent “New Yorker” article put it: The American dream is in crisis, [Robert Putnam, author of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis] argues, because Americans used to care about other people’s kids and now they only care about their own kids. But, he writes, “America’s poor kids do belong to us and we to them. They are our kids.”

Here’s what deeply moves me: That on October 31, 2014, someone placed those plastic necklaces and those two dolls on the grave pictured above. A Mexican-American child decorated that child’s grave for Dia de Muertos, I’m guessing. She swept the dirt, she arranged those bricks as best she could, she threw away—God knows what that child discovered in that gritty, surrounded-by-bars-and restaurants cemetery in the heart of San Diego’s Old Town. That generous child is very likely one of those “poor kids” Putnam wrote about.

My kid. Our kid.