Thank you, Brother West

“I am here because somebody loved me,” Cornel West declared at last week’s Harvard Divinity School convocation. And I’m sure I wasn’t the only person hearing his words who didn’t immediately conjure up sopping-wet, helping hands reaching out to someone in need in Houston. Many of us, I’m guessing, silently acknowledged life’s ever-present disasters*—and yet here we all were, safe and dry and ALIVE because, despite their inadequacies, the someones in our own lives had gotten us through.

Talk about inadequate! My words to describe how Brother West‘s declaration moved me will only hint at what I want to say! But here goes:

I felt not just the love of West’s parents and the congregants of Sacramento’s Shiloh Baptist Church and all the loving people in his life—like his teachers; he spoke their names with reverence— that brought him to that (fancy) HDS podium last week, I felt eons of Love. I felt its enormous, glorious Power. I felt every single compassionate and loving act that every single member of our species had ever bestowed, shared, offered to another! Talk about welling up!

In the coming days and weeks, may you, may we find whatever ways available to us to connect with that Power. (We’re going to need it.)

*Some of them, like Hurricane Harvey, man-made. (Which makes them that much more devastating, right?)

“There’s No Plan, Really.”

Charles River Watershed Map. Blue lines indicate stream that are tributary to the river. Source: https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis

Sunday morning, waiting to cross Massachusetts Avenue at Cambridge Street in Harvard Square, I overheard two tourists, standing behind me, also waiting for the crosswalk sign.

“It’s not square,” one woman commented, looking at the hodgepodge of intersecting, bustling streets before us, Cambridge Common, green and leafy, across the street.

“No shape,” agreed the other. She paused, as if at a museum, to carefully assess what was before her: “There’s no plan, really.”

Oh, but there was, I wanted to say! Look again. Directly in front of you, not a quarter of a mile away, is a river. The Charles River. Below your feet, beneath all this concrete and paving, are springs. These multi-lanes streets were once pathways leading to sources of fresh water, the best places to fish, higher-ground land that would not flood in the spring. The indigenous people who once inhabited Harvard Square knew every inch of where we’re standing. They had a plan.

And that Commons, I could have gone on. That was the communal place where early settlers pastured their cows. We greater-Bostonians joke that our meandering, confusing, non-gridded streets were once cowpaths. What we don’t acknowledge is that our semi-historic factoid neglects who’d originally created those paths. And why.

Water is Life, I could have extolled, church bells ringing from the other side of the Commons. That’s the plan. Are you ready?

Say It! Name It!

Tanner Fountain, Harvard University, July, 2017

One evening last week, after a full day of swimming and story-telling in the hammock—just she and I—and playing with her cousins, my granddaughter crawled into my lap.

“Show me a video,” she asked.”Please?” (Here’s one we both love.)

I thought a bit, Dear Reader, for, truth be told, as a Facebook/don’t own a TV kinda grandma, I watch a fair amount of videos! And then I showed her this one. “Blue jeans!” She loved it.

Because her parents were apparently content to let her keep watching and Youtube being Youtube, she and I watched other such videos, conveniently grouped and accessible: the first time a mother hears her son’s voice. The first time a blind child sees his mother’s face. The first time . . . And in every single one, tears. Copious tears. “It just wells up, doesn’t it,” notes a Brit technician to a weeping young woman who has just experienced sound for the first time.

Exactly.

So Much Greenness!

Country Road, Hamden, Connecticut, July, 2017

“The green!” my husband noted as we drove along the leafy country roads of Wyndham County towards our summer rental. “Look at that soft, pale green. Why is that?”

It took us a couple of days for a couple of city dwellers like us to understand what we were seeing: the aftermath of a devastating gypsy moth infestation. Which must have been something! For, once we knew what to look for, we could track the widespread damage those foliage-munching caterpillars had wreaked. Acres and acres. And began to notice how all along the roads, beneath the wayside ferns and wildflowers and weeds, lay huge, tree-limb segments. Everywhere. Had those thick limbs been chain-sawed off to save the rest of a tree?

So, we realized, in fact, what we were seeing was new growth. The tender shoots of renewal, rebirth in the middle of summer. (A wet summer. That certainly helped).

There were butterflies, too. Hundreds. Some in colors I’d only seen before on the end of a pin. So many butterflies, so much soft, spring-like greenness! As if to make clear: transformation happens.

Once home and once again in worship inside, on a bench in a Quaker meetinghouse, I reflected on those acres of pale green, those butterflies. “Is there more?” I wondered inwardly. “Am I to go deeper than ‘Transformation happens.’?”

But that seemed to be enough.

What Love Will Do

A pro-affordable housing rally, City Hall, Somerville (a Sanctuary City) MA; May, 2017

We may be cooked. Even The Boston Globe, whose editorial policy regarding climate change reportage is sometimes mystifying—and often infuriating—featured a front-page article this morning admitting that things look grim.

It’s taken me a couple of years to let this horror sink in. And maybe that’s okay. Because, denial/magical thinking/distractions to help me to forget/bargaining; all the crazy stuff we humans do when faced with Bad News have, over time, brought me right to where I am supposed to be: accepting my humanity. Humbly.

And to ask myself: What am I asked to do? (Besides, of course, doing everything I can possibly do to sharply bring down global emissions.) And although a dear friend says mine is “Pollyanna thinking” (and she may very well be right!), here’s what I’m dedicating/rededicating my life to from now on: lovin’ the hell out of everyone. If my species is doomed, let me affirm what is best about being human; our ability to love.

May my life continue William Penn’s experiment: “Let us then try what Love will do.”

OG’s Seat

Just before my turn to speak at a parole hearing last week, a story came to me; a story I hoped might convey what I wanted to say. So, after telling the parole board after my meeting’s Wednesday night sharing circle, I concluded by saying something like this:

“One of the founders of our circle, OG*, often comes late. He does construction so it’s hard for him to get to the sharing circle, which begins at 7:00, until it has already started. So, because he’s so important to our community, we always put out an extra chair. Now, you might say “That’s OG’s seat.” You might say “That’s Elijah’s chair.” Or you might say that every week, our circle is saving the space for redemption, for transformation.”

Honestly? From where I sat, only one bit of all that verbiage resonated: That OG did construction! I could see the parole board take that (seemingly minor) detail in. Nod their heads. “Ah, yes,” those nods seemed to say. “Returning citizens do construction. That’s how the world works.” And, those nods also seemed to say, “This white-haired Quaker is connected to people like OG. Who is real. So this circle she’s describing seems to be real. And an actual possibility for X, if we decide to grant him parole. Oh.”

So, no, those precious words, redemption, transformation? They didn’t carry the water. A seemingly insignificant detail did. Oh.

Whatever works, right?

*Not his real initials. But OG kinda works.

“I can’t believe I’m still . . . “

[Jean Lafitte National Park, Lafitte, Louisiana]

That arc of history may be long and slowly bending towards justice—but it’s not exactly cruisin’ down I-95, is it! Sometimes that arc moves so slowly its movement is almost imperceptible. Sometimes it pauses, curves back on itself. Sometimes, like a twisty, bendy strangler fig vine, that arc moves backwards. And it feels as though we’re living in one of those retrograde times right now.

But here’s what privilege looks like: For most of my life I’ve expected linear. I’ve expected that arc to move steadily forward. So have been mystified and pissed that, jeez, here we are again? Like so many others, “I can’t believe I’m still . . . “ I mean, didn’t we already do this? Didn’t we settle all these trenchant issues once and for all? It’s so unfair!

So, yeah, I’ve been inwardly whining. Like a three-year-old. And need to take a good, hard look at my expectations surrounding social justice. To admit that some of my stuff is ego, plain and simple and deadly. (I protested. I marched = I fixed it! Riiiight.) Some of this is about my belief that I have a “right to comfort.” On a really bad day, my resistance to accepting that, yup, Things Suck, Get Crackin’ is about not being twenty-two, anymore. I wonder if I actually have the strength and energy and fortitude to show up, resist, interrupt. But, mostly, this is about, at the deepest, most profoundly fundamental level, my cluelessness. Again. Why wouldn’t I, white and privileged, expect that arc to inch forward bit by bit. Slowly, yes. And not a crystal stair, certainly; I was never that clueless. (But close.)

So it is with both humility and fervent hope that I say: I still believe that arc moves toward justice. But it’s going to be much harder and take way longer than I ever before understood.

Whatever Works

When I learned that Nelson Mandela had found great strength in Invictus, I made copies of that William Ernest Henley poem and mailed them to two men I correspond with, currently behind bars.

Nice gesture, right? But pointless. I see that now. Somehow, mysteriously, a Victorian, “stiff upper lip,” Brit poem (i.e. language of his oppressors) spoke to Mandela. He discovered that rereading “I am the master of my fate” every day reminded him that his strength was with him. He chose that particular poem; he let it speak to him. Through him. And it worked.

Each of us has to chose our own Invictus. One poem can’t fit all. But whatever works for you, oh Lordy, I hope you’ve found it, find it!

Here’s what’s working for me these days: a cheesy* version of “How Can I Keep from Singing?” It sounds an echo in my soul, indeed!

*A word about cheesy: From an interview with Patty Jenkins, director of “Wonder Woman” (New York Times, June 1, 2017):

This may be a cheesy question, but what do you want people to take away from this movie?

Did you say cheesy? Cheesy is one of the words banned in my world. I’m tired of sincerity being something we have to be afraid of doing. It’s been like that for 20 years, that the entertainment and art world has shied away from sincerity, real sincerity, because they feel they have to wink at the audience because that’s what the kids like. We have to do the real stories now. The world is in crisis.

I wanted to tell a story about a hero who believes in love, who is filled with love, who believes in change and the betterment of mankind. I believe in it. It’s terrible when it makes so many artists afraid to be sincere and truthful and emotional, and relegates them to the too-cool-for-school department. Art is supposed to bring beauty to the world.

What I’d Do Different Now

[Woolworth’s Sit In, Jackson, Mississippi, May, 1963]

Some years ago I began to wonder: Whatever happened to those two African-Americans who desegregated E.C. Glass High School in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1962? So I found Dr. Lynda Woodruff and Reverend Owen Cardwell, Jr.—and wrote a book about what unfolded because I’d wondered.

These days? Now I am moved to wonder: What would happen if I found one of those despicable young men abusing the Jackson, MS sit-inners? (Surely some are still alive?) Could I possibly sit down with one of them; could I ever listen with an open heart? Face to face with a white supremacist, could I remember to seek “that of God” in the old man seated across from me? Not try to “fix” what I’d hear; offer neither advice nor comments but merely ask questions? (Why do you suppose X happened? How do you make meaning of that? Why do you think Y said that? How did you feel when Z happened? Tell me about how you learned about X? etc. ) And then write a book about what I heard? And learned? Could I?

Not lacking in (compelling, passionately engaged-in) writing projects, I am nevertheless tugged at, nudged to wonder: Where does hate come from? What, in all my studies, all my close attention to race and class and gender and education and all the other variables that make each of us who we are; what have I missed, what have I never understood? What do I need to know?

“Something Close to Love”

What I love about this picture: it perfectly illustrates its accompanying excerpt from WellingUp.net. Check it out! (Keywords: Prison, Light, Green/Exercise Yard)

What else I want to say this picture: Those rusted bars only hint at the horrors of incarceration. But my intention for using this dangerously-close-to-prettifying photograph is to illustrate a prison conversion story—I am not trying to educate the general public re prison conditions. So, reluctantly, I chose what I chose out of thousands of gritty, heart-breaking, online choices.

(But, must say, I will be writing to my prison pen-pals with renewed care and tenderness from now on.)

Light Breaks Through

[Through a meetinghouse window, May, 2017]

Having spent the day before with a dear and loving friend, settling into meeting for worship on Sunday I found myself reviewing the kinds of love as if Philia or Storge were ice cream flavors: yum!

My personal New York Super Fudge Chunk? Agape. So, as I reviewed, true to (her intense and transcendent and grace-lit) style, Universal/Unconditional Love declared herself In The House so powerfully I was almost brought to my feet to shout Hallelujah!

But didn’t for the same reason I hesitate to write about this, today. For what came to me was a Bible passage getting a lot of play lately. Some might say THE Bible passage; John 3:18: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. . . ”

As a pre-Easter Christian and a woman of faith who experiences God as a verb and not a male pronoun, I’ve carelessly (and callously?) dismissed this sentence. Until Sunday. When it hit me that I’ve carelessly skipped over that . . . so loved the world that. . . bit, too.

But that’s the thing about Agape. It won’t be ignored. She won’t be ignored. Her powerful Love, a warm blanket to keep you warm or to beat out fires* will not be denied. So she’s asking me to find Love in the second-half of John 3:18. She’s asking me to explore if there’s Something in the post-Easter Jesus I need to experience. She’s grateful I didn’t get to my feet on Sunday; she wants me to try to write this, today, as carefully and tenderly as I can. Because we both know how much John 3:18 means to others. (Philia is also In The House.)

So I’m listening. Tasting. Testing.

*as a speaker noted on Sunday

“As Good And As Bad As I”

[Kirkland Street Lilacs, Cambridge, MA, April 30, 2017]

Sunday, just as I passed the bushes pictured above—”Somerbridge” boosts thousands of lilac bushes in bloom this week— a car pulled to the curb, its passenger-side window rolled down, and a young, pleasant-looking woman plaintively called, “Can you help me? I’m trying to find the Sheraton Commander and my GPS has me going in circles!” So I gave her the directions to the hotel. A five-minute drive. At most.

“I don’t think I can do this.” She sounded close to tears.

Reader? Honestly? I was annoyed. Insulted. “I just told you where to go,” I inwardly seethed. “What more do you want?”

But then it hit me: Maybe she’s had no experience remembering First This. Then This. Then This. And, finally this. And you’re there. If you’ve relied on GPS your whole life, taking in, absorbing a series of verbal instructions just might be daunting!

So I played the only card I had: (Empowered) Woman to woman. “You got this!” I cheered. “You can do this! You’re practically there, already. It’s not going to be hard.” I reviewed my instructions. She repeated them back to me this time. I corrected her. I raised my fist in the air. And off she drove.

The prevailing, intoxicating scent of my hometown this week—watching sidewalk passersby inhale my lilacs makes me so happy—and this brief yet touching exchange with a stranger brought to mind a poem, excerpted here, written by a Somerville librarian and journalist many years ago. It’s not a great poem. But apt:

The House by the Side of the Road

by Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911)

There are hermit
souls that live withdrawn
In the peace of their self-content;
There are souls, like stars, that dwell apart,
In a fellowless firmament;
There are pioneer souls that blaze their paths
Where highways never ran;-
But let me live by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

Let me live in a house
by the side of the road,
Where the race of men go by-
The men who are good and the men who are bad,
As good and as bad as I.
I would not sit in the scorner’s seat,
Or hurl the cynic’s ban;-
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

I see from my house
by the side of the road,
By the side of the highway of life,
The men who press with the ardor of hope,
The men who are faint with the strife.
But I turn not away from their smiles nor their tears-
Both parts of an infinite plan;-
Let me live in my house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

I know there are brook-gladdened
meadows ahead
And mountains of wearisome height;
That the road passes on through the long afternoon
And stretches away to the night.
But still I rejoice when the travelers rejoice,
And weep with the strangers that moan,
Nor live in my house by the side of the road
Like a man who dwells alone.