montréal reflections: day eight

NOTE: We are on holiday for rest and reflection in Montréal before a new year of engagement, teaching and creativity begins. This is the eighth in a series.

One of my favorite experiences in Montréal is walking with Dianne through Marché Jean-Tallon in the heart of the city's Little Italy. It is a grand farmer's market with the freshest fruit and vegetables around at excellent prices all displayed with an artist's sensibility. Even if we never purchase a thing - and that would be tough - it is a sensual delight simply to stroll amidst the people and produce and bask in the bounty. When we stayed in that neighborhood, we would often do just that - and then call it a day. The colors are sumptuous, the aromas are delicious, and the herbs and flowers are a joy to behold. I couldn't help but consider Psalm 8:

O Lord, our God, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens...
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made (us) a little lower than God,
and crowned (us) with glory and honor.

Yesterday I was taken with all the different types of peppers as well as the late summer cherries and corn. We feasted upon them for an early supper before one last walk through the street fair on St. Laurent. As we looked upon the sunset and the people, I had a deep sense of peace. Yes, the world is in total chaos. Yes, Mother Earth is screaming as she burns and chokes. And yes, at the same time there are millions upon millions of good souls seeking ways of peace within all of these troubles. Like young Greta Thurnberg, who is speaking truth to power. Or William Barber, deepening and advancing the prophetic legacy of MLK. I thought of those loving, courageous, and all too human friends I worked with in the farm worker's union, the Mississippi Wood Cutters Association and the three faith-based community organization I was a part of over the years. And, I thought of the mark made upon my life by Robert Pirsig, author of both Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. 

I loved both books. I know that some found his philosophizing ponderous, but not me. I valued the way he wove the ordinary into the extraordinary, the poetic into the personal, heroic acts within the wounds and brokenness of very real people. These inquiries into values and morals made sense to me. They gave me a way of sorting out some of my culture's blind spots. He may have been the first writer to help me realize that the inward/outward journey was connected. When he quipped, "It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling." I had an aha moment. I still do given how easily I can distract myself. 

I probably liked Lila more than Zen - especially Pirsig's understanding of the way morals devolve. Somewhere in the middle of the book he talks about those like Bertrand Russell who broke decisively from the constraints and confines of Edwardian morality. Those free thinkers and lovers had a foundation against which to rebel; they had been raised with manners and an awareness that our actions have consequences. They grasped that their non-conformity was a way into liberation for all people, but especially those condemned to the fringes of society. In other words, their rejection of the status quo anticipated the greater common good. Not so for those who followed them who grew up without social norms and precious few manners. They often became barbarians. Selfish and rudderless in a sea of choices, without a deep awareness of the consequences of their deeds. I see this in our era's politics and sexuality - and it isn't healthy. Or liberating. Pirsig was also clear that offering a critique of these dangers involves a fine line as those who condemn the quest for freedom are often the greatest hypocrites:

(The) ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals. Full of great ways for others to improve without any expense to themselves. There's an ego thing in there, too. They use morals to make someone else look inferior and that way look better themselves. It doesn't matter what the moral code is - religious morals, political morals, racist morals, capitalist morals, feminist morals, hippie morals - they're all the same. The moral codes change but the meanness and the egotism stay the same.

I think of Bill O'Reilly, once at the helm of Fox News, preaching rules and restraint to the masses while exploiting and sexually harassing the women in his own office. No matter how you cut it, those advocating "cost-free morals" are dangerous. As the sun was setting last night, my heart gave thanks to Robert Pirsig as well as so many others who have struggled to make freedom real for others often at great cost to themselves. 

Because it was raining on and off today I mostly spent time considering the gospel of Thomas a la Cynthia Bourgeault's insights in her wisdom school. Later tonight we will visit with some of Di's colleagues who live here. On Labor Day 2019 I take consolation in this poem by Danusha Laméris: "Small Kindnesses."

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”