There has not been a lot of blogging coming out of my study over the past month. Clearly, my attention has been elsewhere: preparing the garden, writing and researching my weekly live-stream gathering each Sunday morning on Face Book (check it out @ https://www.facebook.com/Be-Still-and-Know-913217865701531/), painting the kitchen, starting to practice guitar again, working on a weekly homily and music for my L'Arche Ottawa community, etc. It has been a weird combination of intense new connection with friends both local and international and even deeper personal solitude. So, for what appears to be the foreseeable future, I suspect this new rhythm will abide. During this time I have slowly been working my way through Christine Valters Painters book: The Soul of a Pilgrim. There are a number of useful insights in it as well as tools for contemplation. One, in particular, spoke to me: discerning the thread that has been a constant in our lives. The idea comes from a poem by William Stafford that includes this line:
There is a thread you follow
Nothing you do can stop times unfolding.
You do not ever let go of the thread.
Like many of us who have been privileged to self-quarantine - and can do so without much obvious distress - these past two months have been a journey. Paintners speaks of this as an inward pilgrimage guided...
... by the monastic vow of obedience - which means deep listening - to whatever emerges in my life. Being a pilgrim means following wherever the call takes me, even if it takes me off the trajectory I expected. This is one of the places where the heart of the pilgrim and monk intersect.
If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.
Clearly, this transmission is at work among us in public once more. So is a second development that holds greater promise and even more popularity. I am thinking of the increasingly compassionate and progressive social analysis that has taken root among us. What was once dismissed as abstract ivory tower radical pipe dreams - a living social wage as well as the importance of universal health care and the reshaping of business priorities - is now mainstream common sense. It is as if the United States went to sleep as Ebeneezer Scrooge and woke up as Bernie Sanders. Two recent developments in popular culture point to this depth of this emerging transformation:
+ The bastion of centrist public reflection, The NY Times, has been working on public policy essays re: how can we rebuild the USA in a vibrant, creative and authentically compassionate manner. In other words, how can this crisis empower us to become our best selves. If you have not seen the Nicholas Kristof report on the difference between a MacDonald's worker in the US and one in Denmark - one who has insurance, paid vacation and sick leave as well as a secure social safety net and the other left to fend for him or herself - it is worth the time. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/sunday/us-denmark-economy.html) The same goes for their new series entitled: The American We Need (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/opinion/ americainequalitycoronavirus.htmlcampaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20200511&instance_id=18387&nl=opiniontoday®i_id=88188211&segment_id=27249&te=1&user_id=0eda16b56f0c867e69fc1f00f235f5ad)
+ A growing encounter with public grief is also bubbling to the surface in these barely United States of America - something that has been anathema for generations. Showing grief in the USA has long been seen as a sign of inner weakness. Just look at the way we used to mourn: three private days were allowed as the maximum time allowed for dealing with a close personal death or tragedy. Then, it was back to work. Perhaps the better resourced private health insurance allowed for short-term grief counseling. But it was to be done in private and only 8 sessions would be covered. This still has not shifted completely. Grieving is a work in progress for us. And with half the American work force now unemployed and at risk of losing their private health insurance, it is not clear what will happen next. But that, too is a source of our collective grief. But beyond the blustering bullies clogging traffic in state capitals, and the self-righteous posturing of toadies like McConnell in the US Senate, more and more ordinary Americans are being forced to own our personal and collective suffering. This extended quote concerning the American heartland is sobering and insightful:
Trump’s approval ratings sank underwater in key midwestern swing states he won: Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa. Any number of polls showed Trump and Joe Biden in a dead heat in about a dozen purple states, or with Biden in a comfortable lead. Bluster and blunder were coming home to roost.Corn prices dived 19% since January. Meat-packing plants are exploding with the coronavirus – 60% of the pork plant workers in Perry, Iowa, are infected. The sheriff for Waterloo, Iowa, said he wanted to stomp a boot on Tyson’s plant. The mayor of Sioux Falls argued with the South Dakota governor to shut down a Smithfield pork facility overrun with the virus. About 65% of people polled think folks should stay home and not dine in at the restaurant buffet. Although the Iowa governor allowed churches to reopen, they aren’t taking her up on the offer with Sunday services. They would just as soon wait until we can get some tests done around here. Republican leaders are not in tune with voters.
The Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat on Biden’s VP shortlist, held forth ably against armed men in the capital lobby and remains far more popular than Trump. In Wisconsin, Democrats were outraged when Republicans forced a primary election involving a key state supreme court race. Voters stood up for democracy, in line for hours braving Covid-19 infection to cast their vote. The Democratic-backed court candidate won. Wisconsin unseated the Republican governor, Scott Walker, in 2018 and elected a gay woman to the US Senate, Democrat Tammy Baldwin, before that. It is the land of La Follette, after all.
A reckoning is due for incompetence and neglect. Farmers are disconsolate. Every dairy worker suicide resonates. Hogs are backed up when one of the huge, consolidated slaughterhouses goes down for lack of healthy help. Producers are left to shoot them and bury them. People in nice SUVs line up for free food. It makes everyone nauseous. Everyday people can’t understand why NBA players can get tested but packinghouse workers ordered to keep the pork loins rolling can’t. Rural communities prone to vote Republican live under a cloud of fear that virus from immigrant workers will spread to them – that the health of your neighbor is in fact your health. Immigrants become human, and their treatment is realized as shameful. We’re waking up, all right. When 30 million people can’t get through to the unemployment system, and half of them lose their health insurance by fall, incumbents should cover their flanks.
Polls show that in the upper midwest, blue urban voters are more motivated to vote than rural red voters by fair margins. Armed people of color escorted an African American legislator into the Michigan capitol last week in response to the white armed men. Talk about stuff getting real. Do you think every African American in Flint is not motivated? “The iron is hot,” Custer said. “This is the time to make permanent change.” Even while sitting in his basement unheard, Biden is winning the midwest for all Trump’s blather. The genius may think we are suckers, but in Iowa we don’t ruin good corn liquor with Clorox. The gig is up. (https://www.theguardian.com/usnews/commentisfree/2020/may/11/mi)
Our shared pain is not only exposed, it is being owned by those who are often the most tight-lipped and taciturn. The anguish within communities of color is increasingly open and bold. Nothing is for certain, of course, and there is likely to be tons more anguish before any semblance of normalcy returns. The belligerence on the Right is not over - not during this bizarre presidential election year. And yet out of all these ashes there is the emerging promise of a new beloved community. Not perfect and barely taking shape in these tremulous times. But ripening and stretching within and among us.
The Biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann, has written that only when a broken society grieves deeply can it burn off the dross of its hubris. When we are truly empty and open - willing to consider new possibilities and authentically repentant - then the Sacred historically shares with our artists, poets, musicians and creative beings visions for a new life together. Behold, says the prophetic poet of ancient Israel, I am doing a new thing among you. Brueggemann believes that one of the clues to this legacy occurs in Isaiah 56 where the blessings of the ancient covenant are extended to all who do justice and share compassion - including those once considered ritually unclean. What the new social contract after exile means is honoring the Sabbath and sharing compassion.
I continue to trust the steadfast love of the Lord even in the darkness.
credits
+ James Lumsden
+ Sojourners @ https://sojo.net/articles/faith-action/trinity-wholeness-contemplation-action-and-healing
+ Solidarity @ https://ips-dc.org/international-solidarity-in-a-time-of-crisis/
+ Solidarity @ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/519391769525412087/?autologin=true
+ Solidarity @ https://thejax.online/event/jax-meetup-solidarity
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