This Fourth of July – and more honestly the whole second half of 2020 thus far – has been unsettling – for me for sure – but for all people of the heart. When we entered this era of physical distancing, solidarity, and the ever-morphing rules of life in the corona contagion, like many of you I prayed it would wake us up as a nation. That it would break our hearts open and we would begin to reclaim our deepest dreams of the Beloved Community. A poem at the start of the pandemic by Lynn Ungar put it like this – and it felt right.
What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath —
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.
That was March. A few weeks later this poem surfaced and rang true:
When this is over, may we never again take for granted: A handshake with a stranger, Full shelves at the store, Conversations with neighbors, A crowded theater, Friday night out, The taste of communion, A routine checkup, The school rush each morning, Coffee with a friend, The stadium roaring, Each deep breath. A boring Tuesday, Life itself. When this ends may we find that we have become more like the people we wanted to be - we were called to be - we hoped to be and may we stay that way — better for each other - because of the worst.
I still hold THAT prayer in my heart although currently there is not much evidence that it has captured the national imagination. A month later, in April 2020, James Parker shared this prayer in The Atlantic and notice the more somber and sobering tone.
Dear Lord,
In this our hour of doorknobs and droplets, when masks have canceled our personalities;in this our hour of prickling perimeters, sinister surfaces, defeated bodies, and victorious abstractions, when some of us are stepping into rooms humid with contagion,and some of us are standing in the pasta aisle; in this our hour of vacant parks and boarded-up hoops, when we miss the sky-high roar of the city and hear instead the tarp that flaps on the unfinished roof, the squirrel giving his hinge-like cry, and the siren constantly passing, to You we send up our prayer, as follows: Let not heebie-jeebies become our religion,our new ideology, with its own jargon. Fortify us, Lord. Show us how. What would your saints be doing now? Saint Francis, he was a fan of the human.
He’d be rolling naked on Boston Common. He’d be sharing a bottle. No mask, no gloves, shielded only by burning love. But I don’t think we’re in the mood for feats of antic beatitude. In New York City, and in Madrid, the saints maintain the rumbling grid. Bless the mailman, and equally bless the bus driver, vector of steadfastness. Protect the bravest, the best we’ve got. Protect the rest of us, why not. And if the virus that took John Prine comes, as it may, for me and mine, although we’ve mostly stayed indoors, well—then, as ever, we’re all Yours. Until further notice, AMEN.
Today we must confess that our hopes and dreams for the revitalization of America spiritually, politically, and socially were premature. The four months of solitude, fear, prayer, and modest sacrifice that some of us committed to living has been undone – and violated. Forty of our fifty states quit trying to overcome the pandemic. They gave in to the shallow promises of economic renewal, a little fun, and a night on the town. And now more than 50,000 of our sisters and brothers are coming down with the plague every day and our national death count is starting to soar. The New York Times columnist, David Brooks, said it best: "We Americans enter the July 4 weekend of 2020 humiliated as almost never before. We had one collective project this year and that was to crush Covid-19, and we failed."
This failure will lead to other failures. A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression according to the Census Bureau. Suspected drug overdose deaths surged by 42 percent in May. Small businesses, colleges and community hubs will close. (The good news is that at least we Americans are not in denial about the nation’s turmoil…. According to a Pew survey, 71 percent of Americans are angry about the state of the country right now, 66 percent are fearful and only 17 percent are proud.
I’m with Brother Brooks on this today: we as a nation have failed. We should be humiliated. We must own that our bruising sense of entitlement and our inflated collective stupidity has created a monster that is devouring us. It is bigger than the belligerent arrogance and ignorance of the President – although he loves to throw gasoline on this fire. Brooks hit the nail on the head when he wrote: It wasn’t Trump who went out to bars in Tempe, Austin, and Los Angeles in June.
It wasn’t Trump who put on hospital gowns and told the American people you could suspend the lockdown if your cause was just. Once you told people they could suspend the lockdown for one thing, they were going to suspend it for others. Our fixation on the awfulness of Donald Trump has distracted us from the larger problems and rendered us strangely passive in the face of them. Sure, this was a Republican failure, but it was also a collective failure, and it follows a few decades of collective failures.
When I started to share Sunday reflections with you at the very outset of this era, it was with love. I realized in my heart that there was very little I could do outside of my home during the lockdown – but given the peculiar blessing of the Internet I could be prayerful, hopeful and tender with those who chose to tune-in. And now that we are facing the moral and social failure of this moment with a brutal honesty, I trust in my soul that there is a small place for us to play in staying grounded, being prayerful, and encouraging one another to live into a tender alternative to the fear, greed, and selfishness that currently feels so overwhelming. Because, you see, if you trust by faith that humiliation, anguish, and even death are NOT the end of the story, but yet another moment when God’s grace can – and will – break through the darkness, then you will join with me and millions of others who are quietly and intentionally renewing our practice of claiming the blessing sof small things.
All week long I avoided making time to get focused on today’s reflection. Thankfully, there were a few birthdays to celebrate – and my commitment to the L’Arche Ottawa community, too – and we’re making plans to finally visit with our children and grandchildren later this week. So, I let myself be in those realities even as my heart inwardly wept. Truth be told, I thought about cancelling sharing anything today because I felt empty and bereft of soul. That’s part of the spiritual journey, right? Living into and through the darkness? Trusting a love greater than my own doubt? Well, even though I KNOW that, I still wrestle with it.
And hate it at times, too. I can’t help but think of Jesus on the Cross screaming into the darkness: My God, my God WHY hast Thou forsaken me? That’s part of what we must do – personally and together – own and honor the darkness within and among us. Our despair, you see, is our descent – it is how we get honest and grounded – so that we might have eyes to see the blessings of small things. So, almost against my will, I went into that space this week. The closer we drew to July 4th the deeper the darkness in my heart. And then three small things happened that gave me a slightly different vision for today:
First, I happened to read a short reflection by Melissa Kuipers, director of family ministries at Central Presbyterian Church in Hamilton, Ontario, she called, "The Gift of Nurturing Small Things.” It had been in my email’s in-box for at least 10 days, but I didn’t bother with it until my heart was ready. She used part of the Creation story to consider the blessing of nurturing small things. Our tradition, she notes, celebrates a cultural mandate “that posits that the very first human calling is not just to literally make more people but to build culture.”
To be fruitful and multiply, to have dominion and influence, means to be given the gift of taking the raw elements of the world around us, elements fecund with potential, and to make beauty: to cultivate relationships, build connections, design structures, and shape the created world into new concepts and constructs. Everything from sourdough starter to just business practices and video conferences can be considered products of this first calling, to make good things of this good good world. God gives us the gift of caring for what God has already made. We, too have been given many good good things to prune and knead and raise and nurture. In the beginning this is a response to the holy, a joyous gift of raw materials we can use to imitate a generous Creator.
When I finished reading her words, I said out loud in my study: Thank you, Lord, I needed that. I didn’t know what I would DO with it, but I knew it was food for the journey. So I just sat with this insight, prayerfully letting the call to be fruitful and multiply grow in my imagination
That’s when the second surprise popped up: one night I picked up my guitar and started to play Cat Stevens’ old song, “The Wind,” in an entirely new way. I’m not kidding. I hadn’t planned on playing it with jazz chords, but they just felt right. Not in a mechanical or creepy way. Not at all. I LOVE that song, but the old way didn’t feel right for this moment in time.
Ok, so it’s a little cheesy – kinda soft jazz – and the LAST place I would usually go in trying to rework an old tune. But I gotta tell you: it just felt right. It felt playful and real. And the more I sang it, the more I liked it – I even wound up using it as my prayer last week. “I listen to my words but they fall far below…” ain’t that the truth? So I literally let my music take me where my heart wants to go. Into love. Into trust. Into compassion and solidarity. That’s where MY heart wants me to go. As I reworked that old song, I was reminded of what I must do to awaken my heart. I have to feed it. I have to nourish it. I have to treat my heart like a wounded lover in need of tenderness. And when I started to consciously remind myself of this truth, what popped up in my poetry email but the words of Walt Whitman who wrote in Leaves of Grass:
This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
It was deep speaking to deep. It was the holy whispering to my humanity about the blessings of small things. It was the consolation of my calling reminding me that the story isn’t over yet. So, obviously, I didn’t hang it up for today and I won’t for the foreseeable future. We’re going to be in this weird place with all its shifting sand for a long time to time – and I trust that we’ll need one another to stay grounded.
And that word grounded is probably the right one for us. In the creation story we’re told that God made all of creation from the earth – from the ground – all the animals, all the green matter, even male and female God created us from the soil. Both etymologically and spiritually the word human is related to the word humus. And hummus – that rich decaying soil nourished by garbage – is related to both humor and humility. So being grounded is vital for this moment in time, yes?
And it seems to me that Jesus took being grounded in a humble, humorous humanity quite seriously as he walked about the dusty roads of ancient Palestine speaking of seeds and shrubs and kernels of wheat falling into the earth to die before they yield new life.
When “a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies,” he said, “it bears much fruit.” “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed,” he said, “which is the smallest of seeds.” “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast,” and “the kingdom of God is like when a man sows seeds.” Jesus knew plants. The small, organic, everyday, life-giving elements of creation were ripe with holy potential for him. The smallest of plants, of microbes, of organisms, can bring great meaning to our lives. Some say Jesus chose these images for a reason: he spoke in metaphors people in his agrarian culture would recognize. I believe this to be the case, that his images were down to earth. But I also think the Son of God, who came to earth as a tiny baby who was shared with animals and shepherds, simply took delight in the little living things around him. “Consider the lilies,” says Jesus, and we do.
Staying grounded in the blessing of small things is, I am coming to trust yet again, both the sacred charism of this moment for many of us – and one of the hardest things to do. We WANT to be part of the healing of this nation. We ACHE to do something meaningful. We YEARN to be active in our solidarity with Black Lives Matter and the Healing the Breach movement of the Poor People’s Campaign. And… and we know that there is precious little action that we can manifest right now. So, let me put it to you like this: could it be that our very impotence is an invitation from God to nourish the blessing of small things? A time to cultivate a deeper trust that God is active even when we are not? That God is greater than this moment of uncertainty and despair? And that even this descent and confusion is working within us and our culture to create something holy from out of our humbling humilation? The Sufi poet, Rumi, put it like this:
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all.
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows
who violently sweet your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
When I scour the Scriptures, I find that most of what Jesus taught involved practicing seeing the small blessings all around us – even during the vicious occupation of Israel by Rome – and then honoring these small gifts by becoming a small blessing to another. Two texts are important: in St. Luke’s gospel, Jesus says: “The one who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and if we are dishonest in a very little thing we are likely to be unrighteous in larger matters.” (Luke 16: 10) This is a call to practice the blessing of small things – to notice them and honor them. The other passage that I find compelling is St. Matthew 18 where Jesus tells his friends: Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for that person to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. It is a call to share small blessings particularly among the vulnerable, the tender, the wounded and heart-broken.
I trust by faith that this moment of national failure and disgrace is not the end of the story. Clearly we must be humbled as a nation in order to get grounded. And we have a small part to play in the redemption of this moment – not in any grandiose way – but as allies and servants – who are at home in the humus because we’re grounded in humility. The poet Naomi Shihab Nye wrote that “before you can know kindness, you must lose things…” Let me close with her wisdom:
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Let’s be silent together for a moment of prayer…
No comments:
Post a Comment