exploring the possibilities...

Back at the beginning of the Trump regime, many of us said: it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Little did we know HOW bad - and the worse is still coming! The singer/songwriter, Carrie Newcomer, recently put it like this:

We are weathering a terrible storm, and so we find shelter, create sanctuary, and share hope and courage. Now is when we feel what we feel, find community and ground ourselves in our deepest most beautiful values and practices. Remember working for positive social change is daily and personal, but needs to be sustainable. What brings you hope and keeps you centered? I just got back from traveling in CO where I cycled and hiked, went to an uplifting concert, took photos of amazing wildflowers. Today I took time to meditate, ruffle my dog’s ears, ate a really good apple for lunch and put my feet in the pond and listened to the birds. I started a new poem. I am finding that staying in touch with beauty in this broken time is essential for centering myself in what I love - and our best work for the better kinder world will always rise up from what we love. When so much feels wrong and broken, what is still whole and beautiful? What still makes sense in senseless times? Spend time there…where ever that is for you.

I resonate with Ms. Newcomer's music, poetry, and prose often but now with one exception - and it's a biggie: hope! Over the past few years a beloved friend has helped me realize that this is not the time to speak about hope. Possibilities? Choices and options? Of course. But not hope as I have traditionally understood it, because as the marine biologist, Avana Elizabeth Johnson, told Krista Tippett of ON BEING:

Facing climate change, with the effect on seas and melting ice caps, has led me to be a realist who is not a fan of hope as a guiding principle, because it by definition assumes that the outcome will be good, which I know is not a given, I am completely enamored with the amount of possibility that’s available to us. So that’s the word that I try to embrace when I think about what if we get it right, is how much possibility remains.

For ages I've affirmed this distinction intellectually with either Meister Eckhart's confession that "reality is the will of God - it can always be better- but we must start with what is real" or Reinhold Niebhur's "Serenity Prayer" which says: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Embracing this shift in my heart, soul, mind, vocabulary, and flesh, however, is still a work in progress. But living into our age of modern plague and political dysfunction has pushed me beyond the confines of abstractions towards embodied prayer. This feels like a season to leave magical thinking, bromides, platitudes, and sentimentality behind so that the sacred can become flesh within our ordinary lives. Jan Richardson is one of my quiet guides who helps me practice letting go again at a more profound level. Her poem "Plentitude" is instructive:

At lunch today
it was the purple
of the olive pits
against my cobalt plate
that stunned me.

At tea,
the gold of peach
bloodstained by its stone.

I do not know
where the greater part
of the miracle lies:
that I should pause
to notice this,

or that I,
a woman of
such great hungers,
should be so well satisfied
by such small things.

It's my hunch that this is something like what St. Paul was telling us in his letter to the emerging church in Rome. He put it like this in Romans 5: "We celebrate our suffering because living openly with our wounds strengthens us with endurance, and endurance can ead to a balanced and wise character which evokes hope within and among us because hope (or trust) is God's love being poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit." (my paraphrase) That is to say, the wisdom of our wounds have the potential to awaken us to new ways of living in balance with the sacred rhytmn of creation. It isn't automatic nor is it inevitable. It is simply a sacred possibility. Carrie Newcomer's poem,"Making Sense," strikes me as another way to imagine the wisdom of the ancient apostle.

Finding what makes sense
In senseless times
Takes grounding
Sometimes quite literally
In the two inches of humus
Faithfully recreating itself
Every hundred years.
It takes steadying oneself
Upon shale and clay and solid rock
Swearing allegiance to an ageless aquifer
Betting on all the still hidden springs.

You can believe in a tree,
With its broad-leafed perspective,
Dedicated to breathing in, and then out,
Reaching down, and then up,
Drinking in a goodness above and below
It’s splayed and mossy feet.
You can trust a tree’s careful
and drawn out way
of speaking.
One thoughtful sentence, covering the span of many seasons.

A tree doesn’t hurry, it doesn’t lie,
It knows how to stand true to itself
Unselfconscious of its beauty and scars,
And all the physical signs of where
and when It needed to bend,
Rather than break.
A tree stands solitary and yet in deepest communion,
For in the gathering of the many,
There is comfort and courage,
Perseverance and protection,
From the storms that howl down from predictable
Or unexplainable directions.

In a senseless time
Hold close to what never stopped
Making sense.
Like love
Like trees
Like how a seed becomes a branch
And compost becomes seedlings again.
Like the scent at the very top of an infant’s head
Because there is nothing more right than that. Nothing.It is all still happening

Even now.
Even now

In so many ways, this IS a senseless time: a season of confusion, despair, anger, and alienation. The world as we have known it is unraveling before our eyes and most of the time our response is unclear. To which the wisdom-keepers reply: "Hold close that which has never stopped making sense..." The late Langston Hughes was clear that we are to:

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

My first inclination, shaped by a broken heart and broken trust, is to become angry. Like many other men confronting our powerlessness to bring healing to this mess, I want to lash out, blame, punish, and overcome my impotence. But that only makes reality worse. To patiently and faithfully explore the possibilities... now there's a healthy alternative. To fortify love. To trust the sacred wisdom of creation so that I live like the trees who know that

A seed becomes a branch
And compost becomes seedlings again.
Like the scent at the very top of an infant’s head because there is nothing more right than that. Nothing.It is all still happening

Even now. Even now.