No worship or fellowship today - or tomorrow - as a real snowmageddon delivers 1-2 inches an hour in these rolling Berkshire hills. All the hoopla and hollering of the past week felt more like hyperbole than honesty. Besides, real New Englanders know how to traverse a winter wonderland, and we haven't had a doozy for a few years - but we do today, and so far I am loving it. Silent. Beautiful. Powerful. And mysterious. Granted, I can make such observations from within the warm safety of our little home - and not everyone knows such privilege. So, it's with a measure of gratitude and humility that I sit silently in my study, savoring the snowfall.
Perched within the security of my solitude, this blizzard is simultaneously majestic and disturbing. Like standing on the seashore during a storm, there's no way to escape the raw, unharnessed fury reining down upon us. There is neither rhyme nor reason to this storm. The Potawatomi author and poet Kaitlin Curtice rightly notes that those who live in these environs cannot avoid winter; we can only go through it. So, I hope to avoid even the hint of sentimentality as I confess to being awed by its elegance. Rudolph Otto wrote in The Idea of the Holy that an authentic encounter with the sacred is always a "fearful and fascinating encounter with mystery." The mysterium tremendum et fascinans is wholly other and entirely beyond the ordinary, evoking wonder; it is saturated with power and awe that is uncontrollable, and despite our fears, also attracts us with the presence of joy. Don't get me wrong: there are times I HATE to drive in such a mess, but I'm not out on the roads today. No, right now I am savoring the mystical bounty of this storm.
My inward/outward serenity rests in jarring contrast to the violence and fear that now engulfs Minneapolis and Portland, ME. ICE thugs, hellbent on terrorizing - and now murdering - their opponents, are pushing us ever closer to civil war as they give shape and form to our nation's shadow. No matter that the current regime literally tries to white-wash our origins and sanitize our memories by taking down historical markers and applying Soviet-era photo scrubs at the Smithsonian, the United States will always be a nation conceived in a cauldron of contradiction: freedom and the pursuit of liberty (read: property) for the landed elite have long been parasitically twinned with acts of genocide, slavery, scapegoating, and gun violence. Yes, since 1607, we have made authentic albeit incremental progress towards a more perfect union through the blood sacrifices of brave and compassionate martyrs. But almost like clockwork, these advances are clawed back in an unholy ebb and flow that punishes the most vulnerable among us while rewarding the 1%. I choose to believe that our better angels always seek to create the land of the brave and the home of the free, but because we're at war with ourselves and refuse to acknowledge this truth, we can't help but attack, demonize, and destroy with a vengeance those who seek the same blessings the privileged take for granted.
Indeed, our national soul is so riven with contradictions, coupled with an incredible tolerance for shedding innocent blood, self- deception, and periodic propaganda that no matter how many times the Holy tells us that God's bounty is to be shared by all so that there is scarcity for none, our habits, fears, history, and addictions insist upon a zero sum ideology where other's gain only if we lose. It is a vicious downward spiral that has once again raised its ugly head and become normative.
And I'm not the only one locked in lament: North American theologian and podcaster, Tripp Fuller, recently published an insightful essay entitled, "The Exhausted Soul and a World Gone Mute," which begins: "I want to tell you about a moment that changed how I see the world. I was sitting at my desk a few years ago, staring at my inbox, when I realized something that should have been obvious but somehow wasn’t: I was losing."
Not losing at anything in particular. Just... losing. Falling behind. No matter how early I woke up, no matter how efficiently I worked, no matter how many productivity apps I downloaded or time-management systems I tried, the gap between what I needed to do and what I could do kept widening. I went to bed each night—as the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa puts it so perfectly—as a “subject of guilt,” unable to work off my ever-expanding to-do list. And here’s the thing: I wasn’t alone. Everyone I knew was drowning in the same invisible flood. What if this isn’t a personal failure? What if it’s something much larger—something structural, something spiritual, something that goes to the very heart of what it means to live in the modern world?
Please read the full essay here (https://open.substack.com/pub/ processthis/ p/the-exhausted-soul-and-a-world-gone?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web) knowing that he makes three clarifying insights: 1) One of the reasons for our culture of exhaustion is that modernity is ALL about accelerating. "What used to take months now takes minutes... as we move faster, produce faster, and connect faster than any generation in history." 2) Acceleration renders time-tested skills and values obsolete as "the institutions we once trusted disappear and the ground shifts beneath your feet." And 3) Multitasking has become normative, meaning we strive to compress more and more into lives that are finite, resulting in "burnout, burn up, and burndown." As Canadian author and theologian Ralph Heinzman notes in Rediscovering Reverence, contemporary Western culture has lost the very idea of reverence and awe.
Reverence conveys a human attitude of respect and deference for something larger or higher in priority than our own individual selves... Reverence results in humility as a Jewish text puts it... (And) awe is the emotion we feel when we encounter someone or something that transcends our normal life, and embodies qualities of excellence, or beauty, or some kind of power or authority that force our admiration, and to which, in some way or other, we submit ourselves, voluntarily or no... (pp. 18-19)
Which brings me back to what I am learning about a spirituality of winter in general and our encounters with snow in specific. "We cannot force the snow to fall. But we can go outside and wait. Grace cannot be manufactured. It arrives—or it doesn't. This is what the contemplatives have always known. This is what Sabbath practice is about. This is what silence and solitude offer. Not escape from the world, but a different relationship with it—one based not on aggression and acquisition but on receptivity, response, and cooperative participation in the ongoing creation of the world." (Fuller, ibid) From my perspective, this means at least the following:
+ First, we must recognize that there is a momentum to a storm that can not be stopped. We may rail against it - piss and moan, bellyache, and carp till the cows come home, too - but none of that matters. We must go through this storm as both Meister Eckhart and the Serenity Prayer tell us: reality is the will of God. It can always be better, but we must accept what cannot be changed and make our peace with it. We are now in a radical and cyclical realignment that is not only bringing to a close 70+ years of rule of law but also the ethos of social equality. I am not saying we must like this - I hate it - but culture, politics, and religion are shifting in ways that are challenging and dangerous. Nostalgia for the past is pointless. So, too, the self-righteous posturing of the Left that's long on elitist blame but short of practical solutions to economic, cultural, and spiritual alienation. The blathering of the Right with its hatred and denigration is equally destructive. The time has come to steel ourselves for our current "dark night," practicing the time-tested tools of contemplation, including centering, stillness, celebration, and small acts of service and care for those most vulnerable.
+ Second, if storms cannot be changed or tamed but, rather, only endured, it is also true that they don't last forever. It is neither fantasy, naivete, nor ideological projection to suggest that a slowly emerging majority of ordinary Americans are growing weary of the current cruelty and chaos. More and more are realizing that WE are not" failing modern life, but modernity is failing US!" (Fuller) This transition is far from complete - and will clearly take more time - but objective evidence points to those who are once again shifting their political and emotional alliances. Those who have lost faith in this current darkness and brokenness are seeking solace. And those who recognize that the storm cannot last forever are starting to build bridges. A recent poll taken immediately after the murder of Alex Pretti documents that many of the young and Latino voters who shifted loyalties in the last national election are now shifting back with a vengeance. A small but growing number of Republicans and their pundits are breaking away from the monolith by demanding a joint investigation into Mr. Pretti's murder. And a few new media outlets are pointing out both the outright lies of the current regime, as well as their ugly and dangerous consequences. An old movement song reminds us that, "It's always darkest before the storm..." Today the snow is still coming down - and we already have more than 24 inches to deal with - but my eyes are not lying: this storm - and all storms - will end.
+ And third, this snowstorm has slowly pushed some towards a new level of cooperation. It is too early to say too much about the all too new mayor of NYC, but he put together a winning coalition that tapped into the real angst of real people without much ideological carping or blame. He clearly respects our wounds and vulnerabilities. He also knows how to bring desperate communities back into relationship with one another in pursuit of the common good. Cultural critique, Ted Gioia at Substack's "The Honest Broker" has named the work of Mamdani and others the ascent of a "new romanticism." (read his essay @ https://www.honest-broker.com/p/25-propositions-about-the-new-romanticism?img=https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%
More than two years ago, I predicted the rise of a New Romanticism—a movement to counter the intense rationalization and expanding technological control of society. This idea had started as a joke. Oh Beethoven, come save us! And give Tchaikovsky the news. But when I dug deeply into the history of the original Romanticist movement, circa 1800, I stopped laughing. The more I probed, the more I was convinced that this provided a blueprint for countering the overreach of technology, the massive expansion in surveillance, and the centralization of both political and economic power.
A few weeks back, right after Renee Good was murdered, I awoke from a deep sleep with an aching panic attack. I'm not prone to these, but have experienced them from time to time when my inner equilibrium is being challenged and/or changed. Over the past decade, I've had to confront my anxieties in pursuit of both personal equanimity and social compassion. Initially, I concluded that there was something wrong or broken in me that caused me to inwardly come apart at the seams with grief and uncertainty. But on the night in question, two things happened that I now recognize as sacred revelation. First, lying silently in bed that night with my anxiety over the violence and hatred allowed me to feel it deeply. I wept. I felt unhinged. Or, in other words, I grieved. I practiced what I've preached. Like Job, I didn't distract myself from my despair. I felt it. Fully. Part of what I realized in my silent darkness was that I was doubting God's grace and love: could the way of the Cross REALLY transform reality? Was it enough? Was there something MORE I could or should do?
Doubt is NOT the absence of faith. Rather, it's an act of clarifying and I started to sense that whenever I felt overwhelmed with anxiety, it was NOT an inward fault but the very voice of God calling me deeper. Like the Rumi poem, Love Dogs, says:
One night a man was crying,
“Allah, Allah!”
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
“So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?”
The man had no answer for that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage,
“Why did you stop praising?”
“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”
“This longing you express
is the return message.”
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs no one knows the names of.Give your life to be one of them.
My feelings of emptiness and yearning were the Via Negativa - the silent call of the sacred - into deeper trust. So, while holding my despair, I read a few lines from Cynthia Bourgeault's The Wisdom Jesus about kenosis - Christ's commitment to self-emptying that empowered him to get over himself and trust God ever more deeply. And as I read, and let the words speak to my heart, I could feel the anxiety lift. It was palpable. It was awesome. It was restorative. Not that my feelings changed anything objectively in the world. No, what the presence of grace did was change me. A little bit. Enough to get grounded again. Enough to trust that Dr. King was right: hatred cannot conquer hatred, only love can do that; just as the darkness cannot overcome darkness but needs the light. Call this my new credo: be still and know - reconnect to small celebrations as I seek and serve - and trust that grief and emptiness are just as much of the Lord as jubilation. And just in case I wasn't listening, I just received this announcement from Kaitlin Curtice about the creation of her Aki Institute of Peace and Justice, built upon three pillars: rest, resistance, and responsibility. (check it out along with me @
.jpg)
.jpg)
