Getting Out and Coming Back

There’s a rumor of a blizzard across the lower 48, hammering New York City, with cars crashing, police overwhelmed. Up here in Fairbanks, it’s “March” already. Snow-wise. With temps in the thirties and forties the last two days, strong undeniable sunshine, and incredible skiing.

Marin, Annika, Teo and I met up with two mom friends and their kids on Wednesday at Birch Hill. Cooper, John and Teo were on skis. Moms Paula and Nina and I held their hands or called them back, skiing alongside. Paula was also pulling Quinn in a little sled. The sun was warm and lovely after the long dark cold winter. After a half hour, I switched out with Marin, rocking and consoling Annika, while she took the Matteo watch. Out in the world! It felt like a resurrection.

Speaking of resurrection. I’ve been working on an Easter Sunday talk for our local UU Fellowship. I was thinking of doing a straight “In Lieu of Resurrection” topic, which would be about how the friends of Jesus first experienced his death – as death, loss and oppression (by the brutish Roman invaders), and subsequently began to find the courage to realize that his life didn’t disappear with his death. His vision, his kindness, his community, and his story could continue. But only if people – they themselves – refused to cower from the challenges he confronted.

So how can that happen for us, lacking the deceptive “reward” of an afterlife? That would have been the heart of the Sunday “talk,” and the challenge would have been to address where we in our Fellowship find ourselves in the face of “brutish invaders” such as fear-of-terrorism, consuming militarism, anti-immigrant racism, runaway corporate interests, blind consumerism – lots of life-denying challenges. Where is our “resurrection,” as UU’s? Can we learn anything from the metaphors, rituals, and narratives of Christians facing the same “death-dealing?”

When I went to the Religious Exploration meeting on Tuesday, we started talking about making this topic into an intergenerational service. I began to think about it, and realized that the Jewish Passover story, the Christian Easter story, all benefit from the earlier Pagan everlasting-Spring story, not to mention the Buddhist story about discovering and embracing freedom from suffering. Hm.

The Chalice Circle questions for the coming week are about this issue – how we as individuals find resources for transformation. We have talked about our own biographies, our religious stories, the Unitarian story, and how we fit into the Fellowship itself. Now, what do we have to offer? One of the questions goes: “Are there books, authors, poets, friends, teachers, singers, radio stations, plays, communities, times of the year, places in Fairbanks, drives, walks, songs, prayers, memories, or any other "midwives" to the birth, within you, of your healthy, strong and vibrant spirit, "reliable guides" which can bring you to a sense of being deeply connected, exhilarated, at peace with yourself?”

Well, I was feeling pretty bad, personally, about this line of questioning, swirling through my post-Annika life. There was less sleep, no writing, a new exciting job with the UU’s, planning a trip to Tacoma for a UU conference next week, family visiting our little Pepita, changes, distranctions, fun and forgetting. I was going to add, “no exercise,” but we’ve been out on the trails two of the last two days.

And that’s the thing.

After skiing came, surprisingly, writing. A blog entry. After writing came a new sense of self, a confidence. Similar to answered prayer, but different. Interesting how personal this issue of “getting spiritually lost” and “recentering” has been for me the past months, not to mention the last 40 years!

Mystical Babies Only / Christmas Day 1

It’s Christmas Eve, somewhere in the wee hours of the morning. Marin turns to me in bed and says, everyone else wants Christmas, and we’re hoping for the opposite.

She was referring to the fact that she’s been feeling generally under the weather all day, which turned specifically into having contractions all evening. Her gynecologist didn’t return a message she left. And a friend, a midwife we were thinking of calling, had a Christmas Eve car accident and broke her collar bone.

Our Christmas Eve was outside, the UU "Advent Garden," held in moonlight and candlelight. Some of us at the Fellowship stamped out a 30-foot spiral in the snow after the service Sunday. Tonight, while we sang traditional carols together, 40 of us meditatively, one by one, walked the spiral to the center, lit candles stuck into apples, and set the flaming apple-candles into the fir boughs which defined the spiral against the white snow.

A simpler, sweeter Christmas eve celebration I have not seen. As usual the UU sense of levity mixed in with the ceremonial seriousness, people laughed with me when it turned out that one of my favorite carols, "Lo how a Rose ‘ere Blooming," was known only to me. Someone noted, after the first verse came out without participation, "nice solo."

"Must be a Lutheran song," I quipped back. Merriment ensued.

As in the Solstice service last Sunday, there was a lot of time to think. It wasn’t all programmed. The time it took for people to arrive and get into place with candles and songbooks around the spiral circle, gave everyone a chance to settle in, heartwise. A friend Carrie with her daughter Naomi came, their first UU experience. I’d sent her "Irving the Snowchicken is Coming to Town" (see yesterday) and we laughed about it. It was so fun to see her. Also Trista, one of my Yoga teachers, came with her son, her sweetie, and another family. I never thought of the UU Advent Garden as an outreach service.

I still am being surprised by the healing, joyful potential of belonging to a non-religious Religion.

At a reception we went to afterwards at Larry and Terry’s, Matteo managed to sneak, it was rumored, two pieces of cheesecake. Art on all the walls, some of it Terry’s, what a nice thing. Maybe for us someday... Marin confirmed the cheesecake rumor, which he must have snagged when we were both in separate rooms from the dessert table. "Ringed with chocolate," is how she described his guilty mouth.

Makes sense, then, that he was bouncing off the walls when we got home at 10. And I couldn’t get him to settle. Marin went straight to bed. He and I watched an episode "Peep and the Big Wide World," a National Science Foundation funded cartoon. Then, after tooth brushing, we had a standoff about stories. He wanted two, I wanted to tell one. After five minutes of silence, he gave in. And I told the Mary-Joseph-Baby-Jesus-Shepherds-Angels story. And reminded him that Santa was bringing gifts because it was Christmas eve. "What Christmas eve is?"

Later, when he cried out in the middle of the night, Marin, who couldn’t sleep more than an hour at a stretch, came to sleep with him. He told her, "Papa told me a story about Jesus," and he started the process of waking get up. Marin: "Oh, you’re too early, you have to sleep a little bit more." Teo’s response: "It’s already that day, but I don’t remember what it is, Mama."

And now, much later than normal (7:30 am), he’s awake. We’ve decided not to make much of the "Santa" connection (since presents will be showing up for the next two weeks...), but managed to get the first installment wrapped and placed under the tree. He hasn’t noticed yet.

He’s being the "birdie" in his "nest," which is Marin’s lap, drinking "juice and nurse." And the little one kicking inside her to get out, is still holding back. Time to run!

The Better Part / Advent Day 20

Psalm 131

Lord, I am not proud,
holding my head too high,
reaching beyond my grasp.

No, I am calm and tranquil
like a weaned child
resting in its mother’s arms:
my whole being at rest.

Let Israel rest in the Lord,
now and for ever.

Well, that’s sure not me talking. Here’s where the "beloved" interpretation of the Psalms I talked about a couple days ago, has it right. At best, we want to ask for, or long for, or humbly work toward these qualities. Here’s how Nan Merrill says it:

Help me to calm and quiet my soul,
like a child quieted at its mother’s breast,
like a child that is quieted,
be so my soul.

The weekend before Christmas, I feel like Martha of the Mary-Martha story (Luke 10:38). They are co-hosts of an impromptu reception for Jesus and his entourage. Mary gets all focused on what Jesus is saying in the living room, and Martha out back on the grill is herself steaming. "Tell her to help out," she demands of Jesus. He should know injustice when he sees it, right?

"Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things," he replies. "There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."

Not how I would have said it, to be sure. But an important distinction. What do we spend our time on earth doing? Crossing items off our list? Or living out from the center?

How do we find our way back to the center, when we’re in the ice-fog of daily life? Isn’t it by calling out, like a voice in a Psalm, if you believe in being answered. Or by stopping and listening, if you believe that the answering voice comes from within.

My friend Margaret and I were talking over coffee yesterday about "mission." Margaret thought she didn’t have a mission, and I thought we all do, which, after defining terms, we ended up agreeing on. What we do with our hours and days, our to-do lists and our relationships, become our "mission," for better or worse.

What’s nice about religions of the "book," the Bible, is that they have texts to remind you of what you aspired to. You keep coming back to them. What’s not great is when the texts are wielded by someone other than you, someone who is unwise or even cruel. The people who are drawn to authority, and who become "authority," often are people who carry some pain.

Which is where other practices, like sitting and breathing, a la Thich Nhat Hanh, are so helpful. You come back to being "a child quieted at its mother’s breast," because it’s who you want to be for yourself.

It’s also probably who you want to be to others in the world, holding them close, and loving them for who they are, freeing them, challenging them to be fully themselves. No list-keeping required.

The Beloved / Advent Day 18

In the gospel of John, there is a disciple of Jesus who is called, simply, the "beloved" disciple. He is introduced halfway through, days before Jesus death. After Jesus washes the disciples feet – sort of like cheerfully sprucing up the toilets of a home where you’re a guest as an example of serene, committed hospitality – he begins to talk about one of his followers turning him over to the police.

Then it reads: "One of the disciples – the one whom Jesus loved – was reclining next to Jesus..." Immediately, Peter asks this "beloved" disciple to be an intermediary, grilling Jesus as to who the betrayer is. This shows that Peter, in other gospels the go-to guy, is really not tops on Jesus’ list, at least not in the Gospel of John. The beloved disciple is.

This shows that at the beginning of Christianity there was a non-hierarchical way of "following Jesus." It was community-based, not leader-centered, and focused on relationships rooted in authentic love, not on doctrines or on the succession of dynasties. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. One led to the Vatican, which did all it could to destroy the other road compeletly. The other led to the Society of Friends (the Quakers), and all kinds of committed communities based on human rights and earth-sustainability.

My friend Kathy Franzenburg, a Lutheran pastor in Palmer, AK and now in Iowa, sent me an interpretation of the Psalms which refers to God always as "the Beloved." It’s not your grandmother’s Book of Psalms. A "beloved" God assures that there is love at the center of each of the 150 laments, prayers, and songs. Christians would call it "grace," as in "Amazing Grace How Sweet the Sound."

With love stipulated as being central, community follows. Love, at the center of things, means that we are all part of one community, even if we fail to acknowledge it or live by it.

I believe this. I believe that when we live as if we are part of a community, things fall into place nicely. When we don’t, it’s sometimes easier – like not changing the oil in the car is easier. But it’s also destructive, possibly painful, and probably irresponsible.

Beloved. I was telling Marin as we drove through the -30 degree ice fog this morning – her truck blew a hose – that a lot of the edginess and difficulty of the Psalms can vanish in this interpretation.

Psalm 137, for example, a lament of a captive, hauled across the desert from Zion where God dwells -- Jerusalem -- to a ghetto "By the Waters of Babylon." His revenge fantasy includes dashing infants, children of his captor, against rocks. (Luther finessed this psalm, apparently, by allegorizing infants as nascent sin, and rocks as sturdy Jesus: dash those infants!) In the new interpretation, the songs that are sung in Psalm 137, are sung by dolphins, and no alien babies are harmed, or even mentioned.

Teo, Mike, and Maroni / Advent Day 12

I lie beside Matteo this afternoon, trying to help him move from waking into his nap. He resists, and kicks his legs, flails his limbs, sings, sighs, complains of throat pains, and actually gets counted down (1 2 3 Magic) and spends five minutes in the hotel room bathroom by himself, doing his crying routine – all very familiar.

But then I turn gruff, and he surrenders. Two minutes later, he’s fast asleep.

In those two minutes I think of the passage into unconsciousness. It’s an acceptance, on one level, of our limitations. I can’t stay awake forever, I have to let sleep take over.

On another level, it’s an acceptance of mortality. Finally, there will come a day when I will let go of life, in essentially the same way. Resisting, resisting, and then, in two magical minutes, surrendering, and passing.

I think of my little boy, who may be there holding my hand (as I was a six weeks ago, holding my dying mother’s hand), guiding me then as I guide him now, as I breathe my last, and relax into death.

It always is so sweet to fall asleep with Teo, who often will throw his arm over me to join mine over him, with my hand tucked under him behind his back. All hunkered down like a litter of puppies while I tell him a story until one or both of us doze off. Falling asleep with someone I love is the very best thing.

Interestingly, the Advent theme of the end times could have been for Christians a gentle letting go, a breathing in of God’s breath as God comes to bring us all to a rest which will grant us strength to live a deeper intimacy with God.

Instead, their vision is of the world dissolving in fire and suffering, as God loses patience with all the evil (think Noah’s Ark – that frustrated, vindictive God). And, as Jesus articulates it, some people will be ready and safe, but most will be shocked and in torment. Why’d the early Christians take this domestic lullaby of endings, and raise it to a shrill murderous shriek?

There’s a video making its way around the web which takes up the origination myth of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, or Mormons.

In a cartoon format, it explains how gods in the spirit-world gave birth to a spirit child, Elohim, who grew up and came up with the idea for our planet to be physical home for the billions of spirit children they all were generating by having methodical celestial sex.

Two of Elohim’s spirit children, the Mormon-Jesus and Satan, were in competition for stipulations to add to human free will. Satan wanted no free will, the Mormon-Jesus wanted lots. Satan and a third of the Mormon heavenly host rebelled and were punished by being sent to earth, but without bodies. The undecided heavenly host came to earth, enfleshed, but black, with no hope of redemption.

The rest came as whites, and had the opportunity to earn planets after death to continue to have sex and create more spirit children for the universe.

By the way, Elohim and Eve started things on earth, and later Elohim came and had sex with Mary to give Jesus a body to live in. Guy’s pretty focused on sex for a God.

During his life, Jesus married Mary Magdalen, Martha, and the other Mary, and had kids, before being crucified. On his resurrection, he converted a white race in the New World, which fought the rebellious, dark skinned Indians, and lost. Moroni was the last of that race, who hid the gold tablets of their writings (which explain all this?) in the ground before his death.

Which Joseph Smith discovered, translated with Moroni’s angelic help, and then lost. Smith, the God Elohim, and the Mormon-Jesus will judge all who die.

While former Baptist Minister Mike Huckabee abruptly backed down from his observing that(Mitt Romney and) Mormons see Jesus and Satan as brothers after the Republican debate in Iowa last night, I have an humble observation.

I want to observe that both the first century cosmology (Jesus will return to judge the earth with fire) and John Smith’s cosmology (compliant Mormon men earn planets and continue the solemn, cosmic sex after death) – both are a sad, empty preoccupation of vain men clinging to the silliest power there is, religion (or in Smith’s case, sex).

Enough with that version of the end-time Advent theme. Instead, let’s make a religion out of the simple, real things. Like: to put our children to bed, helping them graciously to let go of the lovely golden sunsetting afternoon. To breathe their breath, clinging to their little bodies, giving thanks that we don’t have to worry either ourselves or others about some demented version of life after death.

Open Door Closed Door / Advent Day 4

Which doors to our heart do we keep open. Which are closed, nailed shut? Which doors do we sit beside, carefully monitoring what comes in? Which are like the gates of the Buddhist monasteries before which pilgrims sit meditating for days before the enclosure is opened from within, and the pilgrim is invited to join the seeking, meal-sharing community?

A friend Marilyn told the story at last week’s Chalice Circle at UUFF about being at Plum Village, the Buddhist visionary Thich Nhat Hanh’s community in France. Every 15 minutes throughout the day, a bell would sound which could be heard everywhere, and each person would stop what they were doing, stop their conversation, their reading, their writing, take note of their breath: "I breathe in, my body relaxes; I breathe out, I smile."

I decided I was going to cut back on the crap that I have delivered to my "in box" over the internet. But as I peeled through it before breakfast this morning, it wasn’t overwhelming. Don’t we owe it to ourselves and our children to know, for example, that George Bush remains this morning undeterred in his threats and blame of Iran, despite the rebellion in his Intelligence services, which revealed yesterday that Iran has been off the "bomb" for at least the past four years. This in the face of Bush’s World War 3 quip from six weeks ago, against those who would not join the US in leveling sanctions against the Tehran regime. You would have thought he’d do damage control and let the focus shift to something the GOP is better at growling over, such as undocumented people (now even the left is calling these unfortunates "illegal aliens"). Bush/Cheny may yet get to start a third Mideast war before it’s all over.

Is this worth reading about? Does this help us live, and love, and care for one another?

I think so. If only to set out what a bottom line of "adequacy" in the craft of reporting. Last week, listening to the KCRW "Left, Right and Center" podcast, I heard Bob Sheer’s (of Truthdig.com) insightful critique of the press corps which trudges after the candidates, drinking in small town bars at night, sharing gossip, offering up for their editors Iowan nuance and insider insights, but failing utterly to look at the large issues of history, how and where common people live their lives, what is happening to the world on our watch. Immediately after his brilliant rant, moderator Matt Miller asked Tony Blankly of the Washington Times about a gathering of press corps and Mike Huckabee inside the beltway over a lunch, and three minutes of Iowan nuance and insider insights resulted, directly in the face of Sheer’s critique. Sheer jumped back in and nailed them.

He’s exactly right! It’s so hard to stay focused on the substance of our political life together. What about corporations and climate change? What about changing the American lifestyle so that we can live beyond peak oil? What about creating a sense of community together, rather than exploiting differences in opinion on Abortion or Muslims or Homosexuality to gin up fears and angers on deadline for election day? Instead of having a conversation among ourselves which matters, we allow the politicos to drink and gossip together for our delight or disgust, and let the war continue, let the economy feed the rich, and let the oil companies destroy the future of our planet.

And the religious or spiritually attuned, feel overwhelmed by the sadness of all this. They turn to prayer, meditation, and other practices in order to recover a sense of self, or God’s presence above the fray.

But aren’t we making the same mistake that all escapists make – those who do TV or Paris Hilton or alcohol or false religion or sports to feel better – about the sacred. The sacred isn’t an idea, it’s a way of living together in the real biological community called Earth. Part of it is the wonderfully resiliant political realm created for us by the Jeffersons and Madisons, salvaged at great human expense from the Hitlers and Pol Pots. And now from the Blackwaters and the Exxons. Aren’t we allowing the slackers in the media to annoy us to the point that we stop paying attention. And when we stop being able to "stay awake" Haliburton steals your wallet, and your keys, and locks you out of your own home.

"Keep alert," Jesus says in one of his famous parables, (Luke 12: 36): "Know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into." Maybe some would say that our preparation for the Winter Solstice, the Christians season of Advent, isn’t a time to have hands sullied with the matters of the world. I’d say, like anyone waiting for a rare wild animal to come down to drink from the stream at dusk: "Quiet. Watch."

Stories, Lost and Found / Advent Day 3

What I meant, when I said that "the good stories get lost," happens to me all the time. Last night it happened this way. Marin and Matteo were bedding down in our upstairs radon-free nest, and I was reading something at the dining room table.

"Light the Christmas tree," chanted Teo, leaning on "tree" in his sweetly emphatic way, "for the baby." Huh? I didn’t get it, but Marin usually knows what’s on his mind. She replied, "that’s right, Matteo, there’s a baby that’s born during Christmas."

I could barely hold myself back from shouting the corrective, "Baby Jesus," drawing out "Jesus" in my sermony, corrective, highly-annoying-to-Marin way, but managed to.

But what the heck are the Christians doing spending four weeks of their lives in the dark during Advent, lighting candles, praying, longing, listening, singing quietly, asking for God to come. "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" (means "God-with-us").

They’re waiting for an intervention in their lives, a sign, a fierce encouragement, a liberation. And when, faithfully, you look for what you need, you receive what you need, in one way or another. This you are required to believe, somehow or other, in order to be healthy, to be a good companion to your friends, your community, your generation, your era. To be a good steward of all the universe has invested in you.

Jesus was one of the heros. He found a richly adorned religious facade with forbidding guards and an imposing admission-fee-structure (no women, no children, circumcision, etc). From the side, though, the view was different. A lot of people knew that, but Jesus was the one who knew what to do about that. He located and entered by the side door, and invited all the people he ever met (+women, +children) to bring their most important hopes, dreams, and memories with them, and help him reconstruct the ancient ruin. To make life-giving a place that inflicted death.

This is the time of year we remember people like him, who are born into our world and give the world its greatest hopes back, at great cost. We owe them dearly. In the darkest time of the year (and up here in Fairbanks, that’s no metaphor – it’s 9:00 am as I write and there’s a crescent moon hanging in the skeletal trees behind me through the window, but there won’t be a lightening of the sky for another half hour, and I’m not even talking about sunrise), all people who know their connection to the earth and to each other, prepare to light the bonfires to call down and give thanks for these heros, these enlivening spirits.

They have helped bring us back to ourselves when we have locked ourselves (or been locked by others) into various dark rooms, behind shiny facades of many failed illusions. Each has a side entrance. If you can find it, bring your friends along when you invade, and make a real home for all of you there. Don’t forget Pooh, the bear of very little brain, and his very good stories.