Life Choice, Annika's Community

January 6, 2009
Three Kings Day / Ephiphany /
The revealing of God to the nations


I was looking at Annika this morning
as I fed her cooked cereal, yogurt and applesauce,
and, remembering Henri Nouwen and L’Arche
of my recent posts, I realized it wouldn’t matter much to me
if she was “normal” or if she was somehow “differently abled.”
I love the children. Sometimes they drive me nuts.
But they are delightful for themselves alone,
and if Annika hadn’t received (God forbid)
enough oxygen during her delivery,
she’d be a two year old forever.
Huh. What two-year-olds do is odd and delightful.
Minus the tragedy, everything’s fine, a human
who needs me, loves me, and draws my love forth
for herself. Same at L’Arche.

It’s a matter of love.

I realized that I might have had a different idea
had we discovered when Annika was in utereo
that she as a fetus was “compromised.”

The difference is the application of love.
Before she was there to love, Annika was an idea.
She was an idea of love. Now she’s a reality.

Maybe what separates “choice” people from “life” people
is that choice is more about individuals, about their struggles,
opinions, and options, about individual (family) energy and spirit.

Life is more about communities, about trusting in what can be,
about sharing difficulty, growing into a deeper empowerment,
together...

Maybe choice is what is real for unplanned pregnancies.
When people aren’t mature enough, or when there aren’t
supporting structures like family or a social safety net,
in which case it’s maybe nuts
to “embrace the chaotic blessing of life.”

Predictably, this led me to thoughts about religion.
I was thinking about atheists, Unitarians, Jews and Christians.

I was thinking that their stories and traditions
(often shared) train Jews and Christians
in the skills of interpretation and appreciation.
(“Appreciative inquiry: The basic idea
is to build organizations around what works,
rather than trying to fix what doesn't.”)
( )

Example: how to love a story like Noah and the Ark,
where God decides to kill off the sinful earth?
Then commissions virtuous Noah to provide a parachute.
Here’s how to read this story:
look to the improbable concept of “saving the animals.”
Celebrate that. Draw it, sing it, crayon it.
Teach your children how much Love can transform
seeming disasters. (Don’t focus on the liability
of this story, which is that Love started the problem
with a big angry rain).

Ask a Lubavitcher or a Mormon and they’ll have thought about it,
they’ll focus on one detail (Noah’s improbable obedience)
or another detail (God sets a rainbow in the sky and promises
never to destroy the earth again, a free-will covenant).
Not that you’d approve of their interpretation.
It’s like movie reviews. Sometimes you can’t like a movie
no matter how “important” the NYT reviewer
says it is to the history of cinema.

But if you’re “in” the community you agree to disagree.
You’re not “in” the community
if you walk out and never return to that church.
You’re a principled dissenter, out there on your own
(maybe dragging your family along, or splitting your family).

Another thing the traditional religions teach people
is that they aren’t God, they aren’t at the center.
God or Love is at the center.
The rest is “blessed mystery.”
Love it, love the blessed chaos of it.
Forget about “explaining” the important stuff.
Even thinking you could, is crazy-making.

In this world view, humility is “becoming.”
It’s a steadying comfort. An anchoring worldview.
Whether you’re trying to understand a tragedy,
or to build a community, finding a place
for your unique self in the larger scheme
feels like a blessing to the effort. It empowers.
These traditions often give rise to leaders
who guide, console, referee fights, and bless.
(as well as leaders not up to the task,
who divide, accuse, blame, pontificate, even abuse...)

In contrast, when many are sure of their “right-ness”
their “different-ness,” the resulting populist chaos
often isn’t very “blessed mystery.” It’s bracing, but lonely.
Lots of these folks in Alaska, firing off tirades
to “Letters to the Editor,” whose wives aren’t very good
text editors (as is mine, when I float a broadside past her,
and she wisely advises: “delete.”)
In a community, it’s often distracting, annoying,
it thrashes community members,
and drives off individuals with a low threshold for infighting,
or who don’t sense a deeper “truth” happening there.

What agnostics and other non-theistic people
have going for them is that they readily question authority.
Thus, the tyranny and silliness of “leaders-so-called” don’t fly.
People don’t “do” things obediently
because the priest or minister or board of directors
say they should. But, they also don’t “do” things
that they don’t understand. That can seem selfish.
Sometimes you don’t have to understand to love.
There’s a lot which people won’t ever understand,
but could love, because of that “blessed mystery.”

I have a small experience pool,
and from my time in our funky,
end of the road, furthest north lay-led UU fellowship,
I’m wondering if other groups which are based on the premise
that “there’s no authority,” and that there are “no answers,”
can make for the kind of community I crave. If people see
no reason to compromise their freedom, why bond?
If they don’t believe in the rewards of banding together,
why would they learn the skills of community?

For the sake of the blessed mysteries which are yet to be revealed,
if they be tragic (losses, failures, sadnesses, economic disaster) or ecstatic
(getting work we love, raising kids we admire, having a justice president, reversing global warming), I long to find a community which will love my improbable family,
and in which we can sharpen our compassion, implement our desire to serve,
share our wisdom, grow kindness, and learn how to dance
with improbable partners through life together.

The Real Body

Watched “Lars and the Real Girl” last night.
It depicts how a family, their physician,
their small-town Minnesota community,
and their likely Lutheran church live into
a really difficult, actually pretty intractable problem:
the seeming deepening insanity of a sweet
but socially maladjusted young man.

Reminds me of my Nouwen blog yesterday,
of Henri dressing and feeding Adam
at L’Arche Toronto (Daybreak).
Adam was about 20 or 30, severely handicapped.
As I remember he vocalized but not meaningfully.
His movements were spastic at best. He needed to be
in a wheelchair or a bed at all times.
Henri, this 50-year-old Dutch priest, lecturer and writer,
was himself gradually transformed
from being annoyed (and feeling profoundly guilty)
by the simplicity of caring for and coming to know a person whom others
in our culture would simply abandon to their families or to care institutions...
People are transformed at L’Arche, not by big statements,
but by living presently, deeply, authentically with people of needs.

In the movie, “Lars Lindstrom lives in the converted garage behind the house he and his brother Gus inherited from their father. His pregnant sister-in-law Karin's persistent attempts to lure him into the house for a family meal are usually rebuffed, and on the rare occasions he accepts, their conversation is stilted and he seems eager to leave as soon as he can. The young man finds it difficult to interact with or relate to his family, co-workers, or fellow parishioners in the church he regularly attends.

“One day Lars happily announces to Gus and Karin he has a visitor he met via the Internet, a wheelchair-bound missionary of Brazilian and Danish descent named Bianca. The two are startled to discover Bianca is in fact a lifelike doll Lars ordered from an adult website. Concerned about his mental health, they convince Lars to take Bianca to Dagmar, the family doctor who is also a psychologist. Dagmar diagnoses Bianca with low blood pressure and advises Lars he needs to bring her in for weekly treatments, during which she will attempt to analyze him and get to the root of his behavior. She urges Gus and Karin to assist with Lars' therapy by treating Bianca as if she were a real woman.

“As time passes, Lars begins to introduce Bianca as his girlfriend to his co-workers and various townspeople. Aware of the situation, everyone reacts to the doll as if she were real, and Bianca soon finds herself involved in volunteer programs, getting a makeover from the local beautician, and working part-time as a model in a clothing store. Due to their acceptance of Bianca, Lars soon finds himself interacting more with people. At work, he takes notice of Margo, and when she reveals she has broken up with her boyfriend, Lars agrees to go bowling with her while Bianca attends a school board meeting. The two spend a pleasant evening, although Lars is quick to remind Margo he could never cheat on Bianca. She replies she would never expect that of him and tells him she hopes one day to find a man as faithful as he...” (Wikipedia)

I imagine myself in a similar situations, which our everyday lives (especially raising kids) provide us in abundance, and sense that I’m a lot like the older brother. I want to externalize the “problem,” I want others to agree with me that Lars is nuts and we deserve sympathy or can’t afford care. Or I’m like some in the town’s church council (not the pastor) who meet with Gus and Karin to discuss what to do when Lars turns up with Bianca on Sunday at church – one elder riffs that it’s “idolatry,” a robust and intriguing theological concept, but totally out of touch with Lars’ struggle, and who Lars is.

It’s the physician who takes the behavior as pointing to something important, and she “goes along” with Lars over the months, and she’s the one who gets to the bottom of it. Her vulnerability and presence remind me of Henri, one of whose most important books was “The Wounded Healer.” My idea of authentic “saints” implies people with a deep connection to real people, their foibles, their losses, their gratitude, in general.

(Note on being raised as a Christian – when I criticize myself, it’s ultimately a very hopeful move, a move which keeps alive the possibility of being a good person, or a “saint.” What I find incredibly sad is when people observe my self-criticism, and pile on, assuming that their life-choices and behaviors would gain a pass. Our hope and optimism is contingent on a self-awareness which embraces a robust self-criticism, and is scandalized by people who aren’t earnest, sincere, and true to (or at least cognizant of) the principles against which we measure our behavior.)

In relation to the film, Roger Ebert comments on this clarity of vision: "There are so many ways [the film] could have gone wrong that one of the film's fascinations is how adroitly it sidesteps them. Its weapon is absolute sincerity ... It has a kind of purity to it." Purity. Saintliness.

In his Letters and Papers from Prison, where Dietrich Bonhoeffer was held and finally executed for his participation in a plot to blow up Adolf Hitler, the young (39 year old) pastor writes on this same subject of an authentic life of faith. Bonhoeffer was recalling from prison a conversation with a young French pastor, the pacifist and peace activist Jean Laserre, whom he had met 13 years earlier in the US.

‘We were asking ourselves quite simply what we wanted to do with our lives. He said he would like to become a saint (and I think it’s quite likely that he did become one). At the time I was very impressed, but I disagreed with him, and said, in effect, that I should like to learn to have faith. For a long time I didn’t realize the depth of the contrast. I thought I could acquire faith by trying to live a holy life, or something like that.

“I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of one self, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous person or an unrighteous one, a sick person or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes human and a Christian.” ("Letters and Papers from Prison")

“Metanoia” is the word most often translated from the Greek New Testament as “repentance.” It’s what Jesus offers the searching and suffering crowds that come to hear him talking about the hope he brings ("repent!" or "turn your heart around"). I think it’s a measure of “real” (as in “Lars and the “Real” Girl) that the possibility of profound personal transformation at the very foundation of your life (setting aside the red herring of “original sin”) is, to most people, a profoundly hopeful one, greatly to be desired. People almost by their nature want to be more “real,” have a greater capacity for kindness and beauty, want to work everyday “miracles.” In light of this, I wonder if it was Bianca or Margo who was the most “real,” the most miraculous, of Lars girls?

What I haven’t been able to get a handle on in my own life just yet is whether the liberal religion I’ve been pursuing the past couple years has a stomach for this kind of “real,” this “incarnate-ness.” There are wonderful stories in WWII-era Europe of “right action.” But what about the local, the personal, the recent? It’s a deeply important issue for me at this point. Can I help? Would the liberal religious community be willing, as was Lars', to "repent" of preconceived notions, and embrace significant transformation, for the sake of others, for the healing of the world?

Anyway, in “Lars and the Real Girl” you can see Dagmar the physician, Karin the sister-in-law, the pastor, and a whole community make this crucial move. They go from taking seriously their own sufferings, to taking seriously the sufferings of the authentically, honestly human (a designation for Jesus in the Christian bible was ‘the human one’) in their world.

Home With the Fearful Brave

Most of the movies Marin and I see
scare us. Maybe it’s because our life
is boundaried by children needing many things.

Maybe it’s because the films, many of them documentaries,
are well done and bring up important, challenging issues.

“Home of the Brave” scared us for different reasons.

It’s the story of Viola Liuzzo, 39, the only white woman
to lose her life in the civil rights era.
She died between Birmingham and Selma in 1965.

Viola Liuzzo’s life changed in the late 50's
when she birthed a stillborn child.
The catholic church in Detroit told her that the child
could not go to heaven, because it had not been baptized
while it was still alive.

Viola left the church. Despite having five children,
she went back to school. Was it the student activist groups
which brought her to the new place. Was it the Unitarian church
she began attending? Was it having a deep relationship
with a woman caring for her children, an African American her age?

When Viola saw black people beaten by the Selma police
on television, she didn’t just feel horrified. Responding to calls
for assistance from Civil Rights leaders, she got in her car.
She drove to Selma. She lived in the projects and helped
on the famous “voting rights march” in Alabama.
Only 150 black people were registered to vote among 30,000.
To vote, a black person needed a white “patron.”

Driving a young man back from Birmingham one night
she was assassinated. Four Ku Klux Klanners in a car
took her out. One was an informer from the FBI.
They were acquitted by a local jury.

What her five children began to discover in the 70's was
not only did the FBI informant spur the Klansmen on,
he likely was the shooter. He also was involved
in most of the mortal violence of the Civil Rights era,
including the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham
which killed four little girls, two years earlier.

The FBI had a thousand-page file on their mother,
a smear-campaign originating with J Edgar Hoover himself.
The entire file on the KKK at the height of the civil rights movement
was 1/3 of Viola Liuzzo’s.

The children’s civil suit against the FBI in federal court
that their mother’s civil rights were violated
was ruled against, and the kids needed to pick up
the court fees of around $100,000.
“I’ll never pay a penny to the US government
for the murder of my mother,” was Tony’s response.
That’s when the oldest son, Tommy, went AWOL
from Michigan into the backwoods of Mississippi.
Tony joined the Michigan militia,
a la Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.
After 9/11 with the Patriot Act becoming law,
he also went underground. The three daughters
struggled to pay off debts, live with poverty,
sorrow and loss.

The movie scared Marin
because of the devastation of Viola’s family.
What can happen to the innocent in this world
when an idealist takes on powers of evil on behalf of others,
and justice is denied. It was indeed harrowing to consider.
Having the government against you, harming you.

The movie scared me
because of the arrogance of power
wielded against poor people by the FBI.
As a follower of Jesus, the ravages of the poor
always move me toward a deep sadness.
Which we see in various forms almost daily.
The past three days Israel bombing Gaza.
And by personally not doing anything about it.

We gather in the morning darkness and sing
“May there always be sunshine,
may there always be blue sky,
may there always be Mama,
may there always be me”
in the candlelit living room
before our day begins.

Isn’t “mama” is a stand in for God,
a simple way of saying,
“may trustworthy hope always stand beside us,”
may transforming love hold us close,
and give us courage,
to stand up to all sadness, and greed
and violence and self-serving power.

If we stand there and know this,
know it with the muscle memory
of our hearts, so we can reflexively
reach for it and find it, and gather it
in the darkest most paralyzing dark
then
there is no fear.

Intrusion of a Welcome Grace

The other day I read a blog that talked about someone
who preached once at Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Fairbanks...
The author of the blog, a good friend of mine, talked about the experience
opening him to a whole new world of reading and thinking,
listing authors like Wendell Berry, and Natalie Goldberg,
and Thich Nhat Hanh, and Richard Nelson, and Thomas Berry,
and I was thinking, this must have been before my time at UUFF,
I want to know this guy. He was working on the same stuff
I was working on, the land, spirit, community, a deep presence...
http://discontinuouspermafrost.wordpress.com/2008/12/26/where-spirituality-is-not-welcome/

Then I realized as he wove his tale, that my friend was
talking about me... It was pretty discomfiting at first.
Like Alfred Nobel reading his obituary, or something.

It happened again last night, when I was waiting
for Marin to put Annika down so we could watch
some DVD by the Coen Brothers, a pretty weird spoof
of DC culture and spy movie thrillers (“Burn After Reading”),
triggered by a woman gripped by the need to reinvent herself
through liposuction, and a breast-and-face-job
which her HMO won’t pay for, resulting in
two co-workers at “Hardbodies” exercise gym
dying absurd deaths, plus another guy in a coma –
too many casualties for Marin and me.

Plus, we don’t like graphic violence, we end up clutching each other
on the sofa and closing our eyes, even when it’s satirical,
that is, not serious... Deaths have to have some redemption.
We’re kind of old fashioned or something.
Maybe that’s the DNA I talked about
in the earlier post about Matteo’s aesthetic preferences.

Well, while I was waiting for Marin to emerge
to watch this weird movie on New Years Eve 2008,
NPR was showing something about L’Arche,
“The Ark,” a Catholic movement which cares for handicapped people,
originating in France and Toronto. I thought,
this is going to be about Henri.

It was. Henri Nouwen, a good friend and kind of saint,
vulnerable, lovely, articulate, dear.
He was a Dutch priest, a teaching “star”
at Yale Divinity School when I was there,
and I was surprised when he took notice of me,
the famous teachers down at my undergraduate Yale College
never did... He willingly came down to New York
to preach at my ordination in 1979 at St Peters,
http://www.saintpeters.org/
and we became friends. I visited him
at the Abbey of the Genesee in upstate NY
http://www.geneseeabbey.org/
and for longer periods, spiritual retreats really,
in the 80's at the International headquarters of L’Arche
in a sweet 17th Century farm north of Paris, and at Daybreak,
the L’Arche headquarters in North America in Toronto.
http://www.larche.ca/

The movie had all of the friends I knew
from his circle, Sue Mosteller, Nathan Ball,
and the residents I met and helped care for
at the various L’Arche locations.

Henri’s way of speaking about God and spirituality
is very affecting, not sure if it’s his voice,
his expressive hands, his sincerity,
or the way he is “familiar” with God’s ways,
it fills me with a sense of hope and kindness.

This was Henri, always focused
on love and transformation,
though always rooted in his sadness and longing,
trusting in the power of being connected,
finally, ultimately, to God.

He talked in the video about “first love,” that God
always was the “first love,” the love foundational to all loves,
and when you tried to transfer a human love into that position
it becomes all sadness and trouble.
The video talked about his great sadness in the final years.
I remember the last time he was in Philadelphia visiting me,
he was very sad and needy... We all hung out,
Henri, my friends Tyler and Steve, it was
maybe November of 1994.

Henri died suddenly in Holland in 1996
when I was far away at Holden Village.

The great sadness.

In some ways the last 15 years
have been my excursus on the great sadness
and beyond, the same sadness that afflicted Henri.
Leaving the New York, Philadelphia, the east coast,
taking on life as village pastor in a small town
in the Washington Cascades,
then pastoring in Wasilla Alaska and Palmer,
and Fairbanks, and getting married,
then not pastoring, and then parenting.
An expanding universe. Or shrinking?

For Henri, it seems that the great sadness
was subsumed in his vision of the “first love?”
I totally know this. I know it in my spiritual bones.
I know how to do this.

However, I don’t think I know how to do this now.

Safe Page

Judy Blume, the children’s author, who wrote
“Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret”
was talking on NPR Morning Edition the other day. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98706074
She was talking about being a mom in New Jersey
trying to figure out what to do with her life,
making felt hangings to sell, and being able
to remember vividly what it was like to be a kid,
and writing from that viewpoint.

I began to smell the Emmaus Public Library
when it was all books and very, very quiet,
a little house sitting on the downtown “Triangle,”
with two older women who watched over it.
It’s funny the places you feel safe and alive
or the places you remember feeling that.

We keep being surprised by what kind of stories
and videos Matteo likes and doesn’t like.

At almost 4, he’s way into the Solar System,
and will watch nonstop DVD’s about the planets.
I need to make up stories about them, with Venus
being Mar’s sister, and papa Jupiter
and mama Juno (not a planet, sadly)
trying to keep the family from killing each other.
Mercury’s the best friend, very fast runner,
and Uranus is very slow... Neptune, quite the swimmer.
Not quite Shakespeare, but...

He loves Mister Rogers (which has gone out of syndication
on most NPR stations, but ours is running it...)
but he’s ambivalent these days on Sesame Street,
which I don’t quite understand. I really like Elmo,
though Marin can’t stand his sweet little laugh...
Then there’s Thomas the Train, which he also seems
to be getting over. He used to cry whenever
TTT had one of their many crashes or derailments,
which seem to be ubiquitous...

Last night we tried the Curious George movie,
mostly because we like the Jack Johnson soundtrack,
but after less than 30 minutes Matteo was ready for bed.
We tried to get out of him what he didn’t like,
he said something like there were bad people in there,
people saying no (he hates “no”), opening and shutting doors,
and there was a dinosaur skeleton collapse,
noisy and cataclysmic, which he hated...

Suspense and change, these are things that don’t sit well
with his aesthetic and moral DNA...

A couple weeks ago I launched into telling him
chapters based on C. S. Lewis’ Narnia story,
“The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”
He thought it was too long. He also stopped me
when the Witch had the Lion on the stone table,
about to “sacrifice” him. I didn’t get to redeem
the story. It ended with Lucy and Susan sad,
instead of the dance of the next morning,
and the freeing of Mr. Tumnus from the curse
of having become stone... I read those books
in the original hardcover, from Muhlenberg library.
They became a deep memory of
possibility, wonder and brilliance.

It’s funny the places you feel safe and alive.

Empathy

[Marin steps in for a more average family-oriented post.]

I keep trying to write my own thoughts but have thwarted myself time and again with notes scrawled on envelopes that I throw out, computer files not saved.

In a quiet moment, I muse on the children and their inner worlds. Little Girl (Annika) seems to be on some spurt of ordering and organizing – or perhaps I just stopped long enough to observe her. What I see is a little girl who’s a lot more “with-it” than I thought. In a brand new development, she climbed the whole stairwell (with a spotter) three times yesterday. She also gets the concept of putting shape blocks in shape holes, and that repetitive action like dropping cheerios or nibbling on my nose can be a hoot.

In Matteo’s world, there is the total fascination with space that now surpasses airplanes, which surpassed trains, which surpassed heavy equipment… [See photo of Matteo organizing his balls as the solar system.] Jeff and I cannot fathom what deep space is to a 3.5 year old as it’s still really a pretty heady concept for the adult mind, but he’s into it.

Back on earth, in the inner being, I see in Matteo something that fascinates me – a new sense of empathy with his surroundings.

A conversation with Matteo on Thanksgiving morning:

Matteo, “That turkey looks go-ood.”

[Naked raw turkey carcass, looking not good. I start get ready to cook a pumpkin that is rotting and a new butternut squash.]

Matteo, “Don’t kill the squash. He’s my friend.”

Marin, “But he will mold, rot, die if we don’t eat him.”

Matteo, “What’s rot?”

Marin, “Rot is like dying. He will end up in the compost pile. It’s his job to be eaten. (I stop, realizing this is not helping.)

Matteo, “But he’s my friend. Who will be my friend?”

The stand-off was diffused by agreeing to save seed to grow NEW friends. And, the squash was good.

The dawning of empathy, part two:

For Christmas, Matteo, predictably, received two solar system puzzles (and three books on space as well as glow in the dark planets and stars). One of the puzzles, a neat but more artistic representation of the planets, inexplicably had a small planet with a frown and two tears. Matteo immediately grabbed it and gasped “Pluto is crying!”

I grasped for some acceptable explanation. “It’s sad to be so far from the sun?”

“Saturn is blocking it” Matteo explained, and “He doesn’t like the Outer Orbit.”

Our puzzle process was derailed.

I created a small smiling planet and taped it on top of Pluto. We completed the puzzle but decided that Pluto (as in that piece of the puzzle) could need to come up to the table and sit with Matteo. This would clearly make Pluto happier. Meanwhile, Matteo was please to see that “Neptune is with his boyfriend Uranus.”

I’m not sure empathy yet extends to other children, or his sister, but for a young boy who has a jet for a dolly, the planets were now aligned.

A Solstice Sermon to Me

The sun has been scraping along
in and out of the clouds of the horizon all week.
They burst into flame when the sun
remains offstage, or when it has gone.
What is it now, 3 hours 42 minutes peeking
above the horizon?

The moon is higher,
and has been gradually losing its brilliance
all week long, falling behind in its race, soon
to vanish entirely, and then be reborn.

What kind of rituals to give thanks
for the wonders of our days.

Marin came home late Thursday night
(an ordeal of snow in Seattle
bequeathed 5 hours of extra airport time
on her and Annika) just in time for
Matteo’s little seasonal program Friday morning,
for which I was guitar accompanist and conductor.
One of the girls, Rika, had a birthday which the class
commemorated after the parents had left
and the cookies were gone.

Ms Hanneman laid out a universe of time on the floor:
the sun with it’s flaming hair and cheery face,
12 month names circled around it like rays,
and Rika was positioned standing on “December”
and holding a remarkably colorful, earth globe.
We sing: “The earth turns round the sun,
the earth turns round the sun,
the earth turns round the sun,
and Rika is one.”

Carrying the whole world
in her two hands, all the seas, the air, the 6 billion people
the giraffes, the gerbils, the belugas and birds,
Rika, a young and ingenuous Atlas,
walks through the empty universe, holding us all
just far enough from the sun, bound by universal laws.

“What were you doing, Rika, when you were one,”
Ms Hanneman asks, interrupting my reverie.
“Learning to walk,” Rika improvises.
And then she takes another turn
walking around the sun while we all sing,
questioned and improvising, until she’s reached her 5.
A wonderful, satisfying ritual.

I believe from years of praying and meditating,
preaching and singing and talking about it,
that the members of a tribe or community must gather together.
They find themselves sacred spaces and go there at sacred times,
to promote health, to stay fully alive, to honor their newborns
and mourn their dead, to tell the stories that hold them together,
in order to support and challenge, comfort and teach,
nurture and wonder, all so that people can live committed,
vital, changed lives, and are able then to offer
just that to the wider community and world:
A life of authentic engagement, and openness to growth,
to the health of the earth and to the generations to come.