I am sure that the pressures of this time of year are weighing on you in whatever ways that happens. End-of-year fiscal close, Holiday-season concerts and parties, Christmas/Hanukah/Yule/Kwanza -whatever your stressor, may peace be with you. Find some silence. Slow down if you can. Choose rest when given the choice. and remember, that none of us is meant to do this alone.
I was raised to be fiercely independent. My community-based ethic evolved over time in my adulthood, as I received the same toxic messages of ‘competency means being able to do it alone’ and ‘if you want it done right, do it yourself’ that many got. I have moved away from that attitude as a base of action, having learned that cooperative and collective work is stronger, more creative, and more sustainable. But I still never want to be a burden, and want to be useful and helpful wherever I am.
It has been hard for me personally to learn the truth of something I’ve preached as true for years -that we give a gift of grace when we allow others to do things for us. I KNOW it’s true, that we all need help, and that insisting on doing something for ourselves actually takes an opportunity to assist and serve AWAY from someone.
I am grateful that my understanding of God is generous and always had been. I’ve never had to fight for the image of a loving and accepting God, and was incredibly lucky in the clergy people who came into my life as a grew up. Bad theology takes a lifetime and much therapy to unlearn, and even with all those good models, I had some nonsense to slough off to be sure.
I see all faithful action stemming from a place of love or hope or discipline as prayer, regardless of its form. Election days are important times for me, and my sense of call in the world. They are always periods of hope and despair, focus and confusion, pleas and permissions -undiluted microcosms of the usual tensions of life in the already-not yet.
I don’t know what the issue is at hand where you live, but I am sure -100% sure- that there is something being debated and decided that you do actually care about, that matters to you, and that will impact your life. I urge you to find it, and play the game of democracy along with us. Some games are small group games, and indeed need a constrained community to function. But this search for a common life among and between us all? It really works better with a large group.
There used to be actual laws in this country about what could and couldn’t be put on television and other media, regulations around accuracy and sensationalism. But it has been many years since this was true. We have exchanged the ability to trust the news for access to any fool who wants to say anything without consequence. We have purchased a pretend liberty and paid a very high price for it.
I feel all of these ways about the Body Politic. There is an essence of being of this place, this country, that we have abandoned. But it is findable, for it is of Spirit. There is an internal movement in how we do or do not vote or act, and this too is of that inner guide, or can be. I am interested in the ways that our common good is embodied, and how we move towards that goal. How do we nurture that Spirit of Community that engenders common care, and mutual decision making?
I have as a personal and political goal the continuing expansion of the electorate and its more full and robust participation. This has been part of my worldview for most of my life. I do not constrain this body, the electorate, to a set of people who meet the identical thresholds for all things. Citizenship may be required for some participation, but mostly, all parties have a right to some sort of say in most of the decisions that affect their lives.
But all of the arts, all performance, all offerings of creation and imagination, require audience. They all need to be seen, heard, read, tasted to be whole, to be real in a way. Certainly, the unpeopled audience is a nightmare for performers but it is also an incomplete picture.
No art exists in a vacuum, and our responses matter.
Each of these times of rest, the sanctuary given freely and openly, has made the next move possible. Each has been an immense privilege and gift. I know that my own privilege and status in our American caste system has made all of it possible, but I also know how easy it would have been to reject these offers of help along the way.
Both women held forth great and steady light in a world too frequently overrun by darkness, doubt, and fear. Against all seeming rational argument, they chose hope and action. They chose to say no to those in power over them and take what power they had in any given time and place. And usually, it was a great deal of power.
I have learned to plant and grow. I began container gardening 10 years ago and had great balcony spaces for it. But it was while living inside a loft home with no access to the outdoors at all that I learned to grow from seed, and I started a small hydroponics garden. But now it’s time to move outside for real. Plant food to truly feed, not only ourselves but others.
August in Memphis can make anyone a little crazy. But it’s also beautiful -a sacred time when music goes long into the night chasing after breezes, when sweat pours from bodies and carries away all that separates us, when it’s too damn hot to do anything other than just be, exist. There is something equalizing about this shared immersion in the power of the planet to make us stop. Not move so fast. Take our time and our breath and slow ourselves down.
Now we are starting to see that there was an intentional campaign to take over the American Evangelical movement and use it as a political weapon. Religion has been used to control populations for as long as it has existed, but people of faith and intentional communities have also continually reformed and countered these forces. It is radically irresponsible to not be able to acknowledge the harm that has been done, not only by the church but by every organized faith system at some point.
For me in my life it has been important to have this changing and shifting comprehension of time. It has freed me both simply to be in an experience, and to juggle, compress, and expand time as needed. As I primarily work in the climate justice world, and that is a world made up almost completely of immediate tasks that all requires long time spans, the graciousness of unfolding, in order to be successful and sustainable.
