Lack and Plenty

I grew up in the American South but was born in the plain states, near the Yanktoni reservation in South Dakota. We visited our grandparents every summer, giving us a respite from the Memphis heat and providing us a small dive into the world of crop farming and small town rural life. Post retirement, my grandparents were leaning into being farmers and I learned a lot about how important things like soil quality and water access could be key for survival.

The thing is that the American South is fertile land and flush with water. I had never before considered what it was like for the LACK of water to be the problem. Floods and rising waters like creeks that washed out roads and bridges were the dangers around water at home. Well, that and the Cottonmouths, sneaky river snakes.

Now I live in the American Mountain West, and our relationship here with water is much different from both the agricultural plains or the river rich South. Here, fire can consume 150,000 acres in an afternoon and there isn’t enough water anywhere to put it out. On the edge  of the Continental Divide, we are very conscious of water. We know that what falls on our western slope flows into the Pacific, and is “owned” by many communities along that route. Water that falls on our Eastern side feeds into the plains rivers and eventually reaches the Atlantic.

And so water reclamation is the name of the game. How can we capture and re-use water? How can we stop its use by the extraction industries? How can we close some of our water systems and not be so wasteful? How do we shift our relationship with water from one of commodification and control to one of respect and asset-based building?

As long as our stance is one of lack, we will choose poorly. Lack is blinding, and creates looping dark holes in our minds that fulfill all their own expectations. There are also dangers to being in a context of plenty without awareness, as this leads to complacency and an assumption of abundance when in fact, control is being seeped away. This very nearly happened recently in Memphis, TN, when the now canceled Byhalia Pipeline threatened the integrity of the Memphis Sands, a huge aquifer that supplies clean water to the region.

We don’t balance lack and plenty well. We tend to live wholly in one or the other. This isn’t a simple matter of whether one sees a glass with water in it as half full or half empty. This isn’t about pessimism or optimism, although their shadows of cynicism and naïveté do reflect this conflict between lack and plenty, this tension.

This week I am preparing for a Seminar Series I am doing on Scarcity & Abundance. And I’m wrestling with the various ways in which we smack right into both these things. The more subtle bits will make themselves known.

And so water again bubbles up. It’s fundamental, as we ourselves are mostly made of it, the planet is mostly water, and we require it to remain alive. And yet for much of our lives, many of us have never considered water -where it comes from, how it gets to us, where it all goes. We turn the tap and it flows. Usually. But even if you live in Flint, MI, or along one of the compromised fracking field routes, your toilet flushes and your laundry works. You can get water FREE at most restaurants. (Remember that one. It won’t last if we don’t change.)

One of the many ironies of this situation is that right now, very few of us actually drink enough water. I know I don’t and I even like water! (I’m told by many friends the reason they don’t drink enough water is that they hate the taste. I don’t get that. Even hard water is interesting.)

“Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.

They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.” -Joni Mitchell

We bounce between lack and plenty, and it may be true that we often don’t realize it. I used to be a youth minister and had a special affinity for Middle Schoolers. One of my favorite games to play with them is something called “I Want, I Need, I Have” -swiped 100% in name, if not totally in content, from The Journey to Adulthood curriculum, a progressive Protestant course that attempts to equip young people with what they need to be functional adults.

This game invites a deep inventories not only of items but of attitudes. We catalogue belongings each young person may ‘own’ or have access to, what they don’t or can’t get, what they believe they need to be certain things or claim certain identities. The game invites an exploration of the balance between want and need, something I wish more adults had a handle on.

For all of our own human issues with this tension, and we have wrestled with lack and plenty for a great deal of our history, the last 100 years have had the added layer of mass media advertising. And that industry has been all about perverted images of both Lack and Plenty. Perhaps a piece of the whole conversation must include some deconstruction of messaging techniques themselves.

Fear is also deeply entwined with Lack and Plenty. I can hear blues notes behind me as I think on this, and am struck by how familiar a story it is, the embracing of the fear and then its alchemy into empowerment and fuel for action. And I wish I couldn’t, but I also hear the screeching riffs of angry mutterings as fear hardens hearts and closes borders.

We live in a time of Plenty. We have all we need, yet all we see around us is Lack. And Lack is there -a lack of justice, a dearth of compassion, an abyss of accountability. But within each of these struggles is also Plenty, for when they are based out of love, our actions are generative.

“I have come that you might have life more abundant.” -Jesus

Citizen Christian IV: Rules of Life

I grew up an Episcopalian, and while they do attempt to be open and accepting, Episcopalians have many, many rules that are active within any Episcopal community. Not knowing them can be an obstacle for newcomers, and sometimes longtime members as well. Who can do what in the service and who cannot. Who can do what in a congregation and who cannot. What types of activities are allowed of by or within the church. All of it is documented in something called the Canons and Constitution, which dictate the parameters of all these things. And yet few Episcopalians themselves, people who attend and volunteer and sustain the church, know anything about these documents and how their lives are formed by them.

Throughout the worship service texts are instructions, called rubrics, that tell you where to go and when to sit or stand and if you might have a choice about that at a certain time or situation. Rubrics tell you all of the things actually, but most of the actions tasked are so ingrained by the congregation that they are done without reading anything, simply followed.

Those are the official rubrics, of course, as a seminary professor would say “Rubrics with a capital R” but there are always little rubrics as well, sometimes more ‘important’ to the Rule of Life in that place. These are the expectations, traditions, patterns, and placements that make a congregation unique, the choices that over time have paved particular pathways of what is possible. Violating these rubrics can cause anything from embarrassment to ostracism. But it has been my experience that people know more about these rules than the others, and that they are happy, even honored, to explain and unfold the traditions of that church for new members.

But now I am an American Baptist pastor, and my congregation couldn’t really be termed as fitting into any denominational structure. Little that we do meets the ‘warrants’ of Christian worship as established. I officiated a wedding for former members of a church youth group now grown, with an assembly of almost all traditional church folk, that left blank every single box down the checklist of such warrants, those required characteristics. 

But I contend that what we do IS Christian in a broad sense, and of the Gospel, and that while few Episcopalians would recognize it as such, we have a liturgy of our weekly gatherings. As we move into our fifth year of regular worship together, we have even developed small ‘r’ rubrics, such as the chanting of one particular song and the usual use of a particular poem as an ending prayer. But these things are also changeable, and do shift as per need.

We certainly wouldn’t pass the purity tests established by many religious systems. I recently learned during an odd exchange with fringe Evangelicals that although I am an ordained minister of the Gospel in the Baptist tradition, can tell the stories of Jesus like they happened to my brother, have formed my life to live out those stories’ lessons, and deeply love the usually eschewed Paul, I did not meet their criteria for being a Christian.

I am still not sure what being a Christian or following Jesus meant to them, because nothing they said had anything to do with actions or behavior. There did not seem to be any active Rule of Life other than casting people out of the ranks of the righteous due to unbelief or a near obsessive need to testify to others.

That said, I would be hard pressed to define the Rule of Life at Living Waters other than by a few things. Firstly, we have made a commitment that no one must go through something alone. A virtue of community is that we can collectively weave trust and vulnerability together to form a fabric that covers all of us. No one person has to be that assistant. And no one person has to travel alone. Secondly, I ask members of Living Waters to consider their own spiritual journeys as valid, sacred, and real. I ask them to consider, and act upon, how their own hearts, minds, and spirits call them into the Universe. I suppose our Rule of Life is community and intention.

We all have these small ‘r’ rubric lists, sometimes known and sometimes unknown, that define for us what something is, and if it be authentically that or something else. We see this active in Houses of Worship, sure, but these lists are also a prime motivator in the political sphere. What constitutes a ‘real Republican’ these days seems to be fluid and dynamic thing, and I certainly hope the conversation keeps going there. What makes a ‘real Democrat’ was stretched and pulled into heretofore unknown shapes via the Presidential runs of Bernie Sanders, but that conversation seems stalled. Certainly what makes a ‘real American’ is infused with racial, classist, gendered, and religious projections and expectations.

But far too often these arguments are only about what people THINK, and not what they do, advocate for, or endorse. This makes the crafting of policy near impossible. I believe that politics is merely the mechanics of our common life. But right now, politics is only a stage for shallow power, and we don’t have time for that nonsense.

Politics is all about the posturing and the platforming when what we need it to be is active, engaged, and responsive to real needs. Without Rules of Life, the Evangelical church has radically lost its way, becoming so disassociated from Gospel truths that endorsing Donald Trump as President seemed reasonable. With no actions expected, no lived lives as models, and no commitments on record, there is nothing to hold on to, nothing to compare to, nothing against which to say “this thing is so far from that thing that they are no longer the same thing.”

And so what might be our Rules of Life for an engaged citizenry? Actions of dissent against injustice on the regular? Frequent check-ins and accountability regarding policy development? 

I’m not sure exactly what that would look like, but I do know it’s needed. Our current political party system has failed. It no longer serves the people, and only perpetuates monied interests. Perhaps the answer is like unto what has happened in churches and other Houses of Worship, a separation from expected systems and a forming of new communities of faith. Is regionalism one of the answers for us politically? Smaller more responsive systems could incorporate more contextual needs.

Again, I am unsure how we should proceed except to say that we must examine our political Rules of Life, not our pet theories or opinions, and see where that focus on work can bring us.

Language and Control

I am a word nerd. I have an adversarial relationship with nouns, and they won’t stay in my head. But otherwise, I love language. I love its nuance, how 10 words can mean one thing but just a slightly different aspect of said thing. Or how one word can mean ten different things, depending only on context and use. Word choice matters greatly and has a significant impact in effect. Period. Sticks and stones may draw blood, sure, but words themselves DO have power. Power to illuminate and reveal, explain and describe -but also the power to obscure, deceive.

I grew up in the land of the subtle euphemism, the American South. I understand how carefully chosen words can soften a harsh reality -a terminal diagnosis or an expression of accountability. All our hearts are blessed regularly, and I also understand how seemingly polite words can hold deep barbs. And much to my surprise, I carry pieces of the Lost Cause narrative, a great example of how language and story are used to control. I’ll write about those revelations later in the month. 

I was getting a couple of degrees in the ‘90s when the term Political Correctness hit the mainstream conservative media. It was a term we in academia were using to describe an intentionally measured discourse, and it was a term the Left used as a self-critique. By application of that now well-known right media smear machine, ‘political correctness’ became the catch-all pejorative phrase for any pushback against racist, sexist, harassing, or otherwise oppressive language. 

But the movements towards excising cruelty from our language, and the emerging awarenesses of the power of naming, claiming, owning the wide diversity of our lives have only marched on, increased. It doesn’t really matter what mocking term Fox News used, the shifts were happening. These days, I even hear a backlash against the PC pushback itself by telling complainers not to be so sensitive about losing their ‘right’ to denigrate others, that changes in language aren’t an exercise of any thought police but rather a choice not to be an asshole. 

Although I do hear fellow leftists use it in an ironic way sometimes, so I suppose its use has come full circle.

I have been involved in the environmental movement since I was a child in the 1970s. I first started using the term Global Warming in the 1980s. By the late ‘90s, that same smear machine had begun to take Global Warming apart as a viably descriptive term. A few years later, it was reported widely as evidence Global Warming was a hoax for a sitting Senator to toss a snowball around the Senate chambers. Idiotic. 

Climate Change was a term more commonly used only within scientific communities. It was mostly about the various deltas, that is changes, in metrics and crucial data points, some of which have driven our comprehension of climate for centuries. Weather patterns. Rainfall. Snowfall. Air temperature. Ocean rise. Water temperature. Harvests and soil health. Infant mortality. As our ability to measure has become more sophisticated, we have captured more information. As we have more information, we can more accurately predict what kinds of changes are before us, and where those tipping points might be. 

The primary pushback against Climate Change seems to be an intentional confusion of weather and climate. Weather can change hourly. A place’s climate, the long term patterns of weather alongside all those other metrics, generally does not change noticeably in one’s lifetime. Michigan would be shocking with a new tropical zone and snow in Miami would shut South Beach down.

About ten years ago, the USDA recategorized Colorado as the slightly warmer 5b planting zone, although there are various zones throughout the state. This happened all over the US and another published change is anticipated. These shifts affect all manner of planting and harvesting, from massive industrial agriculture to your backyard garden. 

Floods and fires are increasing throughout the country, and as predicted the frequency and severity of storms is rising. And it snowed in Texas this year. Climate scientist Kathryn Hayhoe brilliantly upends the mockable Global Warming and calls it all Global Weirding, a phrase that’s accessible, funny, and true.

Which brings me to the topic that got me started thinking about words this week, about the use of language to control the narrative, to shift the perception of the truth. Of course, I mean the soon to be outlawed Critical Race Theory. And yes, it’s the same playbook all over again. An idea debated in academia, concepts studied as a framework for years as a way to describe lived experience, made its way into the common discourse and was vilified by the churn of the right wing media that simply cannot tolerate truth, and the required nuance of history.

We are right now experiencing an attempt by nearly a dozen state legislatures around the country to ban the use of teaching actual history, apparently because it makes some white people feel bad about themselves. And I get it. It’s intimidating to face. And for many, this fear traps them, keeps them from facing toxic remnants of history, structures of our institutions and systems that keep us bound, and the fatal and punitive realities of day to day life for nonwhite people in America. Unfortunately, these fearful people in such deep denial make public policy.

Many are right to fear this movement towards a more honest comprehension of our American History and how it forms us now. Education is dangerous for fear and denial and these are tools that address many aspects of our national history that we have never taught.  Most white people do not know about mass graves of Indigenous children, massacres of large Black populations, or the destruction of several Black economic centers. Interventions like reparations begin to make sense when you understand the long term patterns of intentional disenfranchisement and destruction.  And so they are clamping down, trying to make it illegal to discuss anything that challenges our whitewashed national narrative.

Words matter, and how we teach our national history matters. I am angry every time I discover a huge chunk that I honestly feel was intentionally kept from me in order to perpetuate a toxic system that benefits only me. I can’t understand being okay with not knowing the real stories as much as possible, and choosing a comfortable mythology.

I pray that good educators, anti-racism trainers, truthful curriculum writers, and members of Boards of Education with integrity will figure out a way around these capricious bans through the creative use of language. But honestly, it’s important to pushback against the co-opting of truth and education, especially because children and young people are involved. When we count on attrition or death to hasten cultural shifts (we all do this -all groups), we forget the kids. We forget that modeling continually instructs and that children repeat what they hear, ingest what they are fed.

Why I Don't Say Namaste

Firstly, let me say that I was unaware of an explicit connection between “Namaste” and yoga itself until fairly recently, about 7 years ago when I returned to Denver. Secondly, I have been practicing yoga since 1975. Sure, I was 4 when I started but hear me out.

In 1975, my parents and I were living in Steven’s Point, WI, where my father was teaching at the University and my mother was getting a Master’s degree. I was 4 years old and very happy about life there. I’d had some major toddler eczema that a Native American doctor had treated, and so my mother was open to all kinds of things new to her. She used to tell me, “Find the people who know, Jessie.”

My mother’s belly-baby, whom I called Flower, was causing her back pain. Her Lamaze instructor recommended yoga and so we went. The downward-facing dog and the floor stretches really helped and even after my sister Rosie was born, we did yoga in the living room. Yoga became a regular part of my life, and I started practicing in earnest in my late 20s. I have fallen in and out of the discipline, like every pattern of mine, and now have the awareness to seek authentic teachers and systems in a manner like to my pugilist spouse’s search for fight schools with legitimate lineages.

My relationship with Namaste is separate. In my late 20s, I studied Al-Ghazali and Rumi, respectively Sunni and Sufi Muslim mystics and poets with whom I found great resonance. Both men use Namaste conceptually and I fell in love with this idea, that those we meet hold within them a spark of the Divine to which we bow. My deep love, gratitude, and respect for the wisdom that their writings brought me made this Namaste something I loved to share. I cringe now at the thought that I actively evangelized for the distribution and dispersal of Namaste. I taught it to many.

Then we returned to Denver in 2012. I immediately began work as a hospital chaplain resident, and returning to swimming and yoga became necessary to process the grief, formation, and sheer exhaustion of that work. Swimming doesn’t really change, and the near-silent rhythms of water helped me meditate and pray. I returned to yoga as a way to focus my breath and responses in moments of crisis. One of the first things I noticed was the Namaste.

“Namaste” the teacher would say at the close of class, no matter the form of yoga (Hatha, Vinyasa, Yin, etc) being practiced. And invariably, the class as a whole responded, “Namaste.” At first I was pleased about this. “Oh!” I thought to myself, “This idea of Namaste has really become normative. That’s exciting.”

I began to speak about the idea more often, and sure folks knew the word. But the concept? That this meant an inherent divinity within each of us, that we had the choice whether or not to acknowledge and honor it, and that to do so required a deep mutuality? Not so much… It began to bother me, to stick in my throat.

Then I began to read writings of people from the Indian subcontinent and their own take on Namaste. I learned about varying interpretations within India or Pakistan or between differing religious schools. I heard a clear insistence upon ownership and groundedness in Namaste. I heard a lament that its use had become appropriated so thoroughly that ironic t-shirts and yoga teddy-bears alike evoked Namaste in some way.

I stopped responding with the group. I ceased with the Namaste. At first, this was fine. I think the teachers just assumed I didn’t know any better. After a while, the subtle hints started. I was told that Namaste meant hello or hey fellow special being and this sometimes turned into not so subtle shaming. My silence is always noticed by the teacher, and rarely by my fellow classmates. Occasionally, a teacher will ask me about it, perhaps by engaging me after class to be sure I know what Namaste means. If I respond that I do, and they follow up, I will explain.

I’m a word nerd. I love language. And it would be a lessening of Namaste itself for me to toss it about. It is a sacred and true thing, and not for every moment.  The truth is that at the end of a yoga class, I’m not there. I know for some, yoga is church. They probably really are in that place of deep connection.  But I’m not. And I won’t cheapen the word to fulfill a social expectation.

As a result, I’ve cancelled my CorePower membership for good. I seek better yoga. And no. I will not say Namaste at the end of class without cause.