Wednesday, November 16, 2016

People

For a couple of years now, I've fallen back on the phrase "people are the worst and I hate them" whenever I am disappointed by the world. It works out pretty well most of the time. Someone yells at you when you were just doing your job? People are the worst and I hate them. Someone leaves you in a lurch, making you responsible for extra work at your job, at school, at home? People are the worst and I hate them. Someone says hello to your chest before they meet your eye or "accidentally" grabs your butt on the metro? People are the absolute worst and I hate them.

It works for more minor offenses as well. Someone cut you off in traffic? Someone check out the book you need from the library? Someone sneeze on you and fail to apologize? People are the worst and I hate them.

But I've found that this phrase that I've clung so tightly to, the one that has protected me and my heart for the past two or three years, the combination of words that lowers my expectation for those around me so much that I can only hope that they won't be able to surprise or hurt me anymore, that phrase fails in light of the big disappointments.

Someone walk out of your life and never look back? Someone say a hateful thing to a vulnerable person? Someone do something to hurt a vulnerable person? The nation elect a candidate who in many ways represents the worst of America? People are... people. And when people do these things, I realize not our value but rather how broken we must be. How ignored. How frightened. How angry. How lost. How unloved we must feel. How hated.

I thank God that in those moments of realization, I feel overwhelming compassion instead of derision or rejection. I know that doesn't come from me. l know that quiet sadness that settles into my heart and reaches my arm out toward another isn't me. Throwing my phone across the room on election night and screaming at the television is me. Reaching for a bottle instead of the phone is me. Staring at the pavement as I walk past those in need is me. I have so much me inside me. It rises up and occupies my mind with my needs, my pain, my sorrow, my shame. It clouds my eyes day after day, only allowing me to see the problems of my heart to the exclusion of all other cares. It is focused on myself because I have believed the lie that if I don't care about me, no one will. All those people out there, all they want to do is hurt me. They're the worst. I hate them.

My sisters, my brothers, this should not be. As humans, we are capable of such terrible things. We are bound by such horrifying self-preservation. We do not let the cries of those in pain reach us. We do not acknowledge when we are the cause of that pain. We allow our fears to twist us. We do such hateful things.

But we do not have to. I know we don't have to. I know we don't have to because in those moments when I realize the depths of human brokenness, I do not feel that hate. In that time when hate should overwhelm me, when by all rights I should despair, something better works a miracle in me. A tiny miracle for me, because the burden the world has placed on me is so much smaller than for others, but I can recognize that same miracle in those from whom the world has taken much. There is a light that can shine through us even in the worst of times, a light that brings love where by all rights there should only be hate.

Friends, let us seek that love. Let us seek that love in every situation for as long as we can. Let us love and protect those who are vulnerable and let us never cease to speak out and act against the people and systems causing and exploiting that vulnerability, but let us also love those who hate. Let us hear the pain of the hateful and seek also to heal that. It is only by healing the hearts of humans that we can hope for change.

I don't have the exact actionable answer for how we do all that healing. I don't have a detailed plan for how to ecumenically reach every human heart and stop it from hurting another out of its hurt. I only really realized that I shouldn't hate people yesterday. I hadn't thought about how deeply I had allowed a flippant phrase to take root in my own heart and how atrophied my muscle of love had become. But recognizing that there is something better than hate in every situation is a step. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Be that love. Be that loud, active love.



"[16] So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. [17] Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgement, because as he is, so are we in this world. [18] There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. [19] We love because he first loved us. [20] Those who say, "I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. [21] The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also." 1 John 4:16-21.

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Wednesday

Think about November 9th.

I know that these last months have been a race to November 8th. I know it has been an exhausting time. I know we're all ready for Wednesday. But I also know that election day is vitally important for our country. I want to add my voice to those asking you to go vote on election day. This is your chance to be involved in your government, to have a say in who represents you and shapes your country. Our democracy is exactly as fragile as the people it governs. The government by the people and for the people cannot survive without the people, without the belief of the people. People have fought and died to gain and preserve your right to vote. Your vote, if you choose to exercise that right, honors their sacrifice and safeguards the nation. I can't think of anything better to do with your life today. 

If you do vote, I want you to keep November 9th in mind. On November 9th, regardless of who wins, we wake up and start holding the current president and congress and governors and state legislatures and judges and every other elected official you can think of accountable for their actions again. They have months left in office at the least and they have so much work to do. November 9th is the day we let this past season go, turn back to our current elected officials, and begin the practice that our new president and members of Congress and every other elected official should come to expect from us when they take up office in the new year: the demand for accountability. As you vote, keep in mind who you want to hold accountable in January. Keep in mind who you think will respond to your voice as a voter. Keep in mind the candidates who will listen to the criticism and critique of those around them when they are not acting in the best interest of the American people and the vulnerable citizens of America and the globe. 

On November 9th, the wounds we've inflicted on each other, the divisions we've allowed this election to foster, the angry words said and the friendships broken will all still exist. The end of the election will not change the words we said during the election season. We will need to rebuild, and maybe more than we've ever needed to rebuild before. As you vote, keep in mind the candidates that will facilitate that rebuilding. Vote for the people who can help make us a more complete nation. 

But most of all, whether you voted or not, whether you've run from this election or cheered on your candidate, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican or adamantly or dispassionately neither, on November 9th, be a part of change that you wish to see in America. Pray for healing, for wholeness. Pray for our current leaders and for our future leaders. Continue to pay attention even as the lights turn away from the government. Don't step away from the world because the drama of this season is over. Hear the voices of those in need and help them or at least help their stories get to those who can help them. Do the good that you can in the world. 

The success of the American experiment is not guaranteed. It is only with the honest participation in and respect of the democratic system by voters and candidates that America survives. It is care of the people that it will carry America forward. Friends, let us be those people. Let us care for and carry this great unfinished symphony forward. 

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

My Editorial Ghost

I have three blog posts that I started for today but they're all pretentious wastes of words and you don't need to read them.

That's not true. I don't think they're pretentious. I'm only saying that so that you'll think I have some humility about what I write. I think there's value in the ideas, but they're half-formed and I haven't been able to sit down and make them write themselves out of my brain because I'm working and I should be studying and I have this thought that I simultaneously love having and know that I shouldn't have and my mental powers are consumed between working and studying and struggling and so my output is not what I want it to be. It's fine. It's trying. I wrote this paragraph so that you would see that I value who I am and what I do and what I think. I wrote this paragraph to set up the critique that I over-value who I am and what I do and what I think. Please don't think so little of me as to assume that I haven't already bounced this ball off the walls of my mind. The repetition has left a dent. 

You can never really know what's in someone else's mind. They can tell you, but you don't really know. You can't experience it. You physically cannot see the world through any eyes but your own. The taste and touch and smell and sound, the way the minutes tick by and the colors dance, the distance between you and every other object and being in the universe, the way in which the universe enters into your understanding of it, all of that is perfectly unique to each person who experiences existence. I can tell you that I love you, but you don't really know what that love feels like. You don't know how strong or weak it is, how much it's based on careful consideration of the emotions I've experienced and how much of it is intuited from two glances and a dance. I can tell you how my stomach jumps when I think about you, but you would still have to relate that back to a time when you felt butterflies over someone you have affection for. Even then, we had two distinct experiences that may or may not have any relation to each other. Neither of us will ever actually know if what we feel is the same thing. There might be no one else in the world, feeling what I feel right now, would classify it as love. There's no externally verifiable evidence here. There's only the indescribable qualia of the heart. And if you think this paragraph is just about processing something in my experiences, you've missed the existential point in favor of the sensory one. Maybe that's what I wanted when I wrote it. But better to give me the benefit of the doubt and think that I intended for the honest example to draw you in and hoped that you would make a wonderful connection with it.

So if there's a real way in which we can't understand one another, can never understand one another, can never actually connect with each other on a basic level, do we despair? Do we consign ourselves to waving at each other from across the chasm of our perpetual separation from every other human? Do we learn how to embrace the loneliness that the nature of our existence seems to force upon us? Are you judging me for using too many rhetorical questions? If this were a court room, would you object loudly to the judge that I'm leading the witness? Be patient with me. I promise I have a point. I assumed, when I set out to write, that you'd be with me in this, that you'd hang on for my point, that you'd trust my guidance as we wander through the mire of consciousness together. Have the generosity of spirit that I assumed you'd have.

Humanity, I think, has never despaired of its loneliness. We talk. We talk and we listen, we write and we read, we make movies and art and write songs and poetry and share those things with others. We seek experiences. We travel to new places, we explore, we seek out the company of others and when that company cannot be found, we invent others. There is some kind of calling in our bones to be community, in relationships. We will shout across that void and toss light and lifelines until our throats are raw and our arms exhausted. If you're distracted by my use of "light" in last sentence and think it was left from an earlier draft, the first thing is that the joke's on you-- the majority of my posts are first drafts-- and the second thing is that I have been told that poets sometimes will place words together that don't make sense in order to force you to lean into that incongruence and source it and wrestle with it. I revel in mixing metaphors and I know it upsets people and I am not bothered by that. There is an infinite set of things I am bothered by, but the majority of my writing choices are not contained within it. What I want most from you is for you to respect those choices, to see them, acknowledge them, listen to them, question them, engage with them, and to never sweep them under the rug as if I believed so little in the impact of my words that I would toss them about like leaves in the wind instead of the precious children that they are to me. I may toss them in the air, but never too far and never beyond me ability to catch. 

This month is National Novel Writing Month and I don't think it could have been more timely for me.  No matter how prepared you think you are for it, seminary is an upheaval of the soul. There wasn't the tearing down of foundations for me like there may be for others, but that's because I already did that on my own. I have been re-formed and I have been shaped and every step of the way I have had to be intentional about the way in which that reformation has happened. I got a thought I need to deal with, a longing that I need to write around, and I think it's going to have to be long form. I wasn't going to do NaNoWriMo this year because making the time for it will be an endeavor, but I need to shout across the void. Even if no one ever reads it, I need the practice of expressing something which I have found to be true.

Some people can express their truths through their actions. The beliefs they hold deep are written in the lines of their faces. I need to practice that, to be better at loving people in the real world we all inhabit together, to see every person that comes before me as a person and as such, valuable. I need to care and care deeply for others and I have to be better at expressing that through my life. But I have these words, you know? I have these thoughts and I am tired of apologizing for them. Because I wrote this paragraph to tell you that I know that I have to love others and I undersold my ability to care for them so that I'd fit into your narrative of who I am, or what I fear your narrative for me is. Please don't treat me like a new soul walking into this strange world without any ability to do anything other than absorb. If I am blinded by the cacophony of lights that is existence, it is because I have endeavored to see it. I could have chosen otherwise. 

Anyway, all this to say that I might be a little spotty with the posts this month. I hate not keeping a commitment, especially when I've gotten so much from writing here, but I do genuinely think there'll be a benefit to the change. My pride sits at the back of my head like a little editorial ghost, telling me that I'm good enough without trying, telling me that my disposition is only an advantage, minimizing the effects of the truth spoken to me. Even though my heart and mind has felt the rumbles of the past few months, it'll be good to move into a space with a different kind of resonance.

Maybe I'll learn something that way.